Zones and Quests
I thought the zones in BC were for the most part better than those in vanilla WoW. Not only were zones generally level-oriented with a few exceptions (Elemental Plateau, Throne of Kil'jaeden, Skettis), things just seemed to make more sense. The battle against the multiple groups overtaken by Illidan's corruption in Shadowmoon, for example, was better than Winterspring, where you just had a bunch of evil bad guys (Frost Giants, Darkwhisper Gorge, Timbermaw) that you had to kill. The lore fit better in the outside world, basically.

5-men content
I enjoyed 5-man dungeons for a while until they became stale. 2 years of running the same 15 dungeons will obviously get old. Most of them were balanced, a few were rough early in the expansion with the gear requirements to clear something like Heroic Black Morass, but everything evened out eventually. If anything, they became too easy too fast. The badge system I feel was a double-edged sword, which I will address later.

Raids
As a casual raider pre-BC that raided up through part of AQ40, I prefer 25-man raids immensely. Not only were raids easier to organize, but there was more of a sense of niche than there was pre-BC. Less players meant you had to earn your spot more, which was nice to have (hopefully) less dead weight. 10-man raids were a good thing, allowing for smaller raids to see some challenge and progression. Zul'aman was a great addition that set the precedent of challenging 10-man raiding that hopefully will continue deep into Wrath of the Lich King. Smaller guilds could clear dungeons, and if they wanted, push themselves to speed clear it and gain extra rewards (BEAR CAVALRY HOOOOOOOO).

I feel that loot was pretty good in Wrath, with two exceptions. First of all, badges (again, I'll talk about this later) and tier tokens. I was never really a fan of the token system even back in AQ40/Naxx, I would rather have bosses drop items that could immediately be equipped. There was a thread here on EJ a few months ago that asked: What if everything was a badge system? For example, rather than receiving an item from a boss, you received a token (Weapon of the Fallen ________).

As far as class balance goes, I feel 3.0 is another step in the right direction. DPS checks are always nice, but it should hinge on player skill and not whether the Enhance Shaman and all 8 Destruction Warlocks decided to show up. Opening up more class/spec choices is nice (Retribution/Protection Paladins, Shadow Priests, Boomkins, Assassination Rogues, etc.) also.

PvP
I love PvP and enjoy participating in it. Arenas were great for the first couple seasons, but the changes that were made based on PvP that affected PvE were bad. The Windfury change is definitely one of these. Battlegrounds are alright, although most people that queue up on a daily basis are terrible and stupid (and there's not much Blizzard can do to change that). I don't like the new honor system, I was one of the rank grinders back in the day and enjoyed the first honor ladder far more than the current point system, although it did demand more play time of its participants.

Eye of the Storm is a terrible battleground, but that's just personal preference.

Class balance was above average, I think. Some classes got the short end of the stick (Hunters) but overall everybody had a niche in arena play. Obviously you queue up expecting to see a lot of Rogues, Druids, Warriors, and Warlocks, but whatever. Overall, it could have been much worse.

Professions
I don't think much changed in the way of professions in BC. Jewelcrafting is nice, I'm a 375 JC myself, but it just ends up feeling like another Enchanting. For the most part, nobody needs Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, etc., with the obvious exception of Spellthreads and Armor Kits. Alchemy remained useful, even with the battle/guardian elixir change.

Misc
Badges. My people are addicted to them. An addiction made manifest after the Sunwell patch was released...

And I'll stop there. Badges are not inherently bad. I think they're actually a great addition to the game. The implementation, however, was terrible. Allow us to look at the history of Badges of Justice.

Badges in 2.1
Badges only drop from heroic dungeons, which are difficult and demanding. Certain items can be purchased, such as trinkets and jewelry.

Badges in 2.3
Badges drop from Karazhan and all other raids, as well as Heroic Daily quests that offer more incentive to run those dungeons. About half your gear can be purchased with badges. Daily quests were an amazing idea, as they gave incentive to run normally deserted heroics (LFG Heroic Durnholde! Anyone? ... Anyone???)

Badges in 2.4
Badges drop from just about everything, and can be used to buy a full set of tier 6 quality gear. This is bad. Very bad.




And one other thing I'd like to address quickly is attunements. Attunements are great and should be kept in the game when the first few bosses of an instance are hilariously easy. However, they shouldn't hinge on finishing the previous dungeon, as they can become a nightmare to organize attuning new members (finding Hyjal/BT attuned recruits was an obvious case of this).

Best and Worst
I'm going to sum this up in under 10 words for each.

Best: Alternative raid progression options, badges to fill in gear holes.
Worst: Welfare systems rewarding time spent over quality play from everyone.

Burning crusade dumped a lot of raid content into the laps of the players at release. Now, some of it may not have been achievable until it received nerfs, but the amount of instances raid content that players could chew threw only limited by their own time/skill/consumable commitment was heavily top loaded.

This had some major effects on raider burning for the guilds that quickly finished the T6 instances and found themselves quickly left with little to do and a 6~10 hour raid commitment until sunwell came out. However, Sunwell itself was gated to limit the rate that people can progression.

Looking towards WotLK, I'm interested to see what raiding is like when the amount of raid content is limited. For example:
TBC Release: Kara, Gruul, Magtheridon, SSC, TK (3 full instances, 2 minor)
TBC Patches: Hyjal, Black Temple, Zul'Aman, Sunwell

WotLK Release: The Nexus: The Eye of Eternity, The Obsidian Sanctum, Vault of Archavon, Naxx (1 full instance, 3 minor)
WotLK: Patches: Ulduar, ?

The rate at which blizzard plans to release content is going to have some major effects on raid guild retention rate and burnout. It's not exactly like the sunwell gates, but only having one full raid instance at release seems like a very blunt instrument to pace the rate at which people consume content.

Raid time in my guild is less than twelve hours a week, so this staggered release of raid instances is fine for us. Hopefully we'll be just starting to farm the previous instance when the next one comes out. If we finish early we could always go for the "hard mode" achievements.

Given that it would be impossible for blizzard to provide anywhere near the rate it gets consumed, between TBC and WoltK (or even original WoW) models for releasing it, what methods are preferred? Also, how do you handle the gaps between content releases?

To be fair, Tier 2 is absolutely gorgeous. I think most people will agree that Paladin T2 is probably the best looking gear set in existence, and there are recolored versions of pally T2 everywhere (dungeon blue set in BC, the recent "____ Garb of Undead Slaying" sets, etc. I feel pretty lucky to have my paladin with 8/8 T2 from vanilla; I run around in that gearset just for the fun of it and people (probably joined after vanilla) pm me asking where I got it. Sorta wish that Blizzard (or even EJ, hint hint) would sell shirts with a picture of Judgement armor, but I suppose they have better things to do.

I agree that Outlands was ugly in general, but I think that's more of an artifact of Outlands already being heavily described in previous books and documents, so the artists had a lot more of a rigid guideline to follow. Nagrand could afford to be the prettiest zone because there wasn't anything special in it: no big daily quest hubs, no big lore, no instances, etc. Every other zone has a raid instance in it, and so Blizzard feels the need to "ugly-up" the zone to provide justification of why we're attacking this big, bad, dangerous boss.

And to an extent, that is true. Everybody saw the need of why Kael had to be stopped when they did the questlines, and discovered that Kael had turned a once-lush paradise into a blasted purple-rocked zone. Illidan had to be stopped because of the devastation he brought to HFP and Shadowmoon Valley. Vanilla WoW's "evil" zones correspond to having raid instances in them: everybody hates Silithus, and AQ is in there. Same with MC and BWL and their containing zones of Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge.

And while I'll agree with you that the weapons and armor tended toward the ugly side, I would disagree on the draenei issue. Female draenei can be surprisingly... attractive. I think they're the new NE females.

Would you please clarify the above statement? Please cite specific examples of how you think Druids were "Broken Healers" where arena matches were concerned IF that is what you are saying.

I agree with what you posted about Raids and 5 mans, however I’m saddened to have to inform you that WOTLK is bringing more of the pure linear boring 5 mans like we had in TBC. Actually now they will be even shorter, and according to IIRC a blue post we will never see another BRD like instance again

Zones and Quests

Hellfire Peninsula-(3/5). A let down after walking past the dark portal entrance. Fel Reaver was fun to dodge.
Zangarmarsh-(2/5). Meh. I trained fishing here.
Nagrand-(5/5). Excellent, both in looks and quests. Favorite zone in the game to this point.
BEM-(2/5) Disjointed at best.
Netherstorm-(3/5). Consortium grind.
SMV-(4/5). Felt epic, was challenging and fun.

5-men content

(4/5). All in all, quite happy with them, despite the linearity. Love the implementation of heroics and the badge system ensured that eventuallly, everyone got something.

Raids

(1/5). I'm of the opinion that TBC raiding was difficult on guilds in general. There were fights that had very little margin for error, and that was in direct conflict with the guild concept. In TBC raiding, "Casual" players could not come to a raid unprepared and succeed. "Hardcore" players could not carry others on their proverbial backs and succeed. This caused unbelievable friction resulting in extreme demands on guild leadership, and sucked the fun out of the endgame for players that can't devote a significant amount of time to the game.

Loot distribution. (0/5). RNG is ridiculous, especially when KEY items (DST for one) have such low drop rates.

Attunements (0/5). Kael and Vashj. Great fights, but difficult if not impossible for non-hardcore guilds, limiting the available encounters to T5 content.

PvP

(0/5). Arenas threaten to ruin the game. Imbalances that cause the dev team to affect other aspects of the game (PvE) trying to correct them.

Professions

(2/5). Discoveries, while nice, are again at the mercy of the RNG. Profession-specific bonuses are not balanced, leading to narrow choices based on your class. Sales of crafted items are imbalanced. There's a reason my wife (Enchanter) has 3 times the money I do. (Leatherworker)

Misc

Something that sticks with me almost two years later, is the CUTTHROAT aspect of leveling once TBC came out. Specific mobs for quests brought out the worst in people, including myself.

Best and Worst

Best- I'm in the minority here. I like Shattrah. The Aldor/Scryer choice, the layout of the city, hub to everything.
Worst- Dragonspine Trophy. Such a key dps trinket for so many classes. Such a low drop rate in an instance that is nothing more than a pit-stop between Kara and T5 content make it nearly impossible to get. There's no reason for tanks/healers to go back to farm it, leaving people like myself SOL.

I'll have to disagree on this, DST was "easy" to get ignoring the RNG and low drop chance. In every raid group i've been part of in TBC there was always that "lets do gruul for xxx's DST and 20m of fun on vent" after progress raids. Even when Gruul got too old for this, people on my server would get a couple of guildies on their mains/alts fill the rest of the raid with randoms and clear it with DST going to the one organising the raid. The only thing that anoys me with things like these who set some apart from the rest was that the only comparable caster version of DST dropped of Illidan and wasnt puggable in 20 minutes.

Zones and Quests
The BC zones were good. Each had their own unique theme, and had plenty of interesting content. The sheer size made getting around sometimes a bit of a pain.

5-men content
I love the way 5 man content went in BC, until the point where it became stale and full of dps in full pvp gear wanting to be carried to badges. The highlight was easily the Black Morass (though it did become stale approaching exalted). Short, sharp and to the point instances are, in my opinion, awesome. The longer more irritating ones (SH, Arc) became hard to find groups for after everyone had realised that the best badge farming options were mech and SP. I never did see a group for H Durn. MGT gave me a mixed reaction to...the idea was good, but it could be quite a pain in a sub-optimal pug, and didnt really encourage class balanced (much easier with a paly tank as they could heal during the last 2 bosses, for example).

Raids
The raids I did, I enjoyed. Kara was long, and became boring, but worked well where it was. ZA was exeptionally well implemented. Gruul I enjoyed. SSC and TK were quite cool, though I really only saw them in the deeply nurfed state (though still bits were a little challenging for our somewhat-not-amazingly-good guild). Hyjal was fun, as well as what I saw of BT (not that much). From all accounts, sunwell was amazing, and I wish I had managed to get there.

PvP
I enjoyed arena. It was frustrating at times, and my teams never did all that well, but it could be alot of fun. I think the learning curve at 1500 is a problem: many people start for the first time, lose 10 games, and become disheartened. I can think of no solution to this. Gear dependence can be an irritation: I think back to when we hit 1650 in pve blues in s1, and that was awesome. In s3 or s4 you needed to be fully decked already to not go straight down to 1300 (for the average player, if you are particularly good this is probably not the case). As someone who *detests* battlegrounds, I think that it is a problem that it is necessary to grind them to fill out all the other slots in your gear: rings, neck, belt/boots/bracers and trinkets. The introduction of badges-for-a-few-seasons-back gear was a good start: I bought 2 pieces this way that I otherwise wouldnt have had, but in general, I would like a way of getting resilience gear in every slot without wasting my life in a BG (I would prefer say 100 hours running 5 mans for badges than 50 hours in a BG).

Professions
Professions seemed to be alot more relevant than previously. Jewelcrafting brought a new facet to the game. The crafting professions having perks was something I liked. Leatherworking was the one profession I had for the whole expansion, it was rediculously expensive to level before the nurf, and I was glad to have it, but it became particularly silly when you see cloth classes rolling it just for drums. Overall, I think professions are looking good for wrath.

Misc
Perhaps my biggest gripe with BC was the way that the abundance of PvP gear meant that, by the end, every dps class and many healers were fully geared in epics this way, thus 5-man pve became somewhat redundant. Heroics were useful for farming badges, but that was it, and everyone expected a group full of epics and to be carried through. You could bring a tank with 13k HP to a heroic and dps would imply they were undergeared.

Best and Worst
best: Black Morass, before it became trivial.
worst: Having to BG for gear to arena in. PvP gear removing low-level pve for dps/healers.

Personally, I prefer the shorter 5-mans. This is partially due to several horrible experiences I had in BRD, and partly due to basic time restrictions.

The problem with longer instances is simply that, they take a long time. This issue is mitigated if you have a group of experienced and skilled players, and enhanced if you don't. Compounding the issue is the implicit assumption that players learn their class/raiding skills through instances, meaning we must assume that a significant portion of the instance pool is inexperienced, unskilled or both. Thus an instance that doesn't take more than and hour and change for a decent group will take two to three hours discounting time spent organizing the group.

This is an issue that doesn't affect most, I assume, of the people who frequent this board save when they attempt a PuG.

I personally didn't find the linearity of the instances a problem. Instances that avoid linearity are certainly welcome, but they often enough end up feeling linear anyway as the "best" path to killing all the bosses is discovered. The option to skip bosses is there, and it is sometimes taken advantage of but most of the time the difference is almost purely aesthetic.

All of that said, my biggest concern with instances growing even shorter is the issue of overhead in getting together a group. Maybe a different culture will emerge after people figure out it sucks to spend an hour and a half throwing a group together for a 1 hour instance (or less), but I'm anxious about the implications of shorter instances in that regard.

This highlights a problem I have had with BC. I chose to stop raiding with BC. It just was not punching my buttons. However, playing the game was still entertaining. So, I leveled alts. I have 6 70 alts now. However, the non raiding, non-PvP playing player has little to do at the level cap at the end of BC. All of the 70 5 man content requires a certain critical mass to sustain, a critical mass that was not really there by about midway through the BC life cycle. Ironically, I believe the problem is that there are too many options - 8 normal lvl 70 dungeons, 16 heroic dungeons for a total of 24 - for small group activities, leading the small pool of players being too fragmented. Additionally, the LFG tool helps to enhance this fragmentation. In my experience, a given evening on has enough players to support 4-8 groups, however the LFG tool balkanizes this group over the 24 different options.

You raise a fair point here, though I think this is more a factor in late-BC than early-BC, since earlier on there was a larger group of people who were going to 5-mans actually for the drops. By the end of the expansion, really the only valuable drops in 5-mans (for the majority of the population) were those trinkets floating around ([Scarab of the Infinite Cycle], [Quagmirran's Eye] etc.). Reducing the number of instances, while it would probably enable more groups to form due to higher concentrations of people, would probably be detramental due to the fact that the instances would either need to be long, or for bosses to have incredibly large loot tables (or a much smaller variety of loot dropping) - and enough people whine about running instance x y times for item z even with the current loot-table size.

The other factor is that there is such a variety of instance difficulty: if, for example, SH wasn't *that* much harder than say, ramparts, more people would be willing to consider gear from there as a viable option, and thus willing to perhaps go there.

Zones and Quests
The zones were absolutely beautiful, I think most people are agreeing with this. The quests were only marginally better than vanilla wow though, I'm told that Wrath quests are highly enjoyable so maybe they're pretty average or maybe they are actually really good only time will tell.


5-man content
The 5 man instances were fairly good, I liked that there were a lot of options and that most of them weren't really long like BRD. I feel that Heroics could have been done better but I'm not quite sure how, perhaps adding worthwhile drops to all bosses, vanity loot, keeping the keys at Revered requirement, these would have all made Heroics much more fun.


Raids
I really liked Karazhan, it wasn't as epic as MC or any of the vanilla raids really but it had a few good mechanics and some good loot, it was a nice introduction to BC raiding. Gruuls and Mag were good for introductory 25man raids as well, nothing quite had the epic feel that vanilla raids had but they were fun enough. I'm a huge fan of ZA still and I'm glad they added it, heres hoping they make a similar style raid for Wrath or even a "heroic" zg or something.


PvP
I was going to say that I hated PVP but it wasn't the pvp that was so bad it was the gear system and the itemization vs PVE gear taht I didn't like. PVP was mostly so-so, Arenas were a nice change but after the first season it was impossible to get into it without some serious effort which is a shame because I didn't do a single arena until S3.


Professions
Definitely got a much needed make-over, having crafted gear that was actually usable was a welcome addition. Overall I'm fairly pleased with how the professions turned out.


Misc
I hated dailies, they destroyed the economy and punished people who didn't have time to do them. The people I know that did have time to do them were rolling in gold and everyone else were poor. Personally I only did dailies for rewards that I thought were worthwhile like the Netherwing mounts. having 10+ dailies for one faction to do per day is dumb dumb dumb if you ask me, they should limit it to a handful per faction but have a larger variety.


Best and Worst
Best - Flying mounts! My god I love 'em
Worst - itemization between arena and raiding.

Zones and Quests
There were several highlights. I loved Zangarmarsh (pretty AND different zone design), which had plenty of quest areas and a variety of quest types. The idea of bombing runs was fun, but unfortunately started to guild old after the umpteenth rerun of them. In general, zones were massively better laid out. It was much harder to miss a quest, flight points were more convenient, and so on. I also loved both the Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas, compared to the originals - wider variety of quests, and shorter run distances between them. If you haven't ever done the Furbolg totem quest on Azuremyst, I'd recommend it. Some very nifty effects there, that I hope to see similar usage in Northrend.

5-man content
I think the idea of heroics as a bootstrap into raiding was a good one. When I first started them at 70, they were hard. They started to become trivial, at least until Magister's... and now, post-nerf, they're stupid easy. Badge loot is nice, in that it lets you avoid the random number generator's opinion of you/your class. At the same time, it's frustrating to finally down some boss only to discover that some pants anyone can buy at the store are better than what they have. I'm really looking forward to the way Heroic achievements (some of which sound nigh impossible) will be implemented in Wrath.

Raids
The class balance in raiding shifted over the course of TBC. When we first started Gruul, Affliction Warlocks were king; as various patches and tweaks went through, and as itemization from our current raiding drops went up, we saw various rogue, mage, and paladin specs start to grab the top spot. Probably the most frustrating aspect here was when a particular class or ability was nerfed because of its imbalance in Arenas. I'd like to see The Blizz just balance certain abilities completely separately between PvE and PvP.

Karazhan was a beautiful zone... but the compression from 40-man down to 10-man nearly destroyed our raiding alliance. Everyone needed to pull their weight, which was an improvement. It also made our raids more social (you could be chattier during a raid when there wasn't the risk of 40 people yakking at once).

PvP
I don't PvP enough to care about class balance, beyond witnessing nerfs to my PvE effectiveness that were driven by PvP. I think the Arena system is a good choice for some players, but it's frustrating to see gear of a certain quality pretty much guaranteed after N weeks of playing, when it takes potentially much much longer to organize 25-man raids, and get the luck of the RNG, and have sufficient DKP to get the gear through PvE. Obviously, I'm seeing this through a particular lens. I had fun getting a set of S2 daggers with a 5-man team, before resilience became Serious Business.

Professions
The balance of BoP craftable items was broken, particularly with regards to tailoring for casters in preparing for early levels of raiding. The class-specific engineering goggles helped there, but engineering still has a lot of fun items that you never see used because they take up a trinket slot. My sense was that blacksmithing, and to some extent leatherworking, really got the short end of the stick (in part because their materials were harder to farm). I didn't jewelcraft myself, but gear socketing is a fun source of additional customization.

Best and Worst
Best: Karazhan. Fun encounters, many of which were difficult at the time, beautifully designed (much better than the repetitive looks of SSC and TK, in particular), and very loreful.
Worst: Rep grinds. I love exploring new content, so being strongly encouraged to have to do the same thing every day over and over again frustrated me. I only recently got CE to exalted, for example; I just can't bring myself to do super-repetitive tasks.

Overall I think every aspect of the game was improved in TBC with the exception of five man instances. They were bland and unimaginative. They lacked the ambiance and storylines/lore that went along with the 1-60 instances. Fortunately, though, it looks like they have corrected that for the most part in WotLK. I am concerned, however, that despite being visually and stylistically impressive they will end up being too easy.

Ah the list of "I don't care about other people's thread but here's my list" continues. Good to know.

In terms of raid pacing. It wasn't about top progression guild running out of contents, as they WILL run out of contents no matter what. It was the fact that SSC and TK (10 total bosses) was around for 4 months, BT/Hyjal (14 total bosses) 8, and Sunwell (6 bosses) for 8 months is very unevenly distributed. To make up for that, Sunwell was tuned extremely difficult, which ended up killing a lot of raiding guilds. If they didn't rush to release Hyjal and BT, and gave SSC/TK another, say 2 months, for bleeding edge guilds to relax a bit as well as letting the lower tier guilds catch up a bit, the content would have been a lot smoother, and the need for a Shamanwell would not have been nearly as big. Another idea that bothered me was the fact that the first four bosses in BT were so brainless that they might as well just be trash mobs. I fully support the notion of having reward bosses, but having simple tank n spank (Naj, Supremus, Gorefiend) with minor gimmicks just feels very sloppy.

I also notice the fact that most people found arena to be some of their least favorite part of the expansion, and I can't fault them for that. For DPS/healer, Druid dominated 2s due to their mobility and crowd control. And due to the fact that damage is VERY manageable in 2s, low HPS yet high HPM and mobile hots while being not interruptable just outclassed other healers. 3 stack lifebloom excelled in both HPM and HPS that it wasn't even fair.

With that addressed, I must say that it is very hard for a MMO to balance around small-bracket PvP, if possible at all. The majority of players play mmo to interact with many other players, and in my opinion, variety and flavor is much more important than class balance as long as class balance is not completely out of whack. I realize the danger of my saying this, being a druid myself, but even RTS and FPS cannot achieve perfect balance, let alone an MMORPG.

I would prefer that you say there's no reason for pug raids to do Gruul, because of badge/SS rep rewards and that Kara is a better badge per time ratio.

The vast majority of guilds do fun runs on offtime; my alt hunter has the DST, and I don't use him for anything other than farming, or the occasional 5man if my friends need an extra DPS. I would happily bring my healing alts to a Gruul's run if a guildie needed me, and I bet you'd find that most tanks and healers would do the same if asked by a guildie.

However, there is no way I'd heal for a pug Gruul's run. First, I don't want to be saved, and secondly, pug runs are wipefests. There are some surprisingly incompetent people out there that - even 2 years after BC release - couldn't down Gruul if their life depended on it.

I had high hopes for outdoor bosses in TBC. When I first started running around in Hellfire and the pesky Fel Reavers kept showing up I was utterly delighted, hoping there would be many easily accessible bosses like that roaming around in the different zones.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I'm from a pvp server and I do remember lots of fights and races to spawnpoints when the green world dragons came into existence which translated into lots of fun and only some frustration. In TBC there wasn't much of that at all. The loot from the outdoor bosses was either irrelevant or they were complete pushovers, unlike their counterparts in Classic WoW which actually did need some semblance of raid coordination to kill. There was simply not much of an incentive to go after these guys in TBC. A shame, actually.

There were quite a few potential outdoor bosses already in the game, the bone dragon in Auchindon, for example. Or the various dragons in Blade's Edge could've been fleshed out a little more.

I hope this situation will improve again in Wrath.

I'm not sure how you're remembering TBC outdoor bosses as pushovers, but they were pretty serious business when we were decked in blues attempting them. Kazzak hit like a truck and demanded extreme AoE healing, while Doomwalker was maddening to keep under control and was more of a freight train when enraged. I think that these two bosses were perfectly done, some of the loot wasn't very well itemized but then some of it was great -- no better or worse than you can hope for. Bottom line, it was an appropriate ilvl reward for the challenge.

There's no particular shortage of Fel Reaver type mobs in Northrend. Several giants and quest mobs will still step on you once in a while. But WotLK regrettably shows no signs of any outdoor raid bosses, and I felt a major flaw of TBC was that there were only two. So I'm a little disappointed in that regard. They may not be major content for the raiders themselves, but their very presence would give leveling players a dangerous vibe. And at the risk of slipping off topic, this is the heart of why I believe that Archavon has already turned out to be a failed experiment. He should be wandering the zone bellowing at players during [shorter] periods between rounds, not hiding inside the keep.


Back on track: I agree that the way Arena has turned out was a major downside of this expansion. Not only did it pull things into a harder-to-balance environment, but it ruined battlegrounds. Seemingly gone are the days of competitive WSG/AB, long gone in the case of AV, and EotS seems as though it never even had a chance. There just wasn't enough redundancy or crossover between the two -- plenty of people did Arenas for fun and hated grinding BGs for gear, or did BGs for fun and took in token Arena points. Rating requirements on Arena gear was a terrible idea IMO that completely invalidated the concept of the rating system itself -- and they made this problem worse, as the folks who hated Arenas but loved other aspects of PvP were stuck with high-pressure competition in that environment.

In tBC, I think the game and the game mechanics were greatly improved. Worthwhile talents, interesting mechanics, and cool concepts, like heroics, badges, daily quests and professions that remained relevant. I liked the caverns of time concept as well.

However, looking back, I think that a lot of things in tBC left a lot to be desired. I agree with bathoz that the art desgin war awful. And that was linked to a bigger thing: the whole thing with spaceships, robots, and such just broke the feel of the old Warcraft for me (which is why I liked CoT so much). Furthermore, while I think there were quite a few interesting boss fights (Kael, for instance), they relied too much on enrage timers and "idiot causes wipe" mechanics which led to an overemphasis on min max and gear.

I guess outdoor raid bosses were neglected because of what has happened to the outdoor raid bosses from classic, especially the green dragons. Monopolization by two or three guilds on the server. When the green dragons were released, I was in THE top Horde raiding guild on my server, yet I have never killed one, simply because the Alliance guilds were more organized rushing to green dragon spawns.

So when designing a really hard raiding instance is content for a tiny minority, worthwhile outdoor raid bosses end up even more exclusive. I still think they should implement more of them, and they should drop legendaries (or vanity pets of course; both will do it).

Daily dungeons seemed to help this somewhat, as long as you didn't much mind leaving your choice of instance for the night up to roulette. For me, though, it seemed to only reinforce what I was doing before 2.3; whatever random heroic I could get a group for, then maybe doing a normal I needed a bit of loot from or needed a quest in if random chance dictated that I could somehow form a group for it. The dailies seemed to replace spotting a partial group in the LFG randoms, but it was still chance.

That might be just me; when 2.3 hit, I was in blues and PUGging, putting together my own groups. I don't know how they affected other people.

I'll just comment on 5 men:

The most horrible dungeon experience ever had in any MMO I played, nothing compares to the boredom, predictability and general dullness of TBC instances. As someone posted elsewhere sometime ago, this is the map for pretty much every dungeon ---[]---[]---[]
Old Hillsbrad Foothills was the only saving grace of the expansion, Coilfang was tolerable the firt time I did it, every other place was a snoring fest, with Auchindon being the worst possible area (and mana tombs the most ugly dungeon MMO-wide). I liked some fights mechanic, but if we talk about design, depth, etc. I'd rather do an old school BRD a hundred times rather than a single Auchindon dungeon run.

TBC lacked immersion, which for me is still a very important factor, many zones felt disconnected, some were pretty bland, some factions, such as Consortium, made no sense at all (greedy space mummies corporation? please...), some were boring (lower city/sha'tar), but that's acceptable, most grinds for reputation were horribly implemented, especially the Aldor/Scryer ones.

With the exception of Karazhan placed in Deadwind Pass, the old world was abandoned completely, this is in my opinion the worst thing done by Blizzard.
The best? Hard to point out a single feature, maybe that most specs became useful to a degree, I loved a lot of the little touches here and there and having played in wotlk beta for a bit, I think the future looks promising.