Originally Posted by
Mosha
You have some nice points, but I'm going to have to disagree with some of them here...
I wouldn't really point to this as to why it was so popular tbh... at the start of wrath I was an arena player and I was a resto druid....and if you remember anything about what happened to resto druids at the start of wrath well....we were absolutely fucked. I still loved wotlk even with this in mind, and honestly the opness didn't make me want to play a dk it made me want to beat them, so I went holy paladin and I still had a blast.
Pve gear was strong, REALLY REALLY strong near the end with shadowmourne and DBW etc... but honestly overall through the whole expansion, the pve really wasn't THAT big of a issue. What I mean by this is that if you had tier 2 weapons you did just fine in arena, and tier one weapons weren't even THAT bad. Yes, there were some pve items that were objectively better, but it didn't really make or break the game (excluding shadowmourne here because that weapon for SURE did break it).
Also, wrath wasn't the reason MLG dropped wow arenas, it was the release of cata. Honestly, it didn't have TOO much to do with what they did to pvp (even though post cata they fucked it all up), MLG just dropped it because they realized a game where when an expansion hits, it requires you to level up to end level, grind for a massive amount of time for gear, and do XYZ before you are even ready for arena, didn't make for a good competitive scene.
WOTLK arenas were where the competitive scene was at its peak. Every popular highlight you can probably think of came from wotlk. So idk if you were trying to blame the removal from MLG on wotlk or not but if you were that's not even remotely close.
Eh..no...not really. It was way less scrapped than tbc that's for sure with every resto druid running around and basically only seeing a couple comps once you hit a certain point.
Disc/feral was super fucking strong. Lock/pally was super fucking strong. Warrior was super fucking strong. Mage rogue and mage shadow priest was super fucking strong. Honestly, I remember playing around 2500 rating on 2v2 in wotlk and seeing a dk team was pretty relaxed compared to some comps tbh. At least for me, I played holy paladin destro (sometimes aff) lock and the only teams that I fucking dreaded was feral disc teams and warrior teams. Warriors would just sit on the locks pet and fucking DESTROY them with massive crits and I would just be sitting there ooming myself trying to keep the fucking thing alive long enough for my lock to do something.
Dks teams weren't bad at all compared to that.
5v5 was honestly a blast in wotlk post fan of knives bullshit and pre shadowmourne triple healer. But that's all subjective I suppose. 3v3 was great pretty much throughout the whole expac tbh. Yeah there were some op comps from heal but honestly it wasn't just one comp running things. African turtle was nasty, beast cleave was nasty, shadow play was nasty, obviously TSG was everywhere, RMP was great, WLS was great, RLS was great....
Human racial isn't as bad a undead racial was in TBC imo. Yeah you get an extra trinket, but it wasn't that crazy... There were still a fuck ton of horde making titles so idk man.
Shadowmourne was broken I will admit that but outside of that one item pve gear wasn't that big of an issue. There were numerous occasions where I had literally 0 pieces of pve gear on and I still could make glad range ratings.
World pvp pretty much turned into wintergrasp only which....to each their own, if you hated it then whatever but I loved it personally. Dueling in the sewers was a fucking blast as well.
Raiding did sort of go to easy mode I will admit that (outside of challenge modes etc) but you did NOT has to pve to pvp, this is 100% incorrect.
No....lol this is just silly. It was not bad game growth. A genre of games always hits a capacity at some point, to where there just isn't enough people interested in the game. WOTLK broke records and held the HIGHEST number of subs on an mmo ever, and growth isn't the most important thing to think about, it's retaining those subs. Let's just say 12 mil or so people were going to be the most amount of people to ever be interested in wow, if cata came along and kept that 12 mil sub count, it would also be seen as an amazing expansion, even if it didn't grow at all, because it kept those people interested in the game well enough.
There comes a point where growth just isn't really feasible anymore, because let's be honest, there just isn't a massive percentage of gamers who are super interested in mmos...
The cata thing I will agree with, but you should never JUST look at growth when looking at a successful video game, especially a game like world of warcraft. Before WoW even launched, they had a massive fan base. Tons of people from warcraft 3, starcraft, diablo, etc etc etc. So of COURSE the 'growth' from no game to some game is probably going to be the largest climb. But I will agree that I personally believe tbc was the best version of the game and it really did an amazing job at bringing in new people as well as hyping up the 'veteran' players into playing this game long term. If tbc wasn't as great as it was, then I for sure think wotlk would have suffered quite a bit. Obviously.
I think you have some valid criticisms, I just don't agree with some and some are just sort of...well..wrong.... at least the pvp ones