Is there still different skill ranks? Talent trees, dual spec?
Never played so im curious what to expect.
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Well, they mostly made a bigger step into the direction that is now the trashfest that is retail wow.
You will see plenty of classes losing their identity, because they started giving classes the same abilities. For instance hunters get killshot, which is essentially execute from warriors. They ruined warriors by removing stance dance and force you into Battlestance.
Mages cast even less than they do now. Its mostly just instant spamming. Some classes get some ability that they lacked in TBCC or so. Overall it might have been the most popular expansion but the only reason is because Vanilla and TBC were so good, even the slowest of slowpokes finally gave WoW a try. Wrath is worse than TBC, but still playable. Cata is where it all goes to hell
I remember the world being even less interactive than TBCC once everyone had lvled. Atleast you flew into certain zones in TBCC, but in Wotlk I think most of the farming is done in the wpvp zone they added.
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Classes started to lose identity because smaller raid sizes meant you took only certain classes. In TBC you had to take 5 or more shamans, You stacked hunters and locks because they were such strong DPS. It’s hard to complain about the classes when the playerbase outright refused to take certain classes and specs to raids.
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They also lost identity cause Lizzard was really keen on pushing the PvP esports meta and arena in general. While the main focus always was PvE, you can clearly see how Arena PvP influenced certain specs and talents. A lot of these talents were things that classes lacked in TBC.
That said, even if you completely disregard the PvP aspect and just focus on your PvE argument, I still think your assessment that because the playerbase min maxs they decided to give every class more or less the same things down the line is a weird way to look at things. Its the devs task to give every class something to bring to the table, specially in raids, where you can actually finetune encounters. Rather than pushing classes into corners that only they can fill and therefore enhancing the experience for every class as a whole they went with the lazy approach and tried to give all classes the same tools. I guess the PvP part of the game had a hand in that. There are enough fools out there that think WoW pvp is a fair and esport worthy meta worth to be pursued.
Either way, Wotlk is what it is, OP asked what changes. Class assimilation took a big step there. The whole game lost a lot of flavour in general
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scottejaye posted a video yesterday about this topic:
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Different spell ranks? Yes, but the mana cost is the same so healer downranking is dead but there are niche situations like Mage casting r1 Frostbolt for faster cast time on the slow.
Talent trees? Yep. They are still there. (https://wotlk.evowow.com/?talent) Look around they are pretty cool.
Duel Spec? Yep. Costs either 1000g or 5000g. I think it’s 1k but I’m not 100%. Easy breezy beautiful covergirl, play offspec, play pvp. It’s great.
Biggest change overall are to the classes. Lot of specs have 5-6 buttons in rotation with procs now. 1 button spam is dead.
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The short version is Is the classes as a whole get more balanced everybody’s Mana problems get solved.
You can play Is whatever you want And you never have to worry if you’re going to be super far behind this class or that classed everybody’s pretty balanced.
Everybody just gets more fun there’s a little bit more homogenization our imagination but it’s enough imagination where no one feels like they are lacking anything.
But not enough where everybody feels the same essentially that and PVP is pretty fun too robes aren’t gods anymore.
They’re good but not gods
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Other than the obvious, 10 more levels, new continent, new class etc…
Raids are now 10/25 man
Achievements are added
Raids have hard modes now(which are activated in various ways)
5 man Heroics are positioned firmly as pre raid content in terms of difficulty
All tanks are brought up to pally aoe threat levels
Various buffs including Heroism are made raid wide, yay!!
Badges are now per tier
Honor gear is always 1 season behind arena gear
Dual spec, although this isn’t so much a major change as an obvious duh this should be in now
LFD which with any luck they’ll try something else like linked realms
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Oh yeah they changed mob tagging to on agro not on damage, so annoying they didn’t do that for classic yet.
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Spell ranks are still a thing, but you really just don’t need to downrank anymore except to maybe have that Rank 1 version of Frostbolt or w/e for utility purposes.
Talents just get bigger and longer, with ever increasingly powerful must-have talents deeper in the tree. Classes are generally forced to go to the bottom of a given tree to be a proper spec, but a few oddball exceptions exist here and there to utilize a new Wrath skill or a new combination of talents.
Just as TBC saw every class getting new spells and abilities baseline, that happens again in Wrath, and just like in TBC, the new skills fill gaps. Wrath was the first big attempt to get roles settled into specific sets of skills, that way if you had a choice of Feral Druid, Enhancement Shaman, or Fury Warrior, you should be able to pick whoever was your favorite because the fight didn’t call for a specific class/spec, but a Melee DPS. Examples:
- More Melee had AoE skills, like Rogues gaining Fan of Knives
- Healers got more tools to let them do multiple jobs better, like Druids getting Nourish for single target direct healing
- Tanks were intended to be more balanced against each other, so all the Tanks got a Thunderclap/Demo Shout debuff in their kit, and they were all normalized to do the same thing
We get Dual Spec in Wrath (assuming it isn’t added earlier) which just let you swap specs with a consumable, and swapping had to be out of combat and would reduce your resource bar to zero. With how many weird oddities you could come up with with the talent trees, Dual Spec let people do a lot of fun things more freely.
Barbershop becomes a thing in Wrath, giving you some customization to your character, and access to a few things you couldn’t get at character creation, such as hairstyles that normally were reserved for particular races only.
The new profession is Inscription, which comes with a new power system called Glyphs. You get three major and three minor, the major glyphs are big game changer boosts like “Fireball does 20% more damage” or “Icy Veins has a 10% faster CD”, whereas the minor glyphs were mostly convenience/fun stuff like “Gift of the Wild no longer costs a reagent” or “Aquatic Form is now a killer whale”. Inscription also crafts the shoulder enchants that we currently get from Aldor/Scryer.
Professions in general are normalized in their bonuses, such that crafting professions all offer personal stat boosts that are MOSTLY equal to each other. LW get specialized fur-lining enchants for their bracers that are just insane gobs of Stamina or Agility, JC get to socket three custom gems that are huge chunks of stats that match any color, etc. Essentially everyone who was serious about PvE/PvP went double crafting, typically Engineering+WhateverYouFavored. I was LW/JC in original Wrath as a Feral Tank.
Reputation is much easier to build since you can purchase a tabard from the faction you want to build with and just wear it while doing high level Normal dungeons and any Heroic. This lets you focus on the loot drops you want/need without having to run dungeons you don’t need just because of the rep. Reputations are still your gateway to key head enchants, patterns, a few pre-raid epics, and a few other goodies.
Dailies are more fleshed out, especially once we get to the Argent Tournament, but you can largely skip a lot of them still since they mostly help with side factions that aren’t critical or don’t have insane goods you desperately need.
Heroics are substantially easier this time around, like way way way easier. If you have any measure of T6 or Sunwell gear, you can more or less not upgrade any of it other than replace your gems (the green and blue quality gems in Wrath are better than epic gems in TBC) and roll right into Heroics the moment you ding 80.
The first tier is almost insultingly easy. Naxx 2.0 is the first raid and its is everything you remember from original Naxx, except way less deadly, and Four Horsemen is an outright joke. The other two entry raids, Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity, aren’t too much better but they’re dragon raids so that’s always fun. Obsidian Sanctum also offers the first attempt at a hardmode encounter where specific loot and rewards were locked behind killing the boss the hard way.
Raids are split between 10 and 25m versions. 10m is easier with weaker and different loot than 25m, which means you sometimes have an awkward situation where a trinket has some uniquely powerful proc that only appears on 10m but not 25m, or vice versa. The hardmodes that kick into high gear starting with Ulduar are also fairly challenging, and significantly harder than anything TBC can offer. People will really feel the difference in skill and effort when Ulduar releases and people can’t beat Heartbreaker or Firefighter.
Badge vendors are basically on steroids in Wrath, where everything gives badges, and raids have their own tier of badges, and every new tier we get a new set of badges with new gear that can only be bought by the new badges. Some tier gear is available through badges, along with 3-4 other epics that are actually quite good, so everyone is more or less guaranteed to have 3-4 upgrades in the first month even if you aren’t killing many bosses or your loot luck sucks.
Achievements!
I’m sure there’s more but that’s it for now…
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Here’s some worth noting:
-Classes and talent pages are in their prime.
-Dungeon finder, meaning you don’t have to spend an hour typing “LF TANK.”
-New class IS a tank, and starts at 58.
-Dual spec, meaning you can bank a tank/heal build.
-More BGs.
-Wintergrasp.
-Northrend is a hell of lot bigger and better designed than outlands. 2 starting areas is a nice touch so not everyone is dogpiled in 1 zone at launch. Blizzard learned the hard way with hellfire and didn’t want to repeat that disaster.
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The hard modes in Wotlk are no harder than Vashj and Kael are right now.
Not even close.
DPS requirements are tighter, Tank damage is significantly deadlier, Tanks have to manage CDs, and the number of moving parts on many hardmodes dwarfs anything Vashj/Kael throw at us.
Hodir Hardmode is much easier than Vashj/Kael, since it is just a speed kill of normal Hodir, who isn’t hard anyway.
Mimiron Hardmode is leagues harder than Vashj/Kael.
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The reason I play TBCC is the utility and identity my warrior has there. He also plays like a beast compared to WotLK… only thing really cool about WotLk tho is Titans Grip…. Man do I LOVE to dual wield two twohanders….
Literally did hardmodes in OG WotLK in a guild that didn’t use Voice chat. So im gonna have to disagree.
Going to call BS on that then if you expect anyone to believe you did Freya, Mimiron, Algalon, Yogg, Twin Valkyr, or half the ICC hardmodes without any voice comms when those fights were relevant.
I did all of WotLK content as well, so no.
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This is the least accurate comment ever, WoTLK was peak WoW.
After wrath you start to see minor shift toward the game being bad, that added up over multiple xpacs to make the game trash.
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Wotlk is my favorite xpac. The pvp in wotlk imo is very good, probably the best wow ever had.
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I mean you could stop chugging soy and try PVP. Wotlk was the PEAK for warriors in pvp. Huge skill ceiling, a lot more so than TBC.
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This is why i ultimately quit. Because they gutted the role out of the role playing game.
The incessant whining on these official forums (like we are seeing now, all over again) became so overwhelming that the devs just started surrendering to the mobs demands.
Before WotLK devs frequently referenced the ‘holy trinity’ of tank, dps, heals to maintain at least a basic core identity to each class or spec. WotLK is when they stopped bringing it up because the lines had become so blurred there was no identity anymore. You no longer filled a role, you filled a subscription and a group slot.
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