Wrath was more casual friendly. Introducing 10 man (regular at the start) and 25 man (called heroic at the start) raids.
Even my family friendly leveling guild was able to down Naxx 10 man within the first month and a half.
BC wasn’t very casual friendly at the start. So I didn’t like it.
I played both expansions for a considerable amount of time. Things were different then, however.
TBC I mained a BM hunter and warrior. I was on a small server and transferred to a larger server mid-way through it. I did many BGs and would grind until my entire set was full of PvP epics. It took a long time, but PvP was fun, and I remember it being more based on skill rather than gear (although gear helped).
On the small server my guild could barely clear Kara. Many players still clicked spells and key turned. On the large server many people were pugging kara and even BT. But it was unlikely that the pug would clear BT.
Arena in TBC seemed to be a lot of druids and warlocks. Druids were nearly impossible to kill. Warlocks were killable but very annoying.
AV was a lot of fun in TBC. Though it was not often to be Zergs, and alliance won 90% of the time. It gave tons of honor during AV weekend.
Obtaining honor took a lot of time, and you needed upwards of 45,550 or something for a chest or helm. It could have even been 65,550 for all I can remember. It would take you hours on end to grind that much.
WOTLK occurs and I mained a elemental/enhance shaman and rogue. I got 2200 in area as a rogue and was one of the best on the server (even named in a forum post titled, “the best of our PvPers.” I lost the link to it sadly.
My shaman really owned as elemental, and that was the best I remember the state of the game and my enjoyment of it. It was competitive, and I was progressing in heroic ToC 25 man at the time. I left the raid scene and continued PvP. I did not like the PvP sets in WOTLK as much because they did not look as good initially.
Though I think WOTLK offered great content and had some incredible zones at the time. Ulduar was also incredible. WOTLK began the first of the GDKP runs, and I made lots of money participating in them.
Looking back at both expansions, I see TBC as an overall fun and engaging expansion, but I never excelled during it. In WOTLK I got good at PvP and PvE, but it began to go downhill after ICC. Cataclysm was unique in that it changed the original zones, but the state of the game began its first leap into homogenization, a problem that had to be addressed in WoD.
TLDR: WOTLK was the better of the two expansions, but I enjoyed BC more and for longer given that I started it from level 1.
Raid modes were kind of a mess in wrath. First they had just 10 or 25 man with achievements on a per boss basis and a meta achievement for the entire raid on a specific size. Then they did 10 and 25 each with a normal and hard mode so 4 lockouts per week that tier… hardcore guilds loved that… Finally ICC landed on 10/25 man with a hardmode toggle per boss.
I meant to write I liked Wrath better at the start.
10 mans were called ‘regular’.
And 25 mans were called ‘heroic’.
And then everything got messed up with 4 raid difficulties
Everyone on my server just referred to them as 10 or 25 man, and then hardmodes. I forget what the tooltips said at this point.
I really enjoyed wrath, but it was the beginning of the end for me. The game started to move away from the RPG elements I enjoyed.
I enjoyed Wrath more from a lore perspective as a Warcraft RTS fanboy. They also told the story very well, you saw and interacted with the main villain pretty much from the beginning of the leveling experience right on through to the end.
That and I very much enjoyed some of the classes. Other than that my best times with this game were vanilla+tbc.
Isn’t it interesting that as the game became more ‘casual friendly’ the casuals actually ended up leaving. It’s almost like Blizz has no idea what actual casual players want or why they played the game.
The casuals started bailing in Cata when blizzard tried to go back to more “hardcore”
TBC excels at content to play, and for it’s time it is the single best WoW expansion. It fixed classes, specs, itemization, and basically completed what made vanilla an amazing game.
WotLK further iterates on classes and offers outright more complete and more fun to play specs than does TBC. It also has the advantage of beginning where Frozen Throne left off, and that goes a long way to make the content feel better, imo.
The content of TBC is more exciting than WotLK, but playing a class or spec in WotLK is 1000x better than the already vast improvements made in TBC.
Cata had immensely weak narrative hooks compared to TBC and WotLK. It also further developed “accessibility” features and systems that had already overstepped during WotLK. Cata felt like a very sloppy idea, and when MoP followed, I tuned out of WoW completely.
TBC > Classic > WotLK >= Not playing at all > Every other expansion I tried.
TBC is the best overall. It has its issues but the PvP was great, the classes felt unique and the raiding was fun. I enjoyed raiding, I enjoyed battlegrounds, I enjoyed world PvP, I enjoyed city raids. About the only thing I didn’t enjoy was arenas.
WotLK, while better than nothing, largely destroyed it. I quit just before ICC was officially released. I spent that entire time waiting for the game to become fun again and just gave up waiting.
They had destroyed PvP and battlegrounds trying to shore up arena participation and largely homogenized the classes to the point they didn’t feel near as unique. I played as a feral druid and I really hated how they broke up cat and bear and made it where bear form was effectively useless in PvP while my cat form was a Resto/Rogue Hybrid DPS racing for healing/CC procs. I liked the fact they made them PvE viable, but they did so at the expense of the fun factor of the class. And sorry if I can take a mage from 100% to 3-7% with just my intro, that isn’t PvP.
Then you have them consolidating Hit and Spell Hit, Crit and Spell Crit, Spell Damage and Healing when they should have remained separate and them being separate actually served a purpose.
Then you have how they put diminishing returns on EVERYTHING as a bandaid way to avoid scaling them screwing up scaling instead of actually addressing the scaling.
With WotLK, if all you did was PvE, you were fine with it overall, but having your stats give less and less as you get them felt kind crappy, but if you enjoyed PvP outside of the sandbox, you got crapped on. And even if you enjoyed arena you largely got crapped on when I played. I remember Death Knights ruled Northrend with an iron fist unless a paladin was around to take it away from them.
Sorry but TBC is a great game and attracted many players, WotLK ran many of them off.
Edit: What they need to do is actually address issues in Classic and TBC they should have done the first time and don’t give the “Museum Piece” excuse because they know people actually play this and if all they plan to do is just leave it, they are no better than the private servers they hate at this point and just milking the popular parts without fixing them.
If the person I replied to is to be believed, the subs flatlined in Wrath, when the game went all-out in easiness and ‘casual-friendly’ features (as the devs would define it). And there was nothing hardcore about Cata.
Personally hated Wrath. Loved TBC and loved Cataclysm.
Wrath sounds …like retail.
LFG didn’t exist until after Ulduar was out, and the ilvl bloat didn’t happen until the end of ToGC.
LFG launched with 3.3, Icrcrown Citadel, so after TotC.
Was great for 2 weeks, and then the reality hit.
Right, knew it was after t8 at least. We ran most things in guild, so the addition didn’t make much of an impact. That said, I’ve never had a problem with LFG for 5 man content; the teleportation was a bit much, but the concept of a group finder is good for the game.
When they made LFR for Vault is when it all became stupid.
One of the major issues it introduced was instead of there being a daily dungeon, it was just any dungeon. So dungeons that would otherwise be avoided but got run on their daily dungeon day just became a toxic excuse to bail.
And that behavior continues to this day.
To be fair, trying to find someone to run Heroic Oculus when specific heroic dungeons were a thing could be a challenge.
As a Tank or Healer, I was able to make a group, but trying to find one on my hunter, usually requires me to trade runs with another tanks alt hehe.
TBC. But that’s all based on nostalgia.