Which WoW expansion has the worst lore?

MoP... yo there was one panda in WC3, so lets make an entire race and expansion around it.

Imagine any other unit in WC3 that there was one of. Okay, now make an expansion designed after it, and it becomes a playable race... so poorly done.
10/28/2018 11:30 AMPosted by Narya
nd the Horde is led by H

bfa prepatch stuff *spoilers*

sylvanis nukes teldrassil so the alliance mount a counter attack on the ruins of lordaeron which syvanis also nukes while "droppiing the plague on her own people"...

yeah horde are not the bad guys at all (¬_¬) someone forgot to tell the writers

ps:goblins were on the ground handing out gasmasks but still
10/28/2018 10:47 AMPosted by Kelzar
Vanilla...
Every other expaction at least trued to have a true story with a main antagonist.


Most certainly Warlords of Draenor... time travel is silly in most sci if setting and has no place in a high fantasy setting.

The GREAT thing about vanilla was the fact that there is no big villain, each zone had a story and you were only a small part in it.
WoD easily

Time traveling mixed with new characters with horrible writing (Yrel). Coupled with the Iron Horde that was a pointless threat, and they even scrapped most if its lore early in beta (Re-work of Gorgrond). Overall it just felt like a Legion prepatch that was nonsensical through and through.
Vanilla, horde and alliance are fighting again after banding together to beat archimonde for reasons... also DI are trying to summon ragnaros and are fighting black dragons so we should kill them so they dont kill eachother?

BC, Illidan has invaded through the dark portal and we need to take the fight to him by killing his leaders before we take him out.

WotlK, the LK has sent a scourge invasion so we need to end his threat to keep peace.

Cata, deathwing has destroyed the world pillar when escaping the earth plane causing a massive disruption to the world and causing the elemental lords to rise up, we need to restore balance to the world and stop deathwing.

MoP, recovering from the cataclysm both factions are trying to rebuild and have started fighting over resources when a new continent is discovered which is rich in resources, so a massive land grab begins only to discover that war on this land causes the beaten old god to awaken and corrupt the land. Horde leader is corrupted and we fight to depose him and bring him to justice.

WoD, bronze dragon breaks hellscream out of prison so he can take him back to the height of power of the orc horde and using various timelines of horde to create an infinite orcish horde to fight the infinite legion of demons, is betrayed by hellscream who just wants to make orcs great again cause he is a racist as established last expaction. We are attacked by this new horde and must defend ourselves as well as try to bring hellscream to justice after his escape.

Legion, old timeline guldan escapes and does guldan things in trying to bring back the legion since the give him power, manages to find Illidans demon soul which he plans to revive as an avatar of sargeras. We must band together to stop another legion invasion, eventually we take the fight to argus to end the threat of the legion once and for all.

BfA, Sylvanas has instigated war against the alliance(reasons still unclear). Both factions are looking for new allies to replenish there ranks from the war with the legion so they can win this new war(story still mostly unfinished so really hard to judge at this time)

So while some of them have story elements that people might not like every expansion other than vanilla had an overarching story except vanilla.
Even though I loved TBC, I still hated the lore aspect of it (and every xpac that came later). In my eyes it ruined any possibility of us getting a proper sequel to WC3. This was why I liked Classic, and why I believe they left it so open-ended, as to not burn down the epic story they created.
10/28/2018 11:04 AMPosted by Lightelf
Also started the horrible trend of making iconic Alliance characters neutral quest-givers, while killing off iconic Horde characters (which continues to this day).

Only Alliance character I can think of that turned out to be evil was Archbishop Benedictus in Cata. But even then it made no sense because even after he was outed as a cultist he was at Wyrmrest Temple like one of the good guys?

The only other Alliance character that kinda fits is Cordana Felsong (but with a name like Felsong it was kind of a hint from the start she was bad news).

Horde = lol bad guys, let's raid them (see 8.1 raid)
Alliance = We can't fight them, for the light and stuff.

At least with Vanilla there was some nuance to the factions, but that was unbalance as well. The "neutral" stance with Undercity, Alliance all starts off friendly. Give me a break.
Mists, it was all based on the 1 joke hero unit from Warcraft 3 bonus campaign that literally had no backstory until they made one up on the spot for that expansion.

Blizzard had a whole library of untouched lore to choose from and they went with their own Kung Fu Panda because the movie was really popular at the time when they just started development on it right after Cataclysm launched.

I still remember everyone arguing about it, they didn't copy them because the Brewmaster was in Warcraft 3 first... give me a break, Blizzard wanted to copy the movie and they had that 1 little excuse from a past game to do it.
I want to say Pandas but Space Goats remain undefeated.
10/28/2018 12:21 PMPosted by Wyn
I want to say Pandas but Space Goats remain undefeated.


They should have a Cow King race.
For the Loreheads... they hated everything BC did and everything afterwards

For those here for gameplay that dont care for the lore: Cata. And MAYBE the tail end of WoTLK.
10/28/2018 12:18 PMPosted by Mightylink
they went with their own Kung Fu Panda because the movie was really popular at the time

mop was more about getting the asian market than it was about capitalizing on a movie about pandas, I think the fans made it that.
Come to think of it, can you imagine how the end of legion was going? near the end we were portaling to planets being invaded by the legion and wiping them out.stopping their invasion, how do you think the natives hiding in the bushes outside the battle were thinking, suddenly this army of demons shows up then a few minutes/hours later another group of aliens shows up kills the demons and leaves.
I don't think it's fair to critique the WoD lore based on the moronic time-travel gimmick they used to get us there.
10/28/2018 12:18 PMPosted by Mightylink
Mists, it was all based on the 1 joke hero unit from Warcraft 3 bonus campaign that literally had no backstory until they made one up on the spot for that expansion.

Blizzard had a whole library of untouched lore to choose from and they went with their own Kung Fu Panda because the movie was really popular at the time when they just started development on it right after Cataclysm launched.

I still remember everyone arguing about it, they didn't copy them because the Brewmaster was in Warcraft 3 first... give me a break, Blizzard wanted to copy the movie and they had that 1 little excuse from a past game to do it.


You're not actually saying why the lore is bad here. Accusing MoP of being derivative of Kung-Fu Panda is a disagreement with it's stylistic choice, not the lore.
The idea that it's all based on one unit from War3 is also a non-criticism. How is it a bad thing that Blizzard built an entire expansion around one unit? Part of keeping a massive universe like WoW going is being able to expand on what already exists in it.

MoP ultimately had very solid, well-developed lore between the various new races introduced, new characters, and villains. Being highly derivative helped it be highly cohesive, and it shows. Its only real flubs are Garrosh, but that's more Cata's fault than MoP's, since Cata had such muddled characterization for him, and Panda's being able to join either faction.
10/28/2018 10:47 AMPosted by Kelzar
Vanilla...
Every other expaction at least trued to have a true story with a main antagonist.

I really liked the story from Vanilla. It starts with a slow burn as for why there are critical gaps in the Stormwind kingdom's defenses, pointing to disenfranchised stone masons turned badits called Defias, leading all the way up to the top of the food chain with an epic quest chain that brings you to the throne room to expose a traitor no one saw coming.

That's no woman, it's a DRAGON!
10/28/2018 10:47 AMPosted by Kelzar
Vanilla...
Every other expaction at least trued to have a true story with a main antagonist.
Only teenagers need a primary antagonist. In Vanilla, the world was a complicated place to live. Antagonists varied from old gods to political subversionists. A good story doesn't have to have the cliche "bad guy," to catch the attention of an avid reader. The lore of vanilla was not just captivating but written far better than the other expansions.
10/28/2018 12:41 PMPosted by Asbury
I don't think it's fair to critique the WoD lore based on the moronic time-travel gimmick they used to get us there.


That's part of the lore of the expac, so of course it's fair game. The real sin is that it's never really explained how Kairoz managed to find/create a pocket dimension of Draenor from Azeroth, and the massive retcon with Demons and the storyline.

The idea of "one Legion across all time-lines and universes" is one of the worst lore ideas in the new game, and makes no sense in the context of WoD, or anything that predates WoD. WoD is a alternate pocket universe, and not our actual past. So the idea that the Legion from our universe finds this pocket dimension, and tries to do the exact same orc corruption plan is baffling.

Imagine for a moment Kil'Jaeden:

"Oh look, an alternate version of the orc planet. Let's corrupt them (again) and send them to... invade Azeroth?"

-How would he link the dark portal with Prime Azeroth? It took Sargeras/Medivh to do so originally.
-This plan had already failed once against an overall weaker Alliance. Plus now there's also the new Horde to contend with. The overall pathetic efforts of the Iron Horde only reinforces how stupid the idea is.

WoD makes the Legion look mindbogglingly stupid, and the only way that can rectified is to ignore the "One Legion" lore point, and to accept that the Legion fought in WoD is an alternate universe Burning Legion, and Gul'dan only got to prime Azeroth by pure mistake.
10/28/2018 12:11 PMPosted by Yca
Only Alliance character I can think of that turned out to be evil was Archbishop Benedictus in Cata.


NE king became evil too. Cata raid.
10/28/2018 12:57 PMPosted by Raggnnar
10/28/2018 12:11 PMPosted by Yca
Only Alliance character I can think of that turned out to be evil was Archbishop Benedictus in Cata.


NE king became evil too. Cata raid.


I Think WotLK also had an entire expansion based on a single character from WC3, who was also an alliance character who went bad...