Before the Tanaan patch.
Flying seems like the only downside.
No forced rep grinds, and no time gating for rep. Can grind it all out.
No power gains gated behind rep.
No need to grind and farm raid mats.
No need to farm gold.
Easy to get PvP gear off a vendor
No boring dailies that are forced to be done.
Basically log in and play. Do whatever you want without any chores. No daily tasks to check off.
It is almost like people don’t know what they want…
Doesn’t matter how good the expansion is / was. The forum whiners here on GD will find something to cry about…
WoD was’nt perfect, but if it lived up to it’s potential, it coulda been great. instead… nothing.
WoD’s biggest problem was that there was very little to do, outside of dungeons & raids.
Most people loved WoD, until Blizzard basically abandoned updating it.
It was the exact opposite scenario of BfA. Instead of having a plethora of seemingly mandatory chores that you aren’t engaged in, there was a literal lack of concrete, meaningful, expansion-specific content in WoD.
WoD was an expansion that people wanted to play, but just couldn’t since there just wasn’t anything with any meaningful longevity.
This material writes itself.
Sure if what you want is nothing.
Class design felt solid. Story was okay as I played through and my only real complaint of the story was how much of the story was cut due to time, and that Thrall stole my Garrosh kill.
I enjoyed working with Yrel, and watching Her grow as a leader.
I also got filthy rich thanks to Garrisons.
I had fun just running around and casually playing my main character and alts and it felt fun to use abilities and fight things. That is something that is sorely missing from BFA. The GCD changes and the overall combat pace slow-down they did really really messed that up.
I was indifferent on flying. (I still don’t have WoD pathfinder.) Tanaan felt kind of meh.
Ashran was awful.
I would rate the entire expansion a 6/10 as an experience.
Biggest issue with WoD. You ran out of things to do precisely because if we listened to the forums, the game would literally have no content left as it all “sucks” apparently.
WoD’s biggest flaw was it was raid or die character progression wise.
I enjoyed the raid logging aspect of it, but it lost a lot of the non-raiders.
The thing about “forced” rep grinds in modern WoW is that people consider it “forced” because of things like Allied Race unlocks and Pathfinder for flight. Both of those things are actually totally optional and you can play the game fully without them. People are weird.
I’m not saying I agree with how either system works right now, because I don’t, but still.
But, yeah, take WoD and throw in a dungeon currency grind for vendor gear and maybe actual daily hubs instead of purely mob grinding (but leave that in too for those who want it) and people would have been crazy about the expansion.
Assuming it actually had another major patch/raid tier and 6.1 had actual content in some form. Realistically WoD had it’s issues, but the biggest one was just… not having -enough- standard endgame content, even in comparison to pre-Legion expectations.
It’s almost like people will complain about anything just to complain.
I think it’s more that Blizzard finds it very hard to strike the right balance, and tends to go overboard.
In Mists, some people complained about too many dailies. So they completely removed them in the following expansion.
There’s some middle ground, there.
The issue is that the devs learned the wrong lesson from WoD.
People didn’t have enough to do? Make them need to do everything (essences.)
It would be pretty easy to strike a balance by making lots of content, but without making people have to grind all of it.
An example would be fully clearing a Mythic raid should fulfill most of your AP requirement, but non-raiders can do WQs, etc.
Meh. WoD was the first round of ability pruning, and the first expansion where we got nothing new at max level.
It felt bad, at the time. The only reason it looks okay in hindsight is that Blizzard tripled down on the idea and did 2 more expansions of pruning after that.
Garrison’s was the worst part of WOD. It gave you no reason to go out in the world.
Well, we did get Seal Twisting as a result of that, though. Which was fun and filled in blanks in the rotation and kept you excited during a fight. Towards the middle/end of the Expansion it became the less-ideal playstyle, but it was still fun.
Probably why I feel like the pruning wasn’t too bad.
Yes. A recurring problem is that every time Blizzard adds some new system to the game, they really stick it to raiders by forcing them to do it, rather than have it be something that non-raiders can just do, instead.
They also refuse to have raiding just be enough on its own. That goes back to MoP when you could full clear a raid on the hardest difficulty but still had to go do scenarios to VP cap for the week.
It seems like Blizzard has always relied on raiders to carry the load. One of the devs even said once that they purposely funneled raiders into LFR to “smooth out the runs” for non-raiders in the group.
But given the decimation of the raiding population this expansion, it looks like they finally went too far. (Not that the player population as a whole is doing great either, of course.)