According to MMO Champion. MOP is WoW 2nd Best Expansion

[Segus1992]

Strongly disagree. It's what burned me out on WoW for the first time in my life, and was the first time I quit for more than 1-2 months...

On topic: IMO, the biggest problem with MoP was there gross overestimation of how cool Pandaren are supposed to be. The design for the males is ludicrously bad (I like the females a lot, but I never play female characters). The Asian-esque theme never fit WoW in the first place, and really grated on immersion for me.

I've never been sympathetic to the whole "content drought OMG" argument. Just quit the game for a while - that's exactly what'll make droughts less likely to happen anyway: Blizzard realizing that unless they give out content, people won't stay subscribed.

I do agree mostly about the rest of your post though, I don't really mind Pandaren much (but not a fan either), but there was too much focus on them and the Asian theme compared to how much previous and later expansions have focused on their themes.

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People like to leave out it presided over the largest sub drop ever, and had the lowest sub count over its run of ALL expansions. So whatever its problems, they were big.

Sub drop started in Wrath, and has been more or less consistent since. My point wasn't that MoP was perfect, but that if "content drought!!" was the biggest problem they could point to, there wasn't much to actually complain about.

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Arguably. WoD's content drought was not much longer and it destroyed all good impressions I had of this expansion.

I don't think many blame WoD's content drought (ie length of time between content releases) for it being a poor expansion, which is exactly what my point was.

That said, a lot of people do talk shit on just how little content WoD had and how little the patches added, which is a different argument altogether. Little content always = uninteresting to play always. No content for a period = uninteresting to play for a short period. Wanting to not play the entire expansion isn't great, wanting to not play for a period of time at the end of the expansion is fine.

[Amariw]

MoP really was great. All lock speccs were amazing, but the amount of choice and agency in demonology was truly a work of art that was unrivaled in wow.

As for dailies, ye it was way overboard but when they fixed it, they fixed it good. Free roaming isles like Thunder and Timeless Isles were great, and especially timeless gave you tons of freedom in how you wanted to approach it. (treasure hunting? Solo killing tough mobs? Group farming the frogs? The free for all pvp? Choices).

Mechagon uses the same "every mob drops zonewide currency" model... But it has no tough mobs that are challenging to solo, so it falls flat.

[Segus1992]

No. According to MMO-Champion, MOP wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either on this poll of 2500 different users.

That isn't at all what that poll says. That only says that more people thought MoP was the worst than Vanilla or TBC. Doesn't necessarily mean that more people thought Vanilla or TBC was the best.

[plz delete account]

That isn't at all what that poll says. That only says that more people thought MoP was the worst than Vanilla or TBC. Doesn't necessarily mean that more people thought Vanilla or TBC was the best.

Actually, it is. MOP is smack dab in the middle between expacs like WOD, Cata, BFA, Legion, and Wotlk, TBC, Vanilla.

[Aradur]

Well, its one of the bests, that's why it's rated that way in the other thread. Why we need an extra thread for this?

[dusselldorf]

Mop was the last expansion before flying fiascos and mission tables. It had a zone with no flying, but it was limited in area and scope. It was a cool zone. Blizzard took the success of that small area and tried to make the whole game the same way, and it killed the charm of what made timeless aisle good. Just because something works in a small zone does not mean it's scalable.

[Seradi]

MoP is my 3rd favorite after Legion and Wrath. I can understand why people would rank it 1st or 2nd.

[Autoriot]

Daily quests
To many abilitys
Scenarios over dungeons
Pandas didn't "fit" wow
Raids to long and liniar

And what did we get in wod?.
Massive reduction in daily
Ability pruning
Mythic 5man difficulty
Orcs.... Orcs fucking everywhere, behind the trees, under the bushes, in my underpants!
Wing raids, all raid be flying Mon.

I mean you can almost go 1 for 1 on complaints to wod "features"

Wod litteraly dilivered exactly what the majority of this forum and others who were bitching wanted. And it was absolute utter shit, we ordered that shit sandwich because we thought we liked the taste of excrement and butter.

Wod was on us. We need to own the responsibility for letting the vocal minority go unchallenged and make sure if you disagree with a critisim then say so, if you agree then say so, because we have seen what happens when blizz pokes there nose into an echo chamber and thinks that's what every one wants.

At the start of MoP, there were more dailies than the daily cap (25). Not to mention they were required if you wanted to do crafting or be raid ready.
They later fixed it. The dailies outside ToT were fine, so were the ones in KWilds involving PvP objectives.
Most people didn't say we never want dailies again and no MoP didn't introduce dailies... BC and Wrath had them. People were riled up about the AMOUNT of REQUIRED dailies at the start of MoP. Sure, people were thrilled when they were announced to be scaled back a ton, but people also probably assumed there would be SOME content there.

The player base didn't ask for yet another difficulty from what I can remember. Yes, a lot of people were not fans of the scenarios (myself included) and even Blizzard said they learned they were better used for story content than repeatable content. Not sure how you think Mythic difficulty came from Scenario complaining.

On the topic of Pandas, they were an April Fools joke in the past, and yes they were in WC3. I wasn't a fan of the Pandas or their lore, still don't like Panda characters and have never created one. I'm not sure how this is tied to Orcs though. People were burnt out on Orcs before WoD, thanks to SoO and the events leading up to it.

Complaining about linear raids got us "winged" raids or raids where you can choose to skip or do bosses in a different order is what I'm assuming you're trying to say, not sure how that is a bad thing. All I know is a lot of people say the one thing WoD got right was the raids, which I agree with. Oh darn, you have a choice in raids..... not sure how that is a negative.

WoD was a disaster because certain parts of it were rushed and it wasn't well thought out, not because of players asking for changes. The story of an alternative dimension was F'd from the beginning and they tried to sell it as a return to BC. People asked for housing/guild housing and they gave garrisons. Not only that, but they gave a super simplified and watered down version of Garrison compared to what they previewed at Blizzcon the year before. Yes, people asked for less dailies and got that, but they got the other extreme which they didn't ask for, which was 1 daily and no other content other than mission table/garrison junk that could be completed from your phone.

In general, I agree that a lot of things Blizzard has tried or implemented has been because the general player base has asked for it. That being said, they often come up with terrible ideas of their own or twist things, like housing into garrisons. Blaming WoD on the player base is terrible.

[Biske]

I have a special loathing for cata. I had to quit a few months in as I just couldn't stand what they had done to my paladin and really really couldn't be doing with leveling a new char. Tbh I'd say I'd probly never have come back if it wasn't for the free boosts. But even then I'd say I always feel like I'm renting time on what ever I main nowadays. Cata broke my attachment to my main that I'd played since vanilla and for that I'll always spit on that shit stain of an expac.....ugh....fucking cata.

I also main a paladin, so I feel you.

[Houle]

Well, thats cause mop was fckn great. i didnt like the idea of "panda island" at first either, but playing it changed my mind, it was awesome.
which made wod look even worse once it was out for a few months

[Drusin]

Yea but playing devil's advocate, we're nit very good at saying what we want only what we don't.

Like we say, ou" bars are too full" so they cut out all the abilities we rarely use, makes logical sense right. but 2 problems 1 how many were actualy complaining about that? And 2 what did we really mean by to ooooo full?

I agree, on official forums I always try to be as detailed as possible and offer what I'd like to see. Here not so much lol.

[Segus1992]

Actually, it is. MOP is smack dab in the middle between expacs like WOD, Cata, BFA, Legion, and Wotlk, TBC, Vanilla.

No, that's not at all what the data says regardless. Extrapolating the data from that poll can give us the result of any expansion being the most loved overall, assuming everyone who -didn't- vote that that was the worst expansion thought it was the best expansion.

Obviously that isn't the case, but that means that the data is entirely useless for finding out what the -best- expansion is.

[Monster Hunter]

I also main a paladin, so I feel you.

Holy.... Combo points batman!

Absolutly hated it. There was just no need to holy power on top of the talent changes, especialy for holy paladin.....

"excuse me Mr tank, could you kindly slow down dieing whilst I build combo points to give you proper heal...."

Ughh..

[Low Hanging Fruit]

MoP wasn't that bad. It had a rough release with daily insanity and the end with a 14 month of nothing content drought are what scar it. The World of Daily craft quickly worked itself out because you either were quickly finished with it or later on it was patched to be less of a grind. The last patch content drought though really hung in there. Probably compounded because WoD was basically a whole expansion that followed it that was pretty much summed up by content drought itself (to be clear I mostly liked the content in WoD, but its hard to spin the fact there was a lot of it).

[Zantera]

It sounds pretty accurate to me quality-wise. I'm more upset Wotlk is nr1. From a PVP perspective I can understand if people loved it, as a mostly PVE-er myself that xpac was such a massive disappointment. Faceroll easy 5-man dungeons and only Ulduar out of the raids was great IMO. Even WoD - for all its problems (and its my least favorite xpac) had much better raids overall.

[Stormdash]

Seeing as 80% of the argument against it is "lol pandas" I'm not sure why this is a surprise.

[FlasKamel]

MoP is easily my #1 expansion. It's the one I played the least, but the one where I enjoyed the actual content and story the most.
I might've had even more fun in WoD, but not because of the current content.
I might've played more in Legion - even BfA, but that says more about my life than the content.
WotLK was amazing, but everything from Vanilla to Cata I played in my tweens - mid-to-late teens, so it's difficult to compare. MoP was like the perfect transition between old and new WoW.

[EnacheV]

first half of the BC expansion was the pinnacle of WoW, never to be reached again. Wotlk was ok. MoP was garbage except class button counts

[RobertMugabe]

Well MoP had only one aspect that received a lot of criticism and that was its setting. Everything else was overall well received.

[Spyrith]

first half of the BC expansion was the pinnacle of WoW, never to be reached again. Wotlk was ok. MoP was garbage except class button counts

I also liked WoW best at the BC expansion. Who knows, maybe the'll do another "Classic WoW Burning Crusade" event. I'd be up for that.