I noticed the beginning of the downfall of Blizzard when the first WoW expansion (The Burning Crusade) released in 2007. Activision bought Blizzard shortly after in 2008. I can't describe it perfectly, but in TBC Blizzard began making some pretty stupid decisions that didn't make sense. Well, it made sense for making money, but not for making a better game. It was small mistakes at first, but over time they got bigger and more blatant. Even though Wrath of the Lich King was arguably the most loved and successful WoW expansion by fans, it was obvious by then that Blizzard was only making changes to make more money, to keep the subscribers in the hamster wheel. Greed can only sustain a company for so long until it collapses. We're seeing the late stages of it in Blizzard now. It's hilarious too, that greed started their downfall, and now they're essentially admitting "I hate money". Diversity and inclusion pairs with gamers as much as oil and water.
I started playing near the end of Vanilla so never got the chance to do the original raids as they were but I did play throughout all of TBC and managed to get all the way to t6 content before things opened up more [Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal titles] and actually enjoyed some of the more niche encounters since I was my groups mage tank during the t4 and t6 fights that required one. Still my favourite expansion as things still needed tactics/cc back then and pulling entire rooms then aoe grinding through dungeons wasn't yet a thing. There were also still payoffs for putting in extra effort like getting the key to summon Yor in the Mana Tombs dungeon, something that ended up being relevant again in TBC Timewalking, or bothering with fishing skills to then summon the Lurker in SSC.
Then Wrath happened.
For all the "good" Wrath is praised for, almost entirely Ulduar all things considered, the expansion introduced 2/3 of the worst things to ever happen to the game.
LFG. This singlehandedly killed open world exploration since players could just sit in a hub and queue for every dungeon in the game. One of the consequences of this was players having no fucking clue of the corpse run directions needed after wipes because they never learned the location of the dungeon entrances in the first place. It also killed a lot of server socialising. When you can run a dungeon without needing a be in a guild and may very well never see the 4 other randoms you team with ever again that results in both increased trolling/ninja looting as well as decreased server interactions.
Actual welfare epics. While Sunwell Plateau and IQD content added in the token vendors at the end of TBC they were there more to supplement raiding activity as well as help gear up alts late in the expansion. Wrath however did this far more than TBC had done from the get go. By the time ICC was out fresh 70s could quite quickly find themselves not only decked out in acceptable 10m raid gear but also work on upgrading that without doing any actual raiding. A consequence of this was "gearscore" which caused more problems than it fixed as ilvl meant nothing at that point regarding player skill when even literal huntards and noobs could gear up easily enough.
The WoW store and "that retarded horse". The significant start of MTXs in WoW. The Celestial Steed became a meme after Totalbuscuit started calling it "that retarded horse"/TRH since then the game pushed more and more MTXs on players eventually culminating in the WoW Token in WoD letting players buy officially buy in game gold for real money. The horse mount was so in demand that it resulted in a queue for online purchases.
It costs $25 USD. Its sole in-game function is fulfilled by hundreds of other things that don't cost $25 USD. Hundreds of thousands were sold in a few days. And you know you want one.
I started playing in early/mid Vanilla WoW, mostly to hang out with my older sister and brother in law who lived in another state. It was probably one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had. I had never played anything like it, and the world felt alive and huge. Back then MMOs were fairly new. Looking back on it now, it's mostly nostalgia, but the memories were great.
However, Vanilla is arguably the best and most unique WoW ever was, in my opinion. TBC had some great additions, but it felt too corporatized and streamlined. It began to lose a lot of the uniqueness that WoW had in Vanilla. Vanilla could absolutely be improved upon, but what they did was treading down a path that was the wrong direction. For example, in Vanilla WoW the 40v40 Alterac Valley battlegrounds that could last for hours or days were absolute fucking awesome. Even if you would join up, play, and never win the match, it was really damned fun. I pity the people that never got to experience the true epic battle of original AV. All changes to it since then have streamlined it, "improved" it, and made it a lot less fun. It's an apt microcosm of WoW in general.
It's why I was turned off from MMOs in general after what Blizzard had turned WoW into. Most MMOs are just hamster wheels to keep the players placated and addicted, to keep playing and paying for as long as possible. They intentionally inflate the time required to do things and put ridiculous things behind unneeded time sinks, making a lot of it feel artificial, implemented only for the sake of the keeping the player addicted rather than having fun, which reduces the immersion and reality of the world. Even though there are obvious achievements, dungeons, raids, and items to work toward that should require investment, and be earned, the way they're implemented in the grindfest that most MMOs today have done is just bad. Simply put, they're not fun.
in Vanilla WoW the 40v40 Alterac Valley battlegrounds that could last for hours or days
Ah the good ol' days you could join AV, fight for hours, leave, eat, sleep, go to work, come back, and then rejoin the very same bg. Then it just turned into "rush the towers" along with complaints about not enough people defending cap points.
Fun days when the pvpv wasnt so unbalanced that you could actually d at towers. eventually the meme classes became so versatile that thered just be a rush and no chance of holding them from the alli cucks
Several of the earlier MMOs that were around before MTXs were a thing went that route adding them in later, sometimes to outright appalling levels.
City of Heroes/Villains ended up moving two of it's original classes to behind a paywall.
SWTOR shifted to a Freemium model that put weekly limits on running content that could be lifted by spending money on them. While in game credits could buy the items from the auction house the original items still often enough required someone at some point to spend real money to get it from the store and then put it on the AH, similar to how WoW Tokens work. Sure back in WoD days players were making stupid amounts of gold from their personal bases that they could sustain their monthly sub prices with that but someone still had to buy the token to then sell on for real gold first.
MTXs are one of the big plagues to have infested gaming and other areas over the last decades and unfortunately there are enough normies about it won't be going away.
The welfare epics before wrath required hideous grinding, which prevented them becoming as ubiquitus as the easily fought ones in wrath. And the horse was always gay, we said it would ruin wow, and it did. Never wanted one, your last quote is kinda gay too.
The focus on arena in TBC destroyed guild cohesion. It was much easier to get a 2-5 man team and grind pvp than a 20-40 man raid.
I get they don't want to spend much effort on content only a few no-lifes will ever see but just the existence of "aspirational" content made the game much more interesting.
The "honor" system was beyond retarded and made pvp servers close to unplayable. I know its all "thats world pvp" but in-game rewards for ganking was a really bad idea.
Cross server BGs did decrease the queues but also destroyed the character of the servers, preventing fun rivalries.
Correct, IQD was the first zone dedicated to dailies although there were others added like the profession dailies and dungeon targets in Lower [Shattrath] City. TBC was also the expansion that achievements were added in.
I did like the arenas in TBC but I understand were you are coming from, it splintered guilds and made raiding harder for some guild but it was still very much enjoyable.
Maybe it it youth or something but I loved TBC.
TBC was probably peak WoW despite Wrath being so widely acclaimed.
As many point out Wrath only really had a few good selling points.
Big bad was a huge lore character and unlike with Illidan in TBC you had the Lich King pop up several times from the Wrath starting zones 'til ICC, in part because of how little players saw Illidan in TBC despite also being a huge lore character as well as continuing the Caverns of Time time-traveling journey by adding in the Culling of Stratholme which let long time players relive the Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne story there.
Ulduar. A lot of new mechanics were added in Wrath in general such as "Vehicles" which the players could "first" experience during the Death Knight starter chain when controlling a ship cannon and bombarding a beach of religious zealots. While the Malygos fight had a vehicle phase at the very end [that could at least be practiced through the Aces High quest near the raid entrance], it was still only a straightforward 3 button mash fest. Ulduar started with the Leviathan Gauntlet and later boss fight using several different vehicle types. It also was the first of the raids to feature "Hard modes" since the previous content was the revamped Naxx that everyone could have run in TBC even after Vanilla ended, the Sartharion single dragon boss encounter similar to Onyxia, and the Malygos raid so tier 7 wasn't really that creative. Tier 8/Ulduar on the other hand meant a lot of both new lore and content since it dealt with the Old Gods that hasn't been addressed since the AQ20 and AQ40 raids.
Wrath was also a step back to non welfare Legendaries as TBC Warglaives and Thori'dal were both Rogue drops simply very low RNG drops. The Ulduar healing mace and later ICC 2h axe had long crafting chains that also required certain raid boss fights to be done in special ways.
However also as pointed out it added some of the worst features to ever happen in the game.
LFG which later added LFR [Looking for Retards Raid] in Cata, and the wow store with various mounts and other aesthetics that were often several times over a monthly sub price.
TBC meanwhile dropped the ball by underusing Illidan as well as writing him poorly enough that Legion retconned his actions to paint him as an anti-hero.
Karazhan was an incredible introductory raid despite it only being a 10man.
T5 content SSC/TK were a good mix of easy [Lurker/Loot Below + Void/Loot Reaver] to extremely difficult [Vashj + Kael'Thas] content and attunements were still a thing throughout the expansion although this itself was often a gripe. Note that's only the attunement for t4. T5 required you to do that for every character you had so if someone rerolled they needed to that all over again every time.
T6 content dealt with Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, both significant lore locations which helped hype them up, and in the case of the former dealt with Warcraft 3 history as was often the case with the time-traveling dungeons and raids.
Black Temple was effectively the crowning point of TBC however because Illidan had been so absent his eventual defeat felt empty to many and Wrath was still months away so additional content in the forms of the Isle of Quel'Danas and Sunwell were brought in along with the achievement system which served as a carrot for all the completionists to go back and do content they had probably done dozens of time before.
Also items and crafting were kinda broken in TBC since even just the regular non raid crafts were at times on par with T5 gear and the later Sunwell recipe drops were so OP players not only dropped existing professions that they may have had since Vanilla but were able to use some of those items well into Wrath. One of the best tanking trinkets in game for Avoidance/Dodge was still a Vanilla drop from Blackwing Lair. While it's understandable for things like the Vanilla Legendaries to still be competitive in TBC the fact non t3 items weren't challenged by TBC content highlights a lack of creative design when filling in itemisation spots. Additionally there was a Chinese guild that managed to clear all of TBC still wearing their full t3 because the full 8/8 set [back when 8/8 sets were still a thing] was that powerful compared to the new content despite the jokes about replacing it all with your very first quest hand in. Set bonuses would very often piss all over stat increases when they could fundamentally change something like a caster's mana budget.
Edit: Visual depiction of Vanilla and TBC attunements. Section on the left is Vanilla with the red boxes showing the raid content. Molten Core.MC was tier 1. Blackwing Lair/BWL was tier 2. Naxx was tier 3. The other red boxes were either one off world bosses in the cases of Kruul, Azuregos, Lethon/Ysondre/Emeriss/Taerar, or the AQ raids which served as a sort of tier 2.5. Back in vanilla attunemts and gear were a lot less forgiving if you were missing something. You NEEDED frost res gear for Naxx or a lot of bosses would wipe your group quickly. You NEEDED nature res gear for AQ raids or similar deaths would happen. All the while various raid bosses could be parts of the Legendary crafting quests which would involve weekly farming on the chance an item might drop such as the 40 Atiesh staff fragments which would then still need both the final AQ40 and Naxx bosses killed for the remaining two missing parts. At that point you had killed everything in the game already but still needed to keep farming it to make one of the best caster weapons in the game at the time.
TBC attunement was... extensive as shown on the right side. Everything needed done in order to enter Hyjal before the attunements were lifted later in the expansion. While rerolling could be sped up by having established t6 raiders boosting a new character it still meant having to run ALL OF THAT every time someone might have needed to replace a character. Because of this raid groups could be very protective about their members as attuning someone only for them to leave and join another group was a massive pain and waste of time and resources. And it happened.
Additionally there was a Chinese guild that managed to clear all of TBC still wearing their
Arguably many portions of TBC were set more as a hard SKILL check, instead of a gear check. It was in Wrath where blizz swapped to the GEAR check model, with blues in the tundra vastly eclipsing epics from TBC. I think its a superior method of raiding design.
I dont think arena split guilds it provided alternate gear paths, wasnt too demanding for base gear (which was still outleveled by most of the raid gear) and could be done in your free time. Afaaik you could queue anytime, being in town. the removal of that requirement was also a mistake.
there was still a lot higher difficulty in that expac too, getting ready for dungeons, n' raids, and all that. You couldnt raid with early arena gear, with few exceptions. + u/acp_k2win/ The honor system was kinda jank
I mean, there weren't any 40 man raids and they introduced 10 man raids which made things more accessible. They also didn't ramp down the difficulty. I actually had an easier time getting raids going in TBC.
Wrath was what wound up killing my guild. Nax being a cakewalk made a lot of people lazy, then when Ulduar spiked the difficulty up a lot of people quit. The PVP fight in the Trial also broke a lot of guilds, as many players had limited to no experience in PVP. Then you had the group finder for 5 man content, which killed a lot of the server community. My guild went from fielding two 25 man teams to about 15 active raiders, but at least we cleared the content. I wound up quitting halfway through Cata as I was bored with the rehash of old raids.
I loved Mythic Plus, for someone who had a lot less time it was a cool skill based encounter with good rewards.
However Legion did have a lot of bad ideas, like randomly getting higher level versions of items - I forgot what that was called - and those legendary drops. Later you could farm to get the one you wanted but I remember that after the first 2 the drop rate was considerably lower and I got stuck with 2 useless legendries for a long time.
And PVP / world PVP was a complete mess.
Titanforging originated as Thunderforging from MoP which later became warforging After Throne of Thunder. The biggest problem with TF over WF was while WF could add a few ilevels to gear TF could add dozens and completely invalidate raid drops if you happened to get a stupid enough RNG chain from a world quest.
On top of that due to how itemisation worked for various classes and specs you could sometimes get drops which were a higher ilevel than what you had equipped but if the secondary stats weren't useful the higher ilvl meant nothing. This coupled with the devs removing Master Looter meant players couldn't even pass the useless drop to someone else because you were only allowed to trade ilvl downgrades which didn't even bother to consider how secondary stats could be significantly more important at times.
As for the problem with Legendary drops, initially you only got two per character. That was it. If they weren't your BiS you were fucked and raiders literally rerolled toons when this happened.
Regarding the interrupt Legendary you had that was the ring wasn't it? It was deservedly criticised because it was not only poorly designed originally but also it wasn't class specific so everyone ran the risk of getting it at first and compared to other options it wasn't any good. It wasn't until the devs removed the drop cap as well as letting players work towards a Legendary that the system became player friendly but Blizzard in their eternal greed implemented artificial timegates to keep players active but the other limits in place could outright kill the performance of some characters if they got shit Legendaries due to how game changing some of them were regarding both class mechanics and sheer dps output for some.
afaik tbc was mostly done when acti bought blizzard. What decisions are you talking about from that expac? Wrath was loved because blizz still had inertia, but it was ruined by the end of the expan and the content lacks.
Diversity and inclusion pairs with gamers as much as oil and water.
And that's also why anita and friends pushed for so many of these soy fags into gamdev, to ruin entertainment for the rest of us. obligatory fuck kotick too
What decisions are you talking about from that expac?
I can't remember all of them, this was many years ago. The only one I remember specifically is class changes that didn't make sense. The class changes weren't made to make the classes play better or be more balanced. It was essentially just change for change sake, to keep players in a perpetual mouse wheel of change so they "felt" like stuff wasn't boring, which aligned with other things they were doing to make the game feel fresh. In reality, it was just done to increase player retention without having to add new content. It was lazy, and the motivations behind it were highly suspect, which increasingly corrupted Blizzard over time.
There are other changes too, but my brain doesn't work that way. I forget the details, but remember the overarching ideas behind them. To be fair, they were fewer and smaller for TBC, but they became bigger and more blatant as time went on. Even though WotLK was well received, it was obvious by then the direction Blizzard was taking, which is why I dipped out (and most of my friends did too) to other MMOs after Wrath.
I noticed the beginning of the downfall of Blizzard when the first WoW expansion (The Burning Crusade) released in 2007. Activision bought Blizzard shortly after in 2008. I can't describe it perfectly, but in TBC Blizzard began making some pretty stupid decisions that didn't make sense. Well, it made sense for making money, but not for making a better game. It was small mistakes at first, but over time they got bigger and more blatant. Even though Wrath of the Lich King was arguably the most loved and successful WoW expansion by fans, it was obvious by then that Blizzard was only making changes to make more money, to keep the subscribers in the hamster wheel. Greed can only sustain a company for so long until it collapses. We're seeing the late stages of it in Blizzard now. It's hilarious too, that greed started their downfall, and now they're essentially admitting "I hate money". Diversity and inclusion pairs with gamers as much as oil and water.
I started playing near the end of Vanilla so never got the chance to do the original raids as they were but I did play throughout all of TBC and managed to get all the way to t6 content before things opened up more [Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal titles] and actually enjoyed some of the more niche encounters since I was my groups mage tank during the t4 and t6 fights that required one. Still my favourite expansion as things still needed tactics/cc back then and pulling entire rooms then aoe grinding through dungeons wasn't yet a thing. There were also still payoffs for putting in extra effort like getting the key to summon Yor in the Mana Tombs dungeon, something that ended up being relevant again in TBC Timewalking, or bothering with fishing skills to then summon the Lurker in SSC.
Then Wrath happened.
For all the "good" Wrath is praised for, almost entirely Ulduar all things considered, the expansion introduced 2/3 of the worst things to ever happen to the game.
LFG. This singlehandedly killed open world exploration since players could just sit in a hub and queue for every dungeon in the game. One of the consequences of this was players having no fucking clue of the corpse run directions needed after wipes because they never learned the location of the dungeon entrances in the first place. It also killed a lot of server socialising. When you can run a dungeon without needing a be in a guild and may very well never see the 4 other randoms you team with ever again that results in both increased trolling/ninja looting as well as decreased server interactions.
Actual welfare epics. While Sunwell Plateau and IQD content added in the token vendors at the end of TBC they were there more to supplement raiding activity as well as help gear up alts late in the expansion. Wrath however did this far more than TBC had done from the get go. By the time ICC was out fresh 70s could quite quickly find themselves not only decked out in acceptable 10m raid gear but also work on upgrading that without doing any actual raiding. A consequence of this was "gearscore" which caused more problems than it fixed as ilvl meant nothing at that point regarding player skill when even literal huntards and noobs could gear up easily enough.
The WoW store and "that retarded horse". The significant start of MTXs in WoW. The Celestial Steed became a meme after Totalbuscuit started calling it "that retarded horse"/TRH since then the game pushed more and more MTXs on players eventually culminating in the WoW Token in WoD letting players buy officially buy in game gold for real money. The horse mount was so in demand that it resulted in a queue for online purchases.
Agreed.
I started playing in early/mid Vanilla WoW, mostly to hang out with my older sister and brother in law who lived in another state. It was probably one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had. I had never played anything like it, and the world felt alive and huge. Back then MMOs were fairly new. Looking back on it now, it's mostly nostalgia, but the memories were great.
However, Vanilla is arguably the best and most unique WoW ever was, in my opinion. TBC had some great additions, but it felt too corporatized and streamlined. It began to lose a lot of the uniqueness that WoW had in Vanilla. Vanilla could absolutely be improved upon, but what they did was treading down a path that was the wrong direction. For example, in Vanilla WoW the 40v40 Alterac Valley battlegrounds that could last for hours or days were absolute fucking awesome. Even if you would join up, play, and never win the match, it was really damned fun. I pity the people that never got to experience the true epic battle of original AV. All changes to it since then have streamlined it, "improved" it, and made it a lot less fun. It's an apt microcosm of WoW in general.
It's why I was turned off from MMOs in general after what Blizzard had turned WoW into. Most MMOs are just hamster wheels to keep the players placated and addicted, to keep playing and paying for as long as possible. They intentionally inflate the time required to do things and put ridiculous things behind unneeded time sinks, making a lot of it feel artificial, implemented only for the sake of the keeping the player addicted rather than having fun, which reduces the immersion and reality of the world. Even though there are obvious achievements, dungeons, raids, and items to work toward that should require investment, and be earned, the way they're implemented in the grindfest that most MMOs today have done is just bad. Simply put, they're not fun.
Ah the good ol' days you could join AV, fight for hours, leave, eat, sleep, go to work, come back, and then rejoin the very same bg. Then it just turned into "rush the towers" along with complaints about not enough people defending cap points.
Fun days when the pvpv wasnt so unbalanced that you could actually d at towers. eventually the meme classes became so versatile that thered just be a rush and no chance of holding them from the alli cucks
Several of the earlier MMOs that were around before MTXs were a thing went that route adding them in later, sometimes to outright appalling levels.
City of Heroes/Villains ended up moving two of it's original classes to behind a paywall.
SWTOR shifted to a Freemium model that put weekly limits on running content that could be lifted by spending money on them. While in game credits could buy the items from the auction house the original items still often enough required someone at some point to spend real money to get it from the store and then put it on the AH, similar to how WoW Tokens work. Sure back in WoD days players were making stupid amounts of gold from their personal bases that they could sustain their monthly sub prices with that but someone still had to buy the token to then sell on for real gold first.
MTXs are one of the big plagues to have infested gaming and other areas over the last decades and unfortunately there are enough normies about it won't be going away.
The welfare epics before wrath required hideous grinding, which prevented them becoming as ubiquitus as the easily fought ones in wrath. And the horse was always gay, we said it would ruin wow, and it did. Never wanted one, your last quote is kinda gay too.
The focus on arena in TBC destroyed guild cohesion. It was much easier to get a 2-5 man team and grind pvp than a 20-40 man raid.
I get they don't want to spend much effort on content only a few no-lifes will ever see but just the existence of "aspirational" content made the game much more interesting.
The "honor" system was beyond retarded and made pvp servers close to unplayable. I know its all "thats world pvp" but in-game rewards for ganking was a really bad idea.
Cross server BGs did decrease the queues but also destroyed the character of the servers, preventing fun rivalries.
If I remember correctly, daily missions (or mass implementation of them) began in TBC as well.
Correct, IQD was the first zone dedicated to dailies although there were others added like the profession dailies and dungeon targets in Lower [Shattrath] City. TBC was also the expansion that achievements were added in.
If i could remove 1 thing from there, it would be achievements and the new trees.
I did like the arenas in TBC but I understand were you are coming from, it splintered guilds and made raiding harder for some guild but it was still very much enjoyable. Maybe it it youth or something but I loved TBC.
TBC was probably peak WoW despite Wrath being so widely acclaimed.
As many point out Wrath only really had a few good selling points.
Big bad was a huge lore character and unlike with Illidan in TBC you had the Lich King pop up several times from the Wrath starting zones 'til ICC, in part because of how little players saw Illidan in TBC despite also being a huge lore character as well as continuing the Caverns of Time time-traveling journey by adding in the Culling of Stratholme which let long time players relive the Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne story there.
Ulduar. A lot of new mechanics were added in Wrath in general such as "Vehicles" which the players could "first" experience during the Death Knight starter chain when controlling a ship cannon and bombarding a beach of religious zealots. While the Malygos fight had a vehicle phase at the very end [that could at least be practiced through the Aces High quest near the raid entrance], it was still only a straightforward 3 button mash fest. Ulduar started with the Leviathan Gauntlet and later boss fight using several different vehicle types. It also was the first of the raids to feature "Hard modes" since the previous content was the revamped Naxx that everyone could have run in TBC even after Vanilla ended, the Sartharion single dragon boss encounter similar to Onyxia, and the Malygos raid so tier 7 wasn't really that creative. Tier 8/Ulduar on the other hand meant a lot of both new lore and content since it dealt with the Old Gods that hasn't been addressed since the AQ20 and AQ40 raids.
Wrath was also a step back to non welfare Legendaries as TBC Warglaives and Thori'dal were both
Rogue dropssimply very low RNG drops. The Ulduar healing mace and later ICC 2h axe had long crafting chains that also required certain raid boss fights to be done in special ways.However also as pointed out it added some of the worst features to ever happen in the game.
LFG which later added LFR [Looking for
RetardsRaid] in Cata, and the wow store with various mounts and other aesthetics that were often several times over a monthly sub price.TBC meanwhile dropped the ball by underusing Illidan as well as writing him poorly enough that Legion retconned his actions to paint him as an anti-hero.
Karazhan was an incredible introductory raid despite it only being a 10man.
T5 content SSC/TK were a good mix of easy [Lurker/Loot Below + Void/Loot Reaver] to extremely difficult [Vashj + Kael'Thas] content and attunements were still a thing throughout the expansion although this itself was often a gripe. Note that's only the attunement for t4. T5 required you to do that for every character you had so if someone rerolled they needed to that all over again every time.
T6 content dealt with Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, both significant lore locations which helped hype them up, and in the case of the former dealt with Warcraft 3 history as was often the case with the time-traveling dungeons and raids.
Black Temple was effectively the crowning point of TBC however because Illidan had been so absent his eventual defeat felt empty to many and Wrath was still months away so additional content in the forms of the Isle of Quel'Danas and Sunwell were brought in along with the achievement system which served as a carrot for all the completionists to go back and do content they had probably done dozens of time before.
Also items and crafting were kinda broken in TBC since even just the regular non raid crafts were at times on par with T5 gear and the later Sunwell recipe drops were so OP players not only dropped existing professions that they may have had since Vanilla but were able to use some of those items well into Wrath. One of the best tanking trinkets in game for Avoidance/Dodge was still a Vanilla drop from Blackwing Lair. While it's understandable for things like the Vanilla Legendaries to still be competitive in TBC the fact non t3 items weren't challenged by TBC content highlights a lack of creative design when filling in itemisation spots. Additionally there was a Chinese guild that managed to clear all of TBC still wearing their full t3 because the full 8/8 set [back when 8/8 sets were still a thing] was that powerful compared to the new content despite the jokes about replacing it all with your very first quest hand in. Set bonuses would very often piss all over stat increases when they could fundamentally change something like a caster's mana budget.
Edit: Visual depiction of Vanilla and TBC attunements. Section on the left is Vanilla with the red boxes showing the raid content. Molten Core.MC was tier 1. Blackwing Lair/BWL was tier 2. Naxx was tier 3. The other red boxes were either one off world bosses in the cases of Kruul, Azuregos, Lethon/Ysondre/Emeriss/Taerar, or the AQ raids which served as a sort of tier 2.5. Back in vanilla attunemts and gear were a lot less forgiving if you were missing something. You NEEDED frost res gear for Naxx or a lot of bosses would wipe your group quickly. You NEEDED nature res gear for AQ raids or similar deaths would happen. All the while various raid bosses could be parts of the Legendary crafting quests which would involve weekly farming on the chance an item might drop such as the 40 Atiesh staff fragments which would then still need both the final AQ40 and Naxx bosses killed for the remaining two missing parts. At that point you had killed everything in the game already but still needed to keep farming it to make one of the best caster weapons in the game at the time.
TBC attunement was... extensive as shown on the right side. Everything needed done in order to enter Hyjal before the attunements were lifted later in the expansion. While rerolling could be sped up by having established t6 raiders boosting a new character it still meant having to run ALL OF THAT every time someone might have needed to replace a character. Because of this raid groups could be very protective about their members as attuning someone only for them to leave and join another group was a massive pain and waste of time and resources. And it happened.
That was a trip down memory lane
Arguably many portions of TBC were set more as a hard SKILL check, instead of a gear check. It was in Wrath where blizz swapped to the GEAR check model, with blues in the tundra vastly eclipsing epics from TBC. I think its a superior method of raiding design.
I dont think arena split guilds it provided alternate gear paths, wasnt too demanding for base gear (which was still outleveled by most of the raid gear) and could be done in your free time. Afaaik you could queue anytime, being in town. the removal of that requirement was also a mistake.
there was still a lot higher difficulty in that expac too, getting ready for dungeons, n' raids, and all that. You couldnt raid with early arena gear, with few exceptions. + u/acp_k2win/ The honor system was kinda jank
I mean, there weren't any 40 man raids and they introduced 10 man raids which made things more accessible. They also didn't ramp down the difficulty. I actually had an easier time getting raids going in TBC.
Wrath was what wound up killing my guild. Nax being a cakewalk made a lot of people lazy, then when Ulduar spiked the difficulty up a lot of people quit. The PVP fight in the Trial also broke a lot of guilds, as many players had limited to no experience in PVP. Then you had the group finder for 5 man content, which killed a lot of the server community. My guild went from fielding two 25 man teams to about 15 active raiders, but at least we cleared the content. I wound up quitting halfway through Cata as I was bored with the rehash of old raids.
I loved Mythic Plus, for someone who had a lot less time it was a cool skill based encounter with good rewards.
However Legion did have a lot of bad ideas, like randomly getting higher level versions of items - I forgot what that was called - and those legendary drops. Later you could farm to get the one you wanted but I remember that after the first 2 the drop rate was considerably lower and I got stuck with 2 useless legendries for a long time. And PVP / world PVP was a complete mess.
titanforging was stolen from d3, one of its countless garbage ideas.
Titanforging originated as Thunderforging from MoP which later became warforging After Throne of Thunder. The biggest problem with TF over WF was while WF could add a few ilevels to gear TF could add dozens and completely invalidate raid drops if you happened to get a stupid enough RNG chain from a world quest.
On top of that due to how itemisation worked for various classes and specs you could sometimes get drops which were a higher ilevel than what you had equipped but if the secondary stats weren't useful the higher ilvl meant nothing. This coupled with the devs removing Master Looter meant players couldn't even pass the useless drop to someone else because you were only allowed to trade ilvl downgrades which didn't even bother to consider how secondary stats could be significantly more important at times.
As for the problem with Legendary drops, initially you only got two per character. That was it. If they weren't your BiS you were fucked and raiders literally rerolled toons when this happened.
Regarding the interrupt Legendary you had that was the ring wasn't it? It was deservedly criticised because it was not only poorly designed originally but also it wasn't class specific so everyone ran the risk of getting it at first and compared to other options it wasn't any good. It wasn't until the devs removed the drop cap as well as letting players work towards a Legendary that the system became player friendly but Blizzard in their eternal greed implemented artificial timegates to keep players active but the other limits in place could outright kill the performance of some characters if they got shit Legendaries due to how game changing some of them were regarding both class mechanics and sheer dps output for some.
afaik tbc was mostly done when acti bought blizzard. What decisions are you talking about from that expac? Wrath was loved because blizz still had inertia, but it was ruined by the end of the expan and the content lacks.
And that's also why anita and friends pushed for so many of these soy fags into gamdev, to ruin entertainment for the rest of us. obligatory fuck kotick too
I can't remember all of them, this was many years ago. The only one I remember specifically is class changes that didn't make sense. The class changes weren't made to make the classes play better or be more balanced. It was essentially just change for change sake, to keep players in a perpetual mouse wheel of change so they "felt" like stuff wasn't boring, which aligned with other things they were doing to make the game feel fresh. In reality, it was just done to increase player retention without having to add new content. It was lazy, and the motivations behind it were highly suspect, which increasingly corrupted Blizzard over time.
There are other changes too, but my brain doesn't work that way. I forget the details, but remember the overarching ideas behind them. To be fair, they were fewer and smaller for TBC, but they became bigger and more blatant as time went on. Even though WotLK was well received, it was obvious by then the direction Blizzard was taking, which is why I dipped out (and most of my friends did too) to other MMOs after Wrath.