So lemme get this straight

[ro9ue]

Wrath is probably my #2 expansion only behind Legion.

I rank expansions by how much fun I was having, how much I was playing, and evaluating the expansion within the context of it's own time period. Right now if you're a new player leveling a character through the Wrath zones or doing the TW raid/dungeons, they definitely show their age, but it's not really a reflection of what the expansion was for people in 2008 with everything that existed in that time.

[Grapemask]

I see a lot of people mention "WotLK was a controversial expansion," which reminds me that the people in discussion communities tend to be pretty far disconnected from actual players. Wrath was well-loved by most real players, even if it had plenty of things that made the vocal minority scream themselves to death. That means more, now, when the vocal minority is likely a majority of the remaining playerbase - but back in 2008, when WoW had nearly 12 million players, they weren't much to look at.

Wrath was great. It was the first point that Blizzard started seriously considering player feedback and using it to shape the game, but it was also probably the last point in Blizzard's history where they had any competence in the game's design. Since then, they've just frantically been tossing ideas at the wall and trying to figure out how to get back what they lost, without really understanding why they lost it or how they can get it back. They started listening to players, then took it too far and forgot when to stop listening to players - and which players not to listen to at all.

WotLK was fun...classes were in a better place (hybrids like Enhancement and Retribution had some actual buttons to push and get some love for their magic damage)

This point was the big one. Blizzard was (mostly) on point with class balance, with only a few exceptions. If you were good at your spec, you could probably top a meter. Today, they've largely caved to whining that certain specs should always be on top, and certain specs should never be on top.

[Velshin]

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.

Welfare epics actually started at the end of TBC with the Magisters Terrace 5 man dungeon reward you with epic gears item lvl equal to Karazhan raid stuff.

[cparle87]

Dude naxx 25 was freelot. There was this 3 add dragon fight. And that was basically all the content of s1.

There was also Malygos and the first boss of Wintergrasp.

[Charge me Doctor]

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 same reason people put classic on a pedestal, or tbc - whatever expansion they started playing is "the best"

[Athredas]

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

That's exactly why many of the people like the expansion tho

[Lane]

Classes were the most fun they've ever been in Wrath. I've heard they were great in MoP, but I didn't play it and I still think I'd prefer the Wrath iteration since I've hated the addition of resources like paladin's Holy Power since Cata.

Howling Fjord is still the most visually unique and stunning zone in the game. As Alliance, taking the ship through the cliffsides to Valgarde was an experience.

Questing was generally improved over BC, it also introduced vehicles which were new and interesting at the time (except for Occulus :P). The storyline was arguably the best it's ever been in the game (again, didn't play MoP). Most of the zones felt like an epic experience, especially Storm Peaks.

Everything about DKs was amazing. The class, the starting zone, the Ebon Blade, all of it.

Badge gear and rep tabards existed. I still consider Wrath to be the most alt friendly expansion because between both it was possible to catch up to your main relatively quickly.

I don't have much negative to say about Wrath that isn't trivial or nitpicky, like not liking the jousting part of the Argent Tournament. Since I didn't play MoP and my next two expansions were Cata and WoD it made Wrath seem even better by comparison. (I hated both those expansions, a lot.) Legion comes a close second, mainly because I loved artifact weapons, class halls, and Suramar.

[Rusken]

I've always thought Wrath was overrated. It had one really good raid (Ulduar) and one decent raid (ICC). It was also the beginning of the great dumbening of the entire game.
Dungeons were incredibly easy to the point that you'd just mass pull the whole things and AoE them down in 5 minutes.
Naxx was a shitty rehash tuned so a group of monkeys could clear it in the first week.
ToC was trash, pure trash. A filler raid that took a total of 30 minutes to clear.
LFG tool was introduced which killed server communities.
And Gearscore, although being an addon was the pre-cursor to item level being the go-to metric for player "skill". Which in turn gave every moron with a bit of gear the idea that they were god's gift to whatever group they were in.

Oh! Don't forget Ruby Sanctum which was randomly added to try and get people to stick around for the full year of nothing between ICC and Cataclysm. Which barely anyone even noticed because it was so irrelevant.

Was it fun at the time? Sure, but it's stupid to look back now and think it was any sort of "golden age of WoW' as it's so often hailed as around here.

[Shaqthefat]

Very disingenuous of you to only list the Lichking as memorable, many of the fights in there still hold a place in peoples memories.

The fights that are memorable aside from Lich King are either memorable because of how awful they were (Gunship), or due to memes associated with the boss (Marrowgar and Putricide) or a mixture of both (Sindragosa).

[Sinaa]

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.

Ulduar was great from week 2, what are you talking about? (Ulduar is the best raid Blizzard has ever made)

[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.

[Kauko]

People forget how much hate was on the forums regarding Wotlk at that time... It looked like everyone hated it. And when MoP or better said, Pandas happened, people started remembering LK as a holy grail of expansions... The same was with MoP.

[Arainie]

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

Zoom on with your day and we'll get on with ours. We don't expect you to appreciate it anyway, it wasn't fast enough or filled with enough instant gratification for you.

[Vampyrr]

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.

The fights in TOC were unique ONCE. But in a serious guild you ran it 4 times a week (10n 10h 25n 25h) it got old fast.

[Cosmic Janitor]

The same reason people put classic on a pedestal, or tbc - whatever expansion they started playing is "the best"

I started playing in vanilla beta and I consider TBC the logical advancment of the game and WotLK still the superior of the 3. Mind you, I wouldn't want any of them back today. EVERY SINGLE iteration of WoW had it's major problems, not any version of it was ever without a major flaw. In TBC the length of attunements was off the charts and poisoned the raiding pool, vanilla had countless issues, from a disjointed mostly non-existent narrative to no real plan for endgame content for most of it and so did WotLK, as indeed it did have a really weak showing with a rehashed naxx and ToGC is to date probably the worst raid Blizzard has designed with the most wasted potential.

From Cata onward alot of the game and it's design changed alot. While it started in WotLK, it left alot of the original stuff entirely behind. You are somewhat right that alot of people will sing the praises of their first/starting expansion though, as people tend to forget alot of the flaws of MoP as well these days. I personally had probably the most fun with Legion, as the massive class lore and feature dump during it's time was simply appealing to me, despite me hating AP and the legendary lottery and the game becoming significantly better during the later period when these ceased to matter.

[cparle87]

Restricted? No, raiding back then was most accessible that has ever been. Because of 10 man and because of low difficulty bar.

What what if you had 15 people who wanted to raid? Or 30? Or 40? Odds are 5 don't get to raid, more if the excess of the core 10-man group don't have the neccesary tanks or heals.

[Kynario]

Your first point is lost on me, not sure how that is different group finder or no.

Your second point has some merit. Personally, i'd rather be able to actually run leveling dungeons as opposed to now on classic, where you essentially can't. It's a fine tradeoff to me.

If you could only run 2 dungeons maximum per hour, people would rush less knowing that they have to actually try and this mindless spamming and zergfesting of dungeons would perhaps stop. It's probably a really bad idea, but I'm not sure how else to solve the Dungeon Finder mentality. Still, I'd rather go for quality than quantity as it is now.

[Exeunt]

Ulduar wasn't widely done until people were overgearing it, i.e in toc gear.

What? Everyone I knew on my Server back than was at LEAST on Mimiron when it came out, we were fighting Yogg and killed him a week or two later. Super casual guild as well.
I actually remember folks complaining that ToC came out too early.

[Orwell7]

The fights in TOC were unique ONCE. But in a serious guild you ran it 4 times a week (10n 10h 25n 25h) it got old fast.

Nowadays serious guilds run A LOT more than that and raids were good as ever.

Let's be honest, Wotlk really was good BECAUSE it was easy. Because easy content got you max level gear. Not fully decked, but a few pieces.
Also in Wotlk, your gear didn't matter THAT much, base max level characters were much stronger than they are now, and getting them fully geared didn't made their dps go up by 500%.

[DeltrusDisc]

Anyway the point isn't to change your minds, but to understand why you have such a hardon for a run-of-the-mill wow expansion.
Outside of dual spec, nothing wotlk did was really amazing. I had fun, but I also had more fun in other expansions.

Let me repeat myself: I prefer TBC to WotLK.

Hell, I'm not sure, but MoP might actually be better...