World of Warcraft®

Why TBC was the best expansion

It wasn't.

I miss TBC :-(

While one can argue that the current system that makes people experience all (or most) of the new content. It feels like empty content to me.

While I'm not the biggest raider, that's because raiding doesn't give the .. uh.. fulfillment like it used to.

In TBC i only raided (and did dungeons of course) because PvP wasn't all that exciting. I always felt like i had something to achieve in PvE, and finally starting a new raid and clearing it was something i strove for.

Now i can just jump into a random LFR and clear the latest raid, big deal. While LFR isn't exactly the same as normal/heroic, it's still the same raid. And i feel like i have "cleared" it, normal/hc just doesn't feel the same afterwards.

Also, I'm quite annoyed that Heroic doesn't actually mean anything anymore. All the Heroic dungeons are way too easy. While the TBC heroics wasn't superultramega hard, beating them felt like some sort of achievement. And while Heroic raids are harder, i think they could do something more with it then how it is now.

Point is, almost not having any requirements for the latest raids make the raids feel more dull. I just hopped in, i didn't have to do anything to get here. Other then push a button. If i had to gain the required gear through dungeons and other "lesser" raids finally getting into that last raid will feel like it's worth something.

How long do you guys want to discuss this ? It's not like that this standard is coming back ever.
They chose the masses (kid's baddies, etc) over the hardcore players.

Ha!
so the hardcore players are affected because their elitism is being undermined by everyone getting to experience the same game they paid for, which during TBC was reserved to the minority of players?
The majority of players wanting to play a game to it's fullest which they pay for monthly is more important than making a minority of 'hardcore' players feel like special little buttercups.

People who are capable of clearing content fast were not affected :) There are still many reasons to feel like a special little buttercup ^^

05/05/2012 01:08Posted by Sharein

So many TBC fanboys in this thread. Vanilla was the best for me, TBC couldn't even compare. Dungeon Finder and achievements (I love them) ruined Wow a little. But hey that's life.

A mistreated dead horse, but..

.. a game does not stay fun forever, most of these feelings stem from nostalgia. TBC, and classic in particular, had plenty of downsides, but everyone seems to have forgotten about those.

True that. I'm the kind of person that remembers both downsides and upsides ... that's why I miss nothing about pre WotLK era.

* Some form of progression: An example of World of Warcraft at this very moment, you ding level 85, you run some random 5 man heroics & *puff* your ready to raid Dragon Soul... This is not what I would classify as progression, even if you could call it that its a very short & effortless one.

It shouldn't be that simple which is why a lot of posters are referring to TBC, because it had a good progression model... Its not a case that myself & others don't want everyone to experience raid content but it's more of a case that we feel everyone should have to put a bit more effort in to get there, rather than expect it practically handed to them.

Once again, do you mean just seeing DS or clearing all the difficulties. Because "seeing DS" is not the end of current progression. And even with 20% nerf not everyone have cleared "so easy" heroic mode. And no, it's not because people don't want to see the same boss models :P There are many guilds still progressing thru HC DS.

* Social interaction within the game: This is where the realm community comes into play. I have seen various comments flying around on various post of a similar nature, perhaps one of the most troubling comments I have seen is...

"Why should I be forced to spend my game time being social if that's not what I want to do."

It's not really about people not wanting to experience social interaction. Hell, social stuff is the main reason I haven't quit this game several times. But when you speak about server community, those are random people that may or may not suit you for interraction. People are different, have different expectation and they feel best around people that are more similar to themselves. Therefor, for many guilds are THE social interraction that comes from the game. And let me tell you, those are very strong social bonds.

Forcing people to enjoy interraction with your server is like forcing them to interract with whole you neighbourhood, which you possibly may not like.

Guilds are people you chose to interract with. Server communities are random people that happen to play on the same server.

Anyway, great post, shame a lot of people are missing the point completely & going off topic.

I think that what pre WotLK fan tend to miss is that mmo experience is something much more beyond game design. That's why without "going offtopic" you can't see the whole picture (which I do see most of pre WotLK era fan suffer from)

05/05/2012 02:03Posted by Yarathir

Why TBC was the best expansion

It wasn't.

There were only 2 good things about wotlk in my opinion, questing feeling directly related to the main story arc & dual spec implementation, pvp standards were flushed down the toilet in favor of pve mechanics & PvE the long term raiding model being smashed.

While looking for group could be added as the 3rd good addition during wotlk, and yes it was a success initially its brought about severe community issues.

05/05/2012 01:42Posted by Azriyel

* Social interaction within the game: This is where the realm community comes into play. I have seen various comments flying around on various post of a similar nature, perhaps one of the most troubling comments I have seen is...

That same community that blacklisted feral druids for taking "rogue loot", the same community that said "prot paladins do not exist", same community that called "elementals for lolamentals" ? Community was the bane of all evil then as much as it is now. Just those who managed to struggle trough and establish reputation regardless of class were on good tide wave, but that was in fact minority.

Do not think that community was any different (better-worse) than it is now. It just has shifted its problems from hybrids to everyone, still being so dramatic over loot.

It's so true. I did suffer a lot from discrimination due to the spec I enjoyed to play the most (while it was perfectly vialable to play even with all it's flaws). I could not join a hardcore guild ONLY because I loved being a caster dps druid, which was a blasphemy for "the community". Maybe that's what shattered my nostalgia glasses :P

Also, I'm quite annoyed that Heroic doesn't actually mean anything anymore. All the Heroic dungeons are way too easy. While the TBC heroics wasn't superultramega hard, beating them felt like some sort of achievement. And while Heroic raids are harder, i think they could do something more with it then how it is now.

Point is, almost not having any requirements for the latest raids make the raids feel more dull. I just hopped in, i didn't have to do anything to get here. Other then push a button. If i had to gain the required gear through dungeons and other "lesser" raids finally getting into that last raid will feel like it's worth something.

As I recall it, doint heroics at the end expantion wasn't anything exiting in TBC either...

05/05/2012 06:35Posted by Bennyblanco

It wasn't.

There were only 2 good things about wotlk in my opinion, questing feeling directly related to the main story arc & dual spec implementation, pvp standards were flushed down the toilet in favor of pve mechanics & PvE the long term raiding model being smashed.

In my oppinion it's TBC and arena that had the worse influence on WoW PvP model. Trying to fix it Blizzard only hurt PvE class balance.

While looking for group could be added as the 3rd good addition during wotlk, and yes it was a success initially its brought about severe community issues.

Those issues where there always. LFD only opened people's eyes.

I'd just like to say that how the encounters have changed is not the real problem brought up. I still think that they way they design PVE encounters is solid (save for the fact that Spine HC isn't really viable with certain specs), but the problem is that they have introduced way too much convenience into the game, and that they seem to have a knack for changing things that already work as opposed to changing things that don't.

The MoP beta contains a couple of good examples from my own spec:

1: Changing the already working Feral Spirit (the wolves) into guardians, and by "working" I mean acting according to logic and always attack while in combat - wich now isn't even close to working properly in the beta.

2: NOT changing the way searing flames work from the searing totem, but instead adding to the problem in MoP.

In short, they should read the class forums alot more often.

I did NOT read the whole 26 pages thread, ... nono never ever, two pages only ... (got other things to do aswell XD)

But i simply agree with the second point of the OP ... (not everything tho)
With my hunter i did not see the whole SW either ... but i raided everything from kara over ssc/TK and BT/MH ... and i really loved it the way it was. (same goes for MC/BWL/AQ/NAXX on my rogue)

The LFR system is not that horrible as some people say it is. It is a good way to show casuals the whole aspects of the game, but I would love it to be a little bit harder. I mean clearing the whole instance with 8 bosses in less than 3 hours?????
Clearing MC back then with 40 fully T1 or T2 equipped people took you a whole evening (starting at 7pm ending at midnight) and if something bad happened even two.
No this is not a nostalgic post btw.

But to clear one thing out:
Vanilla was the most time intensiv part of the whole WoW ... I have 148 days /played on my rogue (8 days were lvling from 60 to 85) and this rogue stopped raiding when TBC hit.
TBC was a little less time intensiv. My hunter "just" has 120 days /played 80 of them on lvl 70 (see what i want to state?)

How should a casual who really has to work his/her butt off to afford a flat, car, family bring up the time to spend 140 respectively 80 REAL LIFE days ... (those are TOTALLED ... NOT days you own the game) to play a game??

When i had the time to do so I was in school. I had enough time to play. Now I do not and I am sure most of the WoW player base does not have the time either.

So the LFR system is a good one (escept the very ... erm ... low difficulty)

Another thing to balance the whole game out would be to reinvent the reputation part of the game ... gain reputation in order to gain access to heroics and even LFR (YES this is a good idea trust me, even if I get mocked and kicked in the !@# and whatsoever there is. You will have fun with ONE class or two and you will not have 10 different characters on one server you get bored after 2 hours of gameplay) ... this means some simple points for EVERYONE:
- EVERYONE is actually ABLE to learn the class he/she is playing
- the class the player plays with gets cared for
- since the majority of the playerbase actually knows the class that is played with: the difficulty can be raised. At least do this for MoP ...

So i do not want /12354664 days played monsters ... but it is a real deadly poison for the whole of WoW if there are /2 days played misbehaving LITTLE monsters with an ilvl of a straight 384 who try to talk you into how worse you are playing while they are only using the three finger system of playing ... (hitting two buttons to do dmg, tank or heal and going forward with the two mouse buttons)

Reinvent CC in every instance ... at the moment you just need a healer and a tank for Hour of Twilight ... :( I barely see a sheep ... or a frozen mob ... especially because it is not needed anymore ... and this is a VERY important aspect of the game aswell.

So long story short: there is a good way to balance the whole game out for both kind of players ... hardcore ones and casuals aswell. Just try that. Even for those who enjoyed vanilla and TBC as much as I did aswell and also for those who started with Wotlk or Cata who sadly missed a very interesting part of playing a Role Play Game.

I hope i wrote my opinion at least a little bit understandable and maybe at least even a MVP reads it.

However it wasn't just the players that defined what a class could & couldn't do, take a look at the old tier gears (tiers 1, 2 & 3) designed by Blizzard & you will see the reasons as to why Druids, Paladins & Shamans were expected to go healer... Also Druids & Shamans as caster's didn't work to well due to raids such as AQ 20/40 the mobs within had a high amount of nature resist/immunities, the same reason why Fire Mages were a no in Molten Core.

Thats what I means aswell btw ;)

On the comment quoted in the OP of this thread that vanilla didn't require perfection is bollox. Anyone here remember Razorgore? That fight took a long time to work with 40 man raids.

A lot of bosses in BWL needed a decent level of perfection and coordination.

And what is bad about some kind of perfection and knowledge of your class? It took us plenty of time aswell to do him, but we did him.
Like in MC the second hardest boss was the first one ... should be like this in my opinion if a guild wants to raid. THEN and only THEN you will start thinking about tactics and be in expectation that the instance can maybe become harder every boss.

In my oppinion it's TBC and arena that had the worse influence on WoW PvP model. Trying to fix it Blizzard only hurt PvE class balance.

Not really,
Specs like ret paladin came into tbc as a joke & left as joke, there were spec issues regardless of pvp, there were hardly any drastic dmg nerfs because damage wasnt a problem like it became in wotlk.
Now wotlk specs in pvp on the other hand, lol, tanks having higher burst dmg than their dps specs, holy paladins keeping their healing gear & shifting to prot spec and becoming no.1 PvP healer.. as prot.. simply down to poor spec design.
Stuff like that made spec issues 100x worse than prior wotlk & they've somewhat rectified it in Cataclysm.

Those issues where there always. LFD only opened people's eyes.

Totally, i played in groups in tbc a nice person, keeping in contact with good tanks & decent dps & healers after dungeon runs were over and never ninjaed 1 item for years because i knew i had to be polite & behave.

since lfd when i tank if someone does anything i dont like i start a vote kick, sometimes i start a vote kick if i dont like the race/gender combo they picked, if someone in the group messes up gets me killed i pull the dungeon & leave with the middle finger up , i need on everything while playing my 3x tanks just because i want the enchant mats, and tbf im not going to see them again anway.

point being, you had to work together to achieve something prior, now you dont owe 1 second of your time to anyone, btw the community will keep getting worse from here on out, its inevitable with the direction this game is headed.

* Some form of progression: An example of World of Warcraft at this very moment, you ding level 85, you run some random 5 man heroics & *puff* your ready to raid Dragon Soul... This is not what I would classify as progression, even if you could call it that its a very short & effortless one.

It shouldn't be that simple which is why a lot of posters are referring to TBC, because it had a good progression model... Its not a case that myself & others don't want everyone to experience raid content but it's more of a case that we feel everyone should have to put a bit more effort in to get there, rather than expect it practically handed to them.

Once again, do you mean just seeing DS or clearing all the difficulties. Because "seeing DS" is not the end of current progression. And even with 20% nerf not everyone have cleared "so easy" heroic mode. And no, it's not because people don't want to see the same boss models :P There are many guilds still progressing thru HC DS.

Lets just put raid difficulty to one side for the time being as this subject matter is what I mean by missing the point.

Lets forget about how easy or hard TBC was, if someone wanted to start raiding whether it be a new player or an alt of a more advanced player you both had to start at the beginning,

5 mans ---> tier 4 raids (Karazhan, Gruul, Magtheridon) ---> tier 5 raids (Serpentshrine Cavern, The Eye) ---> tier 6 raid (Black Temple) ---> Sunwell Plateau

^^ This is why people are referring to TBC as a good progression model, as you feel as if your working towards something.

Where as at the moment in World of Warcraft Cataclysm you can obtain everything a character needs (full 378 item level of gear) from 5 man heroics & then you can hope straight into the Dragon Soul raid on normal.

An analogy could be.. there is a corridor of booby traps with a locked door at the end, players just need to traverse the corridor find the key & unlock the door... Where as now Blizzard disarmed all of the booby traps, unlocked the door & left it wide open.. This is why I said the following quote...

This is not what I would classify as progression, even if you could call it that its a very short & effortless one.

Even the end of WotLK had a little bit more of a progression model in place, players could run the newer 5 man heroics for item level 232 gear, however you couldn't get everything you needed from these heroics alone & so trips to Trial of the Crusader was necessary before entering Icecrown Citadel.

* Social interaction within the game: This is where the realm community comes into play. I have seen various comments flying around on various post of a similar nature, perhaps one of the most troubling comments I have seen is...

"Why should I be forced to spend my game time being social if that's not what I want to do."

It's not really about people not wanting to experience social interaction. Hell, social stuff is the main reason I haven't quit this game several times. But when you speak about server community, those are random people that may or may not suit you for interraction. People are different, have different expectation and they feel best around people that are more similar to themselves. Therefor, for many guilds are THE social interraction that comes from the game. And let me tell you, those are very strong social bonds.

Forcing people to enjoy interraction with your server is like forcing them to interract with whole you neighbourhood, which you possibly may not like.

Guilds are people you chose to interract with. Server communities are random people that happen to play on the same server.

Anyway, great post, shame a lot of people are missing the point completely & going off topic.

I think that what pre WotLK fan tend to miss is that mmo experience is something much more beyond game design. That's why without "going offtopic" you can't see the whole picture (which I do see most of pre WotLK era fan suffer from)

Part of the biggest killer for the decline & degrade in realm community is not just the LFD / LFR systems, though they do have their part to play, which is a change that took place at the beginning of the Cataclysm... The merging of 10 & 25 man raids into the same lockout, making you choose one or the other rather than participating in both.

During WotLK The LFD system come into play but a reasonable realm community was still present due to the pugging scene, you raid 10 man with your guild & pugged 25 man or vice versa. The pugging scene was big contribution to the realm community, I for one met some very fun & interesting players that made it onto my friends list & we started doing more things together as time went on, All thanks to the PUG in WotLK :p

as during TBC both Druids & Paladins were accepted as tanks. Also the examples you have provided I feel fall more into the MMO category of "in-game culture" as the players decided what was acceptable & what was taboo or a no no.

Towards 2nd half of the game, yes. But not 1st half. Since I was on front line of those hybrids movements for proper loot, spells and such. we made made videos, in realm, off realm, forum and whatnot campaigns showing that druids, shaman and paladins a lot more than meets the eye. Hybrid non healers were not widely accepted before T6 era. And still trough T4 and T5 those very players had to work double to prove it.

The fact that BT opened some door and SWP might have let few in does not mean anything was fine before wotlk. More widely accepted, yes. But think what your average group ahd in MGT, or what your average ZA raid had in ? Nope, it wasn't shaman dps, or druid dps or paladin dps. Tanks maybe because of general lack of tanks made people pull from the straw, but that was not widely accepted.

Do not get me wrong, I do not hate TBC, I just refuse to idolize it as some people here do. Community was always s**** just as someone said : LFR made more players to notice it.

And those bashing WoTLK. Let me ask :

Really ? So you say WoTLK only had bad ? No good music, no technological improvements, more linear and full zones, better class design, better raid compositions (aka less class stacking) designs, better PvP balance (this can be argued, due to some FoTMs, but if you call TBC PvP balanced, I can easily counter that), better quest and daily quest designs, reputation gains and so on ? No improvements on flight paths, no... NOTHING GOOD AT ALL ? Item trade systems, easier profession levelling - more linear, hybrids made raid viable, better customer service and so on... Oh really? WOTLK had no good at all ? NONE ?

I am sure someone would call me wrath baby, but i just say - I've been here from eu launch. My fave era was vanilla, but even in vanilla was so much bad. I do not fan TBC, but I see some of the best things come from TBC. I do not like WoTLK raid model, yet WoTLK did a lot of good and guess what even cataclysm has its good sides.

05/05/2012 02:38Posted by Jito

Before patch 4.3, would you have claimed that the progression model of Cataclysm wasn't good?

Yes. The old raiding tiers have lost their meaning after new patch goes live ever since ToC. There is no reason what so ever to go back. You dont think there's something wrong with a model like that? Dev time nicely wasted.

And TBC was the last expansion that actually catered the players, now it only tries to attract new players. Now it's just re-used content which is new and exciting to the new players. Now Asians that are on decline, we get cute and cuddly pandas. Also we they havent tried to lure in the kids around 7 years of age, so they added pokemon. Next expansion will be Hello Kitty island and the main villain just hugs us all and brings happiness to people. Everyone will be given complementary epics, since we all know how hard 5-year-olds get when they dont get what they want.

05/05/2012 11:41Posted by Azriyel

Towards 2nd half of the game, yes. But not 1st half. Since I was on front line of those hybrids movements for proper loot, spells and such. we made made videos, in realm, off realm, forum and whatnot campaigns showing that druids, shaman and paladins a lot more than meets the eye. Hybrid non healers were not widely accepted before T6 era. And still trough T4 and T5 those very players had to work double to prove it.

I remember crying my eyes out if I did not get that ele shaman in my group. Also remember shadow priests being regen-machines for their group.

The group system is one thing I miss, probably because I did not raidlead.

I also miss the days when the classes were not so homogeneous.

Jito, let me comment on one thing you said in part 1of the thread. Sorry I couldn't resist letting it go. :P

The LFD and the LFR are arguably the two biggest design successes for Blizzard. There's no need to even elaborate that, because that's just a fact.

Are you aware of what you said here? Did you just call the system of mindless, antisocial gameplay with 24 bots (often behaving like jerks, which makes them even worse than bots) the biggest design success of a game which over the years delivered tons of awesomeness, used to sparkle some real emotions and trigger insane immersion? For me you have just offended hundreds of WoW devs for whom this is an insult. The current system promotes one value: accessibility but is a slap in the face for handful of others: immersion, social gameplay, server communities, responsibility in game, individual approach to the game. This, as you call, "design success" is thus a pretty nihilistic one.

You seem to base your view on argument that if people use something, they enjoy it and it's good. This gives you F Grade from psychology and gaming theory. People will always choose the more accessible path and thus the nature of games has always been based on toying with the gamer, stimulating their dreams, hopes and desires this way. I can assure you that if you rewarded one epic per login, people would use it. 99,9% of them. Does it mean we should implement it? No because they would hate it. And use it. And so it works. I am fairly sure that there is a large group of players that use LFD/RF as lesser evil and they don't quite enjoy it despite the usage. Most players don't have the will to resist accessibility when the game stops toying with them. This is why it's is the dev who is the responsible. A hunger for positive reinforcements is infinite so it's the developer who has to say "Ok, stop" and be aware that from certain point just giving away more accessible things doesn't cope up with more fun from the game. I for one have stepped into raid maybe 4-5 times in TBC. I was totally casual but driven and motivated by things I could *not* see. Now I can everything. And I don't give a damn.

I don't want to portray current WoW designers as laymans since I am sure each of them is more experienced than all of us discussing in this thread together. But the whole gaming world has been dealing with how to digest the boom of social media and casual gamer. This is a pretty new situation even for such veterans like Blizzard. And looking at gaming industry in general, the choking on is noticeable. After euphoria fades out I am fairly sure that many leading gamedevelopers will have facepalm on their faces, looking at how silly anti-gaming tendencies entered into great games. The huge globalisation of gameplay fails already. The model of playing with strangers whenever I want to might work in FIFA 12 friendlies or Battlefield deathmatches but will not work in social games. It was introduced as pro-social and full of open windows but it paradoxically results in loneliness in the mob and less personal gameplay. Farmville works when I can show altruism, can you provide a hint of any motivational emotion in LFR (despite rage)?

TL:DR: anything that lessens bonds between the players in social game is against the game. Calling the WoW's biggest community/social destroyer as the biggest design success proves how lost and uncertain in the new era of gaming we all are.

The LFR system is not that horrible as some people say it is. It is a good way to show casuals the whole aspects of the game, but I would love it to be a little bit harder. I mean clearing the whole instance with 8 bosses in less than 3 hours?????
Clearing MC back then with 40 fully T1 or T2 equipped people took you a whole evening (starting at 7pm ending at midnight) and if something bad happened even two.
No this is not a nostalgic post btw.

My guild did 3 hour MCs... Also, having 40 fully T1 or T2 people wasn't that common. It was extremly hard to fully gear whole guild in any tier.

... this means some simple points for EVERYONE:
- EVERYONE is actually ABLE to learn the class he/she is playing
- the class the player plays with gets cared for
- since the majority of the playerbase actually knows the class that is played with: the difficulty can be raised. At least do this for MoP ...

The problem lies totally elsewhere. People should know the basics of their class/spec gameplay when they reach lvl 85. WoW doesn't teach you how to play thru leveling process ... and tbh it never did. To really master you class you still need to do a lot of reading since from pure gameplay you will miss a lot of quite crutial information you need in order to play properly.

Until that happens, we can't have hight levels of difficulty for pug groups because it will end with tons of frustration as it was at the start of Cata (what was the reason for the first wave of massive quits). I do hope scenario mechanics will open the door for ingame tutorials so the game itself can fully prepare new players for what awaits for them at max lvl.

05/05/2012 10:09Posted by Bennyblanco

Those issues where there always. LFD only opened people's eyes.

Totally, i played in groups in tbc a nice person, keeping in contact with good tanks & decent dps & healers after dungeon runs were over and never ninjaed 1 item for years because i knew i had to be polite & behave.

since lfd when i tank if someone does anything i dont like i start a vote kick, sometimes i start a vote kick if i dont like the race/gender combo they picked, if someone in the group messes up gets me killed i pull the dungeon & leave with the middle finger up , i need on everything while playing my 3x tanks just because i want the enchant mats, and tbf im not going to see them again anway.

point being, you had to work together to achieve something prior, now you dont owe 1 second of your time to anyone, btw the community will keep getting worse from here on out, its inevitable with the direction this game is headed.

That is problem of your attitude - not the LFD. If you need a higher power to force you to behave like a decent person than I'm very sorry for you.

I behaved exactly the same in Vanilla as I do now. I don't need anyone to force me to keep some standards.

Also, it's not true that you couldn't achieve anything while acting badly pre LFD. I knew plenty of douchbags who did all the bad things to the community and still had their own group of friends (other douchbags) to play with.