Wrath of the Lich King: Classic

About one year after the release of The Burning Crusade: Classic, Blizzard has re-released WoW's next--and best-regarded--expansion. 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 general improvement TBC demonstrated over the original Classic experience. The expansion held my attention better than I could have ever anticipated. Everything was better. Better balance. Better dungeons. Better progression. Just better.

I ended up finding 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. Ultimately I rage-quitted following my 15th clear of Kara, when, for the 15th run in a row, the Nathrezim Mindblade refused to drop.

25% droprate. 15 runs. I never once saw it (until, of course, my final run in preparation for Wrath, when I no longer needed it). By that point my frustration was no longer about the weapon--which wasn't that huge of an improvement--but over the absurdity of RNG-based loot in a game where loot is the only method of progression at max level.

The Burning Crusade lost me then. I couldn't take it anymore. 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? That brought me back.

Wrath of the Lich King

The pre-patch launched at the end of August. With it came myriad gameplay changes, including complete overhauls of class balance and the new Death Knight class. They tell me DKs were not originally in the pre-patch, but that Blizzard decided to include them this time around to spice things up.

Some weeks before this I had woken up early one morning with knots in my chest. A haze of nostalgic anxiety overcame me. I felt a deep yearning like I was a child once again--and with it a primal, instinctual urge to play a Death Knight.

This fit of excitement over Wrath 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, at least tied with Kael, and in my brief flirtations with WoW growing up I always tried leveling DKs once the option availed itself. I must have played through the DK starting zone thirty times as a tweenager, including twice during the Wrath beta.

So the date came and so I made my DK. I named him Korakos, after the deuteragonist from Manaseared, and set to work leveling through TBC as Frost spec.

I liked Korakos. I liked him a lot. I liked him even more than my mage. He promptly became my main once I hit 70, and on him I experienced most of the late-game TBC content I had missed. The only raids I didn't end up beating were Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, and only for a lack of available groups. I did tons of PvP and ground out a full set of Season 4 Brutal Gladiator gear, and I even had some good luck with loot: on my first and only visitation to Kharazan, I made a forever friend:

[Fiery Warhorse]

In general TBC content with endgame gear and Wrath talents was trivially easy. My mage used to top charts every raid with around 1.2k single target DPS, and that was as high as I could go in a long, sit-down fight. After the pre-patch I was doing 1.8k single target without any clue how to play.

Still I can say safely that this month-long period of reveling in the full release of TBC, finding groups and doing raids and spamming Alterac Valley, was the most fun I've ever had in World of Warcraft. I played over 100 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

Everyone agrees that Wrath was and is the best expansion. Certainly everyone I know. The reasons are obvious from the outset: improved class balance over the previous two iterations of the game (an understatement), good raid content (or so they tell me), and better paced PvP. Personally I had much less nostalgia for it than TBC; while I leveled countless DKs to 60, I was old enough by 2008-2009 that I no longer watched my brother on raidnights, and I had next to no familiarity with any of the content.

Well. 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 certainly not without its merits. The core gameplay is greatly improved over TBC. Every class is viable and, more importantly, way more fun. I suspect this is why it is held in such regard. The zones are gorgeous and the ambience enveloping. There is even a story. But after two weeks, I feel compelled to take a break from my actual work writing to 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 jumped-up start has the effect of allowing the player to get his new abilities for the expansion right away. Earn your new toys. Start experimenting with them.

Wrath has no such pacing. 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, that's going to be faster than heading up to Icecrown. Guaranteed.

This monotony does not so much amplify the slog of questing as it does turn it into lava. Viscous and deathly to the touch, leveling up provides no sense of progress anywhere in Northrend. As if to intentionally make this worse, 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 in gear; here, I started Wrath with 34% Crit on my DK, and after 24 hours at level 80, I'm still down around 25%. If I ever get it back up to where it started, it will be at the very end of the expansion.

Losing Crit--annoying for a Death Knight, terminal for a Fire Mage--while I'm supposed to be embarking on new adventures and increasing my power level is agony. It feels like shit. It's frustrating and ruins the fantasy of progression. It makes the whole game feel (even more) pointless.

And for skills in training, who knows what logic has gone into their placement. At 73 my mage still can't make any water worth drinking. She hasn't earned any new skills unique to Wrath except Living Bomb, which is from a talent. On my DK the two most important skills I earned while leveling were Empower Rune Weapon at 75--good--and Army of the Dead at 80. But Army of the Dead is a useless piece of shit that has no utility whatsoever except while questing. Why was it at 80? Why not 79?

The pacing makes no sense.

The zones themselves are horrific. Wrath was Blizzard's first attempt to make questing more """"engaging"""" by varying mission structure, objectives, and introducing vehicles. The end result is a miserable nightmare of bad level design. The more complicated quests in Wrath are simply atrocious. 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.

Turning yourself into a hawk and stealing eggs from gryphons? This has nothing to do with the gameplay of WoW. It's shit.

I cannot stress enough how bad vehicles are. Often you won't have any idea what you're supposed to do, even after reading the quest text; the game will want some very specific action to be performed; nothing about your stats or talents will matter; even if you do everything right you could fail, because for some reason vehicles are where the real difficulty of Wrath lies; and the vehicle itself will inevitably be buggy and poorly implemented, so you might even do the correct thing but not get credit once the quest is done.

One or two shitty vehicle quests could be tolerable. But I did the math and there are precisely elven hundred and seventy eight million of them spread throughout Northrend. They also often come as the conclusion to large chains, so you have to do them to get the best quest rewards.

I hate vehicles. They suck. Stop.

The other attempts at designing more engaging quests are variously more and less successful, 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 listened to nearly every single book written by Thomas Sowell while leveling in TBC last year. It was a fantastic experience. Despite spending almost as long leveling in Wrath, I only managed to make it through one audiobook--George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier. I had to keep pausing what I was listening to because the game was demanding too much attention.

That might sound like an odd criticism. "The game is making me play it too hard!"

But WoW isn't good at being a complicated 'real' game where I have to pay attention. It's good at being a grind-a-thon that I play while listening to audiobooks. By demanding more attention from me while questing, the designers aren't making questing more fun--they're just making it less like WoW, while also not making it any better. Then each quest will inevitably come with some item that you can only use once every 30 seconds, slowing everything down for no reason, and all the while you'll simply be wishing for a dwarf who can send you off to "Kill 900 Lion Cubs" for old time's sake.

The concept art for WoW sure looks a lot more awesome than you ever will playing it.

Some zones are better than others. Borean Tundra and Sholezar are the best designed, while Zul'Drak is without any question the worst. There's an entire chain in ZD filled with some of the most poorly designed vehicle and "fun" (there aren't enough terabytes in the world to render the scare quotes required for that word in this context) quests in all of 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 a piece--or half of what any other quest would, including simple fetch quests in Sholezar.

The whole zone is like it's designed to troll the subscriber base.

Clearly some less than capable designer at Blizzard was responsible for Zul'Drak, while the people who knew what they were doing worked elsewhere. It's interesting how clearly that shows through the gameplay. Unfortunately what isn't interesting is Zul'Drak.

Meanwhile you'll be doing dungeons to supplement your XP while leveling up. I like dungeon spam. DPS races, meeting new people in groups--all of my best memories from the previous expansions were from dungeons.

But Wrath's dungeons suck Sindragosa's frozen ovaries. Every single one is full of bosses with raid-like mechanics, except they're also all trivially easy; these mechanics 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; I can't get off my Empower Rune Weapon combo when Anub'Arak disappears like an asshole every time we deal 20% of his HP as damage.

There is a severe dissonance between the level design and the systems design in these new dungeon boss fights. 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 then the descent would begin thereafter, as is often said--but actually that's not the case. The real reason why I'm so frustrated with Wrath of the Lich King: Classic is because it's clear that this is where the chorification begins.

In TBC, the Heroic dungeons at level 70 were insanely difficult. They were way harder than Kara. They were only easier than Gruul and Mag by virtue of lacking the logistical difficulty of coordinating with twenty extra retards to make sure no one stood in the fire. Heroic dungeons were my favorite part of The Burning Crusade. They tested every player's skill. They gave great loot. They were a completely new way to look at the game. They demanded play at a high level while also being accessible, and they opened up a non-RNG based progression schema 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 just supposed to log on every day, farm through every single Heroic dungeon, then go to bed. Because Wrath isn't about progression. It isn't about difficulty. It isn't about fun, certainty. It isn't even really about loot. It's just about chores.

We all know, retrospectively, that this is the course WoW went down. But it breaks my heart to see it. This twist on the formula of the first two expansions makes me furious. While I'm not a fan of the grind, it had its purpose, and what was it replaced with? A treadmill that's ten times bigger and a thousand times more pointless.

By the way, through making Heroics trivially easy and removing the requirement from TBC, 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, like the Culling of Stratholme, because the pool of players is so massively reduced. Yet another reason why leveling in Wrath is nightmarish.

And Pointless Changes

So it's probably clear I don't especially like Wrath of the Lich King so far. I don't hate it, but with the exception of the most fundamental level of gameplay balance, I think TBC did absolutely everything better. This fact therefore makes it rather strange that I would feel the need to complain about the pointless changes Blizzard has insisted on shoehorning into their newest iteration of Classic, but I never pass up an opportunity to whinge.

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. This is what nerds have argued, at least, for over a decade on the forums.

Apparently Blizzard agreed. So they removed the dungeon finder. In its place they introduced a group finder tool, as thus:

The Group Finder is a usable but clunky piece of shit that really could just be automated...like it used to be. I would be fine with a removal of cross-server searching, but designing a new tool was insane. No one wanted this. The rallying cry for Classic was "NO CHANGES!" They stuck by this all through TBC; why was this where they drew the line?

But the door was opened. Now Blizzard can't stop making stupid, pointless changes to Wrath. They've introduced "adventuring supplies" as random rewards for quests, which give shitloads of potions and various other bits of junk. At launch these were giving so many potions that they actually had to tone it down massively, so now the supply packs are basically useless.

Why? Why add this? Remember "NO CHANGES?" Why?

Then, of course, there's gender selection. They've removed the male and female options in character creation; these are now replaced by the much more progressive silhouettes of male and female bodies. Incidentally they have gone through and, like Winston Smith, made this woke change to WotLK Classic--while leaving the male and female symbols in Shadowlands! Retail is unchanged! You know, the game that's actually supposed to be under development?

Controlling the past is actually more important to these fucking lunatics than controlling the present.

Hey Blizzard, STOP FUCKING WITH THE GAME.

Oh, and you can have sex changes at the barber now.

Just what we always needed. Actually I'm rather offended that they included this without the option for a free name change to go with; aren't I being deadnamed by the game whenever I look at the top left corner of my screen, if I really did want to change my character's sex? Seems pretty transphobic of Blizz to me. I should start a Twitter campaign.

It isn't that I care so much about individual changes, although it happens to be the true that all those mentioned above are bad and should be reversed, but that I simply do not trust Blizzard to improve Wrath Classic without fucking it up. I think the evidence already speaks for itself. Sure, there might be improvements that could be made--but do you have faith that Blizz in 2022 can both identify and implement them?

If you do, you can have fun with Overwatch 2. Unfortunately I'm not quite so insane to believe that yet. If I see another blue exclamation mark on my minimap, though, I might get there.

Apathy

I've played a lot of Wrath over the last two weeks. And ultimately, the game has left almost no impression on me. In the opening of this post I indicated that I appreciated the atmosphere and ambience and musical design of the zones--but I don't, really. The zones look fine. They're fine. They're just fine. But they don't compare to Nagrand, or Zangarmarsh, or Netherstorm, and certainly not any of the Classic zones. I included that line only because it's what everyone says about Wrath. But I don't really believe it myself.

It's almost like it didn't happen. Like I'm forgetting about it already. While I found much of my leveling to be deeply frustrating, I enjoyed it because I like WoW. But it was just okay. I don't feel compelled to keep playing, really, although I'm having a decent amount of fun with my mage now. I don't want to run any more Heroics. I'm not that interested in raiding. The endgame has completely lost me. And the leveling itself--it just wasn't that interesting, or original, or fun. It was like a Call of Duty campaign.

TBC wasn't like that. Even Classic, which was often miserable, wasn't like that for me. But Wrath was.

My disappointment is hard to convey. This was my most anticipated release of the year. To find the expansion little more than a laundry list of tedious dungeons and hair-pulling chores is almost unbelievable. This is what people loved? Really? I don't feel any of the magic of the last two games. It's completely gone. What's replaced it seems so bland.

But that's Wrath of the Lich King: Classic. I'm not quite done with it. Maybe the best is yet to come. But I doubt it.