10 years of WoW 2014 - 2024: A personal journey - Warlords of Draenor
Launch
My first expansion launch was.... Definitely something. WoD was known for a really bad launch and I and my friends where there for all of it. Long login queues, lag so bad it would take literal minutes for things to register you hit them or clicked them, down to people spamming a fake macro trying to get you mouse cursor to interact with a stupid telescope you needed in Frostfire Ridge to start the garrison stuff.
This all seems trivial now but damn did it suck, especially if you were in a guild of a bunch of people all trying to make sure they were as geared up before the first raid comes out.
Leveling
Leveling was probably some of my favorite stuff to do in WoD. The leveling was so good and so fast, lots of pretty zones and cool stories (never get sick of orcs), definitely some of the best leveling content blizzard has ever made.
Once you capped though a lot changed. quickly we found out that the garrison was hands down the most useful thing ever given too us, from herbs and mining materials to portals and followers that gave us gear a tier above whatever raid difficulty we were actually doing, along with the solid gold you'd make doing absolutely nothing, it was a pretty serious change up from how things had been done previously. Your alts had way more value now with a garrison, you could funnel materials to your main or your crafters at an unprecedented rate and seriously devalued those professions.
While a lot of the end game was seriously lacking in terms of content for people that enjoyed things like PvP, Crafting, and Outdoor World Content the main subset of WoW players were eating great this expansion, Raiders.
Raiding
So much time spent in these raids, let an old man ramble if you will. During most of my time in warlords I was a Blood DK as well as a few other thing like Frost DK and where I first got my feet wet as a healer. I ended up loving healing and made my shaman in this expansion. I'd do on to heal from Legion on through to current day.
Highmaul
Raiding in WoD was something I spent nearly every single day of that expansion doing, weather it was prep for raid, leveling new alts to fill other roles we needed or just getting extra kills in trying top find PUG groups I was always in one of the raids at the time. There was Highmaul the Ogre stronghold, such a fun raid that a lot of our raid team still brings up for fun kills like Butcher and Tectus but the main memories we have of HM was definitely Imperator Mar'gok.
Mar'gok was one of the first marathon boss kills I had ever had, we killed him on the very last day we had of progression as a guild before the release of Blackrock Foundry and the kill totaled a little over 7 minutes, such an insane kill time where the only hard part is the last 10%. Such a fun boss with a fun mythic encounter twist. Sorely underused by the developers, such a fun and interesting area only for just 1 raid that wasn't relevant for very long in the grand scheme of the expansion.
Blackrock Foundry
Absolutely one of my favorites. This is what raiding is all about, a short tight boss roster, fun encounters and a great challenge on mythic. Blackhand to this day is one of the best boss fights blizzard has ever made, from the arena to the dialogue and the mechanics, absolutely chef's kiss magnificent.
This is also where we had guild drama.
we got and killed Blackhand and after a lot of trials with the officer team, we had "decided" that the GM (My brother) would get the first Blackhand mount. After that dropped and was given to my brother, we then lost about half of the officer team just like that. Took a while to recover but in the meantime I had swapped over to alliance as a hunter for a few months before out guild had rebuilt.
Hellfire Citadel
The end here. I have such fond memories of this raid and the people we did it with, still to this day were friends with a good amount of them and have met up with most of them in real life. The raid was awesome but with some sticker bosses (looking at you Shadow Lord Iskar). The fights were good, the gear was decent looking. The main thing I remember from this raid was fucking Gorefiend...
We did Mythic fairely hardcore around this time. 3hrs a night, 3 days a week. and for a bout 3 weeks all of that time was dedicated to just Mythic Gorefiend, the wall. This is hands down the hardest boss I have ever personally done and by my estimations one of the hardest theyve ever developed. The mechanics were punishing, the play had to be perfect and it all had to be a dance done exactly frame perfect. Absolutely one of the best achievements I have in WoW. I screamed myself horse that day. We eventually ended this tier at Mythic Mannoroth and with Legion on the Horizon we decided to move on to selling Archimonde carrys in what we called "Archi-Mondays".
Overall WoD was a great expansion for radiers and PvErs alike, but lacked content in a ton of other ways, by the end I and the whole raid team were just raid logging without anything to do outside of the instanced content every week and begging to skip the first 5 mythic bosses we had on farm. At the time considered the worst expansion ever but man.. did we have some stinkers to come.