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  1. #121
    Quote Originally Posted by Thoughtcrime View Post
    Being there felt like the end of a long journey, it was a masterpiece, and I loved it.
    One of the main reasons for the player feeling a sentiment of belonging in that expansion (in my case, anyway) is probably the fact that the Lich King had his whole story built up back in WC3. If you did the campaign, you accompanied Arthas during his full transformation from hero to villain. Not only that, but we also controlled him as a unit during the missions, tightening the bond between player and character and making the entire experience wholesome. But then, during WotLK, we played as the hero, commited to bringing justice to his story, only for it to reach its climax atop Icecrown Citadel.

  2. #122
    WotLK was not very good.

    It had the most players because of when it occurred and the main focus of it (tying up the biggest draw from WC3).

    Overall, it was a pretty piss poor expansion even WoD had beat. I had to take an 8 month break in the middle of it to go back to Runescape and I wish I was joking.

    Let's also not forget the bullshittery of how Arthas died.

    "Jokes it was my plan all along to bring you here!!!"
    "By the light make me anime bullshit to win the day"
    "Oh no not the unexplained light that instantly wins the day!!!!"

  3. #123
    Nice opinion there man, would be a shame if someone disagreed with it.

  4. #124
    The Lightbringer Perkunas's Avatar
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    1. Tier gear from badges - FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA
    2. Trial of the Grand Crusader - Completely uninspired and boring raid
    3. Wintergrasp - Welfare gear for terribles
    4. Heroic Dungeons - They were turned into a complete faceroll
    5. LFG - Forced easier content on us and made the playerbase lazy
    6. Gearscore - Idiots demanding you outgear an instance in order to run said instance FOR GEAR
    Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory
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    When we both of us knew how the end always is...

  5. #125
    Quote Originally Posted by Doomchicken View Post
    Also wrath had the worst excuse for a tier raid I've ever participated it: Trial of the crusader. That place was shit.
    It was better then having 24 months of 2 raids. Trial of the crusader is exactly the example of why WoD is garbage in a can. Same for ruby sanctum, same for Sunwell is TBC. You had shit to play, they didnt sit on their ass. You had ulduar right before TotC. If Wrath was WoD, you would have raided eye of eternity and naxx for a year, then ice crown citadel for another year.
    Last edited by minteK917; 2016-08-24 at 05:08 AM.

  6. #126
    Quote Originally Posted by Exilian View Post

    3) Crystalsong, arguably the most beautiful zone in the Northrend, had virtually zero content. Now I'm not sure where exactly I saw this, but I read somewhere that it was supposed to be a thriving questing zone like all the others but Blizz decided to cut content before release, possibly due to lack of resources (WOD flashbacks anyone?).
    Dalaran (Lagaran) was a massive resource hog, as per blizzard statements made in the past. The rest of your post is opinion, nothing more.

  7. #127
    Quote Originally Posted by Volardelis View Post
    Anub'arak was original? The dude dies in a launch dungeon and shares similar mechanics.
    ToC Anub was completely different from the dungeon one. The ice patches for both the minnions and the transitions phases was very original and unique. Also last phase that you had to keep everyone low and at the same time be careful to not let people die was very original. So yea, I think that fight was amazing.

  8. #128
    Deleted
    Dungeons becoming much too easy, introducing the 'raid or die' model for group content
    Bad content pacing - Ulduar lasting far too short, ICC lasting a year
    Abolishing progression system in favor of modern-day content obsoletization

    In TBC multiple tiers could have existed at the same time - BT was released before anyone could even enter it.
    In WOTLK this sytem went away. Ofc WoD has more extreme version of it (where older tiers are completely useless, even if they belong to the same patch - Highmaul -> BRF) but overall it's nearly the same.

    Basically WOTLK was the transient patch from oldschool WoW to modern WoW.
    Not a bad expansion but not without its flaws either.

  9. #129
    WOTLK has a soft spot for me because it's when my guild was most active. Members from across the USA came to visit us (based in Houston, TX). We had all weekend LAN parties at each others places. We pugged raids with folks from our server. There was a sense of community and cooperation.

    It's gone now.

  10. #130
    The most mature and thereby the best expansion is MoP no matter how you look at it. Environments, quest design, raiding, pvp, world questing through factions, world pvp through karasang, advancing main story arc throughout the expansion, etc. The literal only downside was Pandas, and zero familiar WoW elements, other than the horde -alliance conflict, which it leaned heavily on.

    Even Cata was almost there. With Cata, cutting Abyssal Maw and relegating DS to a 8 boss raid was blaspheme and so unfortunate for such a promising expansion.


    Wrath without a doubt is best / near best for being a precursor to excellent development we've seen in questing and environment. Most of the nuanced problems weren't because there was just zero content like WoD, but because so much was an experiment which just didn't have any prior knowledge to be given proper timing. I don't blame Blizz at all for doing things as they did.

  11. #131
    Mechagnome kojinshugi's Avatar
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    1. They were not disconnected from the main story at all. There were three story threads in Wrath - Arthas, the Dragonflights, and Titans/Old Gods. The latter two set the ground for future expansions, yet were still connected to the Arthas story as well.

    2. If you think Icecrown and Storm Peaks were visually identical, you need to get your eyesight checked. If you mean they were internally consistent, how is that a bad thing? The area in Storm Peaks with the dwarf/giant battle frozen in ice is still one of the most visually stunning places in the game.

    3. Crystalsong was tiny and still had some quest content. Considering there were TWO end-game zones, a third one wasn't really needed.

    4. Out of nowhere? Old God corruption was present in nearly every zone, it explained the origin of Humans, Dwarves and Gnomes. Unimpressive end? The culmination of what is to this day the best raid ever created, freeing of the Titan Keepers and the revelation of Algalon? Were we playing the same game?

    5. The zones were specifically designed for flying. Storm Peaks could have a sense of massive scale that did justice to the Titan machinery there, whereas Icecrown was riddled with extremely dangerous elites, making the player pick areas they could risk poking their nose into.

    6. As opposed to Cataclysm, where we knew we would eventually get to and kill Deathwing, or MoP, where we knew we would eventually get to and defeat Garrosh, or WoD, where we... I'm still unsure as to what actually happened in WoD.

    Wrath had its flaws, but your nitpicks are absurd.
    When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

  12. #132
    Quote Originally Posted by Exilian View Post
    1) Most of the quests in zones like Grizzly Hills, Fjord, Borean, and Sholazar were completely disconnected from the main story
    I can agree for the most part, though I don't think it's a particularly bad thing. The focus in most of the Wrath zones was to introduce you to the sub-players: the factions and enemies that would fill in the story. However, there were also constant appearances by the Big Bad to imply that he was behind the commotion in these zones. It's not the world's greatest connect, but it doesn't bother me.

    2) The two top level zones were almost completely identical in aesthetics with very few visual variations throughout.
    They're identical in the sense that both of them were mountainy and snowy, but I disagree that the overall aesthetics were identical. They felt quite different. Icecrown felt very menacing, and particularly in the quests you were doing it was clear that this was where the Lich King's army was being staged and had to be stopped. Storm Peaks felt pretty pristine, with the strange interspersions of the Titans that would define that zone's raid.

    3) Crystalsong, arguably the most beautiful zone in the Northrend, had virtually zero content.
    Can't argue with this. It seems quite likely that it was indeed cut content, but since I literally don't remember anybody complaining about not having enough to do in Wrath I don't see how it matters. People always look at cuts like something is being taken away from them, like they're something to be mad about, but it's not really true. Plans change. The expansion was fine without whatever may have been planned for Crystalsong.

    4) Yogg'saron was squeezed in seemingly out of nowhere, and met a highly unimpressive and unimportant end for something that is apparently the root of (almost) all evil on Azeroth.
    Can't you make the same argument for almost any boss, especially ones that aren't the end-expansion boss? Regardless it was a good fight and with the ability to ramp up the difficulty, it kept people interested and busy for a long time. Ulduar is many peoples' all-time favorite raids; whatever you feel was missing for Yogg clearly wasn't a huge deal.

    5) Flying was available at lvl 77, allowing players to fly over all of the seemingly looming, menacing threats in Icecrown and Stormpeaks, taking away much of the "darkness" and "danger" behind them.
    Disagree, but no sense reigniting the flying debate. I think the pure scale of the zones--which damn-near necessitate flying--does plenty to make them feel epic and menacing.

    6) The entire expansion was pretty predictable, from start to finish, in that we knew we would eventually get to and kill Arthas. No plot twists aside from Wrathgate, which again didn't impact the overall story though.
    Good, I liked that. I liked the way the Lich King kept popping up as the influence behind all the evils happening on that continent, and knowing he would be fighting him at the end did nothing to blunt my enjoyment of the expansion or the boss fight.

    I much prefer this "one Big Bad" strategy to the MoP/WoD strategy of trying to sneak the Big Bad in near the end and to lead that into the next expansion. I also think it is better for storytelling purposes because it allows time to pass more freely. I have no idea how much time has supposedly passed during the war on Draenor, but it's pretty clear that not much passed between the end of MoP and going to Draenor and the death of Archimonde and the beginning of Legion. It's hard to grow and develop characters when so little time passes, and while I don't dislike the whole "the player is the new hero" thing, we still need good auxiliary characters to develop alongside.

    "oh it was the best thing that ever happened to WOW, everything was 10/10", well, they're wrong.
    Even among people who count Wrath as their favorite expansion--and I am among them--I have never heard anybody utter those words. If this was a long-winded excuse to give your opinion on Wrath, so be it. There are my replies.
    “Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.” -- Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

  13. #133
    Deleted
    Wotlk was the expansion when they undid ner'zhul. It was then when darth vader randomly was decided to be superior.

  14. #134
    Wrath still to this day holds 2 of the best raids ever made with Ulduar and ICC. They were huge and felt like you were really out of your place (Ulduar!) all raid since then has felt restrained somehow. Like HFC most recent, why is it so small? Even from the outside the building looks small. If you compare the inside size with the putside you wuickly notice that it's1/3 as big as it should've been on the outside. When we stood outside ICC or Ulduar we were dwarfed by the size of those buildings...

    I enjoy the encounters in HFC and some of the ones in other new raids, but the whole pack doesn't feel anywhere close to as epic as Ulduar or ICC was. Maybe Suramar raid will be good.
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  15. #135
    Quote Originally Posted by Exilian View Post
    I realise I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this, but I'm honestly getting a bit tired of hearing that "WOTLK was the greatest expansion ever ergmagherrrrd" mantra that seems to be prevalent throughout the WoW community (although it still takes second place in the annoyance competition with the "everything but Vanilla sucked because it was too easy" adage). Hence, I thought I'd outline some of the shortcomings of the fabled expansion to remind people that it, too, had many things that sucked bigtime.

    1) Most of the quests in zones like Grizzly Hills, Fjord, Borean, and Sholazar were completely disconnected from the main story, which would have been fine as standalone plot arcs had they not been, for the most part, boring and anticlimactic, not to mention cliche. Just for comparison, every single new zone in Cataclysm, for example, absolutely blew all of Northrend out of the water when it came to plot and aesthetics.

    2) The two top level zones were almost completely identical in aesthetics with very few visual variations throughout. This was consistent with the lore of the zones, but failed to make them any less of an eye-sore after a few months of seeing more of the same every single day.

    3) Crystalsong, arguably the most beautiful zone in the Northrend, had virtually zero content. Now I'm not sure where exactly I saw this, but I read somewhere that it was supposed to be a thriving questing zone like all the others but Blizz decided to cut content before release, possibly due to lack of resources (WOD flashbacks anyone?).

    4) Yogg'saron was squeezed in seemingly out of nowhere, and met a highly unimpressive and unimportant end for something that is apparently the root of (almost) all evil on Azeroth.

    5) Flying was available at lvl 77, allowing players to fly over all of the seemingly looming, menacing threats in Icecrown and Stormpeaks, taking away much of the "darkness" and "danger" behind them.

    6) The entire expansion was pretty predictable, from start to finish, in that we knew we would eventually get to and kill Arthas. No plot twists aside from Wrathgate, which again didn't impact the overall story though.

    Overall, I am not trying to say that WOTLK was a bad expansion by any means, nor that it wasn't *better* than, say, WOD, but when people over-exaggerate and go "oh it was the best thing that ever happened to WOW, everything was 10/10", well, they're wrong. It was, for the most part, fun and new. But it was also a bit monotonous and stale in looks and storytelling.
    1. So the whole story of trying to integrate into a new land with new people, the continent wide corruption of Yogg Saron and the Lich King showing up numerous times had nothing to do with the story?

    2. Icecrown and Storm Peaks... One of them a beautiful snowy mountain range with a Titan theme, the other one a barren wasteland of rock, corrupted and inhabited by scourge? I'm not entirely sure how you have come up with this one.

    3. Questing content in Crystalsong was cut due to Dalaran lag issues.

    4. You mean Yogg Saron who's lore and presence was there throughout the whole levelling process and expansion? I mean Yogg Saron was second only to Lich King as the overall theme of the Expansion. I guess if you ignored all of that and the overarching story, the whispers, the visions and the build up it would seem squeezed in seemingly out of nowhere... If you actually paid attention, amazingly it makes perfect sense!

    5. The zones were designed with flying in mind, there was no lack of "darkness and danger". Their solution to making the size of the scourge force look adequate was to have it covering most of the zone, no doubt Lord of the Rings inspired.. Wouldn't exactly be practical on foot would it?

    6. No plot twists aside from the big plot twist largely considered one of the defining moments of lore in the history of the game, and the standard setter for epic in game cinematics? In which expansion did we not defeat the end boss? Oh I guess all the other times we killed the end boss were unpredictible then... Whoa we defeated Garrosh in an expansion where we knew he would be the end boss... How unpredictible that we defeat the last boss of a raid..


    Overall you're talking out of your ass.
    Last edited by Bigbazz; 2016-08-24 at 05:51 AM.
    Probably running on a Pentium 4

  16. #136
    wrath was good but not like, crazy good compared to other expansions

    people really overstate much things change between expansions; the experience in wrath > cata > Mop > WoD has been pretty similar. It's fine to have your favorites and least favorites but let's not pretend they're so radically different.

    - - - Updated - - -

    also ICC wasn't a good raid, especially in comparison to ulduar. The whole place was boring and same-y looking and only a couple of the encounters were anything really memorable

  17. #137
    Best expansion "hybrid" would be
    Raids from - WotLK
    Quests/Leveling from - Warlords
    Max level content outside pvp/raids - MoP (maybe Legion?)
    Class balance - Cataclysm
    Community - Vanilla and TBC
    Sense of aconplishment* - TBC, WotLK

    *Meaning things were hard enough to make rewards feel way better and "worth it" when you finally got them done.
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  18. #138
    I will say that I thought wotlk did a good job of tying the raids in with the questing experience; I really liked how often we saw arthas throughout the process, as opposed to other expansions where the end-bosses feel really disconnected from the story. In wrath, by the time you fought yogg or arthas it felt like you'd been dealing with them for a while and the raid was culmination of the story. In cata it was like, oh nefarian's back? Er, okay I guess? And in mists the raid bosses were total no-names, aside from garrosh.

  19. #139
    Scarab Lord Leih's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Volardelis View Post
    They brought it back for Ra-den in Heroic Throne of Thunder
    True I guess, he was so easy (mostly due to being broken) it was kind of a non-factor though. What I meant was, they didn't start putting it in every tier!

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Huntingbear_grimbatol View Post
    Best expansion "hybrid" would be
    Raids from - WotLK
    You've gotta be kidding

  20. #140
    None of these have anything to do with what made wrath great.

    Quote Originally Posted by Exilian View Post
    4) Yogg'saron was squeezed in seemingly out of nowhere, and met a highly unimpressive and unimportant end for something that is apparently the root of (almost) all evil on Azeroth.
    False. There were hints about him all throughout the leveling process. His appearance was very much expected.

    Quote Originally Posted by Exilian View Post
    6) The entire expansion was pretty predictable, from start to finish, in that we knew we would eventually get to and kill Arthas. No plot twists aside from Wrathgate, which again didn't impact the overall story though.
    Just like TBC, just like Cataclysm. If the expansion has a villain it should come as no surprise that we're gonna kill him.

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