For me, Cata was the worst. I thought having new zones mixed in with old world zones was a good idea. I was wrong.
Here is my order:
Wrath
Legion
Pandaria
TBC
Warlords
Cata.
TBC should place higher, seeing as it is the first, but it hasn’t aged as well.
Warlords I hated the goddamn garrison, the raids, and Tanaan
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Warlords, and that was as a recent solo player.
I barely played MoP (hated it), never played Cata, found Wrath mostly boring, and loved TBC. For me, I thought TBC had just the right amount of variety in 5mans but (outside of Karazhan) was let down by the raids.
Even though I was mostly a PVPer and hardcore raider in vanilla/tbc, I always loved running 5mans the most - and I think 5mans are something that have gotten weaker with every successive expansion - perhaps partly as a consequence to the increasing homogeneity of classes and abilities…
I think I’m mostly with Mr. Crump.
Wrath (Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel, which is WoW’s best one-two raid punch, easily)
Legion (my 3rd most played expansion, after Wrath and TBC, and a pretty good raid in Tombs of Sargeras…I’m going to check out Argus next week!)
TBC (Karazhan/Black Temple was so great)
Pandaria (didn’t really raid, and the farming stuff was annoying)
Warlords (I was pretty burned out by this point, only bought in the last couple of months before Legion)
Cata (easily the worst idea the devs ever had)
They never again equaled Wintergrasp for large scale PvP awesomeness.
Wrath wins for a few reasons:
Legion my biggest criticism is I don’t like artifact power. I reminds me too much of leveling my pants in DAoC ToA. It’s also the one expansion I haven’t felt like leveling my alts, but some of that is there is so much to do on my main.
Almost every expansion I can look back on and pull something positive out of: TBC, flying, BELFs, Draenae, Karazhan. Wrath, ICC, LFG, great zone design. MoP Pandas, good zone design, a story with some humor. WoD: seeing the “original” Draenor was nice. Legion: Demon Hunters are fun, good zone design, and an attempt to have some variety in leveling progression. The best I can get with Cata is “goblins?” The streamlined leveling from 1-60 was nice, but leveling now is so irrelevant it feels like a porno that skips right to the money shot.
Why can’t they just revive it for current level caps? It was so much fun. I don’t even care if the rewards are minor. I just liked being at the cap and playing this.
This x1000 for me, why I quit. Taking away insta flight, without a huge grind on my druid also added to the killing. My resto druid was so much fun to play at one point, and they just destroyed it. I appreciate that Blizzard isn’t afraid to take big chances and make big changes, it keeps the game fresh, but when they do something you hate, it can really kill the game in it’s tracks.
While I agree with everyone putting Cataclysm at the bottom, I only do so for the new content. As a player that started very early on in 2004/5, getting a refresh of the old areas was really quite cool. Lots of nods to players that knew the areas before.
I was never into WoW nearly as much after Burning Crusade, though I played WOTLK, Cataclysm, and WoD. I guess Burning Crusade would be my default favorite expansion, but honestly nothing came close to Vanilla for me. Call it nostalgia. The game fucking ruled my world in 05/06 and everything after that (thankfully) was like an aftershock.
While I understand the concept of trying to revise the newbie zones, I really didn’t like what they did with the Barrens.
Yeah, I really hate how they ruined the old zones. It’s true that a lot of the quests were all over the map (literally), but they could have addressed that by simply changing the rewards. If a quest required you to travel to the four corners of the world, then have it reward a mount, don’t take it out of the game.
When I farm old world instances or travel through the old zones, all I can think of is how much better they used to be and how Cata ruined them. Quests like “The Day Deathwing Came” and I presume the Johnny Awesome line (I don’t play horde, but what I’ve read online seems hilarious) are a few gems amongst the shit. I mean, they turned Burning Steppes into a giant Rambo homage, ffs.
The only two Cata zones I liked were Hyjal and Ulduar. Ulduar with the Indiana Jones rip off story line is one of my favorite zones in the game. So I amend my earlier post about nothing good in Cata.
Legion I am enjoying. The grind is still there, but they seem to have done a better job at sliding a shiny veneer on it. I don’t mind the WQs, and the WQGF addon is a life saver. The only grind driving me nuts is the ancient mana grind for the Suramar quest lines. It feels like with that component they tried to stretch and already long quest line out further. I’m also not thrilled with some of the Suramar quests that take place in invis-seeing elite mobs. There was one quest-giver I found it easier to just jump off the ledge, die and rez.
I’m making progress in Suramar for flying. I only have a couple of quest lines left for the achieve. I’m doing the mana grind for the ley line chain. I still have a few other factions to get to revered. I still haven’t done much with the Broken Shore stuff.
Ha, I think I know which one you mean. My Demon Hunter floated down but missed the landing and I freaked out and ran around gathering elites as I went until I could find a good place to rest in peace so i could rez without fuss.
I think you mean Uldum (which was indeed great). Ulduar was the second Wrath raid, and still probably my favorite in the entire game.
Thanks. I always get them mixed up.
Not hard to confuse them!
Finally finished up Suramar and got the Loremaster achieve. That was a slog. I enjoyed them, but it felt like getting that one zone done took as long as all the others combined.
Now to get 6k each Wardens and Highmountain rep/
What killed Suramar for me were the elite sections. I’ve got a quest that is mandatory to continue the storyline and it’s impossible to stealth to the targets and impossible to kill the giant wandering patrols and impossible to rez without aggroing a patrol and impossible to get a group and so I just quit playing.
There are a couple like this. I generally just throw myself off the ledge, die, and rez where I need to.
The “are you with us” one was the worst one. There was one part of a manhole quest that was bad, but the “are you with us” was the one that drove me to drink.
I just encountered a fairly stupid bit of WoW quest design/writing. I got the quest “Pillars of Creation” which required me to obtain 3 specific items. Problem is, I had already obtained all 3 items, from the dungeon bosses in 3 of the Legion dungeons. I submitted a ticket and the GM explained that the items must be obtained a second time for this quest, from the raid Tomb of Sargeras. This annoyed me for 2 reasons: 1)the quest wasn’t marked as a Raid Quest which caused confusion and 2)they couldn’t come up with 3 new names for the items? Why have me obtain items I already had, which were already mounted in the Dalaran trophy room? Couldn’t they at least make them a variation of the base item to avoid confusion?
Feh, stupid quest design. I am officially Moderately Annoyed.