I agree. I don’t want to be as powerful a mage as Jaina Proudmoore or Khadgar, but the way it’s set up from what I’ve seen right now, it seems they are trying to say that I am more powerful than even Kalecgos (the new frickin Malygos) because I can go and get Aluneth and apparently even he can’t do that? Same goes for any other class. I shouldn’t be a better warrior than Varian Wrynn RIP Varian, or better shaman than Thrall, or any of that. I can accept being on par with those maybe, but not BETTER than.
I would rather witness the true greatness of those characters or evilness in the case of people like Sylvanas and stuff like that. That’s why it takes 5, 10, 20, 25 people to kill these raid minions and stuff like that. There’s a disconnect between the story line and how it tells the story vs what is actually happening in the game. So it feels disjointed. Like I just got the overpowered artifact weapon on my mage by doing something that even Khadgar or kalec couldn’t do, yet now I have to take 25 other people into a raid to kill burning legion members when I saw in other cutscenes how Khadgar and Kalec can kill most of them on their own.
So the story and the reason to raid feel disjointed. Kind of like Blizzard wanted to say to people who didn’t want to raid or PVP that “it’s ok, just play our story and you’ll be more powerful than you can ever imagine.” That isn’t WoW, or at least it wasn’t the WoW I remembered from Vanilla-Cata
Level squish doesn’t solve the problems, it just punts them. There’s really three things that need to happen in retail to make leveling enjoyable again. This is just about leveling, and not stuff like ‘make the world dangerous again’.
Make class trainers relevant again. Part of leveling used to be going back to your class trainer to get new spells or upgrade spells. You could see that, “Sweet, next level I can upgrade my Shadowbolt!” To say nothing of class quests to get certain features, like a Warlock needing to do quests to get their different demons. Stop adding things directly to the spellbook and the action bar, and don’t upgrade them automatically, and it gives you anticipation about the future.
TALENT TREES. Instead of talents being a few bars you pick one out of three, bring back the trees, and allow people to customize and make hybrid builds. Allow people to make mistakes, or find ways to play that fits their style, rather than the premade paths that everyone is channeled into.
Stop with the ‘external’ progression systems (like artifacts or HoA), or allow us to keep that stuff when the expansion is over, making it a permanent part of our character. One or the other.
What disappointing feedback? from what I can see it’s about 60/40 towards positive.Whether it can sustain that well we’ll see but honestly it’s a solid patch .
They are not going to change the design ethos of the WoW product because of Classic. At all. The people currently playing WoW are playing it because they enjoy it the way it’s being designed, no matter how much uppity people like the ones around here wish to scoff at them for it.
With the expected level squish, I see proper talent trees as a real possibility for the first time in years.
With regards to the classic-influenced design, I’m curious how the community would react to major reverts like:
Warriors returning to stance-dancing
Paladins returning to the seal-judge system
Warlocks returning to soul-shard resource / farming
Multiple classes returning to mana-based resouce (i.e. no more holy power, maelstrom, focus, insanity, etc…)
To me, there’s too many things that ruined it that aren’t removable - Too many raid difficulties and the different tier gear looking the same, flying, transmog, etc. etc.
They’ll probably try to creep closer to Classic, but there will still be catchup, millions of mounts, and lack of anyone feeling special which was it’s downfall. It’s unrecoverable.
I doubt there will be radical changes that’s make modern WoW “classic, but with expansions”, but I wouldn’t doubt that they re-learn some things forgotten.
Like “hey, we believed this was terrible, but it was actually a pretty good idea” sort of thing. A potential talent system revamp could be foreseen, as well as shift in class and content design philosophy. Pacing of the world might change as well.
Less AoE-ing 20 enemies down in every pull, and more strategic gameplay.
Still, nothing too drastic. It could end up being more like Wrath or Cata than Classic, which are the expansions where I believe set the “mid-way point” between old WoW and modern WoW design philosophies, having elements of both.
Yes. You do realize that not everyone is totally enamored with the idea of Classic WoW right? There are a lot of people playing Retail WoW who have no interest in Classic. They’re perfectly fine with WoW how it is, no matter how much uppity snobs like you want to scoff at them for it from the safety of your keyboards.
If you change Retail drastically to match Classic, those people will stop playing. Then you’re banking on everyone who is playing Classic jumping ship back to Retail, which is unlikely to happen as Classic offers them things that Retail never can again.
Designing Retail around Classic ideals is a surefire way to sink the entire ship.
It really doesn’t matter what they do, or if a patch is “pretty good”. Until they revert the fundamentals back to the way they were - class identity, doing away with homgenization, going back to old talents, going back to the way professions were originally designed, going back to the community approach, removing cash shops and the ability to p2w, etc., etc., the game will never be much different than it currently is.
They’d have to completely overhaul the base game and we all know that is never going to happen.
Anyway, your choice as a business owner/stakeholder is to just ride it into the ground without even trying? Yes, Classic-like changes could kill things, but you’re already getting there as-is. I don’t agree with your head-in-the-sand approach, but in the end, neither one of us have a say.