coldheat - Weblog von Christian Mücke 
Looking back at two years of the 2nd World of Warcraft expansion.
World of Warcraft – Wrath of the Lich King Epilogue
With patch 4.0.1 and the intro cinematic being released, the third expansion for World of Warcraft is approaching fast. As usual i want to look back at what we played in the last two years of the game. To preparate for the article, i went back to The Burning Crusade. Visited some old instances, watched some videos and looked at older screenshots. If i should sum up Lich King as an expansion it would be generic improvements. At this point Lich King looks to be the better expansion that won’t last as long in my memories, as The Burning Crusade. For the next walls of text, i’ll try to go into more details, i will exclude class balance though.
Setting and Quests
There’s a roadmap that leaked in early WoW beta, about what continent potential upcoming expansions would cover. So far that map seems 100% legit and so it was no suprise, that Northrend was the 2nd new landmass to play. Blizzard kinda drop the first ball here. Coming from two years of playing spacy environments in Burning Crusade the more traditional fantasy Northrend seemed superior. Comparing both settings right now, i’m convinced Outland will be remembered longer. Northrend lacks the scale and variety of Burning Crusade’s zones.
By far the biggest strength of this expansion, Blizzard really improved the quest design for the game. That’s where i see the biggest improvements. Playing the game solo keeps up with single player offline RPGs. Again the major issue for a game of this size is scale. Where dozens of quests is enough for other games, WoW needs hundreds and thousands. Sure overlap in terms of design can not fully be avoided, but in Lich King they expanded the Kill 10 foozles blueprint, with phasing – e.g. realtime world server instancing for single players – being the new killer tool to design story focused quests. Actually this is a whole separate part of the game so to speak and something i so look forward to in Cataclysm. Eploring new zones by questing kinda is a unique experience. If you like this kind of gameplay, even Lich King is perfect already. What it spoiled some, may only be the popularity of the game, with dozens of players waiting and hunting single shared quest NPCs. Dungeon Finder will take the heat out of this for Cataclysm i guess.
Raids
This topic won’t be pretty. Let me just say this: raid dungeon and encounter design in Lich King is the only area where Blizzard really took at least two steps backwards. Let’s start with the news they pushed months prior release, that their raid progression for this expansion would be separated into two sizes. With Karazhan in Burning Crusade being so successful, they took it to the next level and offering 10 player versions for every new raid instance. Their proof of concept should be the two year old instance Naxxramas. Blizzard chose this as raid Tier 1 to look if their designers really can come up with two scaled versions of single encounters. They succeeded to proof 10man raids being viable and they failed to introduce a compelling first raid tier for this expansion. Let’s compare Malygos, Sartharion and Naxxramas against Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon from Burning Crusade. Blizzard kinda beta tested too many new ideas in Lich King raid tier 1. 10man scale, vehicle based combat (Malygos) and multiple tiered difficulty for the same encounter (Sartharion).
After a rough start, Blizzard was about to drop the single best raid instance they have ever produced and probably one of the top 3 i have ever played. Ulduar was the shit. Ulduar finally was all the small parts of the new expansion coming together. This dungeon looks good, plays good and rewards you well for it. Ulduar is the only instance in this expansion, wich flaws are minimal. Remember the doubts for the dungeon and encounters? A complete boss about vehicle based combat? Look how well this really turned out to be. The brilliance of Ulduar was the concept of Sartharion adopted to many bosses. Choose your own meta-difficulty: heroic Mimiron. My raid never beat it, but i won’t forget every single try. What an amazing encounter. Ulduar is the single highlight of Lich King raids. It’s a perfect dungeon. Period,
Just when you thought Blizzard figured out to deliver, they droped the worst raid. I won’t even begin to count the flaws of Crusaders‘ Coliseum. Nothing about this raid is good. Everything is flawed on so many levels. It’s really awful…and then we waited, and waited and waited even longer for Blizzard to built the climax dungeon for the expansion. For a quick summary: Icecrown is good but not very much. Compared to Burning Crusade’s climax dungeon Black Temple, Icecrown pales. There are some very good design ideas here, but compared to Ulduar Blizzard underperformed in Icecrown. The only boss in here i will remember for a long time is the Professor. Everyhing else, including the Lich King himself? Very generic and forgotten fast. The built-up and pacing of Icecrown is lacking and very few bosses impress. There are too many high-concept encounters. The Blood Queen being the perfect example. It’s a gimmick fight, where your raid has to master the Vampire buff, while juggling the usual generic tasks. What in theory sounds neat, is executed very lackluster. As a healer this is one of the worst fights i’ve ever played. Spam your heal and pray for others not to fuck it up. That’s fun…not.
Progression
Try to count the number of points and emblems collected over the last two years. It boggles the mind how much they tinkered with progression paths. I’m conviced it’s very wise to lock players into one path for Cataclysm. While it will kill 25man raids for sure, playing both 10s and 25s along each other doesn’t make sense. Heroic 5mans were rendered futile way too fast. Lich King lacked any difficulty small scale content. Part of this being the result of the messed up item progression. Blizzard never intended the game to have to epic-epic levels of raid gear. Heroics messed up so much, that players outgeared content within a blink of an eye. This is why encounters became more and more twitch-based. Raids wiping within 1 GCD? Unbelievable once. Reality now. This is why they pull the handbrake for Cataclysm. Slow it down and streamline it.
Scope and Scale
It all comes down to this. I’ll look at Burning Crusade encounters and start to memorize the pain and suffering. Kaelthas destroyed three of my raids back then. Big experienced raids, just vanished cause we couldn’t beat the encounter. It beat us. Almost literally and still, if i remember the first time we got him into phase 5, when he destroys the room, floats up into the air and takes the raid with him…amazing. An unforgettable gaming moment. Something like that was sacrificed for accessibility in Wrath of the Lich King. Yeah heroic bosses still beat the crap out of you, but why bang your head against the door, when you got the key right in your pocket (normal mode). Here’s a secret: you value rewards more, if you have to really earn it. In Lich King earning rewards did not exist (normal mode) or wasn’t worth it (heroic).
Raid progression and instances just felt more epic in Burning Crusade. I don’t doubt that 10man raids are popular and a good business decision for Blizzard but it also decreased the epicness of the game at least for me. The really epic scale got lost and i don’t see it coming back for Cataclysm. The game changed over the last two years of this expansion. It’s different now. It’s way more bite sized. for sure. Dungeon Finder, Weekly Raid Quests and all the little UI improvements set new standards but in the end i will rate Wrath of the Lich King below the prior The Burning Crusade. I know it’s nitpicking cause at the end of the article one thing is for sure. To rate MMORPGs the scale goes from 0 to World of Warcraft, even Lich King doesn’t change that.
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Like usual your conclusion hit the spot. I’ve just looked into an older article from me and there I share your view that Vanilla and Burning Crusade had clearly the better and more memorable Raid-Dungeons with the only exception of Ulduar. Especially the Mimiron Hardmode Encounter is clearly a Milestone (and pre HP Nerf and with only max 226 item LvL) it was really a tough but doable fight. The cool thing was that you had to adjust your as Tobold puts it „Simon-Say’s Moves“ to control the fire in a strategic way and you had a bit more to do than just consider raid-rule 2b „Don’t stand in shit that hurts you“. Kael’thas is another good example thank godness he didn’t kill our raid but i think we used nearly 90% time of 3IDs to beat him and succeeded downing him pre nerf. I could go on, Twins, C’thun, Classic Naxx everywhere you faced hard encounters and the taste of victory was very sweet once you downed one of those encounters. It felt more epic.Blizzard maybe succeeded in making the game more accessible for everybody but sacrificed the epicness with their far far to steep Item-progression. Roughly 13 Itemlevel increments per Raidtier was far far to much. Mudfluation at it’s worst! Nearly every Raidtier you could swap out almost every single Itemslot with a new BIS-Item. A new player (or twink) could jump from itemlevel ~178 questblues and greens right into 232 Epics, skip all previous raidtiers and is fully equipped to kick serious butt in Icecrown – Epic Fail! Blizzard killed their own content bei short cutting it.
It still don’t get it how you analyze that the entryraid in BC – Karazhan and Gruul was a big success and then strive for a tactic that eliminates all lower raidtiers below your current top-raid-dungeon is beyond me.
I’am biased when it comes to Burning Crusade Tier 1. Karazhan to me is on the same level as Ulduar in terms of overall quality and impact. I was expecting a second Karazhan-like experience in Lich King Tier 1 and it just did not deliver.
Overall raid progression in this expansion was so smooth, that my raid couldn’t really enjoy first kills. Lich King 25 being the exception. The concept of heroic raid bosses fails, in terms of mental rewarding so to speak. By the time you beat Heroic bosses, you farmed them on normal dozens of times before and wiped on them even more in heroic. The reward for the average player is „shiny old toy+1“. The reward for the same task in BC was entry to new content and items you aquired for the first time ever.
Combine that with the fact, that so many first kills in Lich King were real shady ones, with Heroic Lich King being the exception. This one truly was made for the history books of gaming. This was a Micheal Jordan level of performing way beyond other players. This kill will stick for sure.
I guess WoW really does want me to continue to play, cause i just gifted my main a very rare mount after the 1st kill of the Halloween event boss this year. Sometimes the random numbers generator really works on your side. Amazing.
Yeah thats the essence of the whole problem. When you aren’t involved in the race for the world and/or european/US 1st Kills – the heroic version of the encounters often become pale and are acompanied by a bitter taste of been there done that mixed with the feeling that you just beated Boss X with your right hand tied to your back. That is just not heroic. Remeber the last time where your random actionhero in a movie crippeled his ability to fight his opponent on purpose to make it more exciting?!? Never? Exactly! This just don’t happen for a reason. It is used in movies sometimes for a quick laugh when nameless henchmen No. 47 gets kicked his ass but I’ve think I never seen it happen during the climatic showdown.You just saw the same death animation of the same old pixelheep and get a item that has the same old form fit and function. Some other player has to pull out the magnifying glass and examine your items to see the difference – how epic is that?!?
As a sidenote though, Blizzard nailed the concept of raid „heroics“ in Ulduar, where it was called hardmode. Many reasons why it worked so damn fine in Ulduar? Hardmodes could be triggered without the UI. Hardmodes most of the time changed the core idea of the encounter very much and not just buffed the numbers. Hardmodes rewards were unique loot items.
It’s sad that they broke the system right after in the Coliseum. I understand their reasons. They invest too much ressources into new encounters, to not have the majority of active raiders participate in them. In Burning Crusade both top raid tier instances were played by less than 10% of the raiding community. In LK if anything, only Algalon comes close to that as real „exclusive“ content…even now…long after mudlfation trivialized the access to him.