Blizzard has left the door open to additional content beyond vanilla in Classic. Obviously, different people want different things, and I’m not attempting to convince anyone who wants either vanilla forever, or TBC/WotLK. However, that is not the universal opinion, so it’s fair to discuss options.
Broadly speaking, I’d like additional content in Classic over time, but content that remains true to the feel of vanilla, and does not invalidate vanilla. For example, I want Blackrock Mountain to be relevant for a long time, because it’s awesome. While there are always risks in adding anything, we have a helpful guide here that minimizes those risks. We know that retail has morphed into something, over time, that classic players don’t want. So we can ask a simple question for any proposed change: Does this change make the game feel more like vanilla, or more like retail?
The main question is how do we add new content, without invalidating older stuff, and without making people feel overwhelmed by having to do tons of stuff? Here’s a stab at a Classic+ framework to do this.
- Level cap: Leave it at 60, because WoW level mechanics means that gaining levels quickly trivializes older stuff. Don’t alter existing itemization, for the most part. Some item squashing could be needed, to make the rest of this work, but nothing is invalidated as was done in TBC.
- New questing zones: These offer tougher mobs, and so will have an iLevel recommendation. The zones have long quest chains, roughly as long as a normal expansion zone would have, and in return offer new spell ranks, raised skill caps (e.g. sword or axe skill), expanded talent trees and additional talent points, attunements, and gear that is useful in special contexts for related dungeons/raids. For example, there could be BiS shadow resist for a slot or two, for the dungeon/raid in the area that is heavy in mob shadow damage.
- New dungeons: These could offer similar rewards to the questing zones, but they are disjoint. That is, if you want all the rewards, you need to do both zone quests and all the dungeons. Some drops will be random, encouraging multiple runs, but not too harsh, so you can get everything in a “reasonable” amount of time. In addition, unlike vanilla, the different dungeons have different iLevels, so there is progression, and a new group of 60s will be unable to do harder dungeons.
- New raids: This is similar to vanilla raiding, in that there is progression across raids. However, to avoid invalidating older content, the overall gear jump isn’t so great, but rather each raid offers a few BiS slots. That is, MC might offer the absolute best DPS shoulders, but a newer raid has the best tanking helm. To avoid the feeling that most drops are useless, each raid’s basic drops still rise with iLevel, just not as dramatically. Furthermore, the raids also drop gear that is particularly good in a few specific contexts – including itself. For example, fire resist in MC. This way, the BiS loot offer a chance at a very exciting/impactful drop, while the regular drops are still valued and useful. Over time and different raids, players feel like they are accumulating more tools to deal with different situations, rather than just getting one set of gear that smashes everything. But don’t make players swap gear constantly within a raid – only between raids.
- Dungeon/Raid difficulty I haven’t played in a while, so I might be wrong on this one. But in vanilla, I felt that difficulty was added by introducing randomness through unexpected situations – wandering patrols, taunt failures, fears into adds, etc. You had a chance to react to these situations to recover. As time went on, I felt like difficulty become simply being more punishing – a single DPS pulling threat would cause a wipe. I think the former is much more fun.
- Increasing difficulty for older content: Even without level differences, as players get stronger, eventually PvE content will become too trivial. There are a couple of ways that that we can offset this, but in general there probably will need to be some sort of difficulty selector. Higher difficulties could be simple mob stat bumps, but even better, could instead have more mobs, more patrols, different mechanics, time constraints, fewer allowed players, etc. This allows the content to feel more epic, rather than just feeling like a difficulty treadmill. It is important to ensure that these don’t feel gimmicky or dramatically different from a normal run. You don’t want people to dread stupid challenges. Higher difficulty levels would have better rewards.
- Rotating rewards: At some point, you’ll have so much content, it will feel like a chore to farm stuff. One solution might be to have rotating or transient rewards. Perhaps both raids and dungeons have periods of time with special loot tables or additional bosses. A particular BiS item, profession upgrades or patterns, a powerful consumable, cosmetic items, etc. So the pattern will be that a guild is mainly trying to progress in a particular raid, but every week will have some featured old content that will also be useful to them. Similar with dungeons. This encourages occasionally revisiting older content, which is nice both as a change of pace, and allowing you to see how your power level has increased.
- PvP introduce tiers in battlegrounds. When you start, you’re in tier 1 which has the least-geared opponents, and the worst gear rewards. As you improve, you can choose to move up in tier, granting better-geared opponents and better rewards. I think it’s good to allow people to choose worse tiers if they want, so they can occasionally feel how strong they’ve become, but there’s no benefit for them to do that often. World PvP will also reflect true power differences. Otherwise, it’s just a treadmill. No arena.
- Class balance: Every change must be made through the lens of “does this change make the class feel more or less like a vanilla class?” Since I played a warrior in vanilla, I’ll give warrior examples. Warriors should remain weak when alone, unprepared, or ungeared, and strong when paired with healers and well-geared. The rage mechanic should continue to mean that warriors are weak at the start of combat, but they gain strength as time goes on. Rage should be limited in most contexts, but each use of it should feel impactful (a Mortal Strike should never be spammable, but do large, significant bursts). Arms should remain bursty, favoring slow 2H weapons, and Mortal Strike should always remain the premier arms spell. Talent trees can grow, but must retain the basic flavor and tradeoffs, primarily tweaking bonuses, rather than adding spells. A class should be able to do all its duties at some base level, regardless of talent spec. Overall class strength can be tweaked a bit, as e.g. warriors are too strong in 1.12. However, the relative strengths, roles, and feel must remain as is. When in doubt, don’t change anything. For example, I’m not sure that warrior stance-dancing really adds all that much fun, but changing it does make the class less like vanilla. So leave it in.
- Assets: Assets in retail that fit in vanilla are welcome, if they are re-imagined with the above mechanics. Assets that don’t fit are discarded. So, Karazhan and Northrend might be in; Pandas and Outworld might be out. Clearly, this is subjective, so a wide variety of opinions are inevitable.
- New player catchup: Since a player becomes somewhat useful at 60, there is no need for any type of boost or catch-up.
- Significant mechanics changes: Flying mounts, changes in weapon proficiencies, removing ammo, LFG, garrisons, arenas, cataclysms in the world, etc; all drastically change the vanilla feel. Do not include them.
Obviously, there are many complexities to do this right, and it’s not nearly as simple as what I’ve written.
What do you think?