The Cursed Gnome The life of a midget warlock

While we’re waiting for Cataclysm… WOTLK memories

So... Less than three hours left, mostly everything prepared (I only need to make a few hundred rings and disenchant them in case we get an Enchanting mats rush on the AH, then I'm ready), and I start late at work tomorrow so I can play for a few hours before going to bed. Needless to say, I'm excited at what the new expansion will bring, and the excitement also brings up thoughts about WOTLK - how it affected my gaming experience, what I liked and didn't like, and of course memories. As I've just imported the Cataclysm soundtrack CD that came with the CE box, I'll spend some time listening to the music and writing about those memories.

To understand my take on WOTLK, some BC history is needed. I bought WoW during a home exam (which went very well, by the way), to have something to do during breaks. This was somewhere around the middle of BC. During my exam I tried out a hunter on some random realm, and realized I loved the game but disliked the class. After the exam I started a rogue, which remained my main for close to a year - I spent that year as a complete noob, and had several long breaks, but I still had a great time. When I was at level 60-something, I did however get completely bored, and decided to reroll.

I rolled a Warlock.

This char was leveled a lot faster than the previous one (and I didn't take breaks anymore), but since my main focus on the game was RP, I still spent ages compared to a powerleveler. I originally decided on staying guildless (as my previous experience was only mass-invite guilds with no goal other than having an extra chat channel), but after I encountered a friendly group of players in Stormwind one day, I was invited into a roleplaying guild - which turned out to be my first proper guild experience.

We had RP meetings every Sunday evening, which was great, and also gave an opportunity to better know your guildmates. For the rest of BC, I focused on roleplaying and leveling, and I hit 70 on the day WOTLK hit. I still had a very casual relationship to the game, but being with serious players started giving me another perspective on the game - it was possible to play well and still be nice.

The guild did, however, disband and reform right before WOTLK launch. We did, however, have a lot of fun during the first moths of WOTLK, and I still miss that time, though I probably wouldn't want to go back to that way of playing the game. I hit level 80 right before Christmas 2008, and since I had no clue what to do at that point (after all I just continued leveling a few hours after hitting 70), I started searching around for info. Not long after I was geared enough to get a spot in Naxx 10, and had some great weeks with occasional raiding with guildmates. They taught me a lot about raiding - I'll especially remember when our patient (and somewhat scary) guild master gave the newbies, including me, a school-teacher lesson on how to survive Heigan's dance phase - in tree form.

However, activity waned, and we disbanded shortly after. Raiding did, however, appeal to me, and that encouraged me to look for another guild instead of just quitting the game (which did appear to me). One of my old guildmates told me about this guild called Forgotten Legacy, to which he'd been accepted and with which he had a great time. I figured I could just as well give it a try, and wrote an application. Thankfully they needed another Warlock, and I was accepted into the guild. I'll never forget how friendly I was welcomed - our recruitment officer did a great job at following up on recruits to make sure they felt at home, and this made the guild transition a lot easier.

Forgotten Legacy is based on maintaining a good progression while raiding fewer days (two days a week) than more hardcore guilds, while having a friendly atmosphere and a more close-knit raid team. We'd rather cancel the odd raid than have twenty subs, and we prefer 23-manning over inviting people from outside the guild. This works very well, and not least it really makes us a very close-knit team. We recruit not only from a player's skill and gear level - we require him or her to actually be a good person. If people act like jerks towards other players, they have no place in Forgotten Legacy.

Needless to say, this suited me very well. I loved the raids (and the fact that they almost always occurred twice a week), I loved the atmosphere, and I loved the people. There's not a lot of drama in Forgotten Legacy, which is great. People respect each other, and I consider them my friends, not just random names in green text. We're also a strong guild, and we've survived through periods of breaks and vacations causing downtime that would've killed a lot of other guilds - actually most guilds on our server of our "level" have disbanded throughout the last year, but we're still going strong.

Over the almost two years with "softcore" (to quote our current GM) raiding, I've had the opportunity to delve deeper into the game, while still not spending twelve hours a day. I'm still not the hugest theorycrafting geek you'll find, but I dare say I know my class. So basically my experience of WOTLK is with a completely different outlook than I had during BC.

So to sum up how I've felt about WOTLK, I've made two lists: What I liked, and what I didn't like. Original! Anyways, here we go:

What Biep liked about WOTLK

• The continent. I always hated Outland... it's just too spacey. Northrend, as a return to Azeroth, felt a lot more like Warcraft (of which I've been a fan since I played Warcraft I during junior high) than the neon purple bits of rock formerly called Draenor. I suspect those rocks were part of why I didn't hit 70 until WOTLK launch - I simply liked the old world more.
• The lore. The story about Arthas was one of my main motivations for even starting to play WoW.
• Achievements. I'm no Achievement whore (I still have less than or around 7k points), but they've still caused me to pursue fun parts of the games that I'd otherwise ignore. And of course some dreadfully boring ones.
• Raids. Yes, you heard me right. I agree to the fact that initial WOTLK raiding was a bit boring - I had a fun time in Naxx, but that was due to raiding being a new experience. If the initial Cataclysm raiding were to be like Naxx, I'd probably be bored too. Still... post-Naxx raiding has been far better than the whiners claim to. Ulduar was great, and had several challenging encounters. Okay, ToC was boring, but at least it didn't last long. ICC is great, and a return to the the pre-WOTLK principles of raiding being more than pushing out max DPS - I've had to adjust, and will have to adjust more when Cata hits, but I'm enjoying it.

  I also see no reason to complain at the current gear system. I don't give a rat's ass whether new players (and alts) wear the gear I did last tier after just a few weeks/days of 5-man farming. Actually I think it's great that they do - BC was far too based on having to have been in on raiding since the start. If you didn't find a Kara guild, you were usually out of luck. The current solution makes it possible for new players to find great guilds, and it makes it possible for great guilds to find great new players. It also makes it possible to have players switch mains if it's needed without having the entire guild farm like crazy.

  And I have absolutely no beef with the fact that you can do the same encounters with smaller groups and in two difficulties. This makes it possible for smaller guilds to at least see most of the content, and it makes it possible to see the content without being in a high-end guild. The hard modes have been more than challenging enough (at least a lot of them), so the problem doesn't lay with the lack of challenging content - it lays with people not seeing any motivation in doing a harder version when you can farm the easy version with less hassle. Interestingly enough, the people complaining about content being too easy are often the same people who aren't motivated for hard modes.

  I also don't have a problem with gear not being the motivating factor anymore - okay, I want to look good. But I don't give half a rat's ass if I see a less skilled player (or perhaps a similarly skilled player in a less skilled guild) in similar-looking gear. What matters to me is actually having beaten the challenge. If they removed titles, gear, achievements and accompanying mounts, I'd still want to raid, since the feeling of finally downing an encounter you've been banging your heads against beats all of that. It's motivation enough.

  Of course I do understand that some of these design choices probably demotivated some of the people who had their pride in their gear. But honestly people, adjust! Make the achievement (and by that I mean beating the challenge, not the yellow box that pops up) matter, not the externals!

• Perhaps one of the reasons I liked raiding was also that I loved being a Warlock in WOTLK. During my time of raiding, I've got to play virtually every spec due to patches changing things - Fel/Ember, Destruction (in both its simple and post-4.0 more complicated form), Affliction, and I've even dabbled in Demonology from time to time. This constant change of playstyle of course makes raiding a lot more interesting than if you're playing some three-button class with no change of playstyle for two years.
• The quests. Albeit often stupidly easy, they were much more thought through than most of what came before. I'm looking forward to Cata continuing this tradition.
• This could just as well be implemented into the paragraph above, but I want to emphasize it - I simply loved the feeling of epicness in the conclusion of some of the quest chains - Wrathgate, killing Thel'zan, the phasing causing Icecrown to be forever changed by your efforts, the Titan quest line in Storm Peaks... the list is long.
• Reputation tabards. Farming rep is just boring...
• I also loved when they turned arcanums etc. into heirlooms. Same with flying. Same with everything that lessened the amount of farming needed for new chars - if it wasn't for this, I'd probably not bother leveling alts.
• Then on to some personal experiences not directly connected to WOTLK itself... I've loved slowly learning how to handle the AH, and how to use professions to make gold, instead of just farming. It's a lot more fun, a lot less dangerous, and a lot less time-consuming. This also enabled me to get all my mounts. Yay.
• And once again, I loved being in Forgotten Legacy, and in Coalition. I also loved the fact that a lot of the former Coalition members became part of Forgotten Legacy over time. I've had a great time in these two guilds, and they've enabled me to experience more deeply the two aspects of WoW that I love the most - namely roleplaying and raiding. I've made friends over the last few years that I hope I'll remain in contact with long after WoW is history.
• As a sub-point, I love how we proved as a guild that great progression is possible with a "softcore" raiding scheme. We've cleared ICC25 HC up to and including Sindragosa, which a lot of WoW players would think impossible. We've come just as far as the five-days-a-week raiding guilds on our server, and we've stayed strong while most of them have disbanded. That's a great achievement, if you ask me.

What Biep did not like in WOTLK

• As you've probably understood, I'm no enemy of casualization. However, some of the changes I applauded above also had their downsides. The only one I'll bother to mention here is how it enabled completely clueless players to enter raid PUGs. The easily accessible gear makes it difficult to distinguish players from gear alone, which means that it's easier to invite players who shouldn't have been in your PUG. However, this can still be done by means of achievements, and I suspect poor players managed to get their gear in BC too. During WOTLK I've been in both bad PUGs and great PUGs, but I suspect the bad to great ratio is bigger for people that either PUG more or don't know which PUGs to join.
• 5-mans. Okay, they were great in pre-Naxx10 gear. For a few days. After that, they were just plain out boring. The ICC 5-mans fixed this. But then you had new players accustomed to the existing steamroll content, so they were usually a pain. I'm really looking forward to Cataclysm (hopefully) having better 5-mans.
• Argent Tournament. I've never hated a place more - the dailies were boring, and after having maxed reputations, and acquired all mounts, pets and other vanity items, I almost deleted my tabard. The raid instance was also dreadful, for the most part. I liked the Twins, other than that it was a pain.
• I HATE how the general part of the WoW population seems to have been filled with idiots, or 13-year-olds, or perhaps both. There are still great and mature players around, but they're getting harder to spot out in the open world. Grow up, Sporeggar!
• Even though we've come insanely far in ICC, I still wished we managed to kill LK HC 25. But oh well - Deathwing, here we come! And I by far prefer killing thirteen out of fourteen bosses in heroic mode among great people than killing all of them among jerks. Not saying that all hardcore guilds consist of jerks (heck, we've recruited a lot of great people from hardcore guilds too), but a lot of them sadly seem to do so.

The lists are probably longer than that if I take more time to think, but it's less than one hour left now, and I need to make rings. So I'll post this without even proof reading, I hope I have your understanding :-) I also wanted to make a list of what I'm looking forward to in Cataclysm, but I'll skip that - let's just say I think it'll be fun!