Just Why Was Wrath of the Lich King So Popular?

hello ladies and gentlemen willie here why was wrath of the lich king as popular as it was for an expansion really though when you think about some of the features that it had added throughout its duration the sheer mention of them would be met with a sheer wall of resistance even now in classic when it's become quite apparent that given our player knowledge and reference client choice that for many people experiencing any form of challenge seems less and less likely looking at this sub count chart here the last one that blizzard would ever publicly release we can see that raffle lich king was indeed the peak but ever so narrowly and indeed the amount of growth wow experienced throughout vanilla and tbc was unprecedented for the mmo genre vanilla achieving about eight million subs in the space of two and a half years and tbc taking that eight million all the way up to eleven and a half million concurrent subscribed players raph the lich king though whilst the peak was in many ways the plateau of wow's phenomenal growth adding about 500k subs throughout its duration interestingly enough there was never really the rise and fall with patches as we've seen with subsequent expansions in terms of players it remained very consistent all the way throughout what puzzles me about its success then i mean i wouldn't have the same questions for tbc which felt like a real successor to classic with more expanded classes overall better balance updated raid formats with more challenge added additional pvp content in the way of arenas what are the real complaints of tbc alton friendly dungeons and raid requirements are lowered in later patches dailies optional content was largely optional and not as much required for power gain as they are today in bfa arena boosts or win trading maybe that one yeah what about wrath of the lich king though heroic dungeons are now extremely easy gear progression could be replaced with each patch by a new set of badge gear heirlooms to make leveling faster dual specialization was a thing the gear score add-on which admittedly was player made though blizzard later integrated it into the game all the extra convenience factors like more bank space a barber shop paid race change and let's not forget the looking for group tool or lfg tool as well i wonder if and when we get to rafter lich king classic will it have less subs than classic initially did will people be saying all of this is what ruined the game or instead will they be saying ah finally now i can dual spec to pvp i can level my alts faster i can get dungeon quest done whilst levelling or any of the other things that raffle lich king brought into the game which had been retrospectively criticized classic has certainly done well for itself as a game especially as a remake of a game but the starting decision to make servers so much larger than they were ever really meant to be for the game has caused so many problems it's unreal that's on top of people approaching it like it's a race where there isn't really all that much to be won at the end it's not necessarily the case that every decision made during wrath of the lich king was the right one but looking back at classic now it's pretty clear that the game is being taken on by a very new type of audience as opposed to what we had back in the day an audience which will write something off as too easy at the drop of a hat i mean just look at the recent drama around c'thun where it was found that there was a delay before the first i-beam after players entered the room which apparently matched a blizzard's reference client for us now they've patched it out very quickly so the beam now fires off as soon as somebody is in line of sight i mean people are calling the whole raid easy based off this one thing when in reality the difference is to send one guy in with a great nature protection potion soak the first beam that everyone else runs in that's sort of it the difference would be a couple posts on reddit where a raid loses half its members randomly because somebody does something dumb call it iconic if you want but you know ragnaros was iconic never seen phase two by the way valestraz was iconic most skills got past it no problem let's not pretend we're still in the past here okay anyways little tangent aside how come an expansion which had all these features that people claim to hate was the most popular world of warcraft would ever prove to go and i'm talking beyond initially too this expansion was a lot more than just a hype phase that gradually faded away like warlords of draenor let me ask you this how important is law to a game or not necessarily just law but having some kind of founding story that it's evolved from rafa lich king was the final time in wow where real pre-established law unfolded yeah deathwing was sort of known about before after the lich king but as an authorian or the earthwarder anyways we can't forget that wow was a port of an rts over to an mmo rpg with loads of story already ready to be told that have been created in this earlier game format which is either now seen firsthand or experienced in the game the war of the ancients culling of stratholme thrall's entire story from internment camp to leading the horde the opening of the dark portal arthas's fateful journey to the frozen north with muradin and his men chasing malganis only to take up the runeblade frostmourne and become the next lich king even if you weren't much of a lore person at the start it was pretty hard to ignore the progression that the story took in wrath of the lich king if you played it the whole way through especially that final cut scene in the fall of the lich king patch what about a new class then this was certainly another thing to hype rafa litechking up that bit extra the death knight was more or less the most overpowered class we have ever seen introduced to world of warcraft crazy in all regards for pvp pve and of course it brought along the edgiest role players we have ever seen in the game in fact i did a whole video on how the death knight was at the start of wrath of the lich king and it was more or less as opie as i remembered it check it out if you want what else kept people so engaged with the lich king then i'm gonna say a change in philosophy to gearing and also more active class balancing throughout as i'm sure you know in classic the gear ladder is quite a big one and quite a linear one and with each new patch that gap gets wider level cap priebus from dungeons and then zg a q20 molten core then onto blackwing aq40 and then finally max rammus depending on your chosen class and specialization it can take a very long time to go from fresh 60 to geared character and in fact there are a lot of people who play just for this gear progression ladder and then quit and do it all again so people may come back to the game after having quit before blackwing lure and then want to check out aq40 and realistically you're gonna have to go and start to farm quite a bit before you do so you need your consumables you need your nature resistance set you need to upgrade your gear a decent bid as well before you can step in there this means going out and grinding old content which less people will be running or just reserving everything or joining a guild's b team to try and soak up some of the gear in hope of getting to the new content in time this was also kind of the case for tbc though it was made more accessible later on in the game as well as the requirements for heroic dungeons being lowered in wrath of the lich king the gear ladder more or less did a hard reset every single new major patch a new badge currency spammable heroics through the lfg new bosses in the vault of archivon very powerful catch-up gear through the later heroic dungeons like trilobite crusader pit of sauron forge of souls and the halls of reflection and then we also had normal and heroic raids where normal was considerably easier too this meant that when you came back you didn't feel incredibly insurmountably behind everybody else i mean it's an mmo right character progression is very important i completely agree and it does make sense for somebody who has played consistently throughout the entire expansion to be ahead of somebody who's returning but not like one or two months worth of progression in power levels ahead just look at bfa recently where blizzard have actually made this exact same mistake as they did years and years ago with all these temporary power systems that have arbitrary catch-up times and how they've had to go back and make there be more viable catch-up options this more streamlined gearing process felt like it made people much more inclined to re-roll or play in a bit more of a flavor than month playstyle which isn't necessarily a bad thing back in these days of course class balance was active during an expansion so it was very much the case that no singular class ruled from day one to the end of the expansion or maybe you just wanted to play a new class or a different role next tier it wasn't an enormous effort to do so time or gold wise you know what else we had a real start to the true matter of world of warcraft collections the stats panel was more of a curiosity but achievements were something that had started to grow on gaming more and more just look at steam or consoles at that period in time for example and now they were also coming to well it made old content relevant they added extra layers of difficulty to raids push people even harder to get those pvp top arena ratings your bank got more slots for collectibles and consumables or pets and there were so many new mounts added throughout the game for our achievements themselves or even random rare mounts out in the world like the time loss proto-drake raids were scaled to 10 or 25 man now too and all the issues about buffs and debuff caps were totally gone and removed multiple different classes could provide boston debuffs too like horn of winter from death knights or strength of earth totem from shaman both giving the same buff and to top it all off all buffs were raid wide no longer did you have to assign people to buff certain parties or refresh those buffs every 15 minutes or whatever they may have been and let's not forget dual spec 2. it did cost 1 000 gold to unlock initially but it meant that those healer classes could actually go and do some solo content outside of raids like dailies and not just hit like a wet noodle and then we just have the zones themselves one of which was in particular planned around you having flying to integrate it more into the game that being the storm peaks for land referred to as the frozen north it certainly had a wide variety of different biomes to enjoy and the thing is a lot of these issues that i went over before are things that sort of enabled all of these new types of gameplay to be possible did it make the game less sociable yes it did absolutely but i think if classics anything to go by then players are a bit less sociable these days as well in fact back during the wrath of the lich king era people called it the expansion with the casuals one and calling people who started back then raph babies you've got a lot of people holding on to the past of course i think we've talked at length about how you can bring a game back to its start but you can't bring the players back too and given all this now that i think about it i reckon i've got a bit of a better understanding of what made wrath of the lich king the real peak of world of warcraft accessibility it was faster and easier to get into the game than it had ever been before or just as a returning player heirlooms gear resets the lfg dailies just the overall ease of access made it good to get into and then at top end there was also some real challenge from the raiding scene as well and as i mentioned if and when we do get to wrap the lich king classic which i'm expecting to all be but guaranteed once tbc is a thing it will be interesting to see how people react will it be all oh this is the expansion that ruined everything or will people end up saying finally dual spec earliness at lfg i've waited so long whilst i bet there's going to be some of the former i think there'll be a whole lot more of the latter and the wrath of the lich king would be a huge success if done again anyways ramble over what are your thoughts on what made rafa the lich king so great and how do you think it will be received if we do end up going there again on our classic iteration hit me up below as always i do hope you guys enjoyed the video and i will see you in the next one very soon if you like what you see do give the video a like and subscribe as there will be plenty more to come take care guys and i'll see you in the next one very soon [Music]

Channel: WillE

Views: 412,910

Keywords: the burning crusade, tbc, phase 5, scarab lord, AQ40, AQ20, top 10 wow, grind, wow, gold, gold guide, best farm vanilla, World of Warcraft, WoW Classic, classic, shadowlands, pvp, pve, raiding, tbc beta, blizzard, twitch, mage, rogue, shaman, warrior, paladin, hunter, druid, warlock, priest

Id: ljXESTHS5GU

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020