Was Pandas really the start of the downfall for WoW?

game was kill by wrath and cata

I like the pandas though, not just because furshit but because they brought the angle of looking at both factions from a neutral perspective and played like its own little story in the setting when you played as them, I was really hoping they would capitalize on this but the following expansions just go back to horde vs alliance and never touch this sort of stuff again. Seriously, the games is at a dead end, it always comes back to horde vs alliance but noone takes any ground or actually makes any meaningful moves after all this fucking time. Consider how long the "war" has been going and all that has actually changed in the world, noone is any closer to winning or losing and the narrative just stays the same in every event after Arthas died.

They need to make a new game that advances the plot of the setting so something fucking changes, god knows they wont do it in WoW, make another Warcraft game maybe not actually. given how the remaster appeared or make WoW 2, have WoW stil exist as its own seperate thing if whales still want to play it much like Classic is its own thing, they desperately need to carry on the story.

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Wrath was.

If we didn't get pandas, we wouldn't have gotten the best 25H fight ever made, aka Siegecrafter Blackfuse.

BC was the start and each expansion and some patches added new problems. BC as a whole was fine. Wrath fucked up shit a lot more, but will still pretty alright . Cata had a nice start and seemed like it was going to be comparable at least to wrath, but they dropped the ball hard. Its around here most people started noticing or at least getting fed up with problems in the game.

whut

WoTLK was the start of the downfall of WoW, with a resurgence coming with Cataclysm...then they did the same thing. Halfway through Cataclysm they started merging shit because of the fucking casuals bitching too much. Made shit easier, more accessible, etc. That's when it truly went to shit.

>Burning Crusade was the fucking best and fuck if you if you disagree because you're WRONG

didn't help that the patch dungeons in cata made people ignore the rest of the dungeons because they had better gear.

Cata definitely marked the change that lead to the shit we have today. That said, as gay as pandas themselves are, the expansion itself was pretty great. Especially the story and locations.

>flying
>tokens
>blood elves
>lore rape

>2011+9
>not being able to greentext properly
shiggy

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>as gay as pandas themselves are, the expansion itself was pretty great.

that's the thing, if you can't get over the pandas (like me) then you can't really enjoy an expansion centered around them

Should've made the pandas cuter.

Pandaring.

fuck off, pve content is always easy. dont measure difficulty on raids.
cata was the worst and without cata, classic would have never happened. dont get me wrong i like classic but it still would have never happened.
cata was everything no one ever wanted.

wrath was the start of that shit. The whole reason cata took the turn it did is because the wrath babies complaining about dungeons.

kind of true, still i hate fags that start their sentence with "this"

I honestly think that flying being introduced was one of the worst things they did all around in terms of gameplay. Being able to avoid all danger should never be a thing when travelling outside of fast travel, it has effectively made world design and any/all encounters completely non existent, the world feels fucking dead.

The wow devs know they fucked up by adding flying, but if they try to remove it now all the casual fucks will never stop crying.

the "downfall" is based on several different metrics
casualization began with charity purples in wrath
gameplay deterioration began with cata
uninspired and lazy development began in wod
total systems failure completed in bfa

>angle of looking at both factions from a neutral perspective and
Ironically MoP is where Blizz started writing faction-exclusive quests to paint the opposing faction in a bad light, i.e. Alliance torches innocent foxgirls if you are Horde and Horde kidnaps panda cubs if you are Alliance, to artificially rile you up against the other faction (but really to cover for Horde being the assholes every time)

the horde being assholes every time is 100% the writers being failures
the modern horde were supposed to be noble savages and outcasts banding together to make a home for themselves
they were written like warmongering imperialistic assholes by writers who completely missed the point

Mists is one of the best expansions. It had its flaws but the good content heavily outweighed the bad. IMO the start of WoW's downfall was when Blizzard began pruning all the skills and abilities to make every class and spec homogenous and easy for brain-dead people to use while removing so much fun utility.

One thing I really wish Blizzard would do is graphical updates for all the armors pre-Mists, especially Vanilla and BC armors, because god damn those textures look so bad in the rest of the game and some of them really need to have their stretching and smearing problems fixed.

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They shouldve leaned hard into this stuff. I remember at the time It was In the back of my mind that they were going to introduce a 3rd faction in all this with how all that shit was going, a faction that consists of certain races from both sides in one faction. Something to change the pace of things for fuck sake. Now it seems like they have completely forgot Pandaren exist and everything about that plot and how the factions were portrayed from the outside has been pushed aside for more villain of the week shit, that gets resolved, and we are back to square one of alliance vs horde and nothing happened.

Are people still upset that it's harder to gank people now that they can fly away?

I mean... Braindead classes have been a thing for a while, just look at mage throughout the years.

>are people still upset
The answer is yes for almost anything you ask this about. There is always going to be one guy out there at the very least.

i suspect the higher ups probably told them to write less panda stuff after how unpopular pandas were with people who thought they were "kiddy"
only super serious stuff for my game about walking cows and space goats

It's about wanting immersion over convenience

The pandas would've been better if they weren't such comedic material besides the Shadopan

No WoW suffered from unsustainable gameplay since vanilla, and unsalvagable lore since the burning crusade.

>pandaria Warlock
What the fuck was that? That class was absurdly fun, why didn't the chimps at blizzard follow that design and refresh the classes that way instead of gutting locks and calling it a day? No wonder wod dropped players like flies.

Like i said, that's when the downfall truly began. Shadowlands is bringing back some of the variety and utility but I feel it's too little too late.

Flying does that for a lot of games.
It seems like a thing you really want in so many games, but the mechanic of it makes so much other stuff redundant and removes more of the game.

They would do well to do something like
>alliance
good guys
>horde
neutral
>undead as its own faction
Actual bad guys. Let someone be fucking evil for christ sake, let them do mass sacrifice and have acolytes and shit and they KNOW its wrong, they dont care.. Id play a fucking skeleton if they let me, or an acolyte spellcaster with some new classes like a necromancer, just give them a host of undead themed races and let players actually play as the forsaken.

Why in all that is holy is the Forsaken in the Horde, I never understood this, even in the game the Forsaken are constantly trying to kill their allies, in the parts where the factions gather, the undead are always off in theor own corner doing their own thing and the undead themselves HATE their living companions.

This, Pandapack was great until SoO

And you can't be immersed because you CHOOSE to fly instead of walking?

i love fem pandas :)

>tfw no panda gf

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There are gnomes in the game, like, fucking gnomes. Why do people think this is a serious setting. Pandas are as consistent to the setting as the fucking quillboar and murlocks, its fantasy, all it needs to do is obey its own rules and stick to them, and pandaren were just another race among other goofy races.

Not him, but most players will make the game worse for themselves by doing things the easier way. I forget whats its called but its a well documented.

alliance shouldn't be good
no faction should be unequivocally good
alliance should be xenophobic, especially nelves who should even be xenophobic to the alliance itself
however having a cackling cartoon villain faction might be fun, but the forsaken were already well-established and interesting, you could maybe do an offshoot of them like the royal apothecary society having their own faction and maybe recruiting a few other asshole races or subraces

also by "no faction" i mean no player faction
i'm fine with e.g. the argent dawn being unequivocally good

Wrath was and Cata was the file shot in the head.

>there are people who act like Kul Tirans have completely and utterly destroyed everything they love and hold dear in this world
It's hilarious, the same people who jerk off to fat bears and demand obese ogres fly off the handle into spittle-flecked rages because there are plus-sized humans in the game. I've never had more fun going through WoW than I have with my Elemental Shaman Kul Tiran gal.

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also alliance should be the imperialistic warmongers that the horde have for some reason been written as

Wrath was my favorite expansion but also when signs of the game getting worse started to show. Everything up to ulduar, superb. Trials, shit. ICC, fantastic but went on for years because it was the last update in the expansion. The features like raid finder that popped up with ICC, if I'm remembering that correctly, were the biggest warning signs. But cata was the biggest failure in my eyes and was when I quit the game.
>game world completely revamped
>old, nostalgic areas removed
>muh flying
Then you realise that's all the expansion had and the new quest zones were trash, the revamped world is something nobody will ever even use unless you make a new character and there was a single raid on release that was partly a rehash. Funny that each expansion following was somehow even worse than that shit. The latest expansion is just sad.

Yeah this. People love to hate on cata and some parts were atrocious and killed a lot. Namely the revamp of the old world which not only removed all the soul from azeroth but also swallowed up a massive amount of resources leading to cut content and loooooooong dragon soul. What cata did very wrong was the raid browser though. The 80-85 content, class design and max level stuff they added with cata was top notch with some exceptions. It's just that everything else was complete shit.

you always post this same shit when literally no one cares about kul tiran and you're looking for some weak ass justification for liking fat girls on a video game lmao

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I have been leveling characters and MoP has pretty interesting zones. I can understand why it was a total turnoff to majority of players, pandaren were little bit too jolly and goofy for standard WoW themes.

>Namely the revamp of the old world which not only removed all the soul from azeroth
Nah, after nearly a decade of going through the same things over and over again having the world be changed made it refreshing and fun again.

SO
THICC

Exhibit A

youtube.com/watch?v=nyeZ8khSEC0

The original MoP reveal trailer is a failure of legendary proportion.
They set the trailer up to be such a massive letdown.
>vanilla
>bc
>wrath
>cata
>and now a new chapter... PANDAS LOLOLOLOL

THIS was the first look the world had at MoP and this one little trailer sabotaged the entire expansion HARD.

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Then separate factions by ideals.
Have alliance want to maintain the purity of the land and all that entails or some shit, they were there first so it is their right. The spreading influences of the other factions undermines their own peace and security.

Have horde want to merely exist and has to fight to do that. All things have a right to life or something and land is just land, they fight to survive and in some cases this means taking land that isnt actually theirs in order to live.

Have Forsaken trying to achieve its own goals like because they cant thrive in untainted land they have to defile it. They are undead and are hated by all, and so have an aggressive outlook making them enemies of other factions. They cant help what they are

Each faction is the heroes in its own mind.

Different tastes I guess. I wouldn't have minded them speeding up the 1-60 grind considerably, but they replaced it with almost exclusively meme-content. It just never felt right to me.

user it had only been like six years. Also, they just revamp the world again and have all the quests be related to their own stories and zones instead of everything because about cata shit.

trials were barely passable raid quality wise but the real shit was fucking charity gear
if they had been a side raid without straight upgrades to one of the best raids ever made, they would have been fine
also icc wasn't nearly as good as ulduar, it was a perfectly fine raid but the end of expansion raid should ideally be the one that's incredible because it's going to go on for like a year
also there's nothing inherently wrong with a raid finder system, the problem was the way it was implemented starting at the end of cata. the proper way to do it was eventually done later with the premade groups feature where you could list your group and other people could join it.

yes, exactly
now you're getting it, i would completely support this

I like my women with a healthy coat of fur.

I dont know I kindof loved the actual trailer user.
youtube.com/watch?v=wvYXoyxLv64

>trials were barely passable raid
The entire idea for the Trials instance/raid was absolutely retarded. "Hey, everyone, let's kill each other at the Lich King's doorstep to prove who among us is strong enough to go storm Icecrown Citadel!".

It did? MoP is one of the best-recieved and liked expansions.