Originally Posted by
Belloc
1) Naxx 10 and 25 were fun. Yeah, sure, they were easy, and the loot was practically free, but... it was fun. That's it. And we also had Sarth (1,2&3d) and Malygos.
Achievements were brand new and you bet your ass we went for them! You know how satisfying it was to finally get The Immortal?
2) It was perfectly playable at release. My guild, at the time, wasn't heroic-capable in 25-man, but the normal fights were perfectly fine for even our lesser players. 10-man was even better, though, because we absolutely had a solid core 10 players. My server wasn't big, but we had plenty of guilds progressing through and clearing normal without issue in both sizes. You say that there was low participation, but that was absolutely not my experience. Maybe you were on a dead server?
3) Talk shit about ToC. Try it. What you got? Here's what I got:
The fights were unique. They did things that we hadn't seen before. Out of the 5 fights, there was really only one that was particularly boring, and that was the second boss. The first boss was good on normal and a nice challenge on heroic. The third boss was a PvP puzzle that, afaik, still stands as one of the most unique encounters in the game. The fourth boss hit players with the concept of bullet-hell and encouraged some innovating strategies. The fifth boss? I'm biased on the fifth boss, at least on heroic. Normal mode was whatever. For non-heroic players, it was fine, no complaints. But heroic was a raid-wide challenge. Add tanks had to have specific lower-level gear sets, heavy cooldown rotations required from a variety of raid members, resource conservation (the frost), pathing and positioning, and then an intentionally low-health war of attrition for the final phase.
It. Was. Awesome.
Oh, and no trash. No one likes trash and there was absolutely none of it. No one ever gives the raid the respect it deserves.