I've never played world of warcraft, why is this expansion so incredibly hated? Like...

le old gods bait and switch lmao

Another thing they kinda screwed with this time is the dungeons. I don't know why they designed them like that, but literally 80% of them are scripted corridors FILLED with trash mobs that all have annoying as fuck abilities and can't be skipped. Add to that the fact that they nerfed almost all area control abilities of most classes, and changed tanks balance and threat generation - dungeons at the start of this expansion were a fucking nightmare to do. I don't know if it's better now, but Legion dungeons were infinetly better than bfa's.

The trash in atal dazar is harder than the bosses themselves

For starters, if you want to balance the game around vanilla-esque class design paradigm, you don't need to look further than TBC where pretty much every role is desirable in a min/maxed raid ("role", because for pure classes there tends to be one highest personal DPS spec, although a lot of those alternatives are covered as well, at least at some gear level). Making most specs viable (optimal) is no trouble whatsoever, you just need to let go of the idea of symmetric balance and let them justify their raid spot through utility or doing some specific thing overwhelmingly better (look at TBC tank niches).

Hell, while symmetric balance is the prime culprit in class stacking (you no longer need to pay attention to party synergies -> every raid slot after covering your bases in regards to required utility goes to the highest-performing spec), it really shouldn't be that unreasonable to achieve relative balance. Indeed, Blizzard has often managed this: for example, with 3.3.3 talents and low-end ICC gear levels, most specs are within a relatively narrow band of performance... this just breaks apart if you move to low-end gear levels (in T7 warlocks could literally be doubling warrior DPS) or ICC BiS (and now SMourne fury is #1 by a pretty wide margin). Extreme scaling from gear is the problem here by making balance a moving target that is difficult to hit.

It has all the same problems as the last one and somehow they made them even worse. also they tripled down on fucking up the writing.
People are only really upset because of the shit writing. Legion was just as bad from a gameplay perspective but people at that shit up because order halls distracted them or something.

gear scaling should not be an issue, you can make formulas that take gear scaling into consideration.
over the years you always had some specs that had shit for scaling and its retarded.
when community made simulators can clearly tell you that spec x will not scale well into the current or next tier and you dont do anything about it then you got a shit dev team working on your game.

Well, it kinda is, because some classes are inevitably going to have more scaling factors (say, vanilla/TBC DoTs don't scale from crit/haste unlike specs that don't rely on them), or scale superlinearly (consider how fire mage's Hot Streak scales with crit in Wrath). It's trivial to assume a certain gear level and adjust damage of a spec's main nuke or something until they sim the same at that gear level - and I think Blizzard has done this at points where they cared, but to make them sim the same at all gear levels requires far more dramatic changes to the mechanics.

Of course, it's clearly not impossible in general, but balancing something like vanilla specs for all gear levels simply by tweaking numbers of extant talents would be. But then again, since vanilla doesn't have artificial difficulty modes introducing what basically amounts to several tiers worth of scaling in each tier, the disparity wouldn't have time to go so far out of hand.

WoD got hated on way more

were you in a coma? no one hates it anymore everyone has moved on already and no one cares about wow anymore

still the most popular MMO

paralympic champions are still retards