The perfect expansion doesn't exis-

>The perfect expansion doesn't exis-

Flying Mounts were the beginning of the end.

>tfw when you only started playing WoW post TBC
>tfw everyone speaks about the TBC glory days.

>flying mounts
>welfare epics
>arenas
>class homogenization
its the worst one for the simple fact that it introduced cancer

You don't miss BC. You miss being young.

Flying mounts are just a convenient way to travel around at max level, nothing wrong with them.

>>class homogenization

name 1(ONE) example of this in BC

Im sorry I cant really remember what the class balance was as I quit very long time ago. I remember though one day I logged in on my shaman and half my totems were fucking gone.

>Flying mounts are just a convenient way to travel around at max level, nothing wrong with them.
That's just straight up bullshit and you know it. If you didn't have one you were locked out of all the end game areas.
>b-b-b-but you could just get summoned by a warlock!
Yeah, now you don't need flying, three other people do. Warlock summoning also didn't work in Netherstorm which means you were screwed out of 3 dungeons and a raid.

You probably couldn't complete the raid anyway if you were too retarded to not get a flying mount.

I thought you fags defended attunements, flying is a attunement, and here you are contradicting yourself

pala for horde shaman for alliance.

You put that goalpost back where you found it.

Flying mounts were the only good thing in TBC

that didn't happen in BC

t. played shaman too

This is more "faction homogenization"

Welfare in TBC still required you to farm heroics, which still required some semblance of teamwork rather than AOE AOE AOE AOE AOE ad infinitum

Sup fags

>flying mounts
Made very much sense given the geography or the continent, they were used as an actual gameplay mechanic (in gating content like Tempest Keep or in quests like the ones at Netherwing Ledge) and TBC featured designs that kept their harmful effects, admittedly fairly inherent ones, to a minimum (like 60% flying being slower than actually prestigious 280% flying that made sure no one would "skip content" while it was even remotely relevant to them, long mount cast times being right in the area where you can't just conveniently run away from combat, reasons to get grounded still being present such that impact on PvP is almost completely limited to perceived sense of danger rather than actual frequency of world PvP encounters)

It is true their inclusion was like opening the Pandora's box and with that in mind, in retrospect, they shouldn't have been included in TBC either, but their harmful impact in TBC specifically was low or you could even argue pros outweighed the cons (which no longer cannot be said about WotLK).

>welfare epics
Having gear available from variety of different sources is interesting and good for the game. So is catchup gear in general. For starters, it increases the pool from which high-end guilds could conceivably recruit and at least lessens the problem of guilds cannibalizing each other, gives capable newcomers a chance to rise up instead of being stuck with scrubs that simply don't have what it takes to raid higher-tier content, and indirect nerfs from new sources of gear allow low-end players who ultimately are the backbone of the game to do content in the long run after it has become obsolete in terms of progression raiding, an alternatively clearly preferable to artificial difficulty option.

That's if these three conditions are met, anyway: It takes sufficient degree of time and effort to get and doesn't make any content obsolete. All these conditions were met in TBC (indeed, badges kept heroics and Karazhan in particular active longer than they otherwise would have been). Even the most nerfed versions of heroics were respectable and unless you started doing the toughest heroics like Arcatratz daily, it took a long time to get even a single piece of gear. Or you participated in raids at which point I don't understand what could possibly be the issue.

Vanilla also had its form of catchup gear (like well-itemized loots from DM or 5-man blues buffed towards the end of expansion), not to mention small raid content in ZG/AQ20 and with these criteria they could even argued to be more damning than TBC badge gear. Which they of course weren't, because such introductions are FINE.

>arenas
Maybe you can name PvE-relevant changes that at least arguably were influenced by PvP (I could name a couple) but overall arenas in TBC were harmless past-time that didn't negatively influence players not interested in them. It wasn't until WotLK when Blizzard truly started gutting classes in the name of "e-sports". The peaked class interdependency and uniqueness should be a testament to the fact that this wasn't a problem in TBC.
>class homogenization
And like I said in previous point, this sure as hell wasn't a thing because it was in fact the very opposite. Faction homogenization is one thing. However, giving paladins and shamans to both factions is the reason these classes could have extremely pronounced strengths, the antithesis of class homogenization, in the first place! With that in mind, the decision was well justified. In general, classes/specs GAINED unique tools and roles (for example, restoration druids were transformed from yet another downranked direct heal spammers to HoT-based tank healers with +healing party buff and shadow priests from just barely arguably viable +shadow damage debuffers to mana batteries).

Patch 2.4 removed the block and allowed you to summon directly into raids and instances and as mentioned if you were at that level of raiding and didn't have a flying mount by then you were shit tier anyway.

You are right, it doesn't

Wrong pic op

The chart is meaningless because it's all par for the course. Fucking hell, even if you ignore the fact that you'd want to gear up in 5-mans before going into Kara or clear T4 before starting T5, you'd expect players to give the content a look see at least once just to see what's it like and you can do the quests while doing so. Now, having to be revered to get heroic keys admittedly is a bit harsh for some factions (Consortium) but for most it's also something you'd expect to get in standard play as well because you'd be expected to run the content for desirable drops or exalted rep rewards for yourself and/or your guildmates anyway.

Anyone that tries to claim TBC, classic or even Wrath to some extent featured more homogenization than current retail is a moron and never played during that time, or played but were too young/stupid to remember any of the nuances.

TBC had the worst aesthetics in WoW by far.

>turned blood elves from a once proud but now fallen race with a volatile and insatiable craving for magic and power into LOOOOOOK I'M *SOOOOOOO* GAY XD
>turned the draenei into russian space goats because having an ugly race would mean no waifuism and r34 porn

>flying mounts
>dailies
>attunements everywhere
>hybrid classes still getting mostly shafted

Overall it was a pretty good expansion, but it wasn't perfect by any stretch.

>TBC was the best expa-

Fuck off.
They weren't super polished, maybe, but at least it wasn't the Tolkien bullshit we got for the following 2 expansions, followed by the most generic Eastern setting in video games. And then an "alien world" that is barely distinguishable from Azeroth.

I MISS MOP SO FUCKING MUCH

Judging by your replies you had no business in pre-nerf tk or even the dungeons anyway.

t. Someone who signed up in late Cata.

TBC was literally a bad looking gook MMO.

>Tolkien bullshit
Sup Forums is 18+, son.

>Fucking hell, even if you ignore the fact that you'd want to gear up in 5-mans before going into Kara or clear T4 before starting T5

No you dont understand, in LIVE you can go straight to ToV before doing EN, theres no flow or character progression associated with the raids. The attunements were rather meaningless for people moving at the cutting edge, but for the guys who are casuals, they couldn't progress past Kara and THATS FINE. It gives them a reason to try, which is what alot of people are missing who dont raid top end.

I prefer a system where people are gated by their efforts (i think attunmenets should be account bound like now however). ilvl right now is just another form of attunment that isnt strictly enforced.

>TBC was literally a bad looking gook MMO
kekkimus dekkimus. Shit came out in super early 2007 during a time when almost everybody playing WoW had potato computers. Nobody was bitching about the quality of graphics at the time, but you'd know that if you had actually played TBC and weren't just an insecure, falseflagging underage shitter.

Every caster class getting in combat mana regen, rather than it just being exclusive to locks, druids with a bit of a cooldown, and mages with varying cooldowns.

This reduced the amount of mana management that a caster needed, and lowered the skill ceiling of casting classes.

Furries, leave

This, fags who killed MMO's by enabling WoW should leave

>mana management
Use mana pot on cooldown, spam life tap and beg for heals/bandage, use evocation/innervate? Oh, use a lower rank of the spell if you're bleeding mana too fast.

Let's be real here. Raising the level was a mistake

Power creep was a mistake. There should definitely not have been that big of a boost between every expansion. Old gear should not get obsolete so fast and everyone shouldn't be decked out in epics when new content hits.

I always felt the biggest was in BC. Decked out in decent (not best) Vanilla epics and immediately find greens that are way better.

>downranking
Why when Vampiric Touch would make sure all your mana needs were well met?
Fuck Vampiric Touch was so good that for a time it was mandatory to bring an Spriest.

Yeah man wanding for a bit until enough mana came back while mana pot was on cooldown took so much skill.

Except for the fact that if you had half decent mana management you wouldn't need to do that except after burst phases or on the longest fights.

I quit right before legion because of the stat equalization and the gear change. You're not going to force me to run around with 4% vers like a fuckin asshole, i'll unsub first. Ghostcrawler wasn't great but at least he didn't ruin pvp and everything it stood for

>spriest
They were called mana batteries for a reason
Really? IIRC some vanilla gear held its own for quite a while, though they were mostly trinkets. DMC: Maelstrom wasn't replaced until Romulu's Poison Vial in Kara, the Hand of Justice trinket from BRD was still good enough that they had to reduce the proc chance for 70s.

New content gear typically has a lot more stamina at the expense of offensive stats, but a big part of the leap might've been due to vanilla's horrible itemization. Vanilla had weird shit like rogue belts with resist (needed, I guess?) values and fucking parry rating (they had ripposte in mind I guess) so it's not really hard to beat those with a straightforward formula of stamina + secondary stat + crit/haste/hit

>Complicated
It's a lot, especially when laid out like that.
16 year old me was capable of working out who I needed to gain rep with to unlock which content and when being offered certain quests with a highlighted urgencies, it would lead to unlocking more content.

>flying mounts
I already made an argument in defence of flying mounts in TBC ()
>dailies
The original justification given was to give low killing power specs (ie. tanks/healers) some kind of alternative to get gold and pay the bills. Which most certainly makes sense given that TBC was still everything but homogenized. Aside from someone (not necessarily you) having to do Isle dailies for unlocks, you weren't in any way pressured to do them and indeed the old-fashioned farming would have been preferable if you were a DPS class and just wanted gold. It was a whole another beast to the way later expansions bastardized the concept (with the original reason for adding them no longer valid, with tanks and healers having their damage potential doubled or more).
>attunements everywhere
Getting Mana Tombs heroic key was iffy. Tempest Keep revered was also annoying although in this case you'd be expected to run the normal modes a decent bit regardless. Besides that, there's literally nothing wrong with the attunements present in TBC and above all they serve to provide backstory to the instances involved and give a feeling of progression. By the time they actually started becoming a hindrance (obsolete in terms of progression raiding and most people already having completed them with no particular reason to go and complete them from newcomers who didn't have them yet) they were lifted.

That's how most expansions work. If the newest content didn't set a new starting point it would be finished in a day without breaking a sweat. Why do people act like WoW invented everything and is the source of all evil? Plus, if the level cap didn't raise, new gear couldn't be made. It would just be the exact same thing because you simply can't come up with so many different effects that aren't just stats, or most of them would end up being garbage because it would be impossible to balance.

>Tfw Corecraft effectively set back the BC private server community 5 years

I want to play BC again fuck.

>hybrid classes still getting mostly shafted
Hardly. Enhancement is the #1 raid DPS spec. One shadow priest is virtually mandatory and more can be justified. Feral is handled as DPS/tank hybrid even if dedicated cat isn't "viable". Ret is a raid DPS boost with utility for Horde and for Alliance you exchange some DPS to sizeable utility and it can be justified. Elemental is ~+-0% raid DPS difference compared to taking another lock/mage and taking one more resto shaman in favour of another healing class (with that in mind, as well as the fact that they can use items cloth-users can't utilize, I'd take ele for progression raiding setup). All tank specs are near-obligatory (ideal progression setup features one of each). All healers are desirable. If you count support-oriented "pure" class specs, survival and arms, as "hybrids", they're also in.

The only "hybrid" class that isn't justified in min/maxed progression raiding setup is balance and taking their raid DPS boost into account, the difference to lock/mage is ultimately SMALL. Even if you look at personal DPS at BiS gear levels, with one exception of shadow priests, the variation actually isn't that much. For example, both in TBC and WotLK enhancement is almost exactly 75% of #1 personal DPS (Thori'dal BM hunter/Shadowmourne fury warrior respectively) while in TBC enha is 150% of raid DPS and in WotLK it's whopping 76%.

If anything, in progression raiding context, it's rogues (pure class) and fury warriors that take the shaft because, while they do top DPS with glaives and there's a few encounters in which 2 melee groups would be justified, every rogue and fury warrior spends most or entirety of their life glaive-less and while 2 melee groups would be nice on M'uru, you won't shed any tears for replacing it with a dedicated hunter group while many other tough encounters are very hostile to melee. In effect, there's basically one to two spots for pure melee DPS in min/maxed progression raid

Did corecraft die?

Yeah they dropped off the face of the Earth around the time Nost shut down.

The test server is still up but presumably the developers have abandoned the project. Shiro has allegedly lost contact with NiM and hasn't been able to discuss what to do with it.

>makes sense given the geography of the continent
A continent that they designed. They could have designed it without flying mounts in mind and there would have been no excuse for them.
>you weren't in any way pressured to do dailies
Unless you were shitting in gold through playing the AH, getting lucky with rare and valuable world drops or grinding professions to sell mats, then you were pressured to do dailies otherwise you'd be too poor to partake in the game's economy
>attunements
I wouldn't mind if attunement was account wide but if you played more than one character it was a fucking bore to re-do it, as was farming gold for your flying mount(s) etc

Hybrids are support classes, you bring them for their (de)buffs and utility, not because they do good dps on their own - that's what locks, mages and rogues are for. Depending on your class they were also a fucking bore to play in comparison, ret paladins in particular, because they only had one attack (two with consecration, +2 in parts of Sunwell and BT) annoying seal/judge mechanics. Your job as a ret was clutching with your hand spells and then watching your swing timer to try to squeeze out an acceptable amount of DPS.

Moreover, it was the general attitude of other players against these classes that was the worst. To most, ret was a PVP spec, period. Moonkins were good for nothing but spamming moonfire in PVP, etc. Sure, if you played with good people who valued raid utility over the additional 200-300 DPS a proper class would squeeze out you might get to tag along, but with PUGs, no such luck.

why is it the best?

Corecraft revival when?

>while 2 melee groups would be nice on M'uru
Actually, scratch that. If you were to use 3 tank strategy (prot pally tanking both the Void Sentinel and Void Spawns) as opposed to sub-optimal 4 tank strategy (prot warrior tanking Sentinel while pally takes spawns), you kinda need 3 misdirects (->hunter group) anyway so there wouldn't be space for 2 melee groups.

The thing is, while people at the time (certainly the scrubs) might have been too enthralled by DPS meters to look at actual theorycrafting numbers or were playing their old characters that no longer made for the ideal raid setup (warriors and rogues actually were a class to stack in vanilla so it's not surprising that many guilds, even high-end ones, kept their old vets in their roster), hybrids were very much a thing in TBC played "correctly". This might not have been the case in retail practise but you could even say TBC was THE expansion of hybrid specs if you look at what is actually good for the raid. And despite an expansion like WotLK often being praised for its balance, the situation with personal DPS was same in TBC too (shadow priests as the only outlier).

Moreover, how involved the spec is depends a lot. I'd argue feral cats (not worth it in dedicated DPS role but cat DPS >>> prot pally/warrior DPS so you'd see a lot of DPS action regardless when two or fewer tanks are needed) and shadow priests were the most involved specs to DPS with and they were hybrids. Arms, which you could count as a hybrid, would be the third. Meanwhile, while there of course is some nuance (for example, there's an underappreciated fact in that if you have only slow hard casts, movement is EXTREMELY punished), we all know how pure DPS specs like BM and shadow destro play. I've never liked paladins (in vanilla and TBC they feel passive, in WotLK they feel like cheating, complete with "you don't die even if you are killed" abilities) but even ret is kinda involved in a sense.

TBC was the beginning of the end and embodies everything wrong with modern WoW. You're a faggot.

You can argue about aesthetics and the setting (some people adore the Outlandish setting with giant mushrooms and floating islands, some people like the more traditional fantasy landscapes) but mechanically, it's a direct upgrade over vanilla: far better balance and greater variety among specs, broader toolkits with none of the nuance lost (think of tanking where threat and even grabbing mobs became almost irrelevant with new abilities introduced in WotLK), more involved encounters with tougher tuning, you name it. Overall, in terms of general style of the game, it still feels like an MMO.

It gets rid of the old clunkiness without changing the overall design: for example, items still have varied itemization with some low-tier items lasting a good while (as opposed to the worth being almost entirely dependent on item level and then secondary stat distribution), but TBC got rid of idiocy like spirit plate and introduced itemization for specs that previously didn't have proper gear available to them (like spell power tanking gear for prot pallies)

It represents the peak of the game on countless accounts from big to small (from uniqueness of specs to value of professions)

It precedes cancerous designs present in WotLK and up (ranging from planned obsolescence of raids to class homogenization and RDF)

The average quality of content is high (there certainly are weaker bits like Hyjal but even it is superior to garbage like TOC) with many standout areas (like Karazhan)

While it's a major culprit of role rape in its own right, this thing is cumulative so all subsequent expansions are worse by default (for example, I don't think draenei should have been handled the way they were, but the space goats are still there in WotLK)

i'd agree but the network they used couldn't handle players moving at that speed, thats why they teleported around on your screen

desu legion would be the best expansion if it didn't have so much RNG

BC was best everything apart from story, plot made no sense.

i don't think he's talking about the graphical fidelity, but the art style. you know, colors, architecture, environments, the look of the armor sets etc.

shit can have amazing graphical fidelity and still look like shit. Wow still has shitty graphics but it's really pretty.

Only reason I prefer Vanilla is because TBC and the following expansions took the focus away from the main Azeroth continents.
These days in retail most of the zones in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are dead because everyone is at whatever the new area is.

Actually class homogenization happened because of situation in TBC. Only certain classes really mattered. It was the "bring the class not the player" situation. Class homogenization happened because Blizz wanted the exact opposite - "Bring the player not the class situation."

literally kill yourself you worthless faggot piece of shit

prenerf sunwell was hell
fucking muru

And managed to make it worse because no longer were specific classes/specs desirable because they brought something unique and desirable to the raid and after going through a checklist of (de)buffs that were unique no longer, you could just stack the highest personal DPS specs.

Raid compositions became more volatile to boot (shadow priest DPS, the lowest of all specs in T6/SWP even including PvP specs, could have been cut in half and they still could have counted on getting a raid spot no matter what the encounter, while differences of just a percent or two could be the difference between "viable" and "not viable" when unique roles disappear): it's easier for guilds to recognize that all tank specs have very distinct strengths that are sometimes needed and recruit one of each and stick with that comp from the beginning of expansion until the end, than it is to know in advance that Yoggy+0 would be best done with absurd affliction lock stacking or that fury warriors and fire mages are the premier DPS specs in the next patch. Moreover, making the buffs raid wide made damn sure you'd never have more than one "support spec" in well set up raid (as opposed to, say, running a dedicated hunter group or second melee group and taking a second enhancement shaman, or having shadow priest in caster group in addition to healer group).

Playing a tankadin during tbc was a waste of time. Mana regen mechanics was fucking retarded.

That's not Wrath of the Lich King.

I have a job and a steady income, I don't know why I have this urge as of late to start playing wow again.

Least when I was younger I played on pirated servers because lol no money, but now, for some reason, after all htese years, I want to try out the (((legit))) experience.

For someone who started in TBC and stopped in Cata, all private servers, would it be worth it for me to start now?

>not using Dark/Demonic Rune too
Casual

>a waste of time
yeah just the best offtank in the game on tons of fights
we fucking benched druids

>3.2
pls i don't want that abomination

uldaman was great
rest was SHIT