So let’s talk about us finally getting to the one guy that broke our hearts and kept doing so throughout the whole expansion, starting with the Death Knight(DK) zone. But probably DK first??? Ok Death Knights first and then Arthas…
This was the first time that a completely new class has been added to the game with it’s own starting zone and story line. The manual called it a Hero Class, I believe it had something to do with the fact that when you created a DK it would start at level 55 as opposed to 1, and you would go through the starting zone for DKs and gain 5 levels. Then at level 60 you would start at the last expansion which was Burning Crusade and work your way to Wrath. This helped a ton for people starting out in the game with Wrath, they skipped 60 levels of grind, but you still had the grossness of BC to go through.
The story line was incredible for the DK, at first Arthas lead them creating a whole army in his likeness and you took quests from him to go ahead and kill and pillage the town close by. Only to be betrayed by the betrayer of light. Go figure though… I mean we should have seen it coming, the guy made a career of doing that. After all of that you then are accepted back into your faction and have to do the walk of shame through the city, with people throwing garbage at you and booing. It was amazing, really made me feel like crap when I was going through it.
The downside of playing a DK was that you shared gear with two other plate wearers, so you didn’t keep that distinct look you started out with, and there was no Transmoging then like there is now. And that’s pretty much when I stopped playing a DK, I went to Outlands in BC and got the same ugly gear that warriors get and thought to myself… meh I might as well keep playing my Paladin, I will look the same and don’t have to figure out a whole new class.
Later on, the DKs were balanced and rebalanced a couple times and ended up being an incredible class to play, and now a days every class has a distinct look and feel to them so that solved that problem. I kind of wish I had a max level DK now though.
As mentioned before our ultimate goal in this expansion was to get to Arthas, and make him pay. The story around it is awesome and well worth experiencing yourself.
There were other things in the expansion that were fun, like the introduction of new npc races, new dungeons/instances.
But it all ultimately came down to us getting to Arthas… And we did. I am here to tell you I hated it.
Spoilers… Arthas dies at the end of the last raid in Icecrown. His death left a major hole in the hearts of WoW players. He was by all accounts the smartest and the strongest villain we faced thus far. And it wasn’t the fact that he was ultra powerful or something like that, it’s just he was always more clever than we were. It created a challenge for us story wise and expectation wise as well. I remember thinking that he will probably find a way to escape… I mean Illidan did and look he is fine… But not Arthas, he really does die, the cinematic is awesome and the story does have closure, but he is dead?!?!
What next?
Blizzard has been trying to answer that question ever since. I don’t know about you, but for me it has been a miss every time.
I remember an interview with one of Blizzard employees at the time, when asked where do we go after Arthas, they said, that Blizzard has so many more great villains that they are not worried at all. I was worried, I don’t care about some big run of the mill dragon… or some weird concept that is the Old Gods… I just don’t care, there is plenty of that in other MMOs. Arthas was one of us and is now gone, only to be replaced by some Generic Bad Guy [Insert Name Here] type of deal.
It is at that point that I realized I have no more interest in WoW as far as stories went, and the game play was so basic that I wasn’t very interested in it, so I quit…
It was never a permanent type of “I quit” I would comeback for every new expansion and play it until the main story lines were complete and then always just get burned out on the grind and leave again.
With Arthas dying, something else went away my motivation as a character or a person to keep exploring this new world and trying to beat up this next bad guy. I DON’T CARE we will just kill that one too big deal. Arthas was smarter and we never knew how the story would end with him… until it did and then it was just like everything else in the gaming industry.
But enough of that! This article has been less about the expansion itself and more about how I felt, which is fine, considering the whole point of this is to remember and put thoughts on paper. Came out kind of ranty actually. Sorry about that. Hopefully you enjoyed it and either agree with me or don’t both are fine, let me know what you think.
All in all Wrath of the Lich King was an amazing expansion, to me the best expansion ever released for World of Warcraft. Thinking about it, the only expansion that sort of came close, for me at least, was Legion. Similar feel to it somehow, all though it was back to the ugly green and demons and stuff. But it did feel great.
So there is that, see you in the next one!
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