I feel like WotLK was the sweet spot

[shimerra]

i happened to love naxxramas.

How? Two nights in with the type of raiders we wouldn't have let near a 25 man with a 200foot long pole and we had naxx full cleared and farms status. And the immortal achievement was perhaps the most infuriating achievement ever. And yes I have my black proto drake. The only way we could keep our entertainment that tier was to intentionally do stupid shit to keep it interesting. OS3+10 was that tier's singular saving grace.

[Phood]

Ugh. MMO-Champ was ablaze with WOTLK hate posts when it was current content. How soon we forget. TBC nostalgia ran amok. I think it's pretty safe to say that a vast majority of MMO-Champ posters just love to hate on the current content.

[Deleted]

From WotLK I miss the ability to have multiple max level characters, all reasonable well geared for raids.

[Madruga]

Personally I thought wrath was doo doo, LFD made dungeons a snooze fest, pull all the trash in the room at once and aoe without risk of dying, ICC for a year, PvP had some massive ups and downs in wrath too. I think the high sub rate had more to do with the lich king story line which many people wanted to see play out from the wc3 days.

Dungeons near the end of Cataclysm were also AOE fests. The same dungeons that made people despair in frustation at the begining of the x-pack. Thing is, when you overgear content so hard, you really can't expect a challenge.

Wrath dungeons were just easier to overgear. Blizz even stated that they made epic gear too powerfull at the begining of Wrath.

[shimerra]

From WotLK I miss the ability to have multiple max level characters, all reasonable well geared for raids.

You still have that. 4 raid geared 90s, zero outside help. Made my own pugs and almost always did LFR by myself. Didn't buy any epics either unless they were 2kish.

Dungeons near the end of Cataclysm were also AOE fests. The same dungeons that made people despair in frustation at the begining of the x-pack. Thing is, when you overgear content so hard, you really can't expect a challenge.

Wrath dungeons were just easier to overgear. Blizz even stated that they made epic gear too powerfull at the begining of Wrath.

Thing is Wrath dungeons were AoE snooze fests from the get go. Occulus was the singular undesirable instance. My fresh lvl 80dk was ran through by a ret paladin in his alt prot gear from sunwell through every single heroic except occulus in a day so I could soak up all the tank gear. I guess if you call a wierd mish mash of wrath ret gear and sunwell prot gear overgearing/shrug.

[LaughingMan]

I really don't understand all the hate for Naxxramas. I had a lot of fun with it. I thought it was great that it was fairly easy, seeing how it was the first raid tier of the expansion. Within the first week there were enough people at the level cap on my server to pug some of it on 10 man.

I still think that adding the dungeon finder was a mistake though. It was fun when we had daily dungeon quests.

I also miss hybrid specs. That was another plus of WotLK. As a mage, it feels like my options are more limited in MoP. Not only that, but the specs are almost meaningless now. They aren't different enough. A pure fire mage shouldn't have Ice Barrier, and a frost mage shouldn't have an arcane bomb. There is too much overlap in the specs.

When I started raiding in MoP, I wanted to be a frost mage. I was soon after forced to take a bomb other than Frost Bomb though to increase DPS, which is ridiculous. The new talents were supposed to be about choice, but they are not. I can no longer be a Frostfire mage, an arcane frost mage, or a PoM Pyro mage. I can no longer experience the joy of timing my water elemental's Freeze attack with a damaging Deep Freeze of bosses. On top of that, I am forced to run out of mana so that my level 90 talents serve a purpose. I don't know what class I'm playing anymore, but it certainly isn't the mage that I played in BC and WotLK.

[stomination]

From WotLK I miss the ability to have multiple max level characters, all reasonable well geared for raids.

Not much has changed in that regard.

[killidan]

From pvp to pve, from hardcore to casual. Patch 3.3.5 was icing on the cake.

Shifting away from WotLK formula was a huge mistake. A wise man once said: Never change a winning team.

They should've added more content, not completely change how things work. Blizzard hasn't reached the sweet spot again since 4.0

I played WotLK because it was the one after TBC. It was not as good in my opinion as Vanilla or TBC. However, I agree with do not change the winning team/don't try to fix what's not broken approach.

A mix of TBC+WotLK gives us:

A new continent with 7-8 zones
A joint horde-alliance capital city
10 levels
About 15 NEW 5-man dungeons with about 55 bosses
3.5 tiers of NEW raid dungeons with about 50 bosses
A main villain that is relatively well-known
Standard Warcraft lore, no pandas and rats and rabbits
1 new race or class
Incentive for non-LFD and non-LFR runs (can't remove them suddenly)
A reasonable number of dailies
Gimmicks like challenge modes, mounts, pokemon only if there is time to devote, not a priority

[Haywire5714]

I often wonder what the reaction would be if a thread like this was posted back in Wotlk.

[Griffter]

I started playing in Wrath and started raiding in ICC, so I will always be a bit biased toward that expansion. That said, I do genuinely think the raids were set up better back then, with 10mans being the more casual raiding content and 25s being the more "hardcore." We 10-man guilds didn't feel like second-class citizens then. We knew we were bad and just wanted to have fun together and kill bosses. LFR is not a good substitute for that, so we're left without any raiding content that feels like it was meant for us.

[mvaliz]

Thing is Wrath dungeons were AoE snooze fests from the get go. Occulus was the singular undesirable instance. My fresh lvl 80dk was ran through by a ret paladin in his alt prot gear from sunwell through every single heroic except occulus in a day so I could soak up all the tank gear. I guess if you call a wierd mish mash of wrath ret gear and sunwell prot gear overgearing/shrug.

Oh HELLS NO you didn't say that.

Wrath dungeons were SOOOO not AoE fests at the begining! I remember wiping several times on the last boss in Halls of Lightning. If you didn't get out of that AoE blast, you were one-shotted.

I remember having to gather and deal with the adds against the final boss of Halls of Stone.

I remember having an INSANE tough time hoping to hold out against the adds in the Bran Bronzebeard escort part.

I remember Venoxis without the add-kiting glitch at the door... /shiver

I remember getting malowned by the final boss of Old Kingdom simply because I couldn't handle the shadow-adds. >_<

And lets not forget the terror that was the Consortium guy in Violet Hold!

Yeah... they were NOT AoE fests at the beginning. They only became as such when LFD happened, and people actually got gear-matched with other players...

I STILL remember the very loud disdain people had when they heard about LFD for the first time. All anybody pictured in their minds was wipefest after wipefest... (ironically, what we feared when LFD was first announced DID happen when Cataclysm was released...)

NOBODY expected it to become a fast-paced AOE bananza fest! :P

---------- Post added 2013-05-21 at 03:47 AM ----------

I often wonder what the reaction would be if a thread like this was posted back in Wotlk.

BC fans would complain... the rest of us would be enjoying playing Wrath and not reading the forums. :P

[NatePsy]

They should have never moved from the accessibility ICC had, you could pug it and still down things because Ventrilo etc. Complexity increased bigtime in the expansions after ICC, leaving raids not very puggable as they used to be. I remember that weekend ICC pug and having a great time, now? Not so much.

[Deleted]

i loved doing mass aoe damage with seed of corruption.

Yeah well. I dont know about you, but 12 months pressing one button is not compelling gameplay. SoC was great but not really so amazing I would still love to spam that, and only that before boss that dies in literally 20-30 seconds depending on phases or mechanics (like going immune).

Oh HELLS NO you didn't say that.

Wrath dungeons were SOOOO not AoE fests at the begining! I remember wiping several times on the last boss in Halls of Lightning. If you didn't get out of that AoE blast, you were one-shotted.

OP said 3.3.5 was "icing on the cake" so this aint about start of wrath (strictly). Not to mention praises about LFD (back then, not in cata/mop).


The big mistake they did was going from snoozefest "you can raid while watching tv on normal modes" to Cata's difficulty.
Now which one was wrong.. the cata's difficulty or wrath's is subjective I guess.

But wrath sure wasnt having much of complex things at 3.3.5 on normal/casual content.

[Flaks]

And actually I think MoP carries on all the main elements of Wrath and just added a lot of new content on top.

In terms of grindiness, MoP is closer to tBC than Wrath. And that's the bottomline. Blizzard brought back to the game the worst possible thing that they could and something they had been effectively moving away from for 4 years.

[Shampro]

To me Wrath had 3 solid things. Ulduar , LFG and a lot of pug friendly ativities. Everything else was just such a drag. ToC probably the worst Raid for me, Naxx, something that was in the game previously, PVP was not that great, Wrathful glad season was solid though. A lot of Class balance issues. And the worst of all, ICC/RS lasting fucking 12 months, that was fucking awful and I sometimes get a smile when I see people praise Wrath when back then it was a shitstorm on the forums because content was draged out so damn much.

Oh before I forget, 5mans should be easy yes, but 5mans back then could be done with no healer and tank thats honestly something that shouldn't happpen. Mist has a really good sweet spot for 5man sadly there weren't enough of them.

[killidan]

[Maelstrom51]

That graph is misleading at first. Note that the green line isn't representing an amount, but the amount of change. Basically, BC showed the quickest gain in subscribers, followed by Wrath, and then Cata started the major decline, and with MoP is sinking faster than ever.

I have no idea if this has much to do with dungeons though. Its always important to realize that correlation is not the same as causation.

[Mormolyce]

Hard mode Lich King. Normal was a joke, downed it the first week he was open.

EVERYTHING is downed the first week it opens on NM. That's what it's tuned for.

[Halicia]

Oh before I forget, 5mans should be easy yes, but 5mans back then could be done with no healer and tank thats honestly something that shouldn't happpen. Mist has a really good sweet spot for 5man sadly there weren't enough of them.

Agree with ya on dungeons... While Normal mode Raids in Wrath were closer to the sweet spot then Normals in Cata/MoP, I feel the Heroic Raids were too easy and now they're much closer to where they should be. Which makes sense because they were still trying to see where they fit in the grand scheme of things.

[Deleted]

Yeah, wotlk was pretty much wow's climax. Things have been rolling down hill ever since.