So lemme get this straight

[Kalisandra]

Yeah, and they dropped ilvl 200 gear -- what's your point?

One i200 piece off the end boss. The rest was lower level (i187?) blues. For me in the early days of LK the big deal with heroics, aside from the badges, were the crafting orbs. Of course, only one of those dropped too, so getting enough for a crafted piece was a time consuming process. Still, I made a good amount of gold selling crafted weapons. i200 weapons with damned good stats, as I recall. Actually the plate helmets had good stats too, because the DPS one had no Stamina, so all the stat budget went into DPS stats.

[Otimus]

Most people rate it highly because of the coherent narrative, theming, and structure, combined with it capping off major lore from Warcraft 3 and delivering a prominent villain with a clear conclusion. It also had a very nice world map/environments and the questing was a gigantic step up in quality from Classic and BC.

Most people don't give a single damned shit about raids. Hell, most people don't even care about balance, structured pvp or even dungeons.

[tangers58]

Yes got it straight, it is one of the best expansions.

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Most people rate it highly because of the coherent narrative, theming, and structure, combined with it capping off major lore from Warcraft 3 and delivering a prominent villain with a clear conclusion. It also had a very nice world map/environments and the questing was a gigantic step up in quality from Classic and BC.

Most people don't give a single damned shit about raids. Hell, most people don't even care about balance, structured pvp or even dungeons.

Ha sweetie, if there is anything the last decade has shown it is that it does not matter how disjointed the story, world map, environments, and questing becomes; so long as the raids are good the vast majority of players aren't going anywhere.

[Dhrizzle]

You couldn't do that in LK either. It took more runs than that to get the currency, and heroics were on daily lockouts. You are massive exaggerating unless you mean "grind heroics for an hours or so a day for a few weeks". The welfare epics didn't really turn up until ICC, and the 5-mans for that, and they weren't i200 heroics, and unless you had a guild carrying your alt they weren't trivial until well into ICC.

The welfare epics in WotLK came from Badges of Justice/Conquest/whatever. Originally you had regular blues from badges dropped by bosses and a weekly quest that gave you badges to spend on the loot the ilvl of the current 10-man raid. Then with a new patch you could use the normal badges on the previous tiers loot and have a weekly quest to get the more current gear.

I can't remember exactly how it worked but my warrior came out of WotLK with 2 pieces of tier 10, the rest tier 9 and a few supplemental pieces from the Icecrown heroics without once setting foot in a raid.

[Kalisandra]

Could get badges from heroic 5 mans to buy gear and when I decide to do Naxx on an alt (and did get the Undying title) it sure fit my idea of "relevant"

Never got the Undying title. Idiots kept dying to frogger. One run we decided to get the achieve. We set up a lock closet to bypass frogger - and some idiot decided they didn't need to use it. That was in the last lockout before it was made unavailable...

[Kralljin]

Also, when BG currency could be used to buy old arena epics (season three of BC, I think), which were insanely good compared to heroic or T4 raid gear. That really puched up the quality of gear available to the casual raider who had time on their hands to grind BGs.

That's true, altough it was more limited and those pieces weren't universally great, non feral tanks couldn't use them, most PvP pieces for healers were terrible for healers as they lacked mana regen stats (mostly) and for caster pieces those weren't the best either.

Weapons in general were solid and melees benefited a lot from it, though.

It was popular because a fresh 70 could just AFK leech their way to relatively solid gear without any actual effort, altough on a lot of servers people started to pug with the requirement of "Full S1 / S2 geared people not allowed", as it was big red flag that you just AFK leeched gear in BG's without ever entering a dungeon or raid.

[Otimus]

Yes got it straight, it is one of the best expansions.

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Ha sweetie, if there is anything the last decade has shown it is that it does not matter how disjointed the story, world map, environments, and questing becomes; so long as the raids are good the vast majority of players aren't going anywhere.

The vast majority don't raid.

[Kehego]

You couldn't do that in LK either. It took more runs than that to get the currency, and heroics were on daily lockouts. You are massive exaggerating unless you mean "grind heroics for an hours or so a day for a few weeks". The welfare epics didn't really turn up until ICC, and the 5-mans for that, and they weren't i200 heroics, and unless you had a guild carrying your alt they weren't trivial until well into ICC.

random dungeon finder circumvented dungeon lockouts.

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The welfare epics in WotLK came from Badges of Justice/Conquest/whatever. Originally you had regular blues from badges dropped by bosses and a weekly quest that gave you badges to spend on the loot the ilvl of the current 10-man raid. Then with a new patch you could use the normal badges on the previous tiers loot and have a weekly quest to get the more current gear.

I can't remember exactly how it worked but my warrior came out of WotLK with 2 pieces of tier 10, the rest tier 9 and a few supplemental pieces from the Icecrown heroics without once setting foot in a raid.

correct, wotlk was the first expansion you could get tier from doing easy content, without ever joining a raid

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In TBC you just had to lose 10 arena matches for your welfare epics.

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Massive loregasm, especially for Alliance. It capped off the WC3 story (including some nice flashbacks,) gave deep insights into the nature of the Titans, the creation of the dragons, the origins of humans, dwarves and gnomes, some little hints about NElves and an awful lot of it was tied back to content we experienced in Vanilla.

Add to that it being one of the most casual friendly expansions through stuff like the super-easy "lunchbreak" dungeons and daily quests to save up gold and it's easy to see why so many people have fond memories.

pvp gear save weapons were nigh worthless for pretty much every class except bear tanks. pvp gear lacked +hit and had wasted itemization on resil/stamina, were in most cases, they were worse than pve blues. Good for najentus though

[Kalisandra]

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?

Also, Ulduar-25 gear wasn't a lot worse than TOC-10 gear (and with the right stats it might well be better), so you might want to keep doing Ulduar-25 while doing ToC-10 so get more gear for alts, off-sets, etc. while progressing in ToC-25. As I recall there was no Strength 2-hander in ToC-10 (or if there was it wasn't very good for my Ret main), so you'd be wanting the two-handed sword off Vezax-25, for example.

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.

Lootship.

The first two bosses had some simple mechanics, then there was lootship, and then there was a serious DPS and threat generation check. It wasn't until you got into the upper wings that things got really interesting.

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People cry about DKs and Paladins, but PVP was very good in Wrath. Good talent trees, glyphs, toolkits that would get their weaknesses patched up (Elemental was able to lightning bolt while moving, we literally will never go back to anything that thoughtful and sensible from the Devs ever again).

Moving Lightning Bolt was a Cata innovation, to my recollection. WotLK brought Lava Burst.

[Kalisandra]

thats what i said,wrath had more content,but saying the wrath raids were better than wod is pure insanity,wrath only had ulduar,wod eveyr raid was top tier

I didn't like any WoD raid short of the last, so I'd disagree on that. Raid quality is a matter of opinion, once you get past "were the fights any good?", and even then there's room for different views.

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The only thing that I hold wotlk responsible for is setting the trend for low quality 5 man content, and to attest to that you only need understand the jump from TBC > Wotlk and from Wotlk > Cata.

Early LK heroic 5-mans were not all easy. Some were downright hard. The problem was they they were never tuned upwards, remained relevant (due to badges), and LK had severe gear inflation from ToC onwards, trivialising the old dungeons. Sure, they were never as hard as the BC heroics had originally been, but they were "Are you raid geared? If not, don't even apply" and "As DPS do you bring CC? If not, you won't be running this outside a guild group that brings some to cover for you" hard.

[FelPlague]

in naxx gear? no sir.
maybe 10man, but 10man raids don't count and never did.

1. naxx gear yes
2. 10 man does count
3. you would do 10 man uld... to get gear then to do 25 man uld, are you really unable to understand that?
4. you are delusional.

[Kalisandra]

Ya true in BC you had to show up to arena for a few hours to get your free welfares... lets not pretend that that wasn't a major griping point of the "hardcore" raiders back then... "toughs filthy casuals getting epics... EPICS!!! from pvp... and not even that much of it.... the nerve!"

Yet, by having that arena was very healthy, because of all those 'casuals' (let's face it - most people who did arena for a BiS item or two were not casual at all) packing the lower tiers. And hey, some of them even liked it and kept doing it. Insane, I know.

[Magneto]

WOTLKs susscess stems from the huge playbase created by the Burning Crusade not so much by the contents of the xpack itself. Loads of friendships were created during BC, so it was much more than just an xpack to many.

[valky94]

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 good and arthas being the main antagonist (and lets not forget the grizzly hills soundtrack), that sums it pretty much

[Aleksej89]

Arthas was horribly mishandled but the lack of automatic LFD/LFG/LFR was a good thing.

If blizzard kept LFG as a server-only function (not cross servers) then perhaps it would not have destroyed the concept of server communities.

Spamming text chat channels with LFG/LFM macros was not fun but as usual blizzard went into the extreme opposite instead of going for a moderate solution (like the server-only LFD).

[Kehego]

Also, Ulduar-25 gear wasn't a lot worse than TOC-10 gear (and with the right stats it might well be better), so you might want to keep doing Ulduar-25 while doing ToC-10 so get more gear for alts, off-sets, etc. while progressing in ToC-25. As I recall there was no Strength 2-hander in ToC-10 (or if there was it wasn't very good for my Ret main), so you'd be wanting the two-handed sword off Vezax-25, for example.

Lootship.

The first two bosses had some simple mechanics, then there was lootship, and then there was a serious DPS and threat generation check. It wasn't until you got into the upper wings that things got really interesting.

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Moving Lightning Bolt was a Cata innovation, to my recollection. WotLK brought Lava Burst.

moving lightning bolt was a glyph in firelands, iirc
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Glyph_of_Unleashed_Lightning

patch 4.2

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1. naxx gear yes
2. 10 man does count
3. you would do 10 man uld... to get gear then to do 25 man uld, are you really unable to understand that?
4. you are delusional.

10man uld gear was sidegrades to naxx25 gear, that sweet 1/2 tier upgrade.
And yeah, 10mans still don't count, calm down.

[Kalisandra]

paladins did reach their 3 button peak in wotlk. hybrid viability was a good thing but terrible non-meta specs did absolutely fuckall and would drag any group/raid you were in with very very few exceptions (ffb mages)

Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Judgement, Consecration, plus Wrath and Exorcism (depending on target ype and stage in the expansion). Yep. Three buttons. Now, Prot with their 969 rotation, they were simple. On the other hand, that meant you didn't need to worry about your threat rotation and could concentrate instead on managing all the other tanking stuff. And Holy... well if you had the right gear set Holy Light was the only 'rotational spell you needed. Holy Shock was for emergencies when you had to move and cast at the same time. Flash... a waste of time. If you had a moment you judged for mana, probably. Or refreshed Sacred Shield when that was a thing. The last time I liked Holy.

And yes, bad builds were a thing. So were people who had no idea how to gear for a given spec, and people who stood in fire no matter how many times you explained that colourful patches of flame on the ground were bad for them. What's more, with some effort you can still make bad builds now.

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It was popular because a fresh 70 could just AFK leech their way to relatively solid gear without any actual effort, altough on a lot of servers people started to pug with the requirement of "Full S1 / S2 geared people not allowed", as it was big red flag that you just AFK leeched gear in BG's without ever entering a dungeon or raid.

I was on ours too, though more because people with that gear tended to rely too much of the high stamina/health to get them through sloppy play, making them mana sponges - they were mostly people on alts who should've known better.

Most people I knew just did it for the weapons and a couple of pieces in slots that they were having trouble with. Actually, from that time on, until Blizzard made PvP gear random, I used PvP as a source of weapons, because roughly every second raid tier my main would never see one from a raid.

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random dungeon finder circumvented dungeon lockouts.

And random LFG heroics meant you had to rely on the badges for gear, because only the ToC and ICC dungeons offered better than that single i200, and badges were not a super fast route to gear. The best way to get gear in terms of loot/hour was to get carried through a raid by your (geared) guildies, though that was a once per week per raid thing, of course.

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pvp gear save weapons were nigh worthless for pretty much every class except bear tanks. pvp gear lacked +hit and had wasted itemization on resil/stamina, were in most cases, they were worse than pve blues. Good for najentus though

They had a lot of ilevel compared to heroic and T4 gear though, so the secondary stats on them weren't too bad. They were good starting gear, arguably too good considering the relative ease of acquiring it (though if you had a bad day it could be a lot of hours for sod-all return).

[ElDoorO]

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.

Incorrect. The amount of people who forget the bad and remember the good of WoD are small in number.
Same with BfA.
With Cata if you were a "filthy casual" then you hated Cata and if you were a "hardcore" player, you loved early cata.
Wrath allowed lesser skilled people to actually enjoy the game. It also allowed more hardcore players to enjoy the game. The trouble is hardcore players needed their egos stroked more than lesser skilled people, and it bothered the, that lesser skilled people got gear and enjoyed the game for some bizarre reason.
Almost everyone enjoyed Legion once you weren't gated by your artifact weapon or a lego -- which is basically the last half of the expansion. Otherwise, if you took the 'wrong' tree in your arti -- you were boned, much to the denial of the devs.

[Alkizon]

Ah ****, here we go again...

Summary:

ps. Why do people like to remember WotLK? I don't think that because it was complex and correct in everything, no. Most likely because this is the last time when game “mechanically” and visually (experience/impression) still somehow resembled its original one.

Also:

13. Some thoughts about "best expansions"(worst, also WoD&MoP&Cata&WotLK) +(+/+/+)+/+/+/+

[clevin]

And I rate every other wow expansion somewhere between a 6 and an 8.
The whole premise of the thread is "why is wotlk on a pedestal" when its just as good/bad as any other expansion.

So everything is a 7? oookk....