20 years worth of Wow development team making decisions concerning Wow game-play.
What in your opinion were the most controversial decisions that the Devs made that directly affected and impacted your experience with Wow?
retcon the lore they had with shadowlands
one example
- It was originally stated that the Helm of Domination and Frostmourne were crafted by the dreadlords,[42][43] before Shadowlands retconned this with the origin being the Runecarver instead. The original premise is probably what was told to Kilâjaeden during the creation of the Lich King.
20 Likes
Not baking me a pie every month is pretty controversial.
8 Likes
The dungeon finder probably had the biggest impact on my wow gameplay.
5 Likes
Oh boy.
- The infamous âno flying this patch or ever againâ decision in 6.2 is probably the biggest one. This was without a doubt the biggest instance of quantifiable damage ever done to the gameâs player count, because Blizzard hasnât reported subscriber counts in this game ever since. Like, this decision was so infamously bad that nobody outside of Activision Blizzard (and now Microsoft) will ever know how many subscribers this game has ever again, because this decision caused a drop of north of 3 million WoW subscribers.
- âWe donât want you playing Demonologyâ in response to WoD Demonology getting nerfed into oblivion (and Survival Hunters getting nerfed to the point of being the worst DPS spec in a post-TBC WoW ever) is still an extremely mocked line to this day. People STILL cite this every time a class gets nerfed, even if the nerfs are modest and justified, because of how bad this was.
- The hidden legendary bad luck protection cap of 4 that the devs went out of their way to never bring up until people started badgering them for it was another egregious one. This was BAD.
- Making leveling take an eternity in early Legion was a universally despised change that got reverted halfway into the expansion.
- Azerite Armor. Need I elaborate?
- Corruption. Need I elaborate?
- The entirety of the Shadowlands Covenant system prior to 9.1.5 felt explicitly designed to be as spiteful towards the playerbase as humanly possible. Conduit Energy, a 2-week restriction on swapping Covenants, the works.
- Torghast was just a massive L as soon as player power became locked behind it.
- And to make matters worse, 9.1 introduced Shards of Domination. This was basically âtier sets at homeâ and had acquisition so miserable that I donât think there has ever been a system more universally reviled by the WoW playerbase before or since. Like, they will literally never be able to top this system because it was really and truly that bad.
- The Zskarn fiasco. Horrifically-designed 70-pull boss had a strategy that turned it into a 5-tank, 5-heal boss that took sub-10 pulls, it got the living daylights buffed out of it in the middle of a week in an attempt to make the fightâs difficulty more in-line with what RWF guilds did, and the end result was a boss that went from being a 10-70 pull boss to a 130-200 pull boss that completely ruined Hall of Fame and pissed off a huge amount of guilds.
I could probably name a few more, but I think the ones I listed are the worst ones.
EDIT: I canât believe I forgot to include Sepulcher being ridiculously overtuned across all levels of play outside of LFR on this. This raid obliterated the Mythic raiding population to the point where it hasnât even fully recovered to this day and even on Heroic this raid had bosses like Anduin and Rygelon which, while fine bosses on their own, had mechanics that were incredibly out of touch with Heroicâs intended audience. Heroic Anduin is to this day the most nerfed boss in WoWâs history and has received more individual nerfs than entire raids have received at times, and the one-two punch of Anduin into Rygelon completely erased the concept of an AotC guild that tier.
46 Likes
The biggest hit was Mythic being 20-man only, the death of high end 10 man raiding.
8 Likes
Iâm still bothered by how souls can be split. 
10 Likes
It makes them easier to store in tiny jars if you split them first.
4 Likes
imo allowing warlocks for every race. Tauren warlock is heresy. Draenei warlock is flatout burn at the stake heresy.
9 Likes
The Devs have yet to retcon the retcon known as SL by doing a cinematic showing it was all just a bad dream. That would have been the best pre-patch for DF. Perhaps in an upcoming patch the âfalse memoriesâ we experienced can be lifted and lore reset on itâs original patch.
9 Likes
All of TBC. The races, the zones, adding flying, attunements, and consumable overload. It was a long time ago, so itâs a very dim memory in the grand scheme of things.
Oh yeah I also remember the fights over having a neutral hub
1 Like
Listening to the 'âomgerd wow devs, I donât want to play this game so stop making things that make me uncontrollably want to do something I donât like âcause I need that player powerââ crowd⌠to name one at least.
2 Likes
I was the same way. Whatâs happened has happened, canât remove it now but maybe we can make it better. 
âŚwhich was how my suggestion of the shadowmoon warlock came to be and now iâm not allowed to suggest anymore. 
1 Like
Some good candidates here but Ionâs War on Flying undoubtedly takes the cake.
33 Likes
Was typing and missed this, but a statement worthy of a âbumpâ due to my total and complete agreement.
1 Like
I mean, yeah. It is Heresy. WoW is full of heretics, they kind of drive a lot of the major plots that happen.
Interesting stories are seldom told about the standard person of a given group. The outliers, the heretics are often what make things interesting.
If every single character in WoW conformed to their racial groupâs stereotypes it would be boring af
1 Like
Thatâs the argument from people who donât care about lore.
The whole shtick of Draenei was their everything being ruined by demons, and on the run from them and kil jaeden and archimonde for thousands upon thousands of years. Itâs so dumb.
3 Likes
Attunements were a thing in Vanilla too.
3 Likes
I liked corruption though.
3 Likes
Letâs not forget that the developer who did this waited until the day AFTER his guild killed Zskarn with the cheese strat before changing it. Thatâs why the change happened in the middle of the week instead of on a Tuesday.
5 Likes