Wrath of the Lich King: Classic
WoW Classic has progressed to Wrath of the Lich King. But there's a problem.
Last July, about a month after The Burning Crusade: Classic was re-released, I wrote that I was incredibly impressed by the improvements TBC demonstrated over the original Classic experience. The expansion held my attention better than I could have ever anticipated. Everything was better: balance, dungeons, and late-game progression had all been improved.
I found a great guild after writing that post and played for another three months. I did Gruul and Kara every week. I continued to enjoy myself. But by the time Phase 2's release approached, I was getting bored. I quit the game on the night of my 15th run of Karazhan and did not look back.
The Burning Crusade lost me once I had reached the same wall with raiding that I had in Classic. When nothing but RNG was left to gate my progress, the likely outcome was that I would never get the gear I wanted. I had my fun, and I played hundreds of hours, but I left right before Phase 2 and did not return until the Wrath pre-patch. And that was fine. I didn't need to experience Black Temple or Serpentshrine Cavern. That really wasn't necessary.
But Wrath brought me back.
Wrath of the Lich King
The pre-patch launched at the end of August. With it came a gameplay overhaul and the new Death Knight class. I hear that DKs were not originally in the pre-patch, but Blizzard decided to include them this time around.
A few weeks earlier, I awoke on an early morning with a knot beneath my sternum. A haze of nostalgic anxiety choked me. I was desperate to relive my childhood and play a Death Knight. I needed to do so now.
This fit of nostalgia didn't last long, but it was enough to keep me excited for August 30 anyway. Arthas was my favorite character in Warcraft 3 as a kid, and in my brief flirtations with WoW growing up I always tried leveling DKs. They were so cool! I must have played through the DK starting zone thirty times as a tweenager, including twice during the Wrath beta.
So when the day came, I made my Death Knight. I was going to play Frost spec, and this time, unlike in my youth, I would make it to 70.
I liked Korakos even more than my mage. He became my new main during the pre-patch. I ran through most of the late-game content in TBC that had been released while I was away, and the only raids he didn’t finish were Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau. I ground out a full set of Season 4 Brutal Gladiator gear, and even had the good luck in Karazhan that had always eluded my mage:
The power spike of Wrath balance made TBC end-game content trivially easy. My fire mage used to top charts every raid with around 1.2k single target DPS, and that was as high as I could go. After the pre-patch I was doing 1.8k single target without any clue how to play.
This month-long pre-patch period where I ran raids and spammed Alterac Valley was the most fun that I have ever had with World of Warcraft. I played over one hundred hours in three weeks. If this was what Wrath would be like, then it surely would be as good as people said.
The Best Expansion
It has been the broad consensus for as long as I can remember that Wrath of the Lich King is the best WoW expansion. One needn’t wonder why. The class balance is vastly improved. The raid content is very good. The PvP is more fleshed-out and better-paced.
Personally, despite my love for Death Knights, I had the most nostalgia for TBC. I was old enough by 2009 that I no longer watched my brother on raid nights, and I didn’t sit with my parents while they tried to clear heroic dungeons. I had almost no familiarity with any of Wrath’s content.
Now I do. It's been two weeks since the official release of Wrath of the Lich King: Classic. Korakos is level 80 and has done one raid and every Heroic, while poor Saline is still only level 73.
Wrath is not without merit. The core gameplay is greatly improved over TBC. Every class is viable and much more fun to play. I suspect this is why it is held in such regard. The zones are gorgeous and incredibly atmospheric. There is even a story. But after two weeks, I feel compelled to take a break from my actual work and report that I do not think Wrath is very good.
In fact, I think it's bad. I don't like it at all.
Let's start with the core leveling experience. In TBC, the XP required to reach level 61 is extremely low. You'll level up within two or three runs of Hellfire Ramparts. After that it slows down significantly, but this start has the effect of allowing the player to get his new abilities for the expansion right away. You can start experimenting with your new toys from the start.
No thought has gone into the pacing in Wrath. Every level requires 1.5 million XP. Every mob in Northrend gives ~1000 XP on a kill. Every quest--from 70 to 80--gives 20,000 XP. If you're level 79 and you skipped Borean Tundra, returning there is going to be faster than heading up to Icecrown.
This monotony does not so much thicken the morass of questing as it does turn it into lava. Viscous and deadly, leveling up provides no sense of progress anywhere in Northrend. The systems in place even punish you for gaining levels, as special stats like +Crit score decrease in potency as you increase in level. In TBC this was compensated for by gear, since no one had +Crit equipment yet. But here, I started Wrath with 34% Crit on my DK; after 24 hours at level 80, I'm down to around 25%. If I ever get it back to where it started, it will be at the very end of the expansion.
Why did I even level up? I’m getting weaker by getting stronger!
Losing Crit feels like shit. It's frustrating and ruins the fantasy of progression. It makes the whole game feel (even more) pointless.
The placement of new abilities makes no sense. At 73 my mage still can't make any water worth drinking. She hasn't earned anything unique to Wrath except Living Bomb, which is from a talent. On my DK, the two most important abilities I received while leveling were Empower Rune Weapon at 75 and Army of the Dead at 80. But Army of the Dead isn’t even any good. Why was it at 80? Why not 79?
You don’t feel like you’re getting anything new by leveling up. You get weaker, in exchange for one talent point.
The zones themselves are beautiful, but they are badly designed. Wrath was Blizzard's first attempt to make questing “engaging” with varied mission structure and vehicles. The results are nightmarish. The long quest chains in Wrath are horrific. As tedious as "Slay 25 Gnolls" and "Retrieve 90 Murloc Spines" are as objectives, they feed back into the primary gameplay loop: kill enemies, get XP. You are playing the game by doing them.
When you turn yourself into a hawk and steal eggs from gryphon nests, you are not playing the game.
The new vehicle quests are utter shit. You will rarely have any idea of what you are meant to do. You will need to do some very specific action but not be told what it is or why. Your stats and talents will not matter. Even if you do everything correctly you might still fail, because the true difficulty of Wrath lies in these vehicle sections. Meanwhile the vehicles themselves are buggy and poorly implemented, so you might do the correct thing but not receive credit anyway.
A few vehicle quests probably would have been fine. But they are everywhere. They almost always conclude large chains, which means you have to do them to get the best quest rewards.
The other attempts at designing more engaging quests are sometimes for the better, but they inevitably have the result of overcomplicating the objectives to such an extent that: 1) you'll never be able to figure out what the designers want by just reading the poorly written quest text; and 2) you'll actually be required to pay attention to the game, which is the last thing I wanted from WoW.
I have listened to dozens of audiobooks while playing World of Warcraft over the previous years. This is what I like about WoW. It is simple and mindless. Wrath is still mindless, but I only managed to make it through one audiobook while leveling this time. I had to keep pausing what I was listening to because the game was demanding too much attention.
More complexity doesn’t benefit the gameplay loop. Having to use a special item with a thirty-second cooldown is just frustrating and distracting. Killing 900 lion cubs is where WoW leveling is at its best.
The zones are not all created equal. Borean Tundra and Sholazar Basin are the best, while Zul'Drak is without any question the worst. There's an entire chain in ZD filled with some of the worst-designed quests in WoW history. The vehicles don't work, the objectives are unclear, each mission takes ~20 minutes, you can only do one at a time, there are no mobs to kill for XP, and in the end they reward about 10k XP apiece--or half of what any other quest would, including simple fetch quests in Sholazar.
The whole zone is like it's designed to troll the subscriber base.
You will be doing dungeons to supplement your XP while leveling up. I like spamming dungeons. DPS races and forming new friendships are what make up my best memories from previous WoW expansions.
But Wrath's dungeons suck Sindragosa's frozen ovaries. Each is full of bosses with raid-like mechanics that serve no purpose but to drag out the fights and make the levels long, tedious, and boring. Even worse, they fuck up every class's rotation and destroy the gameplay loop. I can't get off my Empower Rune Weapon combo when Anub'Arak disappears every time we take off 20% of his HP.
There is a severe dissonance between the level design and the systems design in these new dungeon bosses. I do not like any of them. Every single dungeon in Wrath is bad.
The Endgame
But everything I've bitched about so far is really just the start, because the real problem with Wrath is that it represents the moment World of Warcraft was ruined. I thought it would be the pinnacle of old WoW and that the descent would begin afterward, as is often said. This is not the case. The real reason I'm so frustrated with Wrath of the Lich King: Classic is because this is where the chorification began.
In TBC, the Heroic dungeons at level 70 were insanely difficult. They were way harder than Karazhan. They were only easier than Gruul and Mag by virtue of lacking the logistical difficulty of making sure twenty extra players did not stand in the fire. Heroic dungeons were my favorite part of The Burning Crusade; they rigorously challenged a group’s skill while also giving great loot. They demanded play at a high level while also being accessible, and they opened up a non-RNG based progression scheme for the game: something it desperately needed.
Wrath doesn't have Heroics. It says it does, but it doesn't. What it does have is level 80 versions of every dungeon, and each is a daily chore.
The "Heroics" in Northrend are trivially easy. They're fast. Anyone can do them. They require no coordination, despite the theoretically more complicated mechanics on the new bosses. The message is clear after a few days of playing: you aren't supposed to struggle through this content, gradually powering up, overcoming whatever obstacle you've been stuck on for weeks.
No. You're supposed to log on every day, farm through every single dungeon, then go to bed. Because Wrath isn't about progression. It isn't about difficulty. It isn't about fun, certainly. It isn't even really about loot. It's just about chores.
This is the course WoW went down, looking back retrospectively. It is very painful to witness it in real-time. The RNG grind is bad, but what has replaced it? A gigantic treadmill, ten times bigger, ten thousand times more pointless.
Additionally, through making Heroics trivially easy and removing attunements, they've made it so there's never any reason for a level 80 to run a normal version of a dungeon. This makes it functionally impossible to find groups for the dungeons in the high-70s, because the pool of players is so massively reduced. The designers were not thinking about the incentives their new systems would create.
And Pointless Changes
So it's probably clear I don't like Wrath of the Lich King so far. With the exception of the most fundamental level of gameplay balance, I think TBC did absolutely everything better. You might think that this would mean I wouldn’t mind Blizzard making changes to this version of the game. In fact, as a member of the #NoChanges faction, I do mind.
WotLK introduced the game's first version of the cross-server dungeon finder. This sped up leveling massively and was a huge QoL improvement, but was controversial because it splintered intra-server communities and ruined a lot of what made Vanilla so great. I think both sides of this argument have merit, but the fact is that without inter-server groupfinding, Wrath’s incentive structure makes it impossible to find groups while leveling.
But Blizzard decided to side with the #Changes faction. They removed the dungeon finder and replaced it with this “group finder” tool:
The Group Finder is usable but clunky and could really have just been automated, like it was always supposed to be.
With this, Blizzard has begun introducing more changes, including to quest rewards and the barber shop. My belief that the game shouldn’t be changed doesn’t come from the position that I think it can’t or even shouldn’t be improved. I obviously think it could be, and I’m a firm supporter of the Classic+ side project. But if you trust the current version of the company to fiddle with this game without fucking it up, you have much more faith in them than I do.
Apathy
I've played a lot of Wrath over the last two weeks. And ultimately, the game has left almost no impression on me. Higher up I mentioned that the zones were pretty and atmospheric, but I included that line only because it's what everyone says about Wrath. I don't really believe it myself. They don’t have anything like the atmosphere of Nagrand.
I feel like I’m forgetting about it already. I’ve enjoyed Wrath because I like WoW. But I don't feel compelled to keep playing. I don't want to run another Heroic. I'm not that interested in raiding. The endgame has completely lost me. And the leveling itself was just a grind.
TBC wasn't like that. Even Classic, which was often miserable, wasn't like that for me.
I was extremely excited for my chance to live through Wrath. To find that it’s little more than a list of chores and tedious dungeons is an extreme disappointment. This is the expansion that everyone loved? Where has the magic gone?
I’ll play a bit more. But I don’t expect that my opinion will change.