Quote Originally Posted by Y2K21 View Post
I think people forget with WoD is that management literally told the devs about 75% through development that they wanted to change the direction of the expansion - which is why a lot of things were put into the Garrison as well as simple content because of the time constrant.

There was no content because of managerial meddling, as much as we want to blame devs.
Nobody truly knows what happened to Warlords of Draenor and we likely never will. That said, I personally suspect the Warcraft movie has a role to play. Blizzard always planned to do a cross-promotion in which seeing the movie got you a base copy of the game (what was the battle chest at the time) but when the movie was delayed, this would’ve happened during typical expansion downtime. To not have this, WoD was abandoned in favour of going all in on Legion.

Looking at WoD, the initial levelling was great and so was patch 6.2 which is the only actual major patch. 6.1 saw the release of Blackrock Foundry but beyond that it was just some garrison changes and random things that never were anything to write home about. It was also all the last expansion in which PvE progression was purely raid or die. A tried and tested but boring concept that ultimately didn’t fit the modern WoW player base.

Then Legion releases with an absolutely stacked content cycle. There was a patch every 77 days. Five great raids, extra dungeons, the introduction of Mythic+ in 7.0 and extra open world zones that were fun to progress vis reputations. Also the mage tower challenges which were incredible solo challenges. It want without flaw with both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands having slower content cycles while also having the same flawed borrowed power systems.