Fifteen Years of WoW Blogging

I haven't been very good at keeping track of milestones on this blog. Partially I think this is due to the fact that I'd only been posting for a little over three years by the time that I originally decided to step away from WoW. After this the blog lay fallow for a while, even if it never went completely quiet (I'd still find excuses to occasionally comment on BlizzCon announcements and stuff like that), and it seemed odd to celebrate so-and-so many years of blogging when I hadn't really done all that much for a good chunk of those years.

This year I remembered to make a note in advance though... that today, the blog turns fifteen years old. What a crazy ride it's been. I thought it would be fun to look back on those years a bit.

When I started this blog in July 2009, I was 26 years old, working a part-time job in a bakery and still living in Austria with my mother, though I was saving up to relocate to the UK and move in with my then-boyfriend (whom I'd met in WoW, of course) at the end of the year. World of Warcraft was probably close to the peak of its popularity with its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Blogging was quite popular as well, and blogging about WoW was a solid niche.

I'd been reading and leaving comments on other people's WoW blogs for a while (many of which have sadly been lost to time since then), and finally figured that it was time to set up my own space to share my thoughts about the game. My very first post was about heroic Oculus, which was certainly... a choice. In those early days I had a lot of free time and not much else going on in my life, so I posted 12-20 times a month, which seems slightly insane to me now, looking back at it as a 41-year-old with a full time job.

It's hard to summarise all those posts in a few sentences as I wrote about a lot of different subjects. I guess one thing I can say is that my posts were perhaps slightly shorter on average than they are nowadays, and I didn't seem to have as many reservations about just how much "meat" there needed to be to a topic to make it worth its own little post. I wrote about random game mechanics I liked and disliked, good pugs and bad pugs (I spent so much time pugging dungeons back then), raiding with my guild, commented on WoW-related news, and talked about pieces of gear I liked. I basically just really enjoyed the game and almost every aspect of it. I wrote about day one of the dungeon finder, which honestly feels like something of a historical document at this point. At the end of the year, I went through with my plan to move to the UK.

I spent most of 2010 unemployed, and therefore continued to have a lot of time to play and blog, maintaining my cadence of publishing a post pretty much every other day. I continued to write about the same kinds of things, though I think if you look closely, you can see a slow decline in the amount of joy I expressed. There were fewer happy stories, and more rants about inconsiderate pugs and changes I didn't like. Plus my guild wasn't doing so well either. Incidentally, WoW did help me get a job in November though - that post was also the first time I heard of reddit, as someone linked it there and I went to investigate the source of that sudden traffic spike.

At the end of the year, the Cataclysm came, and my boyfriend's physical copy of the expansion got lost in the mail. (If I remember correctly, Amazon refunded him but then the parcel randomly showed up in May the next year or something.) The new content gave me a lot to talk about, something that lasted into 2011.

However, somehow things weren't quite the same. I still posted quite a lot that year, but 12 posts a month went from being my lower limit to being my upper one, with the average being closer to 8. I posted about lacking lustre in February, and nostalgia and doubts in July. When Mists of Pandaria was announced, I was decidedly underwhelmed. I stepped down from raiding and focused on my rated battleground team instead, which brought with it a brief revival of the joy I used to feel when playing. But then Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, and my interest in WoW just petered out. I only made 6 posts in 2012, the last of which was me declaring that I was done with the game and retiring the blog. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

I did indeed not post for more than one and a half years after that, but things changed in my real life during that time. I broke up with my boyfriend (insert some snarky comment about how he was my "WoW boyfriend" so naturally I had dump him when I stopped playing) and started a relationship with the guy who I'm now married to. This included moving house and being unemployed again, which was not so great. As my new love scrambled to find ways to keep me from being too depressed by the circumstances, we ended up realising that he'd also used to play WoW at one point, and we rolled up a new pair of alts at the end of 2013 to check out the changes since both of us had last played. This ended up keeping us busy a few months into 2014, but it wasn't long until we both lost interest in the game again, so I only got a little over a dozen posts out of the whole adventure. In real life, I also got a full time job a couple of months later.

The next revival of the blog came from an unexpected source in mid-2015, as Nostalrius took the private server scene by storm and really made the whole concept of going back to Vanilla go mainstream. I actually never played there myself, as I rolled up on its much smaller competitor Kronos instead. That was super exciting for about a month or ten posts, but then my interest flagged again... though not so much due to lack of appeal this time and more a general lack of time to engage with multiple MMOs at once. At the end of the year I posted about BlizzCon (and shared a video by some medium-sized YouTuber I'd found, called Asmongold) and felt an urge to get back into the saddle on Kronos. I continued to post about my private server adventures at a rate of a couple of posts per month throughout 2016.

By 2017 my enthusiasm for that was starting to dry up again though. I'd left Kronos the previous year since I couldn't stand life at max level on a PvP server, and there always seemed to be something wrong with every other server I tried, so I only made about half a dozen posts throughout most of the year. That November of course was when Blizzard officially announced Classic. I made a few posts related to that in a flurry of initial excitement, and then set in for a long wait until Classic's release, only checking in with the blog occasionally throughout 2018.

The release of Classic in August 2019 is when I feel the blog was revived "properly", as that's when I started posting several times a month again (even if I only made half a dozen posts or less, it was still more and more regular than I'd been for the last seven years before that). I was all in on playing Classic on Horde side for more than six months, followed by me levelling a night elf on an RP server by myself, but I did start to feel the doldrums a bit by spring of 2020 as I didn't have any real friends left to play with.

Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up joining a pug raid in August, and found myself recruited into a great guild shortly afterwards. I also ended up checking out retail again for the first time in more than six years. Hanging out and raiding with my Classic guild - plus an increase in working from home time due to the pandemic - carried me through most of 2021, though things started to go a bit pear-shaped during Classic Burning Crusade as the vibe of the guild changed and Blizzard decided to soft-close the server I was on by enabling free transfers.

I got a few more months of enjoyment out of that expansion in 2022, but my guild eventually folded and when it became clear that there would be no BC era servers, I felt I was done with Classic as it was. I decided to try my luck on Classic era instead and once again fell in with a great guild, though I also kept playing retail on the side and got excited for the Dragonflight expansion.

Throughout 2023, I continued to post about my adventures on Classic era, mixed with posts about retail, which started to gain more ground. Changes at my work meant that raiding with my era guild didn't really work anymore and I had to give up on that, which provided even more of an incentive to focus on retail with my husband and some friends instead. I also tried out Hardcore when it launched, and got excited about Season of Discovery in December.

Sadly, that excitement didn't carry over into 2024 for more than two months, so since then it's mostly been retail with the occasional dip into one of the Classic modes sprinkled in here and there. We'll see where things go from here, but it's certainly been one hell of a journey.

Remembering LFD

In case you missed it somehow, the announcement of Classic Wrath of the Lich King was accompanied by a disclaimer that the devs weren't planning to include the automated dungeon finder that was part of late Wrath, since it seemed to them that this would go against the spirit of WoW Classic. This piece of news caused a huge uproar in the community and I believe there's been a bit of back-pedalling on the subject from Blizzard since then, though last I checked nothing definitive had been announced.

I went back and forth a bit on whether to write anything about the subject at all. Since I've settled on not wanting to play Classic Wrath, my first instinct was that it wasn't really my place to express an opinion... but after seeing that this hasn't stopped a lot of other commentators, I figured to hell with it.

My actual opinion on the question of whether the Looking for Dungeon tool should be in Classic Wrath is extremely easy to sum up anyway, because my approach to Classic has always been one of striving for authenticity - not because I necessarily believe that Classic was the perfect game, but because we've had more than a decade of Blizzard trying to make the game better for one group of players or another, and the results are never quite as expected, so I just wanted to stick to what was a known quantity. Therefore, I would also strive to emulate the original Wrath of the Lich King by adding the dungeon finder with the ICC patch, just like it was the first time around.

It seems that neither Blizzard nor the players care that much about authenticity at this point though. #nochanges is out, endless arguments on the WoW Classic subreddit about why you think your personal vision of the game would be the best are in. Blizzard said they want to spend more time listening to the players, so you never know when shouting loudly will suddenly pay off. But that's a subject for another post...

Really, what I'd like to talk about in this one is not so much whether LFD should be in Wrath Classic or not, but how I experienced it changing the game and how that has affected my views on it over time. I'm in a great position in that regard, since I started this blog five months before WoW dropped its 3.3 patch and I wrote a lot about my experiences with pugging dungeons, so I have receipts for my experiences back in the day (as the kids say these days).

My observations of dungeon finder day one were overall quite positive. There were technical mishaps, DCs and ragequits, but generally it was all one big adventure. As I stated in that post: "The main advantage of the new tool is simply that it's incredibly fast." If you liked running dungeons, you could now do more of the thing you liked! 100% win.

However, only three days later I already wrote another post with the title: "Three things I don't like about the dungeon finder", which included the line "some people seem to forget that there are other human beings playing with them, not bots created for their entertainment". And that after three days! I concluded by saying: "Don't get me wrong, I still love the new dungeon finder, but clearly the added conveniences are not without a price."

That largely remained my attitude throughout the months that followed, with the main thing that changed over time being the importance I assigned to getting things done fast vs. being treated like a bot. In the early days the advantages just seemed to outweigh everything, and the bad behaviour seemed largely forgivable. After all, I'd sometimes had manually assembled pugs go bad too, right? And even when people were being rude, we were still getting stuff done, right?

However, I was basically a slowly boiling frog. I don't think I ever wrote a post where I said something like "I hate the dungeon finder now", but you can see things deteriorating pretty quickly, as my "fail pug" stories went from mostly amusing to increasingly exasperated. In February, only two months after the dungeon finder's launch, I wrote a post called "An exemplary UP pug", in which I had nothing but praise for a run in which only one person dropped group randomly and where, upon me causing a wipe, only one member of the group was mildly rude to me. My standards for what made for a fun dungeon run were in free-fall and I wasn't even really noticing it.

Or maybe I was. In June I wrote about an awful Pit of Saron pug which I had to drop after the people in it voted to kick my boyfriend's warlock for no real reason, and which ended with a rant about how this sort of thing never would've happened in pre-dungeon finder times. In July I wrote about my "pug peeves of the week" because there were now so many bad behaviours on display in my dungeon runs that you could sort them into categories. In September, on a more humorous note, I wrote a checklist of the many ways in which pugs can fail in Halls of Lightning, which consisted of twenty-five different items.

In October I wrote a post called "Ten months of dungeon finding in review" in which I summed up the major pros and cons of the feature as I saw them. The main pro was the revitalisation of levelling dungeons... but the cons were a loss of immersion (what a novel concept, I doubt many people playing WoW even care about that anymore) and the deterioration of people's social skills. However, I still concluded: "Looking back at the dungeon finder's release with all the knowledge that I have about it now... I'd still want it to be introduced again, because I think the basic concepts of automating the group-finding process and enlarging the pool of available players are absolutely worth it."

After that, Cataclysm dropped and I didn't end up talking about the dungeon finder as much for a while, as I was busy focusing on the new quests and doing things with my guild. I did write a post in January called "State of the dungeon finder", which I think got a lot of link love based on the number of comments on it and which basically posited that the increased difficulty of Cata heroics made pugs a bit scary, but people's bad behaviours hadn't really changed in significant ways. It wasn't long afterwards that I noted that my passion for WoW in general was decreasing for unrelated reasons.

The general perception of the dungeon finder definitely seemed to be shifting by that point though. Rohan of Blessing of Kings wrote a post in March of the same year in which he wondered why he wasn't seeing all those bad groups that people were complaining about and speculated that it might be related to playing the healer role. I actually responded to that post with a comment of my own, which I think shows a lot about my state of mind at the time:

The majority of my runs are successful too, but that doesn't equal "fun". The other day I ran heroic Halls of Origination with my hunter, and the tank decided to skip four of the seven bosses and the rest of the group kicked our healer for "not healing enough" even though he had kept everyone up with no problems and we even got the Faster Than the Speed of Light achievement. This is fairly representative for my average run - yes, we'll get it done, but not without someone being a jerk to someone else (not necessarily me) for no reason. I "grew up" in WoW enjoying dungeons for the social experience they provided, even when pugging with strangers from the same server, but since cross-server LFD this experience has become a sour one more often than not.

I had definitely soured on the whole concept by then, which becomes even more evident in a post from a few months later that includes the line "it's widely known that the dungeon finder has a bad reputation" in its opening paragraph. The actual title of the post was "Dreaming of a different dungeon finder" and funnily enough, the features I described in it sound eerily similar to the pre-made group finder that WoW ended up adding in Warlords of Draenor. I'd never thought about that!

Anyway, what all this shows is that my descent into dislike for the dungeon finder was a very gradual process. I'm not saying that everyone's feelings necessarily followed or would follow the same trajectory - if all you care about are rewards/results, then getting runs faster might still be preferable even if people behave badly in them, compared to dealing with the decreased efficiency of a manually assembled group. However, for me it became evident over time that the rewards were worthless if I didn't enjoy the gameplay leading up to them, and I missed having pugs engage with each other as fellow human beings.

Now, the really interesting thing is that for all that, I'm still not entirely against automated group finding for PvE content in MMOs nowadays... I just think that the dungeon finder as it was introduced in Wrath was truly set up to bring out the worst in people. When I started playing SWTOR it didn't have a group finder, something that many people complained about, but to me this was actually refreshing after the cesspits of Cataclysm's LFD. When SWTOR did go ahead and added an automated group finder with its 1.3 patch a few months later, I was worried about what that would do to the game, but it actually turned out to be okay.

You still get a little bit of that sort of "I don't care" behaviour, such as tanks dropping group if the randomiser puts them into an instance they don't fancy at that particular moment, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the stuff I saw in WoW during Wrath's heyday. I couldn't tell you exactly why that is, but let's just say that I  suspect that the details of how this sort of group finding is implemented do make a difference.

Lack of cross-server queues means that there's some accountability for example, and the fact that pops can be slow sometimes gives players a vested interest in not dropping group instantly the moment anything looks less than ideal, because it will mean more time spent waiting. From what I remember, SWTOR has also never offered unique incentives to focus on running random instances over other content - in comparison Wrath's dungeon finder was ridiculously over-incentivised, meaning that lots of players were running heroics purely for the reward, even if they didn't enjoy the gameplay at all. In hindsight it hardly seems a surprise that this led to unpleasant behaviour and conflicts of interest.

It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will cave and add the dungeon finder to Wrath Classic after all, or whether they'll try to achieve some sort of compromise with a modified tool, e.g. by adding something like retail's current pre-made group finder. Considering how much the community has changed, I expect that those deciding to play Wrath will be in for an "interesting" time either way.

Pessimism About Classic Wrath of the Lich King

I'm in a bit of a funny place with Classic right now, in the sense that I'm having a lot of fun with it, but it feels very much like all of that is happening inside a very fragile bubble. In general, Classic doesn't seem to be in the best of places. The killing off of my old home server Hydraxian Waterlords was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to server population issues for example, as people are using paid transfers to slowly depopulate smaller servers and making the faction balance on PvP servers (which are the majority) more and more lop-sided to the point where things can become unplayable for the smaller faction.

At the same time people are already talking about Classic Wrath of the Lich King, which - while nothing has officially been announced - seems guaranteed to be released either by the end of the year or early next year. And I'm not looking forward to that either, as I also said to Redbeard in a comment on one of his recent posts.

Wrath may have been many people's favourite expansion, but as I've previously stated on this blog, for me it was very much a mixed bag. It contained some good content, but it was also the first time in my time playing WoW that some changes and additions started to look genuinely unappealing to me. And what good there was, I already played for all it's worth back in the day - I ran something like 1500 five-man dungeons during original WotLK, for Christ's sake! Even if I obviously had fun with that to some degree, do I really want to farm those badges all over again? I think not. Personal taste in expansions aside, I also have a fairly gloomy outlook on the overall situation as far as Blizzard's handling of Classic goes and looking at the way the community has been developing.

I wasn't as put off as some by the introduction of the paid boost and store mount for Classic BC, but it was definitely a sign that the thumbscrews had come out in terms of monetisation, and I expect Wrath to be ten times worse, as original WotLK was when Blizzard first introduced store mounts - meaning they are part of the "legitimate" Classic experience and Blizz have no reason whatsoever to hold back. There also seems to be a general lack of care for the Classic experience in evidence already - I mean, how many months has that succubus death pose bug been in game now?

And as for the community... it's a complex topic, because it's one thing to talk about something like a server's community, but "the Classic community" is vast and diverse. Still, I feel that in general there's been a lot of complaining from the start about not liking certain features of Classic and vocal demands for convenience updates, which just makes me want to scream: you knew exactly what you were getting with this, if it bothers you so much, why are you even playing?! It can be frustrating to watch people claim to love Classic while also asking for it to be more like retail.

At the same time there's been a lot of over the top min-maxing going on as well as people seemingly treating the game like a checklist of chores, the sheer degree of which has honestly been quite shocking to me. I knew that this was already happening in OG Classic, but it seemed more contained then and not as wide-spread as it became with BC. Even if things have mellowed out now, as those who were the most guilty of this are either burnt out or "done" and have no more reason to log in, the way in which this transformed even people I like and consider friends into relentless grinding machines at the start of BC will remain with me for a long time and that's not something I want to go through a second time. Again, with the introduction of achievements and the additional streamlining that came with Wrath, I only expect this to get ten times worse.

Combine this with all the things I remember not liking all that much about WotLK the first time around, and I think everything will come together to make Wrath Classic a grade A shitshow:

• With dungeons actively designed for easy AoE grinding and the introduction of the dungeon finder, people will feel the need to chain-queue for instances 24/7, leading to even faster burnout than people experienced in BC. The dungeon finder will also eliminate any remaining incentive to make connections or to group up with guildies for anything other than raids, unless you're literally already best friends and doing everything together anyway.
• Everyone seems to forget that the majority of Wrath's first raid tier was Discount Naxx, which made sense at the time because hardly anyone had seen the original, but considering how many guilds cleared the real deal in Classic only a year ago, people will be bored with the nerfed version within a week.
• The death knight meta will cause chaos... everyone always just seems to remember how much they personally liked the death knight play style, forgetting that there'll be thousands of other people wanting to be just as OP at the same time. There'll be all-death knight dungeon runs and battlegrounds, competition for raid spots will be fierce, and people will be thoroughly sick of everyone else playing the class in short order.

All this and more is why I don't think I'll really want to play a Wrath Classic... but the sad thing is, I'm considering it even so. And you know why? Because of my guild. The whole server transfer shenanigans highlighted to me that I've made some strong connections there that are not so easily let go, and I could see myself giving it at least a try for other people's sake... but I'm not optimistic that it will result in lasting enjoyment.

Naxx Update

I haven't written about my guild's Naxx progression since the post about the raid's release in early December, when I expressed some concern about us having gotten only three bosses down during the first week - a week when the news were all about how more hardcore players had once again cleared the raid within hours of release, and our own initial forays felt slow and clumsy even by our more casual standards.

To the Forks' credit though, we have persevered... and in fact appear to have slid into a unique niche on our server as the one Alliance guild that's consistently progressing at more old-school speeds. Everyone else seems to either be (nearly) done or have given up. This has actually led to us picking up more recruits and our roster is the strongest it's been since I joined, to the point that we even have to bench people occasionally.

I missed out on our Maexxna and Razuvious first kills, but was there for Heigan, Patchwerk and Grobbulus.

Getting back into the groove for the Heigan dance was easier than expected (after having learned it during Wrath of the Lich King) and both times we've killed him so far I was one of the few still alive by the end, with half the raid dead (though I have yet to successfully make it out of the gauntlet he teleports you into, something that wasn't present in this form in the Wrath version of the fight).

Patchwerk required a lot of wipes (though they were no skin off a hunter's back as I could always just run into a corner and feign death) while tanks and healers figured out what to do, but then things just suddenly clicked and we went from a 48% wipe to a kill on the next try.

Grobbulus is the biggest loot pinata in the instance, to the point that even we could one-shot him! Figures that a boss like that was hidden behind Patchwerk...

Gothik the Harvester has eluded us so far for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. I remember this fight being so easy in Wrath, and the Classic version isn't really any more complicated mechanically, but somehow we always end up getting overwhelmed by adds on one side or the other just before it's time for him to come down. I'm sure the raid leaders will figure out what's going wrong eventually.

One fight that's very different from how I remember it in Wrath is Loatheb - in Wrath he has this necrotic aura that prevents healing for most of the fight, so healers had to time big heals to go off at just the right time during the brief windows when the aura dropped off for a few seconds. In Classic, there is no such aura, and healing can be done at any time - but casting any healing spell as any class will put all your healing abilities on cooldown for a full minute, meaning that the healers have to set up a strict rotation to keep the main tank topped off and not a single heal can be spared for the dps, meaning that we have to follow our own strict rotation of using consumables to stay alive for five minutes.

We gave it some "dry runs" without consumables just to practice the positioning of the spores and things seemed to go well enough, but when we tried "for real" our dps felt way off. I suggested that we might have to try him as the first boss of the evening with as many world buffs as we could muster (casualness be damned), and when we did that we wiped at 3%. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get him down this reset.

So things are going... decently! We've come a long way from that first night of constant stumbling, followed by other nights of wiping five times in a row on the exact same spider trash pack, to being in a position where we at least have the first few bosses on farm and can progress a little bit more every week. Which is all I could ask for really! Huge kudos to the leadership team for keeping it all together in what honestly seems like pretty challenging circumstances to me (and no, I'm not writing this just to suck up to them in case one of them reads this).

I don't actually know whether we'll even be able to clear the instance before Classic TBC comes out if the rumours about how soon it's supposed to be released are true, but I'm happy to be along for the ride either way.

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.

10 Years of WoW Blogging

Nogamara from Battle Stance celebrated his blog's tenth birthday today. Go and congratulate him, because he's awesome!

Reading that post also gave me pause though. 2009 to 2019... wait, didn't I start blogging on here in 2009 as well? The answer is yes: in fact, technically this blog's anniversary was about three months ago, and I completely forgot about it. (I have no idea why Parallel Context's tenth anniversary the other day didn't trigger a similar line of thought in my mind by the way... brains are weird.)

I suppose I didn't really think of celebrating this blog's anniversary at least in part because I've been completely focused on my Star Wars: The Old Republic blog for the last eight years, and tended to think of this one as lying dormant. However, Nogamara even counted two whole years of his blog's lifetime during which he didn't make a single post at all - meanwhile I somehow ended up putting out at least half a dozen entries per year even during years when I thought of myself as totally not playing WoW, so... I guess that counts as active in some way?

My first ever post was made on the 12th of July 2009 and called Some thoughts on heroic Oculus. I have to admit that, on re-reading that post, I chuckled at myself referring to it as "the o-word". Yes, I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but me from ten years ago might as well be a different person and I think she's kind of funny sometimes, OK?

It's kind of amazing to me now just how prolific I was during the first one and a half years of this blog: I posted pretty much every other day! I was going to say something like "I have no idea how I had the time to do that" but then I remembered that I was unemployed for at least half of that time, so that probably helped.

Incidentally, WoW also played a role in eventually ending my unemployment - and that post was my introduction to reddit, since someone linked it there and gave me a crazy traffic spike.

Anyway, I remain impressed by the sheer amount of things I actually had to say about the game in late Wrath in particular. I kind of wish I'd started this whole blogging lark much earlier; then I would now have a detailed record of everything I thought during Burning Crusade as well.

Going through the archives of those early years, you can see the very slow and gradual decrease in my enjoyment of WoW. My second post on the blog was called Four reasons why I like pugs, and especially in the early days there were still quite a number of happy posts about grouping experiences, but over time the percentage of things that annoyed and frustrated me clearly grew.

I quit in March 2012 and had no intentions of coming back, until my now-husband unexpectedly gifted me the Mists of Pandaria expansion and some game time at the end of 2013, which had us going through a little levelling adventure together, until we both hit max level and quickly got bored again.

In 2015 I discovered the world of private servers during a burst of nostalgia, so then I wrote about my experiences on those at intervals over the next couple of years. Conveniently Blizzard announced WoW Classic mere weeks after I'd got fed up with yet another piece of private server drama, and that eventually led me to where I am now, blogging about WoW Classic. It feels crazy to think that a whole decade has passed in that time, because it certainly hasn't felt that long to me.

I would say something like "to the next ten years", but the thought of one day being able to say that I've blogged about World of Warcraft for twenty years is kind of terrifying in its own right. We'll just see how it goes, alright? Thanks for being along for the ride.

World of Warcraft Cinematic Reactions Over Time

Vanilla WoW



Cinematic message: This is Azeroth, a world full of varied locations and fantastic races who get into badass-looking fights with each other.

My Reaction: This looks amazing, can I be a shape-shifting elf lady too?

Burning Crusade



Cinematic message: Here are some new races you can play. Don't worry though, the old ones are still badass too. Watch a mage sheep a guy and a warlock incinerate murlocs. Hilarious! Also, something about entering the realm of a guy who says that we're not prepared for him.

My Reaction: I have no idea who that demon guy is, but still: looking great! Bring on those new races!

Wrath of the Lich King



Cinematic message: Watch this guy who looks like Sauron raise a skeletal dragon from the ice in a faraway frozen land. He also has a zombie army. The narration implies that he was once a good guy and that there's something like dramatic irony at work.

My Reaction: Well, I'm not sure what this has to do with me, but I guess someone's got to fight that zombie army.

Cataclysm



Cinematic message: Watch a giant, angry dragon wreck the world.

My Reaction: Oi, I was still using that! Quick, let's get him while he's still in Stormwind!

(I wish.)

Mists of Pandaria



Cinematic message: An orc and a human fight each other in a foreign jungle, which seems quite foolish considering that they are shipwrecked with nothing but the clothes on their body. A panda appears and kicks their butts in a humorous fashion.

My Reaction: So, are pandas the bad guys? And will this usher in a new age of peace between the Horde and Alliance as they unite to fight a common foe?

Warlords of Draenor



Cinematic message: Some orc in the past is about to do something very unwise by drinking green goo. But then things don't go as expected and the orcs beat up the big demon and the clearly evil guys.

My Reaction: Go orcs, I guess? Whose side are we on anyway?

The bottom line is, for an MMO trailer to inspire me, it has to make me feel like I want to be part of the pictured world. I can kind of understand why Blizzard moved away from the "look at random characters engage in cool fight scenes" style of the first two trailers, as it probably would have been hard to keep making them that way without things getting repetitive and boring after a while. But especially the trailers for the last two expansions have felt increasingly directionless to me. Why should I be invested in this as a player? This isn't advertising for a movie, where I'll be happy to watch someone else's story play out for two hours. I need to know what this expansion means for me.

Sure, some lore fans will go nuts over seeing Grom again, and seeing him refuse the demon blood and survive. But I reckon that for a lot of people, this is just going to be a bunch of orcs doing stuff that doesn't really relate to anything.

Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Not so Forsaken anymore: how Sylvanas & co. surprised me in Silverpine

MMO Melting Pot has a link to a post by Cynwise up today in which he discusses the Forsaken, why he considers them evil, and why he doesn't really like playing them. It's both interesting as well as conveniently timed for me, because I played through Silverpine Forest on my own undead hunter last night and was left with an urge to post about the experience and how it changed my view of the Forsaken in general. (Unlike previous "I quested in this zone" posts, this one has some very explicit spoilers. You have been warned.)

To start at the beginning, I used to feel ambivalent about the Forsaken. I didn't like them enough to play one of my own until I rolled my death knight, but I enjoyed their company and liked to spend time in their zones. They always struck me as the Azerothian equivalent of that misanthropic guy in your circle of friends whom you suspect you'd really dislike if you got to know him more closely, but as long as you keep him at a safe distance he makes for great company, because he's also clever, sarcastic and funny.

Looking at it a bit more closely and seriously, the Forsaken have always been giving quests that were considerably more evil than those that you got anywhere else. Yes, all factions ask you to kill people, but the Undercity was the only place where they made you think that you were actually helping the one you were going to get killed and considered this perfectly normal behaviour.

And yet, despite of this, I could never get myself to truly dislike them, probably because I was also feeling a bit sorry for them. They are not like other races, they aren't even really a "race" at all. They are sentient abominations, forced to exist in a sort of limbo between life and death where they are unable to truly enjoy anything and have no real purpose in life undeath. For every evil apothecary poisoning people for the hell of it, there was usually a quest about a sad Forsaken trying to recapture some of their lost humanity and failing. More than anything, they are simply some seriously messed up people.

Wrath of the Lich King was a big expansion for the Forsaken, because it went back to their roots and gave them purpose, reminding everyone of how it was the Lich King who was responsible for their current plight and that it made perfect sense for them to want revenge. But then the Wrathgate happened... and it was painful. I'll never forget the shivers that ran down my spine as I watched the cinematic for the first time and saw Putress appear, threatening Arthas with the wrath of the Forsaken (yay, here come our crazy but ass-kicking allies) - until he added "and death to the living" to the end of his speech (oh shit).

After that I felt that things kind of went downhill for the Forsaken. Before that I had always considered the apothecaries a sort of extremist group that wasn't necessarily representative of the undead as a whole, but the Wrathgate made it very clear that they were indeed the ones in charge. Sylvanas denied all responsibility afterwards, but I challenge you to find anyone who actually believed her story.

Now the Forsaken weren't just poor disgruntled monsters anymore, they were traitors. While it had been easy to feel at least some sympathy for them in the past whenever they seemed uncaring or unnecessarily cruel, this was personal, outright treachery and simply inexcusable. I was sad about this because it felt to me like this development really eliminated a lot of shades of grey from their character as a race and just left them as this purely evil people that couldn't be trusted even by their own allies.

As such I wasn't actually looking forward to seeing how their story would develop in Cataclysm, especially after I had heard reports about Sylvanas going mad with power and effectively becoming the new Lich King.

Let's just say, the new undead starting area was surprising.

Tirisfal Glades not so much, as it's retained a lot of the old starter quests; the experience has just been smoothed out considerably. Yes, there are some new quests and they are fun, but nothing that struck me as really out of the ordinary. The only thing I found notable was how different the reception of my new undead character felt compared to the old starter zone. Pre-Cataclysm, it basically said to a newly risen Forsaken: "Oh, you woke up too? Sucks to be us, let's try to make the best of it." Nowadays it says: "Welcome! We brought you back to life so you can serve the wonderful Lady Sylvanas!" The atmosphere is almost... friendly, like you're being inducted into a special club.

When you enter Silverpine, that's where things get really interesting. You immediately get to witness Sylvanas explaining her newest scheme of having Val'kyr intentionally raise new Forsaken to Garrosh, and her choice of words is fascinating. "I have solved the plight of the Forsaken," she says, and "as a race, we Forsaken are unable to procreate". I've seen people brush this off as her simply wanting to "produce" more soldiers for the Horde war effort, but to me those are not the words of a warlord talking about her cannon fodder. You want your people to procreate, Sylvanas? That sounds awfully... maternal.

A bit later you get to ride side by side with her as she explains the history of the Forsaken to you. Usually when your character gets to interact with an important NPC, this strikes me as a way of trying to make you feel more important: you're such a great hero that even the Warchief himself (or whoever) comes to have a chat with you. In this case I got the opposite impression though, namely that this conversation showed that Sylvanas is a leader who genuinely cares about her people, even a lowly schmuck like my level twelve hunter.

In a later quest, you get sent on a rescue mission to save the survivors of an ambush. Rescue mission? What? Are these the same Forsaken that asked me to mercilessly kill any of their number that were unlucky enough to get captured by the enemy in Dragonblight?

During another quest, you accompany a group of soldiers into a cave where they end up getting ambushed. Before I had time to properly process what was happening, the leader of the group shoved my character out of the blast radius, with his last words being that I should tell the Banshee Queen. The way I sat in front of my monitor in stunned confusion must have been a pretty good reflection of the way my character must have felt about this strange act of heroism. "But... I'm just the rookie, and yet he bothered to save me. I don't understand."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Forsaken have suddenly turned into a bunch of fluffy bunnies. They are still ruthless and cruel, but something has changed for sure. They don't just loathe everything and everyone anymore, including themselves. They stick together. They care about the survival of their people. Up until Wrath, it was all about them killing and bombing their way towards the Lich King, no matter the cost, but with Arthas dead, what was left for them to do? Lie down and die?

It seems that Sylvanas has decided to make the Forsaken a "proper" people. They are still undead and messed up, but they also want to have their own land, procreate and get some joy out of their existence, even if it's just from worshipping their Dark Lady. This is a huge change in my opinion, and one that makes them a thousand times easier to relate to. Sure, you can still hate their methods and that's fair enough, but at the end of the day their goals are now not so different from those of the other races. They just want their people to flourish, in their own undead way.

As if to drive the point home, the zone ends with you having to work with the new bosses from Shadowfang Keep for a while, and those guys are bastards. They combine all the worst traits of the old Forsaken philosophy, loathing not just their enemies, but also their allies and even themselves. During the aforementioned rescue mission, Lord Godfrey sometimes randomly pulls out a rifle and shoots the soldiers you just saved because he thinks that they are worthless. This is perfectly in line with old Forsaken quests (refer to the one in Dragonblight I linked above!) but as a player of a "new" Forsaken you can't help but hate him. You're being taught to care for your fellow undead, even if you don't care for anybody else, and you just don't treat them like that!

Later in Hillsbrad, there is a similar situation where you encounter a crazed apothecary for a while who has clearly gone off the deep end and is raising mindless zombies everywhere. I immediately felt uneasy when I saw his whole operation and started to wonder whether I had overestimated the "goodness" of the new Forsaken... until I found Master Apothecary Lydon locked away in a cage and together he and I went back to kick some butt and clean up the mess, because again, this was actually not acceptable by the Forsaken's new standards.

I certainly didn't expect the Forsaken to come out of the Cataclysm more likeable than ever, but there you go. This is my interpretation of their quests at least. I get the impression that a lot of people seem to think that Sylvanas is still scheming quietly about how to destroy all life on Azeroth and how to become the Ultimate Queen of Uber Evil, but I have to admit that I have trouble seeing that side of her, going by the way she behaves in game. Yeah, she hates Garrosh, but who doesn't? She is genuinely saddened by the loss of her Val'kyr companions, and when she deals with Crowley at the end of the Silverpine story, she honours their agreement to let his daughter go unharmed. I think that she just wants to see her people prosper, and while she definitely still has a bone or two to pick with certain people, I doubt that she's hell-bent on world (or even Horde) domination.

An annotated history of the badge system

It seems that the blogosphere is in the mood for talking about badges/emblems/points and things associated with gathering them! Reading these posts got me thinking about just how many changes the badge system has gone through since I started playing, and just how absurd some of them are. This in turn made me wonder how many people are even left who remember all of these changes. So I thought I'd write down what I remember, in order to preserve the knowledge and maybe educate some readers for whom this might be new.

In the beginning... there was vanilla WoW, which had no badge system, or heroics for that matter. After you hit the level cap, you could do some gearing up from drops in normal five-man dungeons, but that was pretty much it. Afterwards the only ways left to progress your character were raiding or PvP. Initially this wasn't a problem as the game was all shiny and new, and people were happy to explore, do leftover quests and roll alts. After a few years people started to get fidgety though, and Blizzard decided to release an expansion, and that in this expansion they were going to provide people with an alternative to raiding at max level: heroic five-mans.

The dungeons were going to be the same ones you had levelled up in, but much, much harder and the last boss would drop an epic. Sweet, getting epics just like a raider! However, someone at Blizzard HQ decided that this epic alone wasn't going to be enough, probably because only ever fighting the RNG for that one item you want and never get can get frustrating quickly, but also because the dungeons were so hard that you might not even end up completing them every time and then you'd feel like you just wasted a lot of time for nothing.

So they came up with the idea of badges of justice, little marks that would drop off all the heroic bosses for no discernible reason and that you could use as currency to purchase further epics from a vendor. There were only very few of them, and it would take quite a few heroic runs to accumulate enough badges to buy anything at all, but at least people would always feel like they were getting something out of each run.

Note that these badges were not dropping off raid bosses. They weren't meant for raiders. Raiders got multiple shiny epics off each boss anyway!

However, the raiders still wanted badges, because some of those epics from the vendor were best-in-slot items for them too, with no raid drops coming even close. So they ran heroics too, presumably while moaning about why they had to bother with this stuff when they were raiding anyway. And lo and behold, Blizzard agreed with this sentiment! So they made raid bosses drop badges too, so raiders could buy the couple of items they wanted without having to farm heroics on top of it all. If you think about Blizzard's current heroic strategy, the thought of the developers willingly letting raiders get out of heroics might give you a headache. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This worked alright for a while. Heroics were hard, and getting a capable group together required effort, so people geared up slowly. Still, after so many patches even the most casual of players had managed to buy all the vendor items they wanted (remember, there weren't that many anyway). People were running fewer heroics, mostly to keep trying for that one specific item that never dropped.

Also, the chasm between raiders and non-raiders in terms of badge acquisition rate was increasing. While heroic runs became less frequent, raiders gained access to more and more raids that they could gain badges from. A tier six guild could go back and do a full clear of Karazhan in only a couple of hours, gaining more badges this way than anyone could realistically get from running heroics all day. Blizzard tried to encourage heroic running with the introduction of the daily heroic quest, which gave you extra badges for completing a specific heroic each day. This did help at least a little, as the psychological trick of "having a quest for it" worked wonders - you'd be surprised at the kinds of things people do when they have a quest for it! Except heroic Shattered Halls maybe, that took at least three quests.

In patch 2.4, Blizzard decided to revitalise people's interest in badges by adding a load of items of tier six quality to a new vendor, though they were considerably more expensive than the old items. Basically, the players' reactions to this could be summed up like this:

Raiders: "OMG, you're giving tier six level gear to non-raiding scrubs? Fail!" (But then they were secretly glad to be able to buy some decent mail leggings after Azgalor refused to drop the ones they really wanted for the umpteenth time.)

Non-raiders: "OMG, you expect me to grind out 150 badges for a crossbow that looks like a dead bird? Do you know how many daily heroics that is?" (But then they did it anyway and secretly felt really cool for having a raid-quality weapon. Also, Blizzard tried to help them out by making it so that even some daily quests had a chance of randomly giving out a bonus badge.)

This kept people reasonably happy and busy until the release of Wrath of the Lich King, but in this expansion the developers decided that they were going to handle this whole badge thing differently. For one thing they wouldn't be called badges anymore, and for another there would be what you could call "heroic emblems" and "raider emblems", to avoid the aforementioned issues of raiders gaining currency much faster than everyone else and from doing content that was trivial to them. (Ten-man raids were lumped in with the heroics at this point, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)

This sounded good in theory and also worked alright at the start of the expansion. Raiders gathered some heroic emblems at the start to help with getting ready for raiding, but afterwards they never had to worry about them again. Non-raiders would have their own "thing" again.

The problem was that the major changes in design philosophy in Wrath of the Lich King threw a whole new spanner in the works. Where the first tier of justice gear in BC had kept people busy for ages due to the slowness of gearing up, WOTLK was too fast and streamlined. Nothing required attunements anymore and the content was so much easier that experienced players just blew right through it. (This is where someone usually pipes up with a comment like: "You're wrong, at the start of WOTLK those heroics were hard too!" Sorry, but no. They were certainly not as faceroll as they became as time went on, and I did have some painful wipes on Loken and Eregos, but it was still an entirely different league compared to BC. In my first heroic Slave Pens run, we wiped three times on the first trash pull until we got the crowd control just right. In my first heroic Utgarde Keep run, we used no CC whatsoever and didn't wipe even once.)

What this meant for the emblem system was that people geared up really quickly and then had no reason to keep running heroics. Raiders weren't running them because they had their own tier of emblems to worry about anyway, and non-raiders simply ran out of things to buy. I can't remember for sure whether the original daily heroics in WOTLK rewarded heroism or valor and couldn't find any data about it, but even if it was valor already, people weren't hugely enthused to keep grinding at a rate of two emblems a day, what with the difficulties of finding a group and everyone only really wanting to bother with certain heroics for their daily. This problem wasn't really new, but it was rearing its head much faster in the new expansion than it had back in BC.

Things only got worse when Blizzard introduced another tier of raider emblems for twenty-five-man Ulduar, as it sent the message that the developers were only interested in letting the raiders advance further, while leaving the dungeon runners in the dust. This is where the system really started to show its cracks in my eyes, because by now it was becoming clear that what had started out as an alternative advancement system for non-raiders had instead turned into a way of giving more gear to raiders, while actively blocking the non-raiders from any further progression because that would mean that they'd be getting the same kinds of goodies as the raiders and we couldn't have that now, could we?

However, Blizzard was aware of the problem, and in patch 3.2 they decided to change things around yet again. They introduced raider emblem tier number three, but converted all the places that used to drop lower tier emblems to emblems of conquest (raid tier two). This meant that everyone suddenly had reason to run heroics again because with the new currency they could now buy gear of the same level as Ulduar twenty-five-man drops, which was a big jump up. Even raiders went back to heroics now, because right up until the patch dropped, many had been working their way through Ulduar only at a slow pace and for many of them conquest emblems still provided some upgrades too. In other words, Blizzard decided that the non-raiders could have the same goodies as the raiders after all, as long as they stayed a tier behind. An improvement in some ways, but at the same time still kind of insulting considering the original purpose of the system.

Another notable change was that the number of items that were available via emblems started to increase with every tier. Presumably the idea was simply that if people had more things to buy, they'd keep gathering currency for longer and thus stay entertained for longer. This was true, but it also caused a slow shift in focus, and for many people the emblems started to become more important than the actual item drops. You could even buy some tier pieces with emblems now. They weren't a bonus that you received during your item hunting anymore; instead you occasionally received a good item drop while grinding for emblems. This development reached its peak during tier nine and ten, when you could buy entire tier sets with nothing but emblems of triumph and frost.

But I am getting ahead of myself. 3.3 repeated what 3.2 had done, introduced raider emblem number four and made everything else drop emblem number three. Interestingly this seemed to cause a bigger outrage than in the previous patch from what I could tell, presumably because it happened that much sooner. By 3.2 everyone could tell that non-raiders were starved for some sort of progression and that it was getting hard to gear up new players for raiding, but when 3.3 gave them even better gear so soon afterwards, it might have seemed too soon for many. The shift in emblem rewards being geared towards raiders and becoming more important than actual raid drops also made it look like dungeon runners were effectively being given raid rewards without raiding.

This is interesting when we compare it to the situation back when the tier six equivalent badge rewards were introduced at the end of Burning Crusade. As I mentioned above, there was some QQ from raiders back then as well, but it wasn't nearly as bad. I think the important difference is that even though both raiders and dungeon runners used the same badges to buy items, the overall loot focus for raiders was still on drops, and those were strictly separate. A raider might scoff at the idea of a non-raider having access to an item that was as good as raid gear, but it still wasn't the same as raid gear. The raider essentially retained a cosmetic reward for having acquired his gear via raiding. Also, heroics in BC never reached the same level of triviality as they did in late WOTLK, so non-raiders were still working hard for their badges. It didn't feel unfair, somehow.

In 3.3 on the other hand, the combination of massive stat inflation due to hard modes and the introduction of the dungeon finder made heroics more trivial than ever, giving people the exact same rewards that raiders had worked hard for only a few months ago. A full set of tier gear was mostly bought with emblems, by raiders and non-raiders alike. In fact, the dungeon finder made things so easy that it even became worth grinding the daily heroic for those two raid tier emblems you'd get as reward every day. Basically, aside from not mainly being targeted at non-raiders anymore, emblems had also ceased to be just a little bonus on the side. Instead they had become the main reward, and this same reward was given to raiders for hard work one month, and then for dungeon runners for running trivial content a few months later.

The sad thing is that Blizzard did not seem to view that as a problem this time, and completely copied that system over into Cataclysm, only doing away with the constantly changing emblems and instead calling them valor points (=current raider tier) and justice points (=heroic tier, current raider tier minus one). On, and you can't buy a full tier set just with points anymore.

So, what do we have now?

A system that was designed as an alternate progression path for non-raiders has been turned into a system that now gives more raid gear (tier pieces etc.) to raiders, while giving the scraps to non-raiders every couple of months.

A system that was meant to complement item drops has largely replaced them.

A system that was meant to leave you at least with a little reward if you couldn't kill the end boss of an instance was given an additional layer that only rewards you if you kill the end boss.

A system that was once designed to be redundant for raiders, now works increasingly hard at bringing raiders back into five-mans they have no interest in. Satchels, anyone?

A system that once wanted to do away with raiders gaining currency from running trivial content now rewards everyone with currency for running trivial content.

You can consider the current badge system good or bad, but I do think it's rather odd that it's basically doing the opposite of what it was originally designed to do now. Do the devs themselves even remember why they started doing things the way they did? Or are they in urgent need of a historian to remind them just how strange some of their decisions appear now when you're looking back at them?

What if WOTLK had never happened?

Klepsacovic expressed some interesting thoughts about Cataclysm last week. In particular he suggested that a lot of the expansion's apparent failings are not so much things that can objectively be classified as problems, but rather that Wrath of the Lich King has changed our views of the game in such a way that we now dislike features that we would have loved only a couple of years ago. Or, as he so distinctly puts it himself in his last sentence: "If WoW had Cataclysm, minus LK, it would be in a much stronger position."

This immediately sent my mind reeling. What if Cataclysm had been the expansion after Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King never happened? I'm not saying that I actually wish that this was the case, but it's an interesting thought experiment. WOTLK introduced so many new mechanics to the game that it's actually quite hard to imagine WoW without them now. But what if?

This kind of speculation is always going to be vague, simply because many of Cataclysm's features are directly based on changes that were previously made in WOTLK. Take raid size for example. If WOTLK hadn't made every raid available in both a ten- and a twenty-five-man version, then Cataclysm's raids would also still only be either one or the other (and going by their overall feel, I'm inclined to say that they were all designed primarily for the larger format). Guilds that were limited to ten-mans in Burning Crusade would have felt left out by this expansion then.

However, I'm pretty sure that nobody would be complaining about Cataclysm raids being too difficult if they had come out straight after Burning Crusade, considering that BC had ended with Sunwell, one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult raid ever at the time. After that, Blackwing Descent & co. would have seemed like good "intro" raids for the new expansion. In fact, hardcore raiders probably would have complained about the content being too easy, especially since BC's attunement requirements are gone and not slowing anyone down anymore, and in this alternate universe there'd be no hard modes either (since that's another WOTLK invention). Since people like to complain regardless, they'd probably have criticised BWD and BoT for their comparatively bland interiors and lack of music.

Likewise, heroic five-mans occasionally wiping people would never have been an issue in a world where most players still remembered spending hours in heroic Shadow Labyrinth, and without a dungeon finder having trained people to expect quick runs involving little personal responsibility. We also wouldn't have started facerolling things quite so quickly if Blizzard had stuck to the old ilevel progression. Did you know that heroic five-mans didn't used to have their own tier back in BC? You basically went in there for badges, crafting materials and the chance of getting an epic from the last boss - which was only good due to being an epic, its actual ilevel was lower than that of a blue drop from normal mode!

With no random dungeon finder there'd still be daily quests for the dungeons, and people would probably feel the lack of max-level normal mode instances even more painfully than they do now. Oh look, the daily is Lost City of the Tol'vir again, what a surprise. Nobody would do the heroic daily if it was Stonecore or Grim Batol, while Vortex Pinnacle would become the new Slave Pens. I just can't decide whether Halls of Origination would be popular or hated - if you actually still had to put work into assembling a group for the daily, then getting badges for seven boss kills would present a pretty sweet reward, but people might still be put off by the length.

You wouldn't be able to accumulate reputation just by wearing the right tabard while instancing, so getting to exalted with all the various factions would actually be slightly more difficult than it is now. Dungeons would only give reputation for an appropriate faction, so Throne of the Tides could give Earthen Ring rep for example, but a place like Halls of Origination doesn't really feel connected to any particular faction and would give nothing. People would probably ask why Blizzard didn't create more alternative ways to get reputation. (Item hand-ins, anyone?)

The old world revamp would probably have been welcomed with less enthusiasm because while vanilla content already started to feel somewhat old in Burning Crusade, I don't think people would have been okay with seeing it replaced with something else just yet. The change in questing style would have felt even more dramatic and off-putting for some people, considering that there was no phasing at all back in BC, and levelling was still a little bit slower back then as well.

Archaeology would still feel incredibly grindy, but people might've been slightly less annoyed with it right after Burning Crusade, seeing how that had some very grindy aspects to it as well that would've still been fresh in people's memories.

So would that have been a better game? In some ways yes, in some ways no. I do agree with Kleps that it's all relative. If you felt that WOTLK was the pinnacle of WoW's development, then it makes sense that the ways in which the developers deviated from that path in Cataclysm won't be appealing to you. However, if (like me) you felt that WoW was at its best during the Burning Crusade era, then I think it's important to be a bit more selective with criticism of the current expansion. You don't have to like all of Cataclysm's features either, but it makes more sense to compare them directly to Burning Crusade than to whinge about things that were already set in motion during Wrath.