by Byron Mudry on Jan 05, 2006
Where to start? There have been many changes to the World of Warcraft over
the past year. We started off the year at version 1.2 and have progressed to
version 1.8 by the end of the year. But what did that really do for the game.
What changes were really made. In this article I look back and highlight all the major changes that were made to the game and what effect they have had, from my point of view.
Can you remember back to the begging of 2005? Coming into the year WoW had a subscriber base of just over one million players! Patch 1.2 had just been released in late December. Blizzard had made several posts stating that they would be attempting to step up patch production and that we should see patches far more often than we had to that point.
The year also started with a huge delay while players waited for the 1.3 patch. It was finally released March 22 of 2005, almost 3 full months after the 1.2 patch! When 1.3 was released it added several major items to the game including: Dire Maul (A new 56+ Instance), Two outdoor raid bosses (Azuregos in Azshara and Lord Kazzak in the Blasted Lands), Meeting stones, the ability to port to Molten Core and Raid caps.
Dire Maul was looked to be a new instance for the vast number of level 60 players, however when it was released the loot was seen as sub-par to the rest of the level 60 instances and not many groups played it. It took quite a while before players say value in running Dire Maul and it is still one of the less popular instances on many servers. It was also unpopular because of the 5 man cap on it, players were already getting accustomed to running most instances with 10 players and did not like the challenge involved in doing this instance with only 5 players.
Raid caps were introduced at the same time to limit item farming in the high level instances. Most instances were now limited to 10 players. The exceptions were Molten Core and Onyxia (40), Blackrock Spire (15) and Dire Maul (5).
Meeting stones were a very cool feature added that never really caught on. They are meant to replace the many LFG (looking for group) messages flying around the major cities and allow players to easily find groups for instances by approaching the instance and joining a queue. Personally I thought this was a great idea but it did not catch on and to this day through several minor tweaks to them, they are still rarely used on most servers.
Two outdoor raid bosses were also added in this patch, Azuregos and Lord Kazzak. Both offering a challenge to high level guilds capable of arranging 40+ man raids as soon as they spawned. The battles turned into massive melees around the bosses very quickly though as you generally needed 2 full raid groups to handle the bosses. The first to fight the actual boss and the second to defend against the other faction coming in to try and steal your kill. These bosses are both now heavily farmed on most servers and all major guilds have alt's setup watching the spawn.
This patch was release April 19th less than a full month after 1.3. It included only one major addition to the game which was the PvP honor system.
The honor system brought a purpose and a reward to the PvP aspect of World of
Warcraft. You now got points for killing the opposing factions players and
earned military style ranks. Once you got to certain ranks you earned the right
to purchase PvP specific equipment. This changed the game drastically on PvP servers for quite a while. There was no safe ground as everyone was out hunting for honor points so "ganking" was rampant in all zones. It also saw the ramp up of aggression between Southshore and Tarren Mill in the Hillsbrad Foothills. These towns with easy to reach flight points were located close enough together that players could fly in and fight the opposing faction immediately. For several weeks the Hillsbrad Foothills were a raging war ground were no one could do anything but PvP. While this was fun for a while, if you were unlucky enough to be trying to level a character on a PvP server at this time, you almost had to give up.
Patch 1.5 was released on June 6th and saw the addition of two new instanced Battlegrounds (Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley) and the addition of a town and flight point in the Searing Gorge called Thorium Point.
The addition of Battlegrounds were probably the
change that had the biggest impact on the World of Warcraft in 2005 and affected the
most people. Until this point both before the honor systems and after its
implementation PvP consisted of random ganking or the running battle between
Southshore and Tarren Mill. Once the Battlegrounds were implemented organized
raids outside of the battlegrounds almost disappeared from the games.
The battlegrounds were introduced to provide a place to vent your aggression in WoW without the ongoing Hillsbrad Foothills war continuing forever. Warsong Gulch is a smaller instance found between the northern Barrens (the Horde entrance) and southern Ashenvale (the Alliance entrance). While Alterac Valley is a larger longer running instance found in Alterac. Of the two Alterac Valley was the immediate hit and drew tons of players, while Warsong Gulch never caught on on most servers and is generally hard to find a group for.
Thorium Point and the Thorium Brotherhood was added to the Searing Gorge along with many more quests in the area ranging from levels 45 - 52. It now made for easier access to Blackrock mountain as the north access side was a much shorter run than the south. Many crafting recipes were also added to the game that could be gained with reputation from the Thorium Brotherhood, many of which were aimed at helping in the Molten Core and / or made with ingredients found in MC.
July 12th saw the release of another new patch, this time including many major changes to the game. The biggest change was the addition of the most difficult raid instance in the game Blackwing Lair (BWL). The other major changes were the addition of Darkmoon Faire and Battlemasters, making changes to Scholomance and Stratholme and major changes to the Warlock and Warrior classes.
Darkmoon Faire was added to the game as something else to do, and has some very nice trinkets available as reward. The Faire itself is only around a few days a month and is located outside of one of the major cities. The cards you need to collect to turn in for the trinkets quickly became a valuable commodity in the game.
Battlemasters were also added to the game as an easy way to get into the Battlegrounds. Many players had complained that they needed to actually travel to the area where the battleground was to enter the queue to play in it. After entering the queue they would sometimes have to wait a long period of time (up to several hours) for enough people to queue up for the battleground to start. Battlemasters were put into place so that you could enter play from all the major cities. This has now become the major way to enter the battlegrounds.
In this patch two of the end game instances were toned down a fair amount to allow groups to be able to complete them without raiding them. Previous to this Scholomance and Stratholme had been meant to be 5 man instances but several of the pulls were insanely large for a 5 man group. Due to this almost no on did them as 5 man but chose to raid them as 10 man groups only. This meant that almost no one was actually doing the quests around these instances. Blizzard analyzed the instances and adjusted several of the groupings so that while still very difficult for most groups, these instances are now able to be completed by a 5 man group.
The last major change introduced in this patch was a complete rewrite of the Warlock and Warrior class. Warlocks were now a very viable class, especially for soloing. Warriors gained the ability to do a lot more damage with this patch if they chose to go that way instead of tanking. Both of these classes seemed to come through the change with flying colors and most people were very happy with them.
September 13th saw the release of two major instances into the World of Warcraft. They were the 20 man raid instance of Zul'Gurub and the Arathi Basin Battleground. Also released was an outdoor fun event, the Stranglethorn Fishing extravaganza and a complete overhaul of the hunter class and their pets.
Zul'Gurub answered the call for some new high level content that could be done without a full 40 man raid. The only real instanced raid content to this point that was not for a 40 person group was Upper Blackrock spire and many level 60's had already ran it too many times to count. Nestled in Stranglethorn vale this 20 man raid fit the bill as a next logical step for players getting ready for Molten Core but not sure if they wanted to enter into full raids. Blizzard also filled it with a ton of new quests, recipes and rare and epic items. It was an immediate success!!
The new Battleground of Arathi Basin brought together the World of Warcraft and some of the mechanics of the RTS Warcraft game to many cheers. Arathi Basin is a small battleground that can be played in roughly 20-40 minutes. In it you compete with the enemy faction to control and collect resources. The first faction to collect 2000 resources wins. Because of the fast play time and fast moving nature of the battleground it has become the favorite on most servers. If it had faction rewards equal to Alterac Valley I am sure it would be number 1 on all servers.
Another addition to the game was adding the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza. This is a daily event that has you fishing for specific fish in order to win a fishing related prize. While not all that rewarding it is very fun if you like fishing and gives you something to do on slow days.
Hunters got their turn to be re designed in this patch and what a redo it was! Hunters talents, spells and pets were all looked at and changed. Pets saw the addition of their own talents and combined with some of the hunters new beast mastery talents became a force all on their own. No more would pets be completely ignored in PvP. Hunters themselves saw a huge boost in their abilities and usefulness. Before this patch it was rare to see hunters being invited into groups and yet after this patch they were and they were showing up in the top DPS and PvP ranks.
This patch was released in early October (the 11th) and saw the addition of four world dragons to the game, the addition of a new city to Silithus and a redesign of the Druid class.
The world dragons are new raid bosses that came about because of a disturbance in the Emerald Dream. They are scattered about the world and have quests around discovering their secrets.
Silithus saw the building of a new city in preparation for the Cenarion Circle to wage war against the Silithid. This added many new quests the the area, recipes and faction rewards. All in preparation for the opening of southern Silithus in patch 1.9.
Lastly was the redesign of the Druid class, which saw the addition of a Moonkin form. The change added some variety to the druid class in the early game. Feral builds apparently are much better early and mid game that they used to be however the changes did little to change their late game role, which is still only as a healer.
2005 ended the same way it came in for the World of Warcraft, with people waiting for a patch. This time for patch 1.9 for the two new raid instances set in southern Silithus and the expansion that will take us to the Outlands and level 70. The patch was released this past week (Jan. 3rd 2006), and no firm date has been set for the expansion yet.
For the patch, at least this time it was only a two month wait since the last major patch. Despite what seems like a long time between patches, when you look at the changes that have occurred over the course of the year it is amazing. It also appears that Blizzard is doing its best to turn out new content on a much more timely basis than they did in 2004, where they spent most of their time addressing performance issues and bugs.
I find it hard to remember a time that Dire Maul was not around, or when you had to run through BRD to get to Molten Core, before Battlegrounds and much much more. Look at how much more to the game is there now that there was when we all first started to play! Most of this was done in WoWs growth phase which now is likely nearing its end. Most of the in game, technical and performance issues have been addressed now. Developers are focusing on additions to the game not just fixes. Blizzard also has a HUGE player base that they are drawing funds from for development. WoW now has over 5 million subscribers world wide!
Seeing how far the game has come in 2005 only leaves me wanting more in 2006!