My Raiding History, Part 3: Wrath of the Lich King

While Burning Crusade was technically my first expansion, I was still too new to the game when it came out to really appreciate how much it was changing things. Wrath was the first time I actually knew about an expansion well in advance and could have some some appreciation of what it was going to bring to the game. I don't think I was particularly hyped, however... unlike many who look back on Wrath with a lot of fondness, I hadn't played any of the Warcraft RTS games and therefore had no clue who Arthas even was (it's not like he came up a lot in Vanilla questing or anything).

Also, many of the announced changes sounded more like "let's wait and see" than immediately exciting to me. For example Blizzard had proudly proclaimed that Wrath of the Lich King was going to turn shadow priests into "real" damage dealers, and that they were going to get rid of the whole "mana battery" role by simply making replenishment a buff that multiple classes could bring to a raid. This sounded sensible to me at the time but not particularly fun considering that I enjoyed the utility and didn't care that much about dps numbers. I ended up switching to holy.

Questing through the new zones was enjoyable to me, but we nonetheless lost some guildies to "having to level up again". My favourite healing buddy, an undead holy priest, only made it to level 71 or 72 before giving up and quitting the game because he just could not stand levelling. The new dungeons were varied and interesting, but also laughably easy on heroic mode compared to BC heroics, with no attunement requirements and pretty much everything being AoE tankable.

The revamped Naxxramas and two new single-boss raids kind of had the same issue - mind you, we were not so good at the game that we breezed through them all in a week or anything, but we did actually kill everything on regular difficulty before Ulduar came out, which was a position we had never been in before. At the time Blizzard had said that they had a plan to revamp raiding in Wrath though, and they had stated that the entry tier of raiding was intentionally supposed to be easy, so we rolled with it.

The one thing to keep us busy for a while was the first "achievement raid" which required you to kill the black dragon Sartharion with all three of his drake adds up instead of killing them beforehand - I thought this was a stupid concept because unlike the ZA bear run it basically required you to "do it wrong", intentionally handicapping yourself, but since there was nothing else to do we did it anyway. Being the second person in the guild to get the much-coveted twilight drake that dropped from doing the achievement wasn't half bad either.

Ulduar came to be considered one of WoW's best raids ever - if not the best - but for me it was once again a mixed bag. Overall the fights were fun, but I didn't really get to enjoy the beautiful environments until much later as my old PC was really struggling in 25-mans at this point and having to dial my graphics down to low meant that the experience largely consisted of me walking around in a grey haze. The new optional hardmodes were clever but also a point of contention at times, e.g. when people argued that we should work on Deconstructor's (the fourth boss's) hard mode instead of trying to push onwards to actually fully clear the raid first. I wrote a whole post about my love/hate relationship with Ulduar in the past.

This time we weren't "done" by the time the next raid tier released, and the fact that there was once again no attunement required, combined with it being much easier on normal mode than Ulduar while also giving better loot, led to more contention about what progression should look like. As I had actually just started this blog around that time, I wrote a whole post about my frustrations with this.

Trial of the Crusader was not a very fun time for me in general - it was accessible and gave good loot, which is why it felt like you should do it multiple times a week if need be, but the fights were meh compared to Ulduar, and the new system of having multiple difficulties for the entire raid still felt kind of half-baked. Normal mode was pretty easy for my guild, but then 25-man hard mode was like an absolute brick wall. I don't remember if we ever even got the first encounter down beyond that one time when it bugged out on us in a helpful way.

Icecrown Citadel felt better again, both in terms of difficulty and in terms of general fun, though the constant AoE healing spam required on some fights was starting to stress me out a bit. (This was something that had started early in Wrath but slowly got worse as the expansion progressed.) Unfortunately, it was also the time when my guild broke apart.

Another one of the new concepts introduced in Wrath was that all raids came in both a 10-man and a 25-man version, with the 25-man giving higher level loot. We were still a 25-man guild and just treated the 10-mans the same way we had Karazhan and Zul'Aman in BC: as optional content that people could run in smaller groups on off-nights and on their alts. This mostly seemed to work okay too, but I think in hindsight the fact that it wasn't actually different content was what first planted the seed of discontent in some people's minds. After all, they clearly could do Naxx, Ulduar etc. with just their small group of friends... 25-man mode only scaled up the numbers for better loot.

So when Blizzard announced that in the next expansion, Cataclysm, 10- and 25-mans were now going to drop the same level of gear, a good chunk of our core raiders decided that they were going to nope out of playing with us right then and there, with the idea being that they would form their own, smaller ten-man guild for Cata. They said that they simply preferred the smaller format but soon seemingly put a lie to this by expanding to 25-man again early in Cata - apparently they just hadn't liked certain people in the guild and wanted to leave this "chaff" behind.

This was a big blow to those of us who remained, especially as the leavers took our former main tank with them. Sindragosa was the last boss that we killed as a 25-man raiding guild. The couple of officers that remained scrambled to keep things going and I did see the Lich King and later Halion dead on 10-man at least, but it wasn't quite the same. (Plus it didn't help that I found the ending of the Arthas fight thoroughly underwhelming.) With less than half of our roster remaining, the guild just felt gutted, and I couldn't help but go into Cataclysm with a certain sadness.

For me, Wrath of the Lich King will always be the expansion that made raiding divisive in the name of giving people options. There had always been arguments and drama, but knowing that you needed those other people to see the content and get the bosses down at least served as a sort of unifying force. Wrath was all about giving people more choices, but as it turns out making choices as a guild is hard and presenting people with too many diverging paths along the way just leads to squabbles:

• The introduction of 10-man raiding reduced 25-man to something some people only did for the better loot, and then promptly ditched the moment Cata allowed it.
• The introduction of dual spec made it easier to change roles, but also meant that people were suddenly expected to be good at and gear for multiple roles, and that raids could be designed around e.g. having a different number of healers on different bosses. Some players did not mind this and were happy to switch, but at other times it felt like pulling straws as for who had to switch to do the "sucky" job now.
• The removal of attunements and every raid tier being instantly accessible from Trial of the Crusader onwards meant that the only reason to go back to places like Ulduar was for achievements and to "see the content", again leading to arguments depending on people's motivations.
• The introduction of the option to extend raid lockouts helped slower progressing guilds to advance through Ulduar but also suddenly caused arguments about whether to extend or reset.

Ultimately this is why I can't look back on Wrath raiding with too much fondness. It did have a lot of good fights and I did have a lot of good times, but it was as if everything good had to come with a "but" attached all of a sudden, where Burning Crusade had just felt like pure fun from start to finish.