This is how you feel. I almost never say anything about Retail because I stopped playing in BfA, but now I just have to, as comparing cannot be done without.
What I like in Classic is:
Upgrades and professions are meaningful.
There’s no hand holding, almost no breadcrumb quests. It’s not linear.
Levelling is fun and an adventure still - I have levelling in excess of 100 characters through the starter zones, and it’s STILL not dull.
You have to discover things for yourself - no golden arrows like in Retail.
You have the option of PvE servers.
I can find challenging encounters at every level - and if they’re too tough, I can just return in a level or two. (Aka. no scaling)
I love the old models - and prefer them over the snub-nosed, inane, and disneyfied abominations of Retail.
I love having to manage bag space, ammo, feed my pet, all those small immersive things.
Talent points - the liberty of no forced specs.
that not all classes has CC, stealth, healing … I love difference and freedom
that the first 10 levels are “the tutorial” not all levels to max.
that you can advance Rep., professions … while levelling, not only at max level.
Freedom of choice in short.
Pocobueno hits bullseye when he says:
What I miss from Retail:
Fishing pool tracking, Barbershop, Transmog, portals in RDF (if they are still a thing)
I played retail pretty heavy up until maybe a month ago . Heroic raid was meh , a lot of my friends and guild kind of tapered off to other games . I tried pugging but it was all about parsing and maximizing your character for literally everything, so it felt more like a 2nd job . The only relaxing thing to do was herb and mine nodes . Retail isnt bad , its just not that fun . The world seems deserted .
I was as hardcore as you could be in Vanilla WoW raiding Naxx successfully. Became super casual in TBC and just did 5 man dungeons. Same for WotLK where I never killed Arthas and quit the game completely from Cata on. I was fooled into returning for Shadowlands and the game was nothing like I once remembered.
I was on rails the entire time during the leveling process and nothing I did seemed to matter. It was a literal slog just trying to reach max level and I just quit by the 3rd zone. Maybe both games in all honesty are complete nonsense, but we like what we are used to.
idk i had the most fun ive ever had leveling my first char in that expansion. turned on pvp and went in with a group of friends and it was like a warzone all the way through the leveling process. took a while to level but it was fun.
You are ironically just contributing to the problem by doing the inverse and posting here.
You may only notice retail hate because you’re a retail player, but classic’s forums are frequented daily by retail “Andys” (who tf is andy?) that don’t even play classic but decide to come ranting here about how it’s not “real wow” etc.
You’re also not going to stop retail hate with an appeal like this. Just play what you like and ignore the naysayers because posts like yours are just inviting trolls.
That is because it is a thoroughly solved game on the best Vanilla patch for raid performance. You can find in depth guides and youtube videos on everything about the game and people who have cleared a raid 100+ lockouts to lead. Not to mention the weak auras, addons and familiarity with WoW that greatly increase the average player’s ability to play the game well.
In Vanilla at this point in the game we didn’t really know how threat works, Warriors were mid but needed for tanking, few people raiding actually knew any of the mechanics and had no place to go look it up. The addons we had were dirt simple and broke every Tuesday. Really different raiding experience.
The real world first was a super tight race between the guilds who were in competition for it expansions later. There are people who were pushing for world first Kel’Thuzad that are still doing that in retail.
Classic is garbage, this anniversary version is easily the worst thing ever. Never ending bots just makes it unplayable. It’s somehow still better than retail and I haven’t touched retail since Mist.
Absolutely