Philipp Sattler Christian Schmid March 16, 2024 | 9:00 a.m. World of Warcraft: Videos, guides, news and more
It hasn't been this pleasant to play World of Warcraft for a long time: With Wrath of the Lich King you currently get a polished old-school WoW on the Classic servers that mitigates the inconveniences of the Classic era and still retains the original world and the old talent trees. In fact, you could say that Wrath of the Lich King is the best WoW of all time. “I love the smell of DRAGON FIRE IN THE MORNING!” thunders through the guild chat. One of your guildmates actually has the absolute audacity to look forward to Cataclysm Classic. This villain! With fire in your chest and pride in your heart, you start the discussion to show the wrongdoer his mistake, but the guy just doesn't want to back down.
Not only that, he even makes a few good counterarguments: Cataclysm is also an important part of WoW's life cycle, perhaps even the most important. There was a turning point here, a real paradigm shift towards telling a story rather than simply providing a world. It was only with Cataclysm that the modern, story-based MMORPG as we know it today reached the mainstream of players, even if World of Warcraft (buy now) was already on the decline at that point. You don't have to like it, but it's just part of WoW. The good has always come hand in hand with the bad in Blizzard's MMORPG, just as it is still played and loved on the era servers: a living witness to things as they once were, full of rough edges; an opportunity for young players to experience the old WoW again step by step. If this isn't a great opportunity for every fan, what is?
Source: buffed Does Cataclysm represent the last supper for the Classic servers? After all, no one asked for the expansion – does the concept still work? “It's a shame, that's it!” you reply hotly, “Classic should stay classic and Cataclysm is the beginning of retail – and therefore the beginning of the end. People want Classic and especially WotLK, why should you give it to them So take it?” Your arguments will also be grudgingly accepted by the other side because they simply make sense. But that doesn't mean that the dispute has been settled. On the contrary, the more you understand the other side, the more you want to be understood by them. After all, the world you love will come to an end in the summer if you don't communicate loudly and clearly.
Wrath of the Lich King was once upon a time, long live our new ruler Deathwing… at least until he bows his head to Garrosh and a continent full of pandas in 2025. You and your guildmate pause and look together at the approaching panda calypse on the horizon. You sit together on a bench in Stormwind, share a pack of fags, and sigh as you look up at the fluffy tidal wave that will inevitably be announced at the next Blizzcon. How do you say so beautifully? The history of Azeroth does not repeat itself. But it rhymes.
Also read these interesting stories
WoW: Shado Pan Showdown – PvP Brawl from March 20th
WoW PvP Brawl: From March 20th it's going to the arena on Tiger Peak. All information about the event here.
WoW: Bonus week for PvP battlegrounds starting March 20th
WoW: The bonus week for PvP battlefields begins on March 20th and invites you to cheerful fights for experience points and badges of honor
Pre-apocalyptic trench warfare
With Cataclysm Classic, Wrath of the Lich King Classic is effectively shut down. Sure, Blizzard's formulation was that you can “take your level 80 characters with you”, but that's not the point, because for many players the regulation as it currently prevails is the perfect classic solution: On the one hand, there is the museum pieces of the vanilla servers, which are always given cool special seasons and on the other WotlK-Classic with the unchanged old world, Outland and Northrend. According to this camp, playing the old world is exactly what makes Classic so special – so why should you hand over to the bad version of a modern WoW in the middle of the Season of Discovery on the vanilla servers, which is basically “Classic Plus”. …so figuratively speaking to “Classic Minus”? The critics also make a legitimate point: Where does it end? Are we now experiencing a new Classic era year after year – until we reach “Shadowlands Classic” in six years? An absolutely bizarre idea.
On the other hand, there is a camp whose arguments we can also easily understand: Classic is intended to gradually experience WoW as it once was. This also includes Cataclysm's level dungeons that are way too difficult, the unbalanced raids and the absolutely messed up classes. But also part of it are the absolutely great raids like the legendary Molten Front, inventive and spectacular boss fights and the best balanced PvP that has been seen in WoW in 20 years. And there would also be the option, as crazy as it may seem, to simply ask the community what kind of Classic they actually want. The whole thing worked with The War Within, so why not for “the other WoW” too? Follow us as we put on our wellies and venture deep into the trenches of a mud fight that could decide the future of the Classic servers. No matter what you decide, we recommend that you listen to the counterarguments at least once.
Source: buffed The “neutral zone” between vanilla and retail: Wrath of the Lich King combines great quests with fast fights and what feels like a large world.
The apocalypse, this time for real
Once Cataclysm Classic hits servers this summer, Deathwing will cause an actual cataclysm for the first time. That's mainly because this time around, players won't be treated to a world-changing overhaul of their favorite game without having a chance to take a long look at it first. On the contrary, most players and the Internet itself have already formed their opinion for 14 years: Cataclysm was to blame for the decline of World of Warcraft and the “destruction” of the beloved old world. Amusement park instead of freedom, prepared stories instead of playful self-determination – Blizzard currently seems to be running headlong into the flowing traffic and nobody really knows why. In order to properly examine both sides of this discussion, we will first focus on the side that would like to retain the opportunity to continue playing on the WotLK servers in some way.
The Lich King of our hearts
In general, Wrath of the Lich King is considered the best WoW of all time among Classic players. We have already touched on the reasons for this in the introduction: All classic zones, from the old world to Outland to Northrend, are available for you – and, above all, can be played one after the other, in the correct historical order. You start as a small nobody in Northshire, fight your way to the burning steppes and then step through the gigantic Dark Portal for the first time. Here, too, you are just one of many invaders who are spread across the foreign environment and trying to find their way in it. It is only with Wrath of the Lich King that not only your position within your faction, but also the storytelling undergoes a major change: all of a sudden the NPCs remember what you have done before. You are not the champion, the general, or the savior of Azeroth, but your deeds are known and you are respected as a veteran adventurer.
Source: buffed Classic is called “Before Cataclysm” in the minds of players, i.e. the old world, the old talent trees and the old systems. Then why the change? The quests available now work with small, self-contained stories, similar to an old television series from the early 90s: There is the metaplot that deals with the Lich King, but in each zone you will find countless small stories, from a werewolf settlement to Loa worshipers.
What is explicitly NOT present is Cataclysm's tendency to present you with a single quest line per zone, so to speak, to deal with a series per zone instead of distributing many small mini-adventures throughout it. For example, the Redridge Mountains on the Alliance side are a Rambo satire, the Stone Claw Mountains on the Horde side are Oppenheimer, and Uldum is the Spaceballs version of Indiana Jones. Not everyone likes this, because this way you lose the feeling of fighting your way through a connected world. When you later return to the corresponding zone, you will instead have the impression of riding through an empty film set. The story has been told, the zone can now be ignored, never to be seen again.
We haven't even seriously addressed the fact that with Cataclysm, Blizzard made the decision to tell the lore primarily through books. You start in the areas devastated by Deathwing, in Outland you suddenly run after a guy named Illidan, while in Northrend you fight an ominous Lich King. References to the importance of Arthas were mostly removed with the Cataclysm Steamroller. Only then do you jump back to the old world, where you can now follow the story from the beginning of your adventure career. It would have been smarter to have an arrangement in which you play through the entire Cataclysm experience from start to finish without stopping in other expansions. But more on that later.