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.

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

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

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

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 :(

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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...

Order halls were the only thing that kept me playing during Legion.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

this dude is a legion baby for sure

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.

I want to see Torghast come back reskinned as caverns of time in Dolly tier, so many good ideas squandered

Lol. Max says it's psycho to change Blink to go in the direction you're moving, but that's exactly how Roll works for Monk.

Talent trees are NOT an illusion of choice.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’d put heirlooms and battlegrounds in the top category with arenas and lfd. Those are the elements that make the game for me.

not utilizing class order halls post-legion is a huge mistake. doesn't have to be constant. but weaving into ongoing class questlines should ABSOLUTELY be a thing

Pet battles are weird because unless you really want to figure out a pet battle, which you only ever do once, then the act of pet battling is trivial and you don't even think about it. The only you can do to get good at pet battles is to collect more pets and leveling them and that's really the content.

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

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.

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?

Legion Legendaries not being "Made game worse category" is WILD coming form a world first raider

I hadn't played since MoP. I came back to try dragonflight and the SINGLE reason I'm hooked on the game again is mythic+. If it didn't exist I would have played for a week or 2 and bounced. But I'm having so much fun getting ksm and currently working on ksh. It's great

Me and the other hunter in our M raid team spent 6ish hours spamming +2 MoS for KP and AP every day. We both got sephuz, blasting cap, pyraz(Neck shield item), and roots of shaldrassil in that order and both of us would get our legendaries on the same day. My buddy starts a boomkin shortly before nighthold and he got 5 legendaries within 3 days of hitting lvl cap lol. You reminding me of this brought back like my one negative memory of legion.

the "problem" with transmog is that is made it alot less cool to show off your endgame gear walking around in vanilla/tbc/wrath will full biscuit felt dope because anyone who saw you would immediately know "that guy f*cks" with xmog, everyone looks the same in greens as they do in the best gear in the game playing dressup is fun tho so imo it's a fine tradeoff

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.

28:28 this all the time when using relatively undergeared toons for rares that are perhaps extra challenging. one thing i can think of is Arachnoid Harvester in mechagon (nearly 800 kills before mount dropped btw). When i first started farming in back in 8.3 i used several toons that struggled to solo it and i also found w/e ways i could to get out of the web ability it uses. For some that was easier then others; monk initially was rushing jade wind, then i figured out tiger's lust broke the pre-stun root, dh i used blade dance at just the right time (probably the easiest one that i figured out), shaman had to be the hardest because i never did find a consistent way to break the root or kill the web stun, so i just had to heal as much as possible. But no matter what class i used i had to figure out a way to stay alive and kill it quickly.

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.

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

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

What Max is missing about glyphs is that initially they did affect throughput e.g. Explosive Shot crit chance increased by 4%, but later in Cata had a glyph tier exclusively for utility and then MoP and WoD got rid of the throughput glyphs so all of them were about utility. In that time it actually was a cool system because you would swap glyphs around depending on the fight just like talents. For example I could glyph Explosive Trap to be a knockback instead of doing damage, or I could glyph Disengage to go further, or Camouflage to be a stealth (originally it was only a stealth when standing still), all depending on the fight. It was a nice level of customisation on top of talents and generally worked well.

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

Reforging was such a good quality of life to get hit rating cap etc. I loved it, now it would be still good please make it back

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

Okay in response to you saying corruption was the only time wow was p2w, I have one thing to say: Shadowlands legendaries. Those things were INSANELY expensive (due to raw vendor cost) and despite running around doing all my callings all the time, I absolutely needed to buy tokens to afford those stupid legendaries.

One thing I don't like about the new Great vault is that as someone who enjoys both pvp and pve, I have to actively decide between which type of content I will limit myself for that week by only choosing one piece of gear.

Rare loot is just titan-Forging with extra steps.

I main a Fury Warrior and Reforging definitely needs to come back simply because if you get a piece that has 40 haste 40 mastery even if it's 30 iLvls lower it will still be wayyyy better than a piece that has 80 vers and 80 crit. And it always feels horrible to get something that's an iLvl upgrade but still a downgrade because of secondary stats.

Blink glyph had its uses! For The Butcher in Highmaul I was the dps responsible for stepping out to adjust which half the raid the soak targeted. Blinking backwards out of melee for a couple GCD’s then blinking back to exactly where I was before was very nice IMO

Corruption was both super fun/cool and the most miserable thing in existence. I am super glad they happened, the long last patch of an expansion was the perfect place to have it, and I never want to see it again.

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.

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

RE: Momentum (the blink glyph) it was originally added to the Mage Trainer as a dialogue option to toggle between blinking in the direction you were moving and the direction you were facing. When it was very first added, it actually counted as a movement speed modifier, similar to the ghost wolf talent that was bugged on dragonflight beta. It was also bugged in a similar way. You could snowfall and blink in wsg off the alliance tunnel and it would basically telepprt you into the horde base. It was hot fixed VERY quickly.

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.

When you are the mage that uses the momentum glyph... and remembering your terrible decision every time you ran NW trying to blink to get the Meat Hook aimed and screwing it up because your momentum is actually wherever the ziggurat is moving.

Artifact weapons was the best feature in wow (.). They should have kept that going, just added a new talent system to the weapon, and added more transmog effects, or a diff legen weapon all together.. Legion was so good.

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

Really think Void Storage should be on there! I don't think I ever met anyone that ever used it.

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

I'd rather Blizz make bad stats better than bring back reforging. Scenarios weren't great, but the scenario TECH used for questing is one of the best things out there for storytelling.

Integrate Challenge mode into M+...i hate the "here's a mount for spending less than 3 weeks getting to 2k" i missed out on challenge mode back in Warlords and mists, but it would make the grind more enticing because it gives another incentive to keep going for armor pieces/cosmetic stuff. Tie things like...getting a stype of currency to spend on those cosmetic pieces, and the higher the keys the higher chance there is to get that token/coin or w/e to go after those pieces.

Thanks to the editor to include the Rich clip. So funny still

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.

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

Legion Legendarys was the reason i stopped playing and I know about 10 people who felt like it too. I did not get the one I needed, even tho i played ALOT and I was not taken with in a raid with my guild because my dmg dropped in comparison to other rogues because i did not have bracers. The fact that u didn't put it to "made the game worse" immidiately, baffles me. If there was a Vendor, could be A. But the fact that people were excluded or had to play the same class again on max, just because there was a higher chance to get bis legendary was a crime.

20man vs 10man is a hard question. Going 10 man means raiding would be more accessible, so more people could be able to try our mythic raiding. (Its much easier to get 10 people together than 20). But on the other side 20 man raids has the advantages max mentions. For me, the 20 man requirement is what stops me from doing mythic raiding. Trying to find 20 people that can raid at the same time often enough to make good progress requires a lot of work. For 10 man it is much easier.

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 loved Torghast but they way they made it mandatory was why so many people hated it.

i cant be the only one who loved timeless isle. Also ashran was FUN and gave nice rewards

F should be a hard to expand system as it's so convoluted that Blizzard doesn't want to expand it. The scrapper wasn't a bad idea, just half thought through. Imagine throwing random green gear that's not worth even selling on the auction house because the fees are worth more than what people would pay for the item, you could throw the item into the scrapper and get materials from item. Garrisons would have been so cool if they made it into a guild hall or a personal house where you could hang up retired faction tabards once you max out the reputation like how sports teams hang up retired jersey/numbers.

Could you rank your tierlists next?

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

9:39 Even scared the dog! 😂

The Customer support used to be good. Now it just like half-ass working people. For LFR people hate it for like - if you are dps the queue time can take up to 2-3 hour - then you join a group that have 10 stack of determination - even LFR difficulty that cut some mechenic and lower damage plus high stack of buff you still see half of the raid dead - also you have a chance to join other region server that higher you ms a lot

Freezing vault items would be super dope

MoP cloak was so sick. Should be A tier.

Came for artefact element, stayed for artefact elephant.

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.

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