Classic = great (somehow they rate this as great when yet the original game barely have anything close to an overarching plot)
TBC = great
Wrath = peak
Cataclysm = crap
Pandaria = crap
WOD = crap
Legion = cool
BFA = dumpster
Shadowlands = dumpster
Dragonflight = dumpster
War within = dumpster
Midnight 12.0 = dumpster
This is the pattern on the forums. And as the results goes they only care about one or two or more things only spectacle and the rule of cool and bam bam bam action action action. And want only dark and gritty and faction conflicts or some other thing that doesn’t provide context or character building or anything of sort and just want cool thing to happen and give you dopamine.
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It’s not just the forums.
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Anyone rating BC as great is delusional.
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Yeah. 
I liked Pandaria and Warlords, parts of Cata, and most of Dragonflight, but they don’t really get a lot of love on here.
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The best part of BC was watching Draenei getting absolutely 0 development as a race despite all of us sitting around in THEIR racial capital, this is certainly not an error that will take a decade to circle back around to fixing. I rate this expansion Belves/10
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Tbh, I feel like TBC, alongside Vanilla, were amazing at the time.
They obviously don’t hold up in a lot of ways today, but back in 2004/7, they were amazing games and laid the foundation for a lot of other stuff.
Like, Blood Elves & Draenei existing at all.
It’s still my favorite expansion just because I found Outland to be really cool, and it was the first time we had any space-themed stuff directly in WoW.
MMO gaming was just different back then, and now everyone expects an overarching narrative, but back then story was kind of a passive background thing (you had to read text/quests to learn everything) and it was purely about the gameplay.
Also, @OP MoP was great. Anyone that says otherwise hasn’t played it.
14 Likes
I think Classic is rated as great because in general people enjoy the side stories and world building, it is the big arching plot that has fallen flat. I loved the Night Fae covenant but hated the overarching Jailer/Sylvanas plotline for instance. The last over arching plotline I loved was Wrath. The zone stories all tend to interest me, even the ones that frustrate me I can get past because there is always another zone that I will find interesting and excited to discover. It is the overarching plotlines that keep getting shoved in your face that is the issue.
I wish I knew why the zone stories seem to usually not just work but excel while the big plot feels painful at best a lot of the time.
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Kael’thas getting villain batted sucked.
They also introduced blood elves in a way a lot of people liked and then completely overwrote it at the end of the expansion when the Sunwell was purified. So many of the complaints about blood elves in Midnight are really the result of the end of BC.
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They also regretted using Illidan as a villain, and killing him off made no sense because we were ultimately fighting the same enemy, the Burning Legion.
The story of TBC is probably the biggest blunder because of how much of it was later retconned, or how many characters that got brought back like Kael and Vashj in SL, but it’s still my favorite purely due to the atmosphere, the music and themes.
I think Midnight itself is fanservice to TBC fans in a lot of ways, and I enjoy that.
ZA as an entire zone, for example. I’m still invested just because I’d like to see what happens to these older places I am familiar with.
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I have not seen classic mentioned in a while.
There are flaws with this generalization.
To begin with, most people don’t want faction conflict, so much as they want faction pride. They want their factions to matter, to exist in the narrative as more than set-dressing, such as the Horde symbol on banners and sails in Silvermoon being the ONLY real Horde presence.
As for character building, I think what players want is character growth. We have plenty of well-built and established characters as it is. What players want to see is these characters grow, shaped by the events of the story.
Instead, we have characters like Turalyon, who take a dozen steps back so they can take two steps forward. Turalyon was the man who told Anduin that they should let the light guide them, but not control them, that they had to think and feel for themselves. As of Midnight, he’s telling Lor’themar that the ONLY thing he needs to do as the regent-lord of a nation facing an imminent void catastrophe is to have faith in the Light. He’s the man whom spared the murderer of his mentor, Anduin Lothar, so that he would face justice in court, but in Midnight tried to kill Zul’Jan for saying mean things about the Light. He’s the man who spent five seconds with the undead Faol and had the epiphany that the Forsaken weren’t monsters, but the people they once were in life (a revelation much of the Alliance still struggles to accept to this day), but in Midnight has no qualms with his forces treating all Void Elves like cultists that’ll turn on them in a heartbeat.
None of that is character growth. It’s character assassination to make the pretext of growth. Turalyon started at point A, got dragged to point C, all so that he could end at point B.
I’m not even going to get into the sheer nonsense that is Arator, the ruin of Lothraxion, of the predictable villain-plot of Zul’Jan.
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I still remember the forums raging endlessly that WotLK ruined Arthas. People always complain about the current story.
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I don’t agree with that at all…
Classic + TBC = overrated mediocrity.
WOTLK = GOATED
Cata = Ok
Panda = Good
WOD = Bad
Legion = Good
BFA = Bad
SL = Worst xpac
DF = Solid
TWW = Eh…
Midnight = Eh… just needs balance tweaks for me, would be solid as well.
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Arthas was a goof and clearly one of the dumbest villains.
Catch me ousside, how bout dat 
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Warlords had one of my favorite stories because we got to fight orcs from Warcraft 2. WoD should’ve been as great as TBC
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Warlords could have been amazing. Warlords could have been PEAK WoW but failed to deliver on so many things. Few things hurt me in this game as much as going to Draenor and seeing the skeleton of things that were only half-way realized.
I unironically think WoD could use a remastering. It’ll probably never happen, but I’d actually give WoD classic a try if it added more of the cut features and took its time to bring it up to the original vision. Both it and SL could use a ReMix.
Anyways, for me it goes:
Vanilla - Nostalgia Blindness/okay for feeling more like a longer journey
TBC - Everything was cool EXCEPT for the story content. New lore and locations were great, but using Illidan and the others as the main villains? Dumb.
Wrath - The good stuff 
Cata - Mixed. Loss of the old world and the new zones not living up to their potential made me feel iffy about it. Deathwing wasn’t as cool of a villain as Arthas and would have been more intimidating as a voiceless force of nature that we got to see some glimpses into the madness in few select encounters. Also Uldum was a waste.
Panda - Good. Probably one of the best times Blizzard’s added a chunk of new lore and made it feel decent.
WoD - Bad. Actually bad.
Legion - Probably the coolest WoW felt since Wrath.
BfA - It was ALMOST decent but couldn’t resist making this crap about old gods. I still stand by the fact that the Kul Tiras quest experience is one of the best in the game.
SL - Up there with WoD for assassinating the story.
DF - Good. I put it up there with Pandas. It had my attention and I didn’t feel like I wasted my time.
TWW - Sinewave. Had some good, had some bad, but it has Undermine so it’s on the good side of things.
Midnight - I don’t dislike it.
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There’s no way that people think Pandaria is crap. That’s probably my favorite expansion.
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Pandarias story is pretty underrated, and I think it’s just because people couldn’t get over the theme of the expansion. But unironically, Pandaria was pure Warcraft to its core. The Horde and Alliance conflict were central while the remnants of an Old God lingered and fed from it.
And BFA is literally just Pandarias story retold, but worse in every way.
Pandaria, Wrath and Legion are the only expansions id ever praise for having a good story.
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To be fair you pretty much nailed my opinion of the expansions.
Also Classic has good stories. Some of WoWs most memorable plotlines are from Classic.
The Defias Brotherhood, the Scarlet Crusade, Onxyia and her corruption, almost all of Duskwood. It’s a big list and I could go on but you get the point.
These stories just lacked the big cinematic technology and budget of modern WoW. But it doesn’t make them any less cool.
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