Hi everyone,
WoD seems to come up alot in the last few days in the discussion about SL being great/TERRIBAD . Most of the times WoD is mentioned as being a terrible expansion. I’m trying to understand why.
I am asking this becoz I consider WoD an amazing XPac from leveling/questing/exploring/artwork points of view, and OK on the raids fronts ( I remember one of the raids was a bit sucky but the others were good ).
Also, as you have prolly read here over the past few days I am very disappointed with SL, while I see legions of ppl that love it.
So I’m trying to understand what makes an expansion good or bad for you.
I don’t consider WoD bad, it was one of my favorite expansions. End game raiding was some of the best I have done, but it needed 1 or 2 more raids. Loved may garrisons, really enjoyed Questng.
BFA is the worst expansion for me. Shadowlands is above BFA but below WoD for me. The maw took if form a 7/10 to a 3/10
For me… WoD was bad because it was raid or die, but at least the story was engaging… Also there was a severe lack of content. SL is bad because the story sucks.
Until BfA was released, I never considered any expansion bad. I did have my favorites and some were, IMO, stronger than others overall. WoD held my interest from launch to HFC. BfA just over a month.
My favorite thing about WoD was warrior’s Gladiator Stance.
It was mostly just a lack of content. The zones were great and what content was there was good enough, but it didn’t have replay value. Eventually it dried up to a desert limbo of nothing to do. There was only one major patch that really added anything. It took seven months to reach that patch and then another 14 months waiting for Legion.
It was just nothing happening, no reason to even log on if you didn’t raid or pvp for months on end. As a result it often gets compared to other expansions as a benchmark bad example.
Blizz just gave up on WoD. And also a significant amount was cut out from the original plan. Original WoD was amazing, but by the time it hit live it was very different in a worse way.
because there was literally no content outside of raiding. Compare it to MoP which was full of good content in pretty much every area. It made WoD into even more of a letdown.
The removal of a raid. Mr Hazzikostas announced that patch 6.2 would not be the last content patch, and then a month later they announced there was no more content to follow, removing an entire raid tier.
The removal of the two faction hubs
Attempting player housing with garrisons which was done so badly that many players continue to hold garrisons up as a reason Blizzard will never implement a feature that I think could have been amazing.
The removal of a number of areas of the expansion zones.
The introduction of Pathfinder after they announced they would remove flight altogether and the uproar that followed.
Patch 6.1. So rewarding and worth the wait.
Numerous things shown at launch which were never included.
Those are just the things I can think of atm. It was the first time in my 11 years of play that I stopped playing for the last 4 months of the expansion due to complete burnout and boredom. For me, thats the major sign of how I felt about it.
Biggest issue with WoD, so much content pulled before release, some character stories (Grom) got butchered because of it. Big content droughts. What we did get, was good, though. I loved leveling
People asked for player housing and got some really half baked rendition of it that had us hanging out in our space more than being out in the world engaging content. The garrison itself was full of bland choices and had zero meaningful depth. By the end people were leveling alts just to use the garrison to farm a ton of gold
The reason we werent out in the world was because there wasnt really anything to do outside of raiding. There was no side content, no world activities, nothing to pursue or grind out
To me, the zones werent memorable or enjoyable. They were tedious. The terrain was insufferable in some places, the clutter was unbearable.
What made WoD bad is how blizzard flat out gave up on it to focus on legion.
6.0, in my opinion, was fantastic. Some of the best leveling and zone design I have seen out of blizzard. It flowed well, the story was told well, it all just worked. On top of that the first raids and pvp system were a+.
6.1 is where it all went down hill. They cut an entire chapter of the story revolving around the Ogres and supposedly was where we dealt with Grommash and explained why he started to work with us. They cut all of this to give us…a selfie camera?
We spent like a year or so stuck in 6.0 content which got boring after awhile and made the garrisons feel like a prison.
6.2 wasn’t even enough to save the xpac we got a recycled legion invasion and a a bunch of story that made no sense because we had no context.
I’ll be honest blizzard will have to try really really really hard to mess up that bad again.
Bladespire and Black Temple/Temple of Karabor captial cities - cut content
Shattrath Raid - cut content
Gorgrond railway and loads of story content - cut content
Farahlon zone - cut content
Fungal whale/Zanga - cut content
However, now, after its past by other content, WoD may be one of the best leveling progression, ever, and thats considering wotlk and mop.
Also, loads of the cut content, so to spend time on Legion, and Broken Shore story campaign was dissapointing and Argus was just hollow and not nearly epic in scope enough.
The problem with WoD is that a significant portion of the planned content was gutted so that resources could be dedicated to Legion… which is why there was a major ‘content’ patch that consisted of the Selfie Camera being one of the ‘big additions!’
Also… by the change in direction that they made to keep from having too many ‘Orc’ raids in a row, we ended up losing the chance to get access to a version of Gorehowl that had updated art… since Grom went from being the planned end boss to someone helping the cause after Gul’Dan’s betrayal.
Otherwise, what actual content that was there… was actually pretty good IMO. I found the initial release content enjoyable but it Blizzard ultimately didn’t support and develop it further so the expansion ultimately failed.
What is pretty much obvious by the way Blizzard treated it is that it was nothing more than a filler expansion to buy time to further develop and set up Legion… much in the same way that BfA was for Shadowlands.
This. The raids were great, challenge modes were great, class design was great. It just needed to be expanded on a little instead of abandoned 1 patch in.
wod wasn’t bad, scrapping an entire content patch to do class balance was bad, and making another content patch nothing but a selfie camera was bad, wod could of been great but bliz basically cashed in on their yearly “We know what you want more than you do” card.
The only good thing about WoD was the raids, leveling, and art work. Once max level there was NOTHING to do besides raid. Now, a lot of people like that. But a lot of people don’t.
Subjectively, I hated WoD’s story and thought Garrison’s sucked. A lot of the player base was suffering from orc fatigue by this point.
I absolutely loved the leveling experience in WoD, along with the art, music, dungeons, raids and even some of the simpler things like collecting mission table followers and fishing. I also enjoyed leveling up the garrison.
By the end however I was bored and ready to move on and leave the garrison behind, as well I really did not enjoy what had been done to professions… and Ashran was very meh… but overall I liked it and still get warm, fuzzy, nostalgic vibes for it sometimes.
