Is there really a Classic WoW period: Vanilla-WotLK?

[kukkamies]

TBC did bring paladins to horde and shamans to alliance which already changed the dynamics a lot.
Also the end of 40man raids, obsoleted old world, arenas, flying, dailies. No more can you grind on your own pace, you have to wait for dailies to reappear.
The end of adventuring around the world, instead turned into quest hubs that lead into the neighboring hub and the game has been like that ever since.

Wouldn't call anything classic period except original itself. TBC is still a good and interesting game, but not classic. It removed and changed so much of the feeling of original one.

[Heathy]

TBC did bring paladins to horde and shamans to alliance which already changed the dynamics a lot.
Also the end of 40man raids, obsoleted old world, arenas, flying, dailies. No more can you grind on your own pace, you have to wait for dailies to reappear.
The end of adventuring around the world, instead turned into quest hubs that lead into the neighboring hub and the game has been like that ever since.

Wouldn't call anything classic period except original itself. TBC is still a good and interesting game, but not classic. It removed and changed so much of the feeling of original one.

I find this sort of thing disingenuous, classic has masses of obsoleted content, the moment you hit level 10 several zones were obsoleted, 20, more zones, 30 more zones. you know you aren't getting content for level 60 in trisfal glades, or mulgore, just like every zone that is level 20-30 is obsoleted by level 40.

there is no difference in tbc, hellfire is mostly obsoleted by level 70. you aren't there killing mobs, at best you're gathering herbs and ores but that is it, same with classic.

you still have to go through classic to reach tbc, if you want a profession you have to farm mats from classic to reach 300 so you can move into tbc. its a progression from A to B, once you reach B you have no more need for A. this wasn't any different in classic, you have silithus, winterspring and felwood, EPL & the burning steppes, at max level there are only a handful of relevant zones. most of it is obsoleted. in fact once you start raiding even the dungeons become mostly obsoleted beyond farming things like righteous orbs there is no progression to be made from doing it over and over.

if the goal was to just aimlessly wander the world with no goal or progression tasks, quests etc, there is nothing inherently stopping ppl doing that. in other words just because outland exists it doesn't mean you can't go back and wander around the world. not that ppl really did that anyway unless they had some sort of quest. or for gathering.

[Hinastorm]

They include wrath because it's the majority of people's favorite expansion, for better or worse.

But the fact that wrath added alot of stuff that sent wow down the more casual friendly mode is just a fact.

- - - Updated - - -

I do somewhat wonder if the reason vanilla through wotlk is considered 'classic' is because those are the 'not shit' expansions.

That said, I'd say that they are the 'classic' era because they don't rework or retool much of anything in the game to that point. You have the talent system, which gets expanded. Your spell list gets expanded. You get new professions, and professions don't really get major reimaginings. If you go into TBC or WotLK without keeping up with the news, there really aren't any systems that you're going to need to get up to speed with.

Couldn't all those points apply to Cata?

MoP seems to be the big turning point expansion.

[Heathy]

They include wrath because it's the majority of people's favorite expansion, for better or worse.

But the fact that wrath added alot of stuff that sent wow down the more casual friendly mode is just a fact.

conversely out of all 3 expansions it was the first one to introduce hard modes. it was casual because for a while you could get saved to 10 and 25 man, this made it very puggable. being able to get saved to naxx twice for example, even if the 10 man gear was worst than the 25, you could still raid a lot without a guild if you have 2 level 80 alts + your main, you could raid all day with different chars doing 10 and 25 on each one. I dunno if this was the result of the game becoming more casual or just the player base as a whole becoming more confident in running and joining pugs. but there was a significant increase in the amount of 25 man pugs in wrath. and it wasn't just naxx 25 being pugged but all raids. when the majority of the player base then is raiding, you don't really have a pauper class of player anymore a player that doesn't raid or doesn't know about raiding this concept was just gone by wrath and everyone was fully clued in at that point and knew what to do.

perhaps just that the mysteries of raid progression being gone was the turning point, when most ppl are raiders then raiding is casual. and no longer something only a fraction of the servers population are doing.

[kukkamies]

I find this sort of thing disingenuous, classic has masses of obsoleted content, the moment you hit level 10 several zones were obsoleted, 20, more zones, 30 more zones. you know you aren't getting content for level 60 in trisfal glades, or mulgore, just like every zone that is level 20-30 is obsoleted by level 40.

there is no difference in tbc, hellfire is mostly obsoleted by level 70. you aren't there killing mobs, at best you're gathering herbs and ores but that is it, same with classic.

you still have to go through classic to reach tbc, if you want a profession you have to farm mats from classic to reach 300 so you can move into tbc. its a progression from A to B, once you reach B you have no more need for A. this wasn't any different in classic, you have silithus, winterspring and felwood, EPL & the burning steppes, at max level there are only a handful of relevant zones. most of it is obsoleted. in fact once you start raiding even the dungeons become mostly obsoleted beyond farming things like righteous orbs there is no progression to be made from doing it over and over.

You do get content in Tirisfal Glades at 60 though. The horde Argent Dawn stuff is there. Mulgore also has Darkmoon Festival which gives powerful buffs at max level. It's only once a month, or once every two months? though.

I do agree with some but not everything. You do still run through the old zones now and then to get to other places, there are many more places around the world with content at max level. There's also STV, Feralas, Searing Gorge, Blasted Lands. World bosses also bring players around the world at times.
With TBC it's all in the small island one flight away. The world turned a lot smaller for max level, since you used to have 2 giant lands with content at all ends.

[Heathy]

its still disingenuous there isn't masses of content, going to a zone for a world boss is a 20 minute thing, are you there for anything else other than that boss? no and when its dead you leave the zone that has no content for you.

STV has ZG but no mob in the zone is over level 45 so there is nothing there for a 60.

you spend the majority of your time at 60 in one of the max level zones where the content is relevant to you and your progression.

do you need the blasted lands consumables? I never bothered farming them maybe if they stacked it might be worth it. but its entirely skippable.

you mean the argent dawn stuff is on the border to the WPL, which caps out at about 55, you have hearthglen but if you're already 60 is there anything there that could be considered progression content or is it just farming elite scarlet crusaders for gold? same with tyr's hand, there isn't much there beyond a single quest chain and endless elite grinding.

grinding elites endlessly for gold you may or may not actually use in the short term isn't really inspiring all that much. I wouldn't really call it content. at least not in the sense that you're making consistent forward momentum just by being there and farming.

level 60 still polarises into either 1) raiding 2) preparing consumables for raiding 3) running dungeons or 4) grinding gold for no other reason other than to have more gold.

I can't say if the tbc dailies were an improvement, at least they were entirely optional. outland is definitely smaller but I think the entire thing was somewhat relevant right the way through, each zone had a dungeon, that had ofc had a heroic version, each zone had relevant gathering mats. its unlikely that at 60 you're still riding around farming iron and tin or peaceblooms. the sub 50 game is obsolete the moment you hit 60. which isn't really any different to the sub 60 game being obsolete at 70. just a natural shifting of the goal posts, but more of outland is relevant at 70, than most of azeroth being relevant at 60. there are a significant amount of levelling zones in classic that you go to once, you do the quests there and you never go back there for any reason, other than perhaps flying past it on your way to somewhere else more relevant.

[Nuciek]

Classic perios is classic. And that's it. There's no TBC or WotLK in classic period, they are different expansions and every expansion changed the game in some way.

TBC alone turned 40 man raids into 10/25 man raids, added flying, dailies, arena, resilience, LFG tool, heroic dungeons, two new races, paladins to the horde and shamans to the alliance, removed honor ranks and changed a lot more things. If someone thinks TBC is the same game that classic is, he's delusional. Both TBC and WotLK altered the game no less then Cataclysm, MoP or any other expansion. I'd like to hear about one thing that stayed the same from Classic to TBC in terms of content category (raiding, dungeons, solo, PvP?).

[Heathy]

Classic perios is classic. And that's it. There's no TBC or WotLK in classic period, they are different expansions and every expansion changed the game in some way.

TBC alone turned 40 man raids into 10/25 man raids, added flying, dailies, arena, resilience, LFG tool, heroic dungeons, two new races, paladins to the horde and shamans to the alliance, removed honor ranks and changed a lot more things. If someone thinks TBC is the same game that classic is, he's delusional. Both TBC and WotLK altered the game no less then Cataclysm, MoP or any other expansion. I'd like to hear about one thing that stayed the same from Classic to TBC in terms of content category (raiding, dungeons, solo, PvP?).

wouldn't be much of a game if things didn't change, the core of the game stayed the same though, the whole level up, run dungeons, get baseline gear, raid. that hasn't changed and is still this way today.

I think everyone thinks classic to wrath was the classic period as it was simply the period of time which had the old talent system. not to mention cataclysm was the first expansion where you could get a free character boost to 80. effectively skipping everything before it. while in classic tbc and wrath if you wanted a max level char you had to level it all the way yourself. if you want a 60 you have to level it to 60, if you want a 70 you have to level to 70, if you wanted an 80 in wrath, you had to level to 80.

in cataclysm anyone who bought that expansion got a free 80, so it was effectively a soft reboot. the talent system changed to what is still there today, all classes were pruned down to the spec system we have today, that is the whole concept of certain specs getting certain abilities and not getting others. in classic to wrath, your class had all of its abilities they just had varying amounts of relevance due to your spec. but you still had them.

[erifwodahs]

@Kralljin so.... guides=players made raids casual, not Blizzard. Every raid encounter in classic could be beaten by almost everyone with the correct guide = normal mode. HC raids require both throughput (somewhat doing rotations) and tactics while mythic require really good execution and increasingly good throughput either via gear gain or practice in encounters (adjusting CD usage and raid comp).
Unless you are saying that to compensate the information access would have to be the in the form mechanical+output difficulty to keep those participation numbers somewhat the same.. Then I would agree it made the raiding more casual but it would cut out was majority of the gamers where endgame was defined to be raiding/pvp. People are no longer satisfied with "I will level these two characters for a year" while doing fun stuff sidetracked. Average Joe might have not raided in Vanilla but they surely are now as we have different standards for the games.
I would agree that LFR casualised raiding because there are no logistics or effort required inthere to go through it (besides full LFR taking 3x time compared to the full normal raid pug with ok gear)

[letssee]

yes man, its obvious. even tho some can argue shit started in wrath, it was still closer to vanilla and tbc than cata was and onwards, later expacs introduced worse shit

[kukkamies]

its still disingenuous there isn't masses of content, going to a zone for a world boss is a 20 minute thing, are you there for anything else other than that boss? no and when its dead you leave the zone that has no content for you.

STV has ZG but no mob in the zone is over level 45 so there is nothing there for a 60.

you spend the majority of your time at 60 in one of the max level zones where the content is relevant to you and your progression.

do you need the blasted lands consumables? I never bothered farming them maybe if they stacked it might be worth it. but its entirely skippable.

you mean the argent dawn stuff is on the border to the WPL, which caps out at about 55, you have hearthglen but if you're already 60 is there anything there that could be considered progression content or is it just farming elite scarlet crusaders for gold? same with tyr's hand, there isn't much there beyond a single quest chain and endless elite grinding.

grinding elites endlessly for gold you may or may not actually use in the short term isn't really inspiring all that much. I wouldn't really call it content. at least not in the sense that you're making consistent forward momentum just by being there and farming.

level 60 still polarises into either 1) raiding 2) preparing consumables for raiding 3) running dungeons or 4) grinding gold for no other reason other than to have more gold.

I can't say if the tbc dailies were an improvement, at least they were entirely optional. outland is definitely smaller but I think the entire thing was somewhat relevant right the way through, each zone had a dungeon, that had ofc had a heroic version, each zone had relevant gathering mats. its unlikely that at 60 you're still riding around farming iron and tin or peaceblooms. the sub 50 game is obsolete the moment you hit 60. which isn't really any different to the sub 60 game being obsolete at 70. just a natural shifting of the goal posts, but more of outland is relevant at 70, than most of azeroth being relevant at 60. there are a significant amount of levelling zones in classic that you go to once, you do the quests there and you never go back there for any reason, other than perhaps flying past it on your way to somewhere else more relevant.

If you think it's only content if you're there past 20 minutes and not just grinding for gold, is there a single zone that's relevant at max level after vanilla? You run straight to instance, do the few dailies or wqs in 5-15 minutes or grinded gold. Do you count instances as zone content or general content?
To me it's max level content if you have to visit it for max level progression. Makes the adventure and world feel bigger. Legion had the class quests that were the first ones after Vanilla that felt really epic and made you see different parts of the world.

Blasted Lands has some class quests at 60. STV has ZG buffs for 60lvls, ZG enchants and fishing contest. WPL does have scholomance. Thinking about it Badlands has the bis hunter pet for fastest attack speed and Desolace has Maraudon for gold farming and few preraid bis. I don't think every place needs to have something for everyone, but everyone should have some place.

[sylenna]

how about this is a really big game with a rich history (lore- and technical-wise) and you either like it or you don't?

why do i need to define eras? i liked every expansion feature because i let the devs take me by the hand and experience what they had in mind when they created it. except corruption, where they made it clear through the whole updates to that mechanic that they weren't satisfied with it either.

if i couldn't immerse myself in a game anymore, i couldn't enjoy it. heck, i enjoy BfA a lot. great music in dazar'alor when you enter the game, really great mountains to sit upon in kul tiras and watch the ships way down and corrupted old zones. sure, i play a lot but not in a raiding guild anymore. still i try to min-max my characters the best i can while enjoying the rest.

chopping it all up into eras and defining what was good and what wasn't is trying to dispel the mystery and the wonders this game has to offer and THAT would kill it, nothing else.

[Heathy]

If you think it's only content if you're there past 20 minutes and not just grinding for gold, is there a single zone that's relevant at max level after vanilla? You run straight to instance, do the few dailies or wqs in 5-15 minutes or grinded gold. Do you count instances as zone content or general content?
To me it's max level content if you have to visit it for max level progression. Makes the adventure and world feel bigger. Legion had the class quests that were the first ones after Vanilla that felt really epic and made you see different parts of the world.

Blasted Lands has some class quests at 60. STV has ZG buffs for 60lvls, ZG enchants and fishing contest. WPL does have scholomance. Thinking about it Badlands has the bis hunter pet for fastest attack speed and Desolace has Maraudon for gold farming and few preraid bis. I don't think every place needs to have something for everyone, but everyone should have some place.

Silithus is relevant even for raiding mains at max level, it is still mostly grinding gold but there are raid tier items attainable from just questing and farming reputation in that zone, most of the zones do only have some fleeting relevance in some minor way, either you're going there to farm a specific item, or gold or quest, it really is only silithus that has progression based on farming twilight dudes and consistently farming templars, dukes & lords. raid tier content in the open world. silithus is also catch up, phase 5 at the moment is the point at which t0.5 was added, but even the summonable elites drop the abyssal green gear which is pretty decent ilvl 65 greens. for freshly dinged 60's cladding yourself in abyssal greens isn't far from dungeon BiS. for casters specifically healers the gear just has no int only stam, but lots of + heal and mp5.

I tend to farm elemental earths for elemental sharpening stones from the badlands, the level 40 elementals have the best chance to drop them. but that would be the singular reason for me to go there. whether this was deliberate or not, there are higher level earth elementals in the game but their chance to drop elemental earths doesn't scale. actually I don't think i've had a single one from the rock eles in silithus.

I think in TBC it would have been nagrand that had the least permanent relevance, I don't remember it having a dungeon, there was the pvp thing, the ring of blood which was more of a levelling thing. but beyond gathering herbs/ore and fish it didn't have the same relevance as say, terrokar or blades edge because of the dailies. pretty sure nagrand had dailies the rep grind just didn't result in a flying mount so it likely just felt less relevant in comparison to the other zones once you're already 70. but over all because of the gathering all of the tbc zones retained some relevance, compared to classic where you simply out level all the crafting stuff under 50.

[Super Kami Dende]

I don't tend to bunch the greatness of Wrath with the shitshow of Vanilla.

[Nuciek]

wouldn't be much of a game if things didn't change, the core of the game stayed the same though, the whole level up, run dungeons, get baseline gear, raid. that hasn't changed and is still this way today.

I think everyone thinks classic to wrath was the classic period as it was simply the period of time which had the old talent system. not to mention cataclysm was the first expansion where you could get a free character boost to 80. effectively skipping everything before it. while in classic tbc and wrath if you wanted a max level char you had to level it all the way yourself. if you want a 60 you have to level it to 60, if you want a 70 you have to level to 70, if you wanted an 80 in wrath, you had to level to 80.

in cataclysm anyone who bought that expansion got a free 80, so it was effectively a soft reboot. the talent system changed to what is still there today, all classes were pruned down to the spec system we have today, that is the whole concept of certain specs getting certain abilities and not getting others. in classic to wrath, your class had all of its abilities they just had varying amounts of relevance due to your spec. but you still had them.

As you said the core of the game is the same now and it was like this than so you can't say that this is what makes classic period or modern period.

The boost was also only with scroll of resurrection if I remember correctly? I don't remember boosting any character in Cataclysm so it was just a case for minor amount of people (that could always buy "unofficial" leveling boost). I just checked and it was introduced on March 2012, when Cata was released on December 2010. Can't really say that's a big part of expansion, can you?

I agree that boosts in general changed how you can get into the current content, but boosts were never given to the max level for free. Like now we have 120 boost, but we will still need to level up in Shadowlands content. Leveling also changed before, WotLK added random dungeons feature which was a massive change to leveling experience. And that's the whole point, every expansion changes something and throwing WotLK and TBC in the same bucket that Classic because there were talent trees in both is just silly. Cataclysm didn't even remove talent trees, they just revamped them. The talent system that we have now has been implemented in MoP, not Cataclysm. Also classes weren't pruned in Cataclysm, they had a shitload of skills. You had access to all the skills your class had, except for couple of them that you would've get only from the specs talent trees anyway before the revamp. But you still had access to other specs skills, pruning was done several expansions later, not in Cata. Unless you count skills like dampen magic.

[Heathy]

well i'm not disagreeing but, I too also see the original classic to wrath as the classic period, the revamped talent trees and the ability to buy the game and skip everything before it was the turning point, not to mention it went right back to azeroth (well kalimdor and the eastern kingdoms) as if cataclysm was meant to be classic 2.0.

generally speaking I don't see that the game HAS changed that much but it has become more formulaic over time, I actually burnt out in wrath at the end I think I did 4 bosses in icc 25 and then I went and started playing eve online and gave my account to my bro, he went on and did the frostmourne questline on his warrior. my guild had some sort of internal strife at the time, like a small band of 'friends' undermining the cohesion of the whole raid, our guild leader also burnt out and was a no show for a while. generally speaking I just didn't care about wow at that point and burnt out myself.

the game has become more and more idiot proof over time and the progression systems that come in for one expansion and are abandoned thereafter sucks a lot. it makes it harder for me to care about any specific expansion when its full of macguffins that are there one minute and gone the next. I really enjoyed legion I was kinda lucky with my legend drops getting my best ones relatively quickly, but it was an expansion that had gimmicky progression mechanics that didn't stay part of the game.

the talent system did change quite drastically in cataclysm, it moved from the old cookie cutter 31/41/51 talent trees back down to 31 trees but without the ability to cross spec, you had to fill one tree before you could put points into another tree, a lot of things were just built into the class, like the meditation talent for priests and other healers, it moved from a talent to being an ingrained part of the class. but cata was also a short expansion like MoP being only 80-85 and MoP being 85-90, for those that like long levelling periods these two expansions probably had the shortest.

toward the end of wrath or maybe mid way through they introduced the singular raid lock tying 10 and 25 raid lockouts together, if you got saved to 10, you couldn't do 25 and vice versa (I think it was upto ToTC that you could raid both not sure which patch it was that changed the lockouts but I feel like I remember being able to run both 10 and 25 totc before it changed) they also introduced the badge cap, which persisted into cataclysm and the valour cap, needing to grind 1000 valour each week to max your item upgrades (prior to this you could grind as many badges as you wanted there was no badge cap in tbc and for a large portion of wrath) this wasn't a great system and just felt like something you had to do. rather than it being something you naturally felt like doing it became that thing you have to do or you miss out. but currency caps suck anyway, what if this week I can grind twice as much currency as next week. it just forces you to grind cap but doesn't allow you to farm for a week that you might not be playing or just playing less. in other words the latter half of wrath and cataclysm in general were the point at which the game started to babysit the player base. the point at which they felt forced to make significant changes to curtail involvement. while also the game in general has just become more focused in terms of becoming raid ready, TBC hit the consumable grind hard compared to classic (I remember using mana oils in tbc but there wasn't much in the way of niche consumables like for example whipper root tubers in classic and potion stacking went the way of the dinosaur). to the point we are at now where there is nothing like that in the game any more. it all feels very structured with limited ways for experimentation. even wrath to some degree changed the formula by having a 10 and 25 man version of raids, I didn't mind this much at the time but in retrospect I preferred the karazhan and zul'aman approach to doing 10s having them be their own raid balanced around that size, rather than simply being a 25 man scaled down for 10. it probably requires a lot less effort to do raids like this rather than having unique raids for each size.

even just the ability to spec a character wrong just doesn't really exist, they made it so that you gained all of that specs main abilities when you picked that spec, as a priest for example, if you chose to be disc you automatically gained penance, gone were hybrid builds. the game has slowly turned into that game that you can't make a wrong choice in, while simplistic enough that the level of effort required to perform well or be ready for raiding is minor.

i'm one of those ppl who doesn't even really mind the LFR, to me I see it as an extension of what running dungeons is before you commit to a raid schedule with a guild. it pretty much fills the same role with the added benefit of keeping the learning curve within the game, not requiring ppl to look outside of the game for information. if you put dungeon running and the LFR side by side they basically fill the same role. the LFR was added in cata which could be considered a major step toward casualisation and pushing the idea of raiding into a mainstream goal. although it was likely wrath and the pug explosion that really cemented the raid culture. classic and tbc during their time weren't as heavy on raiding for the majority of ppl and it was still somewhat niche to be part of a raiding guild.

I think the player base has changed a lot too, I remember doing dungeon raids in stratholme in 2005 where you could take 10-15 ppl into any instance, and having it still be a wipe fest (having ppl back peddling into more packs of mobs) wiping 3-4 times with twice as many ppl as the forced 5s. I think there comes a point where ppl expect to just clear the content and not wipe fest through it. dungeon running like the LFR is that content that you expect to just clear and most ppl won't stay in a group after a couple of wipes. there was definitely a turning point in what ppl expect from the game and from everyone else playing. the player base became more skilled over time but the game slowly required less effort to do well. so you have more ppl willing to put in more effort and the game slowly reducing the required amount of effort.

[Kralljin]

so.... guides=players made raids casual, not Blizzard. Every raid encounter in classic could be beaten by almost everyone with the correct guide = normal mode.

The crucial flaw in your logic is that you analyze Classic raid design from a 2020 PoV, when you should analyze it in this context from the perspective of 2005.

Those bosses weren't designed around this wealth and spread of information that we have now, it's that simple.

HC raids require both throughput (somewhat doing rotations) and tactics while mythic require really good execution and increasingly good throughput either via gear gain or practice in encounters (adjusting CD usage and raid comp).

The people who raid have evolved over the last 15 years...i don't think you're winning anything for that analysis.

People are no longer satisfied with "I will level these two characters for a year" while doing fun stuff sidetracked. Average Joe might have not raided in Vanilla but they surely are now as we have different standards for the games.

That is the point where this discussion really goes offtrack.
However, the difference here is that Blizzard decided during Wotlk to turn raiding into the ultimate endgame for everybody.

Look towards TBC, you could gear your character in (heroic) dungeons, via Badges, Reputation, Professions and even PvP without stepping into a raid.
Since Wotlk (putting M+ aside), you raid (which includes LFR) or your character progression stops dead in its tracks pretty early into the expansion.
Even in Wotlk, Reputation rewards or craftable items quickly lost its value because they were equal / inferior to items from raids, which have become pretty accessible due to 10man Normal.

I could also put it this way: "Raid or die" started in Wotlk.

Rather than building up content intended primarily for the casual playerbase, they just casualized raiding so everybody can do it.

Blizzard nowadays attempts to build a game where everybody partakes in the same type of content except at varying levels of difficulty, whereas previously, people did different aveneues of content depending on their preference.

[erifwodahs]

The crucial flaw in your logic is that you analyze Classic raid design from a 2020 PoV, when you should analyze it in this context from the perspective of 2005.

I was referring to WotLK and anything ever since - thats guides=players who made every raid "casual" and not the blizzard by making it "easy". How should have blizzard countered it? What about people who didn't want to move on from "no guides/no addons"?

And second path for progression was PvP with gear vendors and totally different gear and the third progression was badges.. every tier gave you better badges and from daily HC you could get current raid tier badges.

Raids were made casual by LFR, tho I have no problem with that at all.

Blizzard nowadays attempts to build a game where everybody partakes in the same type of content except at varying levels of difficulty, whereas previously, people did different aveneues of content depending on their preference.

Absolutely untrue. A lot of people don't raid, don't do m+ or don't do pvp. Or do one thing exclusively.

[Kralljin]

I was referring to WotLK and anything ever since - thats guides=players who made every raid "casual" and not the blizzard by making it "easy".

You do realize that they added a 10man difficulty (lower organization requirements) that was undertuned (lower challenge)?

How should have blizzard countered it? What about people who didn't want to move on from "no guides/no addons"?

The point you're trying to make here absolutely eludes me.

And second path for progression was PvP with gear vendors and totally different gear and the third progression was badges.. every tier gave you better badges and from daily HC you could get current raid tier badges.

1.PvP Gear was worse in Wotlk than PvE gear
2.If you limited yourself to the daily heroic, it took ages to buy a piece (2 badges / day isn't exactly the best rate)

Compare that to TBC, where PvP gear was equivalent to PvE gear and you could get far more badges in a single day because they dropped off bosses and not solely tied to a daily heroic.

Absolutely untrue. A lot of people don't raid, don't do m+ or don't do pvp. Or do one thing exclusively.

No, just you just don't get it.

Previously, raids had a barrier of entry, now that barrier is much lower, because the organization requirements and difficulty starts off so low that anyone can enter.
Raiding in Classic / TBC wasn't supposed to be for everybody, in Wotlk they quite clearly turned raiding into the endgame for everybody.

[erifwodahs]

...

so your point is what? That it is not organizational nightmare = casual? WotLK was out when everyone and their mother were on coms anyway so if they maintained the difficulty at the same level as classic (entering raids is more complicated than the boss fights) and with the information being available how to defeat those bosses any social guild would have killed last boss. Smaller guilds would have been forced to pug and likely still killed those bosses.
More people raiding = more people aware of it, aware of requirements and aware of difficulty and logistical stuff rather than just one thing - "raidz ez"

Raids were not undertuned except for naxx and that was still arguably harder than MC. Btw Onyxia 3 man kill says hello. Or the more recent one - naked raid. :>

WotLK gear was not worse than PvE gear for PvP except for Shadowmourne and one trinket.

You seem to, for some reason, put the thing that people can enjoy raiding as a negative thing.