Post-Mortem Analysis: Why Wrath Classic Didn’t Live up to the Nostalgia

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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There’s a bit of talk today to talk about how Wrath didn’t live up to people’s expectations. Many people attribute this to the “rose colored glasses” of nostalgia. By this, they mean that Wrath 2008 wasn’t as great as we remember, and the 2022 version is proof of this.

In reality, the two games are not reflections of each other. There have been vast differences between the 2008 and the 2022 versions of the game, which have impacted nearly every aspect of gameplay. These differences have eliminated nearly all depth from the original, leaving a game with a single-dimensional track, with virtually no room for immersion, exploration, and connection.

There are a few main points here, and I’ll try to keep this brief:

Gathering Professions

  • In the original 2008 game, these provided a basic system of effort-based reward, and dependence-fostered connection to the physical world.
  • In Wrath Classic, this element of the game is all but destroyed by rampant botting, which has out-competed humans on a massive scale.

Factions

  • A vital role of factions in the original game was to provide rare- and epic-quality gear that was essential for gearing up fresh level 80 toons, in addition to providing crafting recipes and enchants. In terms of immersion and depth, factions are the main representation of our social connection and relationship to the in-game world.
  • In Wrath Classic, new catch up features (“Titan Rune Dungeons”), combined with BoA Arcanums and the devaluation of crafting help to make faction-based rewards worth much less, and trivializes the importance of factions themselves.

Crafting Professions

  • Similar to above, gear and items crafted by professions, and thus the professions themselves remained relevant throughout Wrath 2008.
  • Similar to above, most profession-crafted gear, and thus the professions themselves, have been made obsolete by Titan Rune Dungeons. This also impacts the demand for mats gained via gathering professions, making those professions less useful and appealing as well.

Questing and Exploration

  • In Wrath 2008, daily quests provided meaningful gold, as well as an important means of gaining reputation with relevant factions. These could be combined with gathering professions for additional value.
  • Today, bot-induced hyperinflation has decimated the value of gold, and the obsolescence of factions has further made daily quests worthless.

Wintergrasp
This was the most egregious and obvious offender, so I’ll go into a bit more detail here. The changes to Wintergrasp do a great job at illustrating the reduction of the game as a whole to a single-dimensional grind.

In the 2008 game, this zone had a ton of unique magic.

  • It was a world zone that seamlessly transformed into a PvP war-zone every few hours.
  • It was un-instanced, with no loading screens or immersion-breaking gimmicks.
  • A player could transition from farming/questing, to PvP battle, and back again without leaving the zone.
  • The outcome of battles here had persistent, world-wide consequences, impacting the state of buildings, the location of NPCs, access to VoA, and the presence of a realm-wide buff.

In Wrath Classic, this entire concept has been scrapped. In its place, we’ve been given a new instanced battleground. To be sure, Blizzard had reasons for these changes. But that’s exactly the problem. In trying to address flaws identified in Wrath 2008, they’ve destroyed the very thing they wanted to improve.

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In short, Wrath Classic is a gutted reinterpretation of the original game. Nearly every system in the game has been twisted and perverted to a state beyond recognition. The only aspect of the game that resembles the original at all is raiding, and only the current tier from each phase at that. In other words, the issue-plagued game known as “Wrath Classic” isn’t a portal into the past. Its shortcomings don’t tell us that our fond remembrance of Wrath 2008 was merely nostalgia and misrememberance.

Wrath 2008 was imperfect. But Wrath Classic represents a series of failed and misguided attempts at addressing those imperfections, resulting in something far worse.

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Pretty much everything you said is wrong.

They just milked it too long. Should have been on to Cata by now with Ulduar phase been significantly shorter.

The 30% buff should have been out faster.
The RDF should have been out at the start.
QOL items should have been out at the start.

In short, the opposite of what you said is what went wrong and why subs have suffered.

As an avid EQ player and participant in their progression servers (which is what this is) I can tell you nostalgia is dead. It will never feel like the first time. All the quests are discovered, the game is a theme park not a sandbox. There is nothing new about it.

Just enjoy revisiting it as relevant content for a few months and move on is the correct approach.

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I played a Wrath pserver from 2014 to 2018. The server aimed to be a 100% accurate replica of Wrath 2008 and performed remarkably. It managed to avoid all of the shortcomings I mentioned here. The only difference between it and Wrath Classic are bots and the changes Blizzard made.

To see why you’re wrong, you just have to look around at nearly any other title in the history of video games. Fun, successful games continue to be fun even after players understand how they work.

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The pvp aspect I enjoyed most in original Wrath was Wintergrasp, and they turned it into an instanced, cross-realm battleground. All because layers (which they said would be gone forever four years ago) aren’t compatible with it.

And the pve I enjoyed the most was running Heroics in RDF. They could have (and should have) put in RDF early. And the Mythic dungeons, Heroic+, or whatever you want to call them are an utter failure. Just toxic, gatekeeping nonsense full of tryhard min/maxers. The complete opposite of the original Wrath dungeon experience.

So basically they destroyed the two aspects of the game I was looking forward to.

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100%. Neutered the entire PvP experience. Wintergrasp was the biggest draw to the open world in the entire game. Every other multiplayer activity in the game took place inside an instance.

OG heroics were actually fun. Super easy, but fun, and allowed for creative playstyles. I had a ton of fun speed running HoL in ToGC gear. We’d take 4 DPS, and the Ret Pally would “tank” as we melted through mobs.

Titan Rune TOK is the worst dungeon experience in all of WoW history.

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Most fun I had in Wrath was on a pserver too, 1x rate where you’d have to kill every boss in the previous raid to unlock the next (naxx-uld-toc-icc-ruby) and the donations were only for cosmetic items like tabards or pets

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My favorite pserver eventually closed because the devs ran out of time to maintain the server, as they were essentially running it as a charity.

The ironic part is that I lost all of my characters and progress, and so I promised myself I wouldn’t join another pserver, and would wait for Blizz to re-release Wrath, as I’d hoped they would. Fast-forward five years and Blizzard is about to axe Wrath Classic, destroying all my characters and their progress through WotLK raids after a shorter period than I had on the pserver (and for hundreds of dollars more).

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Must be a mega server thing, because I never had issues gathering mats for personal use or making gold.

Arcanums became BoA in Patch 3.3. Not exclusive to Wrath Classic.

They still do. 600g per day per character is still good and enough for anything someone could possibly need.

Which made it actually possible to do as intended and get achievements for it. My server isn’t even a PVP server and is 99% Alliance. Leaving Wintergrasp as is would have resulted in a non-functional BG on many servers due to faction imbalance.

As someone who played OG Wrath, I dig Wrath Classic. They saw issues that would’ve arisen from a 100% recreation and tried to curb them ahead of time. The only true mistake that I feel that they made was not introducing RDF earlier.

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Rather than devalue trial as a catch up mechanic maybe have the dungeons stay but give scourgestones and more badges with the option of trading earlier badges for higher rank badges maybe at a loss like 2:3 or 1:2. Having it give gear might not be best longterm as it prevented people from doing trial or other raids for fast gear as badges are more limited some gear given by stones undercut trial and should have not been buyable.

Not sure how to solve faction balance but having it as a hur dur kill minority faction is not the solution but having a monoserver might have got that sorted. Having it as a nostalgic game with options to all the classic expansions and varients might be best.

So I would do phase one add a vendor which says badges conversion to higher badges to keep things interesting and plan with players love of taking advantage of a system for quick gear like they are doing in sod. Finally with the extra badges just don’t add previous gear to the thing might have worked in the short term but it prevented raids, might also release rs along with trial if there is a next time because people do want easy gear but you dont want to eliminate future motive once you get the primary motive done.

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So much text used to miss pretty much all the real problems that plagued these games.

  1. Horrible mismanagement of realm populations.
  2. Cherry picking class changes.
  3. Too little too late with every positive change.
  4. Allowing the game to be rampant with bots.
  5. Stupid changes instead of good ones.

For classic/crusade, we can add:

  1. No dual spec, no RDF, no token. I said up front these games were doomed without these things.

I should make a better version of this thread.
:axe:

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you totally missed the point that neither are we the reflection of our young selves . I have higher expectations than a boring naxx and easy mode dungeons . not as easy to get “tricked” and invest more time while the 2008 version was so shallow to begin with

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You should try. You’ll realize after you think through these things that issues like server population and minor class balance adjustments had no substantial impact. Please, try.

Undermining nearly every system in the game in an effort to shovel players into the current raid tier, however, explains a lot.

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Blame the players.
Players buy gold to buy gear in GKDPs. Ban GDKPs and the need for gold will be removed. Once that’s removed, people won’t buy gold from bots. Bots will go away.

Blame the players. 100% player created issue and without WG changes by the Devs, we wouldn’t have WG at all. So be thankful it was changed into a BG.

As for the rest, it made a lot of experiences a lot better.
Without Protocol dungeons, loot catch up is horrible.
TBCC proved it. Running up T4/5 during SWP phase was nearly impossible with nearly zero demand for it.

As for 200ilvl gear becoming obsolete, it’s been like this since 2008 and still is a thing on retail/

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Bots will never go away. Retail still has them to this day.

People still need gold outside of this. Even if it’s not as much, people are surprisingly lazy when it comes to making money.

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Even in 2008 Naxx was boring and under-tuned. And I’m not suggesting that the issues that existed in 2008 couldn’t have been addressed. But Blizzard’s solution of castrating most of the systems that added depth to Wrath 2008 made things worse.

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In WotLK Classic it’s still 100% possible for you to go from node to node for both mining and herbalism, simply have FarmHud and Routes and go onto the endless treadmill.

Titan Rune dungeons kept dungeons relevent throughout WotLK, without them no one would bother doing dungeons outside of the daily dungeon.

The fact that the head enchants are BoA is honestly great it means that I can raid with another character and not have them stuck in dungeons.

Wintergrasp didn’t work because of layers, that’s why it’s instanced and layers need to be a thing because without it the lag will be too much.

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There were so many better options…

  1. Substantially buff faction rep loot for each phase
  2. Substantially buff crafted gear that is 2 or more phases behind
  3. Decrease raid lockouts to 3 days or allow 2x runs per lockout for the previous tier, in addition to dropping 25 man loot in 10 man, and increase the amount of loot given
  4. Add catch-up currencies (Sidereal Essence and Scourgestones) to the previous tier raids
  5. Incentivize players to run previous tier raids by adding cosmetics such as mounts to the catch-up currency vendors

With all of these, the point is to buff the rewards of all existing systems so that they remain equally relevant. Instead, Blizzard invented a new single-dimensional system that replaced everything that brought depth to the game.

They effectively replaced 90% of the game’s content (faction rewards, crafted loot, existing heroics, and previous raid tiers) with Titan Rune Dungeons.

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Unless I am missing something (as I didn’t play it back in 2008) faction/rep gear is mostly worthless after the first phase besides recipes and enchants

I played all of this time on a populated server and still went out and farmed myself for herbs and ore. Now granted at times Scholzar’s Basin was a bot mess but outside of there I was able to compete just fine. Now this is just my experience on two servers but meh.

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Honestly.

  1. Rose tinted goggles. People’s memories are distorted. Classic proved it over and over again that very few actually like OLD SCHOOL game designs. Not everything ages well.
  2. Players ruined the game. Devs are simply trying to salvage it the best they can.
  3. Realistically, Wrath peaked 12m only due to hype around it and as not other crazy good games were out. Even Skyrim released during Cataclysm iirc.
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This is the one and only truth to why WoW got so big and why it started to decline. Its not that WoW got worse, its that other options got better.

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