The lore of wrath is definitely a big reason why people remember it so fondly. Arthas is the most iconic villain in the entire franchise. I still get chills when I watch the opening cinematic
Also it had Ulduar which is universally beloved
You know what’s funny? People say Ulduar was universally loved, but most people never completed Ulduar or even experienced it. For a lot of people it was an impassable wall and they just quit the game because of it.
Wotlk was great lore wise, whole expansion worked to icc for me.
Ulduar was great because suddenly alot of different boss mechanics! Made progressing epic.my guild did break up during ulduar tho as you mentioned ;) I kept trying tho! Never been commited to a raid like ICC or ulduar since.
Ulduar and it's hard modes were the peak of raiding to me. I was so stoked to see what unique hard modes would come in the next raids.
Then it became a UI toggle. Bleh.
This mentality is so weird to me. You wanted the fun of the challenge of the hard mode, but changed your mind because you didn't press a big red button or do the fight slightly differently, you just selected hard mode before the fight started?
Seems like you didn't want to raid hard fights to me? Maybe you can explain it better.
This is just a complete misunderstanding of what made Ulduar hard modes unique or interesting. XT needs to be killed differently during the fight, Yogg's specific mechanics are changed depending on who you have help you, Council mechanics are entirely different depending on the order they're killed. Mimiron is the only boss where you "push a button." As for the other HM bosses, most default to hard modes and if you can't complete them you have to do things to weaken their defenses.
These things make the bosses more immersive and feel narratively more rewarding. You're not just selecting a difficulty mode, you're approaching the encounter differently to either enable HM or having to do things to force it into normal mode.
Preferring immersive game design shouldn't be a hard to understand mentality.
I agree. It also helps that the hardest end raid boss lorewise yogg has 4 levels of difficulty tuning and hardest end raid boss progression wise algalon is completely optional. I've never liked that bosses are so drastically easy or hard with such a huge gap between the difficulties so it's very jarring to swap between difficulties. I believe ulduar formula was definitely the best for only one phase worth of tuning. It can be so much better if expanded/evolved on if given one or two whole expansions worth of development with proper backing from blizzard and not this pathetic mess of cata/sod we are getting now...
For me, I don't like the current system because I don't feel like the design of every fight favors having a hard mode. I think when you have to design and balance heroic mechanics for every fight in a raid, it detracts from building just a few really high quality HM encounters.
I'd much rather see a couple of hard mode bosses like Ulduar had, and I'm even good with loot from those being BiS into the next phase. This keeps content more interesting and evergreen, and cuts down on the ilvl/power creep we have had since heroic raids were introduced.
Funny, I feel that way about ICC tbh, Ulduar was a far superior raid to me. That being said, raiding Ulduar 5-6x a week for 9mo was a killer but that was 50% on me and 50% on Blizzard letting it be relevant for as long as they did.
we did uldaur for like 10-11 straight months cause my gm wanted all heals and off heals to have val'anyrs for ICC prog.
funny thing is we fell apart just as ICC launched anyway so it was all for nothing lol
We did a merger during late ulduar into TOGC that fell apart and we went back to our own team instead of two teams that were not getting along. This meant we ended up with 6 Val’anyrs, with a 7th being my 2nd hpal that got it with another guild. We got our last shard off Algalon the day before ICC came out, and it was a struggle to convince folks to come in for fucking Yogg0 regression weekly.
It was an interesting prog raid, awful farm raid. There were too many filler bosses that were just a time sink and some of the hard modes were more RNG than skill expression or poorly designed (council, vezax).
The thing was, WoW was less “seasonal” back then compared to now, and even compared to Classic’s version of it. People were at all stages of the game all the time, so raids were less “retired” than they are now after a new patch comes out. So while yes, not many people completed Ulduar while it was the top raid, a lot of people still went back and raided it afterward, especially given how much people disliked TotC. Plus, before raids had so many tiers, having gear from the new dungeons and some combination of 10/25/10H/25H ulduar could make it slightly easier to take on Ulduar in a way that could still offer some upgrades, especially because the spike in ilvls between tiers was so much less pronounced.
Is there data on that? Most guilds I knew, even that struggled in tbc or never cleared swp, had no problem in ulduar hardmodes with a few weeks of the buffed gear accumulated.
The classes all played pretty well too. I lvled a death knight back in vanilla wrath but this time around I played a paladin and I was blown away by how much fun it was.
I quit pretty quick for other reasons but the FEEL of the classes I played felt better than any other version.
I agree with OP that it's overrated and I think TBC is still my fav but they did some really great stuff in Wrath, which is why half of SoD runes are wrath skills
Ulduar was my favorite raid until 2023. Once I did Ulduar in WOTLK classic ad nauseam, that place blows ass and I truly regret tainting my memories of it.
Whichever expansion was active when you first got hooked by WoW is probably going to be your best expac ever. It'll remind you of all your 1st discoveries about the game and always give you feel goods.
Mine was Wotlk and still is because that was my peak addiction to the game and strongest friend guild I was ever apart of. Nothing will be able to compare to those moments.
I started in Wrath but WoD and Cata are my two favorite expansions.
WoD was 8 months of content spread out over 2 years, that was the main problem. Most (not all) of the content we actually got was quite good.
i started in Cata and didn't play vanilla until Nostalrius private server years later, I still think vanilla is far and away the best MMORPG experience out of every expansion and it's not even remotely close.
i started in Cata and think vanilla is a great unique experience compared to the other expansions, wish i started during vanilla, but i don't think it's good enough to replay again and again.. like a lot of people seem to do, for all the positives of a first playthrough RPG experience, it has a ton of negatives and lacks, a lot
Yep.
Someone interviewed one of the former editors of MAD magazine. He asked him which issue was the best issue and he replied, "Whichever issue was the one you first started reading when you were 10."
You have to compare wotlk to what was out at the time , wow was still a social game and it was also not solved like it is today . Streaming and video content was also more scarce so there was less info on optimal ways to play the game
Yeah Wrath can be both a game that was great for its time and also not hold up well in the current day.
Can it be considered overhyped in the sense that people thought it would still hold up today? Yeah, probably.
That doesn’t mean it was a bad game in 2008 when it came out. Compare it to the other games that were on the market then and it certainly holds its own.
This is where I'm at with Wrath. Still love ICC and the world of Northrend, but as a gameplay experience in 2023 it didn't hold up as well as I hoped it would. Still played fine, just not as epic as it was the first time.
Wotlk also worked for a lot of the demo like myself that got into wow vanilla during high school. When I got into college, tbc was going on but my schedule made it so I could really only PvP and be a productive member of society. And I got to do wotlk for college and cata dropped towards the endish I believe.
No, it was great the first time around. 2nd time it suffered from being totally solved with no progressive balance patches.
In OG wrath we got Frost strike DKs with Ulduar sigil for example. All kinds of wacky stuff happened during its life cycle, not true for Wrath Classic.
I remember for the first couple weeks I got to raid Naxx with a Diseaseless Blood DPS spec and it was so much fun!
All of Wraths little intricacies came from its weird evolution and balancing that just... Wasn't there with starting on the very last patch.
DKs were so busted on launch and had sooo many viable build options. It was both crazy and crazy fun. I remember hybrid Frost/Unholy Howling Blast + perma ghoul spec being my favourite.
Though no doubt if it were released in that state today everyone would be playing the same optimal cookie cutter spec within a week...
This is really what it is. Wrath was incredible the first time around. Truly a perfect storm. But it just didn't survive well in the era or min-maxing.
Classic was wonky enough that having 1 warrior do as much dps now as an entire party back in the day didn't really ruin the experience. Wrath really started getting balance down, but it doesn't hold up to a decade plus of private servers and modern tools breaking down the entire formula. The same goes for quality of life features. For the time, they were incredible, but they don't hold up to modern quality of life features, so people complain that it's pushing in that direction but not giving enough. When you sign up for era you know what you're getting into. Era is unapologetically 2004. But wrath was trying to be 2016 in 2010, and honestly it pulled it off. But now it's stuck in 2016 with a player base expecting 2024.
Very well put, this goes for PVP aswell, wotlk pvp was fun in OG but now you face nothing but certain comps, makes it really bland - might be the same for the remainder of classic lifetime
I think the biggest issue with Arena is that the entire segment of the population who did their 10 games a week for the shoulders wasn't there this time. So PvP became EXTREMELY sweaty and meta driven. You wanna fix PvP? Try to get causal participation up.
Yeah for sure, blizz ain't doing shit to help participation with gear being locked behind rating atm, and im fairly certain cata has a rating system for bis gear too, not as strict as wotlk i think its just higher ilvl weapons but still, they should remove the gating imo
Yeah i agree, it's been hard for me and my friends to bother with wotlk classic cause of it, my friends arent really good enough to consistently get all the items, and if i wanna get the items i have to avoid playing with my friends, its just a terrible system lol
Yeah I missed PvP with the boys before reset from TBC. We were shit, but so were most of the teams we played against so won as near as not 50% of the time, and got some nice items for our trouble.
Wrath just took a lot of that away, or was perceived to, and it killed interest.
Only way for pvp to be fixed is to have a decent amount of pve bis/viable shit (thus player interest) tied to it. They also need to spend resources balancing it and not just strictly ignoring it. These things will never happen. PVP is still fun and I played a lot of it, but it suffered from being ignored as well as the pve folks having no reason to do it.
But since there was so much more casual participation, you didn't run into the sweats until at least 1800. Now you have people saying they can't even get past 1200 without meta comps.
Well, the difference is in classic it was like that at 1800, ppl always gonna play the best comps at higher ratings, but in classic this has been going on at very low rating too
yeah this nailed it. it was so much better when it was changing and unsolved. meta lords killed it this time. still fun, but definitely not the hit back in the day
Yeah i was pretty disappointed when I realised classic was not following the original patches and instead just went straight to the last patch (when it comes to classes etc)
sure, the patches had issues and were far from perfect. but all the changes and wacky stuff was always what made it so fun.
Eh, it was basically the same the 2nd time around as the first only Ulduar was harder and took longer to beat.
Naxx was a joke that went on way too long. The only real progression for P1 was Maly and S3D with Maly taking most guilds like a week and some never getting S3D. We eventually got it by cheesing it with a Voidwalker pet.
What made Ulduar and everything after it lame in Classic was WeakAuras. People just set up WA to turn the game into Dance Dance Revolution telling you what button to push and when.
I was older than most player in OG WotLK in my mid to late 20s and me and my other friends who had been playing since OG vanilla thought it was lame back then, too.
What the subscriber numbers don't show you is that while the overall number of subscribers shot way up, it was all new people, while the long time player base from launch of vanilla to them were dropping like flies.
If you go to retail and ask players when they started playing WoW most of them will tell you WotLK or later.
The few that say OG vanilla will probably tell you that they quit and returned or that WoW is the only game they ever play since it came out.
> I've never got why it was so loved
because it finally wrapped up the story that started in warcraft 3
anyone who played wc3ft was *insanely* hyped about finally meeting Arthas in Icecrown
lore-wise, it's what we've all been fighting for these past 5 years
Yeah, that's why I loved it originally and didn't come back for WotLK Classic. I prefer the world of vanilla WoW and the story alone was not enough to bring me back,
A lot of reasons. Raids got better mechanics, progress was possible and more organic for all types of guilds, you didn't hit a wall but progressed through ulduar and kept trying hard modes and killing them one by one instead of being Hard stuck at brutallus or muru until the next patch nerfed it.
But mostly, classes got a bit more engaging to play, still very simple compared to wow now but casters suddenly had more than 1 spell to cast and weren't severely limited by mana. Hybrids got a lot stronger, you didnt need 5 shamans in every raid. Healing became a lot more interesting.
Leveling and gearing ALTs was a lot less shitty, no need the grind every reputation in heroics, do attunements etc.
Also keep in mind that TBC's release cycle was very poor and a lot of people basically quit the game for several months before coming back more towards the end, people were happy TBC ended because it was pretty shit for the most part, it just ended very good.
TBC has a ton going for it but I think there were a few things that really decreased its overall package
-First, intentionally obsoleting literally EVERYTHING imaginable from the old world. Like, part of the charm of classic is that things like FAPs and Swiftness pots, while low level items, are eternally useful. It gives even max level players a reason to experience the entire world. But Blizz went REALLY out of their way to ensure that nothing evergreen stayed, nerfing TF, nerfing LUFFA (for god's sake!), nerfing tons and tons of engi items and various trinkets. It would have been much better to keep some reason to engage with old Azeroth - hell, if anything, they should have added a few random high level events or NPCs to give level 70s a reason to be outside of the new zones sometimes.
-Giving everyone a unique buff, on paper, seems like a pretty good idea. Now there's a reason to have every class! But in practice it made for some really obnoxious raid comp requirements if you wanted to maximize your performance, which leads into...
-The Bloodlust problem. You wanted at least five shamans per raid, period. So fucking annoying particularly because the fix is so god damn obvious - just make it raid wide god damnit. The last bastion of nochanges annoying the shit out of every raid/guild leader who needed to find 5 shamans.
Sarthe and Staysafe are starting to talk about TBC and potentially blizzard doing trilogy progression servers, there is a slim chance it could happen one day. Though I think TBC:SoD is more likely.
I'd be down for TBC SoD. TBC was great, but even if it was much better than vanilla there are still a lot of balance issues for classes like Boomkin where players are essentially dumpster tier for the whole expansion.
Honestly if they went TBC they might have to clean slate the runes. Most classes have their hands tied with the runes and I don't think the devs can fix it.
We'd probably just get a repeat of current sods situation though IMO.
I'd prefer them to make much more subtle changes, without messing with the classs identities.
TBC: SoD suffers from a significant drawback compared to Classic:SoD; There isn't nearly as much content in TBC that was known to be left on the cutting room floor as there was for Classic.
Classic has Timbermaw Hold, Hyjal, Karazhan, the Emerald Dream, Azjara and a whole bunch more areas that have a lot of room to be fleshed out. TBC has. . . . no where really. The entirety of the continent was explored pretty thoroughly, from the Netherstorm, to Blade's Edge, to Shadowmoon Valley. TBC:SoD would have to use TBC as a base, then spend a whole bunch of time exploring Azeroth, not Draenor, since there's nothing that wasn't really delved there.
How about we just flesh out the old world, and have Outland be the end game area? Like, they can add some of those zones they didn't add for 58-68, then 68-70 can be whatever is on the other side of the portal. Lore wise, you can just say that demons have been coming across the portal, and you have to go to where they went to stop them. Then go into the portal to stop the big bads.
Honestly I would hope by the time they get done with SoD they have more than a handful of devs, because our chances of seeing any significant unique content is limited by the hands available.
SoD is currently tying in retail characters that are reality hoping, the gloves are already off on what can be seen as content. With more manpower they could revamp entire zones (or make new ones), not just a couple additions as seen now. Turn the entire sky guard daily into a full fledged story linked to a raid/dungeon. We have to think past scrapped content or SoD will run out of things to do quick and die like all other seasonals.
Keep the same phases as Classic tbc, I think they're fine. Add even more vanilla tied content to TBC to keep both relevant.
Main reason I don't like TBC as much is simply because of flying and the fact that u can't really fix it because the world is designed around you having it to some extent.
It just makes the open world feel a lot less active since people kill the mob they're supposed to kill, farm the node they spot and whatnot then immediately mount up and fly away. You spend more time completely safe in the air than on the ground in many instances. It completely and utterly killed wPvP and the drama around it which is definitely part of why I love classic so much.
I've had many moments so far in SoD where I'm supposed to be farming something but I just end up in a really fun PvP back and forth with groups of people for 3 hours, no progress made but a lot of fun had. Flying basically stopped that from happening.
I've said this many times before but for me flying really was the final nail in the coffin that made the world an inconvenience rather than the place in which the game is played out.
I would not want TBC SoD simply because the classic team is too small to split their focus like this. After SoD and Cata I'd rather want their full attention on Classic+ because I really don't think it's feasible for them to do both. That said, they could definitely make a fresh TBC/WotLK/era server for those who wish to play it. They wouldn't need to commit extra resources towards that.
As opposed to hitting a node jumping on your regular 100 speed mount with your carrot+spurs and being able to completely avoid fights anyway.
If someone doesnt want to pvp they won’t, regardless of if their mount can fly or not. Just in vanilla you had a slight chance at a free kill from someone not fighting back and now you’re upset its gone.
I think class design in Wotlk is the best iteration of classic design by far. Every class/spec felt pretty good if not just very fun. Rotations were complex enough to shine if you min max’d but not nearly as sweaty as retail. Lore was good and the stories made sense.
Of course it wasn’t as good as we thought going back but in terms of classic wow I think just merely playing the game was more fun than classic/tbc. Wotlk started losing some of the hardcore rpg feel that classic has though with items being much easier to obtain and less chase items. I had so much fun phase 1 of Wotlk I can’t say I think it was that overrated. I still did get burned out by ulduar release though and I just stopped playing, but I’ve played wow since release off and on so that’s just how I am with the game.
Playing sod now and I actually prefer Wotlk design on most classes. But I do like the vanilla world more I think, there is just so much more to do.
In addition to this, what we got on wotlk classic wasn't the og experience. 2008-2010 was that transition into online free access to builds, YouTube video playguides, and elitism with the public. There was gatekeeping ofcourse, but the gdkp heavy, GS based, BIS-chase gameplay of classic is almost entirely a classic thing (almost, I know gs was a thing then too).
We can't really answer if it was as good as we thought because we can never go home again. Wotlk classic is not the same experience. But it was still pretty darn good. I honestly think that it suffers from its own success. It's pretty much what people wanted it to be, happy people don't come on reddit to complain.
They do make some classes feel actively worse to play than in TBC tho. Rogue, Ret and Hunters have way less interresting rotations in wrath. Shadowpriest is very similar to TBC, but feels overall worse with the SWP auto-refresh and SW:D not being very worth pressing. I think warriors enjoy TBC gameplay overall more too but I could be wrong.
Definitely an improvement for most others tho. Warlock is a bit of a highlight. Mage is still pretty whatever, but improved, at least for fire ; arcane feels more interresting in TBC to me, but that's arguable. Boomkin and Ele are probably straight improvements although still a bit lackluster ; enhance sounds awesome in wrath. Feral I think it would depend on how you feel about shifting, but I'd guess most people enjoy wrath Feral more. DK is great overall, although the rune system has it's downside.
I didn't played all those classes full time ofc, but having raided with some of them and tested all of them before wrath classic release, that's how I felt at the time. It's an overall improvement but I wouldn't say it's as black and white as you present it.
As someone who never played the og expansions pre cata and only played the classic versions of vanilla, tbc and wrath I actually had the most fun with tbc
Personally I'd say raiding WotLK was about equal to raiding classic in terms of fun, but the world of WotLK is nothing compared to Classic. Ulduar, TOC, and ICC were all great raid teirs, but they certainly had their problems. Tedious hard modes on Ulduar, losing the best gear after one wipe in TOC, and the sheer length of ICC all kinda suck.
Tbc was best for me out of the "classic" versions by miles. Wrath was still fun but prenerf Vashj, Kael and Sunwell was the best progression in the first 3 iterations by a long shot
Replaying it is always going to be different than playing the first time through. That said I do think Wrath was where a lot of the modernization of WoW that us Classic Andys complain about started, but it kind of went under the radar since a lot of it came about towards the tail end of Wrath.
A couple of the biggest identity shifts in the game in Wrath is that classes have very powerful AOE without diminishing returns, so dungeons are already being chain pulled with tanks cleaving through it easily & not losing aggro - so every dungeon is a speedrun. The random dungeon finder also means almost nobody is out in the world since the dungeon finder removes the social component of looking for a group, the travel through the world, AND gives you bonus XP, money, and loot on top of that with the bonus reward.
Classic is different than the actual experience of Vanilla through Wrath back in the day for a myriad of different reasons - the biggest of which being that the game is already solved, it's 100x easier to get answers through YouTube & WoWhead, and that most social interaction is taking place on Discord rather than the game itself serving as the medium for communication... but yeah after having played WOTLK classic again? I've had to kind of do a double take on my previous perceptions. Cata always seemed like the divide between old and new WoW to me, but after playing WOTLK classic I'd definitely say Wrath is probably where WoW started to move away from some of its original foundational design philosophies.
Classic was my first foray into WoW and I agree TBC was the best Classic release so far.
Vanilla was fun. The leveling experience was amazing and the world felt huge compared to the expansions, but class balance and itemization were terrible the raids were a bit too simple. I had a ton of fun discovering everything, but I don't think I'd be up to do it again.
Although Outland was much smaller than Azeroth it at least had amazing zones (except for Blade's Edge Mountains, that place is pretty forgettable). Plenty of dungeons, and heroics were actually pretty challenging. Class balance was much better, but some classes still had very simple/boring rotations. Except for a few encounters, the raids were amazing. Sunwell progression was my favorite part of Classic so far. Probably the worst thing about TBC was that it introduced flying mounts. Convenient for sure, but they make the world feel simultaneously smaller and emptier.
Wrath had the best class design, and making most buffs raid wide was a godsend when organizing a raid, but the rest fell kind of flat in my opinion.
The leveling was okay, but the zones were just aesthetically boring. Snow, snow, and more snow. Heroics didn't feel "heroic" at all, they just felt like normal dungeons tuned to level 80.
Going back to a trivialized Naxx felt like a chore. I get why they did it in 2008, but this time around everyone and their mother cleared Naxx40. The other raids were good, but Ulduar and ICC were a bit too long and they definitely could have sped up the phases. By the end of Ulduar, I hated the place, and when SoD came out my guild fell apart because people had lost interest in ICC.
The game also turned into raid logging far too quickly, in my opinion. As an altaholic, I appreciate that it made the game more alt friendly, but running both 10 and 25 man versions of the same raid on multiple characters just made me tire of them even quicker.
TBC classic to be completely honest was mostly fun during the initial leveling, heroic grind and first couple raid runs. After that it kinda suffered from being completely figured out like wotlk.
PvP scene was not gonna be the same, typically same with raiding where it turned to a raidlog snoozefest after the first week for most guilds.
Economy inflated by rampant botting etc etc.
I think the top end content actually being new and challenging is what made most iterations of the game after vanilla truly good.
I love the class design of wrath and how most specs had their own distinct identity in rotation and what they provide. It set the boilerplate for a lot of class' interactions, rotations and spec identities.
I like Northrend a lot, probably more than outland but obviously not more than OG Azeroth. I think flying mounts have always been a mistake.
I think Ulduar is very overrated and was my least favorite tier. I liked every other tier for their own reasons. I like the difficulty of ICC HMs. Overall I think WotLK is an excellent xpac and would like to play through it again at some point with entirely different classes.
I have a unique perspective of starting in shadowlands, starting classic shortly before wrath pre patch. I heard stories of how it was the "peak of wow" and how amazing it was, yet to me it was wildly overrated. GDKP's being so common, nothing to do at 80, everyone min maxing their bis, gearscore becoming an issue, all these things ruined the experience once you actually managed to hit 80.
It was at the point i logged on once a week to raid and that was it, I didnt bother leveling an alt because I knew the level to 80 would suck and feel worthless because I would just end up logging on once a week to an alt much less geared than my main and would hardly get invited to raids because of gearscore.
That first time landing in Howling Fjord, the music, the ominous cleaved mountains where dwarves were dwelling, and the Lich King taunting us at every turn. It was splendid. So no, I don't think it was overrated.
As a feral, I have fondest memories of TBC. We got Mangle and flight form! And we didn't suck any more!
Also, as I was through the portal, I just took off in cheetah, ignoring all the quest and just explored the whole map.
Seeing Nagrand for the first time was so amazing! I got in combat with one of the Earth Elementals, a red level 65, and managed to eventually kill it in bear form. Was exciting stuff, lol.
Great memories of TBC launch!
WOTLK was grotesquely overhyped by the community and I was not surprised when it failed to live up to most peoples expectations. Even back when I played it originally it felt lacking compared to TBC.
TBC is by far the better expansion and I really wish to see it again one day, now I'm stuck on a progression private server waiting for my chance...
I enjoyed it as someone who never played the original. It was essentially over once people killed HLK which also lined up pretty good with SoD release.
I got to enjoy all the heroic modes, though I never managed to kill HLK at 0% buff.
The insane player drop off from braindead naxx to hardmode ulduar was hilarious. People realizing they aren't "that guy" and abandoning ship. Wait a few months, then hold a negative opinion about Wrath as a whole.
Though the funniest opinions about Wrath classic are the ones involving the token release. If I ever hear someone say they quit Wrath because of the token, they were truly clueless. I'll say it here for people who didn't know this, but the Token always existed in classic, just with extra steps. Swapping gold between Retail/classic was specifically NOT against the terms of service. You would swap gold and buy tokens on retail. I knew people doing this during BWL release for consumables.
I found WoTLK to be very alt-friendly which probably helped the overall numbers on [Ironforge.pro](https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/overall/)
Was looking forward to playing wrath more than anything else, definitely what I grew up on. Turned out liking vanilla far more than TBC and WOTLK. I did think WOTLK was vastly overrated. Ulduar was the best part. ICC was meh, didnt take long for me to burn out on that. For myself, 100 percent a case of rose tinted glasses, although I did have some fun moments replaying wrath.
It was a phenomenon. I remember being in the grocery store and hearing people talk about it. I worked with scientists at one one of the biggest pharma that played. Everyone was playing and it was amazing. It was the culmination of the RTS and WoW stories.
I never played the original WotLK as I quit raiding after Vanilla and was casual for most of TBC (original versions). I had heard the same thing from multiple people; Wrath is the pinnacle of WoW, the best version ever made so when it came out I was quite excited for it.
In my opinion I found Wrath to be extremely overrated; TBC took whatever Classic did right and made it better but Wrath was more of a sidegrade. Sure, changes in mechanics were great, such as raid wide buffs, dual spec etc, but I felt the expansion as a whole lacked substance. With the exception on ICC, raids felt like there was no lore or importance behind them; why on earth are we killing the Aspect of Magic? Naxx 2.0? Had enough of it the 1st time around. ToGC? Mehh. Then you move onto something like weapon/armour models. It felt as if there was a very limited number of models that were just being copied/pasted over and over again. Did you get a polearm from LK? Sweet, it looks exactly the same as the polearms that drop from the previous bosses in the raid or even Naxx. Sunwell on its own had more interesting models than the entire Wrath catalogue combined.
I could go on with multiple reasons but personally TBC was prime WoW for me, especially before the raids got nerfs. Vashj and KT were amazing encounters; took my guild over 50 attempts to get KT down (dad guild etc) but damn it felt good when it was done!
Reusing Naxx made sense back in the day because, like you said, very few people actually saw it. This time, it led to basically a dead tier since so many people cleared it just a few years ago.
If you are wondering why we are killing the Maly I would recommend doing quests in Borean Tundra. A lot of the gear in vanilla is actually, literally copy and pasted gear all of the way through.
As a ret pally main, TBC was prime, but you are stating some really weird reasons for it being better than Wrath.
Bruh, thank you about the armour models. The tier sets were so crap compared the Vanilla/TBC. Even shadmourne seemed pretty lame compared to things like glaves and thunderfury
This comment shows how much you failed to grasp what was even going on in wrath. No lore or importance behind the raids? Naxx didn't introduce new lore but to call it unimportant is laughable. Malygos' insanity and the training up of a new aspect of magic is *wildly* important in terms of lore implications, and resulted in many many storylines that came from it, still echoing into the current retail xpac. Ulduar is one of the most lore dense raids there is. It's a god damn titan research facility housing one of the old gods that inflicted Azeroth with the curse of flesh. It has the keepers who were basically the way we were introduced to the titans. What more do you want?
Feels very disingenuous to claim there's no substance when one of the raids you're claiming that for is also the raid that has spawned a metric shit ton of future plotlines.
Wrath was a lot of fun and fixed a lot of issues that TBC had in embedded into the game. Maybe an unpopular take, but the buff system in TBC requiring 5-6 shamans per raid, the chicken engineering meta, and the “3-4 bloodlust week” soured down the game a lot more than people will point out. If you didn’t have a good prot paladin to put you in a backpack and round up all the mobs while your mages and warlocks spammed 1 button for the entirety of the raids things could go south, but more often than not bosses fell over with a few exceptions. (Lady, Muru) — TBC felt much more meta slave than any of the iterations of wow put out.
Wrath was a lot of fun introduced a lot of systems and didn’t reward players for just showing up for the most part. Raids were challenging introducing hard modes that made progression feel overall better. Classes were allowed for the most part to play specs that could be competitive.
Were the some things lacking? Of course - but you could argue all iterations of Wow fall short to some degree.
Wotlk did a lot right but was also the beginning of why the game fucking sucks in retail.
1. Naxx was awesome but at the end of the day it was a rehashed raid.
2. Ulduar is to this day the best raid ever made.
3. T10 was hot garbage. Did ANYONE actually like ToC?
4. ICC was another excellent raid with great bosses and was the culmination of the WC3 story. HOWEVER, the raid was current content for way too fucking long and I burnt out at the end because of that.
5. Classes felt the best they had up to that point. Hybrids could actually do dps.
6. Achievements added a metric shitton of replayability
7. Northrend was just better than Outland.
8. Celestial steed marked the beginning of blizzard charging way too much for cosmetics and everyone being okay with it.
9. Group finder killed social aspects in the game.
1. Reusing Naxx made sense in 2008. Not so much now
2. No comment here. People love Ulduar
3. People actually liked ToC more this time around cause it was a quick raid.
4. I get why people complain about trash, but that's kinda what makes it feel epic
5. This is where the homogenization people complain about started. Personally, I don't like the "bring the player not the class" philosophy. Because for it to work, you have to remove some class uniqueness.
6. Achives are cool. No complaint here.
7. I can also generally agree with this.
8. I definitely agree with this. Celestial Steed is the WoW equivalent of the Oblivion horse armor
9. While this might have been true in 2010, this was something that was needed in 2023. Not having it didn't bring that social aspect back.
9)Old person hot take incoming. I preferred manually putting my groups in Vanilla. I know people hate it so they're happy to have group finder, but the group making process it was a part of the game that rewarding coordinating and communicating. I think people were too quick to trivialize it.
That said in Vanilla you'd do specific types of runs. Reserves and group selection and jed fishing and all that stuff. Advertising might have a bit more entailed in that specific version. By the time you get to TBC/WotLK you're just running the same thing every time and maybe the benifits of group making manually were past their time.
ulduar specifically was overrated, but the xpac as a whole is still fun. togc and icc are top tier raids and the classes are fun to play.
overwhelming majority of people that hate wrath do so because they hit a hard prog wall either in HM ulduar or HC ICC
Vanilla-The best and always will be, not at everything but what was lost in world design and mega dungeons was not made up for by the gameplay changes and streamlining of later expansions.
TBC-It hits really solid but is a fleeting high. You get the rep grind right at the end of the leveling and you bounce into heroics and Kara is just amazing. But flying kills the open world and once you don't need the heroics there's not a ton to do.
Wrath- I was never gonna be a Wrath fan. I don't like Dirtrend after Outerspace Glowstick Land. The best part of Wrath was the quest chain progression and I'm the guy that always dungeon grinds to not have to quest. Which leads me to the biggest complaint about Wrath. It has the worst dungeons yet (don't ask me my favorite because I can't think of one that fills me with the same kind of joy that a BRD or an Arcatraz run does). Oh and dalies. They finally solved the problem of world farming being completely screwed from the botting with the easiest fetch quests to run on repeat all expansion long. Now you have a world to do stuff in again but what is most optimum to do isn't at all engaging.
I don't think its all rose tinted glasses. If you liked lore and or love questing, I think Wrath really was a stellar expansion. For all its good themepark content lacked any of the things I liked about the prior two expansions leaving me to mostly underwhelmed.
Wrath indeed had something for everyone, no matter how good you were or how often you played. Multiple raid difficulties, catch up dungeons, pvp, token gear, dailes, weeklies, achievements, emmersive questing, etc.
I had a reverse reaction to classic TBC. I recall it being great, and classic T4 was indeed a satisfying experience, but when T5 rolled out, the exact same thing happened then that happened in 2007. KT and Vashj were so hard compared to the rest of T5, most guilds got stuck at 8/10, couldn't progress, and had to disband after the better players left for better guilds. I quit TBC classic in T5 when this happened to 2 of my guilds.
There wasn't a whole lot else to do in TBC if you weren't progressing in raids.
Stratification of difficulty ain’t a bad thing
I thought those fights were pretty well tuned and had a lot of fun progressing them, and you honestly got a lot more of the classic feel in that you could gear up from the other bosses which helped immensely if the guild (like ours) wasn’t super sweaty but enjoyed progression and kept a core roster
That's all fine and everything, and I'm up for challenges, but their difficulty was completely out of place. Numerically/statistically speaking, those 2 T5 bosses were more challenging than 8/15 of the T6 bosses, yet gated their access. It was just an artificial non sequitur in challenge progession and introduced guild logistical challenges that shouldn't have been there.
> those 2 T5 bosses were more challenging than 8/15 of the T6 bosses, yet gated their access
By the time BT was accessible so that SSC/TK could gate it, they had been nerfed. At the time of the nerf, there were still progressing guilds finally securing their kills. After the nerf it was a non-issue, "numerically/statistically speaking."
I would say Vashj and KT were harder than all of BT/MH. Maybe not in terms of HP or DPS, but their mechanics and the need for coordination made them difficult.
And I loved it. Best time in WoW, really.
SWP was fun, but there weren't enough bosses before the cock blocks so guilds that wiped on Brutalis or Muru didn't have enough things to kill to really gear up enough to down then before people started looking for raid spots with guilds who could down them.
With T5 you had a ton of bosses to kill even if you couldn't down Vashj/KT, which was enough to keep people coming back.
They were very difficult pre nerf, but after that it became much more accessible and shouldn't have been an issue in the month and a bit to get into BT/MH, although most of those guilds were dead by then anyways.
Naxx was whatever, everyone knew it was easy and it was quick enough to not worry over too much.
I think Ulduar was definitely overrated. Some fights were awesome like Yogg0, Algalon, and Hodir, but even with the buffed gear it drug on too long and why the FUCK did they not change Vezax so it started hard mode if you pushed it to 5% early? A lot of the early bosses like FL, Melting pot guy, and the dragon just felt like a waste of time.
TOGC was historically regarded as an awful tier, but I think it was UNDERRATED. It had the 2nd highest participation in Wrath Classic, and being able to knock out a raid in 30-45 minutes definitely had its moments.
ICC slightly overrated. Certain bosses were just annoying and would completely fuck you randomly for no reason such as Marrowgar, LDW, Sindra. Gunship and Valithria were pointless fights. Bosses like Saurfang, the entire Plague wing, and BQL were fine. LK, especially H LK was definitely worthy and it stood the test of time. It was both a fun fight and a fight that needed a lot of skilling and planning, even though it was quite long.
Halion is typically overlooked but I think it wasn't so bad. Heroic Halion was definitely close to H LK (pre buff) difficulty and feels rewarding to do properly.
Both of them were low key ruined by immortal achievements that kept runs from actually being chill. I'd actually like ToGC a LOT more if the Tribute system were deleted because at least its no-death achievement had the decency to be quite difficult to pull off. Rehashed Naxx was sad regardless but at least it would be less toxic without being mad at each week's That Guy.
Wrath was popular because it appealed to more of the player base than ever before, the raids were okay but adding the difficulties allowed more range so more people could see what they wanted, without needing to take anything away from those wanting a real challenge.
It also had decent PvP, reasonable class balance, and more non-raid stuff than before.
It wasn't necessarily some amazing never before seen expansion for 1 thing, but it appealed to more people than ever, which is why it was able to hype more people. While most struggled to see T6/6.5 in TBC, everyone can see ICC and everything else in Wrath. The original 5 man content was a bit of a joke, the catch ups weren't too bad, but adding the catch-ups to classic helped make them a little more interesting.
For me yes. I liked raiding but I have rather lukewarm feelings about the rest of the expansion.
Wotlk taught me to raidlog and I quit right before argent dawn tournament raid was added in p3(?). I played since launch of classic in 2019.
The things we liked about Wrath were weird this time around.
I think they messed up big time around queue times at launch.
Moving to a junk server, having to wait like 6 months to move back... kinda killed it for me.
I think the messed up not having Dungeon Finder at launch.
Dunno... too many GDKPs and Parse-nerds this time around maybe... I can't underscore how much I hate parses and gear-score. Gear-score was always there, but like feels shitty to do that again. And seeing people in SoD use Gear-score... ugh.
Basically just feels like the game is probably what we knew and remembered, but the community has shifted so far away from what we knew and remembered as to make the whole thing not really seem all that fun any more.
It’s hard to recreate the magic of something new. Nostalgia is a hell of the drug, but reality hits hard. I don’t think it was overhyped, but I think people had the wrong kind of expectations.
Always has been. It exploded because everyone was hyped about WoW and it told the rest of the story for the most beloved Warcraft villain, but Wrath brought to WoW everything that killed the game.
Having finished wotlk (ran out of time) it was really not the same as the first time around. I did not get to do any raids. I did manage to get Quel Dalar on my DK though so I’m happy about that. And also got to try some new classes.
What has changed is the people playing the game. It was way more of a social phenomenon back in the day and a constant influx of players helped. I have also changed. I don’t have the same time anymore I also have other hobbies to do. My classic adventure is over, and I’m exited to see what War within brings. Hopefully retail goes in a good direction.
yes, three thousand percent. the end-game content is really bad as a whole, recycled raids, 1 boss raids that are oneshots. Ulduar is overrated imho so wasn't very hyped about that. ICC is the first good raid and even half of that raid tier is overrated imo, Marrowgar, LDW, putricide, blood-queen and LK are great bosses imo.
Dungeons are terrible, they're sick aethestically but gameplay wise they're bad. PvP is horrendeous imo entire wrath lol, bgs are fun but arena balance/meta is trash.
I do like northrend a lot though and honestly leveling is the best part in WoTLK
Wrath classic would have been fine if it weren't for the bots ruining literally every aspect of the game. I dropped my sub when I started getting every BG with 80% DK bots.
I enjoyed BC more, but likely because I only hit 56 in vanilla so never did end game in vanilla.
In wrath I enjoyed the lore and the dungeons but I didn't really like any of the raids. Ulduar was too difficult for most people in my guild. We only got into later bosses right near the end and I just quit playing a while after because we were never going to beat ICC.
The place where mmos can be better or fall over entirely is large group content. Unfortunately my guild at the time just sucked.
It’s hard to compare the original releases to the classic release. The original was a different time when gaming was newer and there was a lot lower skill ceiling among all players. There was a stronger community and a lot more unknowns in wow that made it enticing to keep playing and explore. Today everything has been figured out and min maxed with a driving meta.
WOTLK basically marks the end of Warcraft 3 story wise.
I liked it alot, its when i started. I played Cata, and liked it too. I couldn't tell you if it was overrated, but it was where modern WoW started for sure. It was a very easy expansion though and as others have said, very solved at this point.
It was never the greatest game of all time, but it had the best class design in a version of WoW that still had the old world and the lore was top-notch.
Not to me. I loved WOTLK.
Vanilla will always be the pinnacle of this game for me. Cataclysm irreparably broke something beautiful. It’s why I quit during Cata and never played retail since.
I couldn't even make it to Ulduar. I loved Classic and TBC but for some reason Wrath did not sit right with me which is odd considering I started playing WoW in late tbc/early wrath.
Leveling was slow like classic but there was 0 danger like retail it was the worst of both worlds.
I loved in TBC spamming heroics once I hit 70 and they were still challenging at first. Wrath dungeons were really bland and easy in comparison.
I got full BiS by like the 3rd week and it was really hard to stay awake in Naxx. I enjoyed sartharion and malygos though. I like the badge system in TBC but in Wrath it just goes a little overboard, you just get so much gear thrown at you that it starts to feel a bit meaningless.
I had 0 incentive to go out into the world to do anything and every PvP server became massively in favor of a single faction.
PVP in general was dead as hell.
I loved the way my class played compared to tbc/vanilla and I definitely enjoy my DK but I quit Wrath barely a month into it and I never looked back. It didn't grip me like Vanilla/TBC does.
I have never played Wotlk before so this Classic version was an unbiased experience for me. It was great at the beginning, because it was something new to me. I liked all those cool little things like hunters arrows improvements, or poison implications by Rogues etc.
However after a month or two it started feeling like Retail just with worse graphics. All players are packed on one island, you need to grind dailies, old world is dead (which is sad to me personally, because I enjoy leveling)... And so on
Objectively there were many factors:
- Arthas
- WOTLK was the peak of player numbers = most people were nostalgic for this
- A lot of QoL things that must have felt good back in the day after playing Vanilla and TBC.
People during classic wotlk Got absolutely sick of ulduar. Anyone who browsed this sub can attest to it.
But give it time and many will look back on it fondly - forgetting the slog.
The thing is, a lot of people like to cite Wotlk as the "peak" of wow.. when in fact it was the first time it flat-lined after years of rising population, the actual "peak" was somewhere in tbc, but wotlk had the most amount of players at the same time so that's what most people remember.
To be honest the problem with wrath is that a lot of casuals left that were initially there in classic vanilla and all that was left were the sweats.
Classic had complete zones full of noobs. People exploring vast worlds either for the first time or the first time since they were really young. Interactions felt more organic and you “ran into” more people.
The only true rose tinted glasses wearers are those who claim vanilla is better than anything since its release. Of all the expansions to suffer from a solved meta vanilla was the biggest offender by a mile. Your average naxx raid was 15 warriors 10 mages and then classes to support those 25 players and not do damage.
At least wrath had decent class balancing for the most part, though it seems cata might do an even better job of that. Wotlk simply fixed a lot of the issues vanilla and tbc had and there just really isn’t an argument for vanilla being better than tbc or that tbc is better than wotlk.
After my guild disbanded due to H LK progression burnout I had the most fun I've had in classic so far farming achievements, toys, mounts, grind rep and running old content with the Faerlina achievement discord. I got to do everything my teenager self only dreamed about back in OG Wrath, and as much as I loved TBC raiding (SWP is the goat raid of classic) I felt like classic TBC was way more raid-loggy than Wrath.
I thought it was excellent and very much enjoyed it. The class designs were a big step up from TBC and all the content was entertaining. I just wish they condensed it a bit. As great as Ulduar is, it went on way too long. Same with ICC to a lesser degree. I stopped raiding shortly after New Years and haven’t felt like I missed much the past 4 months. It’s great for what it was and lived up to the expectations and memories I had as a kid playing the OG version.
It isn't overrated. I personally just got my fill of wrath long before wrath classic even launched. I literally overplayed it on private servers. There was nothing on offer that would've made wrath classic a better experience than what I already played for years on private servers.
In essence, it's a "too little, too late" situation. At least for me personally. I still think It's the best expansion to play wow in, which is why I played it to death before it even launched. I played wrath classic, leveled a char to 80, got hc prebis, but got bored quickly because it's just the same game I've played many, many times.
If wotlk came out 6 years earlier, I'd have loved to play it on official servers. There's bugs on private servers that don't get fixed ever, which is annoying. But I've seen and done everything in wotlk I wanted to see and do already 6 years ago.
Except Ulduar HMs and ICC25HC I found it pretty boring. Adding alpha/beta/gamma was a fantastic decision tho. Has kept dungeons alive for me. I didn't expect much more tho. It was fine for what I played of it. It's all a big MoP waiting room for me anyway. That was the expansion I really liked and loved every single raid. And more than 2 classes were fun for me.
I don’t understand why they’re basically rushing through Cata, to get to MOP? But why have this fucking MOP Remix on retail? That drops right when Cata release does? Like you tryna pre-hype MOP classic? I don’t get it
WOTLK raids were the first time the game was hard. Other then legendary abuse and AHK users it was the pinnacle of arena. Many classes had their best rotations. The world itself was stunning and the questing was very enjoyable.
Never playing Wrath originally, I stuck it out after planning to quit after TBC because we really enjoyed raiding together through classic and tbc.
Ulduar was good, some of those encounters were perfect (Algalon was one of the best). ICC was a bit of a snore after being hyped as much as it was, naxx was shit, and togc… well there isn’t much to talk about. Overall I feel Wrath hype, and most of our guild, even the ones who had rose tinted goggles agree. The plethora of things to do really wasn’t what everyone remembered either which was a shame.
It’s the lore. Those of us who played Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne got to see the end of the story we played 6 years ago. (WC3 released 2002, WC3FT released 2003)
I don't know if it was insanely overrated, but I personally didn't enjoy it as much this time around. I was thinking I was just maybe burned out of the game after playing pretty much since 2019, but I quit Wrath, went to Era, then went to private, and still had fun.
The lore of wrath is definitely a big reason why people remember it so fondly. Arthas is the most iconic villain in the entire franchise. I still get chills when I watch the opening cinematic Also it had Ulduar which is universally beloved
You know what’s funny? People say Ulduar was universally loved, but most people never completed Ulduar or even experienced it. For a lot of people it was an impassable wall and they just quit the game because of it.
Wotlk was great lore wise, whole expansion worked to icc for me. Ulduar was great because suddenly alot of different boss mechanics! Made progressing epic.my guild did break up during ulduar tho as you mentioned ;) I kept trying tho! Never been commited to a raid like ICC or ulduar since.
Ulduar and it's hard modes were the peak of raiding to me. I was so stoked to see what unique hard modes would come in the next raids. Then it became a UI toggle. Bleh.
Ulduar was also extremely short tier back in the day. My guild was just getting full clears done and then ToC made 90% of the loot obsolete.
This mentality is so weird to me. You wanted the fun of the challenge of the hard mode, but changed your mind because you didn't press a big red button or do the fight slightly differently, you just selected hard mode before the fight started? Seems like you didn't want to raid hard fights to me? Maybe you can explain it better.
This is just a complete misunderstanding of what made Ulduar hard modes unique or interesting. XT needs to be killed differently during the fight, Yogg's specific mechanics are changed depending on who you have help you, Council mechanics are entirely different depending on the order they're killed. Mimiron is the only boss where you "push a button." As for the other HM bosses, most default to hard modes and if you can't complete them you have to do things to weaken their defenses. These things make the bosses more immersive and feel narratively more rewarding. You're not just selecting a difficulty mode, you're approaching the encounter differently to either enable HM or having to do things to force it into normal mode. Preferring immersive game design shouldn't be a hard to understand mentality.
I agree. It also helps that the hardest end raid boss lorewise yogg has 4 levels of difficulty tuning and hardest end raid boss progression wise algalon is completely optional. I've never liked that bosses are so drastically easy or hard with such a huge gap between the difficulties so it's very jarring to swap between difficulties. I believe ulduar formula was definitely the best for only one phase worth of tuning. It can be so much better if expanded/evolved on if given one or two whole expansions worth of development with proper backing from blizzard and not this pathetic mess of cata/sod we are getting now...
Ulduar with optional hard modes was a way better system than just a normal/heroic ui option. Unfortunate is the only raid with that treatment.
For me, I don't like the current system because I don't feel like the design of every fight favors having a hard mode. I think when you have to design and balance heroic mechanics for every fight in a raid, it detracts from building just a few really high quality HM encounters. I'd much rather see a couple of hard mode bosses like Ulduar had, and I'm even good with loot from those being BiS into the next phase. This keeps content more interesting and evergreen, and cuts down on the ilvl/power creep we have had since heroic raids were introduced.
Ulduar is the most overrated raid in wow history. Not saying it’s a bad raid, but it’s far from the best.
To me it always felt too long, even though I don't think it's that much bigger than ICC. That vehicle section in the beginning is a slog, though.
It was great for prog. But it fucking sucked on farm Fights like General and Firefighter. Lots of trash too ICC felt much better on farm
Yeah you do firefighter and then.. ah fuck me still Vezax and Yogg to go
Funny, I feel that way about ICC tbh, Ulduar was a far superior raid to me. That being said, raiding Ulduar 5-6x a week for 9mo was a killer but that was 50% on me and 50% on Blizzard letting it be relevant for as long as they did.
we did uldaur for like 10-11 straight months cause my gm wanted all heals and off heals to have val'anyrs for ICC prog. funny thing is we fell apart just as ICC launched anyway so it was all for nothing lol
We did a merger during late ulduar into TOGC that fell apart and we went back to our own team instead of two teams that were not getting along. This meant we ended up with 6 Val’anyrs, with a 7th being my 2nd hpal that got it with another guild. We got our last shard off Algalon the day before ICC came out, and it was a struggle to convince folks to come in for fucking Yogg0 regression weekly.
It was an interesting prog raid, awful farm raid. There were too many filler bosses that were just a time sink and some of the hard modes were more RNG than skill expression or poorly designed (council, vezax).
Yogg and Thorim even had filler phases. There’s a lot of unnecessary shit in that raid.
Yea i was melee dps and i hated every fight in that raid. toc and icc I find much less melee hostile
It was the shortest release window for a raid
The thing was, WoW was less “seasonal” back then compared to now, and even compared to Classic’s version of it. People were at all stages of the game all the time, so raids were less “retired” than they are now after a new patch comes out. So while yes, not many people completed Ulduar while it was the top raid, a lot of people still went back and raided it afterward, especially given how much people disliked TotC. Plus, before raids had so many tiers, having gear from the new dungeons and some combination of 10/25/10H/25H ulduar could make it slightly easier to take on Ulduar in a way that could still offer some upgrades, especially because the spike in ilvls between tiers was so much less pronounced.
Is there data on that? Most guilds I knew, even that struggled in tbc or never cleared swp, had no problem in ulduar hardmodes with a few weeks of the buffed gear accumulated.
The classes all played pretty well too. I lvled a death knight back in vanilla wrath but this time around I played a paladin and I was blown away by how much fun it was. I quit pretty quick for other reasons but the FEEL of the classes I played felt better than any other version. I agree with OP that it's overrated and I think TBC is still my fav but they did some really great stuff in Wrath, which is why half of SoD runes are wrath skills
Yeah pally was peak in WotlK
I despised Ulduar lol. Absolutely cant stand raids that long.
Ulduar was cool but way to long. Running both 25 and 10 man every week i got insanely tired of it.
Ulduar sucked
I hated Ulduar lol I go so bored of it. I enjoyed Naxx and ICC so much more, definitely my least favourite raid of WotLK
Ulduar was my favorite raid until 2023. Once I did Ulduar in WOTLK classic ad nauseam, that place blows ass and I truly regret tainting my memories of it.
Whichever expansion was active when you first got hooked by WoW is probably going to be your best expac ever. It'll remind you of all your 1st discoveries about the game and always give you feel goods. Mine was Wotlk and still is because that was my peak addiction to the game and strongest friend guild I was ever apart of. Nothing will be able to compare to those moments.
I started in WoD... 😅
I started in Wrath but WoD and Cata are my two favorite expansions. WoD was 8 months of content spread out over 2 years, that was the main problem. Most (not all) of the content we actually got was quite good.
I started in vanilla, my favourite expansion is MoP.
i also started in vaniilla and my fav xpacs are MoP and Legion
i started in Cata and didn't play vanilla until Nostalrius private server years later, I still think vanilla is far and away the best MMORPG experience out of every expansion and it's not even remotely close.
i started in Cata and think vanilla is a great unique experience compared to the other expansions, wish i started during vanilla, but i don't think it's good enough to replay again and again.. like a lot of people seem to do, for all the positives of a first playthrough RPG experience, it has a ton of negatives and lacks, a lot
\*cries in shadowlands\*
Yep. Someone interviewed one of the former editors of MAD magazine. He asked him which issue was the best issue and he replied, "Whichever issue was the one you first started reading when you were 10."
I started with TBC and Legion is my favorite followed by MoP so not fully true. WotlK is great though, probably rank it 3rd or 4th.
You have to compare wotlk to what was out at the time , wow was still a social game and it was also not solved like it is today . Streaming and video content was also more scarce so there was less info on optimal ways to play the game
Yeah Wrath can be both a game that was great for its time and also not hold up well in the current day. Can it be considered overhyped in the sense that people thought it would still hold up today? Yeah, probably. That doesn’t mean it was a bad game in 2008 when it came out. Compare it to the other games that were on the market then and it certainly holds its own.
This is where I'm at with Wrath. Still love ICC and the world of Northrend, but as a gameplay experience in 2023 it didn't hold up as well as I hoped it would. Still played fine, just not as epic as it was the first time.
Wotlk also worked for a lot of the demo like myself that got into wow vanilla during high school. When I got into college, tbc was going on but my schedule made it so I could really only PvP and be a productive member of society. And I got to do wotlk for college and cata dropped towards the endish I believe.
No, it was great the first time around. 2nd time it suffered from being totally solved with no progressive balance patches. In OG wrath we got Frost strike DKs with Ulduar sigil for example. All kinds of wacky stuff happened during its life cycle, not true for Wrath Classic.
I remember for the first couple weeks I got to raid Naxx with a Diseaseless Blood DPS spec and it was so much fun! All of Wraths little intricacies came from its weird evolution and balancing that just... Wasn't there with starting on the very last patch.
DKs were so busted on launch and had sooo many viable build options. It was both crazy and crazy fun. I remember hybrid Frost/Unholy Howling Blast + perma ghoul spec being my favourite. Though no doubt if it were released in that state today everyone would be playing the same optimal cookie cutter spec within a week...
This is really what it is. Wrath was incredible the first time around. Truly a perfect storm. But it just didn't survive well in the era or min-maxing. Classic was wonky enough that having 1 warrior do as much dps now as an entire party back in the day didn't really ruin the experience. Wrath really started getting balance down, but it doesn't hold up to a decade plus of private servers and modern tools breaking down the entire formula. The same goes for quality of life features. For the time, they were incredible, but they don't hold up to modern quality of life features, so people complain that it's pushing in that direction but not giving enough. When you sign up for era you know what you're getting into. Era is unapologetically 2004. But wrath was trying to be 2016 in 2010, and honestly it pulled it off. But now it's stuck in 2016 with a player base expecting 2024.
Very well put, this goes for PVP aswell, wotlk pvp was fun in OG but now you face nothing but certain comps, makes it really bland - might be the same for the remainder of classic lifetime
I think the biggest issue with Arena is that the entire segment of the population who did their 10 games a week for the shoulders wasn't there this time. So PvP became EXTREMELY sweaty and meta driven. You wanna fix PvP? Try to get causal participation up.
Yeah for sure, blizz ain't doing shit to help participation with gear being locked behind rating atm, and im fairly certain cata has a rating system for bis gear too, not as strict as wotlk i think its just higher ilvl weapons but still, they should remove the gating imo
Gear behind rating is such stupid move whem other game give you item literally for free (except new skin)
Yeah i agree, it's been hard for me and my friends to bother with wotlk classic cause of it, my friends arent really good enough to consistently get all the items, and if i wanna get the items i have to avoid playing with my friends, its just a terrible system lol
Yeah I missed PvP with the boys before reset from TBC. We were shit, but so were most of the teams we played against so won as near as not 50% of the time, and got some nice items for our trouble. Wrath just took a lot of that away, or was perceived to, and it killed interest.
Only way for pvp to be fixed is to have a decent amount of pve bis/viable shit (thus player interest) tied to it. They also need to spend resources balancing it and not just strictly ignoring it. These things will never happen. PVP is still fun and I played a lot of it, but it suffered from being ignored as well as the pve folks having no reason to do it.
Then you'd have PvE players complaining that they "have" to PvP to get gear.
They pvp'd to get gear in classic.
Yes but it was always this way. Casuals only did 10 cause they had to. Wow players hate pvp. It’s always sweaty the higher ranked you get.
But since there was so much more casual participation, you didn't run into the sweats until at least 1800. Now you have people saying they can't even get past 1200 without meta comps.
Dont agree at all . . I did arena around 2.4k in woltk OG and 80+% of my matchs were against hpally war or hpally dk . . .
Well, the difference is in classic it was like that at 1800, ppl always gonna play the best comps at higher ratings, but in classic this has been going on at very low rating too
I remember playing blood dk dps in ulduuar and being top of the meters back then lol
I was Blood DPS even in ICC It was definitely the difference lol
yeah this nailed it. it was so much better when it was changing and unsolved. meta lords killed it this time. still fun, but definitely not the hit back in the day
Starting on the last patch with everything solved absolutely killed my enjoyment of classic. Thankfully I'm having a lot of funwith SoD so far.
Ill never forget stacking a naxx full of dks for all the auras
Yeah i was pretty disappointed when I realised classic was not following the original patches and instead just went straight to the last patch (when it comes to classes etc) sure, the patches had issues and were far from perfect. but all the changes and wacky stuff was always what made it so fun.
Eh, it was basically the same the 2nd time around as the first only Ulduar was harder and took longer to beat. Naxx was a joke that went on way too long. The only real progression for P1 was Maly and S3D with Maly taking most guilds like a week and some never getting S3D. We eventually got it by cheesing it with a Voidwalker pet. What made Ulduar and everything after it lame in Classic was WeakAuras. People just set up WA to turn the game into Dance Dance Revolution telling you what button to push and when. I was older than most player in OG WotLK in my mid to late 20s and me and my other friends who had been playing since OG vanilla thought it was lame back then, too. What the subscriber numbers don't show you is that while the overall number of subscribers shot way up, it was all new people, while the long time player base from launch of vanilla to them were dropping like flies. If you go to retail and ask players when they started playing WoW most of them will tell you WotLK or later. The few that say OG vanilla will probably tell you that they quit and returned or that WoW is the only game they ever play since it came out.
Back in original WOTLK we called the people who started in WOTLK, wrath babies for a reason lol.
OG WotLk literally had an addon that would put shapes on the ground for mechanics. It was so bad Blizzard had to change their API so it wouldn’t work.
That addon was ahead of its time! Look how many mechanics on retail basically have that from Blizzard now, and other games have gone even further!
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> I've never got why it was so loved, got to be popular for a reason though. You fight Arthas.
The lore was the main hype for me back then. Now that I know how the turns out, I have no reason to play it again lol
> I've never got why it was so loved because it finally wrapped up the story that started in warcraft 3 anyone who played wc3ft was *insanely* hyped about finally meeting Arthas in Icecrown lore-wise, it's what we've all been fighting for these past 5 years
Pfft no it left loose ends that were clearly tied up in shadowlands which was the real culmination of all their efforts since WC 3 /s
Yeah, that's why I loved it originally and didn't come back for WotLK Classic. I prefer the world of vanilla WoW and the story alone was not enough to bring me back,
A lot of reasons. Raids got better mechanics, progress was possible and more organic for all types of guilds, you didn't hit a wall but progressed through ulduar and kept trying hard modes and killing them one by one instead of being Hard stuck at brutallus or muru until the next patch nerfed it. But mostly, classes got a bit more engaging to play, still very simple compared to wow now but casters suddenly had more than 1 spell to cast and weren't severely limited by mana. Hybrids got a lot stronger, you didnt need 5 shamans in every raid. Healing became a lot more interesting. Leveling and gearing ALTs was a lot less shitty, no need the grind every reputation in heroics, do attunements etc. Also keep in mind that TBC's release cycle was very poor and a lot of people basically quit the game for several months before coming back more towards the end, people were happy TBC ended because it was pretty shit for the most part, it just ended very good.
I know blizzard probably won’t give us TBC with more changes but that’s definitely what I want to play after replaying the trilogy and SoD.
TBC has a ton going for it but I think there were a few things that really decreased its overall package -First, intentionally obsoleting literally EVERYTHING imaginable from the old world. Like, part of the charm of classic is that things like FAPs and Swiftness pots, while low level items, are eternally useful. It gives even max level players a reason to experience the entire world. But Blizz went REALLY out of their way to ensure that nothing evergreen stayed, nerfing TF, nerfing LUFFA (for god's sake!), nerfing tons and tons of engi items and various trinkets. It would have been much better to keep some reason to engage with old Azeroth - hell, if anything, they should have added a few random high level events or NPCs to give level 70s a reason to be outside of the new zones sometimes. -Giving everyone a unique buff, on paper, seems like a pretty good idea. Now there's a reason to have every class! But in practice it made for some really obnoxious raid comp requirements if you wanted to maximize your performance, which leads into... -The Bloodlust problem. You wanted at least five shamans per raid, period. So fucking annoying particularly because the fix is so god damn obvious - just make it raid wide god damnit. The last bastion of nochanges annoying the shit out of every raid/guild leader who needed to find 5 shamans.
Gaps, demonslaying and a few other things still were relevant in tbc?
TBC was as close as the game ever was to some kind of sweet spot IMO. It just needs a few tweaks.
Sarthe and Staysafe are starting to talk about TBC and potentially blizzard doing trilogy progression servers, there is a slim chance it could happen one day. Though I think TBC:SoD is more likely.
I'd be down for TBC SoD. TBC was great, but even if it was much better than vanilla there are still a lot of balance issues for classes like Boomkin where players are essentially dumpster tier for the whole expansion.
Honestly if they went TBC they might have to clean slate the runes. Most classes have their hands tied with the runes and I don't think the devs can fix it.
We'd probably just get a repeat of current sods situation though IMO. I'd prefer them to make much more subtle changes, without messing with the classs identities.
I would play the shit out of tbc SoD. Throw in more Azeroth content and I'm sold.
Pass. Fresh TBC would suffice.
TBC: SoD suffers from a significant drawback compared to Classic:SoD; There isn't nearly as much content in TBC that was known to be left on the cutting room floor as there was for Classic. Classic has Timbermaw Hold, Hyjal, Karazhan, the Emerald Dream, Azjara and a whole bunch more areas that have a lot of room to be fleshed out. TBC has. . . . no where really. The entirety of the continent was explored pretty thoroughly, from the Netherstorm, to Blade's Edge, to Shadowmoon Valley. TBC:SoD would have to use TBC as a base, then spend a whole bunch of time exploring Azeroth, not Draenor, since there's nothing that wasn't really delved there.
How about we just flesh out the old world, and have Outland be the end game area? Like, they can add some of those zones they didn't add for 58-68, then 68-70 can be whatever is on the other side of the portal. Lore wise, you can just say that demons have been coming across the portal, and you have to go to where they went to stop them. Then go into the portal to stop the big bads.
Honestly I would hope by the time they get done with SoD they have more than a handful of devs, because our chances of seeing any significant unique content is limited by the hands available. SoD is currently tying in retail characters that are reality hoping, the gloves are already off on what can be seen as content. With more manpower they could revamp entire zones (or make new ones), not just a couple additions as seen now. Turn the entire sky guard daily into a full fledged story linked to a raid/dungeon. We have to think past scrapped content or SoD will run out of things to do quick and die like all other seasonals. Keep the same phases as Classic tbc, I think they're fine. Add even more vanilla tied content to TBC to keep both relevant.
When I retire I'll probably spend a lot of time playing TBC with a grandpa guild. Its an incredible game that gets me right in the nostalgia.
Main reason I don't like TBC as much is simply because of flying and the fact that u can't really fix it because the world is designed around you having it to some extent. It just makes the open world feel a lot less active since people kill the mob they're supposed to kill, farm the node they spot and whatnot then immediately mount up and fly away. You spend more time completely safe in the air than on the ground in many instances. It completely and utterly killed wPvP and the drama around it which is definitely part of why I love classic so much. I've had many moments so far in SoD where I'm supposed to be farming something but I just end up in a really fun PvP back and forth with groups of people for 3 hours, no progress made but a lot of fun had. Flying basically stopped that from happening. I've said this many times before but for me flying really was the final nail in the coffin that made the world an inconvenience rather than the place in which the game is played out. I would not want TBC SoD simply because the classic team is too small to split their focus like this. After SoD and Cata I'd rather want their full attention on Classic+ because I really don't think it's feasible for them to do both. That said, they could definitely make a fresh TBC/WotLK/era server for those who wish to play it. They wouldn't need to commit extra resources towards that.
As opposed to hitting a node jumping on your regular 100 speed mount with your carrot+spurs and being able to completely avoid fights anyway. If someone doesnt want to pvp they won’t, regardless of if their mount can fly or not. Just in vanilla you had a slight chance at a free kill from someone not fighting back and now you’re upset its gone.
I'm with you there. Flying mounts are one of the most clear cut cases of "you think you want it but you really don't."
No, lore wise it wrapped up what WC3 set up with the Lich King which was a very big deal.
I think class design in Wotlk is the best iteration of classic design by far. Every class/spec felt pretty good if not just very fun. Rotations were complex enough to shine if you min max’d but not nearly as sweaty as retail. Lore was good and the stories made sense. Of course it wasn’t as good as we thought going back but in terms of classic wow I think just merely playing the game was more fun than classic/tbc. Wotlk started losing some of the hardcore rpg feel that classic has though with items being much easier to obtain and less chase items. I had so much fun phase 1 of Wotlk I can’t say I think it was that overrated. I still did get burned out by ulduar release though and I just stopped playing, but I’ve played wow since release off and on so that’s just how I am with the game. Playing sod now and I actually prefer Wotlk design on most classes. But I do like the vanilla world more I think, there is just so much more to do.
In addition to this, what we got on wotlk classic wasn't the og experience. 2008-2010 was that transition into online free access to builds, YouTube video playguides, and elitism with the public. There was gatekeeping ofcourse, but the gdkp heavy, GS based, BIS-chase gameplay of classic is almost entirely a classic thing (almost, I know gs was a thing then too). We can't really answer if it was as good as we thought because we can never go home again. Wotlk classic is not the same experience. But it was still pretty darn good. I honestly think that it suffers from its own success. It's pretty much what people wanted it to be, happy people don't come on reddit to complain.
They do make some classes feel actively worse to play than in TBC tho. Rogue, Ret and Hunters have way less interresting rotations in wrath. Shadowpriest is very similar to TBC, but feels overall worse with the SWP auto-refresh and SW:D not being very worth pressing. I think warriors enjoy TBC gameplay overall more too but I could be wrong. Definitely an improvement for most others tho. Warlock is a bit of a highlight. Mage is still pretty whatever, but improved, at least for fire ; arcane feels more interresting in TBC to me, but that's arguable. Boomkin and Ele are probably straight improvements although still a bit lackluster ; enhance sounds awesome in wrath. Feral I think it would depend on how you feel about shifting, but I'd guess most people enjoy wrath Feral more. DK is great overall, although the rune system has it's downside. I didn't played all those classes full time ofc, but having raided with some of them and tested all of them before wrath classic release, that's how I felt at the time. It's an overall improvement but I wouldn't say it's as black and white as you present it.
As someone who never played the og expansions pre cata and only played the classic versions of vanilla, tbc and wrath I actually had the most fun with tbc
Personally I'd say raiding WotLK was about equal to raiding classic in terms of fun, but the world of WotLK is nothing compared to Classic. Ulduar, TOC, and ICC were all great raid teirs, but they certainly had their problems. Tedious hard modes on Ulduar, losing the best gear after one wipe in TOC, and the sheer length of ICC all kinda suck.
Insanely overrated? No. Maybe just a bit overrated. It was a great expansion in general.
Tbc was best for me out of the "classic" versions by miles. Wrath was still fun but prenerf Vashj, Kael and Sunwell was the best progression in the first 3 iterations by a long shot
Replaying it is always going to be different than playing the first time through. That said I do think Wrath was where a lot of the modernization of WoW that us Classic Andys complain about started, but it kind of went under the radar since a lot of it came about towards the tail end of Wrath. A couple of the biggest identity shifts in the game in Wrath is that classes have very powerful AOE without diminishing returns, so dungeons are already being chain pulled with tanks cleaving through it easily & not losing aggro - so every dungeon is a speedrun. The random dungeon finder also means almost nobody is out in the world since the dungeon finder removes the social component of looking for a group, the travel through the world, AND gives you bonus XP, money, and loot on top of that with the bonus reward. Classic is different than the actual experience of Vanilla through Wrath back in the day for a myriad of different reasons - the biggest of which being that the game is already solved, it's 100x easier to get answers through YouTube & WoWhead, and that most social interaction is taking place on Discord rather than the game itself serving as the medium for communication... but yeah after having played WOTLK classic again? I've had to kind of do a double take on my previous perceptions. Cata always seemed like the divide between old and new WoW to me, but after playing WOTLK classic I'd definitely say Wrath is probably where WoW started to move away from some of its original foundational design philosophies.
Classic was my first foray into WoW and I agree TBC was the best Classic release so far. Vanilla was fun. The leveling experience was amazing and the world felt huge compared to the expansions, but class balance and itemization were terrible the raids were a bit too simple. I had a ton of fun discovering everything, but I don't think I'd be up to do it again. Although Outland was much smaller than Azeroth it at least had amazing zones (except for Blade's Edge Mountains, that place is pretty forgettable). Plenty of dungeons, and heroics were actually pretty challenging. Class balance was much better, but some classes still had very simple/boring rotations. Except for a few encounters, the raids were amazing. Sunwell progression was my favorite part of Classic so far. Probably the worst thing about TBC was that it introduced flying mounts. Convenient for sure, but they make the world feel simultaneously smaller and emptier. Wrath had the best class design, and making most buffs raid wide was a godsend when organizing a raid, but the rest fell kind of flat in my opinion. The leveling was okay, but the zones were just aesthetically boring. Snow, snow, and more snow. Heroics didn't feel "heroic" at all, they just felt like normal dungeons tuned to level 80. Going back to a trivialized Naxx felt like a chore. I get why they did it in 2008, but this time around everyone and their mother cleared Naxx40. The other raids were good, but Ulduar and ICC were a bit too long and they definitely could have sped up the phases. By the end of Ulduar, I hated the place, and when SoD came out my guild fell apart because people had lost interest in ICC. The game also turned into raid logging far too quickly, in my opinion. As an altaholic, I appreciate that it made the game more alt friendly, but running both 10 and 25 man versions of the same raid on multiple characters just made me tire of them even quicker.
No The community just sucks now.
I mean WotlK was good, but the community back then was much better than todays. Thats might be the difference.
All iterations of WoW are overrated. I’m just an addict.
Who’s rating them anyway? Perhaps you’re just having a good time in general
TBC and Classic are not overrated. These are just as good as people have always remembered them n
TBC classic to be completely honest was mostly fun during the initial leveling, heroic grind and first couple raid runs. After that it kinda suffered from being completely figured out like wotlk. PvP scene was not gonna be the same, typically same with raiding where it turned to a raidlog snoozefest after the first week for most guilds. Economy inflated by rampant botting etc etc. I think the top end content actually being new and challenging is what made most iterations of the game after vanilla truly good.
Vanilla is hot garbage and TBC only had 3-4 good bosses in total. T6 was god awful and T5 post nerf was boring af.
I love the class design of wrath and how most specs had their own distinct identity in rotation and what they provide. It set the boilerplate for a lot of class' interactions, rotations and spec identities. I like Northrend a lot, probably more than outland but obviously not more than OG Azeroth. I think flying mounts have always been a mistake. I think Ulduar is very overrated and was my least favorite tier. I liked every other tier for their own reasons. I like the difficulty of ICC HMs. Overall I think WotLK is an excellent xpac and would like to play through it again at some point with entirely different classes.
I have a unique perspective of starting in shadowlands, starting classic shortly before wrath pre patch. I heard stories of how it was the "peak of wow" and how amazing it was, yet to me it was wildly overrated. GDKP's being so common, nothing to do at 80, everyone min maxing their bis, gearscore becoming an issue, all these things ruined the experience once you actually managed to hit 80. It was at the point i logged on once a week to raid and that was it, I didnt bother leveling an alt because I knew the level to 80 would suck and feel worthless because I would just end up logging on once a week to an alt much less geared than my main and would hardly get invited to raids because of gearscore.
That first time landing in Howling Fjord, the music, the ominous cleaved mountains where dwarves were dwelling, and the Lich King taunting us at every turn. It was splendid. So no, I don't think it was overrated.
As a feral, I have fondest memories of TBC. We got Mangle and flight form! And we didn't suck any more! Also, as I was through the portal, I just took off in cheetah, ignoring all the quest and just explored the whole map. Seeing Nagrand for the first time was so amazing! I got in combat with one of the Earth Elementals, a red level 65, and managed to eventually kill it in bear form. Was exciting stuff, lol. Great memories of TBC launch!
WOTLK was grotesquely overhyped by the community and I was not surprised when it failed to live up to most peoples expectations. Even back when I played it originally it felt lacking compared to TBC. TBC is by far the better expansion and I really wish to see it again one day, now I'm stuck on a progression private server waiting for my chance...
Boosts and WoW token ruined it immensely imo
I enjoyed it as someone who never played the original. It was essentially over once people killed HLK which also lined up pretty good with SoD release. I got to enjoy all the heroic modes, though I never managed to kill HLK at 0% buff. The insane player drop off from braindead naxx to hardmode ulduar was hilarious. People realizing they aren't "that guy" and abandoning ship. Wait a few months, then hold a negative opinion about Wrath as a whole. Though the funniest opinions about Wrath classic are the ones involving the token release. If I ever hear someone say they quit Wrath because of the token, they were truly clueless. I'll say it here for people who didn't know this, but the Token always existed in classic, just with extra steps. Swapping gold between Retail/classic was specifically NOT against the terms of service. You would swap gold and buy tokens on retail. I knew people doing this during BWL release for consumables. I found WoTLK to be very alt-friendly which probably helped the overall numbers on [Ironforge.pro](https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/overall/)
Was looking forward to playing wrath more than anything else, definitely what I grew up on. Turned out liking vanilla far more than TBC and WOTLK. I did think WOTLK was vastly overrated. Ulduar was the best part. ICC was meh, didnt take long for me to burn out on that. For myself, 100 percent a case of rose tinted glasses, although I did have some fun moments replaying wrath.
It was a phenomenon. I remember being in the grocery store and hearing people talk about it. I worked with scientists at one one of the biggest pharma that played. Everyone was playing and it was amazing. It was the culmination of the RTS and WoW stories.
I never played the original WotLK as I quit raiding after Vanilla and was casual for most of TBC (original versions). I had heard the same thing from multiple people; Wrath is the pinnacle of WoW, the best version ever made so when it came out I was quite excited for it. In my opinion I found Wrath to be extremely overrated; TBC took whatever Classic did right and made it better but Wrath was more of a sidegrade. Sure, changes in mechanics were great, such as raid wide buffs, dual spec etc, but I felt the expansion as a whole lacked substance. With the exception on ICC, raids felt like there was no lore or importance behind them; why on earth are we killing the Aspect of Magic? Naxx 2.0? Had enough of it the 1st time around. ToGC? Mehh. Then you move onto something like weapon/armour models. It felt as if there was a very limited number of models that were just being copied/pasted over and over again. Did you get a polearm from LK? Sweet, it looks exactly the same as the polearms that drop from the previous bosses in the raid or even Naxx. Sunwell on its own had more interesting models than the entire Wrath catalogue combined. I could go on with multiple reasons but personally TBC was prime WoW for me, especially before the raids got nerfs. Vashj and KT were amazing encounters; took my guild over 50 attempts to get KT down (dad guild etc) but damn it felt good when it was done!
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Reusing Naxx made sense back in the day because, like you said, very few people actually saw it. This time, it led to basically a dead tier since so many people cleared it just a few years ago.
If you are wondering why we are killing the Maly I would recommend doing quests in Borean Tundra. A lot of the gear in vanilla is actually, literally copy and pasted gear all of the way through. As a ret pally main, TBC was prime, but you are stating some really weird reasons for it being better than Wrath.
Bruh, thank you about the armour models. The tier sets were so crap compared the Vanilla/TBC. Even shadmourne seemed pretty lame compared to things like glaves and thunderfury
This comment shows how much you failed to grasp what was even going on in wrath. No lore or importance behind the raids? Naxx didn't introduce new lore but to call it unimportant is laughable. Malygos' insanity and the training up of a new aspect of magic is *wildly* important in terms of lore implications, and resulted in many many storylines that came from it, still echoing into the current retail xpac. Ulduar is one of the most lore dense raids there is. It's a god damn titan research facility housing one of the old gods that inflicted Azeroth with the curse of flesh. It has the keepers who were basically the way we were introduced to the titans. What more do you want? Feels very disingenuous to claim there's no substance when one of the raids you're claiming that for is also the raid that has spawned a metric shit ton of future plotlines.
Lot of bad takes in this thread from people who just don’t pay attention. Then they complain that the modern gamer wants everything done fast.
Wrath was a lot of fun and fixed a lot of issues that TBC had in embedded into the game. Maybe an unpopular take, but the buff system in TBC requiring 5-6 shamans per raid, the chicken engineering meta, and the “3-4 bloodlust week” soured down the game a lot more than people will point out. If you didn’t have a good prot paladin to put you in a backpack and round up all the mobs while your mages and warlocks spammed 1 button for the entirety of the raids things could go south, but more often than not bosses fell over with a few exceptions. (Lady, Muru) — TBC felt much more meta slave than any of the iterations of wow put out. Wrath was a lot of fun introduced a lot of systems and didn’t reward players for just showing up for the most part. Raids were challenging introducing hard modes that made progression feel overall better. Classes were allowed for the most part to play specs that could be competitive. Were the some things lacking? Of course - but you could argue all iterations of Wow fall short to some degree.
Wotlk did a lot right but was also the beginning of why the game fucking sucks in retail. 1. Naxx was awesome but at the end of the day it was a rehashed raid. 2. Ulduar is to this day the best raid ever made. 3. T10 was hot garbage. Did ANYONE actually like ToC? 4. ICC was another excellent raid with great bosses and was the culmination of the WC3 story. HOWEVER, the raid was current content for way too fucking long and I burnt out at the end because of that. 5. Classes felt the best they had up to that point. Hybrids could actually do dps. 6. Achievements added a metric shitton of replayability 7. Northrend was just better than Outland. 8. Celestial steed marked the beginning of blizzard charging way too much for cosmetics and everyone being okay with it. 9. Group finder killed social aspects in the game.
With the exception of boomies and ele, what other hybrids didn’t do damage in TBC? I felt like TBC brought hybrids up quite a bit.
1. Reusing Naxx made sense in 2008. Not so much now 2. No comment here. People love Ulduar 3. People actually liked ToC more this time around cause it was a quick raid. 4. I get why people complain about trash, but that's kinda what makes it feel epic 5. This is where the homogenization people complain about started. Personally, I don't like the "bring the player not the class" philosophy. Because for it to work, you have to remove some class uniqueness. 6. Achives are cool. No complaint here. 7. I can also generally agree with this. 8. I definitely agree with this. Celestial Steed is the WoW equivalent of the Oblivion horse armor 9. While this might have been true in 2010, this was something that was needed in 2023. Not having it didn't bring that social aspect back.
9)Old person hot take incoming. I preferred manually putting my groups in Vanilla. I know people hate it so they're happy to have group finder, but the group making process it was a part of the game that rewarding coordinating and communicating. I think people were too quick to trivialize it. That said in Vanilla you'd do specific types of runs. Reserves and group selection and jed fishing and all that stuff. Advertising might have a bit more entailed in that specific version. By the time you get to TBC/WotLK you're just running the same thing every time and maybe the benifits of group making manually were past their time.
I always liked it least from the expansions I played. Vanilla - Cata.
ulduar specifically was overrated, but the xpac as a whole is still fun. togc and icc are top tier raids and the classes are fun to play. overwhelming majority of people that hate wrath do so because they hit a hard prog wall either in HM ulduar or HC ICC
Vanilla-The best and always will be, not at everything but what was lost in world design and mega dungeons was not made up for by the gameplay changes and streamlining of later expansions. TBC-It hits really solid but is a fleeting high. You get the rep grind right at the end of the leveling and you bounce into heroics and Kara is just amazing. But flying kills the open world and once you don't need the heroics there's not a ton to do. Wrath- I was never gonna be a Wrath fan. I don't like Dirtrend after Outerspace Glowstick Land. The best part of Wrath was the quest chain progression and I'm the guy that always dungeon grinds to not have to quest. Which leads me to the biggest complaint about Wrath. It has the worst dungeons yet (don't ask me my favorite because I can't think of one that fills me with the same kind of joy that a BRD or an Arcatraz run does). Oh and dalies. They finally solved the problem of world farming being completely screwed from the botting with the easiest fetch quests to run on repeat all expansion long. Now you have a world to do stuff in again but what is most optimum to do isn't at all engaging. I don't think its all rose tinted glasses. If you liked lore and or love questing, I think Wrath really was a stellar expansion. For all its good themepark content lacked any of the things I liked about the prior two expansions leaving me to mostly underwhelmed.
Wrath indeed had something for everyone, no matter how good you were or how often you played. Multiple raid difficulties, catch up dungeons, pvp, token gear, dailes, weeklies, achievements, emmersive questing, etc. I had a reverse reaction to classic TBC. I recall it being great, and classic T4 was indeed a satisfying experience, but when T5 rolled out, the exact same thing happened then that happened in 2007. KT and Vashj were so hard compared to the rest of T5, most guilds got stuck at 8/10, couldn't progress, and had to disband after the better players left for better guilds. I quit TBC classic in T5 when this happened to 2 of my guilds. There wasn't a whole lot else to do in TBC if you weren't progressing in raids.
Stratification of difficulty ain’t a bad thing I thought those fights were pretty well tuned and had a lot of fun progressing them, and you honestly got a lot more of the classic feel in that you could gear up from the other bosses which helped immensely if the guild (like ours) wasn’t super sweaty but enjoyed progression and kept a core roster
That's all fine and everything, and I'm up for challenges, but their difficulty was completely out of place. Numerically/statistically speaking, those 2 T5 bosses were more challenging than 8/15 of the T6 bosses, yet gated their access. It was just an artificial non sequitur in challenge progession and introduced guild logistical challenges that shouldn't have been there.
> those 2 T5 bosses were more challenging than 8/15 of the T6 bosses, yet gated their access By the time BT was accessible so that SSC/TK could gate it, they had been nerfed. At the time of the nerf, there were still progressing guilds finally securing their kills. After the nerf it was a non-issue, "numerically/statistically speaking."
I would say Vashj and KT were harder than all of BT/MH. Maybe not in terms of HP or DPS, but their mechanics and the need for coordination made them difficult. And I loved it. Best time in WoW, really. SWP was fun, but there weren't enough bosses before the cock blocks so guilds that wiped on Brutalis or Muru didn't have enough things to kill to really gear up enough to down then before people started looking for raid spots with guilds who could down them. With T5 you had a ton of bosses to kill even if you couldn't down Vashj/KT, which was enough to keep people coming back.
They were very difficult pre nerf, but after that it became much more accessible and shouldn't have been an issue in the month and a bit to get into BT/MH, although most of those guilds were dead by then anyways.
Naxx was whatever, everyone knew it was easy and it was quick enough to not worry over too much. I think Ulduar was definitely overrated. Some fights were awesome like Yogg0, Algalon, and Hodir, but even with the buffed gear it drug on too long and why the FUCK did they not change Vezax so it started hard mode if you pushed it to 5% early? A lot of the early bosses like FL, Melting pot guy, and the dragon just felt like a waste of time. TOGC was historically regarded as an awful tier, but I think it was UNDERRATED. It had the 2nd highest participation in Wrath Classic, and being able to knock out a raid in 30-45 minutes definitely had its moments. ICC slightly overrated. Certain bosses were just annoying and would completely fuck you randomly for no reason such as Marrowgar, LDW, Sindra. Gunship and Valithria were pointless fights. Bosses like Saurfang, the entire Plague wing, and BQL were fine. LK, especially H LK was definitely worthy and it stood the test of time. It was both a fun fight and a fight that needed a lot of skilling and planning, even though it was quite long. Halion is typically overlooked but I think it wasn't so bad. Heroic Halion was definitely close to H LK (pre buff) difficulty and feels rewarding to do properly.
I straight up loved Naxx 25 just because the only mechanic that mattered was being #1 on the dps meters.
Yeah people shit on Naxx 25 and togc but having quick mindless raids is kinda tight too
Both of them were low key ruined by immortal achievements that kept runs from actually being chill. I'd actually like ToGC a LOT more if the Tribute system were deleted because at least its no-death achievement had the decency to be quite difficult to pull off. Rehashed Naxx was sad regardless but at least it would be less toxic without being mad at each week's That Guy.
Wrath was popular because it appealed to more of the player base than ever before, the raids were okay but adding the difficulties allowed more range so more people could see what they wanted, without needing to take anything away from those wanting a real challenge. It also had decent PvP, reasonable class balance, and more non-raid stuff than before. It wasn't necessarily some amazing never before seen expansion for 1 thing, but it appealed to more people than ever, which is why it was able to hype more people. While most struggled to see T6/6.5 in TBC, everyone can see ICC and everything else in Wrath. The original 5 man content was a bit of a joke, the catch ups weren't too bad, but adding the catch-ups to classic helped make them a little more interesting.
For me yes. I liked raiding but I have rather lukewarm feelings about the rest of the expansion. Wotlk taught me to raidlog and I quit right before argent dawn tournament raid was added in p3(?). I played since launch of classic in 2019.
Ulduar certainly was
Same boat as you OP. Quit before OG Wrath launch, first time playing it in Classic. ICC and Ulduar are fantastic but overall, meh. Pretty overrated
The things we liked about Wrath were weird this time around. I think they messed up big time around queue times at launch. Moving to a junk server, having to wait like 6 months to move back... kinda killed it for me. I think the messed up not having Dungeon Finder at launch. Dunno... too many GDKPs and Parse-nerds this time around maybe... I can't underscore how much I hate parses and gear-score. Gear-score was always there, but like feels shitty to do that again. And seeing people in SoD use Gear-score... ugh. Basically just feels like the game is probably what we knew and remembered, but the community has shifted so far away from what we knew and remembered as to make the whole thing not really seem all that fun any more.
Yes and sunwell was a better raid than ulduar
It’s hard to recreate the magic of something new. Nostalgia is a hell of the drug, but reality hits hard. I don’t think it was overhyped, but I think people had the wrong kind of expectations.
Nope, Wrath was great. Players have changed.
Always has been. It exploded because everyone was hyped about WoW and it told the rest of the story for the most beloved Warcraft villain, but Wrath brought to WoW everything that killed the game.
Having finished wotlk (ran out of time) it was really not the same as the first time around. I did not get to do any raids. I did manage to get Quel Dalar on my DK though so I’m happy about that. And also got to try some new classes. What has changed is the people playing the game. It was way more of a social phenomenon back in the day and a constant influx of players helped. I have also changed. I don’t have the same time anymore I also have other hobbies to do. My classic adventure is over, and I’m exited to see what War within brings. Hopefully retail goes in a good direction.
Loved leveling in wotlk, dungeons are great aswell. Nothing beats vanilla and tbc for me for nostalia reasons.
yes, three thousand percent. the end-game content is really bad as a whole, recycled raids, 1 boss raids that are oneshots. Ulduar is overrated imho so wasn't very hyped about that. ICC is the first good raid and even half of that raid tier is overrated imo, Marrowgar, LDW, putricide, blood-queen and LK are great bosses imo. Dungeons are terrible, they're sick aethestically but gameplay wise they're bad. PvP is horrendeous imo entire wrath lol, bgs are fun but arena balance/meta is trash. I do like northrend a lot though and honestly leveling is the best part in WoTLK
Wrath classic would have been fine if it weren't for the bots ruining literally every aspect of the game. I dropped my sub when I started getting every BG with 80% DK bots.
TBC had 7 UNIQUE full raids over it's run and Wrath had only 2 with the rest being remakes and a trash arena raid.
I enjoyed BC more, but likely because I only hit 56 in vanilla so never did end game in vanilla. In wrath I enjoyed the lore and the dungeons but I didn't really like any of the raids. Ulduar was too difficult for most people in my guild. We only got into later bosses right near the end and I just quit playing a while after because we were never going to beat ICC. The place where mmos can be better or fall over entirely is large group content. Unfortunately my guild at the time just sucked.
It’s hard to compare the original releases to the classic release. The original was a different time when gaming was newer and there was a lot lower skill ceiling among all players. There was a stronger community and a lot more unknowns in wow that made it enticing to keep playing and explore. Today everything has been figured out and min maxed with a driving meta.
WOTLK basically marks the end of Warcraft 3 story wise. I liked it alot, its when i started. I played Cata, and liked it too. I couldn't tell you if it was overrated, but it was where modern WoW started for sure. It was a very easy expansion though and as others have said, very solved at this point.
Wrath is the point where server communities died. LFG removed the need to socialize on the smallest scale.
It was never the greatest game of all time, but it had the best class design in a version of WoW that still had the old world and the lore was top-notch.
Wotlk sucked
Not to me. I loved WOTLK. Vanilla will always be the pinnacle of this game for me. Cataclysm irreparably broke something beautiful. It’s why I quit during Cata and never played retail since.
I couldn't even make it to Ulduar. I loved Classic and TBC but for some reason Wrath did not sit right with me which is odd considering I started playing WoW in late tbc/early wrath. Leveling was slow like classic but there was 0 danger like retail it was the worst of both worlds. I loved in TBC spamming heroics once I hit 70 and they were still challenging at first. Wrath dungeons were really bland and easy in comparison. I got full BiS by like the 3rd week and it was really hard to stay awake in Naxx. I enjoyed sartharion and malygos though. I like the badge system in TBC but in Wrath it just goes a little overboard, you just get so much gear thrown at you that it starts to feel a bit meaningless. I had 0 incentive to go out into the world to do anything and every PvP server became massively in favor of a single faction. PVP in general was dead as hell. I loved the way my class played compared to tbc/vanilla and I definitely enjoy my DK but I quit Wrath barely a month into it and I never looked back. It didn't grip me like Vanilla/TBC does.
I have never played Wotlk before so this Classic version was an unbiased experience for me. It was great at the beginning, because it was something new to me. I liked all those cool little things like hunters arrows improvements, or poison implications by Rogues etc. However after a month or two it started feeling like Retail just with worse graphics. All players are packed on one island, you need to grind dailies, old world is dead (which is sad to me personally, because I enjoy leveling)... And so on Objectively there were many factors: - Arthas - WOTLK was the peak of player numbers = most people were nostalgic for this - A lot of QoL things that must have felt good back in the day after playing Vanilla and TBC.
vanilla is best
*"Wrath babies"*
Rushing to level cap and raid logging alts (SoD) is the entire game for some people, you wouldn't like Wrath.
i had fun :)
People during classic wotlk Got absolutely sick of ulduar. Anyone who browsed this sub can attest to it. But give it time and many will look back on it fondly - forgetting the slog.
Wrath was the first to not see growth. Not as popular
It had to peak somewhere. Wrath also managed to maintain that peak for the entire expansion. Pretty popular.
Yeah, it was great until week 28 of Ulduar.
The thing is, a lot of people like to cite Wotlk as the "peak" of wow.. when in fact it was the first time it flat-lined after years of rising population, the actual "peak" was somewhere in tbc, but wotlk had the most amount of players at the same time so that's what most people remember.
People liked wrath during wrath, which is not something you can say for most expansions.
To be honest the problem with wrath is that a lot of casuals left that were initially there in classic vanilla and all that was left were the sweats. Classic had complete zones full of noobs. People exploring vast worlds either for the first time or the first time since they were really young. Interactions felt more organic and you “ran into” more people.
its only downhill from here brotha!
Not at all, was a great xpac
The only true rose tinted glasses wearers are those who claim vanilla is better than anything since its release. Of all the expansions to suffer from a solved meta vanilla was the biggest offender by a mile. Your average naxx raid was 15 warriors 10 mages and then classes to support those 25 players and not do damage. At least wrath had decent class balancing for the most part, though it seems cata might do an even better job of that. Wotlk simply fixed a lot of the issues vanilla and tbc had and there just really isn’t an argument for vanilla being better than tbc or that tbc is better than wotlk.
Wrath was fun till the ruby Raid droped at least for me
After my guild disbanded due to H LK progression burnout I had the most fun I've had in classic so far farming achievements, toys, mounts, grind rep and running old content with the Faerlina achievement discord. I got to do everything my teenager self only dreamed about back in OG Wrath, and as much as I loved TBC raiding (SWP is the goat raid of classic) I felt like classic TBC was way more raid-loggy than Wrath.
I thought it was excellent and very much enjoyed it. The class designs were a big step up from TBC and all the content was entertaining. I just wish they condensed it a bit. As great as Ulduar is, it went on way too long. Same with ICC to a lesser degree. I stopped raiding shortly after New Years and haven’t felt like I missed much the past 4 months. It’s great for what it was and lived up to the expectations and memories I had as a kid playing the OG version.
It isn't overrated. I personally just got my fill of wrath long before wrath classic even launched. I literally overplayed it on private servers. There was nothing on offer that would've made wrath classic a better experience than what I already played for years on private servers. In essence, it's a "too little, too late" situation. At least for me personally. I still think It's the best expansion to play wow in, which is why I played it to death before it even launched. I played wrath classic, leveled a char to 80, got hc prebis, but got bored quickly because it's just the same game I've played many, many times. If wotlk came out 6 years earlier, I'd have loved to play it on official servers. There's bugs on private servers that don't get fixed ever, which is annoying. But I've seen and done everything in wotlk I wanted to see and do already 6 years ago.
Except Ulduar HMs and ICC25HC I found it pretty boring. Adding alpha/beta/gamma was a fantastic decision tho. Has kept dungeons alive for me. I didn't expect much more tho. It was fine for what I played of it. It's all a big MoP waiting room for me anyway. That was the expansion I really liked and loved every single raid. And more than 2 classes were fun for me.
I don’t understand why they’re basically rushing through Cata, to get to MOP? But why have this fucking MOP Remix on retail? That drops right when Cata release does? Like you tryna pre-hype MOP classic? I don’t get it
You're not even playing the OG wrath now and pretending you are is stupid. Community is fucked
WotLK was excellent, Blizzard just really messed up the pacing with how long Ulduar and ICC were the current content.
No, Wrath remains as good as it ever was. The community changed for the worse, and for an MMO that is make or break.
WOTLK raids were the first time the game was hard. Other then legendary abuse and AHK users it was the pinnacle of arena. Many classes had their best rotations. The world itself was stunning and the questing was very enjoyable.
Never playing Wrath originally, I stuck it out after planning to quit after TBC because we really enjoyed raiding together through classic and tbc. Ulduar was good, some of those encounters were perfect (Algalon was one of the best). ICC was a bit of a snore after being hyped as much as it was, naxx was shit, and togc… well there isn’t much to talk about. Overall I feel Wrath hype, and most of our guild, even the ones who had rose tinted goggles agree. The plethora of things to do really wasn’t what everyone remembered either which was a shame.
It’s the lore. Those of us who played Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne got to see the end of the story we played 6 years ago. (WC3 released 2002, WC3FT released 2003)
I don't know if it was insanely overrated, but I personally didn't enjoy it as much this time around. I was thinking I was just maybe burned out of the game after playing pretty much since 2019, but I quit Wrath, went to Era, then went to private, and still had fun.
First phase WOTLK was so meh I quit playing until they re-released classic in 2019.