Woltk the medicore expansion which became famous as the best

[FuxieDK]

Lets talk about Woltk. Woltk is famous for being the best wow expansion of all time, while other expansions are most of the time flamed for every little thing.
Why is that so, even so Woltk had nothing to make it self stand out.

1. Leveling:

Leveling in Woltk was something special , people loved it for being a new adventure, following arthas and trying to cross his plans, while fighting of the natives, nature and other dangers. I can understand compared to Classic and TBC the leveling was awesome. The zones were great , and most important there were alot. But in todays time we have every expansion less zones with better quests. There is a reason why people hate leveling in Woltk today. Compared to what we have today the quests are boring, bad designed and repatative. No one would level there if he had the choice.

2. Dungeons:

The Dungeons in Woltk were a joke until the pre dungeons for ICC. Heroic or normal, all dungeons had little to now mechanics, reused assests over the whole expansion and after getting the gear there was almost no point in visiting them again. The pre ICC dungeons were challenging for most casuals at the start, but became easier over time and got abused realy fast to equip for ICC which we will talk later about ( which is part of the problem of the dungeon).

3. Raids

The addon had probably the worst first Raid of all time. Naxx was heavely undertuned, Onyxia was a 1 Boss raid which dropped far to good gear , obsidian was also too easy, if you did not go for the 25 mount.
Ulduar was the beacon of Woltk. Hands down the only Raid which can be considerd as ,, good´´. Fun from begining to end, tactical fights, good tuning out site of Yogg alone in the darkness and lots of player reponsibility.

We dont need to talk about the next raid i guess. The pre dungeon was fun, but too easy and way to good gear again. The raid was tuned fine, but boring outsite of two boss fights and a meme.

Now we come to ICC. ICC was a special kind of Raid. It was probably the Raid the most People playing Woltk did. The fights were alot of fun, but at the same time mostly no challenge. Lich king was probably the only fight which saved the Raid from being considerd Naxx level. At one point i hate Icc for being this easy, on the other hand ICC gave people a good way to play after completing the pre dungeons.

4. PvP

Awesome world PvP with thousand winter. But Dks, Tanks, Legendarys ruined almost all arena seasons. And with the Cata bug making the tabard worthless, giving it the last nail in the coffin.

5. Lore

Lichking had more Plotarmor than Sylvanas and she died three times already. Like the only reason the Lichking was allowed to exist this long was because no bigger being like Alextrasza had time or interest to even kill him. (useless nexus war )

It may not sound to bad you will say. But remember in todays time expansions get judged for every little mistake and Woltk was full of boring fights /quests / gameplay. If Woltk would come out today, it would be regarded as even worse than WoD.

Most people will hate on the classic three Expansions: WoD, Cata and Mop.

WoD: no content , while having fair pvp and few of the best raids

Cata: because at the start it was to hard and in the end it was to easy until Spine

MoP: Kungfu Panda

But all this expansions had better dungeons/raids/leveling/pvp and bonus features which were better than Woltks. Okay not Ashran. But Woltk was not the prime of Wow, it was just lucky to ride on a famous character, released before the competition like lol, csgo and other came out and while wow was still famous as hell.

tldr: Woltk was not as good as people act

Pretty much what I have been saying for a decade; however calling WotLK mediocre is too kind... WotLK was a HORRIBLE expansion.

[Alkizon]

4) Introduced vehicles and phasing. Two pieces of new technology, or at least new uses of old technology for vehicles. But Phasing was a big big thing for the questing.

big big bad thing, which greatly violated game world integrity.

I’m too lazy to write a lot, but I can give a link to a friend’s message on eu forum (if it'll help), which I in most part agree with.
<1> (could be more stuff here, but not for WotLK <2><3>)

= Was decent, but laid foundations for a lot of mechanisms that entailed a violation of game basic rules and independent functioning of world together with beginning of community decay. Some more here and here.

[Rhade1337]

It's the same with all expansions:
1 - Ppl enjoy it at start
2 - Ppl start to hate it

It's a circle .. not all people can be pleased, each player loves something about the game and hate other things.
No one can change that blizz can't please all the WoW fanbase, they will never, each will have to do whatever they enjoy in the game, if not go play something else no one is forcing you to pay sub and play this game.

[Malikath]

Easy to say with nothing backing it up.

the entire intro into twilight highlands was cut and replaced with "you blacked out".
eat shit.

[Deleted]

Reminds me of this lol

[sam86]

I'm sorry, but Blizzard have faction bias, and it's come across through several key events. Including development for cataclysm where they purposely cut alliance content to be able to spend more time on Horde content.

u do know that blizz literally did that to horde since day 1, u can even see that in the memos of the developer of vanilla game
so unlike ur bias bullsh8t, we have proof from one of wow founders that blizz polished alliance content to best (for demo purpose) before they even set a foot in horde zones (hence why horde get barrens for 3 races, while literally no alliance zone has an equal)
was that bullsh8t based on the fact that alliance get only to f8ck orgrimmar and its warchief once per week for eternity while horde has none ?

[Azerate]

What you don't get is that this isn't an objective matter. Different players enjoyed different times in the game, for different reasons. It might be as simple as having more active friends in the game. That alone can make or break an expansion for someone, it doesn't have to be about the game itself at all. Some people assume that everyone has a perfect environment in every expansion and they can judge it purely on its gameplay merits, whcih is not the case. For me Wrath was incredibly good and will always have a place in my heart because that's when I started and that's when I played with my best friends for a very long time.

In the end what matters is the feelings you had when you did the content, not so much as the content itself. I agree that on a mechanical level, Legion and BfA are infinitely better than Wrath, and now I'm also having great fun in BfA cause I'm in a guild that suits my playstyle and needs and that's also probably why I love this expansion so much.

[Crackleslap]

Wintergrasp was fun.
Gearing was fun, + those token things
10 man, 25 man was good.
Classes were fun.
The story was great.
Northered was great.
Dalaran was great.
Ulduar was fantastic.

I just enjoyed it.

[Xaviaton]

I agree that if WotLK was released today it would be a fiasco but I think it was a "golden age" of WoW with respect to how good it was compared to previous iterations of WoW (I.E. Vanilla and TBC) and other "competing" games at the time (I'd argue that WotLK had no real competition). While some people felt alienated by the "casual friendly" approach of the expansion, many more took to it with pleasure. I'd argue that the fundamental, expansion agnostic mechanics and systems (Meaning not garrisons, artifacts, azerite etc.) are now at a higher level than they were during WotLK. WoW's current "problem" is a fight against itself going stale, which is why we have "expansion features" such as the garrison, artifacts, and azerite gear. As far as I can tell, WotLK had no "expansion features" as all systems were either carried over from TBC, or carried into Cata. The only feature that could classify as unique to WotLK was Hard Mode in Ulduar but this was only ONE raid, not WotLK.

TLDR: Just because things that happened in the past would be considered bad today does not mean they were better relative to the time they were released.

[therealbowser]

While I don't know if one should call it bias or not, I seem to recall the devs admitting they put extra time into developing the goblin starting experience out of a need to make it as good as the worgen starting experience.

This was the story for the entire Cataclysm expansion, really. I don't think the Horde bias was intentional, but it was really, really heavy. Not in terms of "Alliance lost, and Horde won in the story" or even "I liked the Horde story more", no... it was literally just a matter of Horde having extra work done on their quests and Alliance getting shorter -- or even entirely cut content -- in return. Maybe Blizzard just didn't know what to do with them, I dunno. I can't speculate.

The most offensive area (IMHO) was the pre-Twilight Highlands quests. Not many people realize that the Alliance were originally going to get quests rallying the fleet like the Horde did, only to have it replaced by babysitting Anduin due to time constraints.

[Xykotic]

Are we trying to argue subjective points here? Wrath is the best to me, mostly because I think the Scourge and the plot surrounding them was the best part of the overall Warcraft plot. I agree with some of OP's downsides of course. No expansion or vanilla itself has been without flaws in its design. But for me, I just had an absolute blast from beginning to end in Wrath because I really wanted to be a part of the world and the conflict against the Scourge. Really immersive for me and I could really get into it.

I really miss Wrath upon these reflection actually. Fingers crossed Blizzard will at some point expand upon classic and add it as a separate choice. What I wouldn't give to play official Wrath again.

[Blaki]

Naxxramas was stupid easy, got Undying / Immortal on our alts. The first two dragons raids sucked, and were easy. I quit after Ulduar because they nerfed it on 2nd week, and we cleared everything but Yogg on 1st reset. Downed him 2nd reset and I was out, screw this.

Vanilla + TBC were the best.

[Pheraz]

Wotlk is with wod my most hated expansion.
They messed up the arthas fantasy with that empty and lame ICC design
The launch heroics were faceroll undertuned.
Imho only ulduar was good.

I think this is what happened:
Most people started to play at the end of tbc/ start of lich king and so this was their first contact with wow and thus they praise it as the best expansion because of the nostalgia factor.
I play since EU launch and tbh legion and cata were the best expansions. And maybe on par with mop

[Deleted]

Naxxramas was stupid easy, got Undying / Immortal on our alts. The first two dragons raids sucked, and were easy. I quit after Ulduar because they nerfed it on 2nd week when we cleared everything but Yogg on 1st reset. Downed him 2nd reset and I was out, screw this.

Vanilla + TBC were the best.

haha you cleared everything on 1st reset? Maybe on normal and that is easy difficculty. On heroic Destructor took 35 days for first guild to kill him, Mimiron 16 days... So you either lie or you are talking about normal which is meant to be easy. Algalon 43 days and Yogg+0 took 83 days. But yeah easy raid.... NAxx was easy but ulduar not. (and ulduar had many hardmodes so they took ever more time to get)

[Deleted]

MoP: Kungfu Panda

That sentence summarize your whole post. It's shitty.

[Yriel]

This was the story for the entire Cataclysm expansion, really. I don't think the Horde bias was intentional, but it was really, really heavy. Not in terms of "Alliance lost, and Horde won in the story" or even "I liked the Horde story more", no... it was literally just a matter of Horde having extra work done on their quests and Alliance getting shorter -- or even entirely cut content -- in return. Maybe Blizzard just didn't know what to do with them, I dunno. I can't speculate.

The most offensive area (IMHO) was the pre-Twilight Highlands quests. Not many people realize that the Alliance were originally going to get quests rallying the fleet like the Horde did, only to have it replaced by babysitting Anduin due to time constraints.

Allow me to disagree.
Just look at the zones... Mount Hyal is a full on alliance zone. I don't know why horde is even allowed in there. Help Nightelves here, help Nightelves there. Vashj'ir.. again, full with night elf/naga lore. In deepholm we see that the alliance apparently took over the leadership of the shamans. All i see is draenai and dwarf shamans as major personalities. Uldum, again we follow a human and a dwarf (Harrison Jones and Brann Bronzebeard) through all of the quests.
They may have cut an intro short but i see massive alliance bias in the new zones. I don't mind it though.

[bloodkin]

What sets WotLK apart is that it had the best elements of vanilla and TBC, combined with the perfect amount of player quality of life improvements implemented. Yes, heroics became too easy mid/late expansion and Naxx was under-tuned, but this also helped a lot more people start raiding than the previous expansion (coupled with removal of attunements). It had the best story and most clear and recognizable fantasy themes of any expansion (MoP comes close in this regard though). and classes where still bound to certain RPG elements like weapon skills.

It had the highest amount of players of any expansion for very good reasons. It's fine if you don't like it, but it will always be one of the highest rated expansions in WoW's history.

[ArenaDk]

@EbonBehelit

I didn’t say I think that way about Mop. Mop had some of the best art , boss fights and pvp of all time. But mop has other zones which are just bad , dallie were bad , and a lot of problems

[Deleted]

Anyone remember Sons of Hodir dailies to get shoulder enchants?

[therealbowser]

Allow me to disagree.
Just look at the zones... Mount Hyal is a full on alliance zone. I don't know why horde is even allowed in there. Help Nightelves here, help Nightelves there. Vashj'ir.. again, full with night elf/naga lore. In deepholm we see that the alliance apparently took over the leadership of the shamans. All i see is draenai and dwarf shamans as major personalities. Uldum, again we follow a human and a dwarf (Harrison Jones and Brann Bronzebeard) through all of the quests.
They may have cut an intro short but i see massive alliance bias in the new zones. I don't mind it though.

It's funny you mention Mount Hyjal given how heavy a presence the Horde plays there. Blizzard went out of their way to make sure Hamuul played as big of a role as Malfurion did, despite him having very strong background and reasoning to be that significant. Oddly enough I don't recall any such treatment being given to Nobuundo in relationship to Thrall... how odd.

I mean, sure, Mount Hyjal did have some night elves. It also had tauren, but obviously it was a night elf zone because it had night elves.

Calling Deepholm "Alliance biased" is amusing too, given that there are just as many Horde shaman, and that the leader of the efforts there was a tauren. But obviously he was just a dwarf in disguise. I guess there were earthen there, that aren't aligned with either faction... that played something of a role in the story. They are almost dwarves, so it must be a dwarf zone.

And please, don't mention Uldum. It's bad for both factions. It's not an Alliance zone, it's an Indiana Jones zone. The fact that this is how you are viewing the Alliance speaks volumes of their lore, you should take a look at a zone like Redridge Mountains who had a similar treatment, and compare it with a zone with actual compelling stories and original lore, you know... like Silverpine Forest or Hillsbrad. But that might hurt your argument, to be fair.

I don't count up all the pettiness in Cataclysm and say "Horde got this, and Horde got this, and Horde got this too", I just look at it as a general expansion where Blizzard made a lot of mistakes. But since you wanted to bring them up, I felt the need to respond to them.

That said, the fact that the Horde of the expansion for both factions was the Horde warchief kind of says a lot by itself, and I could also mention Vol'jin leading 4.1 for both factions instead of Danath Trollbane coming to make a stand... but let's not. This response has covered too much as it is. Obviously Horde faction leaders are actually heroes that both factions can admire, especially during open warfare.

PS: I don't throw around the term 'bias' lightly. Cataclysm is the only expansion where Horde content actually had more time put into it. I dont' feel a dramatic amount of bias in any other expansion towards either faction in terms of the stories. And for the record, I don't care nearly as much if a zone has Horde or Aliance themed stories, I only care if the stories are seperate and the Horde or Alliance has better versions. If I got hung up on that, it would never end counting the blades of grass on each side.