Naxxramas: Good Riddance

The big mistake with Karazhan was that it created a 10-man bottleneck for 25-man raiding. Guilds collapsed, reformed and recollapsed as a result of this bizarre decision to make everyone complete a 10-man dungeon multiple times for months before they would be plausibly geared enough for 25-man raiding.

However, while there was a mistake in the general progression of raiding in TBC, Karazhan itself was a beautiful, well-designed, well thought-out dungeon. All of the fights were very interesting, if not unique, and the zone itself was absolutely breathtaking, featuring an eerie, Gothic quality that will not soon be forgotten. It was rich with lore, and despite the frustration of its serving as a bottleneck, I took two characters to exalted with Violet Eye with few complaints.

For Wrath of the Lich King, on the other hand, they decided to have Naxxramas as their starting raid dungeon. Naxxramas, as people know, was the last dungeon of "vanilla Wow" before TBC came out. It came out only a few months before the expansion, and was largely lost in the shuffle. Less than 5% of the player base ever got to see it. So, that the designers didn't want all that work to go to waste is understandable.

The problem was, as an opening dungeon, it was a disaster, for two reasons. First, it looked horribly dated. In fact, it looked exactly like what it was, recycled Undercity skins in big, empty rooms. While Karazhan blew us all away with its beautiful new graphics, Undercity was perhaps the ugliest place in the entire game. After going through beautiful new heroics like Halls of Stone, to then spend months in barren rooms was a disappointment, to say the least.

Second, it was too easy. Karazhan was the perfect difficulty level. All the fights were challenging, but not impossible. Curator was a real dps gear check, but all the fights and even the trash needed to be learned and ultimately mastered. On the other hand, Naxxramas was a joke. We cleared it on our third week or raiding, which was ridiculously easy, since we did it with only half of our core raiders. Like most guilds, we were soon able to clear it in a single evening, leaving us with nothing to do for months until Ulduar came out.

Between patches 3.0 and 3.1, raiding in World of Warcraft reached its lowest ebb, one to which I hope it will never return. Effectively, they removed all of the challenge to the game, and those of us who didn't leave wondered if it would ever return. For months, guilds have run the driest, ugliest content that Blizzard has ever been produced. As an introduction to the new expansion, Naxxramas was a horrible failure.

Fortunately, Ulduar has now come out. Okay, the siege area is kind of ugly, but the rest so far looks quite nice and I don't feel like I'm stuck in a nineties shooter. The fights so far seem well balanced, hard but not impossible, and rewarding skill rather than just brute force. I'm enjoying raiding again for the first time since October. Now I plan to simply forget that Naxxramas ever existed.