I used to be of the opinion that WoD was one of the worst expansions we’ve ever seen. I used to cringe whenever hearing about WoD or talking about it. However, recently I’ve had a complete change of heart as I’ve revisited this content. I’ve realized that I actually liked the lore and the set up for Legion with Tanaan Jungle. I’ve realized that most of my favorite tier sets (besides Legion) all come from WoD. Arcanoshatter and the warrior blackrock foundry mythic armor to name a few examples are some of the most amazing sets in the entire game. I also find that I enjoy visiting the zones in Draenor. Frostfire ridge especially is really unique and is a really cool zone.
I remember hating this expansion and I remember garrisons were a huge part of the problem. But aside from that, does anyone else find that the content from the expansion is actually … good?
BRF is basically one of the best raids they’ve ever made, the tier sets were good, the questing was good
And then the xpac was over and they did tanaan jungle and that stunk and the raid had so many problems it was an arms race between add-ons and devs because Archimonde was bologna to the umpth degree
Sitting in my Garrison waiting for either raid night or for missions to complete was definitely how I spent the majority of my time during that expansion… However it was far more preferable to Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands where I felt obligated to farm a resource for power every waking moment.
That’s what I mean, though. The content itself is S tier. For some reason, I never had that opinion until recently when I decided to revisit the content again after a very long time. I was a lot younger during WoD, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy. I just remember garrisons were the reason everyone was complaining, atleast in my memory.
Anima had nothing to do with player power, it was entirely for cosmetics.
They took out the “endless power grind” from Legion and BfA in SL, but still had too many overlapping power systems systems between legendary memories and soulbinds/conduits.
Individual stories and zone questlines were cool, which is something that’s been pretty consistent across WoW’s history as a whole. The premise of alternate universe and also time travel just to trot out some old Horde villains to kill again was stupid, and the end of expansion pivot to fighting the Legion and “DRAENOR IS FREEEEE” being spouted by the main villain of the expansion with zero remorse for everything he did previously will always make WoD an absolute failure of lore.
Yes, there was always something to farm and I was just worn out after two expansions of it that I quit early on (I think the same week Castle Nathria Wing 1 in Looking For Raid opened up. I didn’t come back until Season 4 to get the J-wordworth mount.
Garrisons were a neat feature that just wasn’t implemented quite right, it was a big “missed opportunity” to lay the groundwork for actual proper player housing
I still hearth back to my Garrison here and there, and considering it is content from 2014 I would say that’s some pretty good longevity since we are currently in the year 2024. MOST old/legacy content is just completely abandoned by the playerbase once the current expac is over - but people still dabble in the Garrison here and there
As far as player housing goes, Garrisons were “close, but no cigar”
There wasn’t enough to do in terms of instanced content, and fell really short in total patches/raid tiers compared with previous expansions. We were also pretty sour as a player base after the longest content drought the game has ever known at the end of Mists.
If they’d even introduced M+ then instead of during Legion, it would have been a lot better, though they didn’t have true scaling loot yet in WoD.
Blackrock Foundry remains my favorite raid ever. I also really enjoyed the challenge mode dungeons.
WoD got off to a bad start by not setting up any lore of how the WoW multiverse works.
It set up a lore situation where I now know the alternate reality versions of all the orc warchiefs far better than I know their main reality selves.
The actual questing experience itself was probably the best WoW has ever had (although Nagrand never really clicked with me as a finale - it felt very familiar, yet also disconnected from the story so far). However, I played it through several times in beta while certain script-heavy quests were broken until the last week or two before launch, so it was hard to clear my memory of those bugs.
But the open world apexsis site endgame was awful. Even after the opening week server crashes were fixed, they were almost unplayable for whole of the first patch.
For me WoD was saved by the garrison, which I greatly enjoyed. Without the endgame of collecting followers, building up infrastructure and running missions daily , I can’t imagine I would have continued playing.
Eh, for me it was a solid C or B tier expansion. The leveling content was pretty good, the raids were good, and PVP was in a decent state (except for Trashcan). What knocks it down was centering everything in the expansion around the Garrison and the severe lack of content to do outside of Raids or PVP. I can’t remember having any reason to leave my Garrison once I was max level until it was time to Raid or run RBGs.
wod is my 4th favorite xpac. 1st being bc then mop then wrath. sometimes simplicity is where it is at. ever since wod all we have gotten was layer after layer of systems and convolution. and they wonder why the game died.
