Top 10 Worst New Systems and Gameplay Features Added to World of Warcraft

in this video we'll be going over some features that were in the game that players generally didn't like and were eventually removed or are still part of the game to this day in at number 10 we have the mission tables ever since warlords of draenor's players have had a mission table of some kind where you send off npcs for a couple of hours at a time and then they succeed if they have the correct counters to whatever is predetermined once the mission starts it was an excellent way to gain currency and items although it is essentially a facebook style game where you just waited and there wasn't much more to it than collecting and gearing the followers originally when they first introduced in warlords of draenor they were incredibly well liked for about a month then people grew to hate them which is made even worse by the fact that they added a second to mission table later on in the expansion called the shipyard which many considered a straight downgrade to the original since you'd have to pay a whole bunch of resources for ships that could be destroyed if you failed a mission the mission tables were also incredibly lucrative to the point where warlords of draenor had the highest gold inflation at any point in the game's history by just doing your missions and a couple of dailies provided by your garrison in legion they tried very hard to circumvent this they vastly lowered the amount of followers you could even have and the amount of missions you could run per day in bfa they did the same thing giving you even less followers with about the same amount of missions and then in shadowlands they still have the system although instead of having a rock paper scissors counter-style battle the followers actually have abilities where they fight and deal damage and blizzard put some real effort into trying to improve the mission table over the past three expansions personally i'm a fan of the newest iteration of it it just really needs a balancing tune because my venter followers are incredibly weak now this one is only at number 10 because it is a system that a lot of people don't like but also it's so minor that you can basically just ignore it and it doesn't really affect you very much ever since they removed the ability to gain raid level gear from the table after warlords of draenor and at number 9 we have weapon skills this was the thing of the game for quite a while that wasn't removed until cataclysm i think where every time you got a new weapon you had to make sure you went out and hit something a thousand times in order to get that skill up so that you could use the weapon properly and there was also some code in the background which gave you extra hit or expertise depending on how much weapon skill you had or a lower chance to get glancing blows basically you wanted a high weapon skill because it increased your dps but they didn't really have items in the game that increased your weapon skill past the maximum outside of a few outliers this is probably where the weapon skill kind of failed once you max out your weapon skill it was a stat you no longer even thought about which kind of made it redundant if there was almost no way to increase it past the maximum and it was basically just a chore you had to do on your character once and then never do it again in the game files there's actually a whole bunch of items which had the potential to have an increased weapon skill attribute attached to them as a stat as well as the famous edge master handguard item from vanilla wow which despite not being a max level item were bis for a lot of classes because of the weapon skill increases it provided so they definitely had plans to have more items that gave weapon skills as well but they just abandoned the idea because weapon skills was kind of a complicated stat and people weren't really 100 sure exactly how it even worked in vanilla wow and at number eight we have pathfinder pathfinder is a system where you can't actually fly a new zone of an expansion until you complete a long achievement usually involving gaining a whole bunch of reps and completing basically every story quest that expansion has to offer and it's almost never available at launch as you first have to wait halfway through the expansion before you can even complete it when this was first introduced in warlords of draenor it got a pretty blue warm response a lot of people just wanted to be able to pay to fly and a lot of other people were completely fine getting it for free by just playing the expansion like normal so it wasn't universally hated then they did the same thing in legion and bfa and it got the same response in both of those expansions pretty lukewarm people were kind of expecting at that point however once we got to bfa the problems with pathfinders started to become more apparent if you did not play during legion or warlords of draenor and came back to the game in bfa then you had to do a whole bunch of grinding and old content just so that you could fly on mounts with your alts in those past zones and that's quite the investment to traverse old zones a little bit more conveniently while leveling alts which is to say it's not really worth the time or effort required a lot of returning players just straight up never unlock flying in old zones because it required way too much time for how little of a reward it was to the point where it basically just punished people who didn't play in those expansions for players like me who unlocked them normally while playing through all those expansions i never really minded it very much however if i made a new account and had to do all those grinds fresh right now i would definitely hate the feature as well although blizzard did eventually fix this with shadowlands they straight up just removed the requirement of pathfinder for some of the past expansions only requiring to get pathfinder for the current expansion in order to fly in that current expansion and then after the expansion is over they'll probably make it so you can fly no problem although it's only kind effects you do still need to get pathfinder for bfa but i assume eventually they'll grant flying for that expansion to everyone as well and at number seven we have the pvp stat templates in world of warcraft pvp over the years there used to be different kinds of gear that would only affect pvp related stats and that was kind of how they tried to balance gear in pvp since pvp world of warcraft is kind of inherently unbalanced because of how much power gear will give your character and most other competitive pvp games have a baseline that everyone starts with at the beginning of the match and it's generally seen as unfair to gain a whole bunch of advantages outside of that current match but since world of warcraft pv takes place in an mmo it also made sense for that gear that you acquired in other parts of the game to also help you out in just one other part of the game so in an effort to try to make pvp and an mmo more balanced they introduced the pvp stat templates which basically just ignored your gear and gave you stats based on what blizzard decided your class probably needed so you could no longer bring in overpowered trinkets or items with bonuses and your character can go into an arena or battleground match as basically a vanilla version of itself that could only use things based on your class and pvp talents and having a higher item level would just increase the amount of your stat template by something like one percent per 10 item levels so you couldn't really control your gear in pvp and this did kind of make things a lot more balanced blizzard could just adjust and fix pvp problems by just adjusting the stat template that's exactly what they did in legion during the one expansion that had stat templates except there was a few problems to this more fair system of wow pvp and pretty much everyone hated it for one reason or another no one really liked this change even though it did on paper make things a lot more balanced turns out people like to use their gear in special items in pvp and some people like the inherent advantage mid max and their gear outside of pvp could provide but one of the biggest problems was you could still increase your stat template by getting better gear so it basically forced pvp players to have to do a whole bunch of pve content in order to increase their stat template since they no longer had pvp vendors in order to buy gear from that so it wasn't really that balanced since you could majorly influence the baseline stat anyway and since the pvp snap template was so universally hated they eventually just removed it in the next expansion and tried something else that people didn't like and at number six we have personal loot or more specifically the removal of master loot and the need slash greed when blizzard added personal loot to the game the system which is currently active as of shadowlands the expansion of making this video in when you kill a boss in a dungeon or raid the game will automatically distribute loot from those bosses to everyone in the raid depending on who actually won the role internally and then will give you a piece of loot that's useful for your class in theory this is totally fine it's an excellent tool for pug groups as you no longer have to worry about the raid leader ninja looting pieces of gear or some really sought after mount and to make it even more pug friendly they made it so you can't even trade an item you get through personal loot unless you've already had a piece of equipment in that slot of a higher item level and since you can no longer even have the option to master loot you don't have to worry about a pug group swapping to master loot right before an important boss or being forced to run in a group where they only have master loot or be in a situation where master loot is the preferred thing for pugs so no one uses personal loot they got rid of all of that by just removing the choice this is actually a big win for pucks but not so much for everyone else this system has single-handedly caused world first races to become almost completely pay to win as top raids have to spend millions of gold in order to circumvent the personal loot system so they can funnel gear to their raid starting lineup through split heroic runs and if your guild doesn't have hundreds of millions of gold in order to pay for a whole bunch of boes and a person whose only job is to go out and buy boys for everyone then you can't really compete in a world first race since there's plenty of guilds who are willing to put in that amount of gold for the advantage it provides as someone who primarily pugs or runs with a pretty casual guild it doesn't really affect me very much and is kind of a huge problem only for top end raiders which is why it's somewhat low on this list statistics show that less than one percent of players even clear the hardest level mythic boss of the current ray tier it should also be worth mentioning that in a recent interview the gm of limit a top rating guild with a few world first wins under their belt stated that if master loot was added back to the game it would only make things harder on them since they'd run even crazier split runs to make sure everyone had the best possible gear before the mythic weak started so it turns out the problem is not as simple as just adding master loot back to the game because world first raiders are going to be doing their thing no matter what and at number 5 we have titan forging this was a system which first made its way to the game all the way back in miss append area with the warforge system which basically gave all gear a chance to have a higher item level now at first glance this didn't really seem that bad it meant every time you did a raid dungeon or anything that dropped gear there was a chance you can get a legitimate upgrade to your equipment and it incentivized people to want to run lower difficulties of instances because there was always that chance they could get an upgrade so it could be worth their time however there was a big problem with it and that it wasn't really made apparent until it was out in the game for a while where if there's always a chance that your gear can tighten forge to be better then if you ever get a normal vanilla piece of gear then you're just kind of disappointed that it wasn't titanforged and it would also incentivize people to just constantly run instances of all their difficulties to try to get a full set of titanforged gear which was such a low chance that it was basically impossible there was no real way to get your best possible set of equipment because it was almost impossible to get all of your best out of equipment titanforge although it did also give incentives for high geared players to run low content so blizzard saw it as kind of success for the longest time it was very resistant to actually remove it from the game and casual players weren't running dungeons over and over anyway so they were happy to get lucky and sometimes get incredibly high item level pieces of gear from doing their normal raids or something although eventually blizzard relented and agreed that it probably wasn't that fun for competitive players not ever being satisfied with your gear because it wasn't all titanforge and that it was impossible to do that in the first place so they just eventually removed it from the game at the end of battle for azeroth and at number 4 we have war fronts this was a new system added to the game in battle for azeroth which was supposed to be like a warcraft 3 style game that everyone participated in where in a large group you go around and collect resources in order to build buildings and units in order to eventually take on the enemy cuban defeat their general and on paper that sounded like it was a lot of fun however when we finally got the feature it turns out the mode was so easy that it was almost impossible to lose without any kind of urgency or need to coordinate most people would just do warfronts in afk and the center before eventually they just won now it was possible to lose it was just incredibly difficult to lose the warfront also gave really good rewards for completing them so a lot of people did them anyway and thought if they're so easy might as well try to complete them as fast as possible except the warfronts were also time gated while inside of them they were just things that required arbitrary timers that you could not speed up no matter what you did so you spend a lot of time just waiting around for those timers to eventually allow you to defeat the enemy general for something that was supposed to be a selling point of the expansion they only ever released two of them and neither of them were very well liked so they kind of scrapped it very early on and did try to add a heroic version of the two that they did put in the game and the heroic versions were a huge improvement over the unlosable normal ones although at that point of the game everyone already written them off as a lost system including blizzard so people rarely did warfronts outside of one weekly quest for the heroic version the warfronts were an excellent example that players don't like content that is too easy they at least need to pretend there's some semblance of difficulty going on even lfr is more difficult than whatever war fronts could possibly accomplish in their normal versions and at number three we have another bfa feature the island expeditions just like warfronts this is another key feature of the expansion sold to players is a thing where you go around to different unexplored islands and you'd run around be able to explore a whole bunch of hidden treasures secret entrances with items and mounts it sounded like a pretty fun feature and also you can get some azerite power to upgrade your character's power in the process so it seemed like a win-win you could explore and get a whole bunch of cosmetics while also directly increasing the parallel of your character but in order to not make island expeditions so easy they added an inherent timer where you had to race against an enemy faction who was also exploring the island at the same time and whoever got their azerite progress bar filled up first was the winner now here's the thing with this feature island expeditions became the best way to grind out artifact power so top players who needed to grind out higher neck levels would do island expeditions non-stop all the time in order to get the tiniest amount of advantage or to just unlock the pieces of equipment they would get from raids and the other downside was since you were on a time limit you had to complete it before the enemy team did you were actively just disincentivized from exploring and instead the most efficient way to do island expositions was to just run in and group as many mobs as possible and aoe them down and doing anything else was kind of redundant so ion expeditions basically turned into giant ad pulls where you would just do nothing but fight adds the entire time but at least you could do them somewhat quickly unlike warfronts and there was a higher possibility that you could lose unlike warfronts although just fighting an endless wave of minions over and over since you were incentivized to do island expeditions non-stop made the feature hated very quickly if you didn't actually try to take your time and explore there was a good chance you'd lose that particular run as the enemy team would get their ass right up before you and also it was just more efficient to kill mobs than looking for little treasures anyway since all the loot you got the end of expedition was random anyway after a certain patch this is another selling point of the expansion that was kind of abandoned mid-expansion and they stopped adding new con into the islands towards the end instead focusing on stuff like horrific visions and probably working on tour grass in the upcoming shadowlands expansion and at number 2 we have legionaries or legendaries from legion generally a lot of things about the legion expansion were very well loved except for the pvp stat templates of course and the mainstay use of titan forging and the first implementation of the legion legendaries in their very first form a legendary was a piece of equipment that gave you such an incredible boost to your player's power that you absolutely wanted to get your two legendaries as soon as possible and more specifically you wanted to get two specific legendaries that were the best for your class however the way to get legendaries was entirely random on the first character you had you had a high chance to get your first four legendaries before the game would remove your bad luck protection and then make them a lot harder to obtain randomly so what you had to do in order to get your best legendary was just hope that one of those first four that you could obtain quickly happened to be some of your best if they were not then there was nothing else you could do and mind you these legendaries were incredibly powerful some specs had their whole rotations revolving around certain legendaries as they could drastically increase your dps or healing output and on the other end some of the legendaries were completely worthless for some classes so there was a chance that the first four legendaries that you got were four that just didn't contribute to your character's power at all it was so bad that some top raiders would simultaneously gear up multiple alts of the same class just to get a chance at the first four legendaries being two that were useful for them and then they would just delete the other classes that didn't get a useful legendary and since the chance to get legendaries outside of the first four was so low there were some classes who just never got all the legendaries for the class by the end of the expansion or wouldn't complete it until near the end of the expansion now people did like the idea behind the legendaries themselves it was fun to have incredibly powerful pieces of equipment that can completely change your rotation the biggest problem with them was literally just how you obtained them which was entirely random there were activities that gave you a higher chance to get legendaries than others but you could just get a legendary from looting a blinkertron gift package for example it wasn't until the end of the expansion they finally added a vendor for buying specific legendary items and this was after already progress was done so it was a completely meaningless gesture in shadowlands they returned the system of legendaries in the same way as legion except with two differences one was the individual legendaries are much weaker than the individual legendaries from legion and also they created a crafting system where you just need to get the legendary's recipe in order to make it you could also make it for two slots instead of being stuck to a single equipment slot and they made getting the recipe a lot easier where you could buy some of them reputation from vendors some of them would drop some specific bosses but have a guaranteed chance to drop them every time you kill that boss and some of the more harder ones are just locked behind weekly rotations where you have a guarantee chance to get them if it does pop up or in the twisting corridors people did like the legendaries they just didn't like how you obtained them so with basically the same system and a better way of obtaining legendaries and shadowlands that kind of prove the system itself wasn't flawed just really needed some work and before we go on to number one i have a couple of honorable mentions first we have horrific visions another feature added in bfa at the end of the expansion where you rent a solo instance on a timer in order to get some great rewards at the end of it the system itself was actually kind of fine it didn't start to get terrible and started to run it with five mass and then just some of the terrible affixes those masks would give you which eventually did fix halfway through the patch to be ten times less annoying and it doesn't really apply in the same tier as a lot of the other features that made this list since they were eventually fixed mid patch lfr the looking for raid model of wow which is commonly held as a terrible feature for the game although i just straight up don't agree with the popular opinion on this one because i've talked to a whole bunch of fans over the years who only get to see current raids through lfr and it launches so late into a ray tier that you don't need to run it in order to gear up if you do a raid normally which kind of fixes the problem it used to have where you were incentivized to run lfr in order to get early set bonuses and ever since they delayed the release of lfr that hasn't been an issue and now it's basically a boat for casual players to actually see the story of the ray tear otherwise they wouldn't be able to experience it for themselves at all and finally corruptions a new type of enchantment that had a random chance to proc up pieces of equipment at the end of bfa which was introduced after they removed titan forging now i know corruptions were a very controversial they caused a whole bunch of problems for balance of the game but they were always sold as being temporary and they were kind of supposed to be crazy and i actually really like them although probably only because they were temporary if it was a lasting feature i don't know if i would have liked them as much as i did and finally at number one we have azerite armor and the heart of azeroth and yes this is another mainstay feature of bfa you can kind of see why the expansion had a kind of a bad rap now azerite armor was sold as three pieces of equipment which had bonuses attached to them that were as strong as some of the legion legendaries or even artifact traits bonuses that were so powerful they would completely change the way you played your class and you'd be able to unlock more of them as the pieces of equipment leveled up with your necklace by essentially making it so you would unlock the full potential of your gear through your infinite power grind and on paper this didn't sound very good in order to accomplish this they had to remove tear side bonuses which already did something similar but without having to grind out an external power source and this system was supposed to be a full replacement of legion legendaries tier set bonuses and the artifact weapons and no one was really excited for it on paper like they were for war fronts or even island expeditions then when we finally got azerite armor on the beta very late into the beta i might add they were kind of a mess and no one really liked them and they were never fixed once the game actually went live now one of the big problems with azerite armor was the fact that you had to unlock the extra rings by having a higher level for your necklace so baseline you had three rings the first ring was the easiest one to unlock and also had the main power ability on it which was the thing that might impact your class and then you get two other rings which would be unlocked based on how high the level of your necklace was so once you eventually unlocked all the way to the center you would get everything on the piece of equipment and then it would increase the item level of your armor by five when it was fully unlocked the problem was having to do this again when you got an upgrade and you went into a raid and got a higher item level piece of azerite armor there's a good chance you wouldn't be able to use any of the features on it despite the fact that you would be able to use all the rings on a piece that you had gotten while leveling which had the exact same abilities in it it wasn't so much as leveling up a piece of equipment as it was having to have a high item level necklace so that you could use your equipment there's a big difference and people didn't like having to re-grind out pieces of equipment that they'd already used before just because they got one that was a slightly higher item level and then there was a problem with the actual traits themselves they sold the traits as being impactful as legendaries artifact traits or tier set bonuses and this was actually true for some classes paladins had an azerite trait that was so good called glimmer that they gave it to them as a talent in the next expansion shadow priests had two traits that were so good they constantly had to nerf them as the expansion went on to be less powerful but a lot of them were just mediocre for example my disciplined priests literally had no good azerite traits to the point where the best ones were always just ones that gave you stats that weren't specific for disprice or funny enough one of the best traits was actually meant for shadow priests but unintentionally worked for discipline priests you literally had to be in shadow spec to even pick the best disc pre-straight and then swap back like one of the bad disc main traits for example would add a healing component to pain suppression which is a long cooldown ability that reduces the damage of a target by 40 percent it's real easy to go an entire fight without using pain suppression at all since it's a cooldown you save for emergencies for soaking or for very specific periods of big tank damage that are more predictable and even when you do use it a little bit of healing is not even useful for every fight you do and not even that useful in situations where you do use it as most of the predictable times you use the ability the targets at full health anyway so most of the time it was useless and the situations that it could be useful were rare and this was of the same tier as something like glimmer which was so good that it completely changed how holy paladins healed and their entire spec was based around it the traits were just not balanced at all this was kind of a thing amongst all classes some of them got lucky and had one or two good traits but most of them were kind of mediocre and garbage because the traits would stack with each other since it was possible to get a total of six major ones across a three pieces of equipment they had to create them in a way where they could reasonably stack with other copies of themselves which greatly reduced the creativity they could have with those traits and sometimes it would just be useless like the pain suppression one which they then went and added the exact same trait as a potency conduit in shadow lens for some reason i don't know why they're so obsessed with giving pain suppression a hill when literally no one takes it but that's besides the point so to sum it up a vast majority of traits were mediocre or just kind of bad the progression scale the armor was flawed in theory as blizzard completely removed the whole idea of even having to unlock the rings after the first ray tier and it wasn't a good replacement for even tier set bonuses so people were really badly messed up their gear in order to add that system into the game if there's something wow players love more than anything else it's their equipment so messing it up this badly is why people complain so much about the expansion and since people hate the progression system blizzard had to work very hard in order to introduce the essence system which was a lot more like the artifact system in legion where you got to choose a whole bunch of different active abilities and a couple of passives that would greatly impact your character and in my opinion i think the essence system was great and if they had just launched with the essence system instead of the azerite armor there wouldn't be anywhere near as many complaints about the expansion well probably they did do a good job of fixing a lot of the problems in shadowlands which is why it's probably having a much better reception at launch than bfa did alright and that's the video are there any other major systems that i might have missed that should have definitely been on this list if so i would love to hear about them down in the comments as well as ideas for future videos just like this one i never get anywhere near enough ideas give me your ideas i need them to make videos you

Channel: hirumaredx

Views: 320,886

Rating: 4.8130903 out of 5

Keywords: Battle, For, Azeroth, World Of Warcraft (Video Game), hirumaredx, history, wow, worl, vanilla, bc, burning crusade, wrath, wrath of the lich king, linch king, Video Game (Industry), World Warcraft, facts, Warcraft (Fictional Universe), how did doom work before wrath, before cata, how it use to work, funny, 8.3, 2020

Id: GlwK6fLak7Y

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021