Filed under: The Burning Crusade

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Anyone who raided back in late Wrath remembers the year we all spent in ICC. By the end of that time, it got pretty hairy. However, in the lead up to Cataclysm, we got a surprise raid, The Ruby Sanctum. It wasn't meant to replace ICC as the end raid of Wrath or the Lich King as the end boss of the expansion. No, the Ruby Sanctum and its boss, Halion the Twilight Destroyer, was intended to serve as an introduction of sorts to the Cataclysm that was coming.

At the time, I was fairly derisive of Halion. What was the point of another small raid when we already had ICC? I remember doing heroic Halion attempts in July and feeling like the whole thing was a complete waste of time and a sidetrack from ICC. But now that we've had the same experience in Cataclysm of a long time in our end raid, and this time no intermediate raiding to tide us over until Mists of Pandaria, I'm rethinking my position.

Halion served two purposes. First, he introduced us to new mechanics we'd bee seeing again in Cataclysm. Both Valiona and Theralion and later Ultraxion used elements of the Halion encounter's mechanics. But second and more importantly, he served as a bridge between the ICC fights, with their Scourge, undeath and plague motifs and the coming expansion's introduction of Deathwing and his Twilight's Hammer cult minions. A third but related purpose was to give us something to do that wasn't ICC after six months in the place.

So now I wonder: Did Mists of Pandaria need an intermediate raid? Was it a missed opportunity that we didn't get one? And would it have made sense if we had?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

It spans the universe.

No city in Azeroth can do what the Exodar can. Repaired at last, the Exodar is no mere fortress but rather a satellite of the great Tempest Keep brought to Outland by the naaru. As a result, the Exodar possesses the power to bridge the gulf between worlds, traveling through the Twisting Nether. And after years spent crashed into Azuremyst Isle, the Exodar is fully operational.

But in her turn, the Exodar is more than a vessel. The means of escape for Velen and the draenei who survived the assault of the blood-maddened orc butchery that reduced them to hiding in Zangarmarsh, the Exodar carried them forth after it had been liberated from the blood elves who had invaded Tempest Keep proper. Sabotaged by those same blood elves, servants of Kael'thas Sunstrider, the Exodar's crash landing was yet another travail for the draenei to overcome. But on Azeroth, they found a refuge from the Burning Legion and the will to move forward as members of the Alliance.

It was to the Exodar that Prince Anduin Wrynn of Stormwind came to study the way of the Light under Velen, and in so doing, in time introduce the draenei way of viewing the Light to the Eastern Kingdoms. It was at the Exodar that Velen pledged that the draenei would not leave Azeroth to fend for itself but would stay and defend their new home.

The Exodar spans the universe, right from where it sits today.

I started playing World of Warcraft with no real idea of the Warcraft universe. I'd played a lot of RPGs, but I wasn't a big RTS player and I was generally more into tabletop play. My gateway drugs for the MMO genre were games like Planescape: Torment. (Man, I loved Planescape.)

As a result, my first time through the game, I barely paid attention to what I was doing, who I was fighting or why. It wasn't until I got to Molten Core that I started really thinking about what was going on. How did Thaurissan summon Ragnaros when he clearly had not intended to, and what was the Firelord up to? At the time, Ragnaros seemed astonishing to me, an entity of pure fire older than the whole world. The war between his Dark Iron servants and the dragons and orcs atop the Blackrock Spire became a central part of my game as I moved on to Blackwing Lair. I started paying a lot more attention to the dungeons and quests I was running.

Once we hit Outland and I got to Shadowmoon Valley, I ran the Cipher of Damnation quest line (a quest that is all I could hope for in a long quest chain, frankly), and the end of that quest line raised so many questions that I often point to it as the beginning of my lore nerd status.

What is the Cipher of Damnation? If it's the spell Kil'jaeden taught to Gul'dan that he used to raise the Hand of Gul'dan and sever the connection between the orcs and the elements, it's clearly not all it can do. Since using it summons Cyrukh the Firelord and since Oronok Torn-heart says it has been used "in the history of our worlds," I am now convinced that the Cipher is the spell that Thaurissan used to summon Ragnaros. But where did he learn it? It was also the spell Kael'thas used to try and summon Kil'jaeden through the Sunwell, which continued past Kael's death in Magister's Terrace.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Seriously, what's up with all the things threatening to destroy Azeroth outright?

The Old Gods seem to want to destroy Azeroth to get out from their prison within it. Algalon wanted to reoriginate the planet, which would have effectively destroyed the planet entirely and remade the whole thing, entirely to prevent the Old Gods from getting out. Now, with Algalon sitting back to observe, we had to step up and stop Deathwing from destroying Azeroth as well.

Granted, Deathwing was all tied up in the Old God's agenda, but you get the sense that old Neltharion wanted Azeroth destroyed because, ultimately, he couldn't take his connection to the planet's soil and rock, its very earth, for one more instant. Killing Deathwing almost seems merciful, since at the end he was nothing but a destroyed ruined pile of mutated flesh erupting from his elementium armor.

It is a concept long familiar to World of Warcraft players: the hardcore raider. The women and men who were on the cutting edge of raiding content, who had the absolutely best gear, who played the most and knew the most about the game. Back in classic WoW, I was absolutely this person. I raided. It was all I did, really. My tanking gear was so good that players would stop me in Ironforge to comment on it. We killed everything first up until a new guild came to our server, then we traded kills with them until the end of the original game and the launch of The Burning Crusade.

Cut to the hunt for BC kills. A lot of people I knew were burning out. Some of the encounters were seen as having been tuned too high, while others lamented the loss of 40-man raiding and the shift to 25s, especially with Karazhan as the 10-man raid having caused a lot of guild drama. "Raiding is too easy now. You can go with 10 people to some raids. It's lost the epic feeling of 40-man raiding. Look at how much faster raiding goes now than it did. We used to struggle to learn each boss; now the only real challenge is in end bosses like Kael and Vashj. Gimmicks like legendary weapons and orbs have replaced knowing your role and class."

What am I getting at?

Nostalgia is poisonous. The people who bemoan how easy raiding is now are the same people who defended BC raiding from the old curmudgeon MC/BWL raiders who felt like the BC raid game had dumbed down raiding. It's always better in the past, because the past has passed and become perfected by memory. At the time no one would have said it was the pinnacle of raiding -- far from it. People were still going back to Naxx-40 at level 70 and still having a hard time running it. People sang its praises as the ultimate raid right up until it was removed from the game.

I loathe attunements. When you mention how fun old attunement chains were, I hiss and flee into the night like a werewolf from a cross. That is werewolves, right? No? It's vampires? Oh. Well, whichever. The point is, no. No, they were not fun. No. My lord, how much nostalgia must you be inhaling to argue that the Onyxia chain was fun? The Alliance version had a cool payoff, yes, but my word that thing was a slog -- and the Horde one? Pure, concentrated boring slop. I included the Wowcrendor video above because it's not an exaggeration. I did that quest chain. Twice. At the end, I hated all that lived, and you are all very fortunate that I don't have a death ray because just thinking about that quest makes me want to wipe out whole cities.

All of Draztal's points about attunements are valid. I salute you, brave EU CM, for your willingness to say what so many people seem to have forgotten about them. They're content barriers. That's all that they are. The people remembering them so fondly are, so far as I can tell, drunk out of their minds on the sweet and heady wine of nostalgia or just really invested in creating artificial ways to keep other players from seeing the content. I don't understand the mindset that demands extra hoops outside of the content and its actual difficulty be added to arrest progress.

I like a challenge. I do hard content in my raids. That's fun for me. What I don't like or want is a barrier to entry that has nothing to do with skill, just time and the ability to get other people to help me get through a series of stages that serve no other purpose but to delay me, especially when we're already delayed by other aspects of the game anyway.

The Blizzard Store is having a sale for this week only: The BattleChest (which includes vanilla WoW and The Burning Crusade), Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm are $10 each. These prices are for either the boxed games or the digital downloads. For those of you in the EU region, the European Blizzard Store has them each on sale for EUR 10,00.

Blizzard did something similar just before the release of Cataclysm. Severely reducing the barrier to entry for the coming expansion was obviously a success.

So if you are trying to get friends and/or family to join you in Mists of Pandaria (or want another account), now's the time to do it. The sale ends July 9.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

What's a magnificent bastard, you may ask? Well, sure, it's usually (but not always) someone evil -- but more than that, it's someone who combines ruthlessness with style. Someone who can lie, cheat, steal and kill but who does it with a certain flair. Someone whose sins are grandiose, whose betrayals are notable. Anyone can be a thug, but your magnificent bastard doesn't settle for that.

In the end, though, the term is definitely subjective, kind of a "we know it when we see it" situation. Still, that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this post, because I knew some of the choices I made would not be the ones you'd make. And that's good, because it means you'll get right down into the comments to tell me why I'm insane for leaving out your favorites.

Not all of these choices will be what you'd call villains, at least not to everyone. Some of them will even be revered on some fronts. The point is, were they willing to do things that could get them on this list? If they were, then here they are. Some of these characters are horrible, foul, contemptible garbage; others are far more complex.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

This was the first column I ever wrote for WoW Insider. A lot of things have changed in that five-year period; for one thing, I got five years older. In that time, I've written about tanking shortages, about dungeon etiquette, about killing Cyclonian and rage normalization. Together, we've tanked and DPSed our way through The Burning Crusade, Wrath and now Cataclysm. (I did vanilla before I joined the staff here, so I was woefully alone. Well, OK, my wife helped me out.)

There have been a lot of ups and downs over the years. Warriors had some dizzying highs and some painful lows. Our tanking was weak in The Burning Crusade, with lots of AoE needed that we didn't have, yet later, certain raid bosses were designed to be tanked best by a warrior, putting all those paladins and druids who put us out of work earlier in the expansion suddenly out of work watching us tank. Wrath balanced things for all tanks, but DPS warriors got to ride the roller coaster of rage starvation until getting geared, the big Ulduar nerf, and the ascendency of armor penetration. Cataclysm has had peaks and valleys for us, but on the whole, we've weathered this expansion as a strong tanking class (once you're familiar with all we can do), and both fury and arms have been contenders for best DPS spec at one point or another.

Strange as it may sound, Cata was probably the best overall expansion warriors have had. We've had issues (PvP), but overall, we've been in the hunt if not top of the pack. I wanted to take the opportunity of having a milestone like this to sit back, reflect and consider the pros and cons not only of the class but of my demented love affair with it -- and your participation in it. After all, without you, this would just be me writing these things to myself.

One of the interesting things about converting a real-time strategy game series into a MMO is how the units of the game are converted to playable classes -- or aren't converted, in some cases. While some heroes or units are folded into the classes like Far Seers into shaman and others make it straight into the game like paladins or death knights, others will make it in more as components or abilities sometimes not even given to the thematically suitable class. Such was the case when mages gained the signature Mirror Image from the blademaster hero class instead of warriors, who would seem to be the most appropriate match.

Reading over this post on Scrolls of Lore about the Demon Hunter got me wondering again about these elements' making it into the game. Several posters mentioned that quite a few demon hunter-themed abilities have made their way into the warlock toolkit, making a separate demon hunter class redundant and unlikely. It's a fair point, and it's mirrored in other places.

Mages in WoW make a specific archmage class unlikely. Paladins have pretty much absorbed the knight unit into themselves. Warriors are getting abilities reminiscent of the Mountain King and Tauren Chieftain heroes. At this point in the game's existence, with 11 classes come Mists of Pandaria, are we likely to see any more introduced? Is it better that the trappings of the RTS make it into the MMO at all, or do they have to come packaged with the heroes and units that made us love them?

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Elizabeth Wachowski will be your host today.

Since we'll be discussing female villains, I figured that Betty Draper, the most hated woman on basic cable other than Lori from The Walking Dead, would be an appropriate illustration. I used to think that Betty was the absolute worst, but a few conversations with coworkers made me realize that she's really no worse of a human being than Don. So she's cold and manipulative? Well, she's an isolated housewife married to a philandering, lying workaholic. Do we tend to forgive Don more than Betty because he's the hero of Mad Men? Or does Don Draper's handsomeness erase all sins for many fans? Yes, Mom, I'm talking to you.

sergel92 asked:

What major female baddies are there in WoW? There's Azshara, obviously, and Onyxia too, I guess. But who else could be major enough to get her own expansion, or at least her own patch?

Since Adam took a long look back yesterday, I thought it would be nice to look forward today. The above audio clip is the Sha of Hatred, one of the big threats of Mists of Pandaria. It's interesting to realize how much voice work there is in Mists. The game is definitely moving forward.

OnyxElders5124 asked:

After previous expansions launched, how long was it before prior xpacs contents exp requirements were nerfed?

This was already answered, but to confirm it, patch 4.3 was the patch that lowered the XP needed to level through Northrend and improved dungeon quest flow for both Outland and Northrend dungeons. I'm not sure which patch lowered the XP needed to level in Outland, although this forum thread on Wowhead seems to indicate it was in place by November of 2008. That would mean Patch 3.0.3, the major content patch for Wrath of the Lich King, or slightly before that.

What we can take from this is that Blizzard doesn't have a set pattern for nerfing old content's XP requirements. The devs do it when they think it's warranted, no sooner, no later.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

One of the interesting aspects of the Warcraft setting is which characters have achieved a kind of iconic status. The lore of the game is the unfolding story, and the story is ultimately shaped and defined by its characters. The story is what happened to, and because of, these people be they orc, human, troll, night elf, gnome, tauren or pandaren.

Take Rexxar, for instance. He's one of my favorite characters in Warcraft. Why? Why do I love Rexxar? Well, in part I enjoy that his mixed heritage makes him an outcast in a faction of outcasts, that he was one of the few to see how twisted and warped the old Horde was in time to step away from it before it began its campaign of atrocity across Azeroth. I like his simple faith in the ideals Thrall represented for the Horde in Durotar, his willingness to fight to preserve them, and the lengths he went while at the same time knowing exactly when to finally stop. Rexxar knew that defeating Theramore and Admiral Proudmoore was enough; he didn't have to destroy it.

Let me introduce you to the Massacre Sword. It was, and still is, a solid leveling green with a rather good model. I point it out to you to show you the odds of getting one with stats you'd actually want on a warrior, paladin or hunter (the three classes that would be using the sword at the time the game launched) and how likely it was you'd get, say, a Massacre Sword of the Boar or Whale. Granted, you could get a few fairly useful combinations (one of Strength or Agility, say, or a good two stat combo like Bear, Tiger, Eagle, Monkey or Gorilla depending on your class.

This was a green drop, of course. It wasn't meant to be the best of the best, just something to pick up and use on your way to dungeon loot. It's hard to compare it to what it would be replaced by nowadays, because a lot of that gear was re-itemized when Cataclysm came out and the dungeon levels were adjusted up or down. I remember replacing it with Lord Alexander's Battle Axe, followed by a Demonshear and an Arcanite Champion, before forays into Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. It's fascinating to consider how itemization works as a tool in driving players forward. Bad itemization, while baffling at times when encountered in game, actually serves a purpose in the hands of the developers. An item with too good of a stat spread can actually serve as a hanging burr, sticking to your character long after it should have been replaced.

I mention this because, to my mind, Mists of Pandaria is the first expansion to really know this, forwards and backwards. This is the expansion that will use gear design to motivate you better, more skillfully, and more expansively than ever before.