LK will have a surge at first, just like all new releases. There are a lot of “Wrath babies” out there, who started playing WoW with LK and remember it fondly. They will come back for nostalgia, for a while at least.
But problems will become evident early on, starting with Naxx 10/25. I don’t think we’ve ever heard complaining like we’re going to see when players have to sit through that raid phase for 3-4 months. It was WoW’s easiest raid ever released at the time, easier than Kara, MC, ZG even. It’s going to be extremely boring for most modern players, IMO. And there won’t even be nostalgia for those who played Classic vanilla and farmed Naxx for months not long ago.
And then Ulduar will release, and it’s an excellent raid. But it’s as hard or harder than the T5 content we just did (pre-nerf). Casual guilds are probably going to struggle with it and quickly start calling for nerfs.
And then comes Trial of the Crusader, the shortest and maybe the lamest raid tier ever released. It will take decent guilds like 30 min. to clear, and then what are they going to do for the rest of the week?
WotLK was when they started experimenting with making everyone happy, and its design is very inconsistent and kind of all over the place, IMO.
I do love wrath but not gonna deny this will be a problem. Wrath Naxx at the time was fine but that’s cuz many didn’t get to do it the first time, now that’s not the case. 10 man Naxx is interesting thou, it’s really like the new UBRS heh
i joined a guild where we all turned off xp at the top of the wrath bracket, then only wore gear consistent with the original patch cycle, so by the time we started on naxx, we werent very well geared. after three or so bosses, we finally were allowed 200 gear, but something was seriously overtuned about patchwerk at the time. theoretically, it had been retuned to be challenging to people playing mop+ content, cause he just kicked our butts over and over. we finally got him with only 1 mage left alive, who had like 5hp left himself. lol
Still remember that my first clear of 25 man naxx wrath was a ragtag pug from people who had hit 80 already on the server, I don’t even remember wiping…I made a comment that the hardest thing about the raid was trying to get the loot out of the 4 HM fight because everyone was trying to loot it and it was put in some old wow insider post years ago.
My server didn’t even record server progression for that period other than maybe 3 drakes which took a few days to work out. Even most Ulduar hardmodes weren’t really that hard, maybe you needed an extra week or 2 compared to the Ensidias of the world but they weren’t mechanically challenging.
Only fights that are going to really give people the struggle™ is probably yogg 0, Heroic LK 25M.
The other challenges will be achievements, but you only do those once.
MOP is never going to happen. WOTLK is the last expansion Blizzard is going to release for classic. By this time next year WOW will be on maintenance mode. Right now Blizz is going through a huge lawsuit from the womens groups, the employees filed a lawsuit because of the lawfirm Blizzard hired to fight the women and now the investors are suing. All the higher ups are abandoning the ship. Awakenings is the last expansion for regular WOW but it’s just the work they had done up to this date from the next expansion, All other work has stopped on it. It will have a new class called a “mechanic”, you’ll be able to build and customize your own personal airship. Having warlords flashbacks. But thats all they wrote for WOW. 10 years from now there will still be people playing this thing, maybe, lol.
-You had to do boring Kara, Gruul and Mag for 5 months
-Just because classes were made slightly easier to play doesn’t mean heroics are brainless, ask anyone if they want to do Heroic Oculus
-Ulduar was farmed for legendary maces even when ToC was out
-ToC is far from garbage. Just because it didn’t have trash doesn’t mean it was garbage, the fight were really good and Heroic ToC fight were pretty difficult.
-ICC was only slightly longer than Sunwell when it came to the patch cycle back in the OG times.
-What do you think ZA and badge gear was? Ohh right… that’s catch up gear.
-Everything was 10 and 25 and it was the best of both worlds.
-Classes still had their niches.
-Good! get your PvP out of my PvE
-You don’t think spamming 1 max ranked normal dungeon isn’t a grind? Delusional.
-While I don’t agree 100% with LFD, it didn’t come out until the ICC patch.