Wrath of the Lich King Review.

With the advent of 4.0.3a, the world has changed beyond recognition and Deathwing is out there somewhere, torching whatever he damn well pleases (unless he's in the Badlands). Bearing this in mind, it's now time for my review of Wrath of the Lich King despite it being a bit later than many other commentators. I've done this deliberately because it's always worth seeing another perspective on something I either loved or hated, purely out of a desire to see if I missed the developers intention and would have appreciated something differently had I scoped it from another lens. Also, with Cataclysm now firmly inbound, I feel it would be cathartic to say what I think about the past two years.

If one word was to sum up our adventures in Northrend, it would be access.

Blizzard clearly wanted Wrath of the Lich King to be the expansion where nobody was left out, no matter how much time and effort they were willing to put into the game. This was awesome for the super-casual because it meant they could raid current end-game content, grab gear, charge about in battlegrounds and get fast access to PvE instances. Even reputation grinds for mandatory gear enhancements were made simple by removing them from the "busy-work" pile and putting them on the "PvE" pile. For the more committed PvE player, this fast became a problem because there wasn't enough content for one character. Once you'd geared to a certain level, there ceased to be any worthwhile character development outside of your raid lock and we've seen an explosion of alts as a direct consequence. Heirlooms and talents not-designed for the old world or, indeed, Outland managed to trivialize much of what happened before you landed on Howling Fjord or the Borean Tundra. If you were a committed PvP player, well... You had a laundry list of issues that were all your own.

Bluntly put, the developers wanted as many people to see as much of their game as possible and evidence tells us that they went to admirable lengths to ensure it happened. For good or ill, that was the direction they took and that was how Wrath of the Lich King remained throughout. Being ultra-all inclusive sounds great on paper in a political sense, but it did cause some pretty significant wheels to come off the World of Warcraft jabberwocky in the meantime. For almost every good choice or implementation, it had a negative impact on those at the other side of the spectrum.

We'll look at a few.

Achievements.

The achievement system was a rip-roaring success, and it's only fair we start with it. The cynicism about it started before patch 3.0 went live and got shot to bits not long afterwards. Not only is it a way of developing your character in a myriad of ways by guiding you to what's available, it's a terrific way of showing off what your character is capable of. Titles and rewards are always nice and while it's easy to cheese a lot of achievements at this point, many of them are still a sign that you're looking at a skilled character. From the raiding perspective, it provided that middle ground between casual and hardcore, and it's for this main point that I appreciated it most. I'll let the reader decide what achievements he or she personally deem worthwhile. :)

Raid Access.

The move to create 10 man versions of all raids was a masterstroke. This created a huge opportunity for so many players who were skilled, but didn't want the hassle of dealing with 25 man raid issues. Essentially, this opened up end game content to a huge percentage of the player base and allowed for an explosion of new guilds ready to tackle the content. Conversely, it still caused certain stigma to be applied to 10 man raiders. Despite the fact that (to the erudite, anyway) 10 man strict rankings were generally a higher indication of skill, the lack of legendaries or certain achievements/titles made it look less desirable. Many "realm first" 10 man achievements were effectively stolen by 25 man guilds who significantly outgeared the content they were playing; this was frequently a bitter pill to swallow. Of course, it should also be noted that the "guild explosion" saw something like an 80% mortality rate. Lastly, it also made gear scaling an impossible equation to balance out, and leads onto our next point.

Improved Gear Scaling.

Giving people easy access to gear is good when you have alts that want to get involved in the latest content, or you're a player coming back from a break. It's bad for almost every other facet of the game. It removes the feeling of reward, it skews encounter progression, it obfuscates bad players, it dilutes individuality amongst the playerbase and it causes content to become obsolete far too quickly. Though rehashed, Naxxramas was a good enough raid instance for the 99% of present-day players that never tackled the original 40 man when it was current content and it is now utterly ignored, except for weekly raid quests. This is even more galling when you consider the fantastic Ulduar is also routinely skipped for the same reason. As if fate is trying to flip the bird at us, the first raid deemed mandatory (typically for weapons) was the awful Trial of the Crusader. For anyone who thoroughly dislikes the mindless zerg-fest that heroic instances have become, and especially those who long for the good old days of the Shadow Labyrinth or Magister's Terrace, this is your main reason why.

Class balance.

I need this one out of the way; trying to make all classes viable was a good move and one I wholeheartedly support. The problem, of course, was that balance became particularly difficult to establish. Blizzard eventually settled for "close enough" and that's the best you can ask for realistically, but it still sucks to be the one consistently at the bottom. For me, playing a Protection warrior was frustrating - doing everything you can to be the best possible, then being outperformed by someone putting in less effort due to virtue of his class, is not fun. Warrior utility was supposed to be the check against being benched, but the last expansion asked for brute strength and not sophistication. In the last tier of content, when everything mattered most, paladins and druids ended up being the best healers and the best tanks. If you were an Arms warrior, Frost mage or Subtlety rogue then you know what I'm talking about. Of course, that's PvE. PvP was where the problem really showed itself.

PvP balance.

What a mess. The few times I got involved in it, I was thoroughly discouraged by being blown up by an Elemental shaman or Retribution paladin without any chance of survival. Death knights? Really? The statistics for each bracket indicate, quite clearly, that seasons were dominated by composition and gear, not skill. Against that backdrop, the developers are going to have to accept that their attempts at PvP balance have utterly failed throughout WotLK. Not only that, but several balancing attempts had a significant, and horrible, impact on classes in PvE. No - I'm not going to forgive them for what happened to Warbringer. And in Cataclysm, this is one of the facets they're really going to have to fix. It's just a shame that they couldn't build in the margin for error we saw in PvE.

The "Margin for Error".

Time gone, several things used to kill you. Not interrupting; bad threat management; healers running out of mana; bad positioning; poor crowd control; ignorance of raid mechanics; standing in fire. Officially, the developers decided that they didn't want everyone punished for an unfortunate mistake - unofficially, it led to laziness and a dumbing down of the playerbase. Blizzard are dead right when they say that the players at the top are now better than they ever were. However, they fail to acknowledge that there is a higher percentage of flat-out bad players around the lower echelons of content who assume that a healer or tank can save them regardless of the situation. That belief follows on into behaviour that implies healers and tanks are responsible for everything. Luckily, this is being dealt with in Cataclysm.

Heroic Raids.

The idea of making raid encounters more difficult to get better gear or complete meta-achievements is a good one, and there are good ways to do it. There are also, however, bad ways to do it and we've seen both throughout Wrath of the Lich King. Once again, Ulduar absolutely shines in its production of hard modes. They were fun, interactive and, in most cases, saw a fight change almost completely. Sartharion is another wonderful example of how to stagger the difficulty of a fight. Of course, there are bad ways; entirely separate lock outs of the same instance with more damage coming in, more damage going out and not a lot else. And it's best we don't discuss the Faction Champion encounter. Blizzard is settling for the middle ground it reached in Icecrown Citadel, by allowing the players to toggle heroic modes on or off depending on the boss coming up. While not as fun or intuitive as Ulduar's hard modes, it's a country mile better than Trial of the Crusader.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap up there - this has gone on long enough and I suspect those who have sat it out to this point have blood coming out of their eyes. Let's sum this up with a top and bottom five:

Loves:

5. Achievements: A great way of keeping track of what you've been up to, and a chance to earn titles. Not only did it cater to every aspect of the game imaginable, it did it in a prescriptive way that didn't prescribe.
4. 10 man raiding: This made our guild "the" place to be and we really shined when all of our best players were available. Yes, we heard the comparisons; but no single action made the game more accessible.
3. Hard modes: We didn't get through all of these while current, but they added new dimensions to encounters. Not only that, they provided a way to separate the wheat from the chaff when comparisons are drawn.
2. Warbringer: THE signature talent for Protection warriors, and more fun than sharing a sleeping bag with Cheryl Cole. Yes, the nerf was hard to take - but that shouldn't detract from a great and unique talent.
1. Ulduar: The XT-002 Deconstructor. The Iron Council. Mimiron. Algalon the Observer. Yogg-Saron. Put simply, Ulduar was an absolutely magisterial example of a raid instance, and Blizzard's best ever PvE work.

Hates:

5. Player Versus Player: Nothing that happened in WotLK made me want to play PvP more than I did previously. Blown to bits in no time, with composition and gear determining winners - just not fun at all.
4. Five man instances: Alas, Blizzard just didn't get them right. Yes, they were steamrolled once outgeared (as it should be), but they weren't challenging enough to begin with as major mechanics could be ignored.
3. Gear similarity: I like earning gear as much as the next bloke, but "earning" is the key word. Gear became too easy to get a hold of, to the point it was practically being thrown at players for next to no effort.
2. Balance: As a warrior, it's frustrating when competitive becomes synonymous with "broken". The endless cycle of buffs and nerfs just hints at deeper problems they've taken six years to address properly.
1. Trial of the Crusader: Everything great about Ulduar was reversed. Old models, old mechanics, no trash, no epic scenery and no story; even the patch trailer was bog-awful. One to truly forget for Blizzard.

So, what did you love and what did you hate?

And it's okay to disagree. :)

Mastering Mastery and the Route to Reforging.

The introduction of mastery in Cataclysm is having a pretty significant impact on how you, as a tank, will view gear. Simply put, mastery is something that every spec can put to good use because it's designed to be universally applicable. What this means is that the playerbase has a significantly larger pool of items from which to draw and that the pieces themselves need to be viewed on a stat-by-stat basis. Of course, this applies to pretty much every class but perhaps more to tanks than any other role due to the removal of defence rating. Sorry, but it's example time.

A pair of plate boots just dropped from a raid boss. They look like this:

Zellviren's Boots of Bluster
+2500 Armour
+300 Strength
+400 Stamina
+100 Hit Rating
+100 Mastery

Now, depending on what is being worn around the raid, these boots could well be attractive to both tanks and damage dealers. For me, I'm looking at hit rating and Critical Block; in my offspec, I'm looking at hit rating and Strikes of Opportunity. Both stats are things I want in either role, which equally means that Roarzol, my raid's Arms warrior, could be equally interested in the boots. Instead of merely looking at the iLevel and deciding that "they iz tank bootz" or they izn't, the playerbase is being forced into looking at what a piece of gear could potentially be giving them. Mastery is a tanking stat. It's also a DPS stat. In fact, it could easily be argued that hit rating, expertise rating and mastery (in any combination) could be considered viable tanking options in lieu of something more obvious.

Naturally, this point may be counter-weighted by an assertion that parry and dodge now become the new "defence rating"; if a piece of gear has one of those two stats it's a tank drop and, if it doesn't, it's a DPS drop. However, that line of argument only holds weight if it can be reasonably proven that hit rating, expertise or mastery are clearly undesirable for tanks - and no such proof will ever exist. This is especially true when we consider the other big change to gearing.

Reforging.

The ability to reforge gear cannot be understated. Basically, the ability to remove half of a less desired stat in order to gain an appropriate value of a stat you want more is huge. The argument that tanks should stick to gear with parry and dodge is blown to bits with one trip to the reforger. All of a sudden, our boots look like this:

Zellviren's Boots of Bluster
Reforged
+2500 Armour
+300 Strength
+400 Stamina
+50 Hit Rating
+50 Parry
+100 Mastery

Voila. Bona fide tanking stats.

Mastery really is all things to all men, while potentially opening up gearing avenues that were previously unheard of. The ability to reforge off slightly undesirable stats for something you like better just adds to the level of customisation. Parry and dodge on gear will stop your own items going up in smoke, while you can also start laying claim to things that are potentially decent upgrades despite not being perfectly itemized for you.

The implications here are (I'd say) threefold.

1) An upgrade is an upgrade is an upgrade is an upgrade.

We're back to where we were in vanilla. BiS lists won't go away, but players should start to look at upgrades with a far more open mind. The developers are using mastery and reforging as a means toward freedom in creating gear that doesn't need to be perfectly itemized. If a piece isn't perfect, you can look at the potential in it and then make an assessment of how you can juggle your other slots to make it fit in nicely. Those who like mindless and unambiguous upgrades are going to feel the pinch here, while those who enjoy gaming their gear to get the best out of it are going to have great fun.

2) Tanks are going to be spoiled for choice.

As hinted above, nobody other than a plate tank can lay claim to pieces with dodge or parry on them; they're yours and they're safe. However, anything else that has a mixture of hit, expertise or mastery is fair game if it's going to be good for you. A spec that has traditionally seen a very tight line on gearing up due to defence rating has now been freed to grab pieces that may not be perfect, but could well be very good while you wait on the ultimate upgrade. I'd even argue that haste isn't terribad if you reforge most of it off, but you're pushing it if a plate DPS also wants that drop.

3) The potential for drama has just shot up in PuG raids.

It's obvious that your loot system, whatever it is, should deal with this particular issue regarding guild raids. However, if you mainly attend the higher PvE content in a PuG, I would be ready for arguments. With tanks laying claim to a larger share of the loot table, and with said tanks having little to no interest in the rest of their raid, it's not a jump to suggest that they'll happily roll on drops that will agitate plate DPS players. We've already seen it in Icecrown Citadel when certain casters have argued over cloth that did or didn't have hit rating on it and who, as a result, was entitled to roll. Ouchy-ouchity-ouch.

I've already said that Cataclysm is changing how the players view the game in hugely significant ways and this is yet another that tanks, particularly, should be considering. As you're levelling, you'll be shocked at how often you say "hey, that quest reward could be okay". When you hit raids and you're juggling stats, that notion changes to "actually, I could fit that in nicely". Ultimately, the gearing spectrum just got a lot more colourful for tanks, and in a way that allows for a previously unthinkable level of customisation for the imaginative.

Ghostcrawler argued early on in development that removing stats didn't necessarily remove depth and that we'd have more choice than ever before.

Originally we scoffed, but it's just as we were promised; we're shaping up nicely.

The heavens burn.

Looking past Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard have strongly hinted that we're going to see a significant number of new mechanics brought into the game. Those of you who recall Ciderhelm's post regarding how encounter development needs to evolve to keep the playerbase interested, will be happy to have heard Blizzard's statement on the topic. And don't forget, that those of us who've played through the last two years will be all too aware of how our developers chose to challenge players:

1) Hit them hard.
2) Hit them fast.

In this environment, we end up dealing with numerous implications that will force players into certain modes of behaviour. Tanking decisions such as stamina, avoidance or mitigation are taken away because one piece of the puzzle is significantly more effective than the others, while healer decisions receive similar treatment that skews healers into concentrating on raw throughput. It's no coincidence that druids and paladins, the raw output powerhouses, have dominated much of this expansion. It's also no coincidence that large swathes of content were trivialized by simply getting better gear.

Something had to change.

Enter patch 3.3, Icecrown Citadel. Sunwell Radiance made its unwelcome return in order to deal with inflated avoidance, while allowing boss damage to be scaled down in order to remove the savage spikes that were killing people. Those who fought Gormok the Impaler on heroic difficulty will be only too aware of how frustrating it is to have to use a cooldown rotation (thus not having your cooldowns for the "oh, shoot" moments) or risk losing every hit point in less than a second. For the most part, the plan worked. Spike damage was lowered quite nicely, while healers were still challenged to react as quickly as they'd grown accustomed to in order to perform effectively. In most people's minds, Icecrown Citadel was a nice enough raid despite paling in comparison to the magnificent Ulduar. But there is another part of 3.3 that has seen precious little attention, and I think that's a crying shame.

I am, of course, discussing Halion the Twilight Destroyer.



As far as concerns me, Halion only had one real problem; his release date. We only got to see him at a time of the expansion where the main antagonist had been dealt with by the majority of guilds and many others were looking at a bit of time off or general relaxation. In addition to that, Halion's loot table wasn't impressive enough to see people get in there to grab items to help them with... Oh, yeah. Nothing. Halion was little more than a flavour boss at a point in the game where there was little else to be doing assuming you were in a guild of any genuine PvE quality. Perhaps if his loot table had more vanity items such as a mount, mini-pet, tabard or Twilight activator (eh?) then he'd have seen more raid groups visiting the Ruby Sanctum. But that's where my complaints about Halion end because I reckon, as a boss, he deserved far more than attention than he received.

First of all, we potentially got a peek into the future. There were mechanics here that hadn't been seen prior and they were mechanics that involved everyone in the raid; relatively uncommon. Of course, the major mechanic of the encounter (phase three) was entirely unique and saw a raid need to cooperate in a way they hadn't before. Splitting a raid into separate parts isn't a new idea - having one half directly impact on the other half, however, is. Not only was this an intriguing way of encouraging control over raw pew pew, it was done in a fashion that made a split raid still feel as though they were all fighting the same adversary. Put simply? It was very clever.

Halion was also really well tuned. The amount of damage he could take as well as mete out was about right for raids of either size, and the presence of Twilight Strikes allowed Blizzard to keep the damage at a bearable level. When this is added to the Twilight cutters, random positioning of fire spawns, careful removing of a quirky debuff and high levels of attention needed throughout, you end up with a boss that prioritises control over output, attention over ignorance and communication over silence. I should also mention that it was a damn fun encounter to boot.

In case it wasn't obvious by now, it's worth bearing in mind that the fight is really enjoyable to tank. In phase one you not only need to build threat and mitigate damage, you also have to pay attention to where you tank Halion in accordance with both your raid group and where the fire ends up; frequently, considering the two conjoined. In phase two, the real fun begins as you end up directly responsible for the group succeeding or failing. If you have a tank who cannot grasp the behaviour of the Twilight cutters, you have a tank that will wipe your raid again and again and again and again. I love encounters where what the tank does actually matters. Too many encounters require me to pretty much stand there, build threat and wait for heals. Tossing in a taunt rotation isn't compelling gameplay to me. But when you put me in a position where the whole plan is dependent on me not being a berk, I'm forced to switch on and make sure I'm contributing as much as I can. I've loved encounters like Heigan, Malygos, Hodir and Yogg-Saron because a good tank makes such a significant difference to your chances of success. I happily add Halion to that list.

I'll wrap up now. Suffice it to say, while Halion was the end of something (the Wrath of the Lich King expansion) he also represented a beginning. He's the harbinger of Deathwing's arrival from a lore perspective, but he's also a cunning insight into what we're likely to see more of in Cataclysm; non-spammy dispelling, steady damage with healers using their arsenal of spells, tanks paying attention to more than their hotbars and damage dealers paying attention full stop. It bodes well that Blizzard managed to fit what might look like a Cataclysm encounter into an expansion it wasn't made for, while also hitting the sweet spot between being both challenging, and fun.

Here's to more of the same in Cataclysm.