So lemme get this straight

[FelPlague]

ICC wasn't amazing lets be honest. The memory of ICC is carried hard by the Lich King fight which was an amazing fight, even though progression sucked due to the wipe limit.

ICC was amazing, with many amazing fights, climatic battles, and cool loot, one of the first raids with tons of trinket like weapons. The pull limit was not new either, nor did it really effect too many cause it was only on the hardest content, and was removed later. It really only effected the tip top world first people. Most groups did not spend enough time raiding each week to get there. Then use up all the attempts.

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

Not even fucking close to true. The first boss was literally a free kill, the next 3 were hilariously easy. Then after that the next 2 were just slightly harder. A mostly geared naxx group could easily get up to the titan watchers. Then from there pick off some of the easier bosses like Freya with all trees dead.

[Kehego]

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

you misspelled blackrock foundry, but sure.

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ICC was amazing, with many amazing fights, climatic battles, and cool loot, one of the first raids with tons of trinket like weapons. The pull limit was not new either, nor did it really effect too many cause it was only on the hardest content, and was removed later. It really only effected the tip top world first people. Most groups did not spend enough time raiding each week to get there. Then use up all the attempts.

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Not even fucking close to true. The first boss was literally a free kill, the next 3 were hilariously easy. Then after that the next 2 were just slightly harder. A mostly geared naxx group could easily get up to the titan watchers. Then from there pick off some of the easier bosses like Freya with all trees dead.

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

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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.

yes, toc was "too early" (cus people didn't finish ulduar by then)

[tikcol]

People love welfare.

Individuals that play for prestige are a minority, very small slice of players.

Hence welfare being beloved in those very popular instances. The game would fare better if it revolved more around welfare and lfr like the past has proven.

[dafuq]

People put wotlk on a pedestal which had


2) Ulduar which wasn't playable to most people till ToC

eh wut
ulduar wasnt a massive challenge? if people couldnt do it then i honestly can only say get better or go back to ur lfr dungeons :s

[Kehego]

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.

I can remember every boss i progged on.

wod did raidlogging better but people complained

*shrug*

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People love welfare.

Individuals that play for prestige are a minority, very small slice of players.

Hence welfare being beloved in those very popular instances. The game would fare better if it revolved more around welfare and lfr like the past has proven.

this is a fair point. people love easy games

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eh wut
ulduar wasnt a massive challenge? if people couldnt do it then i honestly can only say get better or go back to ur lfr dungeons :s

there wasn't lfd in ulduar patch kekw

[AwkwardSquirtle]

the same ulduar that people are clueless about in tw?

I too am shocked that players don't remember exactly how to do fights from 10 years ago.

[Kehego]

I too am shocked that players don't remember exactly how to do fights from 10 years ago.

The way people suck ulduar's dick on these forums I'm really shocked that they don't

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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.

quoted in my above reply from another poster


so the playerbase both vividly remembers it... but can't remember it? interesting

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But again, I'm in no way saying that wotlk was bad, I'm not saying I hate wotlk

I'm saying wotlk had flaws like every other expansion and, like every other wow expansion is a 6-8/10

[Tekko]

Everything wasn't solely about raids for starters. 16 dungeons kept things more interesting.

Furthermore, raids were a progression. You weren't just stuck with the current raid.

A year from now, the only raid anyone will be doing (outside of grinding xmogs) will be whatever the latest raid is. So anyone who was on the fence about SL and decides to join in the year won't really experience the first or second raid because of catch up mechanics. Whereas if you joined Wrath 1 year in, you could find a guild and run the first raid as an actual challenge.

I'm sure this is confusing to most modern WoW players who expect dungeon runs to take no more than 10 minutes, raids to be cleared in a couple of hours, and gear to be handed to them weekly for very little effort. But old WoW (Vanilla - Wrath at least) wasn't for that type of attitude.

This is wrong on so many levels.

[kaminaris]

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.

You always had more than 10 to raid 10. And always more than 25 to raid 25. Unless you wanted to raid every other week.

The thing is 10s were vastly more popular for a reason. First it was much easier to assemble such amount of people and second you usually don't have more than 10 friends in wow. But blizzard wanted to dictate people how they should enjoy game and wanted us to get this "epic" feeling of having big group. Which is not epic at all. Just more logistics that are faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar more problematic than everything else.

[Nalam the Venom]

you couldn't do that in tbc.

Which is why TBC was worse.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

The way people suck ulduar's dick on these forums I'm really shocked that they don't

This forum is a very small sample of the playerbase. Lots of players never did ulduar because they didn't play the game at the time. I started in MoP.

[Kalisandra]

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.

I, for one, still think Ulduar was one of the best raids ever. What's more, I pugged quite a lot of it, and well before ToC came out.

One reason WotLK was a great expansion was that with 10-man and 25-man lockouts being completely separate you could raid one size withyour guild and the other with a pug group. Yes, there were issues with loot level vs difficulty, but not as bad as in Cata where they tried to make 10-mans the same difficulty as 25-mans, and sometimes got that hilariously wrong (in both directions). Also, Ulduar had the really fun hard modes that you generally activated by doing the fight a different way.

Ulduar looked epic, felt epic, and had epic fights in it.

Not sure what you mean by 'welfare gear' in this context, but if you mean 5-mans dropping catch-up gear, ToC had that as well.

On top of that, WotLK had an open-world PvP zone (Wintergrasp) that, after some tinkering, actually mostly worked. What's more, by making it always PvP-flagged on PvE realms and making the mobs within drop elemental mats at a better (but not insanely better) rate than elsewhere, and having really good herbs and ore in it, people wanting to farm mats had a choice to make, one we see to an extent with Warmode and rep/XP today.

For many classes it was the high point of the old talent point system, before they forced you into a single 'spec' (Cata) and before the current talent system. It was also, for some, a sweet spot between the simple (and often boring) rotations of Vanilla and BC and the very involved rotations of MoP and later. Class homogenisation wasn't a thing then either. Yes, it was the time of "bring the player, not the class", but many melee and most ranged still lacked kicks, healer cleanses didn't all remove magic and debuffs were more common and more varied. Stuns were less common and usually found on clases that lacked kicks or strong snares, and so on.

While it was 'raid or die' to an extent, you could get gear via PvP (and it was by purchase, as they've gone back to for SL), and some via token farming in heroics.

It's true that there wasn't as much to do, outside of raids, your daily heroic, and PvP. However, that meant that there was a livelier mat and crafting economy, because people would farm whilst chatting with guildies and friends - it was a very social game still. That was what LFG (and the later LFR) killed off, along with having a bazillion dailies and other chores, all of which took more concentration than farming did.

Oh, and mobs weren't packed in so tightly that you couldn't avoid aggroing them when on the ground, as is generally the case these days, and there wasn't a whole lot of BS around flight (and in fact you were assumed to have it in the later part of the levelling process and in the endgame).

All in all it was a really well crafted expansion for the time, though elements of it show their age now.

But, most of all, the game still had enough room that it LK could feel fresh, in a way that later expansions just don't.

I wouldn't want to go back to LK now (though if LK Classic comes out in a few years I'll probably try it), but if the game had stayed more like that I'd probably still be playing it and so would more of my old guildies than there are now.

[Kehego]

I, for one, still think Ulduar was one of the best raids ever. What's more, I pugged quite a lot of it, and well before ToC came out.

One reason WotLK was a great expansion was that with 10-man and 25-man lockouts being completely separate you could raid one size withyour guild and the other with a pug group. Yes, there were issues with loot level vs difficulty, but not as bad as in Cata where they tried to make 10-mans the same difficulty as 25-mans, and sometimes got that hilariously wrong (in both directions). Also, Ulduar had the really fun hard modes that you generally activated by doing the fight a different way.

Ulduar looked epic, felt epic, and had epic fights in it.

Not sure what you mean by 'welfare gear' in this context, but if you mean 5-mans dropping catch-up gear, ToC had that as well.

On top of that, WotLK had an open-world PvP zone (Wintergrasp) that, after some tinkering, actually mostly worked. What's more, by making it always PvP-flagged on PvE realms and making the mobs within drop elemental mats at a better (but not insanely better) rate than elsewhere, and having really good herbs and ore in it, people wanting to farm mats had a choice to make, one we see to an extent with Warmode and rep/XP today.

For many classes it was the high point of the old talent point system, before they forced you into a single 'spec' (Cata) and before the current talent system. It was also, for some, a sweet spot between the simple (and often boring) rotations of Vanilla and BC and the very involved rotations of MoP and later. Class homogenisation wasn't a thing then either. Yes, it was the time of "bring the player, not the class", but many melee and most ranged still lacked kicks, healer cleanses didn't all remove magic and debuffs were more common and more varied. Stuns were less common and usually found on clases that lacked kicks or strong snares, and so on.

While it was 'raid or die' to an extent, you could get gear via PvP (and it was by purchase, as they've gone back to for SL), and some via token farming in heroics.

It's true that there wasn't as much to do, outside of raids, your daily heroic, and PvP. However, that meant that there was a livelier mat and crafting economy, because people would farm whilst chatting with guildies and friends - it was a very social game still. That was what LFG (and the later LFR) killed off, along with having a bazillion dailies and other chores, all of which took more concentration than farming did.

Oh, and mobs weren't packed in so tightly that you couldn't avoid aggroing them when on the ground, as is generally the case these days, and there wasn't a whole lot of BS around flight (and in fact you were assumed to have it in the later part of the levelling process and in the endgame).

All in all it was a really well crafted expansion for the time, though elements of it show their age now.

But, most of all, the game still had enough room that it LK could feel fresh, in a way that later expansions just don't.

I wouldn't want to go back to LK now (though if LK Classic comes out in a few years I'll probably try it), but if the game had stayed more like that I'd probably still be playing it and so would more of my old guildies than there are now.

from these responses i can tell that y'all clearly lack fundamental comprehension skills because i clearly stated

Dungeon finder/welfare gear only happened in ICC patch

heroics in tbc still had a daily lockout. icc patch you were able to farm with no cooldown

[Kalisandra]

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.

I played a Ret Pally in BC and LK. I've always thought LK was a good expac, not only because it was when Blizzard decided that 'hybrid' did not mean 'bad DPS unless you're a Warrior'.

[Kehego]

I played a Ret Pally in BC and LK. I've always thought LK was a good expac, not only because it was when Blizzard decided that 'hybrid' did not mean 'bad DPS unless you're a Warrior'.

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)

[Kokolums]

I played from vanilla onwards. Wrath was so bad i quit halfway thru.

[Kalisandra]

Also, "welfare" epics did start in TBC with the badge vendor introduced in 2.4 for all intents and purposes and in Wotlk, they really kicked the "play the patch" off with 3.2 and ToC 10man being so horribly undertuned despite dropping superior loot to anything that could be found in Ulduar outside of 25man Hardmodes.

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.

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Ulduar was something you could clear for the biggest part if you didn't do HM's, the division of 10 man and 25 man actually made it so social raiding groups were formed that cleared the 10 man content which was easier. No raid finder put people in guilds and made them make an effort to group up, guilds were bigger and had often 10 man raids with socials. Not sure how one would say it wasn't playable.

Amusingly, my guild couldn't field a 25-man raid team (but did have two 10-man raids in ICC most weeks) so we did 10-man as a guild (and were in the top 10 'strictly 10-man guilds at one point in LK). As a result I did a lot of 25-man pugging in LK, and had a ton of fun doing it. 25-man pugs could be frustrating too, because they tended to be slow to start and half fall apart after a wipe or two, but when they worked they were a lot of fun, especially if you didn't expect great things (you didn't go into a pug-25 expecting to easily beat Putricide or Lanathel, for example).

[PixelFox]

Ulduar was the most fun raiding ever. We sot a really fun group of older players together and had a blast even though we never finished it IIRC. The game is only great when played with friends.

LFR wasn't until the end of Cata, but that saved the game for many of us as we were no longer able to raid for a variety of reasons. Without LFR I think a lot of people would have quit permanently.

[Kalisandra]

I will concede that welfare existed in tbc, but wotlk made welfare play a viable playstyle

log in, grind easy 200 il heroics for a couple hours, log out with full 232 gear.

you couldn't do that in tbc.

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.

[Dhrizzle]

I will concede that welfare existed in tbc, but wotlk made welfare play a viable playstyle

log in, grind easy 200 il heroics for a couple hours, log out with full 232 gear.

you couldn't do that in tbc.

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

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I'm not complaining, though. I'm just trying to understand why people put wotlk on a pedestal when, like every other wow expansion, it was a solid 7/10.

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.