Over The Years... [Part One]

World of Warcraft was a growing game up until after the release of its current expansion set, Cataclysm. Although the numbers began to slowly bleed off at the end of the Lich King expansion, Cataclysm was the final nail in the coffin for many.

At the very start, World of Warcraft was a very immerse experience. There were lands unexplored and dungeons to pillage. Players had to work together to conquer most of this content, as solo play was mainly discouraged. As a result, server communities were quite close. It meant your reputation.

For all of the original World of Warcraft and much of the Burning Crusade expansion this was how the game went. As a player who started in late Vanilla ("vanilla" is another term for the original iteration of WoW), I enjoyed the end game of Burning Crusade, which wasn't too different from Vanilla's raid style, raids were cut down to 25 players, warriors were still the de-facto main tanks but druids and paladins now had a decent chance, raiding Retribution paladins weren't too common yet, priests were still the best healers but shadow was becoming increasingly prevalent, Horde and Alliance now both had Shamans and Paladins as these two classes were faction-specific in Vanilla, so and so.

Getting into the raids required going through some quests called "attunements", which were required for a spell to be cast on your character or an item he or she needed to possess to get past the green raid portals. In this case, in Vanilla, players had to trek through the Blackrock Depths and find the entrance to Molten Core in order to retrieve a rock sample. Blackwing Lair required a full run of the Upper Blackrock Spire in order to use the teleportation orb. In Burning Crusade players had to complete a lengthy quest chain including four dungeon runs to re-assemble the key to Karazhan, its entry-level raid. Moving on to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep required slightly more demanding tasks, such as defeating the end bosses of the raid tier before it.

Sadly, Blizzard decided to remove the attunement quests altogether for all raid dungeons in order to let more guilds access this content. While I consider this a bad move, it allowed for more players to flood the raid content, both eager yet unprepared. Although players were now able to enter the hardest raid dungeons without stepping foot in the easier ones, their lack of experience and gear would quickly come to bite them back. This explains why not many guilds ventured past the first few bosses of Black Temple/Mount Hyjal or Sunwell Plateau, which was exceedingly difficult at the time...