An underrated gem. I remember listening to the nighttime music in the Valley of the Four Winds one evening while doing otherwise mindless dailies and thinking to myself, "I'm going to miss this expansion." I'm indifferent toward the pandaren at best, though I was never bored and the actual gameplay was an absolute blast.

It was also the last time for that players would see Blizzard changing up its patch structure and applying feedback actively throughout an expansion. There were legitimate gripes with a lot of the game's features, but the version we had by the end was a very fine-tuned experience.

A game that could have been a 10/10 masterpiece and even surpassed Wrath of the Lich King, but was completely ruined by Blizzard's aim to try and please more and more people. As it's often said, when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.

The biggest issue WoW was facing during this time was the dwindling player base. Many servers were dying around the time, including the server I played on. The obvious solution was to simply merge the servers, but Blizzard never done this. Instead opting to roll out cross-realm features in "server groups", which didn't address the fundamental issue but merely treated some of the lesser symptoms. A roll out that took them years to implement slowly, rather than doing the obvious thing to save the dwindling game. It was starting with this expansion that "server communities" and the "MMO" started to fade away and the game slowly morphed into the "multiplayer dungeon crawler" we see today. Features from 4.3 such as LFR securing themselves as core parts of WoW moving forward really harmed the game in my view and it became obvious that WoW simply was becoming something else entirely starting with MoP. For the worst.

It was also around this time that the game started to lack polish, as many tiny details were incomplete or bugged. This was most obvious in the new "Dungeon Journal", which was an in-game guide book of the game's various dungeons and raids. Many of the descriptions for the bosses in many dungeons and raids were missing and it took Blizzard years to finally finish the feature entirely. It was this noticeable lack of polish of details that was a sign of WoW's decline in expansions to come.

The story for this expansion was very good, while not "Warcraft" because of its setting, it was much so in its faction conflict plot. Often criticised for having "Pandas" in "Pandaland", the self-contained story worked well alongside the faction conflict between the Horde and the Alliance. New lore such as the "Thunder King" was very welcome. Also in this expansion daily quests unlocking more and more of a story became commonplace here, with 5.1 "Landfall" having a great campaign. Where the story fell apart was in its ending in 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar), with the perceived necessity to retain "faction balance" resulting in the "Horde-Alliance War" ending in a way that felt forced because of this reason.

The zones and quests in this expansion were some of the best WoW has had, only behind BC and Wrath. Chen Stormstout and the Shado-pan being allies during levelling added a lot lore and character storytelling while questing. The only zone that wasn't so great was Timeless Isle in 5.4, that quickly became a frustrating grind after a while. (This was a stark contrast to Thundering Isle, which had a fun solo campaign and solo content to play through.) Timeless Isle was also flawed with the World Boss being locked behind the legendary quest chain, which had a tedious grind with a 6 week timegate for little obvious reason except forcing the player to log in and play a lot every week. It was a shame that this World Boss became inaccessible after the expansion, for those that did not go through the annoying quest chain that demanded a over a month of the player's time. Wrathion, who hands out the legendary quests, is also a very dislikeable character, despite being one of the few original characters from WoW Blizzard really stuck with.

Dungeons were alright, with some being excellent and some being painfully average. Raids were similarly mixed, with most of the raids being rather poor, but world bosses making a much welcome return for the first time since Burning Crusade was good. One stand out though was Throne of Thunder, one of the best raids Blizzard have made, despite being weighed down by its basic difficulty in LFR and dying servers making it nigh-impossible to find a group for normal or heroic difficulty. The sense of scale and adventure through the palace was a great experience only matched in its design by Black Temple or Ulduar.

Expansion features such as scenarios were alright and rather fun when doing them for the first time, although became repetitive quickly. Pet Battles were a great minigame on the side, until the end of the "pet battle campaign", where it devolves from a seemingly competent Pokémon clone into a "Rock, Paper, Scissors" style game. It was disappointing seeing you had to collect specific pets to even beat the endgame pet battle bosses, rather than using your main team of pets. Challenge Modes were a welcome return to difficult dungeons, which had been absent since Burning Crusade (with the exception of the start of Cataclysm before the nerf), but like so much else in this expansion, it was hard to find a group for such content when so many servers were dead or dying.

The final point to comment on was Patch 5.3, which was more of an event than a patch and it was a shame it was designed in such a way as most of the patch became unplayable in 5.4.

In conclusion, the expansion had potential but fell short. Failure to address dying servers, a lack of polish, a botched story ending, 5.3 being wasted and other smaller issues soured the experience. An experience that that was (ignoring the flaws) at its zenith in 5.2 but also very near this height in 5.0 and 5.1.

I only played this game because my friend wanted to play it with friends. So, myself, being a good friend, I played this. However, that's the only reason I played this, if my friend didn't ask me to, I wouldn't even know that this game existed, since I ain't a gamer at all.

I ranked this a one star not because it's a terrible game or anything like that, but because this ain't the type of game that I play. I only play the easy games and this game is quite confusing for me, and this game ain't easy. It literally gave my head a thunderous headache after a few times of playing.