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  1. #101
    As someone who is playing a lot on private servers and has even played a catalclysm pserver recently, it always kinda amazes me how people think that cata was so drastically different than wotlk.

    Wotlk and Cata felt and played VERY similarly. In fact, all expansions since TBC follow the same pattern/formula and only really classes have changed a lot. But Wotlk and Cata are VERY similar. In fact, Wotlk is much more similar to Cata than it is to TBC, believe it or not.

  2. #102
    Stealthed Defender unbound's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pohut View Post
    I've seen a few people claim that there is "general consensus" that WoW Classic is actually a WoW period that includes Vanilla, TBC and WotLK. Is it though?

    TBC and Wrath introduced 2 of the worst features of WoW: flying mounts and LFG tool. That's where, arguably, "the decline" started.

    All of a sudden claiming that Classic period is a thing is a bit disingenuous.
    I don't think I would label those as 2 of the worst features, but I agree with the sentiment...mostly with Wrath. Wrath introduced trivial dungeons and raids which ushered in the "Go Go Go" generation. BC introduced PvP gear that started destroying that aspect of the game late in BC and very notably in Wrath.

    In Wrath, you could see where the developers were heading with their decisions, and, sure enough, with the very next expansion, the game has been sliding downhill ever since.

  3. #103
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    Yes it is becasue they were built on the pre-Cata engine using the old systems, spell stacks, and database. So even from a dev standpoint that would be classic.
    No one fucking cares how the game was coded to determine what is "classic" and what not lol. And even if they did, you'd still be wrong, because Cata still used the old MPQ file system and DBC

  4. #104
    I don't think so, the game changed vastly in TBC and an even larger jump in WOTLK, they are 3 very different games. Cataclysm overhauling a few things was a big change but nothing about playing WOTLK felt like a "Classic" period that in any way had some connection to Vanilla, or even TBC.
    Probably running on a Pentium 4

  5. #105
    Quote Originally Posted by RobertMugabe View Post
    Wotlk and Cata felt and played VERY similarly. In fact, all expansions since TBC follow the same pattern/formula and only really classes have changed a lot. But Wotlk and Cata are VERY similar. In fact, Wotlk is much more similar to Cata than it is to TBC, believe it or not.
    Kept saying that for awhile now.

    Always been surprised that Wotlk is like seen as the "height of the game" and Cata as this massive dropoff.
    The biggest change was probably the revamped talent system, which hasn't gone that off the rails as Wotlk has killed most hybrid builds anyway by adding extremely powerful passive talents deep down into a tree, Cata just sealed the deal.
    One could perhaps argue over class design and how Cata really made the homogenization noticeable.

    However, the overall character progression of Wotlk and Cata are very similiar.

    And i absolutely agree that Wotlk and Cata are more similiar than TBC and Wotlk, Wotlk was a controversial expansion at the time not without reason.

  6. #106
    Quote Originally Posted by Kralljin View Post
    Kept saying that for awhile now.

    Always been surprised that Wotlk is like seen as the "height of the game" and Cata as this massive dropoff.
    The biggest change was probably the revamped talent system, which hasn't gone that off the rails as Wotlk has killed most hybrid builds anyway by adding extremely powerful passive talents deep down into a tree, Cata just sealed the deal.
    One could perhaps argue over class design and how Cata really made the homogenization noticeable.

    However, the overall character progression of Wotlk and Cata are very similiar.

    And i absolutely agree that Wotlk and Cata are more similiar than TBC and Wotlk, Wotlk was a controversial expansion at the time not without reason.
    The reason why WotLK was seen as the "height of the game" is because of people's expectations that skyrocketed after TBC. Surely the new expansion would be at least on-par with TBC. And it was, at first. Therefor the sub numbers were the highest in the middle of WotLK.

    Then they implemented dungeon finder and nerfed dungeons to make them work better with the new group finding tool. Normal dungeons were already a lot easier than in TBC but now they became a complete joke. The era of "queue & aoe down" had begun. Combined with the constantly "refining" questing experience, which got started already in TBC, they managed to create a linear, story driven and boring RPG where no one would fail.

    Now, upon the release of Cataclysm people already knew what to expect. The Cataclysm pre-patch was released a few months earlier. Hand-holding and linearity were taken totally to a new level. Questing was like a guided tour instead of an adventure but for some reason dungeons were not tuned respectively. They were really hard at first but then Blizzard gave up and nerfed them to the ground. The game was re-finding its identity and for that reason it's generally seen as "a massive dropoff".

  7. #107
    I'd say that WotLK started the decline of the game,but the effects weren't really felt until after the expansion ended,that's why people still see it as part of the "classic trio"

  8. #108
    While wotlk was on the same system, it was much more different than vanilla and tbc with multiple raid difficulties and raid wide buffs.

    Because wotlk is so similar to modern WoW, the only reason for it to exist is more or less nostalgia.
    Last edited by kranur; 2020-09-20 at 12:14 PM.

  9. #109
    Quote Originally Posted by deniter View Post
    The reason why WotLK was seen as the "height of the game" is because of people's expectations that skyrocketed after TBC. Surely the new expansion would be at least on-par with TBC. And it was, at first. Therefor the sub numbers were the highest in the middle of WotLK.
    You're describring the subgrowth, not necessarily why people nowadays hail Wotlk as the "best expansion".

    Point is that a lot of people still see Wotlk as the best expansion 10 years later, yet at the same time you have a lot of people that dislike Cata, despite those two expansions being not that different in their overall structure.

  10. #110
    Quote Originally Posted by Kralljin View Post
    You're describring the subgrowth, not necessarily why people nowadays hail Wotlk as the "best expansion".

    Point is that a lot of people still see Wotlk as the best expansion 10 years later, yet at the same time you have a lot of people that dislike Cata, despite those two expansions being not that different in their overall structure.
    Cata made me quit playing retail, i couldnt pwn people with my retri paladin anymore...all i needed was buttons 123 to succeed.

  11. #111
    Elemental Lord clevin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ONCHEhap View Post
    I'd say that WotLK started the decline of the game,but the effects weren't really felt until after the expansion ended,that's why people still see it as part of the "classic trio"
    This, and the story wrapped up the classic RTS storyline, finishing the Arthas/Lich King arc.

    Another way to see this is that Vanilla and TBC are one arc, Wrath and Cata another, MoP on, yet a third. It depends on your criteria.

    Wrath changed the feel of the game and began a trend toward making all of the classes similarly capable. For example, in Classic and BC, my rogue was very good single target DPS and brought in-fight utility (Blind, Kidney Shot, etc). With Wrath, the CC utility was rendered meaningless since you simply didn't need to CC and AOE DPS was key so classes that excelled at single target were devalued. Yes, rogues got Fan of Knives, but it was meh.

    The other way to look at this is the removal of play choice. In TBC my rogue went swords, but at the end instead of going fully combat, I went Sub for PVP. That fun of playing a spec that did what you wanted it to started to go away as expansions progressed. Yes, most of these hybrid specs were subpar for raiding etc but when I went Sub Swords, I wasn't raiding... and it was MY decision on how to spec. Blizzard progressively removed that kind of thing as time went on. Combine that with the removal of the hybrid tax and their incessant focus on balance and you get today's WoW.
    Last edited by clevin; 2020-09-21 at 05:44 PM.

  12. #112
    Classic WoW is vanilla+tbc.
    After that big things like threat management or group comp stopped being an issue, achievements and gearscore emerged, and the dev team gave birth to the jokefest named LFG.

    WOTLK is a start of modern wow.

  13. #113
    it was still the last period of the game where it had the classic talent system, I have a love hate relationship with wrath, I burnt out in ICC after going pretty hard all the way through (started playing eve online around 2009-10 and stopped playing wow), the heroics weren't that memorable or even enjoyable. but there was that period of time where you could get saved to both 10 and 25 man, this was at least for me, the pinnacle of alt progression where the game didn't have a ton of progression mechanics like today with azerite power or artifact power hamstringing or bottlenecking you getting into raids (or just making levelling alts a mind numbing bore of repetition that you'd already done on your main), you just levelled to 80 ran a few dungeons and you had pug raiding really start to become a thing ( there was a lot of 10 man pugging in tbc kara and ZA pugs but I think SSC/TK was too hard to pug at the time or required a decent-ish raid so I don't remember many pugs for t5/6 I was getting saved with my guild as most ppl did then if they were doing 25s). so, for a time, it was great for alts many more 25man pugs in wrath, I had about 4 or 5 raiding alts and I had one alt that nearly had as good gear as my main toward the end my priest was doing icc and I had a pala in full totc25 gear. but I had an alt in t7 one in t8. with a few alts you could log in on maintenance day and raid all day with different chars. doing 10 and 25 on each one.

    the raiding dragged on though, afaik wrath is the only expansion with 4 raid tiers, t7(naxx) - t8(ulduar) - t9(totc) - t10 (icc). this probably was 1 tier too many.

    dungeon finder didn't really bother me back then but again I didn't find the wrath dungeons to be all that interesting if you were raiding I feel like they died off faster in wrath than they did in BC, the ICC dungeons must have been the least run dungeons out of all dungeons this game has had, for ppl raiding by the time they came in they would have likely been worth running once and not for gear those final 3 dungeons were supposed to be a magisters terrace sort of thing but I think MgT was probably better/more relevant to more ppl when it came in. TBC had a LFG tool that just showed all the groups being created, but I think it needed to have something as the amount of dungeons with normal and heroic versions, there had to be a way to find a group without needing to sit there for 1hr reading chat spam.

    I played a priest back then so wrath was also the point where my class had its spec identity for all 3 specs, disc became a damage/healing spec in wrath which actually gave it some variation to holy and simply spamming flash heal the whole time. in classic and tbc, there isn't a lot of functional difference between both builds, you spend the majority of your time hammering flash heal but it did change a little bit in wrath when we had atonement and divine aegis. so this sums up my love hate for wrath, the world and rep grinds were boring at max level, the dungeons were uninspired and forgettable, but my class gained more variety and the raiding was pretty decent at least upto the point where they stopped you getting saved to both 10 and 25 effectively cutting the game in half at that point.

    which would suck because I bet if we got wrath again, or if classic progresses to that point, my guess is that it would start with the patch that introduced badge caps and singular lockouts which would probably make me not want to play through it again. it was fun before this happened.

    if you ask me the LFG tool isn't the problem, the problem with the game is that all the 5 mans are now linear 30 minute sprints, if the game continued to get more dungeons like BRD or the L-Ubrs combo, you would naturally have more dungeon discussion as the group decides 1)which way to go 2) who needs which boss and which loot which quests etc etc, these days all the dungeons are streamlined all linear, everyone has the quest, you kill all bosses because there probably are only 4 with optional bosses barely existing at all. there is nothing to discuss, because there is no depth to it. you enter the dungeon there is one path through it and thats it. there are no variables that need to be determined. if they brought back dungeons as mini zones with a multitude of quests some in there, some leading into there. you would naturally get more group discussion as you can see right now, if you've done a BRD run, there is some level of discussion. some of this is due to an emp run taking 2hrs with a level appropriate group, some of it is the depth of that singular instance and how much content is crammed into it. classic is much slower as you have to wait for mana after each pull but this isn't the whole of it. the dungeons in tbc onward are pretty much just palette swaps compared to BRD. its one part of the game that has never really gotten better only more casual / idiot proof. the longer ppl play the game the less likely they are going to need someone to interject on what they are doing, in the early days of wow I remember dungeon discussion mainly consisting of various ppl telling each other how to play their class, but even the worst wow player will eventually learn how to play their class.

    its a crying shame that they didn't take the concept of BRD and improve on it but instead just trimmed down the idea of a dungeon run to its most simplistic nature. they eliminated the group discussion by trivialising dungeon content to faceroll levels of simplicity. removing any concept of needing to make any significant decision about anything. in other words the only way you're going to get more dungeon discussion in this game is when they start making dungeons worth discussing. obviously this idea clashes with timed mythic+ runs in the modern game. the problem still remains that for the most part you only need to run a dungeon once to learn everything about it, with the older longer dungeons, it might have taken you several runs to learn everything about it. this in turn creates discussion. I suppose this also has something to do with the fact that its easy to get used to raiding and the level of dynamics within a raid or raid boss, but when transferred back to the dungeon level, will always feel underwhelming by comparison, in other words I doubt its possible to create a dungeon with the same level of discussion as a raid. but at the same time the dungeons haven't really gotten any more functionally complex either, regardless of how many raids you've cleared. I like a challenge but just creating a numerical difficulty doesn't equate to having depth. at this stage the game has traded all of its depth for a scaling numerical challenge that only really tests the gear you have and your reaction time. while nearly all other aspects of dungeon running are simply a bygone experience. its no wonder the game is the way it is today in terms of social interaction, since the priority of dungeon running is to blow through it as fast as possible it doesn't leave any room to chat. this has absolutely nothing to do with a system that automatically groups ppl together and is entirely down to this watering down of dungeon running into the speed running snooze fest it is today.. what happened to farming dungeons for crafting mats, recipes, rare or optional bosses. quest chains etc etc etc, none of this exists anymore its just a focused burn through a dungeon that has a fraction of the interactability that dungeons had in classic. some dungeons literally are nothing but killing trash and bosses and leaving with no extraneous interactability at all. mythic+ is exactly this. we went from dungeons having depth and variety to the RPG equivalent of a corridor shooter where the corridors have no interaction. compare any dungeon in the entire game to brd or a dire maul tribute run, paper thin is all I can say. there is nothing like that in the game any more. dungeons have no depth, variety or interaction beyond steamrolling through it.

    I think we would see a return of group discussion if dungeons were varied in length, had interaction that goes beyond simply punching your keyboard until everything is dead. but this is the result of casualisation and everything needing to fit into bite sized playstyles. imo you either have time to play mmos or you don't. the downfall was the point at which the mmo decided it needed to cater to more ppl, rather than accepting the ppl who had time for it. all those ppl who enjoyed the long burn adventurous dungeon running likely don't play anymore and all you have left are those ppl who want to burn through a dungeon in 30 mins. because they only have 30 mins to burn. at the same time this leaves you with a player base that has no time to chat life stories and is only there to plough through the content and log off or move onto the next thing. no one takes anything in stride, theres no more stopping to smell the roses because they stopped putting roses in dungeons.
    Last edited by Heathy; 2020-09-23 at 02:38 PM.

  14. #114
    I consider those 3 as the "classic" era of the game. They all still had the orginal azeroth. Most of the design and class systems were either the same or built upon each other. Some of the things introduced in BC and WotLK I would eventually come to dislike but upon introduction I didn't have a huge problem with them tbh.

  15. #115
    The Patient Darkynhalvos's Avatar
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    LFG tool was fine.

    The automated dungeon finder that ports you from wherever straight into the instance was the problem.

  16. #116
    I don't even see the portal to the instance a problem, meeting stones have existed for a long time now if you joined a group where 2 ppl were standing at the instance you got insta ported to the instance. the meeting stone summoning was obviously added to make it so that you didn't have to bring a warlock for every group. if i'm flying to the instance, i'm afk anyway, thats the point where I go smoke or make coffee before the dungeon.

    you also have the fact that if you were to log into the game and say yourself 'I think ill run a dungeon' do you a) find a group and then go to the dungeon or wait to be summoned or do you b) go to the dungeon before making or joining the group so you're there anyway, you know at the place where you wanted to go to. for a while I would have likely been an A) type of player, but since me and the bro usually tank/heal our own runs, it moved to being B) we decide to run a dungeon we go to that dungeon so we're there. the point at which we decide to run a dungeon or find other ppl is when we are pretty much already at said dungeon.
    Last edited by Heathy; 2020-09-24 at 06:52 PM.

  17. #117
    One major reason is that the whole world changed at the time around the end of wotlk. MOBA games happened, social media was getting Increasingly mainstream with the meme culture etc.

    it's the same with everything around that time period really. If u compare a BMW or a Mercedes from 2008 and 2010 you can also find that big jump from the classic look and feel - to the more modern one. I think that's probably the biggest reason because I clearly remember how it went from talking in Skype and doing things in game with friends and everyone was 100% attentive - to 50% focus in game and 50% focus on sending memes to eachother and browsing Facebook/chatting which really killed much of the immersion.

    Now in 2020 when all of that is getting boring and we long for the good old days it may be neglected but if u really think about it when it was new and fresh the whole world was jumping at it head first and it really changed many things

  18. #118
    Quote Originally Posted by RobertMugabe View Post
    As someone who is playing a lot on private servers and has even played a catalclysm pserver recently, it always kinda amazes me how people think that cata was so drastically different than wotlk.
    It's because "the game" also encompasses real-life culture and tech, and player communities' experience of each expansion in moments of time.

    Wrath and Cataclysm share many basic design similarities, although player reception of the two was wildly different, impacting Blizzard's own production performance and leaving each expansion in near-opposite end states of flaunting pinnacle vs. retreat-regroup for the next expansion. MMOs were still novel and social media was in its infancy but each changed quickly in a short span.

    On a private server, of course, hindsight allows players to work their way around design choices that at the time turned people's MMO life upside down.

  19. #119
    Quote Originally Posted by Dhrizzle View Post
    Vanilla to WotLK had the old world to explore and free-form talent trees. Obviously there's a large gradient of changes and everyone is free to draw the line at the point they consider the "golden age" but I'd say the removal of the old world and disallowing hybrid-specs is a pretty good place to draw a definitive line.
    The first ~5 years was the definitive experience. After ICC launched, there was pretty much nothing launched the following year (with the exception of the incredibly forgettable Ruby Sanctum) and then Cataclysm launched.

    The one year of no content saw a lot of people lapse their subscriptions, after having been playing for 3-5 years straight. MOST people didn't play WoW in the first ~6 months and started jumping in sometime between BWL and ZG launches. So you had people playing non-stop for maybe 4 years straight, which is a lot for any video game franchise.

    For me, Wrath was the beginning of the end though in retrospect. A recycled raid at launch (Naxx), the introduction of achievements (and thus the collection mini game WoW has become), catchup gear every patch AND multiple tiers of difficulty for every raid meaning huge gear inflation. Wrath though had a great story line, and these introductions were new and their impacts weren't really felt until well later.

  20. #120
    WotLK was the beginning of the decline of the game.

    It introduced the vast majority of "amenity"-mechanics we have today - like the dreadful achievement system, group finder, mass loot for everyone etc.

    Player base wise, WotLK was the height of the game, but because they made it so much more convenient and casuall/mass gamer friendly. WotLK is where the decline started.

    OG WoW was Classic to TBC.

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