I Ranked All WoW Systems 

If thorgast wasnt tied with currency to make your legendary and instead just an extermal "challenging" things to do for transmog/mount etc. Would have been S tier easily

Timestamps: 00:00:49 Tier Explanation 00:01:49 Transmog 00:02:57 Reforging 00:04:10 Old Talent System 00:05:33 Tier Sets 00:07:36 Scenarios 00:09:05 World Quests 00:10:22 New Talent System 00:11:29 Shadowlands Legendaries 00:13:13 LFR 00:14:39 Azerite Armor 00:17:24 All Mission Tables 00:18:31 MoP Legendary Cloaks 00:19:39 PvP Vendors 00:19:58 Flexible Raiding 00:20:35 PvP Vendor Upgrades 00:21:01 Weapon Skills 00:21:09 Tertiary Stats 00:23:07 Shards of Domination 00:23:40 The Great Vault 00:25:09 M+ 00:26:44 Threads of Fate 00:27:48 Torghast 00:30:18 Hard Mode 00:31:51 (Reforging Adjustment) 00:32:42 Timewalking 00:33:53 PvP Cache 00:34:52 Legion Legendaries 00:37:06 Artifact Weapons 00:39:37 MoP Farm 00:41:07 Warfronts 00:42:08 Glyphs 00:43:34 Netherlight Crucible 00:44:34 Need vs. Greed 00:45:28 Benthic Gear 00:46:33 Creation Catalyst 00:47:41 Order Halls 00:48:27 Valor/Justice Vendors 00:49:24 Personal Loot 00:50:34 Horrific Visions of N'Zoth 00:51:25 Pathfinder 00:52:35 WoD Legendary Rings 00:53:02 Island Expeditions 00:53:41 Item Levels 00:53:56 Challenge Mode 00:54:56 Chromie Time 00:55:11 Conduits 00:55:53 25 Man Raiding 00:56:04 20 Man Mythic Raiding 00:57:16 40 Man Raiding 00:59:48 Mage Tower 01:00:50 Dragonflight Talent Trees 01:02:19 N'Zoth Legendary Cloaks 01:02:47 Corruptions 01:04:40 (Rich Campbell Corruption Rotation Clip) 01:06:43 Brawler's Guild 01:07:30 Battlegrounds 01:08:54 Paragon Reputations 01:09:10 Customer Support 01:10:12 Professions 01:10:49 Covenants 01:13:43 Essence Powers 01:14:23 LFD 01:15:00 (Max's New Haircut) 01:15:13 M+ Cache/Weekly Chest 01:15:32 Runeforging 01:15:43 Arena 01:16:00 Master Loot 01:16:12 Titanforging 01:17:04 Garrisons 01:17:39 10 Man Raiding 01:20:09 Pet Battles 01:21:19 Ashran 01:21:36 Daily Quests 01:22:15 (Max's New Haircut Adjustment) 01:22:33 Cypher of the First Ones 01:22:51 Dragonriding 01:24:10 Heirlooms 01:24:41 Artifact Power 01:27:35 Withered Training 01:28:07 Final List/Review Like for others to see please

Blizzard I believe announced that they removed Reforge bc it caused several issues. Such as: People getting new piece then taking time from the raid to go reforge during raid, People claiming everything as an upgrade bc higher stat value to reforge out of meant high stat of what you want, among several other issues they claim which end up only impacting a small % of the population. All-in-all, I miss Reforging, it made every upgrade feel valuable to an extent, rather than a complete feels bad when you get a higher ilvl item that has your two worst stats by far.

Hey Max, I've been enjoying your content more and more - thanks for the cool videos. One note on this tierlist, from a gamedev perspective (almost 10 years worth of experience on my end): funneling dev time into one feature doesn't necessarily mean a different feature will be underdeveloped, especially at a huge studio like Blizzard. Sometimes we have good ideas on paper, but then after months of implementation, when it comes to playtesting, it turns out we missed some crucial points here and there and... it's usually too late to devote more dev time to make amends. Then a decision needs to be made - is the feature good enough to go live "as is", or do we cut it. In Torghast's example, I personally think it was good enough to go live.

Systems that kept you from playing multiple specs (like azerite armor or covenants/conduits) actively made the game worse. Why would you make systems that basically make players play the game less.

Artifact power actively made the game worse and any arguement for it not are brain rot. As a reason to play every day it was just pressure to get better not actually fun or rewarding in a meaningful way. In fact that arguement works against it because instead of a system or game mode that would be a fun reason to login they put in artifact power, something that DESTROYED MIDCORE GUILDS.

I don't get how covenants aren't "actively made game worse" just because they were swappable. If I step into shit my day doesn't get better just because I have a tissue to kinda wipe it off...

It's quite funny listening to this now and hearing Max talk about the skill jump from everything before Ulduar to after it and knowing that the wrath classic population tanked hard when Ulduar launched because it was too hard for a lot of the casual dad guilds out there.

How are visions in A and Thorgast made the game worse? Thorgast and Jailers Gauntlet especially were actually new ways to play the game, while Visions were just you smashing your head against the very same "dungeon" without anything to make it more interesting for weeks and weeks. Not to mention that in the beginning of visions you could simply die by bad rng stuns into instakill abilities and you would then fall behind for the rest of the patch with no way to make up for it.

How do you feel about/rate Bonus Rolls? did you like the extra chance at loot for bosses each week, as well as being able to stack them?

Fun fact about the mage glyph you’re talking about (even tho it’s just a toggle now) : Not only it’s psycho to play with it, but for some people (me), when I play with it it breaks my shimmer and I effectively can’t cast spells while blinking anymore, rending a huge part of the talent Shimmer completely useless, so yeah guys don’t play with that

Corruptions were the most fun thing ever introduced when you got your full set. Change my mind

Personally I would've put the Legion Legendaries at the "actively made the game worse" tier, it's probably the most infuriating system they ever made as far as I'm concerned because of the way they were acquired. Artifact weapons would be D or A tier for me depending on the patch, I liked the effects and the depth they gave to the class design, loved the transmogs, hated it as a progression system (having to do world quests or farming Maw of Souls for artifact power, not sure why Artifact Power is being rated separately). BfA corruptions would also be A tier or "actively made the game worse" tier depending on whether it's pre-vendor or post-vendor.

Old talent system: you get a talent point with every level up. That alone is a big selling point for me! It also gave a lot of meaningful choice while leveling, because you need to select which part of the build you want first. I returned to classic wotlk recently and think this just feels better for an MMO than the MoP one. The MoP one was also much more restrictive and also had a lot of dead talents (good PvP choices in PvE). The sheer amount of talent points also helped to build in all the stuff, so your character was somewhat complete at max level without having to farm certain legendaries or progress through borrowed power. In Shadowlands, most classes feel broken without their legendaries. On the other hand, the new talent system coincided with the introduction of a lot of great abilities (class design in MoP was overall extremely good). A lot of these great abilities were talents. So the revamp I think was a good creativity booster.

To be honest simply the fact that if I fail a vault I can now get 2 sockets instead of just 1 if I had 3 choices completely salvaged the vault for me.

In regards to battlegrounds I'd say you are correct. In addition I'd add that a very vocal arena community (minority) clutches their pearls at the idea of bgs/rated bgs getting attention at blizzcon, or anything nice in general. I look forward to rated solo queue bgs

Pet Battles could be A tier if they made a pet battle mobile game linked to your WoW account, with cosmetic rewards for your WoW character if you're good at them.

Coming to this video late and seeing order halls. They should give warbands an equivalent! "Player hall" or something and you can use it for various things

cool video , i'd add War Effort for opening of AQ in S tier

Give us Guild Halls based on class hall tech, with collectable assets based on guild achivements... (furniture, wall hangings, banners, chotchkies)

Name a more iconic duo than max and tier lists. I'll wait.

Honestly reforging could come back, but really though I hated that I HAD to use an addon or spreadsheet to tell me how to reforge. As for mythic raiding, I've never done it.

If LFR is the story mode of the raid, what are normal and heroic supposed to be? You've got 3 introductory difficulties, seemingly just based on whatever ilvl you're at. Is there a reason for that? Over here in FFXIV, we have 2 difficulties: normal (story mode), and savage. You can queue for normal, and most people just queue this up and clear it on release day. What would be the benefit of a "normal+" and "pre-savage" difficulty in addition to those? It's weird to see people defend a system that's half-baked and incomplete when all it needs is some polish, but instead of defending the system itself in what it could be, you defend the weirdge state it's in because it seems like whoever was working on it got canned 7 years ago.

4:35 nah it wasnt the illusion of choice lol in WoW classic you could fury tank, do hybrid builds and stuff liek that. The only way you think the old talents gave "the illusion of choice" is if youre someone who only wants to min/max the shit out of the game. And even then getting smaller changes that lead to big ones felt more meaningful than waiting 5 levels to get a talent that i have less that 0 interest in.

18:40 Legendary cloak on my ret pally with the higher threat aura on was really good for tanking heroics in lfd.

imagine if you could use great vault tokens to add a tertiary stat to something in your vault.

Man. Imagine if they hadn't made each of these systems for a single expansion and just actually developed a thing to not shit status then kept it around. All these single player experience things that could have been good if made evergreen

MoP cloak was so sick. Should be A tier.

I would honestly like scenarios to tell stories instead of releasing books which I need to purchase. I understand they will lose some money on it but trust me it will help change public perspective.

Honestly, I'm tired of them placing these one-piece gear systems where your character is irrelevant until you farm like job to get that one leggo or upgrade that one piece. I burn out after my 2nd to 3rd alt and don't wanna play the game just because of that.

Ah, good, saw you putting transmog in A and wrote this long rant about how it's clearly an S. It's literally the biggest source of content in the entire game. then I saw you change it to S. I can understand the hesitation since you don't personally use it much, but it's clearly one of the most important systems in the game today. I agree completely on reforging. Edit: I suppose I could agree with the re evaluated re forging too. Imo, what made reforging good is simply that it was useful. I am sure that if Blizzard cared, they could make a system that does a better job at achieving the same thing.

old static sockets on gear should be here and it should be at least s tier. i miss meta gems and socket bonuses so much. gives a great compromise to reforging and finally gives jewelcrafting an incentive again. also the acquisition of sockets has been complete dogshit since they took static sockets out.

scenarios were fun, the main probelm with them was they werent worth the effort to go through more than one time because gear from dungeons were faster and better to get.

tmog is so good they put it in every game. destiny. diablo, wow. prob some others idk about too

on the MoP farm, hard disagree on the "who cares" rating. I didn't really play in MoP and just derped around with it a while later. TL;DR: if they kept the farm somewhat relevant it could've easily been one of those side things that people could do while not actively doing endgame stuff. adding to player retention by adding downtime activities/'leisure' activities that some people will keep on doing. these leisure activities that are detached/semi-detached from the endgame/core gameplay, could easily add tons more things to do, and will make the game feel more alive with minimal effort other than some housekeeping to keep the systems somewhat relevant/approachable/reachable. longer explanation: looking at the other horse in the room when talking about mmorpgs (FFXIV), you can easily see that these types of content can be a MASSIVE boon to your playerbase. cause except for maybe some economical impact like if you can farm latest-expac flowers and foodstuffs, there's almost no impact on the rest of the game, yet people will do it cause they enjoy it (or can gain some limited benefits from it). add in some achievement rewards that take a while to get and an easy way to reach the content and bam, easy thing to add for player retention, it's already in the game, just keep it somewhat current and GG. ffxiv is the best example you can get for this, i played it for quite a while and never personally got into these things like farming, fishing, chocobo racing,... (except for playing around with them a bit.) but all of these systems are undeniably good things for the game, with their own little communities of players that barely do anything else. hell there's people that are basically jsut playing 'indoor decorator' and just play other aspects of the game to unlock more decoration xP these systems allow players to have some extra downtime activities that can either benefit them a bit ( bit of cash flow from farming materials for buffs you can sell/use so you don't have to buy the buff items) ,can give other rewards like cosmetics, or are just fun in their own right ( I personally dislike fishing in games but there's peeps trying to fish all the like 2K+ different fish types in ffxiv 0.o and theres peeps spending 90% of their time on chocobo racing. same for GW2, theres subcommunities purely based on racing your mounts around) and even if it's just for some none gameplay/endgame/gear grind stuff (pets,mounts,titles, transmogs,...) you WILL have a part of your community that actively revisits/keeps up with this type of stuff, just for those rewards. for the MoP farms though: IMO the reason that maybe only 0.01% of wow players still does mop farming is cause it usually takes a lot of effort/time to get there and there's no real benefit to it. torghast itself was a good example, at least when the purely non-combat reward based wings released. first wings and setup sucked, we all know that it got called "choregast/boreghast" a lot more than it got called torghast... but those later wings where you could do some sort of challenge mode to get rewards that didn't tie in to your power. (so you didn't NEED to do them for your gear treadmill, but you could do them for the rewards.) people were tons more positive about those wings, and they saw a decent amount of use. the only problem will be that they'll become very inaccessible in new expansions, deffo for people that are coming late to the party. put some work in torghast to make it more of a stand-alone thing, and provide a way to get there easily, and BAM another thing to do for players during downtime, rather than just flushing it down the drain whenever a new expac comes along.

I farmed all my Island Expo mounts and xmogs on a twink lock and would pull and clear the whole island in like 4 min lol so fun

I dont understand why he likes Great Vault? It is almost the same problem as Titanforging imo. It creates a disconnection between the content and the loot and its timegated. Great Vault is a shitty patch system for a faulty loot system. Why not up the drop in raids and actually make a nice loot system M+? Instead 80% of our gametime is dedicated to improving that one loot item at the end of the week. Let me loot a nice piece of gear, grind for reforge, sockets or whatever upgrade to that gear, instead of grinding a week like a work slave for that one dopamine spike at the end of the week (with huge potential of disappointment). F*ck Great Vault.

Lol loved the opening clip. Thanks for the laugh max. 👍

AP absolutely made the game worse. Max kind of hand waves over people who stopped playing because of it, but I literally did. AP singlehandedly contributed to making WoW feel like a second job that I was clocking into, which is precisely what made me bounce off of playing WoW and start playing other stuff. Also want to echo others here by saying Torghast belongs in the tier it was placed in, and it makes me sad to put it there because I still see the potential it has. Hopefully we can look back at Torghast as being a predecessor for bigger & brighter features, and I think a lot of features that were favorably ranked yet problematic (like corruptions) CLEARLY were aiming towards something like Toughest. My hope is that Blizzard can see lists like these and take away the positive elements as well as the things that actively harm player experience so that they can make the best content available. Torghast SHOULD return as a PURELY HORIZONTAL experience; that way it can be as challenging as it deserves to be, get as wacky as it ought to be, and reward as cool of cosmetic stuff as it really should reward. Things like Torghast and Mage Tower NEED to exist in WoW as a form of challenging content that people can spend their time on when they're not on the gearing treadmill. Making a kind of content that can be a sandbox for wacky and wild abilities/stat numbers -- things like that insane Haste Corruption, or abilities that are too hard to balance for Mythic raiding/M+ -- Torghast is absolutely perfect for that. Mage Tower is to a lesser extent an appropriate outlet for that stuff, though I think in general Mage Tower was just such a home run of execution that it's still been my single favorite content I've ever done (and I've played since TBC).

Old Talent is better they just need to Chance the Specs for more variety

my favorite part of this is him shitting on customer support, ive never felt more heard then his story.. also getting a good gm really did feel like titanforging..

Late to the discussion, but Garrisons actively made the game worse... for it's community. It had began to shatter cities as a meeting place for a long time.

Hour and half of content dude? Of hell yeah

Wish you ranked Suramar separately, man I loved that

The thing with LFR imo is that it actively makes players worse. It actively rewards ignoring mechanics entirely, because pressing one heal is much more efficient than the whole raid dodging voidzones. It is an afk-leechers heaven. Some people use it to gear their twinks, but in an increadibly inefficient way that looks compelling at first sight. It makes social interaction worse by the constant swapping of players and overall tendency of dilly-dallying around forever without even having fun (if you want to dilly-dally in wow, there are so many great options instead, that do not involve 24 other people who have to dilly-dally along!). In my opinion, the idea to show the raid to people in an easy approachable way is great, though. But I think the easiness factor should come from the number of abilities, not the tuning. Have one boss only do debuffs and a tank frontal. Have another one only have two kinds of voidzones. Have another one only have adds. Tune these abilities so that you have to interact with them, but make it possible to have 100% of attention on this one ability. I think that would not bother many people and feel much more rewarding (I dodged all the lethal voidzones! vs. I hammered my buttons for 5 minutes and nothing happened).

The main argument I have for LFR is the fact that it raiding feel less special because anyone can do it now with the click of a button and also the gear that drops from it is too good for the level of difficulty. It has it's perks and it's good for seeing the story but I think it needs to be nerfed.

Transmog easy s. Wouldn't be playing still if I couldn't come back and farm old dungeons once in a while. Reforging was gangster.

I still can't believe nothing like Mage Tower was made after Legion. Bringing it back in SL with recolored tier sets was an instant pass for me. It has to be entirely new skins.

Essence powers were cool, but they forced you to do content you maybe didnt like to get your BIS essence which sucked. PVPers had to raid, raiders had to do PVP.

Imagine a game that keeps its features that are wanted by the community instead of scrapping them and add new ones expansion after expansion just for the sake of having sth new.

what about re-rolls? does that count as a system? Personally loved them.

Personal loot was ONLY bad for guilds and people are realizing how much they miss it with DF pug content.

some thought on some systenms: old talent system: u foget restriction of talent switching due to gold costs mad them bad liek azerite armor azerithe armor: the idea was good, kinda like building your own set armor but execution was so bad it made the game activly worse. mission table: free gold ! great vault: activly destroys the game, because it disconnected bis gear from the chellange you get it from. farming m+ 15s to play slotmachine is just bad. gear should be acquiered for overcoming a chalange not playing slotmachine. Should be removed from the game. thorghast: first 2 weeks of thorghast was perfect. it was a challenge. ppl just didnt wanted to accept that they are bad, therfore had to do lower tier toghast which made them get leggy a week later then the good player able to finish highest tier in week one. but because everyone cried, that they are not able to finish highest toghast tier blizz nerfed to be a joke, and at that point it became the worst every done. i beleive the first vision from blizz about torghast was good and it was on point in game, blizz shopuld have listined to the (crying) community.

Ranking new talent system above the old and defending LFR tells me all I need to know about this guy

Mythic+ single-handedly revived the gaming enthusiasm on WoW because it offers alternative access for non-raiding players to progress. The most important feature ever created.

Watching this made me realize how different the community feels about many of these systems.

Man it’s so sad seeing Torghast there because I loved it but I also agree with the analysis. It had the potential to grow into another entire facet of the game and they whiffed and fumbled and wasted so much time on it that it BOTH sucked during the expansion AND it scared them from using everything they learned to even continue a rogue like system in wow. What a goddamn failure :(

RIP Chorghast, combining the Alpha version with a larger variety of powers and endless floor climbing challenges (with appearance, achievements and bragging rights as well as milestone mounts) would of been the perfect way to make it work... making it mandatory killed it sooo fast

Not everybody uses wallets for leveling. There actually are lots of people who levels alts from lv1. And heirlooms were very relevant before. Maybe not powerful anymore, but still saves you from trouble looking for gear upgrades in most of the gear slots.

IIRC the Mage Tower is the only time I've ever used the "Move To" button for my Frost Elemental. I used it to do some of the soaks while I was kiting.

I think the problem with Legendaries as they existed up the point to Cataclysm was less the items themselves, it was the community. You can see this in Wrath Classic. Blizzard intended these items to be rewards for people who were persistently raiding, but players turned them into highly desirable setpieces that amplified any given raids ability to clear content, so they only went to the best players in any guild.

I never minded having to use ground mounts to explore new expansion, but I would support Pathfinder being tied to completing the central campaign quests without a lot of extra stuff.

Artifact weapons… I came back to wow mid BFA and I just wanted to play Legion content. Took me like 3 weeks to realize that the whole artifact weapon system was turned off. I stopped playing Legion because of this and felt so bad for wasting my time (did all the dungeons and some raids). The worst kind of systems are those that breaks the game after the next expansion comes.

so many people straight up quick because of the AP grind. Loved raiding/Mythic+ but count keep up with the time commitment of mindless grinding

Agree with the logic with SL legendaries, but they made the game worse. They forced you to only place one character or one spec based off of how much gold you had to buy them. Upgrading them was awful. I have the gold and I don't want to drop tens of thousands just to try something out. It is a system that made me play fewer characters and play the game less. Actively made the game worse.

Arena absolutely made the game worse, not because it's a terrible idea, but because it fractured the identity of the game. Suddenly you are trying to balance a "competitive esport pvp game" and an actual MMORPG at the same time. WoW Arena should have been a separate game with cross game progression/unlocks like Hearthstone. They could have had free reign to really fine tune it, while not being forced to give up the original feel of WoW PVP and item progression. The fact that they've tried so many different iterations on pvp gear/stats and talents is evidence that the two systems are at their core incompatible.

AP is a thing on it's own tier for me. It actually made me straight up quit the game for the first time after playing since vanilla. I already hated dailies in TBC, but at least I could ignore them. AP forced me to either endlessly grind or completely screw over my guild so I just ended up quitting.

Druids can still actively use their order hall with Dreamwalk. It has portals all over the continents and is an easy way to get to legion content if you still farm things there.

I was shocked when you put M+ initially in S and didnt immediately create it's own tier. Good to see a few minutes later you did. I personally think M+ has single handedly kept retail WoW alive, if legion didn't bring that I honestly think WoW would have pulled a new world and bled out 90% of it's playerbase.

Torghast could have been so cool, if they used it to bring back old dungeon and raid bosses. Isn't it supposed to be the Warcraft version of Hell? so finding big evils we have defeated before, wouldn't be that weird? and gameplay/coding wise the fights is already made.

You know when you're at the dinner table and you ask your brother to pass the salt, and instead of handing it to you he slides it half the way in your direction and makes you still reach to get it? That's what blizzard does when they finally "fix" systems after months and months

Boreghast, Snoreghast, Choregast, Poorghast, Soreghast, Deploreghast, Revolving Doorghast, Aborhghast, Hit the Floorghast (cause I fell asleep)

I would argue that the WoD mission table actively made the game worse. it introduced so much gold into the economy and made so many people so rich that anyone that missed out on that was kinda fucked.

They should add a quartermaster for each dungeon, probably by the summoning stones, where you could purchase items from said dungeon with a set amount of valor. Maybe obviously not at max level, and still upgradeable, but that would give you a deterministic way of targeting m+ gear instead of the single drop chance per dungeon, or waiting a week to roll the bones in the vault

Max: 10m raiding was one of the worst things in the history of WoW. You had thriving 25m raid teams in Wrath and then the leaders of those guilds said, "well, raiding 10 is easier" so they tossed fifteen players out on their asses. It was a demographic nightmare. No, the difficulty of heroic dungeons did not help but I think 10m giving equal gear to 25m was the greatest disaster to the raiding scene in wow history. *Shrug* Of course, the numbers either back me up or they don't. Never seen formal numbers from that period. It's my take on the ground though.

The only knock on flex raiding from my raid experience was that every participant had a quantifiable effect on the difficulty of a boss, and their presence could actually make it harder. For the target audience, mostly casual guilds that have more than 10 people, that could make some very tense and awkward situations when you're trying to progress and that 13th/18th raider *being there at all* is making the boss *harder*. Say what you will about 10 man, but if you only had 9 people, bringing any 10th, no matter how sub-optimal, still gave you a better chance numerically of winning.

I miss Proving Grounds in that list. In my opinion it was a nice feature in its basic part for helping people to learn basic features of the game. The infinite mode became really hard and the titles it provided were quite a challenge. Obviously Blizzard did a good job making us forget about it [so they don't need to update it], because nobody talks about that anymore...

51:15 The only problem with visions were really annoying mechanics like fears, stuns, and depending on your class you simply couldnt do anything about some of them ie the mage boss in Stormwind and Alleria in Stormwind.

Again what’s the point of everyone just blindly choose the best Corruption? Your only argument is “yeah, it was fun” but do you realize that 90% of people were just choosing one corruption? There was no choice, even though we had many corruptions, there were always the best one. And how you can call this a good? I’m really amazed at your takes. You only think from your point.

flying and paprthfinder is one of the things DDXIV does sooo much better, with the atunements in new areas, it gives you an actuall reason for not being able to fly, and its not a massively daunting task to unlock.

Netherlight crucible actively made the game worse. Absolute chaos. It wasn't just "item drops, and it boosts one of your artifact talents" it was a whole tree on the crucible that was "randomly" selected. If you wanted the "perfect roll" you'd have to check every time it dropped, which made it untradeable. Mythic+ is a pretty biased take as well, imo. A lot of the arguments you use against torghast (and others) work just as well against mythic+. It's definitely not the most perfect system. WOD legendary rings absolutely made the game worse. Even just compared to their non-legendary stat boosting versions. My cooldown window being tied to other players (other classes, other specs) windows was INCREDIBLY frustrating. Also hard disagree on brawlers guild / mage tower rankings. Brawlers guild is so, so much better. If you remove the rewards (Cosmetic weapon appearances from mage tower, mounts heirlooms gold? pet? from brawlers guild) brawlers guild is just ... *more* Mage tower is what 6? 7? bosses. Most of them were... okay fights. Tank one, I'll admit, was a really tough one. I literally don't remember most of the others I did (Frost, unholy, havoc, resto, enhance, ele). Completed it once, and forgot about it entirely. Brawlers guild, on the other hand, launched with 32 bosses and had 8 more added over MoP's lifetime. WoD they added several new ones (and replaced some older ones) and changed the order. Then they added the raid boss versions that brings everyone in, there's "RP" stuff with throwing tomatoes or whatever and watching the contenders.

Man I feel like shards of domination were so bad that they deserve a tier of their own. I hold them responsible for killing my guild's appetite to raid for that whole season. Not only were they incredibly boring, but you had to loot both the piece with the socket and the gem to go in it separately, so you needed to get lucky six times to see any real benefit instead of the traditional two/four times with tier. We had people in our guild with the sockets but no gem and vice versa. We had people spending hundreds of thousands of gold to recraft legendaries into a slot that didn't conflict with the piece they happened to get. To top it all off they rebalanced the bonuses right in the middle of the tier so the incredibly expensive upgrades people had bought ended up being a rather large, unrectifiable mistake. Plus they clearly balanced the raid around the top few guilds in the world doing endless splits to farm them out in the first couple of weeks, so the whole raid was just way too hard for months, and then suddenly got embarrassingly easy. Oh and also the whole fiasco that they "partially" worked in other content so you were constantly switching gems around... So annoying. Azerite armour was pretty annoying but had its points of interest, really no contest with shards.

I think Tier sets were fine as a borrowed power mechanic because they were consistent. It was borrowing power yes but it was borrowed and returned the exact same way every tier for like a decade straight or something. Problem with all the other systems is that it's a new mechanic every few months and just kinda drowns you in it. IMO if they want to do borrowed power again they NEED to do it in talent trees. Just every system is it's own talent tree that works identically to the class/spec ones and the only difference is how you earn points.

Pet Battles are a strong contender for "who cares" but in that case so is the likes of the Mage Tower, Brawler's Guild or Transmog. Who can just as easily be a "who cares" it just depends on who you ask.3

I think if things are very cool to play with but have extremly bad acquisitions like legion legendarys and corruptions that should make it worse, because it actively excludes unlucky players from fun and even from their raid spot.

I mean yes who cares about professions but if 100% of the playerbase did not care for profession then NO ONE, and like literally no one would have legendaries. Even though professions sucked ass in the last years I think it's still more than "who cares".

The problem with garrisons is that now blizzard can go back and say "We'll we tried housing and you guys didn't play" so in that sense it's actively making the game (way imo) worse

It's weird how we view past expansions differently after we've played them compared to when we are playing them. Today, when I look back to corruption and the end patch of BFA I view it more positively than what i did when i was concurrently playing it.

as a tank i actually really loved corruptions for twilight dev lol

I feel like Transmog should have had it's own separate category for all the things it does and interacts with without ever impacting player power making it completely optional. It allows for player self-expression, it interacts with the economy by making old greens/blues/epics valuable, it gives reason for players to go back and (re)visit old content so it doesn't lay dead as soon as an expansion/patch is over, it allows for status symbols through appearances like the MoP challenge mode weapons and for collect-a-thon lunatics it's a near endless well of engagement.

I loved running that daily heroic scenario back in MoP. Trio content is so much fun and it was semi-difficult when you weren’t geared. When they launched in 5.3 alongside item level upgrades, I finally had a reason to log onto my alts and get them some easy gear that was a tiny step below normal Throne of Thunder as scenario gear didn’t have sockets. The problem was, there was only 3 scenarios worth running and you’d just re que if you got a bad one. But let’s be honest, scenarios were just used to get that quick valor cap. They took 5-7 minutes and awarded around 100-140 valor if you got the bonus and had the account-wide buff. It was so efficient that nobody even cared about doing old raids or dungeon finder anymore.

Thank fuck Jeff Hamilton is gone. No systems would've been better than his ideas.

The title alone made me madge

43:20 There are big differences between conduits and glyphs i think.. glyphs were a huge chunk of the new profession's "gamplay" loop. Inscription (glyphs hugely) helped fuel the economy, serving as a dump skill for herbs. Imagine how useless and cheap herbs would be in wrath if only alchemists, generally, used them. I don't think they're awesome.. but definitely way better than conduits. I think glyph's affected the game in better ways.

I agree with the overall statement about worldbosses at 58:00 but I would argue that Gw2 has pulled off fufilling worldbosses like the dragons end meta event. I'd say the key to success there was making content that needs some players to organise and direct things but to make sure that its all simple enough and telegraphed for new players to get the jist.

Anyone else notice that tier list calls it THORgast instead ot TORGHAST?

I legit believe WoW would be completely dead now without LFR.

So glad to see a content creator agree that Reforging as a system was one of the best things they've ever put in the game, I miss it so much

Dude MoP challenge modes and the brawlers guild were some of the best content ever added. I really hate that people still shit on MoP cause imo it's easily top 3 expacs of all time. Incredible expansion with plenty of content for casuals and hard-core players.

I had the title for auchidoun challenge mode realm best for a while. Super cool to rock that title