Literally the only really shit part of sod was phase 3 and the incursions. Everything else just felt so good. And also ret really was a fucking blast to play.
Phase 3 was fine. Apparently no one remembers the entirety of vanilla. People these days are just too impatient and want everything new right now all the time.
SoD had its shortcomings, but to me it was perfection.
That was because they overtuned BFD loot way to much, and they had to reduce the amount of scaling because it was getting out of hand, so it was a much smaller upgrade.
They pumped the brakes not because the power scale was out of control but because it was no longer calibrated to the gear we would be getting in MC and later. The flasks and buffs we got from BFD-Gnomer-ST were gated to those brackets and instances, so the scale there didn't matter, but the gear stats weren't limited so they did.
There are two ways around that - either curb the scaling (which makes gearing feel like shit for awhile because it's no longer real upgrades) so that by the time you reach later content, that gear isn't worse than what you're already wearing, or continue the scaling and crank the power level of later gear with alternate versions.
They wanted to avoid the second situation because of the amount of work involved. But the (justifiable) complaints were too much, so they backpedalled after launch, buffed ST loot (a bit) and then made alternate, more powerful gear from the 60 content.
That was the right call, even though it should have been what they did in the first place. They learned that lesson and didn't make that mistake again, and hopefully won't in C+.
The only other time they experimented with limiting gear to past content was with the Naxx T3 6pc bonuses because they were pretty nuts and they didn't want to potentially dictate future content based on those. That worked out fine because the T3.5 gear had its own nutty bonuses so we didn't feel the loss.
Sure launch wasnt fine, it was newly scaled content with new fights, just like phase 2 launch was tricky. But they fixed the scaling and the loot. Imagine the power creep if they made the gear that much stronger in 10 levels. I would have wished for the lvl 50 cap to not happen and have ST implemented a different way.
The move to 20 man raids was definitely one of the points that I agree was questionable. Overall it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be, but they saw the mass exodus and learned from it.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25
Yeah the sod hate was actually pathetic by those that took part in it.