Warlords of Draenor - A Great Wasted Potential

Community General Discussion
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I know that many people hate WOD, so much so that Blizzard is skipping the existence of the expansion to go straight to Legion.

But WOD has always seemed like a big “what if” to me, in the sense of a great potential abandoned by some bad decisions.

I don’t know how much is real or rumor, but there are some points that could have made WOD something much greater than it was.

I bet it’s been months since you, the player, set foot on Draenor, but take 5 minutes to revisit and see how beautiful those maps are, truly absurdly beautiful, from Shadowmoon to Nagrand, all the maps are truly beautiful, even the icy desert of Frostfire.

In Legion we had some fantastic maps like Valsharan and Suramar, but in WOD absolutely every map is breathtaking. In BFA with Stormsong Valley and Zuldazar etc…

WOD seems like a big project that was abandoned early on to give full focus to something new, incredible capitals never finished, PVP island with great potential for fun abandoned, raid and dgs project dropped, even some unfinished textures, according to rumors we would have an arc with a Naaru in Shattrath, with a raid similar to what was the Sunwell, even new areas with mentions of the titan’s quick passage through Draenor.

Legion was truly incredible, my favorite expansion by far although it also has big mistakes due to the rushed plot with the Argus arc, but I still can’t help but think that WOD could have been much more, and how it would be if it were reimagined today.

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WoD was my favorite expansion.

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I think they expanded the vision of what they wanted too far and lost track.

Visually saving the Draenei (bias here) from the iron horde and settling into the beauty of Shadowmoon Valley remains one of my favourites.

I love setting up the ‘bases’ over all of the maps. But I think from there scope-creep ate too much into their time and then some of those goodies were made a part of Legion. That’s likely why they won’t revisit WoD.

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at this point its likely a good chunk of the devs that worked on wod are long gone. we will never get the full complete wod.

worst decision ever in all of wow.

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Yrel went on to make the correct decisions. :star:

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yrel needs to meet general rakeesh. #rakeesh did nothing wrong.

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Shadowmoon was beautiful. That said, bad expansions can have good looking zones, which is the case for WoD.

Ultimately, there’s been a bit of retconning going on re: WoD in recent years.

“Oh, the questing was good” (t. Railroad enjoyers), “Oh, it had POTENTIAL, it was just CUT”

I’ll focus on the latter since that’s what you brought up.

WoD did not have potential, and implementing the cut content would not have saved it. WoD didn’t fail because we were stuck in Warspear and its Alliance equivalent instead of Bladespire Citadel & Karabor. WoD didn’t fail because there was no Shat raid in between BRF and HFC. WoD didn’t fail because they didn’t add Titan Lore.

WoD failed because at every level Blizzard made extremely BAD decisions and decided to fight their playerbase tooth and nail.

Valid and legitimate criticisms were brought up re: Pruning. Blizzard went head and pruned buttons – Classes haven’t really recovered from that. They’ve gotten more buttons, but they’ve been rebuilt into entirely different entities. What allowed them to do that? WoD BULLDOZING literally every class “just because.”

Valid and legitimate criticisms were brought up re: WoD’s TOTAL lack of endgame. Blizzard ignored those. Rep doesn’t matter, Apexis Crystals from your 1 daily don’t matter! Hey, you know the Grinning Reaver that logically ought to come from “Exalted With Laughing Skull?” Actually that’s on the shop for real money!

Valid and Legitimate criticisms were brought up re: Garrisons making the open world and other players irrelevant. Blizzard ignored them, and we all spent the expansion AFK in our own private instance with a money printer.

Valid and legitimate criticisms were brought up re: No Flying. Blizzard doubled down and designed WoD to be vertical Hell, and did not relent until the very end with pathfinder.

On every level, Blizzard decided to make incredibly stupid decisions that were outright hostile to their playerbase. Beta testers brought these problems up & some even made compromise suggestions. They were ignored by Blizzard.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the absolutely RIDICULOUS and LORE DESTROYING premise of WoD. Time Travelling Orcs? “One Legion, Many Universes?” Dave Kosak’s infamous “Blades of Grass” comment to gloss over the fact that they can’t keep their own lore straight? WHAT A JOKE.

tl;dr: Total WoD Death.

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Levelling in WOD was great, the story was pretty good, the raid was interesting. I never got to the end game grind, so I did not see what everyone hated. WOD would be great for Remix after Legion.

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I really enjoyed the crafting and the pvp gearing and in combat scaling in WoD, I also liked the garrisons, was not a bad expansion imo.

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t. Railroad enjoyer.

WHAT?

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WoD was HUGE at first , I remember the absurd amount of people farming poundfist for the gronnling mount, the leveling was some of the best at the time, the content was just so bare it killed everyone off… but legion was the best modern expansion we’ve ever had, yet they can’t seem to get us back to that.

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also made a ridiculous amount of gold, this when tokens started and I bought 5 years of game time plus the next 2 expansions with Blizz money, all because of WoD raining gold, that alone made it top expansion for me.

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I know some people don’t like more challenging levelling content. Plus Blackhand’s armor set is one of the best plate sets in the game.

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It’s well known that the art department carries blizzards entire company on their backs.

The devs are nothing without the art team

I don’t think there’s ever been an expansion people regarded as ugly in its time. Perhaps people view older ones as ugly by today’s standards, but when they were current, every expansion has been well liked in terms of art/appearance

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Leveling content isn’t difficult. WoD’s leveling content certainly wasn’t difficult.
What made the WoD leveling experience bad wasn’t some (imagined) difficulty, it was because WoD fully broke away from Modular Quest Hubs, took all player agency out of questing, and decided to FORCE players through a story on rails, so that they could deliver slop cinematics to cap off each zone.

Nothing about this was good, and it made alts incredibly annoying to level unless you abused the XP pots & Bonus objectives. It certainly didn’t allow them to tell stories any better.

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The premise was garbage so no potential was wasted.
It shouldn’t have ever been made.

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No they’re not. I think you’re confusing Legion Remix for Legion Classic

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think it’s more cause we started with mop remix, so you’d think they would do wod next, not legion.
:cherries:

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The issue with WoD was that there simply wasn’t enough content to justify it and as Wildberry pointed out the one two punch of Flying and Vertical maps.

The first was ~to be blunt~ you blew through the actual content that the expansion had to offer but after that… there was a lot less actual content for players and this isn’t really apparent in 2025 becase the expansion is finished; players had like… a year long drought of content and you simply can’t do that in an MMORPG unless you’ve either suffered a catastrophic problem (IE your studio caught fire) or you are looking to let your game retire.

Flying is ~lets be honest with ourselves~ problematic; it pulls players out of the environment (thereby reducing engagement) and makes WPVP an infuriating hell. By the same coin though, flight has been a thing since Patch 2.0 and we can’t exactly put the toothpaste back in the bottle. IF the devs had been determined to build an expansion without flying, they needed to be able to give the players something else to offset that (IE the D.R.I.V.E. system from undermine) or at least design the zones around foot traffic instead of having vast swathes of the map being unassailable. Dragonflight solved this issue (IMHO) by making it so that zones were designed with flight in mind and critically the DF mounts were both fast and required at least a little bit of skill to keep airborne.

My take is that WoD was a learning expierience, and the devs learned things to do and not do going forward.

Also: It would probably make for a banger of a remix since it’s worst flaws wouldn’t be as apparent.

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They created physical servers in my region for that expansion so that could explain why some people thought it was a little light on content to begin with. I would imagine setting up a datacenter on the other side of the world would have been a drain on their resources for the expansion.

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