Well for starters that’s when Blood elves were added lol
Much like Vanilla and (early) Wrath, it was an era when the only people you could interact with were YOUR SERVER. So who you were as a player mattered. You weren’t just “the mage” in the group. Throw in an attempt at making every spec usable for their intended purpose, while retaining good old talent trees giving you an illusion of choice… it was Vanilla but better.
I’ll just be sad that my bad Shaman Enhance Tank dies in that xpac.
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While at the time I didn’t like the feeling that the game was being changed forever, I still greatly enjoyed BC.
The memory of going to Blasted Lands on launch night and making my way through the quests and into the Dark Portal is one of the best memories I have of playing the game.
The leveling experience was great, to this day I still enjoy doing the quests in the BC zones. I have so many great memories of world PVP mostly in Hellfire Peninsula but generally in all of the BC zones.
I liked all of the raids, with my least favorite being Sunwell, which I still thought was an okay raid. Karazhan was always the “feel good” raid I did every week even when I didn’t need it. I know lots of people feel the same.
Even though I wasn’t very good at it until later, I really liked Arena and thought it was a great addition to the game.
Still had the old style progression system of classic, with a lot more polish on the classes to promote balance.
It was a better version of Vanilla, with enough changes to just feel that much better. However, the reason it’s my favorite expansion is because was not for any real gameplay or content reason (MoP was my favorite to actually play): it’s just the period of time where my real-life friends and I had the most time to dedicate to the game. I started in Feb '05, and for most of Vanilla my friends and I were knee-deep in early careers. It just fell into place though where during most of TBC we were in the right parts of our lives to have enough free time without obligations to children and not totally overloaded with work, so we could actually play and enjoy it a lot. We consolidated into (mostly) one faction on one server instead of being spread out and had tons of fun together.
By the middle of Wrath, obligations were growing (personally, I was working 70-75 hour weeks as an engineering lead) and so for post-TBC expansions, I have a more realistic assessment of the expansions.
So, why do the people I used to play (well, still 2 of them around, sometimes…) with and I generally consider TBC to be our favorite? Simply because we had the most fun then. It’s impossible for us to not look at Burning Crusade through rose-tinted glasses because the interpersonal interactions with friends and other guildmates was a huge part of the experience…the same with Vanilla. I almost don’t want to try TBC Classic on the simple basis that my opinion of Vanilla WoW was dulled by playing WoW Classic: I had a decent amount of fun with Classic, but it’s much easier to see the flaws a decade and a half on.
I’ll definitely try TBC Classic out and hopefully some of my old friends will give it a shot again like Classic. My expectations are tempered a bit from WoW Classic; however, I do still love the BC dungeons and raids to this day (I’ve continued to send my leveling characters to BC zones and queued for BC dungeons since Chromie time even if it’s not the most efficient). Will it be as fun as the first time around? I doubt it because I won’t be able to look past the flaws like the first go because I was having so much fun with friends, some who no longer even with us. But, I definitely had more fun the first time around in TBC than in Vanilla.
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wow classic but bigger and better in every conceivable way. (except raid size)
I think you’re underestimating the large number of players, such as myself, who never played TBC when it was current. I’m a “wrath baby,” and I very much enjoyed the opportunity to play through Classic. I found it too cliquey at end game with too few players/guilds to get into raiding with (stuff is either on farm or a guy is trying to put together a new guild that will inevitably fail). I also have to say that I’m addicted to the M+ system, and it’s prolly the only reason I stick with any of these games past leveling up toons.
all of that said, TBC content has always been fascinating to me, and when I went back and did it all at the end of WotLK, I really wished I’d had the opportunity to do it when it “mattered.” so I’ll enjoy it for the same reason I enjoyed Classic. It won’t be my lifetime fulfillment though.
TBC kept the tone of Vanilla quite similar. It wasn’t until Wrath that things really started to change.
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It had a lot of systems to build up toward doing end game group content. There was a LOT of CC in dungeons and you kinda had to CC back.
But it was nothing but a collection of tedious grinds. The only plus side is that nothing was gated. You could literally sit in a forest and kill Aarakocra for 5 rep a piece until you maxed out that reputation if you wanted to.
Every solo progression system was like a slower version of The Avowed rep. I don’t understand why people are looking forward to this either. Badges and such didn’t come until the very last patch of the game.
Only attractive things I can think of is that Karazhan will be progression content again. You can literally just buy flying out of the gate. And professions had value.
I may check it out just to do Isle of Quel’danas again.
I can’t wait for everybody to remember all the attunements
No cross server and everyone had a reputation like a high school you had to earn your spot on the pecking order or be a nameless no body.
It took the foundations laid fourth by vanilla and, well, expanded them. You know, like an expansion.
The raid sizes dropped from 40 man to 25 for ease of access.
Two 10 man raids were added for the more casual player.
Crafting was more relevant for the non raider, as some of the crafted items were great for a long time.
Gameplay loops were created to encourage re runability of dungeons with reputations and heroic difficulty introduction.
More class and race diversity with shaman and paladins no longer faction locked and two new races with Blood Elves and Dranei.
Deeper talent trees and reworked talent trees to encourage experimentation and new options with group composition. (some specs weren’t memes anymore)
Flying mounts created a new world pvp playstyle.
The list goes on and on and on.
QFT
/10 characters
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People liked it because it was new and they were young.
It won’t, in this iteration of BC.
Server sizes were much smaller back then. They created mega servers for classic, which led to very very retail like social interactions. That, and it caused the black lotus scarcity to get way out of hand.
Only thing I didn’t like about TBC was the zones.
It did introduce arena though which is the only reason I’m still subbed to this day.
Burning Crusade… started the process to fixing a lot of the issues Classic had. It improved leveling, improved spec viability, reduced the raid size, and added flying to the game.
It did a lot of really cool things that were vast improvements over classic. Most of them weren’t sustainable or weren’t really that good.
TBC will likely die when people have to face that attunement grind again.
I sure hope you guys will make sure you have 300 fishing before bt comes out.
BC was insanely good 'cause I was 14 years old and literally could play for 16 hours every day.