i can still feel the bumpy box from this image

they expanded upon previous ideas, added a bunch of stuff, added a whole new area, flying mounts and multi-person mounts, etc.
best of all, they added glyphs, socketing, and a better enchantment system. really allowed for some amazing customizations

fantastic expansion, probably the peak of WoW for me

Truly, this was the peak of World of Warcraft. Northrend is the finest collection of zones ever added to the game. The quests populating them are significantly more interesting than those of Outland or the base game. Classes and specs finally, for the first time, feel truly balanced and well designed. The RPG mechanics are at their most robust with complex talent trees, gem slots, and glyphs. The dungeons are easy but numerous.

The raids consist of soaring glorious highs, and lame lows. The first tier with the reuse of Naxx is pathetically easy, and a huge bummer. The second tier is Ulduar, the best raid in history. The third tier is ToC, a one-room parade of only 5 average bosses. The final tier is Icecrown Citadel, the glorious culmination of a decade of hype. It's no longer necessary to raid previous tiers of content due to the presence of catch-up gear, and there's now a choice between raiding with 10 people or 25. Hard modes ensure that casual and hardcore players alike can find what they're looking for, and Blizzard's encounter design has hit its full stride. Wrath really feels like the great compromise between what WoW was and what WoW became.

The best days of WoW.

They'll never come again.


Blizzard, why you fail us now?

Northrend slaps, full stop. It may not have the environmental diversity or incredible skyboxes of Outland, but the consistency of tone across the entire continent is pretty impressive when you consider how much content is available in that space. The overarching story ain't half bad either for an MMO expansion, feeling properly climactic for the end of a narrative started all the way back in Warcraft 3. The quality of the content and storytelling in Northrend is a bit more mixed, but there's still plenty of experiences I had in this expansion that hold a good amount of nostalgia for me. This was WoW's golden era, and it's hard not to see why.

The pinnacle of video games for me. Countless hours were in the various frozen tundras of Northrend or relaxing in Grizzy Hills enjoying my favorite music off of my favorite videogame OST.

The finale of what many consider the "main" story of Warcraft, the leveling experience was (at the time) top notch with experimental quest design branching out past "kill x y times" to tell a story that takes you from zone to zone before taking you to the base of Icecrown Citadel.

Each content patch added more excellent content in the form of unforgettable raids that would go down as some of WoW's greatest even to this day, until we finally got to ascend Icecrown and finally bring down Arthas.

The game isn't without it's flaws, I just don't care about them.

6/5

TBC diehard here, i don't think this expansion was as good as people hype it up to be

BUT wrath was still damn good as far as wow xpaks go in spite of its flaws. questing and dungeons were great, ulduar and icecrown were fantastic raids, and dalaran was the best xpak hub to the point where they brought it back for Legion.

damn though death knights were broken as hell to the point where everyone mained one because of it

me included

um

There are no words to describe how impactful this game is for so many people, including myself. There is not and will never be a better MMORPG and I'm not even exaggerating, this is how good and how high Blizzard got, this is what ever single MMO tried to be before and after WotLK came out, the cream of the crop, but you know, "the higher they get the harder they fall", and they fell hard. HARD. And they never stopped falling, because they were that high. They turned from one of the best gaming companies in the world to... part of Microsoft Teams. Sad stuff.

The thing is, you can't critique this game in a vacuum in 2022. To truly experience this game you would have to teleport back to 2008 and play it live, it was a cultural phenomenon at the time. You will have fun and enjoy it if you find some private server with 100+ people playing but it wouldn't be even close to the real experience. If you were there you would understand how amazing this game was, if you weren't you just won't. And yes I'm gatekeeping, and no I don't care. That's the thing with most MMOs, you need play it live or make a very deep analysis of it to truly understand it.

The last good WoW expansion. I still absolutely adore the environments and world to the point that I sometimes boot up a completely empty private server that no-one uses just so I can have it all to myself for a few hours.
The base game was always giving you enough carrot-on-a-stick quests and items to keep you going for long periods of time. It's not "nice" game design that respects your time but who plays this for any reason other than to have a virtual project to sink your life into and forget about your real-life commitments that just don't reward you as frequently as this?
I enjoyed by time with this game a lot but in terms of getting back into that cooldown combat, killing 10 bears for a 33% chance of a quest item drop, joining dungeons and raids so people can moan at you for not playing in the one specific way they want you to (sorry to any guildmasters I made twitch with that one, lol), repeating all of that hundereds of times so you're able to progress to another area, I just have no interest in going back to it for that reason.
I got what I wanted out of this game when I needed it, and that time is long gone, but it's nice to know it happened.