I have never hated wod. Never hated garrisons. I liked the leveling, dungeons and raids. All my characters were max level and all my professions were maxed. I played the entire expansion from beginning to end with no breaks.
The only thing i hated was the class pruning and the implementation of Pathfinder. But even those were bearable at the time.
To be fair, every expansion at launch is hated by the forums. Including Wrath and BC; hell, certain patches in Vanilla were loathed (seen by some people now saying Classic Patch 1.12 isn’t “My Vanilla.”
With that said, I was speaking from a lot of personal experience and opinions that MoP and Legion were good expansions. MoP is hands down my favorite, and Legion gave me a lot to do that I enjoyed doing.
But you’re also right that they’re good compared to others. Which further influences my believe that there’s a “Team A” who’s responsible for even expansions (Wrath, MoP, Legion) And “Team B” responsible for odd expansions (BC, Cata, WoD, BfA). It makes sense to me with how up and down these expansions have been, but that’s all my own perception and opinion.
You made your way through and moved on. We were stuck there for years. It wouldn’t feel the same at all.
I actually didn’t mind WOD. I did raid, but I burnt out on farm content. I PvP’d casually a lot though. Ashran was fun for me as a healer; I would spend hours in that zone. When I took a break from the game, it was because I shifted over to Overwatch.
Lack of content was really the biggest issue with WOD, along with them gating flying. From my understanding, WOD was released at a time when Blizzard had the idea to release more expansions more quickly. Then, somewhere during the expansion, they must have reverted their philosophy back to longer expansions, so time was spent more on developing Legion instead of WOD. This led to a huge content drought for WOD. I really wish we could have seen what they initially intended for WOD before they cut content to fit a shorter timeframe.
The giant prune from mop… Little did we know it could get worse 
Pathfinder.
Selfie patch.
Honestly though it was one of my favorite expansions. Garisons were way better than warfronts or islands for example. Tanaan was awesome, way better than Argus or nazjatar (mech is close).
Every single expansion from TBC onward was excellent - for me. New and different yet still the same comfortable game. Same char albeit with new spells, less spells, slight adjustments to spell rotations and all but even old broads learn new tricks.
Every xpac has been great fun times - until I run out of things I want to do. See, I don’t expect Blizzard to keep me occupied and entertained 24/7 for the rest of my life. I enjoy the xpacs and big patches and jump in to do all the things. When I’m done-ish, I go do something else amusing.
As an entertainment source, WoW has delivered in spades for my 14 years. I don’t expect the “omg look at this” kind of n00b awe-inspiring visions of day one of TBC or any of the stop and stare moments I’ve had in this game all the time. But there are moments in every single xpac.
Warlords was a lot of fun - there was plenty to do. I even played beta for like 5 months before Live and still kept playing. Also made a boatload of gold and my collections grew so that was excellent.
BfA is the same thing - lots to do, new places to see and wander around in. Plenty of new things to keep me occupied.
That’s all I want from Any video game and WoW delivers. When FoMT comes to the US, I’ll be playing that intensely - but I’ll never break my sub to WoW.
I haven’t moved on. Still in Draenor, while occassionally hitting up the old lands for mounts. Even locked the experience gains.
will you be there for years with massive content droughts? because otherwise…
It’s hard to say. I’m not even in BFA! After I maxed the first character to 120, I made this one, and found Draenor to be the best lands to adventure in. I was in Legion for a while, then decided to go and stay back in Draenor instead.
I liked WoD. Especially the raids and dungeons. I thought they were excellent. I also enjoyed the Garrison and thought it overpowered mostly because they didn’t out anything in the world worth spending much time outside the Garrison.
I think this game is better suited for people like you and me. We don’t go all crazy over content and needing constant updates. I can have fun just adventuring in whichever zone is the coolest, or get down with some pet battles; hit up the dungeons; do quests, or whatever. Even making new classes to experience some of the older stuff that was missed on another.
Some people blow through the content so fast and max out everything, then get bored. That becomes stressful.
I will however say that the mount in Stratholme is totally fiction, because I’ve ran this thing at least a hundred times with no drop.
Absolute truth. Not that I’ve run it that many times but I used to do a weekly circuit of mount drop dungeons and old raids. Mine is periodic runs over years and years. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Onyxia dropped the mount finally after like 8 years. I could solo but my buddy would drag me there. And Kael’s bird and the Nexus and Midnight and Kael’s chicken and all. Just flying around was tiring. But that’s content I can do when I run out of other things to do.
I don’t mind weeks long quests chains for mounts and stuff but they’re usually mounts I don’t even ride.
Still, there’s always something to do. Even when I don’t want to do them. It’s all good.
Yeah, it refuses to drop. I got the run down to 3-5 minutes with a Feral Druid (without any speed enhancing items) + Dreamwalk for instant teleporation. I can run through it extremely fast, but the mount isn’t coming.
[Edit: Just timed the run. It took exactly 3 minutes to go from the entrance, to the boss, to casting Dreamwalk twice (while resetting the instance), and coming back to the entrance.]
Onyxia must have been a sweet drop. Congrats. That is on a raid, which can only be done once per week. It amazes me how people have all these mounts when the drop chance is so slow, and you can’t keep running the same raids. I can run the same instance, and it still won’t drop!
What’s nice about Draenor is there’s mounts to acquire everywhere. A lot of the rare elite creatures roaming in the fields have a 100% drop chance. The rare elites in Tanaan Jungle drop the cage, which guarantees 1 of 3 mounts. The 150,000 apex crystal flying mount is my favorite so far.
It is definitely a process to acquire mounts. Just looking at the Youtube videos they have out there, the drop chance is 1% on most of them; you have to farm reputation for days / weeks, solve riddles in some cases, do raids, all this crazy stuff, with various limitations, and that’s just one aspect of the game. Finding rare pets is an insane task as well.
the flight change was nothing to me. And with enough other ways around; small potatoes.
The offense of WoD -imo- was its absolute waste of potential.
It was a gold mine linked to the past expansion of BC, so much was cut, so many retcons, and the cherry on the crap cake; “Draenor is Free!”
What they had was… mediocre at best. but it could have been BETTER!~
go look up the late ‘Hayven Games’ videos on youtube. There is tons of stuff there. cut islands, cut garrisons, cut raids, cut exploration, etc etc.
Ultimately their decision to cut losses and move to Legion was a good choice, because Legion was so damn good and only evolved everything for the better.
but still… just felt so… wasteful.
BfA suffers a slightly different problem. It has a lot of the stuff Legion had, but it feels like it was just shoved in without understanding WHY it worked.
This is really what it’s all about.
Enjoying the game for what it offers you.
If people don’t like it. Don’t play.