
Originally Posted by
exochaft
Ah, the days when Feral druids were on the positive meme spectrum. While I generally focused on tanking in WotLK, I still had my arpen soft-cap set which wrecked face. Downsides of the time were that Feral hadn't been split into two specs yet, so any adjustments affected both the tanking and DPS aspect of Feral in ways that were a headache at the time. Regardless, it's one of my more favorite times for tanking/DPS as Feral.
While WotLK did have some downsides that have influenced and bled over into problems that exist today, it was a different time and game back then. The re-release (or rather altered version) of Naxx was generally welcomed as an extreme minority of players got to raid it in vanilla, and the raiding population was probably expanding way more than it ever had at that point in WoW. Obsidium Sanctum was the first experiment of how tackling/avoiding bosses could drastically alter the raid experience, which really hasn't been done on outside of self-contained council fights. Ulduar is as iconic as you can get from the player perspective, with some very unique boss mechanics and fight alterations that haven't been seen since despite being quite cool. I was one of those people that liked ToC, even the attempt system despite frustrations when someone DC'd on a pull, as it was something different... especially that PvP fight, I still remember our first kill taking 11 minutes. ICC was just the culmination that lead to some pretty epic encounters at the time, as well as some frustrations at people who always sat in Defile or got knocked off the platform via traps on the last boss. I also enjoyed the Halion fight with the split phases and beams, despite it being sort of a filler raid. Of course, I'm coming from this as someone who got the server first kills of the hardest boss at the time, as sometimes the normal versions of the fights were a little meh compared to the harder versions. There were some really frustrating times, such as a hunter out of position ruining our first attempt at full-attempt no-death 25man ToC... but there were many really fun times to be had that outweighed the frustrating ones.
Here's the thing: the fact that I can still vividly remember all the raids and content from that time says something about the impact it actually had on me as a player. One aspect that gets lost on some was that they forget how much of the game was non-mandatory even if you were a raider at the time, and the game had more breathing room for you to dabble in other aspects of the game, play alts, or just play another game alongside WoW. Since WotLK, I've felt that game keeps adding stuff to make you feel like you fall behind if you don't log in every day... and that's something that just wasn't there in WotLK. If you wanted to raid log, you could w/o negative consequences or gimping your progression. Honestly, that's one aspect of WoW that I miss the most: the feeling that it's okay to step away from the game because there isn't constant daily/weekly grinds. Personally, I feel that for the game's long-term health, designing the game to promote downtime and not needed to log in constantly would get a larger, consistent subscriber base... as right now the game can feel like a chore, something WotLK never felt like at all.
Are there negatives to WotLK? Certain, as I alluded to before WotLK was the precursor to some pretty negative systems in the game that exist today. People have to keep in mind that this was a time where Blizz was trying new things constantly, and sometimes you come across good ideas... and sometimes you come across bad ones. Raid size/lockout changes came into being with ICC, group finder eventually came into the game, raids beginning to be designed around the assumption of boss mod addons, and so forth. The negative effects of some of these late-WotLK additions didn't get felt until expansions later, as systems that break down the server/community take time to take effect. The thing is I don't really blame WotLK for these systems, I blame later expansions and Blizz's decisions to keep in features that proved eventually to be negative in the long term. WotLK had many experients as I've already said, some good, some bad, but overall it was a very unique time and experience if you played through it.