I started at the very end of Wrath, so I never got to play the early game/expansions.
Do you think BC or vanilla is better?
Personally I hope they eventually have all the expansions on “classic” with progression rotation servers where you can jump from one to the next after a “season.”
Anyway, it seems to me like BC “fixed” a lot of the problems with Vanilla and added loads of awesome new content.
TBC (10 characters)
TBC was - I think - largely better.
Some negatives were introduced: Flying, Arenas etc.
But overall I think it was the best version of WOW.
Objectively I don’t think anyone can deny that TBC is better, specifically for this reason. They added some needed QoL changes, while at the same time retaining thematically what made classic, well, classic.
I’d say the only thing (subjectively) worse about TBC was flying.
I liked them both equally tbh. I disliked things like arena and flying tho so vanilla has a slight edge I guess.
The burning crusade feels like an extremely polished vanilla.
It had harder challenges at pretty much every level of gameplay, much much more functional spec designs and balance and continued WC3 lore.
Towards the end of the TBC cycle blizzard started to realise how alienating that type of game design was and that they were increasingly burning through potential players so they shifted to a much much more broadly appealing game. They removed attunements to gate content (it was extreamly demotivating for guilds to regress tiers to attune replacements and often led to poaching from other guilds) and they introduced badge system catch up gear.
To me TBC and WOTLK are the best with vanilla also holding a very special place for me.
I’d personally put Vanilla beyond TBC in pretty much every single category. But I’d put TBC significantly above the other expansions. Wrath was the real shift in the game’s design.
Gosh, so many awesome memories in both, Karazhan tips the scales for me for towards BC, but they are both awesome!
Personally i preferred TBC, i didn’t do the raids personally as i was balls deep in university at the time. However i really enjoyed all the Attunements, i felt like i could do anything i wanted in the world all the while being lead without me realising it. And as mentioned earlier some of the QoL changes that were needed. Still don’t get me wrong i played most of my wow in Vanilla even to this day i haven’t found an expansion other than TBC to be as much or more fun than Vanilla
I am not having a dig but what are the categories you judge based on? I used to think I liked vanilla better (because nostalgia I was more tied to it) but after playing through both several times I now feel TBC is much superior design.
For me TBC has better:
Class\spec design
Itemisation
Professions integration (crafting gear can be super powerful as it should be)
norm to heroic progression in dungeons
Epic quest attunements and progression linking of tiers.
Edit: questing in general feels allot more refined and polished, zones have story and flow and continue into max level, in vanilla they tended to drop off at max level.
I look at them both as awesome, for slightly different reasons.
I’m still not a fan of Arena, even tho I originally thought I would like them a lot. Flying? Very mixed feelings on this, I go back and forth.
I feel like the talent trees got their best versions in BC. Karazhan was awesome (I still want the Wolf Sniper Rifle), so much fun stuff to do!
I would 100% play through BC again on my Vanilla/Classic toon.
I started relatively late in vanilla, so I never hit 60 and never raided vanilla content while it was current. That makes the strongest (and best) of my memories TBC. At the same time, the transition never felt as jarring as it might have for someone who’d played at end-game level for longer. Most of my memory of the transition was the midnight line to pick up the CE at Gamestop and then get the disks loading the update ASAP when I got home.
I don’t really weigh them on a scale of one or the other was better. For me, at least, all that Azeroth content was still vanilla even though at 60 (or 58 for some) characters moved on to Outland. I played through it repeatedly, leveling many alts. The time sequencing felt right. The buildup of strength, because I hadn’t done end-game content, was pretty smooth.
I’m definitely in the realm of wanting separate WOW Classic and BC Classic realms. I don’t want rotations. I don’t want progression and then reversion. I want both available, and the ability to choose for any particular character I want to play whether I want to have the max level be 60 or 70, whether I want vanilla talents or TBC talents, whether I want to see mana addicts and space goats or not, whether I want to deal with people using crafted rings and gem socketed gear and head enchants or not.
Vanilla captured the sense of a living, breathing world with endless possibilities better. BC was a functional and technical improvement on what came before. But vanilla was “bigger” IMO. The world was massive and there was actual player created content like Tarren Mill raids.
BC was good, but Outland was nothing compared to the two continents of Azeroth. Raid size changed, for better or worse. Arena and PvP specific gear (meaning gear with resil on it) was introduced. Heroic dungeons were introduced.
I would prefer vanilla because it felt so massive. I realize that is largely nostalgia talking, but hey, it is what it is.
Both are amazing experiences imo.
I’m a big fan of raiding and , to me, that defines the feel of the experience.
In TBC, you cannot get the feel of Vanilla and vice versa.
Vanilla was dark and claustrophobic, where you felt very weak overall and really brought you together with other players facing the same goal…to survive.
TBC was ‘other worldly’ ( no pun intended ), and felt different in a dark sense. From the neon lands of Zangermarsh, to the glowing crystal in tempest keep, and the ‘auras’ of the ethreal Mana tombs. It felt like space, and a complete departure from Azeroth. To me, it only improved and didn’t regress.
Both are mutually exclusive, and they both were great to me. If I had to stay in one for good, I’d pick TBC.
Vanilla was 60 levels, TBC was only 10.
You can compare the other xpacs to each other, but I always felt Vanilla stands alone.
That’s funny, because when I rolled an alliance shaman I swear I leveled 70 levels… the more you know.
Burning through players? At the end of TBC, that was roughly the last time they had a net susbscriber flow during the entire expansion…and it was a fairly high rate at that.
Content wise it is a wash for me. What I saw as the biggest downside to TBC was not the content, but rather the level cap being picked up and tossed down the road, and the ridiculous gear jump. You potentially worked your butt off to gain your endgame gear in vanilla just to have the bulk of it rendered pointless, as a L58 could walk through the portal and be nearly handed gear that was better.
“Expansions” as blizzard rolled them out, were cancer. Horizontal progression should have been the design.
edit: by and large dungeons were more interesting in vanilla. TBC was when the hallway became the norm, imho.
I am going to slightly disagree here. If you had raid gear past MC it lasted basically all the way to 70. And you even kept tier gear on until karazhan because of how good the bonuses were. Some pieces here and there got replaced after doing some quests like nagrand arena, but overall you kept your gear for quite some time. Now, in WotLK is where your gear got replaced REALLY fast. I think I remember only having my trinket from BT left. But yeah this aspect always was put a sour taste in my mouth but to be fair I am not sure how they could have done horizontal progression and made wow as fun as it was during vanilla>wotlk.
TBC, in my opinion, was the best version of WoW…for many of the reasons already stated.
In addition, it had better support for addons and it introduced a LFG tool that didn’t fully automate the grouping process, but was a much more effective way to form groups than by using /who to cold call random players, or spamming LFG in trade channel.
That said, flying mounts killed world PvP and player immersion, Arenas distracted from getting BGs right, and allowing players to access TBC content at lvl 58 essentially made all lvl 60 5 man dungeons & zones irrelevant.
In a perfect world, and in my opinion, Blizzard would be remaking TBC, not Vanilla…but there is hope.