After all that time spent in the original WoW, or Vanilla WoW, or Classic WoW, whatever you want to call, leveling to 60, came a new experience by the name of The Burning Crusade(TBC).
This was the first expansion to WoW, it came out years after the original game was in place. Almost everyone one reached the maximum level by then. People started to realize there wasn’t a whole lot to do once you got there. Started to complain, some started to leave, others just kept playing the game or started over and created an alt and went through the leveling experience again.
I have left the game by that point, having nothing to do day to day and not really wanting to turn this game into a second job which is what raiding end game would be, I just quit. Unsubscribed and went on to other games. I played a bunch of single player games at that point, some MMORPGs, played a little bit of Lineage 2 again. I also jumped into Everquest 2 with some of my friends, played that a bunch, liked the game itself, couldn’t stand that every new area you went to had a loading screen. Such an immersion breaker. In WoW you could run from one area to another and never see a loading screen, it is still one of the most amazing things to me, that at that time Lineage 2 and WoW were able to achieve this and games like Everquest could not.
There were other smaller MMOs I tried, but none of them really stuck, my home was always going to be World of Warcraft. So when the expansion was announced I was incredibly excited for it. Blizzard were promising a lot with it, a whole new place to level, new instances, new bosses, the story line continuation. All of those were exciting, from the perspective if you liked WoW before it would be more of the same for you here. Which was just fine with me.
That wasn’t all of it though, there were new races added two, which changed the classes available for each faction. Alliance could now play Shaman, and Horde could now play Paladins. Both factions learned that the grass was not indeed greener on the other side, once you got to the other side you realised its just grass and you need to put in a whole lot of work to make it look green.
Probably the biggest promise that I was really excited for in TBC were the flying mounts. How awesome would that be? Flying around, saving time and money on travel, seeing the world from above. In theory all of that sounded incredible, in practice some of those things were true, but it came with side effects, such as ganking on pvp servers. People would swoop in and kill you and then fly right back up where you couldn’t reach them to get your sweet sweet revenge. That added to frustration at the time. And flying was only limited to the world in TBC, you couldn’t go back to your old stomping grounds and fly around. So that was kind of a bummer. People would avoid going back to the old world because you had the slow speed of travel and it felt underwhelming comparably.
The funny part about is that, the reason the old world didn’t get flying right away, eventually Blizzard allowed flying everywhere, was because the map or the world wasn’t quite finished. There were secret locations that we found ways of getting to and exploring that were not ready to be viewed by the general public. And the other significant reason was that, Blizzard removed all the rooftops from buildings, to save on the polygons and make the game easier to run on lower spec PCs… It was in one of the interviews that a Blizzard developer said that they originally had the rooftops but took them out and now had to find a way to put them back in and did not have enough time to do it by TBC.
It has been several years since that first time the flying mounts were introduced… and I would like to make a statement here and now: I wish they weren’t. I hate flying mounts so much now, the world feels so small when you can fly around. Every expansion that comes out I play long enough until Blizzard allows flying again and I quit… I don’t know it just ruined it for me.
So really the game did change a bunch, but the core of it stayed the same, you did quests, you went to dungeons and that was pretty much it. The PVP aspect didn’t really changed but a new way of PVPing was added in called the Arena. It was a small team deathmatch type of PVP unlike the Battlegrounds that had objectives this was just pure PVP. I played that alot and it was fun, but really hard and added to the stress level and I eventually stopped participating.
There was a point in time I played Arena matches that I met a team of players that invited me to play with them in what’s called a premade group. We would get on Voice chat, at the time Ventrilo was the way to go. And we did really well and had fun, however there was a team member that would sub in that played a warlock I believe which was a really weak PVP class at the time and all the rating points we would get without him, we would lose when he would sub in. And I remember I got so frustrated with that, being in my late teenage years, I wasn’t very good at expressing that, other than through sarcastic comments that eventually got on everybody’s nerves. It was then that I was blocked by a group of people for the first time in my life. I annoyed them so much that they removed me from their team and blocked me, not my proudest moment. I eventually apologized and got back into the group, but it wasn’t the same and I quit anyways.
TBC was also the first time that I did serious Raiding content in WoW. It was fun, I had a great guild that I played with. At the time Paladins had a big boost in everything but most of all became incredible healers for Raids. I was a main healer for our Raids in Karazhan. There wasn’t the current setup of having gear drop for a specific spec you were playing, you had to take other classes gear to be viable. So I was a Paladin, an armored warrior of light, in a skirt most of the time… It looked ridiculous, but it worked. Eventually the guild fell apart and I moved on to doing other things within the game.
From that point on I maxed out and left the game again, to wait for the next expansion, and what an expansion that was! Let’s talk about that next time!
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