WotLK arena

the good ol days when hunter pets felt like pets and not auto attack bots.

It, again, depends on who’s experiencing it. I imagine it’s a completely different feel for someone who has never played wotlk before, vs other categories of players.

People who played WOTLK but were too young to be competitive might feel differently from people who played competitively. And among competitive players it could feel different between those who played on an active and competitive battlegroup vs those who played, on, say, Emberstorm for example.

But, I think wotlk feels great. Personally. It’s an evolved TBC. Everything is faster and more unforgiving. Some GCDs have been removed entirely. It improved a lot of the things that people find sluggish or slow about TBC. Where TBC resembles classic WOTLK divorces from it.

It feels more modern than TBC while still boasting the final glimpse of true player agency this game offered before cataclysm started closing doors on hybrids and talent choice.

I can romanticize about wotlk forever lol.

It’s the last time Lore was good. It’s home to some of the most beloved raids in this games history. (Ulduar for example.) Depending on how it launches regarding pvp, it will either be relatively balanced or some of the most unfair stuff you’ll ever see.

Don’t expect rogues to be unpopular. Healers have free choice of what class they want to play. People will be more sweaty than they are on TBC.

These are largely smoothed out in wotlk. But IIRC stun resist still exists, although maybe only for orc? Idk. I think the expertise stat handles it outside of orc racial. As for nova not breaking, deep freeze exists and is affected by cold snap. If nova doesn’t break in wotlk we’re all dead. I don’t remember sitting in nova too much though. I always played with a priest tbf.

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This is an oversimplifcation of wotlk gearing. Sure, shoulders are gated behind 2k. But a full set of last seasons gear is available, and a relatively functional set will always be available for honour + arena points, or simply just honour. Not to mention WG shoulders & Pve gear being perfectly viable depending on the stats.

Full furious is available by season 8 from honour. Honour you can save up from when you’re leveling. You can hit 80 and be in epics you farmed while leveling. The main timegate for WOTLK gearing, iirc Different to tbc, is weapons. There’s no easy honour weapon. Your best hope is a heroic dungeon, depending on the patch, or some raid / crafting / boe. Early seasons gear was so poorly itemized that people opted for full pve gear IIRC. That and 4sets were just nuts for t7.

To be fair though, is that because you were newer to the game, or because the content was that much better?

I LOVED raiding in LK, now I can barely stomach sitting for 2-4 hours trying to do it. The mechanics are a little different, the boss/raid appearance changes but ultimately you’re doing the same junk.

I’ve just often wondered if the game was ever generally (I know certain things are better) any better or worse, or if I just didn’t used to be a burnt out boomer jaded with everything. Lol

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Can you elaborate

I’ll try

Classes had their most potent and dynamic toolkits while still retaining their unique weaknesses would be my guess. MoP had more versatile toolkits but gameplay as a whole was becoming more homogeneous.

I think it’s hard to say which skillcap is the highest gameplay wise. The skills displayed in wow arena have evolved with the game. Some are better highlighted in different metas.

Wotlk is often praised as the last expansion before blizzard started to coddle the classes in the game with QoL upgrades. So in that vein, it’s the last time the game kept its original approach to being punishing. Maybe displaying mastery in such a fast paced and unforgiving meta is why it’s praised?

Other random ideas. Last expansion before stamina bloat. Last expansion where mana mattered for non healers. Last expansion where dps couldn’t self heal reliably. Last expansion with hybrid specs? There’s likely others. Edit: Cata technically had some of the first examples of pruning. So it’s the last expansion where classes retained their core design. Only example i can think of is Frost / Fire ward for mage though turning into mage ward though. So take that with a grain of salt. Another way to approach it being core design is it’s the last time the classes functioned without massive damage modifiers. For better or for worse. Cata introduced stamina bloat, mastery stat, and a bunch of other systems to let classes do enough damage to kill eachother after artificially inflating health by 100k in 5 levels.

Varick pmuch hit on all the points.

I’ll give my brief stance on it too. Classes themselves felt more wholesome and complete, and as a result you almost never felt like you ran out of options unless you played very clumsily. As for skill cap, I think by the virtue of Wotlk class design, every class felt more fleshed out and had significant depth. This eliminated a lot of the cookie cutter gameplay comparitively from class to class due to various customizations and player preferences (you were never really super confined as a class/spec and had the leeway to change things up according to how you wanted to play your class or spec). Also this goes hand in hand with the glyph system that they implemented - which I thought was super cool/interesting because it added more depth/flavor to playstyles. Definitely not the best/most balanced PvP xpac, but it set the trend to a great and enjoyable PvP atmosphere if you take into account how polished Cata and MoP PvP were.

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you’ll see a lot more diversity of comps in wotlk, whereas tbc arena is very primitive and dominated by like 6 specs (rogue mage war lock disc rdru)

namely the hybrid dps specs become non-memes: feral ret enhance ele shadow, along with rshams and hpals

this is also when many of wow’s most iconic skills are introduced: deep freeze, bladestorm, dispersion, penance, lava burst, chaos bolt, shadow dance, etc


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Depends on available gear. Early on due to ease of capping ArP, Beastcleave, Turbo and Cupid are all going to be insane.

By the middle of Season 2 it becomes Hogwarts wars as casters HILARIOUSLY outscale melee and hunters, with the only viable melee being Rogues (as Rogues were NEVER allowed to have a functional counter after Vanilla, see: frost strike started off being undodgeable, was nerfed to remove this and only this quality) and any Ret or DK that gets his hands on Shadowmourne. Even with Shadowmourne, Arms was nonexistent due to being either a bullet magnet (not gemming for resil) or a bullet sponge (gemming for max resil thus no damage).

In short, play Sub, Frost, Destro, Ele or Shadow if you want to PvP in Wrath.

WotLK is where pretty much any spec is viable, including tanks, damage in insane with melee most likely dominating the early seasons and casters nuking the later seasons. It isn’t uncommon to go 100-0 in a short stun or death coil.

The main difference I’d say between TBC and WotLK overall is that healers are insanely overpowered. TBC healers can struggle to keep people alive, while in WotLK, if there isn’t mortal strike, you can easily keep people alive outside of the global one shot burst without breaking a sweat. This with the added with most specs having a lot more utility and more damage lead to a much greater diversity and more interesting PvP than TBC.

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Of the few private servers I’ve played it was pretty fun. Not any better or worse, just something different.

The biggest difference between then and now is mobility (imo). Everyone rp walks in wotlk pvp and the game feels much slower as whole because of it. example-pallies don’t have steed and unbound freedom like now; also no monks and dhs so there’s an obvious lack of zipping around the map. It makes spending every global that much meaningful though. Also the damage outside cds is very high.

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LF ret\warrior\rsham for wotlk 3s horde.
I’m ret btw

I feel like people who enjoy 2s will not enjoy wrath at all. The people who play also play alts won’t enjoy wrath because the grind is still insane. The only people who are truly going to enjoy wrath will probably also enjoy shadowlands.

Well you never mentioned rating requirements, but i have an Rsham ;D (don’t ask my xp plz)

wdym.
Wrath was one of the most fun iterations of PVP there was. Was it perfect? No.
But god damn if you couldn’t pick up a spec and actually enjoy playing it without being mindlessly bored over the same thing left and right.

It also opened up a lot of specs to viability, such as spri & Hpal. And I mean consistent viability where it wasn’t just a niche player playing it, but was something anyone could play if they put the time into it.

And anything is better than SL. Wrath just happens to be the best case scenario of being better.

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You’re ignoring one of the most important parts of game design. Wotlk is fun. The grind exists but the game doesn’t suck. More than half the HKs on my account are from wotlk. This isn’t from gearing. It’s just a fun game.

The grind on SL is awful. But it’s made worse by SL not being particularly fun.

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Wasn’t a lot of that from doing wg early on? My old dk had like 40k kills in wrath and I only used it for mining and wg. And I only played s5 and 6.

Nah my server was deaf af, and computer couldn’t handle wg. So definitely not lmao. Guaranteed 15 stacks of tenacity or something to play a slideshow. I would just show up for vault.

I think people have simply forgotten how fun wotlk bgs were / are.

Especially with consumables. Engineering to bolster toolkits. PvE gear being a liability. Classes being able to kill without cds

better the teams the longer the match.

Say that again but slowly