World of Warcraft Final Report Card 2024

Community General Discussion
1

What Report Card Grade would you give World of Warcraft now in 2024 ?
You can assign each subject an A, B, C, D, E, F. Grade Score.

Subjects Examples:

Story.
Lore.
Art design.
Combat.
Stability.
Fun.
Exploration.
RPG Elements.
Accessibility.
PVE.
PVP.

Also feel free to come up with your own subjects for the game to grade. Or just give the game a general grade score.

2

A as always

C, too many cooldowns I don’t want but would be silly not to take nowadays

F, these servers stink and they have an insane amount of downtime compared to competitors (GW2 loads in the new expansion while people are playing for example).

A but that depends more on the people than the game for me

A

C, I liked the raids. They shouldn’t have made groups harder to skip (dragons after boss 2 in HOI) instead they should have looked at why people skip them and address that. Releasing Augmentation Evoker mid-season was a disaster.

Professions

B, I was able to have fun with them but I understand how people would feel overwhelmed. The public orders should also let you define a minimum quality.

3 Likes
3

D. It technically passes. But it’s bad. It has almost always been bad, this is not a recent develoment. Vanilla might have gotten a B for general worldbuilding, about the same for MoP. Everything else is D with individual moments that are better than that, but not a whole product.

Same as above. D. It’s the same thing. The story is how we get lore. I think it results in an interesting world to play in, but the way its presented to us is pretty bad.

B. WoW does a good job of maintaining its style and it does help keep it somewhat “timeless”, at least compared to a more realistic approach. Environments are solid, updated models are solid. Loses some points for the lackluster armor (way too many non-3D assets for a 2024 game), loses some points for older zones not being properly updated resulting in a jarringly different experience depending on where you are.

For the style of MMO WoW is, A. I do think tab target combat is a bit dated, but since that’s what it’s going for and what the biggest MMOs do, it’s fair game. As a tab target combat experience, it’s unmatched. It’s not perfect simply because I find many spec rotations to be on the bland side, but the mechanics of it and the responsiveness can’t be beat.

For day to day gameplay and instanced content, A. It barely ever has hangups, we generally know when the service will be down, and even expansion launches have been pretty clean over the last decade or so with the exception of WoD (which just seems like it attracted more nostalgia players than they were expecting).

When it comes to open world events that focus on putting lots of players in one location (including player driven ones), F. It’s an MMO and y et it struggles the MOST when you put more than a small group of people together in the world. Unplayable levels of lag / delay. At least the game doesn’t crash and servers stay up, but it’s a ridiculously poor state of affairs.


 C? I struggle with this one. I’m having a decent amount of fun right now, but I’m doing it by basically breaking the game. If I play as intended, I can’t give it above a D right now. But that’s also just my current feelings about endgame leaking through. My desire to play it has plummeted this expansion, but I also don’t feel like it’s designed any worse than usual, I think it’s just me having played for so long.

C. Exploration is hard to feel “right” when we can just fly directly to any location we want to see. Exploration always feels more interesting when we have to figure out weird ways to get places that are perhaps intended for future content or something. Like, Ardenweald had some islands that were supposedly unreachable before they added Flight, because the intent was for a teleportation system to send you to and from those islands, and you unlocked that later on. But you could use class abilities and Gliders and such to get there from Day 1, and that’s the kind of exploration that’s fun to me. Dragonflight doesn’t really have that, since you can just fly anywhere from day 1, nothing is really “unexplored” or “secret”, it’s all part of what you’re supposed to be doing at any given time, so it gets a bog standard score in that regard.

F. Has been an F since like Cata. vanilla → WotLK had a lot of tedium and a lot of it was tied to “RPG elements”, but it definitely accumulated into the game having a different feel to it, and I do kind of miss that. The modern game is a LOT more approachable and overall that’s probably better as a video game, but it is almost entirely lacking in RPG Elements. I want to be clear that I don’t think this makes it a worse game – just a different one, but if I’m rating “RPG Elements”, it’s very low.

B+. The game goes pretty far out of its way to make sure anyone of any skill level can enjoy the game and make progress, and there are decent options for color blindness and such. Addon and Macro support also greatly helps people with vision or mobility issues (including hand issues). It just gets knocked down from A because of its insistence on keeping the highest content arbitrarily locked behind archaic systems that have no reason to exist anymore, namely Mythic Raiding and its Raid ID lockouts forcing players into guilds instead of just pugging as has become the norm for a lot of players in all other forms of content. In addition to that, things like M+ could be queued and functioned with a PvP-esque rating system, but they instead opt to let players gatekeep themselves, which shuts a lot of people out of content who don’t want to deal with navigating that. You can argue whether this is acceptable or not for the game – I personally lean toward it being fine for an MMORPG, which is why it doesn’t drop my score lower than this, but for some, it’s going to be one of their primary issues with the game.

C. The content itself is all fine and probably deserves at least a B. But Blizzard’s choices regarding Raiding and Mythic+ keep it as a C due to the inherent imbalance between them. I literally quit raiding back in BfA (and haven’t returned to it in any serious form) because M+ essentially makes it irrelevant outside of specific items. Nothing has changed since then. It’s still World of Mythic+. And Mythic+ itself is fine! But allowing the game to be drowned in it is not acceptable to me.

Low Level content is also incredibly broken. It’s resulted in a lot of fun for me via Twinking, but there’s no doubt that it’s broken, and this would probably be worth docking points to people who aren’t making use of that brokenness like I am.

F. But I would apply this rating as a blanket rating to ALL MMORPG PvP. It is literally never good. It is such a poor genre for PvP.

4

C

DF is the first expansion that actually has made me pause on getting the next
and I’ve been playing since Vanilla. :dracthyr_comfy_blue:

5

Story.---------------- F
Lore.----------------- B-
Art design.-------- A
Combat.------------ B+
Stability.------------ B-
Fun.------------------ C+
Exploration.------- D-
RPG Elements.— D
Accessibility.------ F
PVE.------------------ C
PVP.------‐----------- C+

6

Story.---------------- F
Lore.----------------- D
Art design.-------- C
Combat.------------ F
Stability.------------ C
Fun.------------------ C
Exploration.------- B
RPG Elements.— C
Accessibility.------ F
PVE.------------------ C
PVP.------‐----------- F

Blizz just doesn’t listen to their playerbase and what they want
/sigh

7

Feels a bit premature to give the final report for a calendar year in May.

8

Story = F (Zzz)
Lore = F
Art design = A
Combat = C+
Stability = C+
Fun = B
Exploration = B
RPG Elements = C
Accessibility = F
PVE = B+
PVP = C