Love for Burning Crusade

This week, Syp made a post getting nostalgic about the Burning Crusade expansion, and I was surprised by how little of a response it got (my own comment being one of only three).

With all the talk about Vanilla WoW I suppose it deserves saying that if I could choose to "live" in any WoW expansion, it would actually be The Burning Crusade. However, Vanilla is close enough (especially when you compare it to current WoW) that I'll take it. And as much as I'd love for Blizzard to also host BC servers (one day... in the far future... even though they've only just started on WoW Classic...) I fear that there isn't as much demand for that simply because all the Burning Crusade content still exists in the live game - strictly speaking anyway, unlike the Vanilla content, which has literally been wiped off the face of Azeroth: geography, NPCs, quests and all.

In one of those discussion threads about what WoW Classic should be like I saw someone make a comment which I thought was very pertinent. They said that if you're longing for Vanilla WoW with better class balance and the biggest annoyances removed, you don't really want Vanilla: you want Burning Crusade. "Like Vanilla, but improved" is definitely a good way to describe Burning Crusade.

Class balance in particular had its golden age during that time in my opinion. In Vanilla you didn't really want to bring a lot of classes/specs to raids. And from Wrath of the Lich King onwards, you wanted to "bring the player, not the class" aka it didn't matter at all what you brought. Only in Burning Crusade did we have a situation that actively encouraged diversity, making it beneficial to bring a mix of classes because they all brought different benefits to the raid. It was a great time if you wanted to be more than just "a damage dealer". I'm not saying that this system didn't have its issues too, such as that feeling of "needing" a certain class or spec that you might not actually have available on a given night. I still preferred having to put up with that to simply having my favoured play style (that of the buffing shadow priest) completely erased though.

Aside from class balance, BC also fixed a whole bunch of other little niggles. Like I mentioned in my reply to Syp's post, quest rewards actually became useful to most classes. Gear for specs like protection paladin actually started existing. The introduction of daily quests made it a bit more palatable for the casual player to grind for gold. Gear token drops and badges of justice mitigated bad RNG without sacrificing the joy of getting a good drop.

It was also my personal golden age for dungeon running. I can appreciate people's love for places like Stratholme and Blackrock Depths on a cerebral level, but personally I always found them confusing and tedious. BC's more straightforward challenges, such as the not-at-all-mazelike Shadow Labyrinth, were much more up my alley and I never grew tired of volunteering to run the heroic version and feeling accomplished by being able to down Murmur.

If I had to point out BC's biggest weakness, I might actually choose the setting. I seem to remember that back in the day, quite a lot of people found Outland to be pretty alienating. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, I heard more than one comment about being glad to be back on Azeroth. However, for me it was never an issue because I only came to Vanilla WoW relatively late, and the alien landscapes beyond the Dark Portal felt like just another natural extension of the world to me.