When I left WoW, during the WOTLK expansion, I came to look back and remember the good times. Those good times were mostly in BC. Sure, we were eager to for WOTLK back then, but little did I know that all the changes the made were counter-balanced with their own flaws. And those flaws eventually made me come to despise what the game had become. Here's why BC was better.
1. PVP was actually fun. There wasn't any "resilience is your armor" bonus, and Wintergrasp is a joke. Back then (before the nightmarish buff Paladins "temporarily" got), pvp play was for the most part balanced, and victories relied on people not being morons. BGs were the rave. And then WOTLK came. Battlegrounds lost their meaning, and everything revolved around Wintergrasp and getting badges from PVE. The problem with this was obvious. PvPers do NOT have the mindset of PvErs. PvErs were moreso teamplayers, except for the PvPers who didn't realize they were PvPers yet. Mixing the two groups created tension, and essentially forced a lot of anti-authorative PvPers to raid, meaning more arguments and less action in raids. So, stupid system.
2. Achievements are bullshit. What turned out to be a potentially inventive new hobby became an obsession that guilds tended to act upon, and forced groups in pve to wipe continuously just for the sake of some stupid prizes that are totally not worth the effort. They make you FEEL like you must do them, therefore giving you way too much shit to do, unless you were a Vanilla WoW veteran who had already done everything. So overall, it was a distraction and a nuisance.
3. Heroic Moments. BC had a crapload of those. There were times where one dpser who could walk up to the boss, and through much blood sweat and tears could pull a hero on the boss, and be a total badass. In WOTLK? Unless you were the tank, good f**king luck. It's essentially impossible to pull anything truly badass in WOTLK, aside from being able to say you could do Heigan's Dance in Naxxramas because it takes a while to learn if you weren't a vanilla WoW veteran, and even then, Heigan himself was a pussy so he doesn't really count as a boss more than his own stage does. But in all honesty, it made it more about the team than the individual, which in a way is the point of raiding. But isn't it more fun to be able to say that you pulled something badass out of thin air and saved everyone from imminent failure? I mean, those kind of stories are fun. When a team is competent and can stomp instances, it takes the fun out of explaining it because everyone else can stomp it just as hard, meaning noone's really special. Which leads me to my next point...
4. BC was truly about the individual. Everything in BC was truly meant to set you in stone as what you were capable of. In WOTLK, the only really individual thing you could do is stat properly in a stat system that had gotten way out of hand and too large to properly keep track of, so if you had no idea what you were doing with the gear, no matter how good you were, you were boned. In BC, if your gear sucked, you could still beat a person in better gear by skill, which by definition is much more awesome, not to mention the statting was much more fair. And if some idiot was screwing up in the raid, it was much, MUCH easier to tell who it was. In WOTLK, since it was more group based, you either lived as a team or died as a team. So even if you rocked face, you suffered for it because someone took aggro when they weren't supposed to.
5. Better armor sets. Hell, in BC, I got to be friggin Hanzo Hattori as my Blood Elf Rogue, and you can't deny that rocks face. All the armor and weapons were really off the wall awesome. In WOTLK, the weapon sets were bland, unimaginative, and repetitive. Although I'll give WOTLK credit for making Death Knights and giving them badass armor, but that's about it.
6. Sure, you got less contact with the main villain in BC, but that made you all the more hungry to tear through all of his minions to kill him. When you see Arthas all the time in WOTLK, and how much of a f**king idiot this guy is, you feel more like sitting back and laughing as he throws a fit like some corny tv show villain like he thinks he's still holding all the cards, and yet pretty much from the looks of it, you're kinda just walking in and stomping his troops all over the place. So it makes Arthas look like a tool. With Illidan, you couldn't tell if he was a tool or not, because he wasn't doing anything, it was Kael that was doing it all, so it made it more intriguing to want to find that out.
7. The Epic Quests were more epic. In WOTLK, you had to cheat in the epic quests by getting an elite item to help you kill elite enemies. In BC, you were pretty much on your own the majority of the time in the shit that you did, and in doing that, you proved you had brass balls of steel. What's the point of killing something much stronger than you if you couldn't do it by the knowledge of your own character? Because it takes balls to be able to solo the animals bosses in Nagrand, and skill to kill them. And that should be a good enough example.
I can't say I thoroughly owned WOTLK in comparison to BC as this is just moreso my feelings on the 2 compared, but I feel I made it clear that some things about BC were indeed better. If anyone has something to add, BC or WOTLK side of the argument, feel free.
1. PVP was actually fun. There wasn't any "resilience is your armor" bonus, and Wintergrasp is a joke. Back then (before the nightmarish buff Paladins "temporarily" got), pvp play was for the most part balanced, and victories relied on people not being morons. BGs were the rave. And then WOTLK came. Battlegrounds lost their meaning, and everything revolved around Wintergrasp and getting badges from PVE. The problem with this was obvious. PvPers do NOT have the mindset of PvErs. PvErs were moreso teamplayers, except for the PvPers who didn't realize they were PvPers yet. Mixing the two groups created tension, and essentially forced a lot of anti-authorative PvPers to raid, meaning more arguments and less action in raids. So, stupid system.
2. Achievements are bullshit. What turned out to be a potentially inventive new hobby became an obsession that guilds tended to act upon, and forced groups in pve to wipe continuously just for the sake of some stupid prizes that are totally not worth the effort. They make you FEEL like you must do them, therefore giving you way too much shit to do, unless you were a Vanilla WoW veteran who had already done everything. So overall, it was a distraction and a nuisance.
3. Heroic Moments. BC had a crapload of those. There were times where one dpser who could walk up to the boss, and through much blood sweat and tears could pull a hero on the boss, and be a total badass. In WOTLK? Unless you were the tank, good f**king luck. It's essentially impossible to pull anything truly badass in WOTLK, aside from being able to say you could do Heigan's Dance in Naxxramas because it takes a while to learn if you weren't a vanilla WoW veteran, and even then, Heigan himself was a pussy so he doesn't really count as a boss more than his own stage does. But in all honesty, it made it more about the team than the individual, which in a way is the point of raiding. But isn't it more fun to be able to say that you pulled something badass out of thin air and saved everyone from imminent failure? I mean, those kind of stories are fun. When a team is competent and can stomp instances, it takes the fun out of explaining it because everyone else can stomp it just as hard, meaning noone's really special. Which leads me to my next point...
4. BC was truly about the individual. Everything in BC was truly meant to set you in stone as what you were capable of. In WOTLK, the only really individual thing you could do is stat properly in a stat system that had gotten way out of hand and too large to properly keep track of, so if you had no idea what you were doing with the gear, no matter how good you were, you were boned. In BC, if your gear sucked, you could still beat a person in better gear by skill, which by definition is much more awesome, not to mention the statting was much more fair. And if some idiot was screwing up in the raid, it was much, MUCH easier to tell who it was. In WOTLK, since it was more group based, you either lived as a team or died as a team. So even if you rocked face, you suffered for it because someone took aggro when they weren't supposed to.
5. Better armor sets. Hell, in BC, I got to be friggin Hanzo Hattori as my Blood Elf Rogue, and you can't deny that rocks face. All the armor and weapons were really off the wall awesome. In WOTLK, the weapon sets were bland, unimaginative, and repetitive. Although I'll give WOTLK credit for making Death Knights and giving them badass armor, but that's about it.
6. Sure, you got less contact with the main villain in BC, but that made you all the more hungry to tear through all of his minions to kill him. When you see Arthas all the time in WOTLK, and how much of a f**king idiot this guy is, you feel more like sitting back and laughing as he throws a fit like some corny tv show villain like he thinks he's still holding all the cards, and yet pretty much from the looks of it, you're kinda just walking in and stomping his troops all over the place. So it makes Arthas look like a tool. With Illidan, you couldn't tell if he was a tool or not, because he wasn't doing anything, it was Kael that was doing it all, so it made it more intriguing to want to find that out.
7. The Epic Quests were more epic. In WOTLK, you had to cheat in the epic quests by getting an elite item to help you kill elite enemies. In BC, you were pretty much on your own the majority of the time in the shit that you did, and in doing that, you proved you had brass balls of steel. What's the point of killing something much stronger than you if you couldn't do it by the knowledge of your own character? Because it takes balls to be able to solo the animals bosses in Nagrand, and skill to kill them. And that should be a good enough example.
I can't say I thoroughly owned WOTLK in comparison to BC as this is just moreso my feelings on the 2 compared, but I feel I made it clear that some things about BC were indeed better. If anyone has something to add, BC or WOTLK side of the argument, feel free.
