Hello All,
I'm here to promote Frostwolf and MoP in general! I'm obviously going to be biased since I love MoP, but I will try to be as balanced as I can presenting both the good parts and bad parts of MoP. For background, I've played WoW since vanilla, having played vanilla-cata on various private servers, MoP and some WoD on retail. As you can imagine, having played WoW private servers since the very first years, I have a lot of patience in dealing with bugs. You may be different, and that is fine. I will explain how well Frostwolf is working and you can decide for yourself if its worth trying.
Why you should consider MoP:
The pros of MoP in general are many. I will list the most important (imo) below.
1. MoP PvE is generally considered to have been amazing. Raids have many mechanics and were considered the best part of this expansion by many players. The raids were also pretty challenging and fun. I'm not a PvE player, so I can really only go by word of mouth. I mostly PvP'd on retail, and also mostly PvP on Frostwolf.
2. MoP PvP is excellent. Now this is just an opinion, but I enjoy the way most classes play out in MoP. Every class has a myriad of options on what they can do as it was the expansion with the highest number of abilities in the game. Furthermore, PvE gear is virtually useless in instanced PvP. The only gear that any serious PvP'er will use is Prideful gear (ilvl 550), because any item that is not Prideful will be downscaled to ilvl 540. This means no Shadowmournes, no Gurthalaks, no Vial of the Shadows, none of that garbage. It is your skill vs. the enemies skill and whether you raid for your gear does not matter.
3. Arenas. Arenas in MoP do not require teams. This cannot be emphasized enough. MoP allows players the flexibility of doing arenas whenever they feel like it, with whichever composition they like. Want to try something crazy like HLS (hunter/lock/shaman), but you got to 2k playing KFC (hunter/warrior/healer)? Well, now you just play with your new partners rather than leave a possibly high rank team.
4. Rated BGs. Expansions before Cataclysm did not have Rated BGs. For those that do not know what these are, Rated BGs are essentially a 10v10 battleground with arena rules (no flasks, potions, heroism, etc.). Rated BGs have their own rating system, giving titles and mounts as rewards unique to this bracket. This is my biggest gripe with WotLK. Once you are in a PvP guild and BIS, most of your game-time revolves around deleting low geared players in Random BGs or doing arenas with the same people over and over again. Rated BGs allow you to challenge other guilds and do competitive BGs!
5. Pandaria. Now I know many people hate Pandaria as a continent and its lore. That's fine, each to his own. I do feel the zones have a lot going on, and there is more to do in the world itself compared to Cataclysm. This is of course at a peak with Timeless Isle and pet battles.
6. Talents. I'm sure this will trigger a lot of people, since the talent tree is one of the things people hated the most about MoP. However I feel the talents in MoP were a step in the right direction. Before MoP, every experienced WoW player knew the exact build they would need to play optimally. This was specially true in PvP since you couldn't swap talents based on the team you were playing against. As a result, we had cookie-cutter builds that we would all find online in some guide, and then use it for the rest of our gaming life. In MoP however, if you do not swap talents based on the team you are against, you may as well be stuck at 1500 mmr.
What sucks about MoP:
There are a fewthings that suck about MoP, and I feel if I don't mention them, people won't take my post seriously. So here they are:
1. Gear difference in PvP. Gear has always been an issue in PvP in WoW. From Vanilla where tier 3 was ridiculous in PvP, to WotLK where Shadowmourne plagues almost all private servers, to MoP where the difference between Grevious and Prideful is quite ridiculous. HOWEVER, MoP also introduced the Conquest Catch Up system allowing new players a larger conquest points cap to get catch-up faster.
2. Post-Cata Azeroth. Unforunately, Azeroth in MoP is still devastated just like in Cataclysm, with flying enabled. I personally think adding flying to the game at all was a huge mistake, and sadly MoP continues the trend. However, this is just part of life after Cataclysm, so there is nothing to be done here. If this is truly a deal breaker for you, then I suppose you can only really play up to WotLK as that is the last expansion in which Azeroth does not have flying.
3. More Effective Health. In PvP the stat that is most relevant is called "Effective Health". Effective Health is essentially you're health, multiplied by damage reduction auras such as resilience, armor, etc. In MoP Effective Health is HIGH. Very high. Players simply cannot be one shot, ever. Even a naked character has close to 300k HP, and there is nothing that can hit 300k in PvP. For example, even a Chaos Bolt with everything (flasks/potions included) maxes out at about 280k. For comparison sake, Judgement in WotLK can easily hit 15k without potions, which is generally the HP of a naked character. What this means is that healers are very strong in MoP, and fights in general take very long. If you are someone that values BGs with 50 Killing Blows, or someone who wants very fast arena games (specially in 3v3), you may not enjoy the expansion. Some double DPS comps are great in 2v2 and can have fast games, but generally, healer/dps comps are superior in 2v2. Personally I enjoy the slower gameplay, but many players have told me they don't like it, so I put it here.
As I mentioned, I love this expansion, and as such I'm struggling finding downsides in it. If you have any, please post as a reply and I will edit my post with your reply!
Now that we have discussed why MoP is good or bad, lets consider some things about Frostwolf.
Great things about Frostwolf:
1. A lot of stuff works. PvP in general is close to perfect. There are bugs, but they are few and far between thanks to a lot of hardwork by our QA/Devs, as well as a lot of players who devoted a LOT of time to report bugs. Staff has been very responsive on class bugs and if you post something truly broken, it generally gets attention very quickly.
2. All raids are open. Now, I'm not saying PvE is perfect on MoP. I don't think its even close to being perfect, PvE is where we struggle the most. However all the raids are open for players to try. There are a lot of servers out there where the raids aren't even open, so I'll take an open raid as a positive (PvE will be talked about lower)
3. Friendly Community. Frostwolf has a VERY friendly community (based on my experience, the most friendly on the whole server). I see people complain about toxic communities a lot, so I think you should give FW a try and see if that's more to your liking. We also have a discord server now to bring the community closer (link here: https://discord.gg/4z4FESt)
4. 3v3 Tournament. It was mentioned by Proterean that a 3v3 tournament may be happening at the end of this season for players who finish high in the arena ladder
5. Conquest catch-up. This took a long fight, but we do have conquest catch-up enabled on Frostwolf, so gearing is a bit better now than it ever was before!
No so great things about Frostwolf:
1. Population. There was a time Frostwolf had a lot of population. Those days are sadly gone. The population is why I'm making this post to begin with. I think the issue with population is that it is a cycle. People leave servers that have low population, which in turn causes others to leave because of the lower population. I'm trying to reverse the cycle by increasing the population, which will bring more people and on and on. If I can sell you on the idea of MoP, I'm sure we can reverse this cycle together!
2. PvE. PvE has a LONG way to go on Frostwolf. We have all the raids open, but there are some major issues that need to be sorted (which to the credit of the devs, they are working on them). Flexible raids are not ready yet, and there is an ID issue which is causing raiders to wait 1 hour between swapping from normal to heroic and vice versa. The QA has stated they are aware of the issue and are working on a fix which will come along with flexible IDs (the raid ID system is different in MoP. If your raid disbands after boss X is killed, you can join another raid that has X downed. This is currently also bugged on Frostwolf and should be fixed along with the 1 hour wait bug).
3. Lack of 3v3 and Rated BG. I'm not sure why this is, we have the population for both 3v3 and Rated BGs but people just seem to not want to do them right now. I think a higher population will lead to more players being active. I also think the 3v3 tournament should help.
Again, if you have others things that should be added to the list, please post in a reply and I will edit the post.
To summarize this massive wall of text which is basically an essay at this point, Frostwolf struggles from only one thing, low population. We have so many things working now that we didn't have when the population was high, that it baffles me how the population is still low. I encourage all of you to join us on our discord server and ask us any questions you have. We will be glad to help in any way, and we would love if you make a character and give FW a try!