Reverse WoW exodus

[Isala]

The discourse was legitimately so bad during MoP that if I dug up old Metacritic reviews circa 2012 for it and told you they were for Dawntrail, you would believe me without a second thought.

MoP was the worst expansion (at the time) with my favorite class designs. I loved taking every single one of them into the Brawler's Guild. As for the rest of the expansion? Pass.

[Isala]

Out of curiosity, what did you dislike about it?

It had some good raiding (Throne of Thunder is still one of the best raid tiers of all time, I think) and a ton of side content, introduced CMs which laid the groundwork for M+, and to top it all off had a semi-cohesive story that was easy to follow.

IMO Cata had less going for it than MoP and was clearly less finished with Abyssal Maw and the Well of Eternity raid getting axed and the final raid, Dragon Soul, being a short raid full of copy pasted recycled boss models.

But if you go by user reception on Metacritic (not the only metric of user enjoyment at all, but I can't think of a better way to assess user sentiment for an expansion that came out more than a decade ago) it is rated the same as Cataclysm and tied for the lowest at the time (5.8) and slightly lower than The Burning Crusade (6.0).

I found that interesting, assuming it's mostly accurate I didn't realize TBC was so contentious as to be lumped in with the likes of Cata, MoP and... gasp... Dawntrail. Although the latter isn't a fair comparison because it's a different game and it's only been out for a month whereas the WoW expansions we're discussing here are 10-15+ years old.

The Dawntrail comparison is pretty on point, actually. Leveling through the zone with that story was pretty bad. We went from Deathwing to "There are monkeys in my brewery! Please fix" to yet again, sudden world ending threats. It was just tonally all over the place. And having to do that horrible slog of a grind for every character to get things unlocked was just a massive pain in the ass. As much as I loved the BG on my alts, there were just as many alts that stalled halfway through, especially around the time you dealt with the fish people and the constant RP as other characters.

[Jojoya]

MoP was the worst expansion (at the time) with my favorite class designs. I loved taking every single one of them into the Brawler's Guild. As for the rest of the expansion? Pass.

MoP had a couple of flaws at its release but the first 2/3s of the expansion were far better than Cataclysm as far as I was concerned.

If the Barrens dailies and Timeless Isle are all you remember about MoP, then I can understand why you consider it the worst to that point. To me, patch 5.3 killed just about all the good work they had done in recovering from the Cataclysm problems plus fixing the most glaring problem at MoP's launch (couldn't spend VP without grinding rep through faction dailies). But up until then I was having a lot of fun.

I found that interesting, assuming it's mostly accurate I didn't realize TBC was so contentious as to be lumped in with the likes of Cata, MoP and... gasp... Dawntrail. Although the latter isn't a fair comparison because it's a different game and it's only been out for a month whereas the WoW expansions we're discussing here are 10-15+ years old.

TBC had a very bad start because everyone was funneled through Hellfire Peninsula when first reaching Outland. Massive log-in queues, zone congestion and frequent server crashes were a result. That led to very bad ratings that were rarely adjusted once players got to end game and could experience the core content.