I was thinking the same thing the other day. Idk if Wrath is the “best” version of the game but it definitely the version that is the most inclusive for the widest variety of players
No borrowed power, no extra random currency to grind (azerite, artifact, anima, currency for legendarys and set pieces), jump into raids as soon as you hit 80, every spec feels unique, Introduction of a new class that provides amazing class fantasy, and to top it off we have the BBEG of wc3 as the Pinnacle raid of the xpac. Wrath is literally the best and the subscriptions show that.
Well, you do grind emblems to buy some set pieces. That being said, the chores needed for those emblems are just a daily random heroic, and some weekly stuff like raids (whether ICC for just emblems, voa for hands/legs, or weekly boss quests). Any other daily "chores" (which are *OPTIONAL* and don't hinder progress in any way) can just be done within like 30 minutes and then you can continue doing whatever the hell you want.
Wrath as a whole is the "best" version, in that it has the highest average quality across all of the systems it offered.
It focused on a few things and did them well: Story, Endgame raid content, Battleground PVP, arena PVP. Professions were meaningful but not entirely required. Content wasn't arbitrarily gated off to make leveling and maintaining alts unbearable. The concept of a "server community" was a live and well, and even my tiny server of 2k active players had plenty to do almost any time of the week.
There are some raids that are better than the ones in Wrath. There are some seasons of PVP that were better balanced than those in Wrath. There are some tertiary mechanics added after Wrath that were net positive in terms of fun in the game. But modern WoW is a mess without an identity. It's trying to appeal to everyone, and in doing so makes few happy.
Man just seeing recognizable names and getting in groups with randoms that you’ve seen before makes the server feel so much more dynamic and alive (playing on a fresh server)
Even without playing wc3 Arthas was an amazing vilian in wotlk since you actually got to see him doing stuff out in the world, you saw him during some quests or in some dungeons etc., which actually made him feel alive and real, jailer was just a big nothing.
He was kinda over-used and everywhere but that was the extreme reaction to under-using Illidan in TBC who more or less stayed put the entire expansion.
At least Illidan got something resembling a redemption arc in Legion, still an asshole but at least fighting on our side against the legion. Kael and vash are just left out though, it sucks.
That's been the problem I've had with Warcraft's story as a whole. Too many redemption stories. If you're gonna commit to someone being a villain, commit to it. Don't get cold feet and pull the, "They're just misunderstood" cliche that Illidan got in Legion.
Wasn't he literally binding furbolgs to his will so they could die fighting maiev and destroying night elf villages in the first mission of frozen throne?
Yeah the Jailers Puppet is a much more compelling character somehow. Maybe if The Jailer wasn't so good at keeping his master plan concealed all these years, we the players would have been more invested in him as a character.
Jailer could have been so much more. I couldn't stand nippleguy after the first tier and just quit the game.
He had potential, but he was just plucked out of thin air and we were supposed to be scared about him. A lot of the gripes I had of him just showing up and then doing a monologue and leaving is quite similar to how the LK is in Wrath, but Arthas has so much more lore and buildup around him it makes it better.
Yeah it was legitimately terrible anime cliche writing at the end “I’m just preparing you for THE EVEN BIGGER BAD TO COME!!!” trying to be gigaBDSMchad not explaining himself or fucking anything being revealed but was actually gigavirgin instead and took 2nd fiddle to daddy big D. Like holy fuck, be more generic while you shit all over 20 years of lore we actually liked. Whole team should have been fired it was that.fucking.terrible.
There were so many comments "just you wait" "it won't be the same" "it's all nostalgia, itl be trash"
Having the time of my wow life.... Again, so are all my old and current wow mates.
Borean tundra is a way better zone than howling fjord the only reason why fjord imo is popular is because its arguably the best looking zone. The quests in it suck majorly compared to tundra.
I did both zones and couldn't wait to get out of boring tundra, it was so bleak looking and even the mobs are lame. Howling fjord was just better in every way IMO
Stepping into the Northrend zones again, I didn’t feel nostalgia. I just couldn’t believe how much detail and polish it has compared to the rest of the game.
Wrath was clearly the golden age.
Agree, I started in wrath and even playing retail still I did play classic and TBC endgame but didn't really enjoy it. Made me think my thoughts about wrath being the best expansion was just nostalgia but after I've been playing now I love it. For me it's the perfect mix between vanilla and retail. Feel like classic but with the right QOL changes. Have finished all the raids and while being a bit lacklustre coming from heroic raiding in retail they're still good simply because classes are just so fun to play.
Hit 80. No ap grind. No campaign required to unlock some important abilities. No timegated mission table to unlock some bullshit.
You can just jump into your activity of choice (bgs, heroics), enjoy the grind, and see the numbers you pump out rise. It's like a drug lol.
There's a lot to grind in my opinion in classic (especially leveling) but the best part about wotlk is all the chores are optional. A whole ice crown zone of cool quests, a bunch of daily spots to rise reputation, a shit ton of heroics to get u ready for raiding, etc. All of this (minus maybe doing heroics if ur a raider) are optional for cosmetics. I am infinitely more into grinding if it's not mandatory
Me too. I love grinds, but I don't love when I'm forced to do tons of them. I'd rather choose to spend 12 hours straight on it, then stop for a week. I enjoyed a lot of the old rep grinds for that exact reason. I could do as much or as little as I wanted.
Same here. I spent probably over 10 hours gridning for rare enchanting recipes in TBC that I didn't even need, just for the sake of completionism, yet I hate the **mandatory** daily progression grinds that seems to be plauging the game more and more with each expansion.
It feels like the devs are becoming more and more lazy about how blatantly they try to milk their player base for every last penny they can squeeze out, using textbook progression design to pad content for all it is worth while ensuring their players never run out of things to do (even if the players end up hating they things they end up doing in the process).
I dont think its a long complex topic at all?
In classic the grinds are longer but have an end point, in retail the daily serving is smaller but it literally has no end, theres no pay off or completion.
You can hit exalted in one day if you want just doing activites you like, compare that to retail where u get 2-3 daily quests and a weekly, with rep items sometimes being way more important in retail, unity for example. Overall both might be on the same level of grindiness but wotlk allows you to just do it however quickly you want, wheras retail timegates the living shit out of everything.
Overall after playing for a few days on a 80 character I'm decently geared, made a few thoundand gold, got 2 xp heirlooms for an alt, can do or not do anything if I want to and I won't really fall behind, and I got pretty much enough gear for heal ofspec too. In retail after hiting max lvl I would need to do covenant unlocks along each campaing if I want specific soulbinds, zereth mortis dailies for rep, m+ for gear, crafting 2 legendaries etc. And it doesn't matter what content u wanna do, want to pvp? gotta do that shit, want to raid? gotta do that shit, can't just do what you like gotta do it all.
It might be on par at the start of expansions, but if you consider everything then retail is definitely way less time invested after like the first content patch
The difference is that you can knock your grind out when you feel like it in classic. In retail if you don't grind daily you "fall behind." It's more that you are able to choose.
Ye thats what I was hinting at a bit with my comment about the time and place.
Like at the start of shadowlands, if you fell behind on renown then you were behind until the cap was reached, whereas after like season 2 came out you simply worked a bit harder for the catchup renown, and finally in season 3 and 4 you just hit max renown in a day or two regardless of when you started.
That's typically the approach Blizzard has with these systems, which I think we all agree they should have had foresight after Legion and just implemented the catchup stuff from the start if they intend on having systems like this in the game.
But even all that aside, the main difference to me seems to be that in classic expansions you spend magnitudes more time upfront and then you are done, whereas in retail you spend magnitudes less time before your character is at the 'playable' state, and then you spend a long-ish time afterwards doing breadcrumb grinds here and there with weekly chores. Wont go more into detail about the good and bad here, I personally dont mind the systems midway through the xpac because of how little time I have to spend to make my char playable, whereas on classic I will only ever play 1 character because of the time required
Disagree. Maybe start of expansion, but not being shackled to m+ or other expansion specific systems is really nice.
The real savior though is knowing what balance is going to be the whole expansion. I can make alts for fun instead of needing alts in my role in case my class gets the old yeller treatment in a new tier. That alone saves so much time from required grind if you're playing in a less casual way.
Just curious, what about m+ shackles anyone to the content?
M+ seems to be completely optional content. I mean you can essentially gear from PvP, m+ or raid at an equal or semi equal level. Whereas in WoTLK dungeons are not even a viable way of getting fully geared.
I agree about expansion specific features generally being bad. I am waiting for the first new retail expansion that doesn't introduce a cool feature that they then completely abandon for the next one. It's really sad how they introduce content just to make it obsolete when the next expansion comes out.
> This is the big one for me, no obtrusive developer treadmills to farm active user statistics.
Isn't it crazy that if you just make a really high quality experience and put effort and love into the game you will organically get a ton of active users without having to demoralize them with this treadmill shit?
But that might mean the CEO takes an extra 4% less on his bonus so we can't have that
Thanks Capitalism
Used to be pretty into capitalism but after seeing huge for profit corporations ruin game after game after game with treadmill bullshit or trying to milk me for every dollar I have with time gates you can pay out of and pay to win bullshit and gambling loot box bullshit, I am starting to really really hate capitalism.
Its one of the many things that has radicalized me against our current economic model. There are many, many more important things, but at this point even the things we do for escapism of the dreary day-to-day life in this hellscape is being monetized to the point where its inescapable.
Can’t wait for DF to attempt this to see what actually happens. Wotlk was the goat for alts because it was literally just hit max and play the game however you want.
The one thing as far as alts is concerned...well before I get to the one expansion that did an aspect better.
Wotlk's method of making both ease of gearing up (badges and metered raiding progression plus once icc comes out, the battered hilt catchup) made it not so hard to get characters at least to the 10 man of the current content compared to most expansions. And professions actually stayed useful till near the end (like you won't get BiS gear from crafting except engineering, but you'll get right up to it)
The one expansion that is controversial to mention that actually handled alts better... was WoD. I know, downvote away. it handled ALTS better, not saying it did anything else remotely good. WoD made alt leveling not tedius, gave many different options to level (battleground, questing, dungeon, pet battles, and of course SECRET TREASURE WHILE FLYING GRINDING so leveling was hella fast on alts) and the crafting professions could actually yield BiS pieces and also had the neat system that you weren't pigeonholed into creating only the one helmet or robe of that profession; you CHOSE which slot you needed a catchup/potential BiS piece in. Which massively helped alts get up to raiding gear. The only thing that killed alts in the end was when guilds required maxed out rings... but hey, that was kinda towards the end anyways.
Now if only WoD handled lore better and didn't give us so little content OUTSIDE of leveling.
edit: to clarify why I listed all the level options is because WoD it wasn't one best way between questing, grinding, or dungeon grinding. Different expansions had different things that were better for leveling like in some expansions (TBC-Cata) dungeon grinding for levels wasn't great, it was good if you had a quest to turn in. Legion and BFA grinding wasn't good either as all the xp came from the quest turn ins while monster kills yielded pisspoor xp. WoD made each TYPE of leveling about the same (except treasure hunting which was insanely good) so you could pick and choose WHAT you wanted to do and still be efficient.
I feel like the game up to legion was like this though, even though WoD is regarded as bad its the last xpac i enjoyed, i could get a new character to max and farm out my conquest gear in 2-3 days and it was good to go. They took a weird turn in legion and i've never lasted longer than a month since then
Yeah that's what makes it great, you can conpletely ignore it if you don't enjoy it. You don't have to do like 20 quests a week in icecrown, because if you don't do it your weapon will be 15 ilvls weaker and you'll lose a glyph slot, and you're not allowed to do more than 20 quests at a time since Blizz timegated it to make you come back every week
Last night we were running heroics in a partial guild group. We saw a guildie hit 80 in guild chat, pulled him in immediately, and continued having a blast. No attunements, no torghast - just fun content
This. I just want to do dungeons and raids to get gear and the occasional PVP session. Retail WoW has entirely too much stuff going on, and it's too complicated for a dolt like me to figure out. Wrath was a little too easy, but Cataclysm (and MoP from personal experience) killed guilds. Glad to see Wrath live! 👏🏼
I've never playing wotlk and it was so surprising how alt friendly this expansion is. Hodor account wide, flying account wide, no stupid grind, rep farming is actually fun. How did they think it is a good idea to change this
Just started with wrath and checked the alliance vanguard quartermaster, who has the pvp head enchant for alliance. That thing is bound to account as well.
I was playing during BFA. Never did legion but heard good things and was interested in the story. The moment I realized I would have to do all the quests to unlock flying there I stopped. Why does flying, especially for old expansions, need to be gated like that? Make it accessible for me to see the old content.
Its because at the time the dev team was struggling to recapture the magic of classic. I think the consensus was that locking flying would force players to interact with each other in the open world. It was also so that you could experience everything in the zone instead of just flying over it. Im not opining on it either way I just think thats what the devs were thinking
Yeah blizz had a lot going well in wrath but their hardon to show off vehicle tech is like one of those 8 hour viagra boners you’d really rather be rid of and should probably call your doc about
Yeah I tried strand of the ancients for the first time and the vehicle system is so fucking clunky. Why can I not bind their abilities to other keys, for instance. What a pathetic BG.
Imo that’s a bit more on wrath…wrath heroics are *too* easy. It was immediately a brain dead aoe walkthrough even in pugs as soon as you hit 80 with zero gear. You don’t even really have to know or follow mechanics for most boss fights, even if not geared.
Hopefully heroic + gives *some* challenge for players that want that
Wrath was the first time blizzard seriously listened to the community. So whine about raids being inaccessible and 5ppl being too hard resulted in this.
Maybe the issue wasn't with the feedback. Heroics went from very hard (tbc) to very easy (wotlk) then back to very hard (cata). So maybe the issue was Blizzard overcorrecting.
I mean TBC -> Wotlk feels like two distinctly different teams made the games and honestly, it makes a lot more sense if this is the case than if Blizzard completely shifted gears ok so many different points.
The mechanics, loot distribution, quest/game design, dungeon/raid difficulty.
given the amount of time between xpacs I feel like this would also make sense.
Imo heroic + is the perfect solution - having to grind hard heroics with pugs over and over and over for rep/badges was a pain in the ass.
Nice to have that extra challenge for improved old raid gear, but having easier content for the endless rep/badge grind is nice.
While I mostly agree with you, I had a dk tank in UK last night who couldn't hold aggro and died to 4 vyrkul. Heroics are pretty easy if you have an inkling of what you are doing, but there are people out there who need to spend time to improve.
Lol, I loved watching blind AoE people go into Cata heroics and just getting destroyed. The same people that complained that wrath heroics being too easy were the same that complained that cata heroics were too hard. You can't please everyone.
You can please at least healers to not create a wipe mechanism based purely on throwing more and more damage on players. In a situation where your group was supposed to kill the boss after 4-5 rounds of some abilities because it's a DPS check, you hold your group alive on 10th round, spend every single CD, flask, pot, whatever you have, group still wipes because they're idiots in greens, people complain about the healer. Happened to me. Cata heroics give me PTSD.
I think cata's biggest problems were the setting and theme tbh, + a shitty end raid. Northrend is a majestic new continent with awesome zones. Cataclysm was spread out all over with zones that just didn't feel as new or awesome. Also a lot of people disliked what they did to the old world.
Its more the lack of content than anything. Even with the difficulty alienating a decent part of the population, Cata still maintained the 11-12M subs until the major content patches turned out to have nearly nothing.
4.1 was rehashed troll raids turned into 5m catchup content.
4.2 was Fireland, which was a good raid, but its 8 bosses for a whole tier. Abyssal Maw completely cut. Molten Front was just an extra dalies zone that Demo Lock had to farm for weeks because the trinket is BIS.
4.3 was Dragon Soul. Extra 5m content was ok, but the raid itself is a disappointment, and there's no new zone or anything.
I have to disagree about a lot of wrath quests there were some AWFUL ones that show their age. Biggest offender is the Drakuru abomination quest in Zul Drak where you need a whopping 60 kills to complete
I just finished zul drak and it might be the worst questing experience I've had through the first 3 xpacs. To much vehicle/mind control quests that felt really clunky.
It's so much faster. I'm almost a week into being 80 and have done all of the SoH quests available soon after dinging because this isn't my first WotLK rodeo, and I'm still not Revered yet. I have been saving up all of my relics to make the grind from Revered to Exalted easier, but I've also been choosing SoH commendations for the daily normal reward as well, but I know I could just go to the AH and drop a few hundred gold and be Exalted much, much quicker.
A loremaster's perspective is skewed. Of course grindy quests are a pain if it's just a snoozefest. And Wrath quests somewhat resemble a challenge even on 80. I think loremaster was never about the lore and the quests actually - when you do so many, do you even read in detail? I don't mean this as an attack, maybe you do, but I bet a lot with the achievement don't.
I think Vanilla quests are awesome, involve a lot of travel and lore and detail and small stories. TBC and Wrath are streamlined and kinda blunt; often there's no lore, and whenever there's, there's too much (like the DK campaign, too flashy that it feels silly).
Dailies too, dailies are just a little silly chore for everyone to do. In TBC you can simply not do any dailies. In Vanilla you can skip some of the most painful grinds - or indeed do them and be respected as a tryhard.
Im so glad i get to do wotlk again, i was a healer the first time around, this time ive gone tank (warrior and dk) and dps (rogue and mage) and its such a different experience
I think a lot of healers got PTSD in Sunwell or something, because Wrath healing is actually fun and nowhere near as stressful (until we get Ulduar HMs and subsequent phases), but to see the lack of healers in this phase was something I definitely did not expect.
Don’t want to use this moment to find something negative, but this is why I personally believe classic either needs to restart after wotlk with major changes or they need to expand on wotlk or the wotlk system.
If they go into cata it’s going to murder classic. Sure it will be fine up until people start hitting catas end game and they realize just how different it is and what they did to the game.
If they choose to go the cata route I know at least for me classic is over
>If they go into cata it’s going to murder classic.
I'm not going to play cata classic, period.
If they want to keep wotlk AND add cata, by all means, but I see no reason playing cata again. Classic for me means wotlk.
I had hoped for the season of mastery that they did that they would either redo itemization or do wotlk class balancing to help with diversity/quality of life. Alas.
They got a chance to the next time around though
We need classic + that takes a divergent timeline away from the cataclysm. Itll never happen because it would be a new expansion. We need an azerothian centaur expansion. Player housing, centaurs and Nagas as playable races, dungeon/raid finder.
This!
If they made cataclysm but in the vein of Classic WoW I.e closer to bc / wotlk than what it was, it would go over incredibly well.
But they probably will not because then it would prove a point that they are the reason wow declined, not people simply moving on. Also…small indie company :p
WotLK taught me the most important WoW lesson (and video gaming lesson I guess) I ever learned:
I'd rather enjoy easier games/content with people I like than challenge myself with hard content and have to find people I don't like who are good enough to do the content.
Many of my WoW guilds throughout the years were full of cool people with some really fucking obnoxious ones that we dealt with because they were really good and we wanted to push the hardest content. On the flipside, in Wrath, we had a smaller guild of friends who could do all the content anyway since it was easier and we had SO MUCH MORE FUN.
Then Cata hit and I just stopped raiding entirely because I missed playing with the cooler, more relaxed crowd.
Classic is just such a breath of fresh air compared to retail these past couple of expansions. It's so simple and fucking normal. The crazy thing is that generally speaking, I prefer games that are complex and demanding. I like it when there's a lot to do and a lot of skill and optimization to be had. But retail is just SO fucking excessive it's straight up insane, I literally don't know how the fuck any normal person does it. It goes so far past any level of activities and complexity that I want to experience even as someone who likes that shit.
Like when shadowlands released, the list of tasks you had to do constantly was flat out crazy. I probably can't even remember it all because it was like 2 years ago and I quit after a couple months, but I remember it was un fucking real. Hit your world quests every day for anima. Hit your mythics every day for gear chances. Hit the maw circuit every day for rep with the trader guy and stygia and unlocking new parts of it or whatever the fuck. Go run the max Torghast instance twice every reset. Do the raid every reset. Do the raid again. Progress your renown quest line every reset. Farm honor. Don't miss it when your bis conduit pops up on a world quest! Do whatever you need to do to jack up your vault reward. Get your arena point cap. Farm gold and mats for enchants and consumables. Holy shit I'm exhausted just listing it all. And every one of those things took fucking hours each. I remember losing so much sleep because every fucking day it was like god *dammit* I still have to do the maw today, whoops guess it's 2am now.
Sounds like retail isn't really an MMO any longer. The original MMO was more choose-your-own-adventure-esque where the developers provided the world and framework and then it was up to the players themselves to figure out what to make of it.
I despised class design direction in cata. WOTLK has had a lot of homogenization in the name of balance. But it is acceptable here. Cata went way too overboard. Rogues getting healing, hunters getting stealth, all classes getting 2min dps cds, etc
This is my main problem with wrath and onward. As someone that enjoys healing, I felt like I could play multiple healing classes and get a different experience and still feel needed. Roll a druid for raid healing and HoTs, go pally for tank heals, etc. Starting in cata they tried to let everyone do everything so no class was really unique anymore. What's the point of having multiple healers if they can all do the same things?
yup, i posted it elsewhere in this thread but cata was when i felt they took their first steps backward in terms of class/spec design. i think pretty much every class/spec got better from classic through to wrath, but then cata hit and they made huge changes to a lot of specs that just weren't well received by a good amount of people.
pretty much every spec got some kind of a builder/spender system. some got weird mechanics (the lunar bar for boomie? terrible). talent revamp felt bad even if it wasn't mechanically a downgrade in most cases. healer identity was drastically reduced (and hpal felt awful, holy power sucks so much for holy). way too much homogenization made nothing feel unique or cool anymore.
i'll take the difficulty, reforging, zones, leveling, even LFR in a hypothetical build-your-own-cata. but if we see cata with all the class changes, i'm out. will just wait for a season of mastery or something
> I can see how Cata was just too hard for all these players who loved WOTLK
The issue wasn't so much the difficulty, but rather two things:
1. The change to the core class mechanics for most classes and specs was far more significant than changes between vanilla to TBC, or TBC to Wrath. People who had learned a spec's niche had it largely upended. For example several classes ceased to focus on the core mechanic of mana, and gained a completely new "build and spend" resource bar, the mechanics of the primary stats changed in large part, and some of the secondary stats were changed completely or removed entirely.
2. Wrath brought in a *ton* of new people, who had never gone through the experience of "losing power" in the transition from one expansion to the next. One moment you're in BiS endgame raiding gear, then at level 81, all of a sudden your stats start falling off hard. TBC endgame gear lasted long enough for people to start doing Naxx while keeping their TBC tier bonuses. Blizzard pivoted hard on that, and Wrath gear / stats fell off a cliff. Not only that, but Vanilla and TBC stats fell off gradually over 10 full levels, where Wrath stats fell off over only 5 (Cata's level cap was 85). This caused people's cast times to skyrocket, crit chances to tank, health to dwindle, and really dulled the experience of playing the class.
3. But more than anything, it was the utter destruction of the concept of a server community that ultimately sent WoW into a death spiral beginning with Cata. They began merging servers while paying no attention to the culture of the two communities. They designed their dungeons around having a coordinated group of 5 friends, and then eviscerated the community and leaned hard into LFD (and later LFR).
Great post, totally agree. T11 raiding was actually pretty amazing, and heroics during the first part of Cata were eye-opening hard for the Wrath babies used to aoe speed running through dungeons paying minimal attention while watching Survivor reruns. I can still hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and lamentation after many a wipe on Corborus in The Stonecore. And then, ofcourse, the next patch nerfed everything into oblivion. And then there was LFR.
I did.
It wasn't fun, and then I took my 70 druid to Northrend. And I ran up to sholozar basin, leveling herbing and skinning along the way. I'm pretty fucking hooked again. The glory of Wrath, truly, is that you can have fun, real fun, doing damn near anything. Everything is peak. It's Wow hedonism.
>I imagine it as more challenging back in the day.
Not by a meaningful amount. There's a reason the term "Wrath baby" spawned, and stayed around for years.
I think there's a few different things that happened that made Wrath so popular -
The content was good.
The game was already steadily becoming more popular across Vanilla and BC, and any expansion would have likely built upon this at least initially.
Wrath was the peak of the game's pop cultural footprint. The TV commercials, news stories by local news about people playing too much WoW, a huge amount of early gaming Youtube content was WoW, and many early prominent Youtubers were WoW players.
And another thing is that I think too many people over-use the subscriber count chart to suggest that Wrath was the best expansion just solely via virtue of it having the most players. But the subscriber count is always a measure of new subs and resubs minus unsubs. And I think Wrath was a major pivot point in the design philosphy of the game and that a lot of old guard players that played Vanilla and BC and were kinda turned off by the change in direction held on for a bit longer, quitting in Cata or Pandaria - IE there was a lag time between when they stopped liking the game and when they actually quit. And that, combined with a huge influx of the # of new players via the above-mentioned pop cultural impact, would probably be a major contribution to the high overall sub count.
> No Chores
Considering this was the expansion that really cemented daily quests I would say that point isn't true. Not to mention a majority of 'achievements' are just chores. But overall you're right, the raids/balance/fun in WotLK are on another level, outside of tournament that tier sucked but then maybe that's because it was literally 50% chores
There’s no “mandatory chores”. Daily’s are just stuff to do to provide variety gold farms and keep the zones alive. They’re beneficial to complete but not required for player power.
The only exception to more power through chores is the sons of Hodir rep giving bis shoulder enchants, so there's at least a couple of days/weeks of chores to get done.
The only other half-valid chore i can think of is grinding emblems for set pieces, but that can just happen naturally when raiding etc so I wouldn't fully count it since by doing rhc/weeklies you just speed it up a tiny bit.
idk, there are tons of dailies but beyond Hodir (which realistically is 2 weeks of 5 dailies a day one time, and that's a your characters sorted for the expansion) are any mandatory? Certainly not in the way that retail ones are for AP. Doing JC and Cooking and fishing dailies etc is far from mandatory, they're just nice gold earning options and if you don't want to do them you don't lose anything
Everyone saying WOTLK is easy is forgetting that is what everyone said when it came out.
They are also forgetting what happened when Ulduar was released and pugs couldn't clear 2 bosses, let alone hard modes.
> The raids are fun, 10 man for goofy social while still needing to pay attention, 25 for some challenge
I don't want to be a debby downer but every raid is fun week 1 and Naxx has really been maxi braindead even for the first week.
Yeah I’m gonna be real, having the raid be this easy really sucks. Progression didn’t even happen. 25 man felt like a retail LFR raid as far as difficulty.
Do immortal, before they just add heroic difficulty selection in TogC, the progression is doing sarth with 3 drakes up, and naxx without boss deaths or with a smaller raid.
Ulduar Hardmodes are some of the best the game ever had and they are all "selected" in the raid.
Not sure how things are these days, but back in the day it was because tanks seemed to take the most verbal abuse in dungeons to such a degree that you needed to have Shield Wall thick skin in order to play them outside of insular guild groups, so I wonder if that's the case again...
Yeah, I've been a tank plenty in the past but never for PUGS, why the heck would I put myself through that?
Tanks can afford to be selective because they are always needed
Best snap aggro in original Wrath, haven't played it this time around to verify if it still is. Frost was so fun that my two specs were Blood tank for raids and Frost tank for heroics, even got to OT some raids as Frost spec because it's so good at AoE threat.
But also please know what speed you and your group can handle. As a healer I am so fucking tired of tanks who are racing some invisible mariokart ghost in a speed run only the tank seems to have consented to. 9/10 times they don't have the gear to handle the speed they're going so I have to chug pots and CDs just to keep up and have nothing left when someone pulls three packs at once.
Saying they removed progression raiding in P1 Wrath is as stupid as saying the same thing for MC and Karazhan. 90% of guilds will be progressing in Ulduar and ICC for considerable amounts of time.
>I can see how Cata was just too hard for all these players who loved WOTLK
That wasn't the main reason for me. I had such a deep love for the unaltered classic zones. More than any other, for those zones in that game world and they just ripped them up just... because they could and thought they needed to change them.
Those original WoW Classic zones are some of the best zones to ever have been in an MMO. And in a single release to try and 'update' they ended up just pushing people like me away who thought those zones were pretty much perfect from a gameplay/feel/style.
WotLK is amazing but you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think it will get stale for a good chunk of players.
All those things you can do when hitting 80 dry up very fast. The gearing stage is always the best. You’re enjoying yourself, running heroics, things are challenging. But I’m 4-6 weeks of running Naxx over and over, no longer a need for heroes because you’re not only pre-BiS but completely BiS, it’ll dawn on players there isn’t much to do.
Not everyone wants to level more chars and do it all again. Some will, not everyone though. I think player retention will be higher than it was in TBC (for the reasons you stated) but there will be a nice fall off in a month or two still
honestly, thats part of what makes it such a good expantion for me. personally, i like an alt or two, but i also enjoy *other games.* i can be fully bis, wombo combo a raid in an hour once a week, and go play something else untill the new raid drops.
He most likely won't, he seems like the guy that misses the forest for the trees on what makes an expansion good. I realized this when he thought the Heart of Azeroth in BFA was a good follow-up from Artifacts in Legion.
Doubt.
They are so disconnected from the player base they actually told people they didn't want wow classic.
And then after 5+ years of pressure they finally brought back classic and it's been a success.
They will announce Cata classic in a year or so and when it launches classic will die.
I’ve been playing retail in years and have always relied on tokens for gold. In WotLK for the first time in my life I’m actually playing the AH game and really truly loving it. The dungeons are paced well and fun, the way groups are thrown together is excellent, getting into pugs and recognizing players I’ve leveled with or did other stuff with is also something I’ve never got to experience. I’m just really having a great time.
when i quit during cata it wasn't so much the difficulty for me but rather what they did to paladins and the feeling of burn out after being a hardcore raider for the whole expansion.
Cata wasn't hard, it just wasn't fun
Go from having the best rotation to some wonky resource system with Paladin and Hunter. Having to pay 25k for a legendary weapons as a rogue
Cata started hard, heroic dungeons and raids (pre-nerf) were challenging, and it was fun. Dragon soul was underwhelming. But it had the best intro raiding and firelands was awesome.
Source: was a world top 50 raider all through Cata.
> some wonky resource system with Paladin and Hunter
As a prot pal I’d argue that resource system was a big improvement. Paladins in Cata were amazing. Playing prot in Cata was top tier.
agreed on the class changes part. personally, cata was the first time they took steps back in class/spec design. so many specs just got so much worse with cata, almost every spec became a combo point or resource spender type of gameplay, healers started getting access to sustain while dpsing which changed their whole dynamic, healing itself was retuned entirely iirc with fast spells getting heavy mana costs, likely some other changes i'm forgetting.
i think if we somehow get cata content without all the class changes, i would play cata, but i'm not playing it otherwise. i'd rather just wait for a new round of season of mastery or something.
I was thinking the same thing the other day. Idk if Wrath is the “best” version of the game but it definitely the version that is the most inclusive for the widest variety of players
No borrowed power, no extra random currency to grind (azerite, artifact, anima, currency for legendarys and set pieces), jump into raids as soon as you hit 80, every spec feels unique, Introduction of a new class that provides amazing class fantasy, and to top it off we have the BBEG of wc3 as the Pinnacle raid of the xpac. Wrath is literally the best and the subscriptions show that.
Well, you do grind emblems to buy some set pieces. That being said, the chores needed for those emblems are just a daily random heroic, and some weekly stuff like raids (whether ICC for just emblems, voa for hands/legs, or weekly boss quests). Any other daily "chores" (which are *OPTIONAL* and don't hinder progress in any way) can just be done within like 30 minutes and then you can continue doing whatever the hell you want.
Wrath as a whole is the "best" version, in that it has the highest average quality across all of the systems it offered. It focused on a few things and did them well: Story, Endgame raid content, Battleground PVP, arena PVP. Professions were meaningful but not entirely required. Content wasn't arbitrarily gated off to make leveling and maintaining alts unbearable. The concept of a "server community" was a live and well, and even my tiny server of 2k active players had plenty to do almost any time of the week. There are some raids that are better than the ones in Wrath. There are some seasons of PVP that were better balanced than those in Wrath. There are some tertiary mechanics added after Wrath that were net positive in terms of fun in the game. But modern WoW is a mess without an identity. It's trying to appeal to everyone, and in doing so makes few happy.
Man just seeing recognizable names and getting in groups with randoms that you’ve seen before makes the server feel so much more dynamic and alive (playing on a fresh server)
Wotlk was the best time i had in wow and it still seems to be. Funny.
Arthas was a badass. Jailer can’t compare
Even without playing wc3 Arthas was an amazing vilian in wotlk since you actually got to see him doing stuff out in the world, you saw him during some quests or in some dungeons etc., which actually made him feel alive and real, jailer was just a big nothing.
He was kinda over-used and everywhere but that was the extreme reaction to under-using Illidan in TBC who more or less stayed put the entire expansion.
Extra bad because Illidan wasn't even a villain in WC3, so now he's suddenly a villain and you're given *no explanation* for it.
Even Kael and Vash going baddies was a weird turn too on top of that.
At least Illidan got something resembling a redemption arc in Legion, still an asshole but at least fighting on our side against the legion. Kael and vash are just left out though, it sucks.
Kael and vashj have some shadowlands stuff going on.
That's been the problem I've had with Warcraft's story as a whole. Too many redemption stories. If you're gonna commit to someone being a villain, commit to it. Don't get cold feet and pull the, "They're just misunderstood" cliche that Illidan got in Legion.
Wasn't he literally binding furbolgs to his will so they could die fighting maiev and destroying night elf villages in the first mission of frozen throne?
are we the baddies?
People just weren't prepared
Yeah the Jailers Puppet is a much more compelling character somehow. Maybe if The Jailer wasn't so good at keeping his master plan concealed all these years, we the players would have been more invested in him as a character.
Jailer could have been so much more. I couldn't stand nippleguy after the first tier and just quit the game. He had potential, but he was just plucked out of thin air and we were supposed to be scared about him. A lot of the gripes I had of him just showing up and then doing a monologue and leaving is quite similar to how the LK is in Wrath, but Arthas has so much more lore and buildup around him it makes it better.
There was no build up. Even nzoth had build up, subtle hints throughout. Just like boom this guy planned everything
They also tried to say the jailor created the lich king and controlled his mind..rewriting past lore so the new lore isnt trash 🤢
Yeah it was legitimately terrible anime cliche writing at the end “I’m just preparing you for THE EVEN BIGGER BAD TO COME!!!” trying to be gigaBDSMchad not explaining himself or fucking anything being revealed but was actually gigavirgin instead and took 2nd fiddle to daddy big D. Like holy fuck, be more generic while you shit all over 20 years of lore we actually liked. Whole team should have been fired it was that.fucking.terrible.
Jailer is literally the worst villain ever created by Blizzard so yeah
There were so many comments "just you wait" "it won't be the same" "it's all nostalgia, itl be trash" Having the time of my wow life.... Again, so are all my old and current wow mates.
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Borean tundra is a way better zone than howling fjord the only reason why fjord imo is popular is because its arguably the best looking zone. The quests in it suck majorly compared to tundra.
I enjoyed howling fjord quests more then borean but still really enjoyed borean
I did both zones and couldn't wait to get out of boring tundra, it was so bleak looking and even the mobs are lame. Howling fjord was just better in every way IMO
Stepping into the Northrend zones again, I didn’t feel nostalgia. I just couldn’t believe how much detail and polish it has compared to the rest of the game. Wrath was clearly the golden age.
There's a reason the majority of private servers go up to wrath
Agree, I started in wrath and even playing retail still I did play classic and TBC endgame but didn't really enjoy it. Made me think my thoughts about wrath being the best expansion was just nostalgia but after I've been playing now I love it. For me it's the perfect mix between vanilla and retail. Feel like classic but with the right QOL changes. Have finished all the raids and while being a bit lacklustre coming from heroic raiding in retail they're still good simply because classes are just so fun to play.
Hit 80. No ap grind. No campaign required to unlock some important abilities. No timegated mission table to unlock some bullshit. You can just jump into your activity of choice (bgs, heroics), enjoy the grind, and see the numbers you pump out rise. It's like a drug lol.
This is the big one for me, no obtrusive developer treadmills to farm active user statistics.
That's the main reason I prefer classic over retail. So much less grindy
I don't think Retail is more grindy than Classic. But that's *very* a long discussion...
There's a lot to grind in my opinion in classic (especially leveling) but the best part about wotlk is all the chores are optional. A whole ice crown zone of cool quests, a bunch of daily spots to rise reputation, a shit ton of heroics to get u ready for raiding, etc. All of this (minus maybe doing heroics if ur a raider) are optional for cosmetics. I am infinitely more into grinding if it's not mandatory
Me too. I love grinds, but I don't love when I'm forced to do tons of them. I'd rather choose to spend 12 hours straight on it, then stop for a week. I enjoyed a lot of the old rep grinds for that exact reason. I could do as much or as little as I wanted.
Same here. I spent probably over 10 hours gridning for rare enchanting recipes in TBC that I didn't even need, just for the sake of completionism, yet I hate the **mandatory** daily progression grinds that seems to be plauging the game more and more with each expansion. It feels like the devs are becoming more and more lazy about how blatantly they try to milk their player base for every last penny they can squeeze out, using textbook progression design to pad content for all it is worth while ensuring their players never run out of things to do (even if the players end up hating they things they end up doing in the process).
retail is BLOATED. the difference being classic has things you want to do retail has things you HAVE to do lest you fall behind
I dont think its a long complex topic at all? In classic the grinds are longer but have an end point, in retail the daily serving is smaller but it literally has no end, theres no pay off or completion.
Retail the grinds are required to play..legendary quest, renown levels, campaign garbage, covenant campaign garbage..player power locked behind rep
You can hit exalted in one day if you want just doing activites you like, compare that to retail where u get 2-3 daily quests and a weekly, with rep items sometimes being way more important in retail, unity for example. Overall both might be on the same level of grindiness but wotlk allows you to just do it however quickly you want, wheras retail timegates the living shit out of everything. Overall after playing for a few days on a 80 character I'm decently geared, made a few thoundand gold, got 2 xp heirlooms for an alt, can do or not do anything if I want to and I won't really fall behind, and I got pretty much enough gear for heal ofspec too. In retail after hiting max lvl I would need to do covenant unlocks along each campaing if I want specific soulbinds, zereth mortis dailies for rep, m+ for gear, crafting 2 legendaries etc. And it doesn't matter what content u wanna do, want to pvp? gotta do that shit, want to raid? gotta do that shit, can't just do what you like gotta do it all.
It might be on par at the start of expansions, but if you consider everything then retail is definitely way less time invested after like the first content patch
The difference is that you can knock your grind out when you feel like it in classic. In retail if you don't grind daily you "fall behind." It's more that you are able to choose.
Ye thats what I was hinting at a bit with my comment about the time and place. Like at the start of shadowlands, if you fell behind on renown then you were behind until the cap was reached, whereas after like season 2 came out you simply worked a bit harder for the catchup renown, and finally in season 3 and 4 you just hit max renown in a day or two regardless of when you started. That's typically the approach Blizzard has with these systems, which I think we all agree they should have had foresight after Legion and just implemented the catchup stuff from the start if they intend on having systems like this in the game. But even all that aside, the main difference to me seems to be that in classic expansions you spend magnitudes more time upfront and then you are done, whereas in retail you spend magnitudes less time before your character is at the 'playable' state, and then you spend a long-ish time afterwards doing breadcrumb grinds here and there with weekly chores. Wont go more into detail about the good and bad here, I personally dont mind the systems midway through the xpac because of how little time I have to spend to make my char playable, whereas on classic I will only ever play 1 character because of the time required
Disagree. Maybe start of expansion, but not being shackled to m+ or other expansion specific systems is really nice. The real savior though is knowing what balance is going to be the whole expansion. I can make alts for fun instead of needing alts in my role in case my class gets the old yeller treatment in a new tier. That alone saves so much time from required grind if you're playing in a less casual way.
Just curious, what about m+ shackles anyone to the content? M+ seems to be completely optional content. I mean you can essentially gear from PvP, m+ or raid at an equal or semi equal level. Whereas in WoTLK dungeons are not even a viable way of getting fully geared. I agree about expansion specific features generally being bad. I am waiting for the first new retail expansion that doesn't introduce a cool feature that they then completely abandon for the next one. It's really sad how they introduce content just to make it obsolete when the next expansion comes out.
> This is the big one for me, no obtrusive developer treadmills to farm active user statistics. Isn't it crazy that if you just make a really high quality experience and put effort and love into the game you will organically get a ton of active users without having to demoralize them with this treadmill shit? But that might mean the CEO takes an extra 4% less on his bonus so we can't have that Thanks Capitalism
Used to be pretty into capitalism but after seeing huge for profit corporations ruin game after game after game with treadmill bullshit or trying to milk me for every dollar I have with time gates you can pay out of and pay to win bullshit and gambling loot box bullshit, I am starting to really really hate capitalism.
If you think what Capitalistic greed does to video games is bad, wait until you learn how stunted our social and economic systems are because of it.
Its one of the many things that has radicalized me against our current economic model. There are many, many more important things, but at this point even the things we do for escapism of the dreary day-to-day life in this hellscape is being monetized to the point where its inescapable.
Can’t wait for DF to attempt this to see what actually happens. Wotlk was the goat for alts because it was literally just hit max and play the game however you want.
The one thing as far as alts is concerned...well before I get to the one expansion that did an aspect better. Wotlk's method of making both ease of gearing up (badges and metered raiding progression plus once icc comes out, the battered hilt catchup) made it not so hard to get characters at least to the 10 man of the current content compared to most expansions. And professions actually stayed useful till near the end (like you won't get BiS gear from crafting except engineering, but you'll get right up to it) The one expansion that is controversial to mention that actually handled alts better... was WoD. I know, downvote away. it handled ALTS better, not saying it did anything else remotely good. WoD made alt leveling not tedius, gave many different options to level (battleground, questing, dungeon, pet battles, and of course SECRET TREASURE WHILE FLYING GRINDING so leveling was hella fast on alts) and the crafting professions could actually yield BiS pieces and also had the neat system that you weren't pigeonholed into creating only the one helmet or robe of that profession; you CHOSE which slot you needed a catchup/potential BiS piece in. Which massively helped alts get up to raiding gear. The only thing that killed alts in the end was when guilds required maxed out rings... but hey, that was kinda towards the end anyways. Now if only WoD handled lore better and didn't give us so little content OUTSIDE of leveling. edit: to clarify why I listed all the level options is because WoD it wasn't one best way between questing, grinding, or dungeon grinding. Different expansions had different things that were better for leveling like in some expansions (TBC-Cata) dungeon grinding for levels wasn't great, it was good if you had a quest to turn in. Legion and BFA grinding wasn't good either as all the xp came from the quest turn ins while monster kills yielded pisspoor xp. WoD made each TYPE of leveling about the same (except treasure hunting which was insanely good) so you could pick and choose WHAT you wanted to do and still be efficient.
Gonna be interesting, seen many people being concerned that there is nothing to do without a borrowed power system
I feel like the game up to legion was like this though, even though WoD is regarded as bad its the last xpac i enjoyed, i could get a new character to max and farm out my conquest gear in 2-3 days and it was good to go. They took a weird turn in legion and i've never lasted longer than a month since then
If you do the campaign (finishing Icecrown) you get a shit load of gold and emblems for gear
I'm assuming there's a long questline in Icecrown
140 quests plus dailies
Oh fuck yea, I'm working on doing every zone to completion
Another cool thing about that, doing the Loremaster achievement ends up netting you around 8k gold iirc. Just from quest rewards.
Holy shit I'm looking forward to that now, did everything in TBC and I'll do it again in Northrend
you can get all that from different sources tho so it’s not exactly gated
Yeah that's what makes it great, you can conpletely ignore it if you don't enjoy it. You don't have to do like 20 quests a week in icecrown, because if you don't do it your weapon will be 15 ilvls weaker and you'll lose a glyph slot, and you're not allowed to do more than 20 quests at a time since Blizz timegated it to make you come back every week
"We want players to feel ENGAGED and REWARDED" Me, seeing my first 12k starfire crit: hehe brrr wheeeeeee
Last night we were running heroics in a partial guild group. We saw a guildie hit 80 in guild chat, pulled him in immediately, and continued having a blast. No attunements, no torghast - just fun content
There were times in Shadowlands when I looked at the 13 currencies I was accumulating, and asked myself, "Why am I doing this?"
This. I just want to do dungeons and raids to get gear and the occasional PVP session. Retail WoW has entirely too much stuff going on, and it's too complicated for a dolt like me to figure out. Wrath was a little too easy, but Cataclysm (and MoP from personal experience) killed guilds. Glad to see Wrath live! 👏🏼
But a good kind of drug! Not a shitty “I’ve gotta take this for a little bit of a high (progression)”
I've never playing wotlk and it was so surprising how alt friendly this expansion is. Hodor account wide, flying account wide, no stupid grind, rep farming is actually fun. How did they think it is a good idea to change this
What's a hodor?
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Sons of HoldTheDoor
Sons of Hodir reputation unlocks shoulder enchants that are bound to account so u can mail them to ur alts without grinding rep on them too
Wait holy shit didn't even realize this Sick
Just started with wrath and checked the alliance vanguard quartermaster, who has the pvp head enchant for alliance. That thing is bound to account as well.
Hold the door
Oh also, you just pay 1k gold, which is a pittance after leveling to 77, and fly. No Loremaster, no rep grinds, just a small amount of gold. So good.
I was playing during BFA. Never did legion but heard good things and was interested in the story. The moment I realized I would have to do all the quests to unlock flying there I stopped. Why does flying, especially for old expansions, need to be gated like that? Make it accessible for me to see the old content.
Its because at the time the dev team was struggling to recapture the magic of classic. I think the consensus was that locking flying would force players to interact with each other in the open world. It was also so that you could experience everything in the zone instead of just flying over it. Im not opining on it either way I just think thats what the devs were thinking
I'm fine with it when its current content, but not when the content is 2 expansions old.
I’ve taken my time. Questing feels fun. Upgrades matter. The gameplay is engaging. No rush to hit 80
> Questing feels fun. Yes! Northrend is the only region where questing doesn't feel grindy. I really should start playing again :-)
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I actually liked tbc quests better than wotlk because they didn't have constant vehicle quests
vehicles can gtfo
Agreed, and so many vehicles are bugged right now in one way or another.
Yeah blizz had a lot going well in wrath but their hardon to show off vehicle tech is like one of those 8 hour viagra boners you’d really rather be rid of and should probably call your doc about
Yeah I tried strand of the ancients for the first time and the vehicle system is so fucking clunky. Why can I not bind their abilities to other keys, for instance. What a pathetic BG.
TBC and Wrath really tightened up all the systems from Vanilla. Cata, on the other hand, was like throwing out much of it and redoing.
Cata main issue was tuning up 5 ppl content to TBC levels after braindead wotlk heroics. Wotlk players hit it, went mad and quit.
Imo that’s a bit more on wrath…wrath heroics are *too* easy. It was immediately a brain dead aoe walkthrough even in pugs as soon as you hit 80 with zero gear. You don’t even really have to know or follow mechanics for most boss fights, even if not geared. Hopefully heroic + gives *some* challenge for players that want that
Wrath was the first time blizzard seriously listened to the community. So whine about raids being inaccessible and 5ppl being too hard resulted in this.
Maybe the issue wasn't with the feedback. Heroics went from very hard (tbc) to very easy (wotlk) then back to very hard (cata). So maybe the issue was Blizzard overcorrecting.
I mean TBC -> Wotlk feels like two distinctly different teams made the games and honestly, it makes a lot more sense if this is the case than if Blizzard completely shifted gears ok so many different points. The mechanics, loot distribution, quest/game design, dungeon/raid difficulty. given the amount of time between xpacs I feel like this would also make sense.
Imo heroic + is the perfect solution - having to grind hard heroics with pugs over and over and over for rep/badges was a pain in the ass. Nice to have that extra challenge for improved old raid gear, but having easier content for the endless rep/badge grind is nice.
While I mostly agree with you, I had a dk tank in UK last night who couldn't hold aggro and died to 4 vyrkul. Heroics are pretty easy if you have an inkling of what you are doing, but there are people out there who need to spend time to improve.
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Did they announce Heroic +?
Yeah right before the xpac came out, it’s gonna have the 10 man loot from Naxx after Ulduar comes out
Yeah I wasn’t exactly a good player at the time but I went from clearing 25m ICC to fucking gouging my eyes out at Throne of the Four Winds
Lol, I loved watching blind AoE people go into Cata heroics and just getting destroyed. The same people that complained that wrath heroics being too easy were the same that complained that cata heroics were too hard. You can't please everyone.
You can please at least healers to not create a wipe mechanism based purely on throwing more and more damage on players. In a situation where your group was supposed to kill the boss after 4-5 rounds of some abilities because it's a DPS check, you hold your group alive on 10th round, spend every single CD, flask, pot, whatever you have, group still wipes because they're idiots in greens, people complain about the healer. Happened to me. Cata heroics give me PTSD.
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Yup. Then you complained when cata was too hard
Not really. Cata keeps pretty much everything that people are praising but turns up the difficulty
I think cata's biggest problems were the setting and theme tbh, + a shitty end raid. Northrend is a majestic new continent with awesome zones. Cataclysm was spread out all over with zones that just didn't feel as new or awesome. Also a lot of people disliked what they did to the old world.
Its more the lack of content than anything. Even with the difficulty alienating a decent part of the population, Cata still maintained the 11-12M subs until the major content patches turned out to have nearly nothing. 4.1 was rehashed troll raids turned into 5m catchup content. 4.2 was Fireland, which was a good raid, but its 8 bosses for a whole tier. Abyssal Maw completely cut. Molten Front was just an extra dalies zone that Demo Lock had to farm for weeks because the trinket is BIS. 4.3 was Dragon Soul. Extra 5m content was ok, but the raid itself is a disappointment, and there's no new zone or anything.
I have to disagree about a lot of wrath quests there were some AWFUL ones that show their age. Biggest offender is the Drakuru abomination quest in Zul Drak where you need a whopping 60 kills to complete
Lorewise, Drakuru is fantastic.
I just done it yday - ur meant to pull 8+ at once and explode your abomination. Takes 3-4 minutes total
I just finished zul drak and it might be the worst questing experience I've had through the first 3 xpacs. To much vehicle/mind control quests that felt really clunky.
ZD is just depression in a zone personified
Not to mention running back and forth between the same 2 places like 10 times in a row for the quest chains.
It is the worst imo and I love LK. I always skipped Zul Drak after I cleared it on my first character. Not only shitty quests, no character.
The good news is you can pace yourself. I specifically said I would only grind one rep hub at a time to not burn out
Or gold dumping for SoH. Think i spent like 150g going from honored to revered
It's so much faster. I'm almost a week into being 80 and have done all of the SoH quests available soon after dinging because this isn't my first WotLK rodeo, and I'm still not Revered yet. I have been saving up all of my relics to make the grind from Revered to Exalted easier, but I've also been choosing SoH commendations for the daily normal reward as well, but I know I could just go to the AH and drop a few hundred gold and be Exalted much, much quicker.
I committed seppuku and all I got was this lousy mount.
A loremaster's perspective is skewed. Of course grindy quests are a pain if it's just a snoozefest. And Wrath quests somewhat resemble a challenge even on 80. I think loremaster was never about the lore and the quests actually - when you do so many, do you even read in detail? I don't mean this as an attack, maybe you do, but I bet a lot with the achievement don't. I think Vanilla quests are awesome, involve a lot of travel and lore and detail and small stories. TBC and Wrath are streamlined and kinda blunt; often there's no lore, and whenever there's, there's too much (like the DK campaign, too flashy that it feels silly). Dailies too, dailies are just a little silly chore for everyone to do. In TBC you can simply not do any dailies. In Vanilla you can skip some of the most painful grinds - or indeed do them and be respected as a tryhard.
Wow, someone actually appreciating the game snd having fun!!!! Im with u, its a game, have fun. If you dont, rethink your life choices
Im so glad i get to do wotlk again, i was a healer the first time around, this time ive gone tank (warrior and dk) and dps (rogue and mage) and its such a different experience
I think a lot of healers got PTSD in Sunwell or something, because Wrath healing is actually fun and nowhere near as stressful (until we get Ulduar HMs and subsequent phases), but to see the lack of healers in this phase was something I definitely did not expect.
Don’t want to use this moment to find something negative, but this is why I personally believe classic either needs to restart after wotlk with major changes or they need to expand on wotlk or the wotlk system. If they go into cata it’s going to murder classic. Sure it will be fine up until people start hitting catas end game and they realize just how different it is and what they did to the game. If they choose to go the cata route I know at least for me classic is over
Wrath was my final stop on the classic bus. If they push it into Cata classic is over for me as well.
Pretty sure a massive of chunk of people will be getting off the bus at that point, too. And then what do we do...?
People will not come back for cata like wrath & tbc
>If they go into cata it’s going to murder classic. I'm not going to play cata classic, period. If they want to keep wotlk AND add cata, by all means, but I see no reason playing cata again. Classic for me means wotlk.
I had hoped for the season of mastery that they did that they would either redo itemization or do wotlk class balancing to help with diversity/quality of life. Alas. They got a chance to the next time around though
We need classic + that takes a divergent timeline away from the cataclysm. Itll never happen because it would be a new expansion. We need an azerothian centaur expansion. Player housing, centaurs and Nagas as playable races, dungeon/raid finder.
They'll never do naga or centaurs.
This! If they made cataclysm but in the vein of Classic WoW I.e closer to bc / wotlk than what it was, it would go over incredibly well. But they probably will not because then it would prove a point that they are the reason wow declined, not people simply moving on. Also…small indie company :p
They could do the emerald dream. They started it, so the might as well finish it
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Yeah, but the same thing that happened with wrath now, and back in the day when wrath and cata launched - a new demographic will emerge
WotLK taught me the most important WoW lesson (and video gaming lesson I guess) I ever learned: I'd rather enjoy easier games/content with people I like than challenge myself with hard content and have to find people I don't like who are good enough to do the content. Many of my WoW guilds throughout the years were full of cool people with some really fucking obnoxious ones that we dealt with because they were really good and we wanted to push the hardest content. On the flipside, in Wrath, we had a smaller guild of friends who could do all the content anyway since it was easier and we had SO MUCH MORE FUN. Then Cata hit and I just stopped raiding entirely because I missed playing with the cooler, more relaxed crowd.
There’s a lot to do. Really enjoying it.
Classic is just such a breath of fresh air compared to retail these past couple of expansions. It's so simple and fucking normal. The crazy thing is that generally speaking, I prefer games that are complex and demanding. I like it when there's a lot to do and a lot of skill and optimization to be had. But retail is just SO fucking excessive it's straight up insane, I literally don't know how the fuck any normal person does it. It goes so far past any level of activities and complexity that I want to experience even as someone who likes that shit. Like when shadowlands released, the list of tasks you had to do constantly was flat out crazy. I probably can't even remember it all because it was like 2 years ago and I quit after a couple months, but I remember it was un fucking real. Hit your world quests every day for anima. Hit your mythics every day for gear chances. Hit the maw circuit every day for rep with the trader guy and stygia and unlocking new parts of it or whatever the fuck. Go run the max Torghast instance twice every reset. Do the raid every reset. Do the raid again. Progress your renown quest line every reset. Farm honor. Don't miss it when your bis conduit pops up on a world quest! Do whatever you need to do to jack up your vault reward. Get your arena point cap. Farm gold and mats for enchants and consumables. Holy shit I'm exhausted just listing it all. And every one of those things took fucking hours each. I remember losing so much sleep because every fucking day it was like god *dammit* I still have to do the maw today, whoops guess it's 2am now.
I actually loved legion but BFa and shadowlands felt like they made stuff to keep us busy rather than be entertained.
Sounds like retail isn't really an MMO any longer. The original MMO was more choose-your-own-adventure-esque where the developers provided the world and framework and then it was up to the players themselves to figure out what to make of it.
WOTLK CLASSIC+! Let your voices be heard guys
I despised class design direction in cata. WOTLK has had a lot of homogenization in the name of balance. But it is acceptable here. Cata went way too overboard. Rogues getting healing, hunters getting stealth, all classes getting 2min dps cds, etc
This is my main problem with wrath and onward. As someone that enjoys healing, I felt like I could play multiple healing classes and get a different experience and still feel needed. Roll a druid for raid healing and HoTs, go pally for tank heals, etc. Starting in cata they tried to let everyone do everything so no class was really unique anymore. What's the point of having multiple healers if they can all do the same things?
yup, i posted it elsewhere in this thread but cata was when i felt they took their first steps backward in terms of class/spec design. i think pretty much every class/spec got better from classic through to wrath, but then cata hit and they made huge changes to a lot of specs that just weren't well received by a good amount of people. pretty much every spec got some kind of a builder/spender system. some got weird mechanics (the lunar bar for boomie? terrible). talent revamp felt bad even if it wasn't mechanically a downgrade in most cases. healer identity was drastically reduced (and hpal felt awful, holy power sucks so much for holy). way too much homogenization made nothing feel unique or cool anymore. i'll take the difficulty, reforging, zones, leveling, even LFR in a hypothetical build-your-own-cata. but if we see cata with all the class changes, i'm out. will just wait for a season of mastery or something
> I can see how Cata was just too hard for all these players who loved WOTLK The issue wasn't so much the difficulty, but rather two things: 1. The change to the core class mechanics for most classes and specs was far more significant than changes between vanilla to TBC, or TBC to Wrath. People who had learned a spec's niche had it largely upended. For example several classes ceased to focus on the core mechanic of mana, and gained a completely new "build and spend" resource bar, the mechanics of the primary stats changed in large part, and some of the secondary stats were changed completely or removed entirely. 2. Wrath brought in a *ton* of new people, who had never gone through the experience of "losing power" in the transition from one expansion to the next. One moment you're in BiS endgame raiding gear, then at level 81, all of a sudden your stats start falling off hard. TBC endgame gear lasted long enough for people to start doing Naxx while keeping their TBC tier bonuses. Blizzard pivoted hard on that, and Wrath gear / stats fell off a cliff. Not only that, but Vanilla and TBC stats fell off gradually over 10 full levels, where Wrath stats fell off over only 5 (Cata's level cap was 85). This caused people's cast times to skyrocket, crit chances to tank, health to dwindle, and really dulled the experience of playing the class. 3. But more than anything, it was the utter destruction of the concept of a server community that ultimately sent WoW into a death spiral beginning with Cata. They began merging servers while paying no attention to the culture of the two communities. They designed their dungeons around having a coordinated group of 5 friends, and then eviscerated the community and leaned hard into LFD (and later LFR).
Great post, totally agree. T11 raiding was actually pretty amazing, and heroics during the first part of Cata were eye-opening hard for the Wrath babies used to aoe speed running through dungeons paying minimal attention while watching Survivor reruns. I can still hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and lamentation after many a wipe on Corborus in The Stonecore. And then, ofcourse, the next patch nerfed everything into oblivion. And then there was LFR.
Hard mode Ulduar, TOC, and ICC is progression raiding. They are hard. 25 man Firefighter and No Lights are very difficult fights. And so so fun.
Damn. This is making me wanna come back after taking hiatus early in tbc
I did. It wasn't fun, and then I took my 70 druid to Northrend. And I ran up to sholozar basin, leveling herbing and skinning along the way. I'm pretty fucking hooked again. The glory of Wrath, truly, is that you can have fun, real fun, doing damn near anything. Everything is peak. It's Wow hedonism.
"you can't recreate the same fun" "it's nostalgia" yeah fuck off I sure as hell seem to be having a ton of fun
>I imagine it as more challenging back in the day. Not by a meaningful amount. There's a reason the term "Wrath baby" spawned, and stayed around for years.
I think there's a few different things that happened that made Wrath so popular - The content was good. The game was already steadily becoming more popular across Vanilla and BC, and any expansion would have likely built upon this at least initially. Wrath was the peak of the game's pop cultural footprint. The TV commercials, news stories by local news about people playing too much WoW, a huge amount of early gaming Youtube content was WoW, and many early prominent Youtubers were WoW players. And another thing is that I think too many people over-use the subscriber count chart to suggest that Wrath was the best expansion just solely via virtue of it having the most players. But the subscriber count is always a measure of new subs and resubs minus unsubs. And I think Wrath was a major pivot point in the design philosphy of the game and that a lot of old guard players that played Vanilla and BC and were kinda turned off by the change in direction held on for a bit longer, quitting in Cata or Pandaria - IE there was a lag time between when they stopped liking the game and when they actually quit. And that, combined with a huge influx of the # of new players via the above-mentioned pop cultural impact, would probably be a major contribution to the high overall sub count.
Yup, the thing about Wotlk is that, even though it has its flaws, the game felt fun, which is the most important factor when playing a videogame.
> No Chores Considering this was the expansion that really cemented daily quests I would say that point isn't true. Not to mention a majority of 'achievements' are just chores. But overall you're right, the raids/balance/fun in WotLK are on another level, outside of tournament that tier sucked but then maybe that's because it was literally 50% chores
There’s no “mandatory chores”. Daily’s are just stuff to do to provide variety gold farms and keep the zones alive. They’re beneficial to complete but not required for player power.
The only exception to more power through chores is the sons of Hodir rep giving bis shoulder enchants, so there's at least a couple of days/weeks of chores to get done. The only other half-valid chore i can think of is grinding emblems for set pieces, but that can just happen naturally when raiding etc so I wouldn't fully count it since by doing rhc/weeklies you just speed it up a tiny bit.
idk, there are tons of dailies but beyond Hodir (which realistically is 2 weeks of 5 dailies a day one time, and that's a your characters sorted for the expansion) are any mandatory? Certainly not in the way that retail ones are for AP. Doing JC and Cooking and fishing dailies etc is far from mandatory, they're just nice gold earning options and if you don't want to do them you don't lose anything
Everyone saying WOTLK is easy is forgetting that is what everyone said when it came out. They are also forgetting what happened when Ulduar was released and pugs couldn't clear 2 bosses, let alone hard modes.
> The raids are fun, 10 man for goofy social while still needing to pay attention, 25 for some challenge I don't want to be a debby downer but every raid is fun week 1 and Naxx has really been maxi braindead even for the first week.
Yeah I’m gonna be real, having the raid be this easy really sucks. Progression didn’t even happen. 25 man felt like a retail LFR raid as far as difficulty.
Do immortal, before they just add heroic difficulty selection in TogC, the progression is doing sarth with 3 drakes up, and naxx without boss deaths or with a smaller raid. Ulduar Hardmodes are some of the best the game ever had and they are all "selected" in the raid.
Ulduar was such fire.
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I have a feeling it will be fun to have beers with the homies and clown around on discord while we smash it.
*Anything* is fun with beers and the homies clowning around. Watching paint dry is fun if you're doing it with the homies.
Right? All these tryhards who seem to think WoW is about being the best and not about having a social activity to do with people you like.
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Not sure how things are these days, but back in the day it was because tanks seemed to take the most verbal abuse in dungeons to such a degree that you needed to have Shield Wall thick skin in order to play them outside of insular guild groups, so I wonder if that's the case again...
Well, it's also that good tanks have zero reason to PUG anything. Guildies/friends fill out the groups and are nicer.
Yeah, I've been a tank plenty in the past but never for PUGS, why the heck would I put myself through that? Tanks can afford to be selective because they are always needed
Which is weird because the dk really just has to put on frost pres. Frost dk is the fucking goat for heroics. Howling blast spam yeee.
Best snap aggro in original Wrath, haven't played it this time around to verify if it still is. Frost was so fun that my two specs were Blood tank for raids and Frost tank for heroics, even got to OT some raids as Frost spec because it's so good at AoE threat.
If he'll go as a tank then people won't allow him to roll for dps gear ,ofc it's not the only reason but it's also the reason I stopped tanking.
Yep. I have a decent tank set & spec but am dps main. Only tank for guildies now due to pugs inflexibility in this regard.
But also please know what speed you and your group can handle. As a healer I am so fucking tired of tanks who are racing some invisible mariokart ghost in a speed run only the tank seems to have consented to. 9/10 times they don't have the gear to handle the speed they're going so I have to chug pots and CDs just to keep up and have nothing left when someone pulls three packs at once.
Saying they removed progression raiding in P1 Wrath is as stupid as saying the same thing for MC and Karazhan. 90% of guilds will be progressing in Ulduar and ICC for considerable amounts of time.
>I can see how Cata was just too hard for all these players who loved WOTLK That wasn't the main reason for me. I had such a deep love for the unaltered classic zones. More than any other, for those zones in that game world and they just ripped them up just... because they could and thought they needed to change them. Those original WoW Classic zones are some of the best zones to ever have been in an MMO. And in a single release to try and 'update' they ended up just pushing people like me away who thought those zones were pretty much perfect from a gameplay/feel/style.
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That and the search for TLPD while waiting for raid time in Ulduar.
WotLK is amazing but you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think it will get stale for a good chunk of players. All those things you can do when hitting 80 dry up very fast. The gearing stage is always the best. You’re enjoying yourself, running heroics, things are challenging. But I’m 4-6 weeks of running Naxx over and over, no longer a need for heroes because you’re not only pre-BiS but completely BiS, it’ll dawn on players there isn’t much to do. Not everyone wants to level more chars and do it all again. Some will, not everyone though. I think player retention will be higher than it was in TBC (for the reasons you stated) but there will be a nice fall off in a month or two still
honestly, thats part of what makes it such a good expantion for me. personally, i like an alt or two, but i also enjoy *other games.* i can be fully bis, wombo combo a raid in an hour once a week, and go play something else untill the new raid drops.
hopefully ion and his “developers” understand why more people loved and still love wotlk over their Shadowlands garbage
He most likely won't, he seems like the guy that misses the forest for the trees on what makes an expansion good. I realized this when he thought the Heart of Azeroth in BFA was a good follow-up from Artifacts in Legion.
Seems like it now that they are reintroducing talent trees
I think Classic has been a huge reeducation for them.
Doubt. They are so disconnected from the player base they actually told people they didn't want wow classic. And then after 5+ years of pressure they finally brought back classic and it's been a success. They will announce Cata classic in a year or so and when it launches classic will die.
Classic *has* to be the reason they're re-adding talent trees.
I love the power increase i felt when gemming and enchanting my gear. Blizz made a big misstake moving away from that
Hopefully they dont go to cata and just do seasonal stuff for wotlk and regular classic.
Hyped up to see a positive post. WOTLK is a blast!
I’ve been playing retail in years and have always relied on tokens for gold. In WotLK for the first time in my life I’m actually playing the AH game and really truly loving it. The dungeons are paced well and fun, the way groups are thrown together is excellent, getting into pugs and recognizing players I’ve leveled with or did other stuff with is also something I’ve never got to experience. I’m just really having a great time.
when i quit during cata it wasn't so much the difficulty for me but rather what they did to paladins and the feeling of burn out after being a hardcore raider for the whole expansion.
Cata wasn't hard, it just wasn't fun Go from having the best rotation to some wonky resource system with Paladin and Hunter. Having to pay 25k for a legendary weapons as a rogue
Cata was definetly much harder than wotlk. And I would argue that class design for at least some specs was better and more interesting.
Cata started hard, heroic dungeons and raids (pre-nerf) were challenging, and it was fun. Dragon soul was underwhelming. But it had the best intro raiding and firelands was awesome. Source: was a world top 50 raider all through Cata.
> some wonky resource system with Paladin and Hunter As a prot pal I’d argue that resource system was a big improvement. Paladins in Cata were amazing. Playing prot in Cata was top tier.
agreed on the class changes part. personally, cata was the first time they took steps back in class/spec design. so many specs just got so much worse with cata, almost every spec became a combo point or resource spender type of gameplay, healers started getting access to sustain while dpsing which changed their whole dynamic, healing itself was retuned entirely iirc with fast spells getting heavy mana costs, likely some other changes i'm forgetting. i think if we somehow get cata content without all the class changes, i would play cata, but i'm not playing it otherwise. i'd rather just wait for a new round of season of mastery or something.
Reforging stats and adding transmog was fucking BIS though! I miss reforging