You can only pick one.
Someone in chat yesterday brought this question up and damn is it hard for me to pick.
If I was required to, I’d probably say Shadowlands. WoD was bad, but Shadowlands was insultingly bad.
Isn’t WoD already some form of retcon?
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WoD is easy to skip for a recap. 
Shadowlands is needed to explain the motive for Sylvanas, Anduin’s disconnection from the light, the new world tree, and both Vol’jin’s assassination and why Sylvanas was warchief. 
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Shadowlands and its not even close. You cant come back from the story/lore being butchered so much.
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Hate Shadowlands as much as you like but without it, Dragonflight couldn’t really worked out.
There would have been no Amdrassil raid.No Ysera come back in dragonflight either. No tree. War Within pre requisites wouldn’t have happened either.
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You needed warlords to make legion happened. Warlords existence was to get guldan and Illidan back.
Warlords also needs to exist to make BfA happen as well.
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Do I have to pick one?
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So it’s complicated.
WoD is not as rough an expansion as SL to me but lore-wise you can skip by it. We chase Garrosh into an alternate timeline, do some stuff, come home without much changing in our Azeroth.
Shadowlands was the endpoint for various plots that started bubbling up around Legion and laid the grown work for major night elf storylines as well as Anduin’s arc. It was important. It was just BAD.
My point is I’d rather retcon Shadowlands as “We all killed by N’Zoth” but it’s way more complicated doing that than just saying Warlords was a hallucination (minus, you know, Mag’har allied race).
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It’s a brutal choice to be made.
retcon shadowlands. watch the forums burn.
But… There is change in Azeroth. Guldan escaped, made Legion expansion happened
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If none is not an option, I reluctantly choose SL. No WoD means no Legion. Meanwhile nothing to follow SL matters so I could undo SL and go for something else.
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It can be hand waved as the Legion attacked and slew Varian and Vol’jin without context even to Gul’dan since we’re fighting our Legion. 
While Gul’dan was cool, he didn’t make any connections and also attacked the Twilight Hammer too-- would’ve thought they would’ve been friends considering our Gul’dan’s leadership. 
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SL was a massive story fail.
WoD was a massive content fail.
So I guess it depends what you want out of the game.
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Shadowlands.
WOD didn’t really retcon all that much. It was more of a “timey-wimey, what if, alternate universe”. Outside of the Mag’har coming to our timeline in BFA, it didn’t really effect the Main Timeline all that much.
SLs, though, went back and changed the origins of things like the Dreadlords, the Helm of Domination, and Frostmourne. It turned Sargaras and the Legion into just chumps being manipulated by The Jailer… a super-secret, all-powerful being that we’ve never heard of before, never got any indication even existed, but is somehow suppose to be a “Titan+++” level threat. Every major event that occurred in the history of WOW was apparently part of the Jailer’s grand, 100 dimensional chess, plan. Oh, and if you’re a race that revered/worshipped your ancestors? Lol you’re just stupid and wrong. Those aren’t your ancestors, dummy. 
SLs is probably the only expansion where not only did I not like the features and systems, but I also disliked the story and lore. And I didn’t even play the whole expansion. I was on hiatus after being so burned out grinding Artifact/Azerite Power in Legion and BFA, that I didn’t come back to the game until 9.2.5, the final patch of SLs. Still didn’t like it.
If I had my druthers, I’d make the entirety of SLs a fevered dream concocted by N’Zoth dying breath.
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Retcon as in the story is no longer canon or retcon as in the entire expansion is removed?
WoD is fun to level through and I still like to visit my garrison from time to time, but I’m also really fond of my Kyrian angel wings transmog.
If it’s just lore, then I’d retcon Shadowlands. If it’s removing an entire expansion, then I’d retcon WoD. Sorry WoD, Shadowlands may have sucked but some of the cosmetics were pretty cool.
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I can’t choose between them, although personally I still think WoD is the worst expansion to date for quite a few things…
Neither, because I’m not that big of a baby. But also because WoD didn’t really have much wrong with it narratively. Just a lack of content. And shadowlands was extremely critical to the story overall. Plus it wasn’t all bad. Actually the only part i would change if given the choice is to scrap all the notion that the Jailer had any part in orchestrating so many major events in the story’s history. In fact i suspect blizz will downplay it to the point that it may as well be retconned.
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WoD is alt universe stuff. BFA and SL need to go.
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As bad as WoD was, you need its story for much of Legion to make sense. Also, based on how important Anduin’s trauma is to things going forward, SL is also kinda stuck now too.
If they were to retcon/rewrite anything, they should scrap all the Zereth stuff about all the cosmic forces having their own “god-construct factories,” and also Zovaal’s “machinations.” He didn’t need to be somehow behind everything. Escaping his imprisonment in the Maw and wanting revenge was good enough motivation, and him being an opportunist instead of his 5D-chess escape plans would have been better storytelling.
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