For me, before Wrath raiding was something other people did.

Before Wrath, heroics were something you did for 45 minutes to an hour if you could gather a group together, which wasn't a guarantee if you had the misfortune of picking one of the "wrong" classes when you started playing (which, having started as a Paladin, was something I did). If you kept at these heroics for weeks or months at a time, you might be able to gather up enough badges to buy some better gear, but for the most part you hit your gear ceiling as soon as you hit max level.

Before Wrath, there wasn't much connecting the player to the story. Why did we raid Black Temple? Illidan was just sitting there. There was no real sense of urgency to taking him down.

During Wrath, I was able to do some raiding, first in PUGs, then in a regular group that was able to clear a good portion of ICC before some of the members transferred off-server. It gave gear progression to everyone by letting everyone purchase raid gear, and then giving raiders the ability to upgrade theirs. Heroics were set up so you didn't have to devote an entire evening to completing just one, and the Dungeon Finder enabled us to find a group for a Heroic even if none of our guild members were online. Questing was more engaging, because we actually saw events playing out in front of us (see the Wrath Gate).

Cataclysm undid a lot of the progress made during Wrath, which is probably why it is so unpopular right now. Shared lockouts made guilds unwilling to pug, which means raiding is now for other people. Heroics are long and drawn out, causing tanks and healers to not queue as often, leading to lengthy queue times for everyone else. Artificial blocks on gearing came back (see plate dps shoulders/helmet). Major lore developments are being moved from the game and put into novels, making players wonder what's going on when new quests come out that assume we all know what happened in the books.

Cataclysm is so unpopular because it felt like a step backwards after Wrath. If Wrath was so horrible, players should be celebrating moving away from the Wrath model. But Cataclysm instead is making everyone unhappy.

I'm sorry but, no.

Wrath gave way more people the opportunity to raid. As the leader of a small guild, we were able to shine in Wrath. We were able to do more than just the 'baby' raids, like Kara was.

Impatient players gave us 15-minute heroics. Sure, AoEing everying was a bit of snooze after everyone had the gear for it but that's what achievements were for - to do it different or harder or faster or whatever.

If hated the 'seamless' questing of Wrath, you must never have played BC where you went all over a zone, back and forth, bouncing between hubs like a ping-pong ball. And you CLEARLY never played Vanilla where they shuttled you from zone to zone or continent to continent, back and forth, just for ONE. SINGLE. QUEST.

And, honestly, there are a lot of people who hated vehicle combat and mechanics. But i thought everyone finally got over it and stopped complaining about it a year ago or more.

Wrath wasn't all love and bunnies and chocolate but it was better than anything we'd had before and, frankly, since. You're entitled to your opinions but you aren't allowed to just vomit hated on those who don't agree with you.

If I remember correctly, Blizzard did no such thing with gearscore. That was a player-made quantifier, and it was the players who enforced its value on everyone else. Blizzard did utilize aspects of it in average ilvls locking undergeared characters out from higher-tier heroics, but that is only to be expected.

You obviously didn't read what she wrote for the quest structure. The content of the quests shared some common ground with older quests, but the way they were positioned and made available was leaps and bounds better than Vanilla.

Last I checked, when I first stepped into heroics at level 80 with a mix of 187 blues and greens, it did not take 15 minutes to finish. They were challenging. That was the idea: they were meant to be challenging at that gear level. With gear inflation, it's only expected that they'd progressively get easier over time. And I always remembered running raids to get the tier gear, not heroics, unless you're talking about the lower level tier sets.

I don't see in any way how WotLK killed raiding. If you're upset that 'casuals' were able to get the "Kingslayer" title, then go and pout in your little corner. That's what Blizzard wanted: more people to see the endgame content through to the end. And subsequently, that's why they made Heroic modes, so that the high-level raiding guilds can still achieve some sort of high prestige for their hard work.

And evaluating a game mechanic at release to govern its success over the entire lifetime of the expansion? Last I checked, they work pretty smoothly now.

"introduced 15 minute heroics that had to be farmed to buy tier gear, forced Gearscore down our throats, and gave us two god-awful battlegrounds"

15 minute heroics as opposed to 1 hr heroics of BC? (that you still need to farm)

"forced Gearscore down our throats"
nope, players forced GS down their own throats... the ability to look up items and item level has always been there... the addon was just developed on that expansion.

"and gave us two god-awful battlegrounds"
don't play it if you don't like it, can always stick with WSG and AV.

If you run out of quests, you're doing it wrong... seriously... think before you type

Running out of quests is a flat out lie/distortion of the truth. My first toon to lvl 80, I had tons of quests left in all areas. Barely touched Howling Fjord, Zul Drak or Storm Peaks. The majority of quests I did in Icecrown were the Argent Crusade ones. I did play other toons so I did have rested XP more often than not. I also leveled 2 production professions, JC and Tailoring while I was at it. I ran UK once at level 70 and perhaps one other time. So yeah, running out of quests? I call bullshit on that.

I disagree:

I don't see how Wrath "ruined" raiding, but as you didn't take the time to provide any arguments to this point, neither shall I.
Heroics did get tedious, but they were amazing story telling tools and interesting boss encounters when they first arrived, the fact that we outgrew them with epic gear should not take anything away from that point.
I agree with the "God awful battlegrounds" statement, though I grew to enjoy Wintergrasp toward the end.
The quests WERE seamless and some of the best story lines in the game as a whole. The fact that you ran out of quests in certain zones should have been your first clue to move to another zone, of which there were plenty to choose from. Please do not blame the developers because you didn't feel like going to Storm Peaks when you finished Icecrown. Bread crumb quests were plentiful.
All in all my feeling is that Wrath of the Lich King was the best expansion to date. I know many of the hardcore raiders will bemoan the fact that raids were made accessible to more people, but that ultimately led to me joining my guilds' raiding team and adding another element to a game that I have played for 5 years. The story was outstanding and the introduction of more phased questing than we've ever had has set the bar very high indeed. As well as ALL of the things listed in the article.
My biggest complaint is that the cut scenes worked so well that Blizzard decided to put the entirety of an Indiana Jones movie into Cataclysm. Hopefully they will back off from that in the future.

@show

If you ran out of quests in Icecrown and Storm Peaks that should be fair enough: they are the end zones of the content - there shouldn't be anymore quests once you've finished with them. That said, with the plethora of dailies in both zones there actually *were* more quests to do, so you could never theoretically run out.

You, sir, get a slime to the face.