Originally Posted by
Tojara
Yeah I'm not sure why people equate WoTLK with having to 'work' for gear in any regard. Badge gear was updated every major patch and allowed you to acquire two pieces of tier gear from doing arguably the easiest iteration of dungeon content this game has ever seen. At least for the first two tiers (before they had dedicated hard mode tier gear in ToGC and ICC), you essentially could just flat out buy two pieces of your tier gear from a vendor (and even in ToGC/ICC, you could get what we would call the heroic version variant today).
TBC introduced this as well, but only in two iterations. One of them was at the end of the expansion, while the other launched with the product. Sure people just did easiest dungeons and Karazhan for badges, but those things were a million times more difficult than WoTLK dungeons.
Realistically outside of fringe cases in TBC, I don't remember threat ever being a thing in WoTK unless you did something obscenely stupid.
This isn't me shitting on WoTLK either, I realize that everybody likes different things. However, trying to jam Vanilla/TBC/WoTLK together like they were pretty much the same is pretty disingenuous. Just because they share the unbroken version of the world prior to Cataclysm and the old school version of talent trees, doesn't mean that they don't differ drastically in nearly every other area, especially game design and overall direction of the game.
TBC is as close to a spiritual successor to Vanilla as you're going to get, and even then there are pretty huge changes between the two (and that's fine). WoTLK by comparison is almost a completely different product (for better or worse, depending on your view point).