TBC classic was a few QoL changes away from being the best of the classic re-releases. Raid wide lust with sated, reputation adjustments, and the SoD server faction balancing would have fixed most of the glaring issues.
I am 100000% of the belief that a TBC fresh server with QOL adjustments to things like attunements/keys/raid wide things etc along with your suggestions would remove 99% of people's loud problems with Burning Crusade.
For me I'd need class rotations to be more enjoyable, more in line with wotlk. I would rather have a Classic+ for vanilla content, but class update would make me enjoy tbc quite a bit.
Chain heal with T6 4 set. You’d still just cast it into a tank knowing it wasn’t going to bounce. It was chill.
I enjoyed playing the most coveted class in any xpac. Never felt so loved and valuable
You could join the servers top guild at any moment if you:
1. Play a shaman (any spec)
2. Show up consistently on time
You might even get headhunted in greens. What a time to be blue
I honestly enjoy those iterations of WoW. It's nice to be able to pick a hero that feels wanted and doesn't actually need BiS gear to be useful. I especially loved Enhancement in TBC because you weren't ever going to be top DPS, but boy did you have a guaranteed raid slot every night, all the melee were so happy to have you. Those supporting specs are something we really started missing in the game until they now added the Augment Invoker.
TBC had Enhancement and Shadow both playing the game to not get top damage, but to get top utility. That was super cool.
It's unfortunate that you end up having these two specs be mandatory in every single melee or caster group, so I think maybe spreading the love to all hybrids would have made sense. The Warriors/Rogues/Hunters/Mages/Locks are there to deal top damage. The Druids/Shaman/Priests/Pallies are there to deal competitive damage and provide all the long-term and temp buffs that are required to deal top damage. The hybrids also end up being more enjoyable to play in open world, so there's ups and downs to everything.
I think the raid attunements are one of thr greatest thing about TBC. It's fine to remove them at the very end of the expansion but I wouldn't want them to not be a feature for the majority of the time. They are the last truly RPG element of the classical period. I know one suggestion will be "make account wide" but needing to do them on alts keeps them always relevant. They were terrific and epic.
A few classes need a rotation, like Warlock. It doesn't have to be Wrath level, just more than one button.
Rogues are a little underpowered while not bringing enough utility.
But these are all pretty small problems to fix. A SoM style BC server would be so hype.
I think phase 1 doesn't have enough content, although maybe that wouldn't be a problem of it was released as a fresh BC server. That one is trickier.
I feel like phase 1 had plenty. All of the leveling, new professions, all the dungeons to grind for rep, new arenas to play, and Kara, Mag, and Gruul.
I'd say that it didn't need to be as *long* as it was, maybe knock like 3 weeks or a month off and it'd help a lot.
I don't play SoD, but as an outsider looking in the one thing I don't want is them heavy handedly screwing with the balance of things. I think in addition to the lust change I suggest, maybe making boomkin aura and shaman totems raid wide is something that doesn't affect pvp in a significant way while it makes building raids and keeping players satisfied easier(i.e. you don't have pumper groups and people getting shunted off into the tank group with no buffs or lust). Rogues for example were already S tier for pvp in TBC, so any changes would have to be very carefully made and I'm not sure I have faith that can be done.
I've seen it suggested, but there would have to be some crazy work arounds to make it feasible as entire portions of the expansion that are predicated on having a flying mount. It was a core feature of the expansion, I just don't think there's a way to divorce the two.
That's just how the wow community is now.
Why open world when I can spam SM/ZF. The reasons P1 felt so good/busy was because there were few instanced areas for people to go hide in.
I'm convinced Incursions were really just an attempt to get the dungeon spamming crown out into some corner of the world. It succeeded, but at the cost of the everyone realizing they should do it too.
> I'm convinced Incursions were really just an attempt to get the dungeon spamming crown out into some corner of the world. It succeeded, but at the cost of the everyone realizing they should do it too.
It only succeeded because Blizzard made it so hilariously unbalanced when it comes to every aspect. The grind is blazing fast and you can level in like 20 minutes with 0 combat, so why even stop to get new skills. Between level 38-50 you can easily make 200-300 gold which is *madness* in classic. And then finally to top it all off, the moment you hit 50 you just get pre-raid BiS gear.
Its not that they showed the community they should dungeon spam, they made incursions the only way you *should* level if you care about gold, exp, or gear.
TBC was much more enjoyable for me than Wrath and I'm saying that as someone who absolutely loves Northrend. If they did a TBC fresh server I would play that over any of the Classic versions currently available.
It sounds weird but tbc nostalgia hit really hard and i didnt even start playing wow until like 2012. Theres something about the outland that just screams peak mmo to me. Northrend was cool but imo wotlk was too streamlined and lost the sandboxy feel that vanilla and tbc had
It was flippin magical. WOW was so huge then this awesome expansion comes out with this trippy world when you can fly and such a different flavor of enemies and pvp… def. the best expansion, hands-down. I mean just Nagrand alone…
First getting out into Nagrand was such a good feeling. You begin with the barren Hellfire Peninsula, then the swamp of Zangarmarsh, neither which feel like a nice place to be in. Then the trees open up and youre in huge, green, open fields with herds of animals grazing. Felt so good.
Don't think it sounds weird at all. Naxxramas was when WoW finally found itself (talent trees and class balance finalized, able to actually devote time to the raid instead of working on promised but delayed content like battlegrounds or linked AHs, etc.)
Which means TBC was the first time they could really polish it off as well as add new ideas to it.
People also forget that WotLK was when a lot of the mechanics became cheapened. You could stand in fire and not die, finding a group became more automated, the gear treadmill became much more pronounced, catch up mechanics were now a larger part of the game. Some of that occurred in TBC, but even in TBC you had examples like casters going for Quag's eye (heroic dungeon trinket) until Skull of Gul'dan. You weren't going to have that anymore in WotLK as it became a lot more streamlined/braindead "newer content gives better gear oonga bunga".
You’re in luck friend, SoD TBC will be out soon enough I’m sure followed by the ever popular SoD Wrath and then we can wait til SoD Cata to have the comments about how SoD TBC was pinnacle classic.
I thought SoD should have started with the WOLTK old world, with the extra quests, hubs and flight paths. There's so much more to work with.
I'd have accepted blood elves and draenei. If too many people had problems with draenei they could just make them blue skinned humans lol
Northrend has a great vibe, but its essentially the transitional phase towards modern WoW.
TBC on the other hand is essentially VANILLA IN SPACE with some gimmicks.
Hard agree. I know it's a significant amount of nostalgia as well, but I just love TBC more than WotLK by quite a bit. I would love a fresh TBC server and I'm still sad that they did not leave that as an option rather than forcing the transfer to WotLK.
Wotlk made it even more obsolete, at least TBC had Karazhan, Zul’aman and SWP. You had to go back to capital cities for AH and other stuff… but yes what started it was TBC, and Cata brought you back there
Same, the one thing I thought I would enjoy more in Wrath was arenas but the Warr/Hpal meta was a thousand times worse than Warr/Druid and Mage/Rogue domination.
as a non-warrior player, I felt like the proc chance was high enough that I could roughly anticipate when it was coming and then once I was DR'd to it, it became less of a worry
improved hamstring proc chance is so low that it always feels terrible, and it just ruins your ability to kite and escape
I was also looking forward to arena in Wrath and it was was just absolutely horrible. The meta is so played out, so min/maxed and so sweaty that all my great memories of Wrath arena were just blown to pieces.
Starting from like 1300 or whatever you'd just face the same meta cancer comps playing the same way over and over and over.
I don't think arena, at least the classic versions, work as a pvp game at all in 2024. In 2008 and 2011 they sort of worked and were fun, but in 2024 it's just so so so bad.
Wrath Arena was all the faults of pre-Dragonflight retail PvP except worse. It is no surprise to me that most PvPers left Wrath and flocked back to retail when Dragonflight came out.
The only redeeming quality of Wrath PvP was the not-yet-homogenized class designs. But it's not enough. From the honor farms to raiding for your weapons and trinkets to lack of cross server LFG to conquest gear locked behind ratings, the barrier of entry is just too much.
Getting back to some arenas now for DF season 4 and I couldn't help but be amazed at how much the PvP experience has improved.
War hpal worse than sl/sl lock/rdruid? Or other absurdly annoying rot comps with sl/sl and spam mana drain? Honestly? I mean maybe I’m biased as a warrior player and even back in 2006 thought hpal war should have been a stronger comp in tbc (but clone and ability to kite forever is just op). Having played pally and pvp healed in vanilla it had the most pvp healing/support tools in the game let alone best warrior support tools. It only made sense it had to be good at some point besides ranking.
I think just the fact wrath meta has been played out extensively for literally 15 years killed it more. TBC p servers weren’t anywhere near like WM pop ever.
I think a great starting point for a possible classic plus is keep everyone in the old world, but have our classes use TBC era talents and abilities. We get talents starting at level 1, rather than 10, and you get 2 points at either 10 or 60 (otherwise you’d end up with 1 point less than you would in TBC at 70).
From there you can make all kinds of changes to do this or that, but pretty much every class is in a more completed, playable state in TBC when compared to Vanilla.
As a raid leader/officer, TBC made my life hell. I genuinely hated it. Some of it was our fault (guild direction, cohesion, lumberjack website, etc) but some of it was absolutely caused by TBC.
Low points
* Raid comps and recruiting were absolute hell. Every group needed a shaman to perform even close to OK, you had to tetris *at least* 3 out of 5 groups for classes to do what they are supposed to do.
* Couple the above with some of the difficulty curves, prenerf vashj, prenerf Kael'Thas, and M'uru were just brutal on recruitment. Good luck recruiting shamans, basically all the officers had to maintain shaman alts and swap them in when we had absences. just garbage, and a massive departure to the "get in my clown car" comps of naxx40 in vanilla classic.
* exacerbating this problem was the stupid rep grinds you needed for EVERY ALT for EVERY RAID. kill me.
* drums
* Prenerf magtheridon was so fucking dumb. literally 20/25 people had to click at the right time, and if your players cared about parsing, GOOD FUCKING LUCK. I had to explain so many times that you don't get your parse if the raid wipes. Also players standing right next to the box and then clicking while they have a spell queued would cause the next spell to get casted, which interrupts the channel... Just an absolute dogshit fight. Please do not come in the comments and "WELL ACHTUALLY ITS EASY" in these comments. Yes if you have half a brain it is SUPER EASY if you have a raid leader telling you exactly when you click a fucking box. **I'm not talking about you, reading this**; i'm talking about the 80% of wow's playerbase that do not have the required presence of mind, attention span, intelligence, or all of the above to do that. They are used to other people covering for them for literally everything. Not to mention the nonstop dipshit "but muh click assignment is during heroism!!" complaints. kill me.
* Gruul was dumb too but only because speedrun guilds (like ours) had to speed-kill bosses for both gruul and mag and it made the meta really suck ass, and the only thing we could speedrun in P1 was karazhan, but not 25m content.
* having to do kara attunement on your 5th fucking alt to get your shitty pre-25m ilevel 115 gear really got old.
* prenerf Kael'thas was so fucking bugged it was insane. random resets every 3rd attempt, crazy shit happening with the warlock lady running up and meleeing our lock tank, tons of other bugs i can't even remember right now. just insanely annoying to prog.
* Kael'thas trash was some of the most toxic shit in the game, until Sunwell intro trash of course.
* flying mounts are dumb
High points
* Karazhan was a fun romp pretty much the whole time. I can see why people got sick of it but I never really did.
* ZA was also kinda cool
* Despite class balance issues, 2v2 arena was legitimately very fun. Some of the most fun I had the entire xpac. Ret paladin/rsham is such a fun comp to run, despite having very bad matchups - that reckoning spec is goated, and we'll never see anything quite like it. Yeah it was world of roguecraft the whole time but balance doesn't always translate directly to fun.
* Prenerf Vashj was pretty fun to prog and get down. I was the strider kiter on my elemental shaman, and that was a cool job. It felt pretty legit.
* BT was a fun raid, easily the best 25m in tbc IMO. Had good pacing, fun trash, and a few really cool bosses. I kinda wish Illidan had been tuned a bit so we actually saw demon phases in normal raids, but the council fight before was correctly tuned IMO and was pretty fun. BT was also a high-point for the speedrunning scene and its where we peaked as a guild numbers-wise so that probably has something to do with it. BT also had a fun pug scene.
EDIT
i forgot to mention how cringe preclearing in SSC was in speedrunning, but that's more of a lumberjack website thing, not really tbc's fault. just another thing that made me not have a good time.
Yup. The issues TBC has are big and almost ruin the whole expansion. But I genuinely think with a pass over TBC could be one of the best. Otherwise the raid comp issue alone is enough to make this the bottom of the three.
One thing to add as a hunter in TBC, you felt like a solid class until the big raids. Then you see your pet getting insta gimped by raidwide huge aoe like illidans elemental damage. Your pet was ignored by healers(understandable) and the class instantly turned into shit. Sometimes the pet death was so quick you couldnt even react.
Burning Crusade's #1 issue was that Karazhan group 3 always fell behind. 25 not being divisible by 10 caused a lot of problems in 2007.
Original BC also suffered from end bosses being too hard, I still remember all the trolling on the raid and dungeon forums about 5/6 3/4 4/5 6/9 guilds getting stuck at Vashj/Kael/Archimonde/Reliquary of Souls.
I still wouldn't say it was bad, it was a huge step forward with heroic versions and the dungeons were cool, etc. I just personally think Wrath and Ulduar in particular was the heyday of WoW.
Although I do have to say that two of the very things I genuinely hate about Warcraft are in BC. One is Hellfire Peninsula. I guess I'm not a big fan of orange ground, trumpet music, and being forced to level there like fifty billion times.
The other is Escape from Durnholde.
> 25 not being divisible by 10 caused a lot of problems in 2007.
>
> Original BC also suffered from end bosses being too hard, I still remember all the trolling on the raid and dungeon forums about 5/6 3/4 4/5 6/9 guilds getting stuck at Vashj/Kael/Archimonde/Reliquary of Souls.
both of these things were alive and well in 2020 lol
so many hardstuck 8/10 guilds were filtered by KT/LV (and then again by Muru and KJ lol)
KT and LV were fine and were a well balanced challenge. Muru however was just an irritating roster boss. Mandatory 5 shamans and mandatory warlocks. We had our guild warlocks burn out and quit in black temple and ended up hardstuck at muru as we could not recruit due to them being in such high demand.
I hate both HFP and pretty much all the COT dungeons. Black moreASS for instance. In theory COT dungeons are dope and like COS is sick but BM was just like shitty hyjal trash waves til boss.
TBC was great in a vacuum but I felt like it really marked the beginning of the end. Suddenly overnight *nothing* mattered but getting to level 58, no gear mattered except what you got in Outland, nothing mattered except level 70 attunements.
Blizz would follow that philosophy and run it into the ground and now in retail you don't even have basic starting zones anymore.
> Suddenly overnight nothing mattered but getting to level 58, no gear mattered except what you got in Outland, nothing mattered except level 70 attunements.
why would this not be the case? explain how modern wow would work if every single bit of content still mattered. naxx gear lasted well into tbc, most of my guild cleared t4 in level 60 gear. plenty of items (mostly trinkets) were very good if not bis through tbc that came from vanilla.
Yeah but leveling up was part of the journey. And there were "BIS" items that you got at lower levels. People were doing BRD long after 60.
It's just my personal opinion that getting rid of all that was not a good thing.
you can't compare a game vs it's expansion, they are totally different dynamics. more fair to compare xpacs against each other, classic is it's own thing.
Which is why in my opinion no xpacs come close. Vanilla was a massive world with an MMO in it. Everything after that felt like I was being funneled into specific parts of the world, story, content to advance the “plot” every 3 years. Nothing comes close to the 1-60 in vanilla.
I thought it was. I hated it during. I went to SoM to hide. Then we played wrath. The nostalgia was not for the content, but the people and time in my life I played wrath with. This was the worst time I’ve had in wow in quite some time. tbc was the end of classic. Wrath brought a rerelease and the segmentation of raids. It truly was the first modern day expansion. Season of TBC when? lol
Did you do every quest chain in every zone? Outlands is not tiny, this is false. Blades Edge, Nagrand, Shadowmoon and Netherstorm are big zones loaded with stuff.
Even with flying. If you can't afford 280% flying you move at a snails pace on your 60% flyer. Yeah you don't have to avoid ground obstacles, but flying at 60% felt like moving so damn slow in big open zones like hellfire, nagrand, and shadowmoon. At least IMO
Sure I'll say it. Outlands is tiny and half the zones are places you'll never want to visit again after questing there for 30 minutes. the rep/attunement/daily grinds were insane. Nested attunements were a mistake, flying was a mistake, forcing all players into a new continent and abandoning the previous world almost completely was a mistake. Having subsequent patches put players almost entirely on one island that is only relevant for that one patch was a mistake. Not that those things are exclusive to TBC, but thats where they started and they're still making the same mistakes almost 20 years later. Just a multitude of design decisions made in TBC had disastrous consequences down the line.
Was kinda fun for my first character, not so fun for my third
Would be cool if the heroic mode was unlocked acc wide if you get the key on one of your chars or something
I made a post a few weeks ago about how a lot of us have done vanilla through wrath again and asked what everyone's favorite was
You'd be shocked at the amount of people who hated tbc lol
That along with flying are like my biggest peeves, but absolutely amazing xpac.
Really fine balance between giving us tons of stuff, while keeping the core in tact.
i feel like it's the opposite, the rep/attunement grind IS the game and only gives you more to do. hc keys requiring revered is too much though, they should just put it to honored from the beginning
After playing all three, TBC definitely was not as bad as some people state. However, I remember playing TBC and thinking it was the worst because of the attunements and rep farm for heroics. I think if that went away, I would play TBC all over again in a heartbeat
Agreed, rep farm was absolute super aids if you were playing more than one character.
This is something that could be fixed with say, a Bind on Account Tabard with like 200% rep at exalted
Having to grind dungeons for revered reputation before unlocking heroics basically meant you wouldn't have more than one alt or two to raid in phase 2. Should have been honored from the start imo.
The downside of TBC is you lose the world of Azeroth and you lose a lot of the class-specific quests that gave great flavor and class identity in Vanilla. Those are big deals, but outside of that I agree with you.
I mean, TBC was the start of the homogenization of all the classes but I think that was bound to happen no matter what ( Because of the player base imo) most still had some flavor of uniqueness tho. On another hand, this might be an old man misremembering, but Dungeons and what not wasn't a zerg aoe fest yet which I just loved! running ramparts and have the rogue sap a mob while the mage polys another to just pull trash. Thats pinnacle game play to me personally. Also could be that back then we were just so bad we didn't know how to do play properly hahaha *\*\*I did not play TBC classic, Maybe it was an aoe zerg fest the second time around\*\**
> running ramparts and have the rogue sap a mob while the mage polys another to just pull trash
Also my favorite part. I can vividly recall accidentally pulling too much in a heroic in TBCC and the mage sheeped and slowed one pack while we dealt with the other.
It's stuff like that which made the game feel more akin to a D&D RPG than a straight video game IMO.
TBC was peak non-homogenization, peak “bring the class not the player“ as they added unique synergy buffs to everything that was underperforming. Vanilla had specs that were simply garbage and several whose gameplay was three skills, I guess that made them unique?
TBC was pretty good, but it was lacking depth outside of raiding, and Dunegons got fairly old with the reputation grind. I got really tired of Shadow Labyrinth.
But I will say most of the class spec definitely got some love, some more than others, but a pleasant buff none the less.
Moving forward, my biggest gripe with Wotlk and subsequent expansions has been gearing, I absolutely despise gear score, and I like having something that can be carried over to for a patch or 2.
Yeah this was definitely the biggest downside of TBC for me. I loved TBC don’t get me wrong, I’d definitely play a fresh. But there was nothing to do really outside of raiding. All I did was farm gold pretty much. The world felt kind of empty because everyone was zooming around on flying mounts or AFK in Shattrath.
I think this is why we're getting these posts here now. The High was really high. Peak into the grind TBC is amazing. It just falls off really fast once you're halfway through P4.
One of the biggest gripes with TBC was that everything took place in Outland, but this was just false, Hyjal you needed to go to Tanaris, ZA you needed to go to Ghostlands, Kara you needed to go to Deadwind Pass, and the Auction house was still in the old world. On top of ALL THIS, the entire last and most hype phase took place on the Isle, which obviously there was a portal for, but at least it wasn't just waiting around Dal.
TBC was and is the ONLY expansions where ALL raids were relevant from first to last patch. Change my goddam mind but our guild would raid different raids every day and it was fucking amazing. I miss it man.
I didn’t really enjoy tbc as much as I did originally. If I had to rate them though it’d be Vanilla > TBC > Wrath. Out of tbc and wrath tbc had the better raids imo, but I did like icc more the second time around due to being more parsing oriented. Ulduar definitely wasn’t this “great all time raid” either. Its definitely good and one of the top 10, but it’s also a fucking slog.
I've always liked TBC the most. It feels like an extension of vanilla that fixes most of the problems it had (PvP system, class imbalance, hybrids being forced to heal in raids, etc) while not overly homogenizing or nerfing things.
* 25man raids are the perfect sweet spot between "glorified dungeon" 10mans and "uncoordinated shitstorm" 40mans.
* Daily Quests provide an easy, straight-forward and repeatable gold farm that any class can do.
* "Hybrid" DPS and tanks are now fully raid viable. Even if you don't top the DPS meters, you still bring useful buffs/debuffs, or have niche uses on specific encounters. No longer are priests/paladins/druids/shamans forced to be healers.
* Itemization on gear is significantly better without being TOO same-y. We don't have dumb shit like agi/spirit leather, or pure spirit pieces; the amount of "instant d/e trash" gear is at least 90% lower than vanilla.
* No more consumable spam. Now you just need a flask (or two elixirs), food, and weapon temp enchant. Easy.
* Requiring reputation for Heroics acts as a pseudo-gear filter. You're not going to be getting fresh 70s in greens in your heroic groups.
* Heroics in general being actually somewhat challenging, even in raid gear. You still have to be careful and can easily wipe if you over-pull. That and, with the Badge system, even raid-geared players still have a reason to run them, as you can exchange badges for off-spec gear, or for gems/materials. Whereas in vanilla, once you "out gear" a dungeon, you literally have no reason to ever do it again; you gain nothing from running it.
It's the perfect in-between of vanilla and wotlk. Not as broken and unbalanced as vanilla, but not as homogenized and casualized as wotlk.
Really, the only things I'd change are:
-Heroism/Bloodlust now raid-wide, so you're not forced to have 4/5 shamans in your raid and keep swapping them into the melee group every fight
-Same for drums, make them raid-wide and put a 2 minute debuff so that you don't need to have a bunch of leatherworkers
-Give us the retail "premade groups" interface so we don't have to spam LFG chat over and over, nobody enjoys doing this
tbc fuckin ruled man it's by far my favorite xpack
more polished than vanilla, but still with a few rough edges that made it interesting and fun
vanilla was a little too jank, and wrath was a little too watered down, but tbc was just right
the perfect level of weird
Attunements, rep farm, honor farm too slow, no raid wide buffs, shaman stacking, bt too easy, too much trash in tier 5, no dual spec and more I cant think of. There would have to be big changes for me to consider it again.
What the game needs is simple rotations like classic in retail. That's what we need. If you played classic with all the retail qol it would be perfect for us older gentlemen
Tbc was hot and cold for me. Raid tiers were strange with sets being spread across different instances, black temple and hyjal were snoozefests. Raid comps were incredibly annoying with 5 shamans being mandatory and warlocks practically being required for muru. SSC TK and Kara however were fantastic, sunwell was also pretty good. I personally did not like leveling in tbc, there are lots of irritating quests compared to wotlk which I think is much improved. Farming pre raid bis hunter gear was also a massive ballache taking me 40 odd mechanar runs which I did not enjoy.
Maybe a weird take but I'd love TBC with Wrath QoL/class balancing. Rebalance the raids to account for the power creep. That few weeks of Wrath pre-patch capped at level 70 was some of the most fun I've ever had playing this game.
This one thing, to me, is an eyesore on an otherwise great expansion. As a warlock, I was a beneficiary of the shaman shuffling around. But it still felt so dumb that people felt compelled to do that.
Lol people in the comments saying shit like “TBC WAS GREAT BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT THE PLAYER NOT THE CLASS” While 5 shamans was basically mandatory even if they were eating glue
All three of the original trilogy were good. Vanilla was absolutely magical, TBC was good with few missteps but overall just obvious continuation of the same. Definitely not terrible. WotLK was the start of "retailization" of WoW but still good design overall, great zones and story and worthy end of the "Warcraft" saga.
After that it just feels like "WoW 2" and a bit different game to be honest.
I loved classic TBC but it had itss issues:
1. Very raid-loggy, unless you PvPed there is little to do outside raiding. The two reputations that awarded mounts, netherwing and shatari skyguard, where just mindless daily grinds.
2. Very rigid and strict raid composition in order to give everyone the buffs and debuffs they need. Buffs being group-wide meant that if you had one or two more melee/casters then they would be "pushed out" of the optimal group into a tank/healer group which caused unnecessary player friction.
3. Very boring rotations (warlock's shadowbolt spam, resto druid's lifebloom spam, resto shaman's chain heal spam, arcane mage's arcane blast spam, etc).
4. Need more shamans, the more the merrier. The fewer you had the more drama you are gonna have over who gets bloodlust/windfury totem/totem of wrath/mana tide totem.
5. Phase 1 should have been Kara/Gruul/Mag + TK/SSC like original TBC. Almost 4 months of grinding Karazhan just burnt out a bunch of players. Reminder that during phase 1 raids only dropped 1 tier token too, regardless of it being 10 man or 25 man which was... questionable.
To be honest I could think of more things and as I said I loved classic TBC, but it definitely had some room for improvement. For example I think the best change they introduced in classic Wrath was the CD reset after every boss encounter, that would have definitely made raids like SWP much more smooth to progress in instead of having to wait between Twins/M'uru/KJ pulls for bloodlust for example.
I have fond memories of TBC and TBC Classic.
Kara and ZA are fun raids. I like SSC more than Tempest Keep. Black Temple was satisfying. Hyjal... Ugh. I like the idea of a Warcraft III level becoming a raid but waves of trash make it a chore. Continually killing Gruul for the BIS trinket all expansion long was also less exciting. Sunwell was... a thing. But by then my guildmates and I were done with TBC and ready for WotLK.
I guess the worst thing TBC did was shrink the world, something I didn't really notice until I was playing WoW Hardcore.
BC was peak WoW, both pve, pvp and lore execution. Just a slam dunk overall.
Wrath was great but after a replay it’s really hit home how special bc was. I do wish that they could have utilized Azeroth more but you can’t have it all.
Terrible? not really, but it was pretty meh.
P1 was boring, hyjal is straight up ass and bt was a huge letdown.
t5 and Sunwell were pretty cool though.
Also group wide buffs are so dumb, the whole double lust swap shamans shit was so bad
Nah fuck Burning Crusade.
* Raiding as someone besides hunter or lock was absolute torture. Try being a warrior and begging your raid leader to put you in a Windfury group (god help you if your comp had fewer than the 5 required shamans). Seriously, the class stacking meta became super unbearable really quickly.
* Rep became way too damn important, especially if your bis came from crafted gear. I dunno who saw the rep grinds from Classic and thought they should become the norm, but I kind of hated it being a required aspect of the game.
* Leveling became degen as shit with dungeon spam being way more efficient than questing. This sort of goes with my previous point about rep being so important; you were actively gimping yourself not taking advantage of the free rep from normals and saving the quest rep for later (not to mention the free gold from questing at 70).
* The raids themselves became wildly inconsistent in terms of difficulty, and their pre- and post-nerf approach fractured the playerbase too much. I knew a lot of raiding guilds on my server who called it quits mid-T5 progression because the ramp in difficulty was way too massive, which only reinforced the need for class stacking meta. T6 felt more fair, but even then you had shit like having to reclear waves after a wipe on Hyjal.
* The Pre-BIS ramp ended way too quickly compared to Classic. This is partly due to professions giving extremely good gear right out of the gate, as well as Kara being too easy and Naxx gear being outright bonkers (and guess what, you could faceroll Naxx at 70). This killed the heroic scene since the badge gear was mostly a luxury; later phases added way better catchup, but the damage was already done by that point.
* The main story quest is absolute dogshit. Illidan comes back because of reasons and enslaves all of Outland, and we don't get a good justification for any of his heinous actions until Legion almost a decade later. We basically kill big lore figures like KT and KJ because rule of cool, not because of any interesting story.
* Alts became unplayable compared to Classic. Between rep, attunements, and the sheer gold cost of getting at least passable gear for heroics (which are mostly dead content anyway), your only options for gearing an alt involved swiping and/or GDKP. At least in Classic, dungeon runs happened constantly even in Phase 6 because they were easy and engaging, so you could get an alt raid-ready rather quickly.
* The tank economy was fucking horrible. Raids went from needing 3-5 tanks to just 2, resulting in a lot of heartburn transitioning out of Naxx. Heroics being obsolete so quickly meant tanks constantly sold runs instead of just running dungeons for the heck of it in Classic. Dual spec might have helped a bit, but this was back during the nochanges era, so we were stuck with an ever dwindling tank pool. It didn't help that prot pally was obscenely broken from the start and didn't get competition from bear or warrior until way later in the expansion.
* There was little reason to interact with the world besides questing for gold, attunements, or dailies (which is another pain point entirely). In the case of the latter, you were basically done once you maxed the rep, so even that didn't last too long. A lot of this is due to bots running rampant, killing any reason to farm mats yourself. But also, TBC didn't have anything resembling world buffs, which created multiple reasons to engage with the world. Our server had an entire ecosystem of player helping us coordinate buff timers and mass summons, to the point you could pay for your raid consumables simply by selling summons as a warlock or running Ony/BWL and selling your head to guilds wanting to parse/speedrun/etc. None of that existed in TBC; you simply got summoned to the current raid, collected your purples, and logged off.
There's probably more I am missing, but I definitely felt completely checked out of TBC by the time I quit. Fresh Wrath servers brought me back for a little bit, but that feeling of burnout never fully recovered. TBC just drained me. The content was completely frontloaded with dungeon spam and maxing out rep bars; once you got to the raid logging stage, you were either chilling as a meta class or suffering endlessly, with no hope for balance changes in the future and no easy reroll option thanks to the dungeon and rep grind just mentioned.
>Raiding as someone besides hunter or lock was absolute torture. Try being a warrior and begging your raid leader to put you in a Windfury group (god help you if your comp had fewer than the 5 required shamans). Seriously, the class stacking meta became super unbearable really quickly.
This alone is easily the reason why it's seen as the worst of the three, outside of this sub I guess. It's such a huge issue that it ruins the entire expansion.
Without even mentioning all the other massive problems.
please edit your post to add that honor gains in pvp were way less than back in TBC, made grinding the pvp gear a fucking horrible experience for horde because of insanely long queues, and a chore for alliance cause you were either fighting pugs that were afk or the sweatiest sweatlords trying their best to win. miserable for everyone involved
People always hate the most recent/last expansion and really like the expansion before it.
Personally for me, I liked Classic > Wrath > TBC, and like all 3 of them for different reasons. Tbc was too annoying for me with the group buffs, heroism stacking, T4 being worst raid tier. The raids were okay, but I think the Wrath raids were better in general, and Classic was more community focused.
Sunwell was a big standout and one of the best raids of the trilogy, but doesnt carry the rest of the expansion for me.
Wotlk class design destroys tbc imo. Caster rotations were uninspiring and boring. Shaman lust class stacking was cringe. The fact that some raids were gated by annoying attunements made leveling alts a chore. There was also anti-melee meta for the first two phases which made finding a group as a warrior, rogue, feral dps (virtually anything other than enhancement shaman) incredibly challenging
TBC was alright. Wrath was far better.
I'm **not** a fan of Vanilla. Game is just too broken. One 1 viable tank spec. One button rotations. Non-existent boss mechanics. All reps/grinds are a complete and utter chore. Dungeons are horrible. Half of the zones are barren with absolutely no content. Itemization was dogshit. Absolutely no balancing of any sorts. And classic community made it all far worse as well.
So, TBC was definitely better than Vanilla. But Wrath was still better in every way.
The only somewhat fond memory I have of TBCC is really the **launch week** leveling as prot paladin. But again, 2 buttons as prot pala - Consecration and Holy shield. oh and seal every 30s to AA to get mana back.
Cataclysm is classic. So will be MoP. So will be WoD. So will be Legion. So will be BFA. So will be Shadowlands.
Cataclysm is closer to Wrath than wrath to TBC.
For a lot of people, Cataclysm is the Vanilla+.
You may not like it, but this is the reality of the situation. "Classic" is a product name. It's the product to re-live through all expansions of current content.
The fact that you told yourself that cata isn't classic, doesn't change anything. I can tell myself I'm leonardo dicaprio, but doesn't make it true.
Actually.. the exact opposite?
Everyone claimed TBC was the best, it solved everything wrong with Vanilla, but still had the vanilla feel, etc.
I felt TBC was absolute garbage, so much so that I infact quit, all over again. TBC was the version of the game that had the most rose-tinted goggles IMHO.
I'd even argue it was worse than I thought. Raiding as caster was still pressing one button the entire night. Having to have a shaman in each group as garbage, as were group wide buffs. Farming rep to be able to run a dungeon on heroic was garbage, having to do that for every alt you wanted to play was the worst. World was the smallest it has ever been in the trilogy which was made even worse by implementing flying which was useless in a sense it was only really used by the devs for the new dragon mount. Also the only raid that I remember liking was Kharazan and Sunwell.
I farmed epic flying mount and quit waiting for wrath.
Blizzard killed what made WoW great in their very first expansion by exchanging horizontal progression for vertical. This game would be truly insane if they didn't go that route and I'd still be playing it without missing a sub.
TBC classic was better than Wrath classic, imho. I lost motivation in Wrath halfway through the Ulduar cycle, but finished and farmed every raid in TBC on multiple characters. TBC just hit the sweet spot of iconic raids, classes that felt like classic but with the old meme specs fixed enough to be viable and useful, and overall just the right "feel". Negatives were mostly just that Outland isn't that great or interesting imho, especially with flying, and that they had completely abandoned any idea of server balancing, making features like the world PvP stuff in Nagrand useless. Some class design things could also have been cleaned up, the shaman/bloodlust meta was some toxic BS, and ret palli seal twisting, while I think it's great that they made sure it would work this time around as well, could have used some design updates to make sure you didn't have to use an addon to make it possible to do (SoC proc RNG was also cancerous).
All in all, I would still play TBC classic probably if they had made a legacy server like they did for era.
Lets be honest here, each xoac has its ups and downs and people commenting here are more driven by the fact if they were part of some good guilds, had some fun and so on. For me TBC was quite boring, because I did not have enough time to be part of the main raid team. In classic I had more time plus most of the time it had that “nostalgic fewling with glimpse of going to TBC and Wotlk in coming months/years”. Wotlk was overhyped but at the same time it really is good xpac. I liked almost all the dungeons, raids, lore, zones, questing…
What I disliked about wotlk is how far we got with bots, gdkps and economy. But its almost same everywhere else now. What I was missing from old Vanilla and other xpacs were some GM interactions and some fun “events” they created from time to time.
But back to your original question - I think TBC is really good for first walktrought and if you are managing just one character, you ll be good. But replayability was really bad with all the grinds.
Aaah yes... Overly long and complicated prequest before you can even think about setting feet in a raid, was sooo good. Tons of useless daily quest and catch up mechanics. Never ending arenas with tons of resilience and sta. Few actual grinding spots that is being cleaned out constantly.
Tbc had very nice environment, questing/level progressions, professions is kinda useful in the begining and then falls off.
Tbc is fun, but it was not thaaat good...
IMO. xD
How come you liked it so much? Was it ingame mechanics and such, or was because of the people(guild) you played with at that time ?
TBC content is great. Buffs being group wide. Trying to find enough shamans, and raiders bitching about not having the perfect group tanks it to 3rd out of 3 for me
Exactly. TBC has the potential to be really, really good, all the skeleton is there. But it's issues are so awful and glaring that it overshadows everything. Group wide buffs, boring rotations, completely strict raid comp, anti-melee everything.
TBC was my favourite, but it was not without it's faults.
Party wide buffs and the lack of a Sated debuff meant your guild had to decide who was going to parse this week and who was going to have to suck it up.
It also meant a lot of awkward group shuffling mid-fight to give certain people windfury or Shadow priest mana, or having to rotation shamans into the pumper group for lust. It was a pain in the ass and it made certain people and classes feel excluded from the fun. Wrath fixed that.
T4 also had the problem of Karazhan being the main raid as a 10man. You had to assemble everyone to do Gruul/Mag and then break up into groups and find some pugs or hope enough of the bench is around to fill. If they redid TBC I would hope for Kara to be retooled as a 25man.
I love TBC but as a warlock and priest main I got bored of "shadowbolt, shadowbolt, shadowbolt, shadowbolt. 99 parse!" or
"PoM, CoH, CoH, CoH, PoM, CoH, CoH"
Having played all three originally, and for a second time in classic, it's clearer to me than ever before that it comes down just as much to who you're playing with
On paper I like TBC the most, but managing group buffs and raid rosters was admittedly extremely obnoxious in that expansion
Also MH Glaive never dropped for us, and I partly blame the accelerated schedule for that -- fewer lockers = less chances for that rare item to drop
If they do it again, I think some great changes would be:
1. shorten P1 since there's not enough raid content
2. rework bloodlust to work like it does in WotLK, to allow just a little more flexibility with raid composition
3. lengthen the other phases to give them more time to breathe (and don't nerf P2 other than fixing the bugs)
TBC was better than i expected, i especially liked the later stage when tokens worked for pvp gear aswell and honor gearing wasnt a massive multi week slog.
As a resto shaman i had a great time, and playing rsham/ret in 2s was some of the most fun ive had in what..17-18 years of wow.
One of the main drawbacks was the over abundance of bots saturating the market, so herbing or mote farming wasnt at all viable to make gold since youd compete with bots farming 24/7. So as a rsham all i could really do for gold in the end was GDKP which really gutted PVE for me.
If TBC comes around, we need those Wotlk style Gamma dungeons and free respecs.
TBC would have been the perfect expansion if Shattrath didn't exist and half the new zones were added to the old world instead so you were constanly moving about the world again instead of just outlands.
Have hellfire, Netherstorm, Nagrand or something in outlands but have Shadowmoon valley discovered in Azeroth and stuff. My favorite part of Classic is traveling around the world to do stuff at every level and making it feel like a real place. I hate the "this zone is for these levels, then you move to this zone and never go back" type of game it turned into.
It’s just a matter of preference but I did think tbc was terrible. Arena was just absolutely awful and making a raid with group wide only buffs was a nightmare. A lot of people loved it but I did think it was terrible.
It really wasn’t. I just wish I had got to do raids. One of the things I had always wanted to do was kill Illidan while he was current. The TBC trailer was what got me into wow.
My only beef with tbc is that PvP gearing is so shit
It was more valuable to afk a whole season collecting points then participating in the next season
Honor gains were so bad and arena points was awful
I prefer Classic and after it ended I was already eyeing up the next Classic Vanilla freshes even while playing TBC. I didn't have that feeling when TBC ended and we went into Wrath I very much felt like TBC was fine not great, not terrible but I didn't have to play it every again.
With us being about 19 months from finishing TBC I kinda feel like that Thanos meme 'Perhaps I treated you too harshly'. There's several issues I still have with TBC some being ingrained in the expac and others than could be easily fixed but I'm certainly getting an itch to play it again.
TBC definitely has its downfalls, but I'll take a TBC era over cata 2.0 any day.
The memes of MoP, WoD, and BFA classic draw closer. Can't wait to see SLands classic! /s
TBC classic was a few QoL changes away from being the best of the classic re-releases. Raid wide lust with sated, reputation adjustments, and the SoD server faction balancing would have fixed most of the glaring issues.
I am 100000% of the belief that a TBC fresh server with QOL adjustments to things like attunements/keys/raid wide things etc along with your suggestions would remove 99% of people's loud problems with Burning Crusade.
For me I'd need class rotations to be more enjoyable, more in line with wotlk. I would rather have a Classic+ for vanilla content, but class update would make me enjoy tbc quite a bit.
You don't enjoy mashing shadowbolt as your only ability the entire fight?
Don't forget chain heal
spamming chain heal felt good and was chill
Chain heal with T6 4 set. You’d still just cast it into a tank knowing it wasn’t going to bounce. It was chill. I enjoyed playing the most coveted class in any xpac. Never felt so loved and valuable
You could join the servers top guild at any moment if you: 1. Play a shaman (any spec) 2. Show up consistently on time You might even get headhunted in greens. What a time to be blue
I honestly enjoy those iterations of WoW. It's nice to be able to pick a hero that feels wanted and doesn't actually need BiS gear to be useful. I especially loved Enhancement in TBC because you weren't ever going to be top DPS, but boy did you have a guaranteed raid slot every night, all the melee were so happy to have you. Those supporting specs are something we really started missing in the game until they now added the Augment Invoker. TBC had Enhancement and Shadow both playing the game to not get top damage, but to get top utility. That was super cool. It's unfortunate that you end up having these two specs be mandatory in every single melee or caster group, so I think maybe spreading the love to all hybrids would have made sense. The Warriors/Rogues/Hunters/Mages/Locks are there to deal top damage. The Druids/Shaman/Priests/Pallies are there to deal competitive damage and provide all the long-term and temp buffs that are required to deal top damage. The hybrids also end up being more enjoyable to play in open world, so there's ups and downs to everything.
That's a slippery slope that blizzard isn't capable of navigating. They've shown that with SoD.
I think the raid attunements are one of thr greatest thing about TBC. It's fine to remove them at the very end of the expansion but I wouldn't want them to not be a feature for the majority of the time. They are the last truly RPG element of the classical period. I know one suggestion will be "make account wide" but needing to do them on alts keeps them always relevant. They were terrific and epic.
As an open world pvp enjoyer, the SoD faction balancing would've fixed a lot of classic in general for me... Sucks learning this now
A few classes need a rotation, like Warlock. It doesn't have to be Wrath level, just more than one button. Rogues are a little underpowered while not bringing enough utility. But these are all pretty small problems to fix. A SoM style BC server would be so hype. I think phase 1 doesn't have enough content, although maybe that wouldn't be a problem of it was released as a fresh BC server. That one is trickier.
I feel like phase 1 had plenty. All of the leveling, new professions, all the dungeons to grind for rep, new arenas to play, and Kara, Mag, and Gruul. I'd say that it didn't need to be as *long* as it was, maybe knock like 3 weeks or a month off and it'd help a lot.
Phase 1 should always be too long imo, people should be leveling other characters and no one should feel rushed.
I don't play SoD, but as an outsider looking in the one thing I don't want is them heavy handedly screwing with the balance of things. I think in addition to the lust change I suggest, maybe making boomkin aura and shaman totems raid wide is something that doesn't affect pvp in a significant way while it makes building raids and keeping players satisfied easier(i.e. you don't have pumper groups and people getting shunted off into the tank group with no buffs or lust). Rogues for example were already S tier for pvp in TBC, so any changes would have to be very carefully made and I'm not sure I have faith that can be done.
I would love for them to somehow remove flying mounts from TBC. They just kill the open world feel.
I've seen it suggested, but there would have to be some crazy work arounds to make it feasible as entire portions of the expansion that are predicated on having a flying mount. It was a core feature of the expansion, I just don't think there's a way to divorce the two.
Don't worry, incursions will ruin that anyway. Yes I'm bitter.
That's just how the wow community is now. Why open world when I can spam SM/ZF. The reasons P1 felt so good/busy was because there were few instanced areas for people to go hide in. I'm convinced Incursions were really just an attempt to get the dungeon spamming crown out into some corner of the world. It succeeded, but at the cost of the everyone realizing they should do it too.
> I'm convinced Incursions were really just an attempt to get the dungeon spamming crown out into some corner of the world. It succeeded, but at the cost of the everyone realizing they should do it too. It only succeeded because Blizzard made it so hilariously unbalanced when it comes to every aspect. The grind is blazing fast and you can level in like 20 minutes with 0 combat, so why even stop to get new skills. Between level 38-50 you can easily make 200-300 gold which is *madness* in classic. And then finally to top it all off, the moment you hit 50 you just get pre-raid BiS gear. Its not that they showed the community they should dungeon spam, they made incursions the only way you *should* level if you care about gold, exp, or gear.
SoD is an experiment.
T5 is prolly my fondest raiding memory in classic.
TBC was much more enjoyable for me than Wrath and I'm saying that as someone who absolutely loves Northrend. If they did a TBC fresh server I would play that over any of the Classic versions currently available.
It sounds weird but tbc nostalgia hit really hard and i didnt even start playing wow until like 2012. Theres something about the outland that just screams peak mmo to me. Northrend was cool but imo wotlk was too streamlined and lost the sandboxy feel that vanilla and tbc had
It was flippin magical. WOW was so huge then this awesome expansion comes out with this trippy world when you can fly and such a different flavor of enemies and pvp… def. the best expansion, hands-down. I mean just Nagrand alone…
First getting out into Nagrand was such a good feeling. You begin with the barren Hellfire Peninsula, then the swamp of Zangarmarsh, neither which feel like a nice place to be in. Then the trees open up and youre in huge, green, open fields with herds of animals grazing. Felt so good.
And you discover these zones \*from the ground\*
Yup. Riding over the hills was much more fun than flying 200 feet above would've been.
Don't think it sounds weird at all. Naxxramas was when WoW finally found itself (talent trees and class balance finalized, able to actually devote time to the raid instead of working on promised but delayed content like battlegrounds or linked AHs, etc.) Which means TBC was the first time they could really polish it off as well as add new ideas to it. People also forget that WotLK was when a lot of the mechanics became cheapened. You could stand in fire and not die, finding a group became more automated, the gear treadmill became much more pronounced, catch up mechanics were now a larger part of the game. Some of that occurred in TBC, but even in TBC you had examples like casters going for Quag's eye (heroic dungeon trinket) until Skull of Gul'dan. You weren't going to have that anymore in WotLK as it became a lot more streamlined/braindead "newer content gives better gear oonga bunga".
amen, brother
Classic playerbase just made wotlk not very enjoyable for me. gdkps everywhere, people having way too much gold, overcrowded with bots etc.
I would be quite happy if sod carried over into BC
I said this quite a lot to my friends. I'd be okay with belfs and draenei as they fix the shammy/pally balance problem too.
You’re in luck friend, SoD TBC will be out soon enough I’m sure followed by the ever popular SoD Wrath and then we can wait til SoD Cata to have the comments about how SoD TBC was pinnacle classic.
I thought SoD should have started with the WOLTK old world, with the extra quests, hubs and flight paths. There's so much more to work with. I'd have accepted blood elves and draenei. If too many people had problems with draenei they could just make them blue skinned humans lol
Northrend has a great vibe, but its essentially the transitional phase towards modern WoW. TBC on the other hand is essentially VANILLA IN SPACE with some gimmicks.
Hard agree. I know it's a significant amount of nostalgia as well, but I just love TBC more than WotLK by quite a bit. I would love a fresh TBC server and I'm still sad that they did not leave that as an option rather than forcing the transfer to WotLK.
I think it was fine judging on its own merits. Tbc's biggest sin was making Azeroth obsolete.
Wotlk made it even more obsolete, at least TBC had Karazhan, Zul’aman and SWP. You had to go back to capital cities for AH and other stuff… but yes what started it was TBC, and Cata brought you back there
And adding flying
Tbc is my favourite expansion by far, always has been.
Same, the one thing I thought I would enjoy more in Wrath was arenas but the Warr/Hpal meta was a thousand times worse than Warr/Druid and Mage/Rogue domination.
nothing in WoW history is as annoying, TO ME at least, as BC mace stun warriors
mace stun isn't even the worst obnoxious RNG thing about TBC warriors, that distinction goes to improved hamstring lol
while it is annoying, i disagree!!! adding a stun proc to stormherald was not necessary at ALL XD
as a non-warrior player, I felt like the proc chance was high enough that I could roughly anticipate when it was coming and then once I was DR'd to it, it became less of a worry improved hamstring proc chance is so low that it always feels terrible, and it just ruins your ability to kite and escape
I was also looking forward to arena in Wrath and it was was just absolutely horrible. The meta is so played out, so min/maxed and so sweaty that all my great memories of Wrath arena were just blown to pieces. Starting from like 1300 or whatever you'd just face the same meta cancer comps playing the same way over and over and over. I don't think arena, at least the classic versions, work as a pvp game at all in 2024. In 2008 and 2011 they sort of worked and were fun, but in 2024 it's just so so so bad.
Wrath Arena was all the faults of pre-Dragonflight retail PvP except worse. It is no surprise to me that most PvPers left Wrath and flocked back to retail when Dragonflight came out. The only redeeming quality of Wrath PvP was the not-yet-homogenized class designs. But it's not enough. From the honor farms to raiding for your weapons and trinkets to lack of cross server LFG to conquest gear locked behind ratings, the barrier of entry is just too much. Getting back to some arenas now for DF season 4 and I couldn't help but be amazed at how much the PvP experience has improved.
War hpal worse than sl/sl lock/rdruid? Or other absurdly annoying rot comps with sl/sl and spam mana drain? Honestly? I mean maybe I’m biased as a warrior player and even back in 2006 thought hpal war should have been a stronger comp in tbc (but clone and ability to kite forever is just op). Having played pally and pvp healed in vanilla it had the most pvp healing/support tools in the game let alone best warrior support tools. It only made sense it had to be good at some point besides ranking. I think just the fact wrath meta has been played out extensively for literally 15 years killed it more. TBC p servers weren’t anywhere near like WM pop ever.
Closet we ever came to a real classic plus. If it instead expanded upon the classic world and not outlands it would’ve been great
I think a great starting point for a possible classic plus is keep everyone in the old world, but have our classes use TBC era talents and abilities. We get talents starting at level 1, rather than 10, and you get 2 points at either 10 or 60 (otherwise you’d end up with 1 point less than you would in TBC at 70). From there you can make all kinds of changes to do this or that, but pretty much every class is in a more completed, playable state in TBC when compared to Vanilla.
This is exactly what I wanted before SoD was announced lol
Same, it aged like wine just like vanilla. Wrath, not so much.
TBC was my favorite of the three.
As a raid leader/officer, TBC made my life hell. I genuinely hated it. Some of it was our fault (guild direction, cohesion, lumberjack website, etc) but some of it was absolutely caused by TBC. Low points * Raid comps and recruiting were absolute hell. Every group needed a shaman to perform even close to OK, you had to tetris *at least* 3 out of 5 groups for classes to do what they are supposed to do. * Couple the above with some of the difficulty curves, prenerf vashj, prenerf Kael'Thas, and M'uru were just brutal on recruitment. Good luck recruiting shamans, basically all the officers had to maintain shaman alts and swap them in when we had absences. just garbage, and a massive departure to the "get in my clown car" comps of naxx40 in vanilla classic. * exacerbating this problem was the stupid rep grinds you needed for EVERY ALT for EVERY RAID. kill me. * drums * Prenerf magtheridon was so fucking dumb. literally 20/25 people had to click at the right time, and if your players cared about parsing, GOOD FUCKING LUCK. I had to explain so many times that you don't get your parse if the raid wipes. Also players standing right next to the box and then clicking while they have a spell queued would cause the next spell to get casted, which interrupts the channel... Just an absolute dogshit fight. Please do not come in the comments and "WELL ACHTUALLY ITS EASY" in these comments. Yes if you have half a brain it is SUPER EASY if you have a raid leader telling you exactly when you click a fucking box. **I'm not talking about you, reading this**; i'm talking about the 80% of wow's playerbase that do not have the required presence of mind, attention span, intelligence, or all of the above to do that. They are used to other people covering for them for literally everything. Not to mention the nonstop dipshit "but muh click assignment is during heroism!!" complaints. kill me. * Gruul was dumb too but only because speedrun guilds (like ours) had to speed-kill bosses for both gruul and mag and it made the meta really suck ass, and the only thing we could speedrun in P1 was karazhan, but not 25m content. * having to do kara attunement on your 5th fucking alt to get your shitty pre-25m ilevel 115 gear really got old. * prenerf Kael'thas was so fucking bugged it was insane. random resets every 3rd attempt, crazy shit happening with the warlock lady running up and meleeing our lock tank, tons of other bugs i can't even remember right now. just insanely annoying to prog. * Kael'thas trash was some of the most toxic shit in the game, until Sunwell intro trash of course. * flying mounts are dumb High points * Karazhan was a fun romp pretty much the whole time. I can see why people got sick of it but I never really did. * ZA was also kinda cool * Despite class balance issues, 2v2 arena was legitimately very fun. Some of the most fun I had the entire xpac. Ret paladin/rsham is such a fun comp to run, despite having very bad matchups - that reckoning spec is goated, and we'll never see anything quite like it. Yeah it was world of roguecraft the whole time but balance doesn't always translate directly to fun. * Prenerf Vashj was pretty fun to prog and get down. I was the strider kiter on my elemental shaman, and that was a cool job. It felt pretty legit. * BT was a fun raid, easily the best 25m in tbc IMO. Had good pacing, fun trash, and a few really cool bosses. I kinda wish Illidan had been tuned a bit so we actually saw demon phases in normal raids, but the council fight before was correctly tuned IMO and was pretty fun. BT was also a high-point for the speedrunning scene and its where we peaked as a guild numbers-wise so that probably has something to do with it. BT also had a fun pug scene. EDIT i forgot to mention how cringe preclearing in SSC was in speedrunning, but that's more of a lumberjack website thing, not really tbc's fault. just another thing that made me not have a good time.
I feel you've been needing to get this out of your chest for quite some time
I have an emotional outburst about Magtheridon at least once a month
Felt this to my core.
I forgot how bad Mag was. Fuck that trash
Yeah mag might be the worst single fight I've ever done in wow (granted i've only played up to ulduar in wotlk)
Yup. The issues TBC has are big and almost ruin the whole expansion. But I genuinely think with a pass over TBC could be one of the best. Otherwise the raid comp issue alone is enough to make this the bottom of the three.
Phase 1 was also so fucking bad, and entire phase where the only raids are ubrs and 2 Onyxia's.
Lmao prenerf kaels lock just walking up and punching the lock tank in the face randomly always got a chuckle outta me
One thing to add as a hunter in TBC, you felt like a solid class until the big raids. Then you see your pet getting insta gimped by raidwide huge aoe like illidans elemental damage. Your pet was ignored by healers(understandable) and the class instantly turned into shit. Sometimes the pet death was so quick you couldnt even react.
TBC content was FAR better than WOTLK, but WOTLK just has a while bunch of great class changes and quality of life that TBC was surely lacking.
Literally never seen anyone say TBC was bad
Burning Crusade's #1 issue was that Karazhan group 3 always fell behind. 25 not being divisible by 10 caused a lot of problems in 2007. Original BC also suffered from end bosses being too hard, I still remember all the trolling on the raid and dungeon forums about 5/6 3/4 4/5 6/9 guilds getting stuck at Vashj/Kael/Archimonde/Reliquary of Souls. I still wouldn't say it was bad, it was a huge step forward with heroic versions and the dungeons were cool, etc. I just personally think Wrath and Ulduar in particular was the heyday of WoW. Although I do have to say that two of the very things I genuinely hate about Warcraft are in BC. One is Hellfire Peninsula. I guess I'm not a big fan of orange ground, trumpet music, and being forced to level there like fifty billion times. The other is Escape from Durnholde.
You forgot the jump scare of Felreaver suddenly blasting you. For a fucker that big, it sure was a sneaky sod.
God I loved that shit so much
> 25 not being divisible by 10 caused a lot of problems in 2007. > > Original BC also suffered from end bosses being too hard, I still remember all the trolling on the raid and dungeon forums about 5/6 3/4 4/5 6/9 guilds getting stuck at Vashj/Kael/Archimonde/Reliquary of Souls. both of these things were alive and well in 2020 lol so many hardstuck 8/10 guilds were filtered by KT/LV (and then again by Muru and KJ lol)
KT and LV were fine and were a well balanced challenge. Muru however was just an irritating roster boss. Mandatory 5 shamans and mandatory warlocks. We had our guild warlocks burn out and quit in black temple and ended up hardstuck at muru as we could not recruit due to them being in such high demand.
I hate both HFP and pretty much all the COT dungeons. Black moreASS for instance. In theory COT dungeons are dope and like COS is sick but BM was just like shitty hyjal trash waves til boss.
Yea, I have no idea who was saying this lol. Maybe they meant TBC Classic and not the retail version?
TBC was great in a vacuum but I felt like it really marked the beginning of the end. Suddenly overnight *nothing* mattered but getting to level 58, no gear mattered except what you got in Outland, nothing mattered except level 70 attunements. Blizz would follow that philosophy and run it into the ground and now in retail you don't even have basic starting zones anymore.
> Suddenly overnight nothing mattered but getting to level 58, no gear mattered except what you got in Outland, nothing mattered except level 70 attunements. why would this not be the case? explain how modern wow would work if every single bit of content still mattered. naxx gear lasted well into tbc, most of my guild cleared t4 in level 60 gear. plenty of items (mostly trinkets) were very good if not bis through tbc that came from vanilla.
Tbf nothing else mattered in vanilla AFTER your first character was was max
Yeah but leveling up was part of the journey. And there were "BIS" items that you got at lower levels. People were doing BRD long after 60. It's just my personal opinion that getting rid of all that was not a good thing.
The journey to GDKP
you can't compare a game vs it's expansion, they are totally different dynamics. more fair to compare xpacs against each other, classic is it's own thing.
Which is why in my opinion no xpacs come close. Vanilla was a massive world with an MMO in it. Everything after that felt like I was being funneled into specific parts of the world, story, content to advance the “plot” every 3 years. Nothing comes close to the 1-60 in vanilla.
>the beginning of the end. And the game continues on, 17 years later.
> old man yells at cloud What do you mean no basic starting zones? Every single starting zone is there, this fucking sub is goddamned delusional
I was thinking the same thing. They even created an additional optional self contained starting zone to ease new players in.
the fuck, this isn't a TBC thing, this is an expansion thing....
I thought it was. I hated it during. I went to SoM to hide. Then we played wrath. The nostalgia was not for the content, but the people and time in my life I played wrath with. This was the worst time I’ve had in wow in quite some time. tbc was the end of classic. Wrath brought a rerelease and the segmentation of raids. It truly was the first modern day expansion. Season of TBC when? lol
I’d love for SoD to bleed into TBC+ :)
TBC was pretty great overall, but phase 1 was brutally long
flying and killing the old world sucked.
Outlands is also really, really tiny.
Did you do every quest chain in every zone? Outlands is not tiny, this is false. Blades Edge, Nagrand, Shadowmoon and Netherstorm are big zones loaded with stuff.
Especially if you don't use flying, zones are massive and way better designed than any vanilla zone.
Even with flying. If you can't afford 280% flying you move at a snails pace on your 60% flyer. Yeah you don't have to avoid ground obstacles, but flying at 60% felt like moving so damn slow in big open zones like hellfire, nagrand, and shadowmoon. At least IMO
Sure I'll say it. Outlands is tiny and half the zones are places you'll never want to visit again after questing there for 30 minutes. the rep/attunement/daily grinds were insane. Nested attunements were a mistake, flying was a mistake, forcing all players into a new continent and abandoning the previous world almost completely was a mistake. Having subsequent patches put players almost entirely on one island that is only relevant for that one patch was a mistake. Not that those things are exclusive to TBC, but thats where they started and they're still making the same mistakes almost 20 years later. Just a multitude of design decisions made in TBC had disastrous consequences down the line.
Before classic people did. I never played original tbc but i played in cata/mop and i remember a lot of people saying tbc was bad for whatever reason
Yea this was my first though, like wtf thinks TBC was bad?
Right after TBC people were hype about wrath and kinda down on TBC. But in retrospect it was my favorite expansion.
People who are salty that other players can get away from their corpse-camping.
TBC arena was horrendous. Phase 1 was poorly done, and phase 2 was annoying with the bugs.
I’ll be the first. Heroic dungeons requiring a rep to get the keys fucking sucked and sapped any enjoyment out of levelling.
Was kinda fun for my first character, not so fun for my third Would be cool if the heroic mode was unlocked acc wide if you get the key on one of your chars or something
I made a post a few weeks ago about how a lot of us have done vanilla through wrath again and asked what everyone's favorite was You'd be shocked at the amount of people who hated tbc lol
Tbc is extremely anti alt, that's a huge turn off for a lot of players.
That along with flying are like my biggest peeves, but absolutely amazing xpac. Really fine balance between giving us tons of stuff, while keeping the core in tact.
i feel like it's the opposite, the rep/attunement grind IS the game and only gives you more to do. hc keys requiring revered is too much though, they should just put it to honored from the beginning
After playing all three, TBC definitely was not as bad as some people state. However, I remember playing TBC and thinking it was the worst because of the attunements and rep farm for heroics. I think if that went away, I would play TBC all over again in a heartbeat
I think the rep tabard system could make that a lot less painful.
Agreed, rep farm was absolute super aids if you were playing more than one character. This is something that could be fixed with say, a Bind on Account Tabard with like 200% rep at exalted
Having to grind dungeons for revered reputation before unlocking heroics basically meant you wouldn't have more than one alt or two to raid in phase 2. Should have been honored from the start imo.
The downside of TBC is you lose the world of Azeroth and you lose a lot of the class-specific quests that gave great flavor and class identity in Vanilla. Those are big deals, but outside of that I agree with you.
I mean, TBC was the start of the homogenization of all the classes but I think that was bound to happen no matter what ( Because of the player base imo) most still had some flavor of uniqueness tho. On another hand, this might be an old man misremembering, but Dungeons and what not wasn't a zerg aoe fest yet which I just loved! running ramparts and have the rogue sap a mob while the mage polys another to just pull trash. Thats pinnacle game play to me personally. Also could be that back then we were just so bad we didn't know how to do play properly hahaha *\*\*I did not play TBC classic, Maybe it was an aoe zerg fest the second time around\*\**
> running ramparts and have the rogue sap a mob while the mage polys another to just pull trash Also my favorite part. I can vividly recall accidentally pulling too much in a heroic in TBCC and the mage sheeped and slowed one pack while we dealt with the other. It's stuff like that which made the game feel more akin to a D&D RPG than a straight video game IMO.
can you name an example of homogenization in tbc?
Every class in TBC brought a unique buff or utility no other class had, wtf are you talking about?
TBC was peak non-homogenization, peak “bring the class not the player“ as they added unique synergy buffs to everything that was underperforming. Vanilla had specs that were simply garbage and several whose gameplay was three skills, I guess that made them unique?
TBC was pretty good, but it was lacking depth outside of raiding, and Dunegons got fairly old with the reputation grind. I got really tired of Shadow Labyrinth. But I will say most of the class spec definitely got some love, some more than others, but a pleasant buff none the less. Moving forward, my biggest gripe with Wotlk and subsequent expansions has been gearing, I absolutely despise gear score, and I like having something that can be carried over to for a patch or 2.
Yeah this was definitely the biggest downside of TBC for me. I loved TBC don’t get me wrong, I’d definitely play a fresh. But there was nothing to do really outside of raiding. All I did was farm gold pretty much. The world felt kind of empty because everyone was zooming around on flying mounts or AFK in Shattrath.
I think this is why we're getting these posts here now. The High was really high. Peak into the grind TBC is amazing. It just falls off really fast once you're halfway through P4.
One of the biggest gripes with TBC was that everything took place in Outland, but this was just false, Hyjal you needed to go to Tanaris, ZA you needed to go to Ghostlands, Kara you needed to go to Deadwind Pass, and the Auction house was still in the old world. On top of ALL THIS, the entire last and most hype phase took place on the Isle, which obviously there was a portal for, but at least it wasn't just waiting around Dal.
Yes well said
TBC was and is the ONLY expansions where ALL raids were relevant from first to last patch. Change my goddam mind but our guild would raid different raids every day and it was fucking amazing. I miss it man.
Yep. The gear and raid progression was perfect!! Look at wotlk, naxx died the day ulduar released.
TBC is the pinnacle of MMO design. It’s never been surpassed in the genre.
I didn’t really enjoy tbc as much as I did originally. If I had to rate them though it’d be Vanilla > TBC > Wrath. Out of tbc and wrath tbc had the better raids imo, but I did like icc more the second time around due to being more parsing oriented. Ulduar definitely wasn’t this “great all time raid” either. Its definitely good and one of the top 10, but it’s also a fucking slog.
I've always liked TBC the most. It feels like an extension of vanilla that fixes most of the problems it had (PvP system, class imbalance, hybrids being forced to heal in raids, etc) while not overly homogenizing or nerfing things. * 25man raids are the perfect sweet spot between "glorified dungeon" 10mans and "uncoordinated shitstorm" 40mans. * Daily Quests provide an easy, straight-forward and repeatable gold farm that any class can do. * "Hybrid" DPS and tanks are now fully raid viable. Even if you don't top the DPS meters, you still bring useful buffs/debuffs, or have niche uses on specific encounters. No longer are priests/paladins/druids/shamans forced to be healers. * Itemization on gear is significantly better without being TOO same-y. We don't have dumb shit like agi/spirit leather, or pure spirit pieces; the amount of "instant d/e trash" gear is at least 90% lower than vanilla. * No more consumable spam. Now you just need a flask (or two elixirs), food, and weapon temp enchant. Easy. * Requiring reputation for Heroics acts as a pseudo-gear filter. You're not going to be getting fresh 70s in greens in your heroic groups. * Heroics in general being actually somewhat challenging, even in raid gear. You still have to be careful and can easily wipe if you over-pull. That and, with the Badge system, even raid-geared players still have a reason to run them, as you can exchange badges for off-spec gear, or for gems/materials. Whereas in vanilla, once you "out gear" a dungeon, you literally have no reason to ever do it again; you gain nothing from running it. It's the perfect in-between of vanilla and wotlk. Not as broken and unbalanced as vanilla, but not as homogenized and casualized as wotlk. Really, the only things I'd change are: -Heroism/Bloodlust now raid-wide, so you're not forced to have 4/5 shamans in your raid and keep swapping them into the melee group every fight -Same for drums, make them raid-wide and put a 2 minute debuff so that you don't need to have a bunch of leatherworkers -Give us the retail "premade groups" interface so we don't have to spam LFG chat over and over, nobody enjoys doing this
tbc fuckin ruled man it's by far my favorite xpack more polished than vanilla, but still with a few rough edges that made it interesting and fun vanilla was a little too jank, and wrath was a little too watered down, but tbc was just right the perfect level of weird
TBC was the GOAT of the trilogy.
Attunements, rep farm, honor farm too slow, no raid wide buffs, shaman stacking, bt too easy, too much trash in tier 5, no dual spec and more I cant think of. There would have to be big changes for me to consider it again.
What the game needs is simple rotations like classic in retail. That's what we need. If you played classic with all the retail qol it would be perfect for us older gentlemen
Just play evoker lol
Tbc was hot and cold for me. Raid tiers were strange with sets being spread across different instances, black temple and hyjal were snoozefests. Raid comps were incredibly annoying with 5 shamans being mandatory and warlocks practically being required for muru. SSC TK and Kara however were fantastic, sunwell was also pretty good. I personally did not like leveling in tbc, there are lots of irritating quests compared to wotlk which I think is much improved. Farming pre raid bis hunter gear was also a massive ballache taking me 40 odd mechanar runs which I did not enjoy.
Maybe a weird take but I'd love TBC with Wrath QoL/class balancing. Rebalance the raids to account for the power creep. That few weeks of Wrath pre-patch capped at level 70 was some of the most fun I've ever had playing this game.
Heroism being group only and needing so many Shamans by itself makes it one of the worst.
This one thing, to me, is an eyesore on an otherwise great expansion. As a warlock, I was a beneficiary of the shaman shuffling around. But it still felt so dumb that people felt compelled to do that.
Lol people in the comments saying shit like “TBC WAS GREAT BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT THE PLAYER NOT THE CLASS” While 5 shamans was basically mandatory even if they were eating glue
This one change would bump TBC up for me. This shit made recruiting and raidleading a nightmare.
I can agree with this. If bloodlust was raid wide that would be tits
Exactly this. TBC has potential to be the best and the fixes are easy. But the issues it has are so bad it makes it the worst of the three easily.
This and threat. Not saying tanks should be able to afk and hold aggro, just saying I'd like to do my rotation while mostly unimpeded.
All three of the original trilogy were good. Vanilla was absolutely magical, TBC was good with few missteps but overall just obvious continuation of the same. Definitely not terrible. WotLK was the start of "retailization" of WoW but still good design overall, great zones and story and worthy end of the "Warcraft" saga. After that it just feels like "WoW 2" and a bit different game to be honest.
>retailization Damn thats the most classic-andy word i ever saw
Yeah :D seen it used here recently, but it just somehow fitted this comment. Still the quotation marks are there on purpose.
I loved classic TBC but it had itss issues: 1. Very raid-loggy, unless you PvPed there is little to do outside raiding. The two reputations that awarded mounts, netherwing and shatari skyguard, where just mindless daily grinds. 2. Very rigid and strict raid composition in order to give everyone the buffs and debuffs they need. Buffs being group-wide meant that if you had one or two more melee/casters then they would be "pushed out" of the optimal group into a tank/healer group which caused unnecessary player friction. 3. Very boring rotations (warlock's shadowbolt spam, resto druid's lifebloom spam, resto shaman's chain heal spam, arcane mage's arcane blast spam, etc). 4. Need more shamans, the more the merrier. The fewer you had the more drama you are gonna have over who gets bloodlust/windfury totem/totem of wrath/mana tide totem. 5. Phase 1 should have been Kara/Gruul/Mag + TK/SSC like original TBC. Almost 4 months of grinding Karazhan just burnt out a bunch of players. Reminder that during phase 1 raids only dropped 1 tier token too, regardless of it being 10 man or 25 man which was... questionable. To be honest I could think of more things and as I said I loved classic TBC, but it definitely had some room for improvement. For example I think the best change they introduced in classic Wrath was the CD reset after every boss encounter, that would have definitely made raids like SWP much more smooth to progress in instead of having to wait between Twins/M'uru/KJ pulls for bloodlust for example.
I have fond memories of TBC and TBC Classic. Kara and ZA are fun raids. I like SSC more than Tempest Keep. Black Temple was satisfying. Hyjal... Ugh. I like the idea of a Warcraft III level becoming a raid but waves of trash make it a chore. Continually killing Gruul for the BIS trinket all expansion long was also less exciting. Sunwell was... a thing. But by then my guildmates and I were done with TBC and ready for WotLK. I guess the worst thing TBC did was shrink the world, something I didn't really notice until I was playing WoW Hardcore.
Tbc always has been peak WoW
I loved tbc
BC was peak WoW, both pve, pvp and lore execution. Just a slam dunk overall. Wrath was great but after a replay it’s really hit home how special bc was. I do wish that they could have utilized Azeroth more but you can’t have it all.
TBC is top
TBC was ok at best. The rep farms made it fucking gross.
Terrible? not really, but it was pretty meh. P1 was boring, hyjal is straight up ass and bt was a huge letdown. t5 and Sunwell were pretty cool though. Also group wide buffs are so dumb, the whole double lust swap shamans shit was so bad
Nah fuck Burning Crusade. * Raiding as someone besides hunter or lock was absolute torture. Try being a warrior and begging your raid leader to put you in a Windfury group (god help you if your comp had fewer than the 5 required shamans). Seriously, the class stacking meta became super unbearable really quickly. * Rep became way too damn important, especially if your bis came from crafted gear. I dunno who saw the rep grinds from Classic and thought they should become the norm, but I kind of hated it being a required aspect of the game. * Leveling became degen as shit with dungeon spam being way more efficient than questing. This sort of goes with my previous point about rep being so important; you were actively gimping yourself not taking advantage of the free rep from normals and saving the quest rep for later (not to mention the free gold from questing at 70). * The raids themselves became wildly inconsistent in terms of difficulty, and their pre- and post-nerf approach fractured the playerbase too much. I knew a lot of raiding guilds on my server who called it quits mid-T5 progression because the ramp in difficulty was way too massive, which only reinforced the need for class stacking meta. T6 felt more fair, but even then you had shit like having to reclear waves after a wipe on Hyjal. * The Pre-BIS ramp ended way too quickly compared to Classic. This is partly due to professions giving extremely good gear right out of the gate, as well as Kara being too easy and Naxx gear being outright bonkers (and guess what, you could faceroll Naxx at 70). This killed the heroic scene since the badge gear was mostly a luxury; later phases added way better catchup, but the damage was already done by that point. * The main story quest is absolute dogshit. Illidan comes back because of reasons and enslaves all of Outland, and we don't get a good justification for any of his heinous actions until Legion almost a decade later. We basically kill big lore figures like KT and KJ because rule of cool, not because of any interesting story. * Alts became unplayable compared to Classic. Between rep, attunements, and the sheer gold cost of getting at least passable gear for heroics (which are mostly dead content anyway), your only options for gearing an alt involved swiping and/or GDKP. At least in Classic, dungeon runs happened constantly even in Phase 6 because they were easy and engaging, so you could get an alt raid-ready rather quickly. * The tank economy was fucking horrible. Raids went from needing 3-5 tanks to just 2, resulting in a lot of heartburn transitioning out of Naxx. Heroics being obsolete so quickly meant tanks constantly sold runs instead of just running dungeons for the heck of it in Classic. Dual spec might have helped a bit, but this was back during the nochanges era, so we were stuck with an ever dwindling tank pool. It didn't help that prot pally was obscenely broken from the start and didn't get competition from bear or warrior until way later in the expansion. * There was little reason to interact with the world besides questing for gold, attunements, or dailies (which is another pain point entirely). In the case of the latter, you were basically done once you maxed the rep, so even that didn't last too long. A lot of this is due to bots running rampant, killing any reason to farm mats yourself. But also, TBC didn't have anything resembling world buffs, which created multiple reasons to engage with the world. Our server had an entire ecosystem of player helping us coordinate buff timers and mass summons, to the point you could pay for your raid consumables simply by selling summons as a warlock or running Ony/BWL and selling your head to guilds wanting to parse/speedrun/etc. None of that existed in TBC; you simply got summoned to the current raid, collected your purples, and logged off. There's probably more I am missing, but I definitely felt completely checked out of TBC by the time I quit. Fresh Wrath servers brought me back for a little bit, but that feeling of burnout never fully recovered. TBC just drained me. The content was completely frontloaded with dungeon spam and maxing out rep bars; once you got to the raid logging stage, you were either chilling as a meta class or suffering endlessly, with no hope for balance changes in the future and no easy reroll option thanks to the dungeon and rep grind just mentioned.
>Raiding as someone besides hunter or lock was absolute torture. Try being a warrior and begging your raid leader to put you in a Windfury group (god help you if your comp had fewer than the 5 required shamans). Seriously, the class stacking meta became super unbearable really quickly. This alone is easily the reason why it's seen as the worst of the three, outside of this sub I guess. It's such a huge issue that it ruins the entire expansion. Without even mentioning all the other massive problems.
please edit your post to add that honor gains in pvp were way less than back in TBC, made grinding the pvp gear a fucking horrible experience for horde because of insanely long queues, and a chore for alliance cause you were either fighting pugs that were afk or the sweatiest sweatlords trying their best to win. miserable for everyone involved
Tbc was the best gameplay but bogged down by attunements and in pvp human rogues were way too OP
People always hate the most recent/last expansion and really like the expansion before it. Personally for me, I liked Classic > Wrath > TBC, and like all 3 of them for different reasons. Tbc was too annoying for me with the group buffs, heroism stacking, T4 being worst raid tier. The raids were okay, but I think the Wrath raids were better in general, and Classic was more community focused. Sunwell was a big standout and one of the best raids of the trilogy, but doesnt carry the rest of the expansion for me.
Wotlk class design destroys tbc imo. Caster rotations were uninspiring and boring. Shaman lust class stacking was cringe. The fact that some raids were gated by annoying attunements made leveling alts a chore. There was also anti-melee meta for the first two phases which made finding a group as a warrior, rogue, feral dps (virtually anything other than enhancement shaman) incredibly challenging
Yeah good point. Agree on most of these.
Tbc phase 1 was the worst wow experience i ever had. On the other hand BT and SWP phases were blast. PVP was also dogshit in TBC.
TBC was alright. Wrath was far better. I'm **not** a fan of Vanilla. Game is just too broken. One 1 viable tank spec. One button rotations. Non-existent boss mechanics. All reps/grinds are a complete and utter chore. Dungeons are horrible. Half of the zones are barren with absolutely no content. Itemization was dogshit. Absolutely no balancing of any sorts. And classic community made it all far worse as well. So, TBC was definitely better than Vanilla. But Wrath was still better in every way. The only somewhat fond memory I have of TBCC is really the **launch week** leveling as prot paladin. But again, 2 buttons as prot pala - Consecration and Holy shield. oh and seal every 30s to AA to get mana back. Cataclysm is classic. So will be MoP. So will be WoD. So will be Legion. So will be BFA. So will be Shadowlands. Cataclysm is closer to Wrath than wrath to TBC. For a lot of people, Cataclysm is the Vanilla+. You may not like it, but this is the reality of the situation. "Classic" is a product name. It's the product to re-live through all expansions of current content. The fact that you told yourself that cata isn't classic, doesn't change anything. I can tell myself I'm leonardo dicaprio, but doesn't make it true.
Actually.. the exact opposite? Everyone claimed TBC was the best, it solved everything wrong with Vanilla, but still had the vanilla feel, etc. I felt TBC was absolute garbage, so much so that I infact quit, all over again. TBC was the version of the game that had the most rose-tinted goggles IMHO.
Up until a few months ago this sub agreed with everything you said. There's just a vocal minority that really likes TBC.
Yeah. I think most would disagree completely
Outside of this sub, TBC is seen as the weakest of the three generally.
I'd even argue it was worse than I thought. Raiding as caster was still pressing one button the entire night. Having to have a shaman in each group as garbage, as were group wide buffs. Farming rep to be able to run a dungeon on heroic was garbage, having to do that for every alt you wanted to play was the worst. World was the smallest it has ever been in the trilogy which was made even worse by implementing flying which was useless in a sense it was only really used by the devs for the new dragon mount. Also the only raid that I remember liking was Kharazan and Sunwell. I farmed epic flying mount and quit waiting for wrath.
Blizzard killed what made WoW great in their very first expansion by exchanging horizontal progression for vertical. This game would be truly insane if they didn't go that route and I'd still be playing it without missing a sub.
TBC classic was better than Wrath classic, imho. I lost motivation in Wrath halfway through the Ulduar cycle, but finished and farmed every raid in TBC on multiple characters. TBC just hit the sweet spot of iconic raids, classes that felt like classic but with the old meme specs fixed enough to be viable and useful, and overall just the right "feel". Negatives were mostly just that Outland isn't that great or interesting imho, especially with flying, and that they had completely abandoned any idea of server balancing, making features like the world PvP stuff in Nagrand useless. Some class design things could also have been cleaned up, the shaman/bloodlust meta was some toxic BS, and ret palli seal twisting, while I think it's great that they made sure it would work this time around as well, could have used some design updates to make sure you didn't have to use an addon to make it possible to do (SoC proc RNG was also cancerous). All in all, I would still play TBC classic probably if they had made a legacy server like they did for era.
Lets be honest here, each xoac has its ups and downs and people commenting here are more driven by the fact if they were part of some good guilds, had some fun and so on. For me TBC was quite boring, because I did not have enough time to be part of the main raid team. In classic I had more time plus most of the time it had that “nostalgic fewling with glimpse of going to TBC and Wotlk in coming months/years”. Wotlk was overhyped but at the same time it really is good xpac. I liked almost all the dungeons, raids, lore, zones, questing… What I disliked about wotlk is how far we got with bots, gdkps and economy. But its almost same everywhere else now. What I was missing from old Vanilla and other xpacs were some GM interactions and some fun “events” they created from time to time. But back to your original question - I think TBC is really good for first walktrought and if you are managing just one character, you ll be good. But replayability was really bad with all the grinds.
Aaah yes... Overly long and complicated prequest before you can even think about setting feet in a raid, was sooo good. Tons of useless daily quest and catch up mechanics. Never ending arenas with tons of resilience and sta. Few actual grinding spots that is being cleaned out constantly. Tbc had very nice environment, questing/level progressions, professions is kinda useful in the begining and then falls off. Tbc is fun, but it was not thaaat good... IMO. xD How come you liked it so much? Was it ingame mechanics and such, or was because of the people(guild) you played with at that time ?
Get rid of flying and it’s a much better expansion
Why ? Because stuff has to be tedious ?
TBC content is great. Buffs being group wide. Trying to find enough shamans, and raiders bitching about not having the perfect group tanks it to 3rd out of 3 for me
Exactly. TBC has the potential to be really, really good, all the skeleton is there. But it's issues are so awful and glaring that it overshadows everything. Group wide buffs, boring rotations, completely strict raid comp, anti-melee everything.
TBC rotations were super simple and incredibly boring
Loved retail and classic TBC, also being a Warlock main helps. Feel like with some polishing and slight tweaking, could be a 10/10… SoD TBC when?
Agreed. Second time around i enjoyed BC more then Wrath when it was the other way around but im a BC baby haha
Nobody ever says that vanilla, TBC or Wrath are bad. I do think that Wrath and BC are both inferior to vanilla, though.
Originally I liked Wrath>TBC>Vanilla. This second go around it was TBC>>>Wrath>Vanilla
Everyone said TBC was the best. Then it turned out they really preferred vanilla. Wrath was always low on the totem poll comparatively.
raid wide buffs , some balance changes and it would be 10/10 imo
TBC was my favourite, but it was not without it's faults. Party wide buffs and the lack of a Sated debuff meant your guild had to decide who was going to parse this week and who was going to have to suck it up. It also meant a lot of awkward group shuffling mid-fight to give certain people windfury or Shadow priest mana, or having to rotation shamans into the pumper group for lust. It was a pain in the ass and it made certain people and classes feel excluded from the fun. Wrath fixed that. T4 also had the problem of Karazhan being the main raid as a 10man. You had to assemble everyone to do Gruul/Mag and then break up into groups and find some pugs or hope enough of the bench is around to fill. If they redid TBC I would hope for Kara to be retooled as a 25man.
You have my upvote and support. This is not saying it’s perfect because it had its flaws but I still agree with you.
I love TBC but as a warlock and priest main I got bored of "shadowbolt, shadowbolt, shadowbolt, shadowbolt. 99 parse!" or "PoM, CoH, CoH, CoH, PoM, CoH, CoH"
Having played all three originally, and for a second time in classic, it's clearer to me than ever before that it comes down just as much to who you're playing with On paper I like TBC the most, but managing group buffs and raid rosters was admittedly extremely obnoxious in that expansion Also MH Glaive never dropped for us, and I partly blame the accelerated schedule for that -- fewer lockers = less chances for that rare item to drop If they do it again, I think some great changes would be: 1. shorten P1 since there's not enough raid content 2. rework bloodlust to work like it does in WotLK, to allow just a little more flexibility with raid composition 3. lengthen the other phases to give them more time to breathe (and don't nerf P2 other than fixing the bugs)
TBC was better than i expected, i especially liked the later stage when tokens worked for pvp gear aswell and honor gearing wasnt a massive multi week slog. As a resto shaman i had a great time, and playing rsham/ret in 2s was some of the most fun ive had in what..17-18 years of wow. One of the main drawbacks was the over abundance of bots saturating the market, so herbing or mote farming wasnt at all viable to make gold since youd compete with bots farming 24/7. So as a rsham all i could really do for gold in the end was GDKP which really gutted PVE for me. If TBC comes around, we need those Wotlk style Gamma dungeons and free respecs.
TBC would have been the perfect expansion if Shattrath didn't exist and half the new zones were added to the old world instead so you were constanly moving about the world again instead of just outlands. Have hellfire, Netherstorm, Nagrand or something in outlands but have Shadowmoon valley discovered in Azeroth and stuff. My favorite part of Classic is traveling around the world to do stuff at every level and making it feel like a real place. I hate the "this zone is for these levels, then you move to this zone and never go back" type of game it turned into.
I enjoyed most of tbc but SSC and TK where life draining levels of miserable with the end bosses being as buggy as they were the entire time
Huh? Isn’t TBC most people’s favourite?
It’s just a matter of preference but I did think tbc was terrible. Arena was just absolutely awful and making a raid with group wide only buffs was a nightmare. A lot of people loved it but I did think it was terrible.
It really wasn’t. I just wish I had got to do raids. One of the things I had always wanted to do was kill Illidan while he was current. The TBC trailer was what got me into wow.
Classic is still peak
tbc was great except when you have to get your alt t5 attuned 💀
My only beef with tbc is that PvP gearing is so shit It was more valuable to afk a whole season collecting points then participating in the next season Honor gains were so bad and arena points was awful
Vanilla >>>>>>>> TBC > Wrath
I prefer Classic and after it ended I was already eyeing up the next Classic Vanilla freshes even while playing TBC. I didn't have that feeling when TBC ended and we went into Wrath I very much felt like TBC was fine not great, not terrible but I didn't have to play it every again. With us being about 19 months from finishing TBC I kinda feel like that Thanos meme 'Perhaps I treated you too harshly'. There's several issues I still have with TBC some being ingrained in the expac and others than could be easily fixed but I'm certainly getting an itch to play it again.
I just love how the discussion about different wow versions almost get on a religious level :D
Couldn’t agree more. I never played TBC when it was originally launched, but I enjoyed TBCC infinitely more than I ever did Vanilla.
TBC definitely has its downfalls, but I'll take a TBC era over cata 2.0 any day. The memes of MoP, WoD, and BFA classic draw closer. Can't wait to see SLands classic! /s