Time to admit it

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion pack for the popular online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, is often hailed as one of the best expansions in the game’s history. However, when compared to its predecessors - the Burning Crusade and Vanilla WoW - Wrath of the Lich King falls short in several aspects.

One of the major drawbacks of Wrath of the Lich King was its focus on raiding. While raiding has always been a significant part of World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King took it to the extreme. The expansion introduced several high-end raid instances, including Icecrown Citadel, Ulduar, and Trial of the Crusader, which required hours of grinding to complete. As a result, the game became more focused on end-game content, leaving little room for casual players to enjoy.

This focus on raiding also contributed to the decline of the PvP scene in Wrath of the Lich King. The game’s PvP scene was completely dead, with players preferring to spend their time in raid instances rather than battling each other. This lack of competition made the game less exciting and less challenging for players who enjoyed PvP content. This becomes more obvious with the massive resurge in Vanilla Classic population.

Another significant issue with Wrath of the Lich King was the introduction of raid loggers. These were players who would log into the game only to participate in raids and then log out immediately after. This trend meant that players were often unable to find groups for dungeons or other non-raid content, which left many feeling isolated and disconnected from the game’s community.

When compared to Vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King was a significant departure from the game’s original formula. Vanilla WoW was all about exploration, adventure, and community-building. The Burning Crusade expanded on this with more challenging content, while still maintaining a balance between PvP and PvE content. In contrast, Wrath of the Lich King was solely focused on raiding, making it less appealing to a broader audience.

In conclusion, while Wrath of the Lich King may be considered one of the best expansions in World of Warcraft history by some, it falls short when compared to its predecessors, Vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade. The focus on raiding at the expense of other content led to a less vibrant and less engaging game overall. The decline of the PvP scene and the rise of raid loggers further contributed to this. Overall, Wrath of the Lich King was a misstep in the evolution of World of Warcraft, and one that the game’s developers learned from in later expansions.

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Grinding only becomes bad if you don’t like that content. As someone that like raiding, the time spent in raiding in wotlk isn’t even that bad if you compare at nowadays requirements. Some guilds are clearing in less than 2 hours easily Ulduar and that’s like the harder raid of wotlk and it will get nerfed eventually.

Raid logging isn’t a bad thing, you shouldn’t feel pressured to keep playing intensively at all time. If people are done they are done. We should be asking what other type of content we can add to the game so you feel you have option to do something, not making more stuff mandatory.

Don’t really have an opinion too much on pvp so I’m gonna skip that part.

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I don’t like TBC and I didn’t in 2007 either. So doesn’t apply to me

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tbc > all.

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This, you shouldn’t be required to play so much just to stay competitive.

Wrath is great for this as it allows you to (after an initial grind period) raid log if you want.

Then you can add play time through alts, which is more enjoyable to me than being required to keep grinding one character endlessly.

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For me, the best of the 3 Classics is TBC. It had the perfect balancing of good raids and PVP being interesting.

I think the problem with the raid scene in WOTLK is the different raid tiers. So you have 10 vs 25, which offers different layers of difficulty and rewards. Sometimes you need to do one but not the other for certain BiS.

Then in Ulduar you have hard modes, which adds a whole other 2 layers to acquiring your best items and another layer of skill and GS requirements. This is then carried onward to TOC and ICC.

In TBC you had only one difficulty and size and you only needed 25 (10 for Kara) and you could say you “cleared the raid” when you did it. Usually you had a few different raids to mix and match gear for, but it was far less than Phase 1 of WOTLKC.

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Only the abomination we have now is the worst expansion to date. Retail developers couldn’t help themselves on changes and/or lacked talent to reproduce what made WotLK successful. That coupled with a community that never cleared the original content, but migrated over from retail, leads to a WA bloated hand holding paint by numbers iteration that seeks to quantify performance through a third party website.

WotLK was objectively the best performing WoW expansion. Whatever we have now is nowhere near what WotLK was. Too little care from Blizzard about player experience, too many bots, too many credit card swipers.

The real WotLK experience can still be had on pservers though.

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2008 called , it wants its post back

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You could get perma banned for RMT in 09 it was literally 1 warning and if you did it again boom ban. You can buy 100k and do a direct trade mailbox trade in WOTLKC lmao

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lol

/10char

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TBC was more of a bandaid of Vanilla. Blizzard’s success was overwhelming for them and I imagine they mostly just tried to keep their heads above.

Wotlk was more of a expansion in comparison. The questing, gear, and classes were far more fluid. It was well received becaue people enjoyed it. Not sure the conundrum.

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Both of the expansions are retail WoW. Neither are Classic.

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Thats subjective, play count doesn’t mean its good. Everyone knew Wrath was going to suck excpet for the retail babies who started out WoW in wrath.

The explosion in player count was a mass marketing campaign riding off the foundation of Vanilla/TBC. They were trying to re-coup their investment in purchasing blizzard and taking the company public.

Vanilla players knew this was going to be trash. We quit originally in wrath, and everyone’s quitting again.

nIgHt eLf mOwHaWk

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Fair, I will admit it. WOTLK IS the best expansion. Better than TBC and worlds better than vanilla. I’m not reading an essay reading a bunch of idiotic non-points.

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<----- The Classic Era forums are that way

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Couldn’t be more wrong if you were trolling.

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Agree with this. As much as I love raiding, I think I loved TBC’s PvP objectives in each zone more.

The removal of WG as a real PvP zone eliminated any hint of world pvp

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What you just described as raid logging has been in classic since 2019. It wasnt the game it was the player. I loved wrath and created multiple characters. This time around i find myself raid logging and doing enough dailies for raid consumes.

Wrath was a good xpac. I think i preferred BC back in the day over wrath only because of nagrand pvp being a thing. As someone mentioned they destroyed wintergrasp this time around which honestly hurts the entire life cycle of the xpac.

Ive done wintergrasp and voa 5 times since wrath was released back in 08 it was a weekly thing.

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Yeah, I hated the Wintergrasp changes and posted about it. Most people didn’t care at all. I understand the reasons of why Blizzard went that route but I also knew it would ruin my enjoyment of it and that’s exactly what happened.

Wrath was more fun to me originally than TBC was, but I also knew that was so specific to my situation that it would never again be repeated (basically I resurrected a Vanilla guild that focused on wpvp and turned it into a (w)pvp/raiding focused guild and helped bring wpvp back to the server, and then by doing that I even, not on purpose, brought other people to the server who wanted that. As in transfers in and wpvp guilds. I KNEW that this experience would never be replicated).

Anyway yes, Wrath Classic is definitely for the raid fans first. About 90% of the people I really connected with since August 2019 have quit the game. The people who I know personally who have stayed absolutely LOVE theory-crafting and class discussions and things. As in they could spend a whole week discussing these things, going into depth with the math and parsing or speed-clearing strategies. That’s who the game is for right now and as far as Blizzard is concerned the same holds true.

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I loved original wrath and I’m loving wrath classic. Is it perfect? Hell no, but I’m having fun. I just wish we had rdf, I really do, I used to enjoy using that so much back in the day.

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