This version of TBC is worse than the classic one. It starts with the fact that it was impossible to boost a character at launch, and it ends with the class balance in PvP, where some classes are extremely strong while others are far too weak to compete. On top of that, in almost every raid the key items are HR, which means you practically have no chance of getting them.
Let’s start with HR:
Imagine you’re playing a melee DPS. To deal decent damage you need a lot of external factors, otherwise your logs will be blue, or at best around 80. When you join a raid as a melee DPS, you need a very specific group setup — at minimum a shaman and a hunter. But from the raids I’ve seen, they usually just invite anyone with something like 1500+ GS and don’t really care about the group composition.
In reality, the chance of getting into a proper party is probably about 1 in 3. And even if you constantly end up in bad groups, you still can’t get the item you need because it’s always HR.
So in the end, most of the time you go into a bad party, into a raid where you can’t even get the item you want, and you produce bad logs. Then people look at those logs and simply stop inviting you.
Arenas:
Some items can’t be purchased from the vendor unless you have a rating of 1700+. But getting that rating is practically impossible. Out of 20 games, the record was 15 wins and 5 losses — only a 25% loss rate. Starting rating was 1500. Try to guess the final rating: it ended up being around ~1420.
For a loss you lose about -18 or -19 rating, but for a win you gain 0 or maybe 1 point. And that’s not even mentioning the PvP skill balance issues, where you can get disabled for 10 seconds straight. In my last game I literally couldn’t press anything for about 30–40 seconds continuously.
That completely kills any fun PvP could have in this game.
Heroic dungeons:
This is a whole separate topic. They’re something that feels many times harder than raids. Mobs can randomly one-shot even well-geared tanks, and there are fears from mobs that almost always send you running into another pack and wipe the entire party.
To be fair, it was interesting during the first week after the expansion launched. But now, after such a short time, there’s basically no reason to go there anymore. Badges are already useless to most people, and there aren’t any other meaningful rewards. At the current stage of the server, it’s just a waste of time.
Heroic SP deserves special mention. It’s almost always run as a “skip run.” Be prepared that in about 80% of cases when you see something like “Skip run 15 min, smooth clear, experienced tank, experienced healer”, the run will take at least 45 minutes.
Gathering Professions:
This one is just insane. If you want to start gathering ore or herbs, you basically need a small investment of around 5000 gold, otherwise collecting anything will be extremely difficult.
But that’s not even the main problem. The biggest issue is that everything is completely flooded with bots.
If you’re not a player who uses gathering professions, you might actually like it, because the bots constantly undercut each other and prices stay low. That means you don’t have to spend a lot of gold buying consumables for raids.
The downside, however, is that real players who leveled mining are ready to kill each other over 5 gold, even inside heroic dungeons. And you’re lucky if that player isn’t the healer.
To sum everything up briefly, this could have been a really great iteration of WoW. But a few things are holding it back: class and spec imbalance, constant HR on key items, a huge number of bots, and heroic dungeons that lost their relevance just two weeks after release.
Personally, I think a good solution would be to add raid items to a badge vendor — for example, for around 200–300 badges — but limit it so that you can only buy one item of your choice per month.
That would make the gameplay much more player-friendly and would also give people a real reason to keep running heroic dungeons again.
Or they could simply remove Master Loot entirely and make raid drops automatically go to a roll between players whose current spec can actually use the item.
A small class rebalance would also be helpful. Right now there are classes that, even with the same gear, deal significantly less DPS than others. Fixing that would make raid compositions much more diverse.
But more than anything, PvP needs the biggest rebalance.