Vanilla WoW was alright, but mostly for nostalgia reasons. The gameplay was really rudimentary and I think pretty much everything was better in the first expansion. TBC perfected the raiding system, took a giant leap for class balance, fixed the pants-on-head retarded itemization from vanilla, and introduced heroic dungeons that were actually challenging and rewarding. The PvP side of the game is more a matter of taste, but there's no denying that the popularity of WoW PvP absolutely exploded with the introduction of arenas. World PvP was always garbage and battlegrounds lacked an ultimate purpose, but arenas introduced PvP as an entirely separate mode of gameplay, allowing people to PvP competitively without forcing them through the PvE treadmill first.
WotLK was a lot like Velious, though. It was perhaps the height of PvE, perfecting the raid scene but also pushing it beyond the point of no return in the process. Like Velious, WotLK brought the true separation between hardcore and normal players, thus marginalizing the latter. It created a huge cleft that divided the playerbase, and Blizzard's response was so panick-stricken that they ruined the game in their effort to revert their plunge into hardcoreism. The rest is history: gigantic, hamfisted leaps in the opposite direction, turning WoW into the watered-down casual shithole it is today. They had it right with TBC but tragically never thought to return to that.
|