I don’t get all the hype people had for this expansion. TBC and Vanilla seemed better to me honestly, I might even enjoy Cataclysm more. The only good raid from this expansion is ICC, Ulduar is cool but it’s very annoying, Nax is just a copy/paste of the Vanilla one but worse and the rest are lackluster or filler.
I enjoyed the zones, but they’re big and empty.
Classes feel a lot stronger than TBC/Vanilla, maybe a bit too much in some cases. I actually enjoyed this tbh.
As a whole, classes feel good and zones are cool, but the rest is nothing special, people had too much nostalgia for this expansion. One problem with WotLK is that this is the expansion that started the trend of “old content is now worthless”.
WoTLK was always overhyped and was always the first major step towards gameplay that people refer to as ‘retail’.
But what WoTLK did right was the fun class mechanics, something later expansions ruined. Cataclysm ruined paladins for a lot of people, the hunter changes were major (improvements imo, but some hate focus) and Cataclysm also completely decimated Fury.
It’s just one of those things. Dull raids with fun classes > Fun raids with dull classes.
I think WOTLK is peak gameplay for Warrior, tuning aside it feels amazing to play all 3 specs. Arms in Cataclysm feels good but both Prot and Fury feel much worse, on top of that they are a tuning disaster and are useless.
Generally speaking I think most classes hit a peak of playability in WOTLK, that for many specs was never improved on, Dragonflight feels so limp compared to WOTLK. Ulduar and ICC are also among the best raids ever released, with really cool bosses and great pacing. TBC had Karazhan, Zul Aman and Black Temple as cool raids, but TBC classes weren’t as fun across the board.
WOTLK isn’t my favourite expansion, but it’s close, TBC is my favourite but I think as a whole WOTLK was better. I prefer to play WOTLK than Vanilla ERA.
You underestimate how people feel about Arthas as a Lich King. For Warcraft 3 players, it will always be the most iconic character who can easily hold the whole expansion on his back. All things around Lich King creates a great atmosphere.
You joking right? TBC is the one that started the trend of making old content worthless. A trend that you don’t have to worry about old content because new expansion will be release. TBC set the “foundations” for future expansions.
Whenever I see someone saying the word “nostalgia”, they are complete clowns in my eyes. A person that is incapable of providing solid arguments to prove his point and they just use that word as quick “escape”. You realise same can be said about TBC right?
How exactly? The best trinket in the game drops in Gruul’s Lair? The only thing they did was remove attunements when content was 2 tiers behind so people could move forward, Vanilla didn’t have attunements that required you to beat the end boss of a hard raid to move forward, you could walk into Naxx 40 by just paying some gold.
In TBC guilds were still progressing T5 when Sunwell came out (A whole year after T6 had been available), because prior to Sunwell release you couldn’t enter T6 unless you had beaten Vashj and KT. In TBCC they nerfed T5 and removed attunements earlier to allow players to catch up, but people still ran all the raids until the last week of TBCC.
You talk about attunements like is the smartest thing Blizzard did back then. But it not. Forcing people to do all raids in order was a chore. Was just a lazy fast system.
And when I said TBC “making old content worthless”, I was referring to old 60 raids.
About the current content from current expansion, OG Wrath was better than Wotlk Classic with the new catch up system. The only smart thing they did in all Wotlk Classisc is buffing Ulduar gear. Without the stupid catch up system, people would still Phase 1 raids.
Being upset that lvl70 raids made lvl60 raids obsolete is like being upset that BRD makes Scarlet Monastary obsolete. In any case, there are actually some things in lvl60 raids that maintained value in TBC, badge of the swarmguard is among a number of examples.
But it’s not until WOTLK that previous tiers become obsolete. Example there is no reason to do Naxx 25 once Ulduar is out, WOTLK Classic did make Ulduar more relevant until expansion end though, with trinkets like Flare/Comet’s Trail.
And that right there is perfect example why TBC fanboys are the most delusional WoW players in history of WoW. You failed to understand the difference between lvl 60 and lvl 70 level cap content and made a stupid comparison with 2 dungeons from same era. People like you love being delusional about TBC being a perfect expansion while they keep pointing finger at Wotlk for decline of WoW.
WOTLK’s best feature is class design, because classes actually feel finished and well designed (some may even be a little over designed) around their core identity. Cataclysm breaks these up by for example giving Warriors a self heal and turning Paladins into Rogues with a combo point system. This is imo primarily why people remember WOTLK so fondly.
As someone who played og WOTLK I never felt any nostalgia for it and I didn’t even consider playing it, the only worthwhile WoW expansion imo is Vanilla.
Okay I’ll bite. How should blizz have handled it then when releasing TBC back in the day? Make 60 raids scale up to 70? Well they wanted players to be in the new raids and experience the story.
Yeah, levelling sucks even with a 50% (70% with looms) bonus and until LFD FINALLY came out endgame just wasn’t engaging for me. I had no interest in Naxx after running it for a year trying to get Ashbringer back in TBC and I’ve always thought Ulduar was overrated.
A lot of the fun I’m having with this expansion is because of the stuff that they added to it. Like Gamma Dungeons and the Scourgestone loot system as well as account wide mounts, pets and toys sparking my interest in collecting again (An interest that died off in retail due to an overabundance of mounts/pets/toys).
How was pre-nerfed T5 content awful? it was the best what TBC had to offer right next to pre-nerfed sunwell. Not everyone enjoys a snoozefest.
And the pre-nerfed states of the raids were by no means something that took world first raider skills to overcome. A proper raid team and players with atleast some understanding of the encounters were all that was needed.
Well, TBC should not happen in the first place. Vanilla had a lot of problems and unfinished zones. Instead of adding more content and fixing the problems (ex. making more specs viable in raids) and adding the rest of the maps in Azeroth (like they did in Cata), they decided to take the easy way and abandon the old content and release TBC. It was a very good decision for making more money, that worked very well for YEARS (and still works for retail), to get new players by reducing raid size from 40 to 25 and making old content (like 60lvl raids) obsolete. Until players got tired of same routine every expansion and that lead the number of subscribers go down.
And that’s why TBC laid the “foundations” for future expansions to happen. But TBC fanboys keep denying that. And keep pointing finger at Wotlk.
But let talk about second scenario how they could have release TBC…
First problem is the stats inflation. Increasing the lvl cap to 70 it not an excuse to inflate stats like that. They could have keep the stats gain from leveling from vanilla. Same with items. That way even 60lvl raids could remain relevant. But eventually they will still become obsolete after many expansions with lvl cap increase.
Another problem is reducing raid size from 40 to 25. You know, for a MMO (MASSIVELY multiplayer online) you would expect epic battles with over 100 people in raids instance vs a boss. But that’s a lot harder to design a raid. A lot easy to design a raid for 25 people.
And another one that I can think now is flying. Blizzard regretted for many years introducing flying mounts in WoW. That’s why they made it harder and more annoying to fly in new zone with each expansion until Dragonflight. They never had a clear idea for years what flying mounts are for, except getting you faster from point A to point B.
But like I said. In the end they should not release TBC in the first place.
Bad example. TBC story was one of the worst. They basically turned iconic characters from Warcraft 3 into generic villains to be killed.
So you mean horizontal progression as opposed to vertical progression? Well back then a new expansion was always heralded by an increase in level cap, so you could experience the zones and storylines. As of now more and more people seem to dislike this in retail becaus it’s absolutely meaningless, but back when TBC was released this really wasn’t the case imo.
It felt incredibly epic to step through the dark portal for the first time and seeing levels 60-70 enemies roaming around, making you want to get to 70 asap to be stronger.
Vanilla was esentially unfinished, true, but it was so massive it really didn’t matter. It was already the most complete mmo that gave every demographic something. You had a very long and interesting leveling journey and easy max lvl dungeons for the casuals, and raids for the little more hardcore.
Hmm I see where you’re coming from but it makes sense to get more powerful items in the newest raids. After having MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx available for so long I don’t think people would have liked having to go there again for loot. I know “having to” isn’t really the case but knowing guilds that want to minmax loot this is what will happen. And TBC raids were a big step up in difficulty so most guilds were stuck there anyway.
This I cannot understand. Getting together 40 people at the time and managing them without the tools we have now, not to mention bad/no voice comms and unstable internet. It’s also not fun having 8 others in the raid that share your class and having only 3 items drop per boss. At the end of vanilla people were so burnt out that they just stopped playing when they knew TBC was about to come out. Not that naxx was so difficult in and of itself, it was everything with 40 man raiding.
Purely subjective. It certainly had it’s flaws, some blizzard fixed when they released TBCC, but to me both TBC and TBCC was an amazing experience.
Also subjective, and could be said about Vanilla aswell. If raid size is the only thing that makes a fight epic, it’s not epic in the first place.