This is what I’ve been saying for a few years: WoW was an absolutely great game with almost flawless design, that then got progressively broken by game designers that upset the original fine balance.

Lots of changes with the new expansion: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13423478/

What a pathetic display of mudlation applied to game design. It all amounts to “with each expansion and patch we broke our fine design, so now we are rolling everything back to how it was originally, so that we can start breaking stuff again.”

So Draenor = WoW v1.0

as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player’s health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them.

To that end, we’re buffing heals less than we’re increasing player health.

Or:

Over the years, we’ve added significantly more new spells and abilities to the game than we’ve removed. This has led to the complexity of the game increasing steadily over time, to the point we’re at now, where players feel like they need dozens of keybinds.

That means making some abilities restricted to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities.

Or:

Another big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there was simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game.

To solve that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament.

It took them quite a while to realize this. Now they basically invented “Infinity, the game design”: things start great, then slowly get broken by designers who enjoy fiddling with what works, until it all goes back to the starting point for a new loop.

First they hype stuff being added: people go YAY!
Then they announce they are removing the stuff they added previously: people go YAY!

The ultimate achievement: make what’s old feel as if it’s new. It already happened with Diablo 3: they design new broken systems so that everyone rejoices when they finally remove them.

And game designers are getting paid to remove what they just added. It’s like modern economy: the illusion of wealth by moving virtual money around.