Breakfast Topic: What won't you miss about Wrath?
by Alex Lowers 
Sep 25th 2010 at 8:00AM
It's a truth we all must face: Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close. Whether you loved it, hated it or something in between, it is time to look forward to the new expansion. With the excitement of a whole new cataclysmic event on the horizon, one can't help but look back on the recent past. There were some glorious moments in Wrath: the Wrathgate quest line leading up to the Battle for the Undercity, epic battles in Wintergrasp, and equally epic encounters like Algalon in Ulduar and the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel all come to mind.
Yet with greatness come some faults. Wrath was no exception. About three months after the expansion's release with the start of the holiday Love is in the Air, a bug caused the message The Ice Stone has melted! to be spammed in everyone's chat logs. And let us not forget the fiasco that was Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later that prevented thousands of players from entering dungeons until servers were upgraded with new hardware months after it started popping up.
There was a lot of fun to be had in Wrath of the Lich King. There was a lot to feel nostalgic about. However, Wrath was far from perfect. What won't you miss about this expansion?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Wrath of the Lich King, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 11)
Lypheforce Sep 25th 2010 8:07AM
Although I enjoyed Wrath, I will not miss the nerfbat that Blizzard took to almost all facets of the game resulting in overly easy dungeons and raids. I also will not miss the quick-death AOEfest that most BG's turned into.
Bring on Cata baby! I'm excited by what I've seen coming down the pipe :)
cmichaelcooper Sep 25th 2010 9:43AM
I have a theory. We saw the accessibility of the game to the casual playerbase increase dramatically. Thousands or maybe millions of players got to do content that wasn't accessible to them before either because of logistics or difficulty. There was really no learning curve in early WoW, it was just a logistics problem or too difficult. In their exposure to easier raid content they learned the basic ideas of what it takes to make a raid work.
Enter Cataclysm. All of those players have at least a baseline understanding of what they need to do to be successful. The difficulty is now ratcheted up a notch to make them improve their game a bit.
The weaksauce difficulty of Wrath was an intentional move on Blizzard's part to bring more players into end-game content so that they could pull the difficulty back up a bit in Cataclysm, expecting that most of those players will be able to readjust to the difficulty now that they have a better idea of what they need to do to be successful.
Ashstryke Sep 25th 2010 9:59AM
@ Jade
^^
This
Ashstryke Sep 25th 2010 10:02AM
What the.... stupid reply system.... posted my response in the wrong section somehow.
Here's Jade's quote:
I for one, won't miss the bitching about Wrath
And my response:
@ Jade
^^
This
Loreana Sep 25th 2010 10:09AM
I just dont understand the seemingly constant complaint that WoTLK was too easy. Yes, by the end of the cycle lower level raids and especially heroics (indeed heroics by fairly early on) became trivialised but that wasn't because they were too easy. It was because our gear had had so many tier increases by this point.
Heroics in il200 were tough. Naxx was tough enough and Ulduar many guilds didnt realy see because as they were hitting it ToC came out. Of course if you had time to gear fully through heroics then naxx 10 into naxx 25 into uld 10 into uld 25 into hardmodes then ok, i guess it might have been slightly easier. But for the even remotely casual guilds out there that wasnt possible as they simply didnt have the time. And sure everyone cleared ToC but a lot didn't on hard mode.
We raid three nights a week pretty much without fail, we have a dedicated 10 man team with the odd piece of 25 gear dotted about. We downed the LK about 6 weeks ago and are now working on hardmodes.
Isnt that how it should be? Fairly dedicated casual guilds reach the end of regular content with a few months to have a crack at the hard modes with the realisation that they are probably beyond them before the expansion?
Of course if you raid five times a week, five hours a night then shouldn't you have completed pretty much everything by now and be a bit bored? Isn't that how it should be? If people raiding that hard hadn't finished all hardmode content then who was that content for? And let's not forget how few guilds out there have done HLK.
The one thing I WOULD suggest is some other way of grinding your badges. The gear scaling did destroy heroics and that did suck. It seems that Blizz are on this anyway with the proposed caps.
TL;DR Over all, from a dedicated but casual raider's perspective, Wrath rocked.
SamLowry Sep 25th 2010 10:17AM
You're actually expecting WoW players to learn something?
Four days into Brewfest my alts kept landing in groups that repeatedly cycled Direbrew--which was okay because I was still collecting trinkets--but after a while someone would complain that they've been attacking him for hours and still no mount had dropped.
DeathPaladin Sep 25th 2010 10:35AM
In regards to difficulty in WoW, I always tell people to be careful what they wish for. It seems that too many people define their ideal difficulty as being just hard enough to prevent players that they deem "worse" than them from getting decent gear. It never seems to occur to them that the game is not balanced around them, and that if Blizzard listened to all of the complaints about the game being too easy, the loudest complainers might find themselves in the group of players who cannot gear up because end game became too difficult for them.
Because believe it or not, but the people who seem to complain the most about the game are the ones in mostly T9 with maybe a couple pieces of Frost gear. When I end up in a random with a Kingslayer (especially if they are tank or healer), it's more a case of "Thank you for flying Air Quick And Painless Run. We'll be landing in 5 minutes." They don't care if I bring my undergeared just-hit-80-ten-minutes-ago alt, or my full T10 main.
dracoamericanus9 Sep 25th 2010 11:59AM
@SamLowery:
Yes, i cant believe people still think the mount drops off coren. i've been farming for the bitter brewmaiden and i cant tell you how manytime on the fourth or fifth run a person will say, "Where's the mount?"
Fordrus Sep 25th 2010 12:00PM
I TOTALLY won't miss people who didn't down Heroic Lich King, particularly not in 25-man, complaining that the content was too easy.
Not a specific complaint against the OP I'm replying to, but certainly a general mark against our playerbase.
I'd LOVE to see some numbers about the percentage of accounts with a Heroic Lich King kill on them somewhere. I bet it's similar to Sunwell completion.
Sorcha Sep 25th 2010 12:55PM
@Loreana;
I have to say that calling Naxx tough is stretching it a bit. For me, a raider from Sunwell in Sunwell gear, Naxx wasn't tough. There was no challenge there at all, at any point. Moving left-right on Thaddius? Not hard. Iceblocks on Sapp? Not hard. Void zones, dancing, plaguebombs, decimates, mind controlling the adds on Raz, Frogger, not hard. Heroics were the same; they weren't tough. Same with ToC; we did it with alts in PvP gear and blues.
But I don't think WotLK was necessarily too easy. I think their aim for the early content was to make easy content to ease a bigger percentage of the population of the game into raiding, and they certainly did that since we can now PuG raids. Where they lost my interest was not making challenging content at the earlier levels (Sarth 3d being a quasi-exception as that really wasn't hard either.) I think there should be content for all skill-levels at all stages and T7 missed that as there were no hard-modes, which I gather are challenging (although I have to say I've seen my boyfriend in PuG runs blast through some of the ICC hardmodes.) For this reason, they lost me early on. I hope to see something more engaging in the next expansion. :)
Hahahaha Sep 25th 2010 1:08PM
Dudette Sorcha, WAY TO GO!
You must be one heck of a raider. Most of the people I know who went into naxx in Sunwell gear were slaughtered.
Pemberton Sep 25th 2010 1:30PM
If Wrath was so easy, no one would have been concerned about gearscore.
Loreana Sep 25th 2010 2:18PM
@Sorcha
On the one hand I'm happy for you if you managed to cake walk Naxx in Sunwell gear. Grats! On the other, if you found all the mechanics you listed (which I kind off took to be ALL the Naxx moves) no challenge at all then you must be really bored playing and I wonder why you do or did. And do note I said tough enough not tough.
However, I didn't find it as easy as that. Nor did my guild. Nor did any of the similar guilds to ours I can think of. Was it super hard? No. Should it have been super hard? No. It was an entry level raid and it was tough enough.
I loved raiding Naxx with my guild. In fact perhaps beacause we weren't super pro raiders it was more fun. Naxx was a time to gear up, a time to wrestle with rusty-from-levelling concepts like hit caps and defence rating and a time for new raiders to learn the ropes. It was where I learned how to react when stuff went wrong because someone in the group screwed up.
And, given it was the first raid of Wrath (and granted I never saw it the first time round - there's a point in there somewhere) when we got confident on a boss I could still quite hapilly suspend my disbelief with an OH MY GOD IM FIGHTING A GIANT SPIDER!!!!
Now I know my first para sounds like I'm having a go but I'm really not (well not much). I just think that if you are that rare species of uber raider then I do mean the grats. I can't do it. I have neither the time nor the skills.
The thing is, I think there are an aweful lot of people like me. We love the challenge to us and we love the story and what we really love is the weird mix of WE JUST KILLED THE BAD GUY!!! and the new shinies he dropped.
Naxx was for us. And importantly Naxx HAD to be for us. It was the best (and perhaps only) to kickstart the raiding population for Wrath.
I know that with all these things it tends to be those with a negative experience that speak up and that's fair enough, but it's nice to speak up once in a while for the things you like. And I liked Wrath. Pretty much all of it.
jscott87 Sep 25th 2010 6:34PM
@ Loreanna
I agree with you, naxx was just tough enough for new raiders. It was the first place I ever stepped foot in a raid, and I loved it from the get go. I remember the first time our guilds 10 man cleared Heigan everyone died except me(shammy healer) and our tank(bear Druid) and we survived and downed him with 15% left. It was epic. I loved naxx and still do. I love taking new raiders into naxx the first time. It has everything a new raider needs.
Para Sep 25th 2010 10:57PM
For me hopefully its not being 1 shot in pvp, and healers with infinite mana (looking at you here druids, possibly paladins to an extent). Dieing in globals....how they allowed it for an entire expansion is beyond me....
Malak Sep 26th 2010 1:00AM
I don't personally think that Wrath being 'easy' means you could just look away and faceroll your keyboard. what it DOES mean is that it was mostly about beating the CD. In BC, I enjoyed looking at a mob pull on my tank, figuring out the best way to pull them, mark the targets for CC (or 2nd kill, etc.) use LoS pulls to bring in casters, etc. Dps taht couldn't figure out how to wait to spam skills (seriously, how hard is it to count to 10 before hitting something? or wait till the adds come around the corner?)
in Wrath, I just charge up to the mob pack and spam AoE skills. Seriously. there's not much to it. At a heroic level, it didnt' matter which ksy i hit first, be it thunderclap, or shockwave, or cleave...i just hit em all. harder heroics make me wish my AoE CD's were shorter. that's it. it's all still mind numbing race to you AoE buttons. Very sad IMO.
Raids added the element of jumping around. Now you had to avoid the fire. hop over an acid pool. and then spam AoE buttons. Gone are the days that i targeted specific mobs and cycled through them to add threat to specific targets, or marked things like it mattered. It didn't' matter. THAT'S what they are talking about.
the other sad part of of current instances is the lack of communication. New runs are tough on peeps because everyone expects you to simply know it, when half of them don't know it themselves, and won't speak up if they don't. And that doesn't even matter, as long as the tank spams their AoE threat skills. It speaks something when you can run an instance not knowing jack squat about it, as long as everyone spams their AoE skills (all 3 of them if they're really good).
Prior to wrath, instance runs took enough organization that folks needed to COMMUNICATE (I know. heaven forbid, talk to your group members.) I've had nights of a half dozen or more heroic runs where NO ONE EVEN TALKS. why even run with a group at that point? I remember the end of one of those runs where someone said 'thanks all" and it was shocking, as that last few runs no one even said that as they left group once it was done. not even a kiss the next morning *sniff*
In Wrath you still have to watch things in later difficulties. But in all honesty, its all about spamming stuff. In raids, my holy pally pretty much spams one heal non stop. its a damage race, nothing more. their forcing us to go beyond that, which is good IMO. now i just need to find those other skills...ya know, the not-AoE-ones, whatever they're called...
Leonidas468 Sep 25th 2010 8:07AM
I won't miss AoE fests and the overall dumbing down of all encounters and bosses. I'd prefer a bit of challenge in the game, like HICC25 was.
Knob Sep 25th 2010 8:58AM
To be fair, H-ICC25 wasn't the pinnacle of raiding design in Wrath. Ulduar's hard modes beat ICC's hard modes hands down both in terms of design and overall impact to the zone. We even had an extra boss in Ulduar which encouraged players to go ahead and do them in order to unlock him; the gear was not the only incentive.
Also, the difficulty ramp-up in ICC didn't go well. Almost all the hard modes pre-LK, except Putricide and maybe Sindragosa were not much different from the normal modes. Then along comes LK which just turns the knob all the way to 11 with no warning. Granted he's supposed to be the hardest boss of the expansion but it wasn't delivered in the right manner imo. You can just see that by the amount of guilds that are still at 11/12 even after all this time.
Hopefully Blizzard has learned the lesson and will deliver the content of Cataclysm in a more streamlined manner with actual progressive ramp-up to the end-game.
Straz Sep 25th 2010 11:55AM
I won't miss the bursty-ness of PvP.
My biggest gripe about Wrath would have to be about heroics. Heroics in BC were a great challenge, and that's about all I really did in my free time. I raided hardcore Pre-BC, so it was nice to have challenging content without trying to find 9-24 other people to do it with. Shadow Labyrinth, Shattered Halls, and Magisters' Terrace were by far the pinnacle of heroic difficulty.
I also won't miss Wrath tanking. The swap on X stacks thing got rode to death. I do give them credit for trying to make it more interesting than it was in the past though.
Argent Tournament was pretty lame too. "The world is in peril, so let's have a RENAISSANCE FAIR!"
Also, mandatory mentions of GearScore, Dalaran lag, phasing, long raids, and jousting.
I will miss Ulduar. Difficult and lore-driven like a solid raid should be.
Rob Sep 25th 2010 1:08PM
Completely agree with Straz. I raided hardcore in BC, and the only other thing I did was heroics. Heroics in wraith, i've done them probably 100x more than BC, and its just a joke. However, I and my friend go and do BC heroics do get achievements, and they are still pretty challenging. We wipe occassionally, which is more than I can say from wraith. BC heroics had alot of tough pulls, alot of CC mobs (stun/silence, etc). This is very minimal in wraith heroics.
if you go back and look at the BC heroics, they were pretty interesting and well designed. Remember the 2nd boss in shadow labs who MCs everyone? Pretty interesting. And, what, the second boss in skek halls, the big beholder, which has a spelllock mechanism designed so you had to be far away to heal the tank? And who could forget the PVP boss in MgT.
However I do like the ease of getting into dungeons/raids in wraith. All level 70 dungeons had keys, and all heroics required, first revered, then honored with certain factions. And don't forget raids had a nice long attunement. Kara, SSC/TK, and BT all had attunements if i recall. I think if they could only have you do this once per account that'd be great. I find such attunements very time consuming and pointless for your 2nd or 3rd alt.