Why I Liked Wrath of the Lich King

While Lich King left a sour taste in my mouth it definitely wasn't without its high points. Although there wasn't much to keep me going throughout the entire expansion there were a couple things worth my while.

Right off the bat, the guild I'd raided in the previous expansion with and helped push to success would be the guild I started raiding with this time around. Sweet!

Northrend itself was the best part of the expansion. While on my rush to 80 I came across a multitude of environments, but never took the time to take them all in and truly appreciate them for what they were. So I slap myself in the face for that. The Dragonblight was most definitely my favorite leveling zone in the entire continent, next to Storm Peaks.

The lore was excellent. Well done.

Lake Wintergrasp, however, takes the cake for bringing us WoW players an epic battleground that provided everyone with a satisfying battle every time they entered. It didn't matter if you won or lost, if the fight was great, you walked away a better player (most of the time).

Why I Didn't Like Wrath of the Lich King (Continued)

By the time I'd cleared Ulduar and our then guild leader bailing on us I was on the verge of another burnout. The guild wasn't the same anymore and getting our raids back up and running was sometimes difficult, because people stopped showing up eventually. While we pushed for an XT-002 hard-mode kill in 25-man we also focused on the Argent Tournament raid, clearing that out in a matter of weeks.

We failed miserably on the Ulduar hard modes, attempting Freya/Hodir/Thorim and some Iron Council. Highly frustrating when people can't or don't get it together. I also remember attempting the Northrend Beasts encounter on hard mode. Fail.

I didn't get much gear from these raids which resulted in me falling behind gear-wise. It was bad to the point where my off-spec gear was higher in item level than my main spec, all because I used to do the occasional 10-man with the better members of the raid team and tank. 

So now I was in a pretty bad situation- I'd have no chance to guild hop, as the guilds doing more progressed content had gotten a bigger edge and my gear was lacking- I'd been using a iLvl 226 weapon from 25-man Ulduar and hadn't replaced it until the Icecrown Citadel 5-mans had opened up, a bump to 232 (Icecrown Citadel was at 251/264/277). Eventually I burned out for the remainder of the year until the following January. I returned and applied to a better guild. Although my gear was lacking at the time I was allowed a trial run with them. I picked up as much useful gear as I could from the badge vendors but the new Frost Emblems were a pain unless you raided Icecrown Citadel. 

Anyway, I'd easily seen all of Icecrown with my new guild and saw the Lich King fight, although never being able to down him personally. My trial had passed and despite getting some new gear in the process, hadn't made the cut. I was still lacking in the arms department. Soon enough, however, a rogue buddy of mines from Burning Crusade invited me to join his guild, which was breaking into Icecrown at the time. So I did. The guild was fairly successful, tackling most of the instance except for Sindragosa and the Lich King. By that time I'd amassed a decent amount of gear, and even got the axe required to progress through the Shadowmourne quest completed. I was effectively geared out to tackle heroic Icecrown but never saw the opportunity.

With that said, I disappeared from the game once more soon after and came back sometime at the year's end. Cataclysm was around the corner, and I had the upgrade already installed when launch arrived. It was time for a new start, hopefully one that would be better than before.

Why I Didn't Like Wrath of the Lich King

This post may be somewhat controversial, but I could care less.

I've always personally felt that Wrath was a hit-and-miss at the same time with many players. Some disliked it for its ease while some loved the fact that they could get to tread the same ground as the endgame players before them for once.

At first, I expected Wrath of the Lich King to bring more of what I'd seen in Burning Crusade. I was aware of the new 10/25-man raid size options for every raid dungeon and was interested in seeing how that worked out. After all, I was still going the 25-man route, which a lot of guilds did in the long run. The main problem with that was, the more hardcore players began expecting their raiders to outfit themselves with items from the 10-man versions in order to make progression easier.

When I first stepped foot on Northrend with my main character I quickly started work on the quest to 80. I kick myself in the ass sometimes over rushing my way to 80, because the three days I spent leveling only accelerated my oncoming disappointment: the endgame.

The heroics, while somewhat troublesome, weren't quite as dangerous as the heroic dungeons we'd seen in Burning Crusade. The new buffs and changes to the classes didn't help much either. AoE (area-of-effect) spells were greatly enhanced this time around, so much that they wound up in some form in everyone's DPS (damage-per-second) rotation. The splash damage was insane. It would only get worse as time went on. While there were the heroics that most players loved to avoid, the majority of them were laughably simple. That was disappointment number 1.

Naxxramas was re-introduced as an entry raid this time around largely due to not enough players being able to experience it when it was relevant during the final months of Vanilla (original WoW). Now tuned for level 80 characters in mind, I expected the immense difficulty to be significantly downgraded for entry-level raiders. I think it was a bit too much.

The fact that we blew through the Spider Wing (Arachnid Quarter) and Plague Wing (Plague Quarter) in one night was somewhat... unsatisfying. We touched on the Abomination Wing (Construct Quarter) before calling it a night. Eventually Sapphiron came up and he too, went down with the rest. By the time I and my 9 max-level guildmates had cleared out Naxxramas I was already nearly decked out in iLevel 200 epic gear. This is not how I started out when I began my journey at Karazhan. Disappointment number 2.

The Obsidan Sanctum and Eye of Eternity were up next. The 10-man modes quickly went down with the wind and by that time most of the guild was touching on 80. We could start 25-man raiding once more. Great. Back to Naxxramas, this time for iLevel 213 gear- still not too much problems, guild was a bit rusty having not raided since patch 3.0's release and the fact that our main Paladin off-tank made the switch to a Death Knight, which really weren't all that great at tanking at the time. Obsidian Sanctum was cleared out then Eye of Eternity. The fact that all that content was cleared out by us in the span of a month was completely devastating. I'd been through every heroic dungeon and every raid at that point. All that was left to do was sit back and await the next content patch.

It was January 2009. I decided to quit playing for the time being and focus on school for a bit. Ulduar opened the following April to critical acclaim. While I couldn't really return to the game due to time (late afternoon classes) I followed my guild as they got in the first few kills (I'd fill them in on our guild board) until I was able to return by late May. By then, the guild had had a falling out and raiding was at a standstill. A few members defected to a new guild and dragged me along. It didn't last very long either. I'd been in this situation before. I was stuck doing Ulduar on 10-man for the time being. So far it was a great raid. I was very curious about the hard modes that some of the bosses possessed and wondered if I'd ever be able to do them with a decent guild. The fact that there were now hard modes meant that your character wasn't going to be at his/her prime from normal modes only.

This is where disappointment number 3 comes in. Hard modes/heroic raiding introduced yet another tier of raiding, or the "real" challenge most of the veteran players were looking for, me included. In my case, my server was extremely lacking in talent, and had been since the later parts of Burning Crusade, when the most progressed guild packed up and left the server when the recruitment pool for Sunwell Plateau grew thin. Only about a handful of guilds were attempting hard modes and neither of the guilds I'd been in since my previous one fell apart were nowhere near heroic material (no offense intended). Eventually along the way I ran into an old raiding buddy from my Karazhan/Gruul days who had transferred back to our server with a start-up hardcore raiding guild. I happily joined and conquered the entirety of Ulduar with them, eventually defeating the Old God, Yogg-Saron.

The guild, despite all the minor setbacks we'd had, did fairly well in the end, but it definitely wasn't the dream team I needed to pursue hard modes. By the time we'd downed Yogg-Saron the Argent Tournament raid had opened and the guild leader bailed on us shortly after the kill, citing that the guild wasn't overly fond of his leadership skill. It was a sad day. That guild eventually struggled to stay together but failed in the end after attempting a hard mode kill in Ulduar and some dabbling in the Argent Tournament raid. Next.

(CONTINUED IN NEXT POST)

An Era Long Gone

I came across this article tonight:

Little Article Here

And it got me thinking about something that's been on my mind as of recently. This is basically the issue most people have with today's World of Warcraft, some may not be aware because they've been playing so long it's slipped their mind or most are truly aware of the state of the game.

A while back a forum post on Blizzard's official forums from a player most would consider "undesirable" because of his lack of knowledge towards the game was made. Anyone who has noticed it should had least felt felt some type of sympathy towards said person.

We all started off as rookies in the World of Warcraft. I'll never forget my roots. I made the grind to endgame with a plethora of mistakes that I worked out by the time I began raiding. I would wear gear with the wrong stats, screw up my talent specialization, have a weird rotation because I tried to use every damn ability given to me. It happened.

When we didn't have things like Looking For Group and Raid Finder we definitely had to build up a reputation on the servers we played on in order to get anywhere in the game. You couldn't do it yourself. You needed a team, a guild. What you did on your server was on you. If other players knew you were a respectable and good team player you would be happily accepted into most guilds.

My hardcore raiding years were during the Burning Crusade expansion- I spent a great deal of time trying to find a suitable raiding home after my first raiding guild crumbled. My class wasn't exactly desirable unless you  were either the one role it was good at (until Blizzard fixed another) so I was straight out of luck. I went through a few guilds before landing a spot with one of the server's higher-end guilds- most players on the servers quickly noted the guild "application" I had put in and were sending me all kinds of whispers wishing me luck as if I'd truly deserved the moment. I only wanted to raid with a guild that kept its things together.

I eventually was allowed to join, but my character wasn't exactly up to snuff in terms of gear (didn't have much luck with raid drops). I had a Lionheart Executioner and various pieces of my classes' Tier 4 armor. I didn't make the cut but was allowed to remain in the guild, and I took a backseat for a while. The internal issues within the guild finally came to a boil and it dissolved during my burnout period.

When I was finally ready to play again I was quickly offered a raid spot from a guild that had existed on the server for some time (reputation being the key reason) and had finally reached the last tier of raiding in the three months I'd been away. I joined and made the best out of that summer with the guild until the second expansion's release.