… and they literally did exactly that… wrath was the beginning of the end. People can upsell wrath all they want and talk about how it’s the best iteration of the game all day but the reality is the game went arcade in wrath, most people hated the argent tournament / TOTGC, and people complained about content draught to the point that blizz released some garbage raid called the Ruby Sanctum.
These same developers purposely made DK OP to get people to play it.
Have you seen the rampant gold inflation at all? Gold sinks slow that down. But then I guess you miss the hundreds of thousands of gold you had in retail right?
What do either of those things have to do with them adding Dual spec?
Have you seen the rampant Gold buying in the game? Gold sinks speed that up and with Blizz cutting so many GM spots it’s almost impossible for them to keep it in check.
I’m saying that the game changed over time, wrath adding dual specialization is in no way shape or form a positive argument for adding dual specialization to classic tbc… wrath was the height of this games population and they killed the game over the course of it.
So your blaming people cheating on the game, instead of blizzard not bothering to enforce the rules? Well, I guess if you don’t want to care about that respec cost so badly, you could just buy gold and get away with it like the others have been doing. I personally hope blizzard starts giving bans to gold buyers. Gold sinks are not the cause of the bots. It’s people who refuse to play the game for themselves and want everything handed to them, so they buy the gold that cause the gold farming bots to even exist.
A lot of the things that started killing wow happened in wrath.
classes became more similar, removing some if the spec identity.
Social aspects got eroded away with lfd being added and removing the need to not be an asset to get groups later ad you would never see 99% of those people again anyway, and you no longer had to make friends with anyone, or even talk to them, to get dungeons done. Dual spec removed a lot of the opportunity costs of your spec, making talking to and grouping in the open world much less needed. Classes were Starting to touch demigod status where every class could solo what was supposed to be group quests, removing social aspects again.
Then came cata and LDR, which did what lfd did but on a much bigger scale of destroying social interaction. Now you didn’t even need a guild to raid and see the content, sure the gear wasn’t as good, but if you just wanted to see the content you could, and you could do it while just staring at your screen if you were a dps because of how easy lfr content was. This brought back the “warm bodies” that was seen in vanilla raids, where you would let someone be in the group just to fill a spot even if they weren’t doing anything.
Wrath was the first step away from what made wow great, people didn’t start to realize it though until toward the end of wrath. Because it’s like being boiled in water. The temperature slowly went up, so we didn’t see it until it was to late, all we knew was something felt off, so the playerbase asked for more things, hoping to fix that off feeling.
I always try to help new tanks learn by doing everything I can to make it easier on them. Frost trap the group so he has more time to react to losing aggro, pulling the casters back to him then explaining LoS pulls for him, misdirection on larger pulls, offering to CC so he doesn’t have to hold aggro on as many mobs at once, and talking to them as a person to person instead of person to brick wall. Some new tanks already have the holier than though attitude and I usually just ignore them at that point. I’ve even taken control of the group with marking, explaining things, exc before when we are wiping a lot to show the tank how he should be leading.
I actually have 3 tanks on my friends list that I helped teach how to tank in terms of marking, watching aggro, asking for CC and focus kill targets, exc.
And the population statistics don’t support that theory… unless you take into account that WotLk launched in China at the tail end of wrath in NA… so basically the game was at its height of popularity in China while it was dying in the US from Wrath into Cata (obviously I don’t mean dying but the population started shrinking)