It has been ten years since Wrath came out now, which is pretty crazy. I associate it a lot with a big move in my life - when I left the east coast after graduating college and moved out to Los Angeles.
Wrath was such an impactful expansion that it is sometimes strange to think how close it was to vanilla. At this point ten years ago, World of Warcraft itself was only as old as Warlords of Draenor is now (roughly.)
While opinions differ of course, for a large number of players, Wrath of the Lich King was WoW's best expansion for about eight years - Legion might have finally unseated it, but Wrath's legacy is huge.
Now, Wrath's content has certainly aged. Northrend tends to feel a bit tedious now, though I think that's largely due to the fact that we've had access to it for a full decade.
Wrath was both revolutionary and evolutionary. What do I mean by that?
First off, world content was improved tremendously: you can see now that questing through Outland versus questing through Northrend is a totally different experience. While Outland sends you across zones to kill every last thing in your way for low-droprate quest items, Wrath really tried to tell interesting stories with its quests. Drakuru's two-part deception and betrayal, Loken's devious plot to get you to help him trap Thorim, the whole build-up to the Wrath Gate incident, and one of my personal favorites, the haunting mystery of Matthias Lehner - all stories told through quests.
The Lich King was an incredibly iconic villain - not only did he have that Sauron-style "dark lord" archetype down to an art, but in contrast with previous villains (like Illidan, whose appearance in Legion was partially just meant to be an opportunity to let him actually be a character - and let Liam O'Brien chew the scenery in the best way,) we actually got to see the Lich King enough to realize how much of a threat he was. The Halls of Reflection dungeon sold the Lich King's power better than any other encounter I've seen, where he's just this implacable force of death inducing panic in us as we desperately try to run away.
It also gave us our first new class after vanilla's launch, the Death Knight, which has remained popular ever since (I sometimes think that if I were going to start all over again I'd main a Blood DK - thankfully my DK is my second-priority character so I still have time to play him a decent amount.)
This was also an expansion in which Blizzard started to play with difficulty. While BC had introduced 10 and 25-player raiding and heroic dungeons, Wrath added new raid difficulties to allow less hardcore players to get to see content. This was a bit of a rocky road, though. Naxxramas, which had been an infamously difficult raid during vanilla, was brought back as a very simple starter raid that left a lot of hardcore players feeling bored while they waited for Ulduar (though that patience was rewarded with a raid that is often considered the best they've ever done.) In Trial of the Crusader (admittedly one of the least popular raids they've done,) they formalized difficulties. The result (helped by the later addition of Raid Finder) is that players can see the raids without being in a committed hardcore progression guild, where once fights like Kil'jaeden (the one in Sunwell Plateau) were seen by only a tiny fraction of the players.
Wrath also introduced the dungeon finder, which admittedly has been seen as something of a mixed bag - Cataclysm would be criticized for making it feel as if there was no point in leaving Stormwind or Orgrimmar. While at max level they've clearly tried to steer away from it - Mythic dungeons, which cannot be queued for, largely play the role LFG used to - for low-level characters who want to run a dungeon, it's a blessing. Prior to dungeon finder, the chance of getting a group for, say, Uldaman, was really low (my friends and I would just run each other through low-level dungeons on our higher-level mains.)
We also got dual-spec, which of course is less relevant now given how easy it is to swap specs these days, but the amount of gold a hybrid character would have to spend to re-spec every time they wanted to solo or run a dungeon would was pretty absurd. I leveled by Paladin all the way to 80 in Prot spec, and I can tell you that soloing took a while.
It was in Wrath that we started to get lots of really interesting hints about the nature of the world, too. Some rather silly quests in Borean Tundra introduced the concept of the Curse of Flesh, which in retrospect is a huge part of Warcraft lore. The Keepers of Ulduar turn out to have been extremely important to Azeroth's history. And of course we got a much better sense of the capabilities and nature of the Old Gods when we faced the second (and last so far, though my money is on N'zoth showing up at the end of BFA) of these monstrosities.
Wrath also gave us the very first in-game cutscenes. The Wrath Gate Incident was a shocking moment, not just in the story but also as a new and cinematic way of showing major events. Wrath would also inaugurate the first raid-closing cinematic, which has now become a tradition (though Legion kicked it up a notch by giving us a full cinematic at the end of every tier raid. I assume we'll get a cinematic at the end of Dazar'alor and then after Azshara's Eternal Palace.)
More controversially, that final cinematic gave us the first really big "huh?" moment in WoW's major plot points. As the ghost of Terenas insisted that there must be a Lich King, we watched as Tirion Fordring crowned Bolvar Fordragon as the new leader of the Scourge - a move that a lot of people have speculated about and maybe doesn't make total sense (would the Scourge really be more dangerous without tactical and strategic leadership?) This also kind of became a tradition, between the similarly baffling "the dragon aspects were originally empowered to stop one of the dragon aspects" after Cataclysm to the somewhat more sensible but still questionable decision by Illidan to stay behind at the Seat of the Pantheon (is he really contributing that much with all the other Titans collectively locking down Sargeras there?)
We got an evolving environment with the Argent Tournament grounds in northern Icecrown in a plot that unfolded over a couple patches, which we hadn't really had before.
The point is, it was a big expansion. The nostalgia a lot of people have for classic WoW is something I might feel a bit more for Wrath of the Lich King. That being said, in the past decade we've come a long way. There are some moves I've been less of a fan of (particularly the move away from currency-based gearing toward pure RNG, though it looks like Blizzard is finally starting to swing the pendulum back that way in 8.1.) But overall I think that the game has improved in myriad ways.
I can't say Wrath was the most innovative expansion - Burning Crusade probably takes that cake - but between the great story, far greater class balance than ever before (in Vanilla and BC there were certain classes you just couldn't DPS with,) and accessibility all combined to make a really great expansion. It's also the expansion that led to the high watermark of WoW subscriptions - while it technically hit that mark during Cataclysm, the precipitous dropoff during Cata suggests that most of that continued rise was out of the expectations set by Wrath.
As a veteran player, I really do think that Legion finally unseated Wrath as the best expansion, but I still think the Scourge are the best villains the Warcraft universe has ever had, and Arthas as the Lich King was the perfect mix of tragedy and menace. Wrath was the period I found my current guild, and I can look back on it with great fondness.
So happy 10th Anniversary, Wrath of the Lich King!
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