World buffs wasnt the reason SoM failed.
the reason it failed was it was barely changed from vanilla, AND there was no WBs.
That’s likely why in SoD, they went the complete other direction and changed too much, but the phases lasting 3x longer than they were likely supposed to was what killed sod, P1 and P2 were fine, but once people saw P3-P5 were lasting exponentially longer with barely anything added (for it being a season of DISCOVERY we’ve had literally one new dungeon the entire lifespan of sod and its not even in a previously unreleased or unfinished area, its just ashenvale’s demon area made into a dungeon) they started quitting. I mean obviously you had the swipers leave because they couldnt control yet another fresh economy too, but that was in P1 and P2 was still going strong.
This is just wrong.
If they didnt belong in the game, they just wouldnt be, as we saw from literally every expansion afterwards.
If it wasn’t intended, they either wouldn’t stack, or they just wouldnt work in dungeons/raids. It was intended. Information on WoW was just nonexistent in 2004-2006. WoWhead, and any site like it, didn’t exist. You just had allakhazam and thottbot (which lets be real, were the exact same thing in different font/lighting) which were just item databases. The only reason people knew GM items or the island even existed was because someone successfully repacked a vanilla client and made a video titled “GM Power” in like 2005 and got people searching the item names.
Instead, they not only worked, but they stacked. Stacking is what made them exponentially powerful, but the problem wasn’t even that, it was that almost all of them heavily favored melee while giving next to nothing for ranged or spellcasters (since as I’m sure you’re aware, hunters had different stats than m/w/p/d because of ranged AP and ranged SP being two different stats, and the way warriors worked, they gained more benefits from stat and gear changes than literally every other class combined. Ferals are an outlier because the way they worked, their item literally didnt matter (hence why ferals used manual crowd pummeler from gnomregan as their bis even in naxx, and they used it for its On use, not any other stat) Energy regen being super slow for rogues and ferals also didnt help.
The phrase you’re looking for is “They werent needed”, because…you know…they werent.
Content wasn’t tuned around WB, it was tuned around blue/purple gear. Things werent tuned for all epics until what, AQ? and even then all the raids had fights that preferred heavy spell school resistance gear over ilvl and stats. Adding WBs on top of that was overkill and instead of blizzard doing anything about that, they just left it for vanilla’s 2 year cycle and then instead of iterating on the idea at all, decided to just abandon and throw away the concept and literally never use it again.
