WOTLK without rose-tinted shades

[Deleted]

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.

Grizzly Hills had less Scourge, yes. But I disagree, that if felt disconnected. Fjord and Sholazar both had Scourge Allies and Scourge running around quite a lot in some strongholds/areas. Esp. Fjord had a ton of Scourge Presence.

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.

"Almost completely identical", mh? You mean both had a lot of snow? Because other than that they couldn't be more different. Icecrown was blue with m any Scourge Themed Areas and bastions. From Vrykul badasses to huge Fortress Walls, "alive" (because undead) and packed with Undead minions.
Stormpeaks was more Titan themed with the valkyr city, the frost giants and ofc Ulduar, which many still hold very dear to their hearts.
While I never liked Storm Peaks personally - I disagree on the "look the same". Because they clearly don't.

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?).

They decided to not put the Argent Tournament (which would have made more sense) into the Crystalsong Forest, because they had performance issues with Dalaran. They had plans for the zone, but had to alter them, because there were so many people above Crystalsong, that another hub below it would have nuked many PCs.
Seeing how performance in Dalaran was sometimes - I believe them.
Not sure about the "WoD flashback". WotlK was serveral years before that and had a ton of content around it. So while it would have been nice to see Gundrak for example, we had a lot of shit to do. So no, WoD does not even come close.

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.

Not sure. I still remember people shitting their pants at the +0 Part. Up to a point in which people were cheating to even kill him. Not to mention he was forshadowed in the whole expansion. Sarionite Mines, Mad Miners, the dead world tree in Grizzly Hills anyone?

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.

You literally couldn't quest in Icecrown or Stormpeaks without a flying mount. While I agree, that it made Icecrown a bit less scary (personally I even said back then, that they should have had some kind of anti air stuff on the ground, so you had at least to keep moving on your flying mount. Like the Dailies in Ogrila in TBC.), but those zones were designed with flying in mind. Quite clearly so. You were not able to get in some areas without flying.

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.

Okey, so was TBC with Illidan unpredictable? Or Cata with Deathwing? Mute point in my book. Ofc we had one major goal in the expansion. And that goal was Arthas. Deathknights even more so. Argent Crusade as well.

WotlK had it's failings but most of your points have nothing to do with them. But hey, I am a realist as well. So I don't have to have rose tinted glasses to know, if I like something, or not after a while. I still believe, that WotlK and MoP were my favs, and that I did not enjoy WoD. With TBC and Cata pretty meh for me personally.

[thunterman]

Predictable story is something they have since fixed, each expansion leading into the next, the end boss potentially having very little to do with the theme of the expansion e.t.c

this is what they should of done from the very beginning. Lich King should of been last but one, the last boss should of led us into Cataclysm. They do this kind of thing now, which is awesome. It tells the story better, and everything "flows" better. You could consider BRF the last raid tier of WoD, and HFC the introduction to Legion, because HFC had practically no ties to WoD as an expansion - but it definitely makes the transition to a new expansion 1000 times better.

If BRF was the last raid and the legion just suddenly dropped from the sky, it would be aweful, this is where they went wrong in previous expansions.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Was wrath perfect? No, it wasn't by any means and a lot of your points are valid reasons to why. But truth be told what made wrath great was you still had a huge, thriving, and most importantly growing community which is what an MMO is really all about. That's really all that most expansions since has lacked as each one peeled another layer of the onion away leaving a smaller and smaller core community. Besides maybe WoD since it merely felt like a DLC that lasted way to long rather than a true expansion.

[Eazy]

Arthas was the most hyped villain in the WoW.
Best PvP season.
Awesome raids(I count ToC as a bonus raid, which wasn't that bad actually, Twilight Bastion was worse for me).
Nice talents and glyphs.
Dalaran, the best city I've ever been in.
WG was better than Halaa and Tol Barad... Ashran isn't even on the scale.

Wotlk is love, wotlk is life.

[Deleted]

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.

You seem to forget that WotLK came after TBC. Some of your points are valid if you look at them now, but let's look at your complaints from the perspective of Playing in vanilla and TBC.

1. Questing, the rewards, the flow of it was way better then that of Vanilla or TBC, so this was a major improvement, without being jarring change. Also this is the first expansion, where we got 2 seperate starting zones, which reduced the lagfest on launch day.

2. Imo being true to the lore is more important, than "diversity". This is entirely subjective, me personally love snowy zones.

3. Again, how many zones were there in Vanilla (pre-Cata rework) and to lesser extent in TBC without any real content? Lots. So in this regard WotLK was not worse. Also even if it's an excuse, it was a wise decision of the devs, not to make Crystalsong and Dalaran lag more. Nowdays you can complain, that there are almost no nooks and cranys in WoW left to explore for yourself.

4. Anything that is not based entirely on the Warcraft games and it's expansion is pulled from thin air and shoehorned into the game.

5. People nowdays complain, that they can't fly Flying is a "you can't do it right" decision, so it's subjective.

6. When was Warcraft lore not predictable? But again, this is subjective. WotLK was the most successful expansion, especialy because it was about killing the Lich King. It's basicaly the closure to the whole Tides of Darkness + Frozen Throne storyline!

If I would complain, I would bring the following:

1. Low difficulty, "too accessible", gear level bloat, too much gear. A lot of topics, but basicaly the same issue. Naxx was admitedly too easy. Epic gear got handed out too easy. No atunement quests. multiple tiers of gear. We had gear level for 10 mans, 10 man heroic/25 man, 25 man heroic in a single raid tier.

2. Gearscore and AVR. First signs, that Blizzard gives no tought about the consequences of their actions. Also their response time was too slow.

3. Trial of the Crusader. That sorry excuse for a raid was a major error in a lot of aspects. As filler content, in terms of level and encounter design, it highlighted the staffing issues of BLizz. so it's a culmination of lot of issues.

And... that's it. WotLK was a major improvement in most aspects compared to Vanilla and TBC. As an aevolutionary step it was pretty dang awesome. Of course over the years the devs got better, learned much from the mistakes of WotLK, but that's natureal. You can't hold that against it. Now can you say that about any other expansion, that it was an improvement across the board?

Also let's not forget why it is the "best" expansion:

1. It made raiding accessible to a large audience.

2. Later addition of the LFG tool was revolutionary, which a lot of other games did not follow for a long time.

3. All classes became playable and usable. Don't forget that before that a lot of specs were unplayable, sub-par or frowned upon.

4. Death Knights. The first heroic class, but also very iconic to Warcraft lore.

5. Better itemisation, usefull gear, real upgrades.

[Deleted]

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.

your rant is just another opinion. While you are entitled to one it poses no added value to the opinions of the people you are referring too.

Every xpac had/has its likes and dislikes. Some things can be measured and some things are simply according to taste. To me WOTLK was the greatest xpac. Why? Simply because in that point in time accompanied by the story it presented (arthas is the greatest warcraft villain to me since wc3 (yes very much MY opinion) appealed to me most and had the highest impact of all storylines blizzard has presented to me.

Why do i respond to a thread like this? Because people who are annoyed by an opinion and for some reason try to make you see that they are right by coming up with some subjective analysis (i mean rly dafuq is that) are really the most annoying form of players to deal with in this community.

cheap shot, stale, boring...all words that apply to your "stomp your feet" childish analysis as to why your opinion should be given more weight than others

[Rogalicus]

The only expansion with 4 tiers.

I don't get this argument. Imagine upscaled Karazhan and instanced Rukhmar as T17, BRF as T18, Highmaul as T19 and HFC and instanced Kazzak as T20. Now WoD has more content, right?

[WowIsDead64]

There is no absolutely perfect xpack - every xpack has it's own pros and cons. WotLK had best pros/cons ratio = best xpack in Wow's history.

[Cien]

my fondest memories are probably of wotlk, as thats the expansion i 'grew up' too, i was only 11 when i started in vanilla so i couldn't enjoy much of the content that it had and the same with tbc, wotlk was when i got a bit older and was able to just do everything that the game had to offer and i loved it, i hated the damn spiders everywhere though

only thing i really hated was ruby sanctum, i actually loved ToC whereas most seem to hate it ;p ulduar though, them nostalgia, such feels, so wow <3

[Hightotemz]

Burning Crusade - Best reward for effort system, Jeff K was endgame designer with Ulduar being his last raid. Raids like Kara had a great atmosphere and heroic dungeons gave non raiders a decent challenge. Social aspect of the game was at it's best.
WOLTK - Lore,Ulduar and LK fight was awesome
Cata - Heroic dungeons at the start
WOD - Questing was by far the best. Unfortunately had to stop playing after I did Blackhand heroic
Legion - Lets see.

I am one of those players driven by effort vs reward system and I think legion is going to have something for every type of player.

[Jawless Jones]

1) You complain about boring, anticlimactic, and cliched quests and then say that Cataclysm was better. Off the top of my head Westfall, Redridge, Uldum are objectively more cliched, boring, and anticlimactic than anything out of Northrend (due to them all being legit copypastas of pop culture).

2) It's Northrend, ofc the primary theme is snow, I was surprised there wasn't more of it, considering WC3 Northrend was nothing but snow maps. The "eye-soreness" is 100% subjective.

3) Valid, it was disappointing that only a few dailies made us go there.

4) The presence of an Old God was heavily established during leveling, with every single zone in Northrend having multiple quests concerning the influence of the Iron Dwarves and the presence of Saronite. As for how we beat him, we took him on with the backing of the Ulduar Keepers, and only fought the fraction of him that escaped it's prison, almost exactly like how we killed C'thun (minus the Keepers).

5) This is my biggest gripe. You do not need to be on the ground for a zone to feel dangerous. Icecrown felt dangerous due to; it's music, the swarms of undead on the glacial path, and all the fucking elite mobs everywhere (I'm pretty sure there's more elite mobs in Icecrown than there were in the old vanilla Silithus).

One of the themes was that it was too dangerous to go into the heart of Icecrown on foot. The Horde and Alliance bases were flying airships, the Argent Crusade set up shop on the outskirts of the zone (Argent Vanguard and Argent Tournament respectively), even the Ebon Blade kept to the most northern part of the zone (and they were constantly under siege from the scourge the whole time they were there).

I'm also pretty sure the Storm Peaks aren't meant to feel dangerous, but incite a feeling of majesty and immense size. This would be supported by it being the most vertical zone in the game (hilariously, even more than Mt. Hyjal was) and being spotted with gigantic structures.

6) Name an expansion that wasn't predictable? In Cata we knew it would end with Deathwing, in MoP we knew it would end with Garrosh, in BC we were fairly sure it would end in Illidan... until Sunwell was announced. Predictability is a predictable theme when it comes to Blizzards story-telling I'm afraid.

Also, the Wrathgate DID influence the story, considering it ends with Bolvar becoming the new Lich King, and has now influenced the story four expansions down the road.

[Armourboy]

Wrath is loved for several reasons but I'd say there are some that stick out.

1. Everyone wanted to beat Arthas' ass

2. Lots of stuff to do, and lots of places to go.

3. The biggest reason imo is that for the first time smaller casual raiding guilds had a true progression path with 10 man raiding. Yeah they had Kara and ZA to some extent in TBC, but this was the first time from start to finish they had their own progression. One of the biggest reasons I think Cata is hated so much, after all of the people got to enjoy raiding in Wrath, Blizzard ripped it right out from under them in Cata. That doesn't even bring up how many people went from being able to finding PUGS at will in Wrath, to finding jack squat in Cata.

[Hiricine]

WOTLK was the culmination of a plotline warcraft fans had basically been following since wc3, and you could even extend that to WC2. The last WC game most people played before wow was Frozen throne, and ended the campaign with Arthas triumphant as basically the most powerful force the game had seen. The biggest complaint is that the xpac really detracted a lot from that plot, then ran out of steam by the time Arthas came up as a villain.

[Super Kami Dende]

Don't think it had anything to do with it being in the same instance, probably just more with graphical limitations.

Whole continents are on the same instance. That is why entire Kalimdor would crash whenever some people decided to gather big raids for world pvp chaos in Silithus. It's kinda also a 'concern' for Legion, no matter what zone to level in you'd pick, the entire continent of Broken Isles will lag even if you don't see anyone around you. Hopefully the new shard tech can handle the load, but I'm predicting quite a few "instance not found"-issues and world crashes.

by instanced area I mean moreso, whilst you were in Crystalsong the game was trying to load all the people above you in Dalaran as well which was a large group, as opposed to say the people spread out around sholozar or borean.

[Deleted]

WOTLK Brought us Achis for that it wins

[Serath]

1) It wasn't as smooth as the following expansion leveling experiences but for the time it was amazing. It's still pretty good, certainly better than vanilla or BC

2) This was a major issue, Especially where it was such a bleak, featureless area.

3) the argent tournament was supposed to be in Crystalsong. It was changed (not cut) because they decided the server load with the tournament being right next to Dal was too much to handle and would give crappy performance

4) We'd already had old god lore and especially howling Fjord had a lot of Old God intro questing

5) not only available, required. If you couldn't afford flying you could rent a mount that only worked in Storm Peaks and Ice Crown because they were designed to require flying. I love the aesthetics of Storm Peaks but is it really a good idea to have a zone that size with such a relatively small amount of content?

6) Is this an issue? Like, I could have told you at the start of WoD that we'd defeat the iron horde and kill most if not all of the old horde heroes... I... what?

[Deleted]

The thing I don't like about Wrath is that before it launched the carrot on the stick was actually gear and gearing in general. Then WotLK launched and turned dungeons into AoE facerolls and showered players with easy epics. It's been like this ever since then.

[Deleted]

WotLK is still my favourite expansion, the lore was fun, the gameplay was fun, there was content, the music was awesome... I love it. I used to give shit to ToC, but then Cataclysm happened with 4.3, which is the raid I hate most (so boring, reused locations, even the frigging announcement trailer was just a few minutes of scrolling past the instances without *any* custom animations or voice overs... god that patch was so crap). 4.1 was also pretty bad (I'd say worse than 3.2) with the random rehashed troll dungeons.

The classes were also much closer to their original idea than they are now imo, paladins didn't have combo points, they weren't overly flashy with giant falling hammers and they still had iconic abilities like the auras. I also thought the way Holy worked back then was fun, Holy Light did massive healing and increasing your mana pool with intellect was another fun thing to do besides get bigger healing numbers. I was so proud breaking 40k mana back then as a casual now I am forced into Flash of Light spam which is just horrible

Death Knights were more fun back then as well, Blood DPS is probably my all time favourite DPS spec and I was so sad when they removed it in Cata. Gathering lots of armour penetration and doing massive hits with Heart Strike, Death Strike and Rune Strike. Summoning another weapon to fight beside you was fun, raising a ghoul and an army of the dead was fun, having fat healing with Mark of Blood, Rune Tap and Vampiric Blood was fun... it truly felt like a death knight back then, now Blizzard wants to make each spec only use spells of their own specialisation, which I hate. Frost is litterally just a warrior who put his weapons in the freezer for a bit and sneezes on people. I fail to see the ''death'' in Death Knight with frost, no more Raise Ghoul, no more Death and Decay, no more Army of the Dead...

In short: WotLK was awesome imo and I miss it

The thing I don't like about Wrath is that before it launched the carrot on the stick was actually gear and gearing in general. Then WotLK launched and turned dungeons into AoE facerolls and showered players with easy epics. It's been like this ever since then.

Did you forget Cata? People whined in Wrath that ''epics aren't epic anymore Blizz'' so they made the Cata heroics super difficult, you had to CC something every, single, trash pull, doing a dungeon could take an hour and it rewarded blues. Then people were like ''wahh this is too hard Blizzard even though we asked for it'' and they made heroics easy again. And as far as I'm aware, heroics still only award blues and not purples.

[Cronovey]

While I like the idea of the thread, it was very poorly executed because you really picked terrible things to point out.

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.

Sholazar had a coherent story that linked Freya as one of the keepers of Ulduar to the expansion's story to lead up to the Ulduar raid, along with Thorim and the Sons of Hodir in Storm Peaks, and to a lesser extent Mimiron as well. Howling Fjord had a connection to the Vrykul, which was continued in Storm Peaks and had multiple dungeons surrounding it, and we get a massive boost to their lore through the Chronicle book and a continuation in Stormheim in the upcoming Legion expansion. While it was a little disjointed at the time, it led us into the lore for the Valkyr, which were very important to the storyline of Wrath and how the Lich King used them to reanimate the dead, so this is another poor point. Borean Tundra introduced you to the Vrykul as well, and also introduced the Taunka as a race, which are a distant relative of the Tauren that belong to the Horde. Grizzly Hills is the only zone you could really argue had no relevance, and even that somewhat alluded to Yogg-Saron with the corrupted world tree located there.

If you wanted to complain about the zones in general, you could have pointed out that the zones themselves seemed a little too focused on one singular story and that there was no real diversity, because outside of Dragonblight taking it's little detour with the Scarlet Crusade (not sure about Alliance side) the entire thing was just focused on LICH KING LICH KING OLD GOD LICH KING (and the infrequent Malygos information outside of Coldarra) and there wasn't really any narrative that wasn't related to them in some way. Compare this to Burning Crusade where you learned of the Mag'har orcs, got more information on the ogres, and the Netherwing drakes which were a lore expansion on Deathwing in freaking Burning Crusade, two expansions early. There was a ton of lore outside of EHRMAGERD ILLIDAN, and even a raid thrown in literally just because they thought it would be fun with Mount Hyjal. To avoid the massive content drought that we're consistently seeing (and because of rushing out Black Temple), they also added the Sunwell Plateau, which expanded on the Naaru that we were introduced to in Burning Crusade through M'uru as well.

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.

Icecrown and Storm Peaks really don't look all that similar, other than the fact that there are mountains. If you wanted to complain about aesthetics, maybe bring up that Sholazar Basin is basically just Un'goro Crater all over again or that Icecrown was filled with seemingly pointless gates and architecture everywhere. Maybe that Trial of the Crusader and the whole Argent Tournament area in general were, for some reason, built literally in the middle of the enemy's stronghold area and for some reason never came under attack other than a poorly written and terribly shoehorned in boss fight at the end of the raid because people felt Anub'arak deserved a better ending than a 5 man boss.

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?).

This would be a fair criticism if you hadn't tried to tie it to Warlords and instead focused on the fact that their own technical limitations basically destroyed an entire zone that could have been very integral to the storyline with Malygos if they had planned properly (especially with the added information from the Chronicle Vol. 1) for Dalaran's flying city nonsense. The zone looks amazing, and if I were an artist that had worked on the zone I'd be quite upset with the lack of usage that the zone got in general.

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.

He definitely wasn't squeezed in out of nowhere, although the order of raids could have made him more important of a figure. By that, I mean he was referred to pretty much directly with Saronite starting at the quests in Dragonblight for the Nerubians. He was also a major factor in the failed world tree in Grizzly Hills, and even part of the reason that Deathwing went insane. When I say the order could have made him a more important figure, I would have liked to see Ulduar come after Icecrown Citadel to link a few things together. The Saronite that was corrupting everything could have been explained more thoroughly and it would have tied into Deathwing and his madness more closely, especially with the vision of the Dragon Soul's creation being one of the visions of madness in Yogg'Saron's raid encounter. They could have had us invade Ulduar to destroy one of the reasons for Deathwing's madness and perhaps even had Val'anyr (instead of being some random, nameless mace nobody ever heard of) be crafted from fragments of the now destroyed Dragon Soul somehow retrieved by Loken for Yogg'Saron's usage, because originally the old gods tried using the Well of Eternity with the Dragon Soul to escape their prisons and maybe he thought the fragments would help him escape. The extra shielding could have just been tied to the element of earth and it's protection as well, and not only would it have made the mace more epic, but it would have been based in the lore of a current powerful artifact (similar to Shadowmourne) and made a lot more sense as an item in general, as well as tying it into the upcoming Cataclysm expansion and Deathwing's lore.

In addition, the Argent Tournament and it's Coliseum raid would have made much more sense in between Icecrown Citadel and Ulduar instead of the other way around; the bored heroes of the Icecrown campaign come together in their defeated enemy's stronghold zone to compete for glory, with the final boss being some sort of servant of Yogg'Saron instead of Anub'arak to lead us into Ulduar. This would have made a hell of a lot more sense than having it stuck where it was in between Ulduar and ICC.

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.

The zones were designed around this. If you wanted to complain about it, point out the casualization of adding the tome that you could send to alts, which was combined with heirlooms to make leveling become insanely easy and casual....starting with Wrath of the Lich King. There was nothing really menacing in Storm Peaks outside of the giant Iron Dwarf construct being created there, the threat of which would have been much harder to appreciate without flying!

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.

As has been said, not everything really needs a giant plot twist. The Wrathgate was a massive twist, which sent you to literally invade and re-conquer a city that had been taken, and set up Bolvar for his future as the new Lich King while setting up Saurfang the Younger to be a boss later, although I think they could have expanded on Saurfang a little more before doing so to make you feel a real connection to his character. The Death Knight introduction quest was also a pretty strong story moment, with the cleansing of the Ashbringer and the Lich King being dealt a massive blow with the loss of his strongest troops outside the frostwyrms.

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.

I don't necessarily think it was the best expansion either, but you do have to give it a fair shake as well and if you're going to be critical of it you need to be intelligent about it. There are flaws with every expansion and great things that came out with every expansion as well, but if you're going to be critical you need to make people think about it first.

Top problems I had with Wrath, in no particular order?

1) Heirlooms and trivializing the leveling process, which made the game insanely easy to get alts leveled in. This in turn still has repercussions to this day with split runs in current raid content to funnel gear onto main characters to help with mythic progression, which forces any high end raider to have multiple alts to dedicate to the same content over and over, which in turn contributes to player burnout and the smaller raiding community as a whole.

2) The ease of content and the Dungeon Finder tool. The ease of heroics and early raid content is where the game became more about making sure there was "something for everyone" and less about providing one or two levels of difficulty that were very separate; normal for casual play and heroic for the more hardcore players. Now we have Legion coming up and look at what we have: 4 levels of raid difficulty instead of 2 with varying group sizes (30 for LFR, 10-30 for normal/heroic, 20 for mythic) and we now have normal, heroic, mythic, and now Mythic+ dungeons all together. The dungeon finder tool that everyone says killed the community? This was invented in Wrath, for those who have forgotten. This was the start of the "that guy queued as a healer but is in DPS spec" and the "I used to know everyone on my server and now it's dead" nonsense that everyone gripes about but doesn't attribute to Wrath as a flaw.

3) Multiple raid difficulties in general. Raids are raids; this whole LFR/normal/heroic/mythic nonsense of added mechanics and nonsensical complexity to fights was only added because of the additional raid difficulties that were introduced in Wrath originally. Look at Archimonde right now: in LFR and normal, there's no Wrought Chaos at all. In heroic, it's there but in a small, non-obtrusive form. Then you get to mythic, where it looks like the fucking Death Star fired at Draenor every time it goes off. All this stems from the heroic mode being introduced in Wrath, instead of leaving raids at a single level of difficulty.

4) The expectation that everyone should be able to do everything. This is something that was for the most part introduced in Wrath, and then iterated upon every expansion since then with the addition of LFR and such. Originally, until the content had been out for very long period of time there was no PUG'ing it, and even then PUG groups were generally limited to the smaller 10/20 man raids of Karazhan/ZA for BC and ZG for vanilla. The fact that something that was insanely difficult in a previous expansion (Naxxramas, where I only ever killed a single boss and never got to SEE another before 70) was suddenly something that I could grab a bunch of randoms and do in its new iteration was utterly depressing. Suddenly raiding was something everyone should be able to do, and heroic dungeons were something for everyone to do despite the previous difficulty of them (Shadow Labs, Shattered Halls, etc). This was also the introduction of world bosses dropping tier pieces as well with the Vault of Archavon, continuing with the addition of Emalon, Koralon, and Toravon. This carried over into future expansions as well with Baradin Hold bosses and on into Mists with Sha of Anger, Nalak, and the Celestials and was finally shut down in Warlords of Draenor.

5) On top of all this, BADGES. Badges badges fucking badges everywhere. Not just one or two kinds like the convenient Justice Points and Valor Points system of Cataclysm (the expansion everyone seems to hate and blame for all of WoW's problems) or the single Badge of Justice from Burning Crusade, but we had Emblems of Valor, Emblems of Heroism, Emblems of Frost, Emblems of Conquest, and Emblems of Triumph. They were fucking everywhere from everything, and you got epic loot for them all over the place, including tier pieces! This was truly the expansion where the term "welfare epics" took off because of the ease of access, although BC's progression into the early form of badges was what really got the ball rolling on this.

6) Portals to everywhere you wanted. Wrath was the beginning of this as well, with portals to all your major cities at your fingertips whenever you wanted, as well as one straight to the Caverns of Time instead of making you actually work to get to your destinations. Your one stop shop for your hearthstone for years to come! Shattrath had portals to your main city, but that was pretty much it. Continuing after Wrath, Cataclysm gave you portals to every zone easily after doing the opening quest chains and some (Twilight Highlands and Deepholm) both had ports straight back too. Mists continued this with the Vale hubs, and now WoD has it as well with Ashran hubs for both factions having portals everywhere. Even inside your main cities are portals everywhere now! Hellfire Peninsula is fine, because the Dark Portal has changed. But Blasted Lands? Ashran hub ports? Now a port to Dalaran as well? It's excessive, and is a large part of what ruined the immersion in the game that everyone seems to be complaining they're lacking, and is now part of the reason Blizzard forces us to ride our asses on the ground instead of flying as their way of trying to get us back into the world.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it all specifically Wrath related as the framework for some of it (badges and welfare epics) was laid out earlier in BC, but are all flaws that were drastically brought to the forefront by Wrath's design choices. I could do the same for other expansions, but I think my book is long enough by now.

[Eurhetemec]

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.

This should be interesting!

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.

Highly subjective, but overall, fuck no.

Aesthetically, Cataclysm was a shitshow, and that's putting generously (except Vash'jr!). All the other Cata zones are fugly - expensive, flashy, but fugly like a gold-plated humvee.

Then there are the stories. They very weak. Sure, they reflected the main story, but why is that a hard requirement? We ended up with several boring zones, either following NPCs around and doing what we were told, or flying, jumping off, killing or picking up a few things, then flying away (there was very little "ground-flow" and it was flying from day 1, unlike WotLK). Uldum is literally the worst zone in WoW. A drunken idiot's boring, stupid re-telling of Indiana Jones, with the player totally de-protagonized and forced to play the fool in the worst way possible. That's saying something as Cata's main world changes also had several awful zones.

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.

Agreed, but still much less bad than the eye-sore value of Twilight Highlands, which is both ugly and stupid-looking. Firelands was nice but...

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?).

Comparing WotLK's content to WoD's? Joking, I presume? WotLK has so much content I haven't even finished every questline there in god-knows-how-many characters. Cutting one zone is fine. Sad, but a very minor complaint.

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.

Totally agree, but still less dumb than anything to do with the Dragon Soul stuff.

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.

Just not true. ICC managed to be remain very threatening, particularly. Whereas in Cata, you could fly from day 1, and it was utter shit as a result.

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.

Yet the story was better than any other expansion. Predictable thus clearly doesn't mean bad. Twists for the sake of twists are the height of stupidity and lazy JJ Abrams-style writing (and WoW is FULL of them!).

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.

Hmmm. Everything was 10/10 was false for sure - prior to Ulduar it was kind of decent-to-good, not amazing. Post-Ulduar, it was pretty goddamn rockin'. Even ToC etc. was at least entertaining in it's way.

I'm not sure what expansion is supposed to be better than it. I mean, TBC was good, but there's no way it's better. MoP has some charm, but ultimately it's very niche and if you're not "into it", it gets old before you finish the first zone (if you are into it, it's jolly good fun). WoD, well, yeah no - not the crime some claimed, but rather "WoW-lite"-feeling.

Cataclysm remains the worst, worse than WoD, in that it was deeply UN-FUN on pretty much every level. Leveling was dire, the daily quests were far too numerous and unrewarding and just plain annoying, the zones were godawful, it wrecked up the old world (literally) in a bunch of ways, many of them deeply un-fun and reflective of a particularly lame and stupid mode of storytelling (which MoP and WoD moved away from), the dungeons were painful and irksome (totally doable - just not fun!), the raids were shoddy, and the tone of the ENTIRE EXPANSION was dubious at best. It proved that, for me, you can definitely overuse the Old Gods, very easily. The zones were also awful. I happily fly around WotLK and enjoy the scenery, but if never saw Twilight Highlands, Uldum or Mount Hyjal (Cata version) ever again, I would be fine with that.