I miss the Lich King

Last night was pretty fun.  We went Retro.

      As is more then possible we did a quick run of heroic 25 ICC.  In about an hour and a half we had blown all the way through the entire raid getting several achievements.  It was fun, it was smooth, and most of all there was little or no tension.  There were a couple of achieves we didn't manage to get, but we can grab them later.  We also had a couple issues working on Frosttide's legendary quest, but he did get further. I'm calling the night a win.  I was kind of sad by the fact that you can heal through the remorseless winter portion of the Lich King fight now.  We just sat back and dpsed him down without running to the edges.  Adds died quick and we pretty much skipped the 2nd phase and 3rd phase as we kept pushing him down before remorseless winter was over.

     We will be back to ICC soon though.  I look forward to getting the next drake after the achieves are done, and I would love to get a couple peeps through their shadowmourne legendary quests.  I use to run retro raids for the guild here and there, but people stopped showing.  I think it might be time to revive the practice.  Not every week, but once or twice a month would be nice to go blow stuff up.  Wrath was the period where I really started raiding, and I look back on it fondly.  I did some raiding at the end of B.C., and never touched it while I was in vanilla, but I smile at a lot of the memories from back then.

     While the game has been streamlined, I almost feel at times that Wrath was a simpler time.  Gearing seemed smooth.  I wasn't afraid to pug my way into a 25 man and do some damage.  Tempers seemed not to flare up so much, and it wasn't hard to do a good job if you focused on what you needed to do.  I know that if I really looked back, it would also have the pain of sitting in trade pugging a group for Raids or dungeons.  Balance was a lot more skewed, and before duel specs it meant a lot of work if you needed to trade specs.  (I recognize that duel spec came out during wrath.)

     A lot of people learned to raid in Wrath as well.  I feel this is when raids became more accessible, and the story line really carried you through Northrend.  Arthas was everywhere, unlike Illidan who you never really saw unless you did the netherwing quest line.  It felt meaningful when you killed him.  It wasn't like Deathwing who would randomly nuke you, Arthas was looking at you specifically.  It made you feel connected to the story in a fascinating way.

     What was your favorite expansion/raiding experience?  Why?

Lag/Dizzty/Lazyeye