Rank the Expacs

Wyrmrest Accord
1

Now that we’ve experienced DF, how would you rank the expacs from best to worst? And why - what are your personal reasons? Here are mine, which have admittedly changed over time.

Wrath of the Lich King
Battle For Azeroth
Legion
Mists of Pandaria
Dragonflight
Vanilla
Warlords of Draenor
Cata
Burning Crusade
Classic WoW
Hardcore WoW
Shadowlands

Lich King
Good: I loved the story it told. It felt cohesive. Battle for Undercity quests were awesome. It was a story that Blizz already had designed and it resonated well with everyone. It was the height of population in the game. WrA was new and shiny.
Bad: It took forever for my guild to get a viable raid team and then we had too many raiders and not enough raid leaders. It took forever to get into raiding and by the time we did, ICC was about half nerfed and all the other raids were old content. There was a lot of gatekeeping in RP (i.e. don’t come to our city, don’t RP a dragon, this is our cart, etc.).

Battle for Azeroth
Good: This is so close to being my favorite because of Drustvar. It brought us Vulpera, Tortollans, a turtle made it to the water, Dolly and Dot, witches, and most importantly (to me), Boralus. I really liked the zone quests. I liked the boats and pirates. I liked Nathanos. I had more characters at max level during this expac than any other (11). I liked allied races and pushed myself for rep (something I normally hate doing). I also liked Warfronts and wished they would have continued those.
Bad: WTH was the design on the Zandalar hub? I mean, I get it was a pyramid, but I saw zero RPers utilizing it. ZERO. Poor planning. Also, would it have killed them to make a non-mob instance of Freehold so we could RP there? And what was up with those spicy pirate/nautical coats they just didn’t translate into player gear appearances? That hurt my soul. Also, this is when the Alliance RPers started their mass exodus to MG.

Legion
Good: Ahhh, the break-glass expac that gave us all those tasty artifact weapons. Best pre-patch event ever. Class halls. Decent plot. Suramar.
Bad: Suramar is just like Freehold - all mobs and nowhere to RP. It would have been a great RP hub, but no. We saw neat things in the order halls like a night elf paladin, but nowhere else. Tyrande, I neeeeeed you.

Pandaria
Good: I was prepared to hate Pandaland. Instead, I found it to be the most visually appealing of all the expacs. I even liked the music (and I typically play with sound off). I loved the farm. This was the last time I enjoyed raiding.
Bad: Too many dailies/rep farms.

Dragonflight
Good: If this expac had been anything else but what it was, I probably would have continued my year-long break from SL and just not come back. Blizz did a good job of palate cleansing. I liked the basic story, the zones, Soup, Wrathion arguing with Sabellian, sitting with the old dragon and listening to his story, Lucky Duck, the Tuskarr questline for hunters. Trading Post is pretty not bad.
Bad: After the basic questlines were done, the rest kind of lost me. I’m still not done with content on any single character and I really don’t care. All early content is just dead. For instance, you can’t finish Soup with the number of participants now. And I hate the crafting system to the point that I won’t do anything but gathering professions. The big bad doesn’t engage me at all. I made 2 evokers, got bored and deleted them. Gilneas questline is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too short.

Vanilla
Good: Everything was new and shiny and omg what is this, a mailbox? The Onxyia confrontation will always hold a special place in my heart. Being on a PVE server and having half the ppl in SW walk Marshal Windsor to the throne room several times a day was amazing. PvP titles were awesome. Pally mount quest. Warlock mount quest.
Bad: Almost no one could raid. Content was difficult. It cost so much for a mount that I got mine through PvP.

WoD
Good: Garrisons.
Bad: Garrisons. Too many Orcs. Raiding ended when my RL decided she didn’t want some people she knew IRL on the raid team because they were hindering progressionnnnn, so she took the rest of team and made her own guild in order to not have to tell them. #drama with RP.

Cata
Good: Let me think on that…the transmogs maybe? Gobbos. Twilight Highlands.
Bad: The switch between super easy end of LK content to the super hard Cata content. I couldn’t get most of my guild into raiding because they were used to being casuals and weren’t able to keep up. I had 2 raid leaders and 7 teams’ worth of raiders. This was the first time I took a break from WoW.

BC
Good: I’ve always thought this expac was ok, but not stellar. I liked blood elves.
Bad: I find almost all the content boring. I was still on a PVE server during BC and couldn’t get a raid team together at all.

Classic WoW
Good: Nostalgia.
Bad: I’ve already done this forever.

Hardcore WoW
Good: Presents a challenge.
Bad: I’ve already done this forever, but now it’s harder. Also people kiting mobs onto you sucks.

Shadowlands
Good: Torgast? LFR wasn’t bad. Sinrunner Blanchy.
Bad: THE MAW. The plot - all of it. The fact that Revendreth was played up and then relegated to the end of the leveling zones. Oribos was useless as a hub. Did I mention the Maw? Also they should have put some neat rewards in Torgast. Pets, toys, transmogs, bags, something.

4 Likes
2

They did! Running the floors of certain halls can get you mounts while other floors allow you to buy transmog stuff from the broker NPC on a given floor! There’s also a few titles and pets as rewards.

1 Like
3

They must’ve done that after I quit. It’s too bad they didn’t do that for the beginning of the expac. I liked Torgast but it felt rather pointless without rewards.

4
  • Wrath
  • Mists of Pandaria
  • Burning Crusade
  • Dragonflight
  • Battle for Azeroth
  • Legion
  • Warlords of Draenor
  • Cataclysm
  • Going to the Dentist
  • Shadowlands
3 Likes
5

To be honest, it’s difficult to put this list together and essentially mine would not be entirely accurate, except for Wrath always taking the #1 spot.

I also separated Vanilla/BC because although I played, I didn’t play enough to say it was a “favorite”.

Wrath of the Lich King
Mists of Pandaria
Dragonflight
Battle For Azeroth
Legion
Warlords of Draenor
Cata
Shadowlands

*Vanilla
*Burning Crusade

*Classic WoW
*Hardcore WoW

Lich King
I started this universe with Orcs & Humans. Arthas came with WC3. So much history in the story of Wrath. So many moments during questing that offered glimpses of what happened and what was coming. The story was great. The art was great. The music was great. THAT SONG IN GRIZZLY HILLS! WG in WRA was legendary, even when we were losing. My Gnome/Dwarf RP guild was having a blast, made Valgarde our home base in Northrend and went on amazing adventures.

Norman things - To this day, I can remember and fly the exact same path I would take each evening to farm goldclover and hope for that 1 or 2 frost lotus to drop. My ore farming routes were legit. Leveling via gathering herbs/ores, would serve me well for many expacs to come.

Cons:
Every single DK that thought since they were an “epic hero” they could automatically tank a dungeon. LFD was a mess because of it. Keristraza and players who weren’t jumping or moving.

Pandaria
I also fully hated the idea of Pandaland. I was annoyed, irritated, you name it. Yes, Pandaren were in the game but that didn’t mean we needed a whole expac about it. It ended up being close to my favorite and I learned a valuable lesson. Enjoyed the questing. Enjoyed the dailies. Loved the farm and Halfhill. I wasn’t a huge fan of the music at first, but over time I got to like it.

Norman things: I would turn the music off and go /afk at the Grummle Bazaar in Kun-Lai, watch the Grummles take off on their journey, listen to the Grummle playing his pipes. The background noise in this game is severely underrated. I’m not sure how many people truly listen to it. The vibe there is awesome. Once in a while, I still go up there.

Bad: Isle of Thunder. I enjoyed it, but the mobs were all jam packed in there and at times it was overwhelming for me. The Horde nuked Theramore.

Dragonflight
Shadowlands nearly did me in, like it did many others. I despised it. DF had to be what it was, or I may have disappeared other than the occasional popping in to see how things are. I haven’t really paid attention to the story, but the Tuskarr story OH MAN WHY CAN’T THEY BE AN ALLIED RACE? I felt that whole storyline and Blizz redeemed themselves. So much adventure. Have said it before, I am here for adventure and DF just kept offering it up. Great content pacing. Tons of cosmetics. (So many hats! Blizz sees me!). I hung out with ducks and got an OTTER MOUNT! Trading post is a great idea, still needs some work but I like it. Rep grinds not too bad. It felt more RPG than this game has felt in a long time. I have not been bored one day during DF.

FOLLOWER DUNGEONS! GIVE ME MORE OF THEM!

Bad: Professions are a clown show. I wanted them to have more weight, but this is overkill. The one-off content parties are great (Zaralek, soup, Rifts, Archives, etc) but if you don’t get everything done while it’s active, good luck catching up. These places are empty. There’s some things I’d like in Zaralek but when I sit there hoping ppl show up, they don’t and I am left empty-handed. Super frustrating.

I hate dragonriding, except for long distances.

Battle for Azeroth
Good: I paid attention to the story and all the little storylines. It felt very Warcraft. the “Daughter of the Sea” song was amazing. Really liked Island expeditions, but the abysmal drop rate of Doubloons soured me. Enjoyed the Warfronts.

GNOMES GOT ATTENTION and Blizz mostly managed not to screw it up. Mechagon is my jam. Everything about it. the Mech dungeons? Amazing. So many mechanical mounts. Hated mechagnomes at first, but finally found a great mog and my Mechagnome Gadget is happily adventuring.

Bad: WHY ON EARTH DID THEY PUT A JETPACK IN THE GAME AND NOT ALLOW ENGINEERS TO CRAFT IT AS A PERMANENT MOUNT? I WILL FOREVER BE SALTY ABOUT THIS. Same with the pirate gear. I’ve said it a dozen times on this forum. The database holds TONS OF pirate mog stuff from BFA that we don’t have access to. Blizz should be held criminally liable for both of these things.

Legion
I hadn’t felt like a rogue in a long time. The class halls were great. I wish they would use them in other expacs. Add stuff to them! Paid attn to the story, mostly. It felt like a solid expac. Varian gave his life for The Alliance. Hated to see him go, but it felt like an honest end to his story. Gave me a way to get back to the Palace of Lei Shen. That alone was awesome.

Bad: I’m not a huge fan of borrowed power, but Blizz clearly loves it. WQ for some reason it always felt like a chore more than in any other expac. Not sure why.

WoD
Good: The questing was great. I leveled more chars up in this expac than any other. Ashran was great, back then. Much adventuring. Garrisons.

Bad: Garrisons were also bad. I can’t stand the design of most of the gear. Several months into the expac, it was apparent Blizz was basically walking away from it. That felt super weird.

Cata
Good: Deathwing. Much history and flying around zones setting things on fire. Deepholm. (love caves) The Dwarf wedding quests in TH was fun. Gnomebliteration.

Bad
Cata is the only expac that I kind of abandoned. I was absent for about 6 months for the most part. Can’t really say why at this point, I don’t remember. I think I was bored with it. They ruined Uldum with a zone wide parody of Indiana Jones. Vash’jir was beautiful to look at but physically painful to quest in and I could not wait to be done with it. They took Southshore. Tol Barad was pathetic bg design. The zones felt disconnected. Jindo the Pug Breaker was Cata also I think?

Shadowlands
Good: I got a party hat. Some cool transmogs, mounts. ZM looks amazing with inky black potion.

Bad: The Maw is a toilet bowl. The story sucks. Oribos is pathetic as an end-game hub. The Maw. The Maw. The Maw. Torghast. Torghast.

The only thing I truly loved about Shadowlands was the art. The art team carried the entire expansion.

Vanilla
Good: Everything. Even if it’s bad, it’s good. This is WoW. I played for a very short time. Norman didn’t exist. I rolled a Dwarf warrior on PvE server, Madoran. It was everything I wanted it to be. I was instantly in love but between family and the military, too much going on in my real life.

Bad: Parts were tedious seemingly for the sake of being tedious.

BC
Family. Military. I came back to BC after the fact. It was a solid expac. I enjoyed Nagrand and the dungeons.

Classic WoW
Good: Nostalgia.
Bad: It took 15 minutes after I logged in to realize I don’t have time for this at my age .

Hardcore WoW
if I’m investing time in WoW, why would it be this version? If I want to play a perma death game, I go play DayZ.

2 Likes
6

Legion- the draenei rific story helped this placement. Great ending
Dragonflight- the paradigm shift expansion- constant content- great story- fun mechanics- the inclusion of giving players everything they want. A shift from the horrid PR they were getting during the Covid years
Burning Crusade- introduced Draenei and where I predominantly learned WoW
Wrath- Just a fun expansion with a great villian
Original- Where the love of the game began
Warlords of Draenor- so much draenei lore- great questing.
Mists of Pandaria- just didn’t play alot of this one but I love the Pandaren. Wish I played more during this time but I was in a wow slump.
Cataclysm- I really enjoyed all the novel tie-ins and seeing Thrall be the hero here. I love the dragons and seeing more of their story was great. Also there was a lot of lore-theorizing in this era. The questing wasn’t as fun and I didn’t find the dungeons as fun either.
Battle for Azeroth- Fantastic art direction and interesting way of questing by having these two continents for us to explore. Playing both sides gave the full story. PvP was fun- some of the systems were not super fun for me. Having the Heart of Azeroth was dope tho.
Shadowlands - I enjoyed the expansion and seeing the different death worlds. However, it didn’t wow me like other expansions on the list. I didn’t care so much about the systems in this one like other people did. A fun story but it felt a bit too alien at times. The villain- who started out very menacingly- ended with sort of a anticlimax. I wish we could’ve seen a bit more from the Jailer.

Edit: I don’t care about WoW classic so much so they don’t make my list.

1 Like
7

I literally put Classic and Hardcore onto my list just to keep moving Shadowlands down further. If I could have put more things between the rest of the list and Shadowlands, I probably would have.

3 Likes
8

Out of all the “classics” I did try Hardcore and while playing with my brother occasionally made it fun, it takes too frigging long to level and do anything in that game. I don’t have time for it. I am not the kinda of person who likes to go and redo content in WoW. I enjoy it the first time and then when the next thing comes I leave it behind.

Also, while Shadowlands is last on my list, I didn’t dislike it. I have never disliked any expansion of WoW.

2 Likes
9

This is a good reason to take a break from building chairs with which to barter my safe passage to WrA.

I found something good and bad with all of the xpacs. To be perfectly honest, while I enjoyed all of them, there really was only three that managed to really keep me interested and didn’t ever feel like a never-ending grind.

Number one would definitely be WotLK. That was the best story!

Number two would have to be BfA. Great story and Drustvar is easily the best zone Blizzard has given us. I also really enjoyed the WPvP.

Third is Cataclysm. I mean Deathwing! Seeing the destruction and the aftermath of that was really powerful to me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I still get a wee bit misty-eyed when I walk around Loch Modan.

Great topic! Thanks!

2 Likes
10

Wrath of the Lich King - It’s more or less where I started, but friends and I read a lot into the lore and knew who Arthas was. We were excited to be entering wow at such a peak time of storytelling.

Mists of Pandaria - I didn’t mind pandaren joining the game and honestly the new art style and story felt great.

Dragonflight - This expansion made the game feel new to me again. It was a MUCH needed breath of fresh air.

Cataclysm - I enjoyed seeing Deathwing break the world, fly over zones, roast everything. I’m also a fan of dragons.

Warlords of Draenor - Say what you will, but as an Orc, I enjoyed it. The BIG reason it ranks higher than the below expansions is Ashran. I f*^%ing loved Ashran.

Legion - Fighting against the big bad burning legion, weapons of great power? Oh yeah, this expansion was great. The only reason it ranked so low on the list is because as a warrior main, I had my ever-loving fill of hingen dingen durgen vikings - especially at a time when it felt like every game I turned to play had damn vikings.

Battle For Azeroth - GREAT start, then turned into an absolute wet fart in my mind. I think I stopped playing during the Tides of Vengeance.

Vanilla - I saw only parts of the old world while I leveled during wrath. That’s why it made it here.

Shadowlands - During release? Absolute dogs%*^. Logged in for all of two hours and just couldn’t do it. Now that it’s NOT mandatory? I enjoyed the WoW-flavored story and honestly enjoy the fact I can skip it now and go straight to farming transmog items.

Burning Crusade - Didn’t play during the hey-day, but from a leveling perspective? Hated it. Hated leveling. Hated the drab scenery. Hated how nothing made sense to me. Go in, waaaagh, move to next zone.
Now that I know the lore, I appreciate it, but it doesn’t rank higher than Shadowlands because I will actually go back to shadowlands to farm transmog items. I won’t go back to Outlands.

2 Likes
11

BC & Vanilla (tie)

It was the aughties. I was a literal child, less jaded and eager to enjoy things. Video games were still new and exciting, and MMOs were the hottest thing at the time. I had friends who played. The idea of anyone getting super sweaty about the mechanics was still distant, and random people who barely knew how to play could easily get invited to a raid to fill out the ranks. I did ten man scholomance and ubrs runs because we were all so bad but willing to put up with out own badness. Were these objectively the best years of this video game? I dunno, classic is still fun but we’ll never see the naive way of playing or go back to when WoW was a social phenomenon again. But a lot of my favorite memories are from this period.

WotLK

It was the last hurrah of that vanilla arc, and it was good. At its tail end it sort of introduced the stuff that ultimately was probably harmful, like heirloom items and cross-realm grouping, but before that it was the last expansion where realm community and the leveling experience were really core to the game. It was also the time when the game was really deliriously popular, which was neat to be a part of.

Legion

I think it had the neatest gameplay of all the post-WotLK expansions, and it just had so much content in class halls and so forth. Yeah, it was the beginning of “borrowed power”, but it was so steeped in lore and extra flavor that it didn’t feel so bad–collecting artifact power was almost secondary to completing all these cool class-specific stories if you were sort of casual. Suramar was probably the high point of the game’s writing in the era where all the WC3 plots had been wrapped up.

The downsides were that Illidan’s return felt really token (did nothing until later patches and then got put in the fridge), and Argus felt somewhat rushed. But even if it was “rushed” it was sort of surprising just how pitched the story got… I went into it expecting “ok we’ll close a portal or something and Sargeras will be grr I’ll get you next time”, but no, we just went there and killed everything and that was pretty intense.

BfA

It gets a lot of hate but really I enjoyed it a lot. Collecting allied races was super fun, and it was really cool to see bursts of creative activity as people RPed new concepts based on the new races. Visions were probably my favorite form of the various “scenario” content they’ve done so far, it was a neat dungeon-crawly experience (with actual rewards, unlike that dust tower). Zandalar and Kul Tiras were really well-realized cultures which were fun to explore.

The story had a lot of moments that felt poorly executed but at least everything felt relevant, it was obvious to any RPer why their character would care about current events, as opposed to Shadowlands or WoD where people might have been scratching their head to come up with a reason why their character was involved.

The biggest downside for me was just bad design choices for Allied Races. Some of them, even if I enjoyed the lore, were just too ugly or janky looking to enjoy playing–Nightborne, Mechagnomes, and Kul Tirans being the biggest offenders. The mogless diaper look was just not good, nightborne dudes got irredeemably shafted in the face department (I think the ladies look fine, but I only really play male characters), and kul tiran guys being ogres isn’t really my ideal male, and mogs seem to struggle to fit around their pot bellies.

MoP

I enjoy monks as a class and some of the zones, but it was an expansion I sat out for the most part because it was hard to find fun stuff to do. The end game at the time relied heavily on dailies which felt sort of exhausting to do (other than the Halfhill stuff, which was fun). Heroics were super easy at the time and offered menial rewards, and I didn’t really wanna raid. It introduced timed content for the first time, a move down the path of sweatiness that I don’t want anything to do with. I don’t like Pandaren or Garrosh too much so I wasn’t super into the story.

All that said it was a really cool time for most classes, since it was probably the point where many of them were maximally complex and unpruned. I played my warlock a lot at the time which was fun since they felt like demigods runnin around while casting op spells with green fire

WoD

It is famous for lacking content but it also had some neat Draenei stuff and some of the loveliest area design the game has ever seen. Poking around the Draenei villages in Shadowmoon is something I still do from time to time because they’re so pretty.

Ashran was fun as just an eternal meat grinder of random battles. I’m not great at PvP so really these sort of disorganized, imbalanced forms of PvP are more fun for me. Idk if I’ve ever won an Arena match but having a random throwdown with someone as we charge around a big open map can be fun.

Garrisons are probably the biggest missed opportunity in the game’s history. They were enjoyable to an extent, but their various issues–the mission board being a money printer, minimal customization, and their current use as a rhetorical bludgeon against anyone asking for player housing–put a big damper on their legacy. I wonder what would have happened if they had gone forward as a permanent feature, letting you build Garrison-like villages in new zones in future expansions, but that didn’t happen and I guess player housing is just dead as an idea.

Shield dps warrior was neat

Cata

It was the end of the “vanilla era” and it was kinda bad. The story was at its most incomprehensible at this time since it relied heavily on novels and tie-ins. The zone revamps were a mixed bag, and the new zones were almost all strangely designed since it allowed flying from the start–they tended toward being huge, open, and mostly empty since you wouldn’t walk in them. Vash’jr was memorable but tbh I’ve only done it all the way through once. Maybe I should try again sometime.

I did like the difficulty of the heroics at the beginning–they were hard, but without any of the modern notions of hardness coming from timers and stuff. Just really good solid slugfests with tough mobs and bosses. I did Cata heroics a lot because they felt meaningful without being too hardcore for me. I think Cata Classic is sort of silly because it wasn’t great and the mechanics had moved beyond all the “classic” ideas of leveling and realm community but I guess they had to go somewhere.

Dragonflight

I liked some stuff but it had the feeling of like, someone taking a dump in your living room and coming back the next day like everything is normal and not acknowledging that they did something bad.

it was fine. But it was the follow up to an era which basically killed the whole franchise so it kinda should’ve been more than fine if it wanted to recover from that. The story was inoffensive but mostly trite and felt irrelevant. I didn’t really enjoy evokers as a class and being a race/class combo was a bad choice for freedom/customization. Dragonriding is enjoyable for me so that’s good. But in the end I think I only subbed for two or three months during its lifespan so it obviously didn’t win me back. It is still sad to me to see WrA way emptier than it was during the BfA and earlier days.

I really didn’t have a lot to do in the expansion since it doesn’t have a lot of content beyond Mythic+ and Raiding, neither of which I enjoy. There wasn’t high-reward casual content like unlocking allied races or challenging, high reward non-timed content for me to dive into. I completed most of the campaign questlines and then just felt finished.

And the fact that it wasn’t very innovative makes me less interested in the future of the game. If Shadowlands didn’t trigger a desire for big design changes then nothing will, the game will just be on the treadmill of “mythic+ and raids are the only important content” forever, and that’s not a game I wanna play

Its really kind of a toss up between this, Cata, Wod and MoP as all expansions that I didn’t love but still kinda liked, I’m just ranking it lower since I was so disengaged with WoW due to shadowlands and it didn’t do anything dramatic to turn things around. The whole WoD MoP Cata DF tier is not bad, I enjoyed all of them to a degree and they’re all close. Just consider the separation between these and the following expansion to be like the difference between a 70-80% on a test and a 0%

Shadowlands

it was just the worst.

I like that it added a beard for draenei males I guess

2 Likes
12

I’m not going to count WoW Classic as an expac–it kind of hits number one by default.

Wrath has to be my favorite. It was the conclusion of so many storylines and struck exactly the right mixture of epic fantasy garbage and emotional character-based growth.

Mists is not far behind for the same purpose. I do think that this expac had some incredibly bad fumbles, particularly based around the faction war, but almost every expac has those fumbles. The environment and story and characters were enough to make up for them.

I guess I’d put Legion third. It also concluded a major storyline, which works well for it. The gameplay was a lot better than I’d previously enjoyed and it really felt like an Azeroth-based, personal adventure with a lot of epic garbage thrown in.

I feel like those three are the “good” ones and after that you enter mediocre to bad territory.

Battle for Azeroth has grown on me slightly. With the suffocating absence of conflict and empty tenderness of Dragonflight, I’ve come to appreciate the aggression and high-consequence atmosphere it was going for. Blizzard’s bad habits only got worse, but I did appreciate that the Horde storyline was abysmally awful as the Alliance’s.

In hindsight, I can kind of appreciate Cataclysm’s ambition. But I think it’s always going to be a slightly sour note for establishing a lot of toxic practices that continue to this day–bad release scheduling, empty content, truly awful and unfair storytelling. But some zones were neat, at least.

I really want to rank Dragonflight worse just because of how offensive it is, but I don’t think I can, in all honesty. The story is probably more uniquely terrible than it ever has been, being one of the first storylines that genuinely feels like it has nothing to do with Warcraft as a setting, but the gameplay is great.

Warlords is far, far beneath Cataclysm. It has one good note in that Draenor was a legitimately cool place to explore and the monsters there were cool. But it’s such a complete waste of resources otherwise.

Shadowlands is genuinely terrible on every level, though. A truly magnificent failure. Bad world, bad story, bad game, bad systems.

2 Likes
13

enekie you did not rank BC please take a moment to tell the class how fun that bombing mission in Hellfire was and how great this particular expansion is

2 Likes
14

The option to have a beard and not that damn mustache added in Wrath was the greatest thing to happen to draenei males since their inception.

2 Likes
15

The stealth van dyke is one of the more curious patch changes in the game. It was the tendril of choice for my shaman at the time. One day, we had a soul patch. The next, we had a van dyke.

What developer decided, “it is time. They must have the stache”? Was it a consensus decision of multiple devs coming together in favor of sudden stache growth? A rogue agent, plastering mustaches on their own, thinking nobody would notice since draenei males aren’t that popular? I don’t know, but I do appreciate that shadowlands helped undo this gross injustice

3 Likes
16

It’s most unfortunate that Gnomes do not have a sleeper agent dev willing to sneak in the Gnome Fro hair style.

4 Likes
17

This made me lol so hard.

1 Like
18

Leaving Vanilla out because I’m counting expacs being from TBC onward, though I am including classic’s iterations because to me they’re like “parallel expacs”.

Wrath of the Lich King

My life and the game overlapped so much with this expac. So many major things. Impossible to unravel the personal nostalgia with my love for the game for this one. Also, the last days before LFD and I started it on a PvP server so it was really some of the last great dungeon summoning stone fights. ALSO, moving over to WrA :slight_smile:

Burning Crusade

I have to put this second just for the Isle of Quel Danas. The best world pvp since Tarren Mill/Southshore. Also, still a lot of PvP in Tarren Mill/Southshore. Access to OP items in Vanilla, still valid at times in PvP.

Legion

From the pre-patch to visiting Argus, this was great. I’ll also never let go of predicting allied races due to funny feelings from Suramar completion on both factions.

Dragonflight

Probably better than Legion tbh. I’m a sucker for new classes, even skinny lizards. Getting big talent trees back. Finally moving to an OCE realm and making great friendships acquaintanceships.

Mists of Pandaria

I loved monks when they were released. I still do, but OG keg toss for life IMO. Got a bit stupid but started strong.

Cataclysm

It was cool to get Goblins.

Classic: Season of Discovery

This has been fun, though I haven’t played it as much as I thought I would – I really like that it exists. I wish retail was getting warlock/rogue/shaman tanking and some other stuff, though.

Classic Hardcore

It’s cool that this existed/exists because it got people to hyperfixate on something long since considered ‘solved’. That one PvP streamer buying all the frost resistance gear and destroying it so that nobody could have it is hilarious.

Classic

This has enabled the above two points and offered people a chance to experience Vanilla. It’s great that they made it official.

Warlords of Draenor

This was a very self-indulgent idea that was poorly executed. There’s some overlap in how dumb things got w/ Mists. There were some fun things in this, especially the way you could twink characters in the final leveling bracket – that was hilarious – but due to life stuff, I could only do this expac casual so I don’t have the nostalgia for most of it.

Shadowlands

This expansion was terrible and stupid.

Battle for Azeroth

There were too many ideas in one expansion, which killed not only the basic idea of the expansion but prevented an entire other expansion (or two) from happening. It also led to Shadowlands. Also, my wife quit during this so I hate it more than Shadowlands.

BfA enabled Shadowlands while robbing us of a proper Azshara expac AND a proper Black Empire expac. Boralus is cool, though.

Closing thoughts:

Mists should have ended with Mogu, not Garrosh
Warlords should have been time travel via Chromie and not established a wonky “AU”
Battle for Azeroth should have focused on Azerite and its effects on the leaders
Battle for Azeroth should have led to an Azshara expac and more islands of lore unlocked
Azshara expac should have led to a Black Empire expac
Black Empire could have led to a “Death” expac but it should have been nothing like Shadowlands – better yet, it could have went straight to Dragonflight
They ruined Sylvanas and that will always suck IMO

1 Like
19

I swear to God if I hear “GLOH-REE TEW OH-DIN” one more time…

2 Likes
20

Wow, listing all these expacs out is making me feel old.

Vanilla = WotLK
These are the main expacs that cemented my interest in this IP, and are the main reasons I stick around today.
I never played the WC games - I didn’t even know they existed at the time I picked up WoW. I started the game because my cousin showed me her game, running around as a playable zombie and getting oneshot by a spooky wizard man. I had absolutely no idea what was going on (years later, I recognized it as her getting ganked by a human warlock in the Forsaken starter zone), but it looked cool and I wanted to find out. I had no idea how to play the game (even at level 40, my rogue was wearing Int gear), but I just loved running around and doing quests so I could see and learn about the world.
And it was a wide world! I rolled so many alts so that I could negotiate noble politics as a human, explore Khaz Modan as a dwarf, run through ancient forests as a night elf, and overcome the harsh wilds of Durotar and the Barrens as an orc. I loved all of them. I loved getting to see these cultures from the ground-up, just running around as a wee little mercenary rather than so many other games where I’d only have the option to play a grand hero going through one grand storyline.

WotLK was atmospheric. The LK’s appearances, even though the back of my brain scoffed at how corny they could be, sent chills down my spine, and I really feared for the NPCs that I met along the way who could die at any moment. Zul’drak was an emotional rollercoaster for me, with the grim fates of the Argents in the west, and the race to save the Drakkari loa in the east. (I still <3 Har’koa.) I didn’t have the experience or even knowledge of WCIII to know the start to Arthas’ story, but I didn’t need it. This expac made me really care about the overarching story and the characters caught in it.

Legion
Class Halls made me feel more like an individual, and made me hope for more custom interactions in the world. The halls themselves were a mixed bag to me, but I liked that Blizzard was trying something like that. The class halls, the Broken Isles, and the Legion were all strongly tied into the setting’s history. I loved re-meeting the Gilnean survivors in Havensbrook, the tauren in Highmountain, getting to see Suramar and a living Highborne city, and returning to Argus with the draenei. I wasn’t fond of crowbarring Val’sharah into night elf history (they’d make more sense as a new night elf effort to reclaim the Temple of Elune and surrounding areas, rather than say this place is super important and has been a stone’s throw from the Nightborne’s bubble for centuries without noticing it), but I still liked how these areas were used to show off playable races’ cultures (the establishment of the night elf town in Suramar is what I wanted for a heritage quest) or at least close-enough cultures.

Burning Crusade = Mists of Pandaria
I had no idea what any of the WC references and legacy characters were when I played through BC, so their treatment didn’t register to me. As a standalone story, I though Vashj, Kael’thas, and Illidan were properly active (through their forces) and interesting antagonists. To me, it was a… well, just an expansion of what I had played before: new lands with new stories. I liked the slow burn of the blood elf plot from the draenei starter zones, to the mana bomb, to Netherstorm. The zones felt properly alien, from Hellfire’s spooky sky to Netherstorm’s outer space vibes.

MoP was a setting and a theme that just wasn’t my cup of tea. I think it was done very well, and Pandaria was a lot more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be, but I still felt like I couldn’t wait for the end of the expac so we could try something else. I did enjoy all the ties to the outside setting in terms of the HvA conflict in Jade Forest, the night elf expedition in Krasarang, the Zandalari plot as fallout from the Cataclysm, and the war story in later patches. And the Thunder King was awesome - I feel like they hit the nail on the head with that ‘introduction of a new raid boss who gets retroactively described as an ancient threat’ plot that can so easily fall flat.

Cataclysm
Oh boy, I was so giddy when I heard the old world was getting an update. The zones I had explored, the NPCs I had met, getting a story update? I couldn’t wait!
…
Well, they weren’t as serious as I would have hoped, but it was something. And my main’s race’s story updates mainly involved the Horde stomping all over them and establishing new bases all over their territories. But I finally got to meet this Malfurion character I had heard about! And I could fly, which meant my druid could perch in trees!
So, it was kinda like seeing a plate of chocolate chip cookies and rushing over, only to find they are oatmeal raisin instead. Not what I had hoped, but I’m partial to oatmeal raisin, too, so it wasn’t a major disappointment.

Dragonflight
I like dragons in just about any media. That carried a lot. I think I like Warcraft’s dragons a bit less after this expac, though - I feel like their aura of mystery ended up being more fun than this reveal about what they really are like as a society. The cinematics are cool, I love the emotional moments… but they don’t feel, I dunno, earned enough by the preceding story? Vyranoth’s antagonism and defection were a cool story idea, but I feel like they didn’t have enough time or detail to bake, to form any kind of emotional weight that can pay off. And the Aspects’ 'family theme is sweet, but felt pretty random and not weighty enough for the final raid finale.
Plus, there’s all the baggage from BfA looming overhead like the Sword o Damocles, that all the characters either ignore or cast aside as quickly as possible like it’s a hot - no, radioactive - potato. And I can’t really blame Blizz for trying to forget all that awfulness instead of wading into the muck to try to resolve it, but it makes the many characters who should comment on it feel either shallow or stupid or both.
The Blue Dragonflight questline is an absolute gem, though. Give me more of that cultural exploration through individual stories of prior minor characters, please!

Warlords of Draenor
WoD was just kinda meh to me. I’m not a fan of multiverse shenanigans. I was mostly looking forward to learning about Kairoz and the Infinite’s plot, and… yeah, that got stamped out early. Still, I enjoyed seeing Arakkoa civilization as it was before the few villages I remembered from BC, and I liked the orc clan aesthetics they developed for this expac.

Battle for Azeroth
“Hey, remember Garrosh and Theramore? What if we ran that same plot again on a x1000 scale? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Narrator: “It was not, in fact, fun.”
I have poured out far too many words on the topic of the Burning. So, the summary: Blizzard bit off way more than they could chew, and now we’re left with a story that still has a huge bleeding bitemark in it that they’ve decided they can’t fix and are trying to push under the rug instead. Let’s see how that strategy works out for them.
But, at least these story developments that I absolutely hated were taking place on Azeroth. I was angry, but I still cared. I wanted to see how it ended, how Blizzard planned on paying back the positive-game-experience deficit they had entered by writing the Burning. Visiting Nazjatar was great. Finally seeing Zandalar and Kul Tiras was great.

Shadowlands
I still have the feeling that SL was someone’s IP story about the afterlife that they couldn’t make as a standalone game and decided to shoehorn it into WoW instead. It’s not what I wanted. I didn’t care about it. I left until it was over. I hope that developer gets to have his standalone IP game, because there’s some neat concepts in it, but I want to play WoW instead.

3 Likes