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)
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