In which expansion did WoW jump the shark?

Flying mounts in TBC killed world PvP, but damn they made life so much easier. Even 60% flying mount was great.

>You have to expand everything in a sideways manner instead of vertical
*laterally progresses your path*

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Cata for sure, its when they killed the old world, and made the games lore service to the jokes/refrences. Also i think the quest structure was made worse.

Well every new raid should be more powerful than the next (unless your intention is to make some casual content), but it should not invalidate everything before it.

Correct.

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As soon as they introduced space goats it was obvious there was no hope for the writing.

>You have to expand everything in a sideways manner instead of vertical, if you know what I mean.
>if you know what I mean
I know exactly what you mean, user, now come here so I can expand your butthole in a sideways manner but theres still gonna be vertical expansion IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

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TBC was the beginning of the end. The expac started so many shitty trends.

wotlk. trail of the crusoder to be precise.

What majority of you miss is how with each expansion interactions between players were diminished.
Be it less PvP
Then LFG/LFR
Phasing
Garrison
Etc.
Whole point of MMO is to have as many people interacting with eachother at once as you can.

>In which expansion did WoW jump the shark?
Literally vanilla
Giving an, albeit small scale, entire World from day one left little room to meaningfully grow or progress. Ideally for long term life, Vanilla should have been ~5 zones (one horde, one alliance, one neutral but leaning for both and one full on contested war zone). Keep in mind I mean five zones that when put together would be as large as all (35?) zones in Vanilla. Each expansion would slowly fill out the continent and even minor shit like kobolds would be exciting to return and could get fully developed instead of constant SAVE THE WORLD FROM BIG BAD. Granted, a slower burn strategy is easy to suggest with the foreknowledge we have that WoW would be a hit that would be popular for over a decade; but, we can't blame Blizzard for not thinking so long term in 2000 when starting the project.
If you just meant quality, it was downhill from the start. Vanilla updates focused too much on raids. Burning Crusade started lfg and flying mounts and was too focused on raids. But it was still good. Wrath was a mixed bag. Cataclysm ruined the game by engraving all the mistakes permanently.

so, Cata?

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You are overblowing WC3 importance.

By your logic BC was the game going to shit because we got to kill Illidan, among others that caused the Orcs so much trouble.

Deathwing was an older enemy to Azeroth than Arthas ever was.

A problem easily solved by making naxx a prerequisite to outland

There no more sir!

Everyone played wow because of wc3 user

BC.
I'd bet my right hand that the demographic that actually played through the end of WOTLK was 10% Vanilla, 40% BC players and half wrathbabbies. Even though it boasted it's highest player count of all time it felt kind of obvious how the playerbase was shifting.

MoP

in 2004

I thought the highest player count was in wrath.

WoW was the best during patch 3.1, where they released Ulduar.
Patch 3.2 then brought Trial of the Crusader, which was the start of the downfall of WoW.

Nobody cared about deathwing people only cared about Kael'thas, Illidan and Arthas

Yeah that's what I meant I just expressed myself badly. There's that sub count picture that get posted a lot showing WoW peak unique player count at WOTLK which was what I was rambling about.
Anyway thinking about it a bit more I think the shift toward shit design happened even earlier than BC to be honest. Kaplan poisoned the developpement team with his raid focus mind and it fucked up the entire shtick. I'd have to say after ZG patch I guess that's when the welfare mindset really set in for dev to start shitting out Raids with catchup mechanics as well.

nah, that's only 12 year old faggots like you who want to be assfucked by every trap and edgelord character you see

>You have to expand everything in a sideways manner instead of vertical, if you know what I mean.
Yes I know exactly what you mean

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>You are overblowing WC3 importance.
oh silly WC2 cucks

TBC

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patch 3.2

Patch 4.3, without a doubt. It gave us Dragon Soul, one of the worst and laziest raids ever, but more importantly it gave us two systems that would do lasting harm to the game: LFR and transmogrification.

I'll do transmogrification first. Lots of people love this feature. What's so bad about it? Well, the problem is that WoW is a loot game, and in loot games how cool you look should be tied to how much you've accomplished. Visual progression is key. Rags to riches. If you're badass, you look badass; if you're not badass, you do not look badass. This is how loot games work. It used to be that you could stand in a city, glance around, and see people's progression. Their gear told you. Looking cool was a reward for doing hard content. What transmogrification did is it allowed everybody to look cool. Just farm old raids, and your character doesn't have to display ugly leveling or pre-raid gear. Instead you can display old gear that was designed for the time to stand out and to signal the player's accomplishment. But when everybody stands out, nobody stands out.

LFR. Back in TBC I was showing the game to my friend. I was riding around Shadowmoon Valley and I pointed out Black Temple. I said, "That's the hardest raid in the game. I haven't even stepped foot in there." He was impressed. Black Temple? A huge forbidding citadel that his friend hadn't seen the inside of? That was cool. He started playing the next day. How much less cool would it have been if I had said, "And that's Black Temple. You just queue for it and you run around like a chicken without a head and watch the villain of the expansion go down effortlessly." Even if I'd added "But there's a hard mode!" it would've been over His interest would have been dead. Hard content that a minority of players sees contributes to making the world cool and fun. The old Blizzard knew this. Players need more to strive for than harder difficulties of content they've already seen.

TBC
flying mounts
smaller raids
raid difficulties
daily quests

In tbc when elves where not cum balloons for orcs

you are 100% right on transmog
not using it is the true swag, looking like a true adventurer that just came out of a dungeon having looted everything dead like a gyppo

>But when everybody stands out, nobody stands out.
Damn that's a quite good sentence.

i was gonna say cata, then i thought about it and was gonna say wotlk, but then i thought about it more and its TBC. hellfire greens being better than naxx purples was absolute horseshit and everyone knew it, flying mounts were horseshit and everyone knew it, 25 mans were horseshit and everyone knew it, invalidating azeroth was horseshit and everyone knew it. what i didnt understand then and still dont is why everyone just took it like a schmuck

WOTLK

tbc was a step down with resilience flying mounts and heroics

patch 1.6's city battlemasters
i miss logging into vent and making a group to travel to alterac and ashenvale together like an expedition
every pvper on the server would be there socializing, dueling and skirmishing between queues
wow went downhill from there on roads paved with good intentions

at the time i was blown away that there wasn't any loading screens in the open world; so expected them to eventually remove the instance portals
like they were some temporary limitation and some seamless tech would come along and make the world whole again

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Patch 3.1: Secrets of Ulduar was the last time WoW was good

>introduce dungeon finder in the next patch
>add the worst raid of all time, Trial of the Crusader in 3.2
>add overpowered legendaries like Shadowmourne that work in PvP

WoW would be in a better place if it was permanently frozen on patch 3.1

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Like the other anons said, it was TBC. But the thing about le vertical progression is that it usually results in one of two outcomes:
>The expansion content is so gated that a very small portion of the population would be able to access it
or
>The old content gets invalidated anyway by catchup gear and class/mechanic changes
A good example of my first point is what would happen if came to be. Original Naxx was only cleared by .01% of the population, meaning that the other 99.99% wouldn't have access to something they paid $40+ for.
The obvious solution to this is to add catchup gear, but instead of implementing it every tier like WoW post-wrath, it would have to be every other tier or even every three tiers. But you still run into the problem of eventually invalidating old content - although in this case, it would be in years rather than months.

this
3.2 was the exact moment wow was ruined forever

>WoW classic
based
>wow tbc
based
>wow wrath of lich king
based but dropped off near the end
>wow post wrath
wtf were they thinking

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>you need to level 120 levels and spend a month playing like a full time autist before your character can look cool
Fuck right off.

Nobody cares about the garbage lore introduced by WoW.

Wrath post-Ulduar.

ICC was great too, but TOC was utter garbage and by ICC they added Dungeon Finder and easy catch-up gear that made Naxx and Ulduar completely irrelevant to the game.

cata and/or mop

i stopped playing during cata and didnt even touch mop. i went back for every other expansion after mop to at least check out the changes/hit the level cap/pvp a bit, then usually quit again. cata was the jump up into the air and mop was the failed landing into the shark pool.

i wish xmog and mounts had more limitations since they make the game look terrible, but there's zero chance at this point, especially with a cash shop in the game

Only EverCucks genuinely believe TBC was the beginning of the end. It was definitely around 3.2 with the introduction of such a compulsive and unsatisfying way to log in and play the game. Frankly everyone who worked on it should go to prison.

>ICC was great too
it really wasnt, the 5 mans were far better than the actual raid

I think several of the bosses were pretty awesome and the overall aesthetic was great. I love most of the T10 sets too. It was too easy for sure though.

It's impossible to overblow WC3 considering it's what both the fans and the devs fanboy over the hardest. However, yes, Deathwing was wanted. It's just a shame that they botched so much of this expansion, like how we could have had full bullshit baby's first Shakespeare plotlines with the elemental lords betraying one another, Ragnaros and Al'Akir siding with the Old Gods while Therazane and Neptulon side with the humans, and a massive elemental war happens everywhere in-between as a result. There were glimmers of that in the Abyssal Maw and Deepholme questlines, but it was never properly manifested or actualized in any substantial way.

Wotlk ending was so bad that it made me quit. And thanks god, because otherwise i would have failed at univ.

>You can't just invalidate everything
Extremely broad statement. The old world was still very relevant. CoT, Kara, Quel'Danas (sp), Ghostlands, Bloodmyst Isles, Zul Aman. There was plenty of reason to stat in Azeroth. However with that said, I see where you're coming from and agree. I hate that expansions means all new zones and all nee blah blah blah. I want expansions that expand on the conflicts already happening everywhere else

This is the true answer that is/was generally agreed upon until thismeme started getting spread

shark was jumped at the last patch of wotlk

vanilla was superb in both pvp and pve, but the raids were such a cumbersome clusterfuck

tbc, yeah flying mounts killed world pvp, but pve really shined here. Best raids/dungeons in the game.

wotlk, pretty good PVE, but not nearly as good as tbc, and then dungeon finder killed the game.

I bought cata and dropped the game after like 2 hours in

Based and objectively correct pilled. Cata was the only expansion that tried to go against the grain and integrate the new content with the old

Where did this "Flying mounts killed wpvp" meme come from? Wpvp died in vanilla as soon as they introduced battlegrounds

>Where did this "Flying mounts killed wpvp" meme come from? Wpvp died in vanilla as soon as they introduced battlegrounds

its newfags who werent there and didnt play shadowpriest, chase flyers, dot, + sw:pain and levitate down.

>Where did this "Flying mounts killed wpvp" meme come from? Wpvp died in vanilla as soon as they introduced battlegrounds

Fucking this.
I still remember it very clearly how much of a drastic change this was.

World pvp was vibrant and active even after they first introduced BGs but you still had to go out to their entrances and queue for it out there.

The very moment they made it so you could queue from capital cities, it was over.
Suddenly the only wpvp occurring was the odd rogue gank here and there, but that was fucking it.

world pvp still happened while everybody was bound to the ground. bgs didn't stop players from running into each other, getting annoyed, calling their friends, and starting wars. with flying mounts you never got to the "annoyed" stage because you just mounted up and hit spacebar. it absolutely killed wpvp.

what are you implying with that pic?

in tbc i have a lot of fond memories of wpvp... in azeroth and on the isle of quel'danas, where you couldn't fly.

How did flying mounts kill PVP? I don't know anything about World of Warcraft, but I'm curious.

>How did flying mounts kill PVP?
Because to avoid combat all you do is activate the mount and hold down spacebar. Problem solved. Nobody can touch you.

Obviously it's not battlegrounds then but auto queue systems, same as what dungeon finder did

Making pvp instanced rather than forcing people to fight out in the world is the problem. People ganked anyone who afk'd near the portals but there weren't any huge wars going on

probably midway through cataclysm.

wrath after ulduar

Imo the first expansion blizz fucked up was Cata, i simply disliked the playstyle of most specs and didn't enjoy the new zones, i also never really got into raiding desu, bcs i simply started playing on wotlk private servers.
Then came MoP and i got hooked again, Pandaria was great and i really enjoyed the artstyle, although i hated healing in MoP, so i mained Tanks (blood dk/g druid) in MoP (i always mained rest sham/disc[holy] priest before) and had a blast. WoD was a real shitshow, i didn't even play for 2 weeks before going back to private servers. I just hated everything about it. The Garrisons were boring, the classes felt like shit and new stats just felt out of place.
My main Problem with Legion was the playstyle (again), since they continued the route they went in WoD, so haven't played Legion.
I didn't even care when they announced BfA, because i already found my sweetspot with TBC/WOTLK/MOP pservers ^^

TBC laid the seed with flying mounts and welfare badge epics. Wrath TOGC + ICC patch sealed it with menu toggle raid difficulties then dungeon finder right after.

I actually agree with you. People in general tend to point out the second half of Wotlk or the etirety of Cataclysm as the point that the game started to suck balls. But somehow I always feel that it was TBC that ruined the game.

It is weird though; WoW had 8 expansions (including vanilla), but it was only good during vanilla (1/8th of it's lifetime).

The latter half of vanilla wasn't nearly as good as the first half so it's even less than 1/8th

>menu toggle raid difficulties
I think it's really understated how much menus have fucked WoW. Everything is done through a fucking menu and takes away from the WORLD of warcraft.

that expansion formula was really bad, people were complaining about it on the forums almost immediately, but wow was printing more cocaine money than even metzen could snort at that point

>Only good during Vanilla
I'm tired of Vanilla dicksuckers

Personally I liked it through vanilla to the end of TBC. Wrath wasn't jumping the shark in my opinion, but it was a dud of an expansion that introduced things I didn't particularly enjoy. On the other hand I found it pretty cool in terms of the zones and the lore.
Death Knights as a player class is a cool concept, but the dropped the ball in the execution department.
The linear nature of raising the level cap and invalidating content and gear is a problem with all the expansions as well.
Where WoW jumped the shark for me was Cataclysm. The gutted the talent system and replaced with a "newer" more "interesting" take, which also lead to you not being rewarded with most anything in particular when it came to leveling. As tiny as thing as it may have seemed, going up a level and investing that new talent point was very satisfying, at least to me.
What they should have done is introduced a new talent tree and kept the old one, maybe separate them by passive effects you gain each level and more active and dynamic ones you gain every five, ten or fifteen levels.
What absolutely killed the game for me though, is that the Cataclysm literally killed WoW. Previous expansions had always kept to themselves and even with their introduction, you could level from 1-60 and experience the same content and zones that were present in vanilla.
In Cata, the zone revamps sucked, all of them were messy. I didn't mind the concept of changing quests, but I do find collecting fifteen bear asses as proof of quelling the local populace for a local hunter more immersive than helping out "LE EBIN RAMBO REFERENCE :-DDD" in Redridge.
Even Westfall has that dumb eyesore of a magic tornado or whatever the fuck. The point is that the zone revamp killed the World of Warcraft for me, and the world was always the part I was interested in personally, specifically exploration and roleplay.
Every expansion since then has just been Blizzard shitting on the game's festering corpse.

Also, reminder not to support Classic.
If you do you are giving money to the people who contributed to killing the game to begin with. None of the people who actually made the game good work there anymore either.
Even worse is that subscribing to play it means you'll also be paying for a subscription to the unholy abomination that is retail.

eat shit and die zoomer