So lemme get this straight

[Benitora]

the same ulduar with yogg, mimiron, flame leviathan, ignis? lmao
the same ulduar that had abysmal participation rates until toc?
the same ulduar that people are clueless about in tw?

couldn't be the same ulduar lmao

I was in a guild doing Servers first runs through Ulduar for Zero light and Algalon.
We had some good competition going in there, so I can't say that for my server that Ulduar was unpopular.

We managed to do Firefighter Mimiron, 4 tower Flame Leviathan and Ignis...Why Ignis? He wasn't really one of the harder ones. XT-002 was the real DPS check before Assembly of Iron or Hardmode Hodir.

Ulduar at the time, was seen as one of the best raids that Blizzard had ever made, except perhaps for a overtuned last boss through hardmode.

[Lei]

were they? i mean raids sure, but patches? they both added raid, and icc added dungeons, and thats it,
when we get raid, visions and some outdoor content in nyalotha it was "empty patch" according to people who praised wotlk in the same commentary...

dont get me wrong, i loved wotlk, and still think of it fondly but people realy do remember only the good things and ignore the rest, usualy in a way "current is bad, past was better" even if objectively speaking its bullshit

I think it's only fair to view individual expansions in their own time bubble.
i never played private servers, but looking at classic and how today's players play it, compared to how 2004 people played it it's clear how different player behavior is. if we'd get Wrath classic today, people would play it vastly vastly differently than in its time.
Wrath has had it's own problems (no xpansion or game is perfect) and looking back on it probably it has even more. But I enjoyed playing it while it was actual. I'd play it today and not many expansions are like that for me. Maybe TBC and MoP, and then that's it.
And then "complaining". I hard-complained in cata because achieves were bugged. What's that compared to BfA or WoD complaints? Fart in the wind.

[Yooginava182]

WoW was good until lfg finder/gearscore came into play.After that,it was all down hill.

whats funny is that gearscore was a player created item. It was something an addon pulled together based on your gear. I remember being in chat asking for a tank 4500 gear score to get the dungeon achievement mount ( red proto drake ).

[WowIsDead64]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

1) naxx10/25
2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC
3) ToC

as one of the best expansions? literally one of the 4 major content patches were "good"

I don't get it. Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch, when was wotlk this fantastic experience? genuinely curious.

Game was completely different back then. It's like asking what content Vanilla had in comparison with post-Legion era. Leveling was still part of "content". Dailies were easy and had cosmetic rewards only. Gearing path was linear. I.e. leveling -> normal 5pps -> heroic 5ppls -> raids. Heroics were part of content, like M+ are now. Since implementation of LFD, they were spammable. Some players, including me, liked so called heroic runs. Raids were very accessible. In fact, WotLK was first xpack in Wow's history, when raids were fully accessible to casual players. Even more. I guess, it was intentional design, because only raids were long term content back then. Everything was designed to allow as fast catching up to start raiding, as possible. There were "warm up" raids, like Arca and Sart. They dropped several gear pieces, that allowed casuals to have smother entering to "real" raiding. Naxx was at LFR level of difficulty. So ever casuals were beating it. Further raids were a little bit harder, but every raid had at least first-second quarters, that were doable by casuals. Plus 10/25 raids, that allowed players to do raids on two possible difficulty levels.

So, game has changed a lot back then. It changed from "squirrel kissing" to "raiding for everyone". Game started to provide real content. Not that "find things to do by yourself", like farming pointless reps via killing millions of mobs. It was really big jump in quality of content. Only problem - faster pace of content caused it to devalue faster. Players started to ask for more content. And there were some sings, that devs couldn't afford such high quality of content. So they started to backpedal in future xpacks, like Cata and MOP.

[Lightstrike]

Fundamentally, Naxx was not loved in WotLK. It was derided at the time because it went from having the reputation of being one of the most difficult raids in history from vanilla to being the intro raid in WotLK. People did not approve of this at all, but I do wonder how much of this is because players in general even in WotLK were just better than in vanilla.

That being said, it allowed a lot of players who missed out on raiding in vanilla to experience the bosses firsthand at an appropriate level.

Ulduar was very much possible without ToC gear, this statement is just plain false. What Ulduar did require for most guilds though was gear from Ulduar to clear Ulduar and IMO this shows great balancing. If you don't need the gear from a raid to completely clear it then what is the point?

Here is the difference. In WotLK, you had Naxx on Farm while you progressed Ulduar. You were still farming Ulduar to do hardmodes and potentially even wanting ToC gear to do those hardmodes too. This stretches the content out a lot more than what we have today where you farm the same raid over and over at different levels. Unless they're implementing a change of direction in Shadowlands, once 9.1 is out Castle Nathria will be all but useless except for transmog and achievement hunting.


Ulduar also provided us with our first taste of hardmodes which IMO should have been used as the template going forward. Unfortunately this didn't really happen. We do have different difficulty modes now but the flexibility isn't the same. This gave it great replayability, especially if you were a guild looking for a challenge or looking to do achievements.

ToC felt more like an experimental tier, previously where people complained about spending ages on trash (certainly could be true in Ulduar), ToC had none of that. The bosses were okay but nothing special IMO apart from only having a limited number of attempts before you got locked out.

My memory starts to get a bit more fuzzy when it comes to ICC but I do remember being a bit underwhelmed. Most of the fights end up just being DPS checks as opposed to anything else and don't get me started on the fucking gunship battle.

That being said, WotLK wasn't just about the raids, it was the last expansion before Blizzard started carving up classes into specs and moving toolkits about. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they made those changes in Cata and I also accept that something needed to be done about bloat. But that doesn't change the fact that Cata classes were a downgrade compared to WotLK.

Additionally, WotLK had multiple levelling routes, lots of 1-2 boss mini raids and a large variety of dungeons.

People always find something to complain about. I remember in WotLK it was all the rage to argue about whether "pure dps" classes should do more damage than hybrids or not.

[FuxieDK]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

1) naxx10/25
2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC
3) ToC

as one of the best expansions? literally one of the 4 major content patches were "good"

I don't get it. Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch, when was wotlk this fantastic experience? genuinely curious.

WotLK was a crap expansion.

Ulduar and Heirlooms were the only two good things; ICC as a raid was mediocre, as an end-expansion-raid, it was downright bad.

[Pyrium]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

1) naxx10/25
2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC
3) ToC

as one of the best expansions? literally one of the 4 major content patches were "good"

I don't get it. Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch, when was wotlk this fantastic experience? genuinely curious.

the story.

- - - Updated - - -

whats funny is that gearscore was a player created item. It was something an addon pulled together based on your gear. I remember being in chat asking for a tank 4500 gear score to get the dungeon achievement mount ( red proto drake ).

gs ruined the game. it wasnt a show of skill and knowledge as you could just buy boes and boost it up. you could be an alt and have done the raid or dungeon on main and have low gs on your alt and people would ridicule you and deny an invite. then you have the achievement whoring where people demanded the achi to join a raid group and if you didnt have it you didnt come. which was stupid cos how would you get the achi for the first time if you couldnt raid with out it. made no sense unless you had a guild

[barrsftw]

People always forget the bad and remember the good, WoW expansions are always beloved in hindsight.

WOTLK took immense flack when it was current, and as someone that actually remembers the bad, I don't count it in my top 3.

Best example of this is MoP. I remember people shitting on it so hard during the expansion. I remember an MMOC thread ranking the expansions from best to worst and most people had MoP last. Now it's seen as a great expansion and people act like it was the glory days of WoW lol.

[FelPlague]

I mean you had 232 which you could grind in a day
so yeah you could get full badge gear

WoTLK wasn't really raid or die cus you could get... full raid gear from spamming year old content save weapons.
you had access to 232 tier 9 from badge vendors during icc patch, which was the previous tier

yet if you wanted the new raids gear you needed to do the raid or spend months and months doing a dungeon a day.

[Zantera]

I never quite got the love for Wotlk myself but I guess a lot of it is just personal preference/experience and such.

TBC was amazing to me and I met and played with some really amazing players, and getting to clear BT and Sunwell before the Wotlk release was truly special and memories I will never forget. Then Wotlk hits and almost instantly people started losing interest. The rehashed Naxxramas was lackluster and even though I didn't do it in vanilla myself, the fact we went in and cleared it pretty much right away with very little trouble just felt very underwhelming. Was this the GREAT difficult Naxx I had heard people talk about? Nah it felt like a joke. Wasn't that fun of a raid either. Could you imagine Blizz today launching a new xpac with a rehashed raid from the past and have people be fine with that? No chance. The less said about the dragon raids the better, total filler.

Ulduar was great but the hype Ulduar brought was pretty much extinguished right away with TotC which felt super lazy. ICC was alright, though personally I never quite loved it because it reminded me of Black Temple but just a lesser version of it. Now that's a very subjective opinion and if you didn't do BT in TBC or you prefer Arthas to Illidan then I fully get if you like ICC more than I did. Zones were pretty good but zones have been good in almost every expansion. Did not care for Argent Tournament at all and I'd rather do almost any of the daily hubs in the expansions since.

For me Wotlk (at the time) was disappointing because it felt a lot easier than TBC with both dungeons and raids and Ulduar was really the only raid I loved. PVP at the time was pretty decent from what I remember but having very little interest in PVP, that didn't really do much for my enjoyment of the expansion.

[Relapses]

Ah yes, I remember this thread.

[StillMcfuu]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

1) naxx10/25
2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC
3) ToC

as one of the best expansions? literally one of the 4 major content patches were "good"

I don't get it. Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch, when was wotlk this fantastic experience? genuinely curious.

Classes were at their peak for "classic playstyle" evolution as well. It's my absolute favorite part, I can't really recall a class I didn't like playing.

[Relapses]

Classes were at their peak for "classic playstyle" evolution as well. It's my absolute favorite part, I can't really recall a class I didn't like playing.

I liked the part where every time I logged into WoW during WotLK an angel would appear in my room and tell me how nice my hair looked that day.

[Laerrus]

Spamming SoC in trash packs in ICC was god mode for Warlocks.

Running Heroic dungeons without a healer.

I personally loved it for how powerful we were.

Many other players seemed to like that and other reasons too. Subscription numbers were consistently the highest that they have been for any expansion.

[Pyrium]

we will also ignore Lagaran and Winterlag. Cos it was eventually fixed.

[Koward]

Classes were at their peak for "classic playstyle" evolution as well. It's my absolute favorite part, I can't really recall a class I didn't like playing.

Let me guess, you mainly played Paladin and Death Knight?

[THEORACLE64]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

1) naxx10/25
2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC
3) ToC

as one of the best expansions? literally one of the 4 major content patches were "good"

I don't get it. Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch, when was wotlk this fantastic experience? genuinely curious.

The story was untouchable, honestly.

There was still a community vibe, the zones were really well done along with quests having new mechanics as well.

It was the first time the game started having graphic upgrades as well, seeing as TBC was basically just an extended Classic and didn't bring a lot new in gameplay regards. Wrath really felt like an expansion.

[TheWorkingTitle]

Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch

Welfare gear started in TBC with badge gear, and if you want to go even further, the TBC pre-patch (iirc) made Rank 14 gear purchasable for honor. So no, welfare gear did not happen in WotLK.

[parasight]

WotLK introduced the Heroic raid variation. Also, the achievement system was introduced. People were waiting for the Arthas/Lich King lore to come to fruition because gamers knew about it for years. Maybe these things help the popularity.

[Triceron]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had

It made end-game more accessible to smaller guilds and casuals alike, which was good for the game.

There was no flexible raid system implemented till much later, and Vanilla and TBC had end-game raids dedicated to 25-man. Karazhan was an intro raid available to 10-man guilds, but that was practically it. Zul'Aman was also 10-man sure but its difficulty was tooled for people who were raiding past Kara and not very accessible to anyone who was solely doing Kara and pugging 25's ever so often.

Wrath made it convenient. You have 10-mans or 25-mans, and smaller guilds progressing through 10-mans could team up together to attempt the 25's. It helped foster a more integrated community without making it purely random pug the way LFR systems ended up doing. As some others said, the community was very different. There was no cross server joining, so guilds and individuals still had reputations to maintain. I'd say that was the number one reason why I enjoyed WOTLK so much - not the content but the 'ruleset' that made raiding flexible to smaller guilds and common players.

Wrath also had better role balance than in TBC IMO. As a Feral(Guardian) Druid, I was able to tank most of TBC but got stuck at a few key points due to mechanics or limited stats/gearing options. Wrath was the first time where they started homogenizing roles so any hybrid could fill a role completely without being limited, and that's what I'd remember Wrath most for.