I think it would be best to explain the mental differences to give the best example through my own personal thoughts. Its not a reflection of the community itself, but its what my own experience with SoD, Vanilla, Retail provides.
With Retail - By the time I get to the point where its time to raid, my character already feels like its achieved a certain strength within the world I’m happy with, so the changes (whether they are big or small) feel irrelevant to me. Once I do this and go through Raid Finder a few times, my experience with the game feels finished.
Original Vanilla - The journey from 1 to 60… once its done it feels as if I really accomplished something, that I earned my way to 60… once I hit 60 I kind of reflect on everything that I did to get there. The people I leveled with, etc. It feels like its something I invested a lot of time into, so I dont want to waste all that time and not try to keep going through the journey with those friends I made. It feels as if they rely on me and I have to rely on them to make my character stronger, it matters what they do as well when it comes to my own growth; so I want to invest time into their growth as well.
SOD - Phase 1 felt great because it was fresh, but Phase 2 and Phase 3 I wonder if its more stalling to get to 60 that makes it feel so much less, or if its just the fact that you can see the power gain is fairly simple to achieve. So I main a mage, in phase 1 it was all about that staff, and the low % of drop. Sure I never got it, but it was basically… a carrot on a stick…(lol)… there was always that thought that it might drop, and I might win the roll so running it was a great idea… now if BFD had not been to a lockout… I wouldve ran BFD over and over and over until the staff dropped and I really wouldve felt like I had earned it after I finally got it… but thats the sense with a lot of pre-raid gear in dungeons around 50-60… in vanilla. Phase 1 felt like a cage, phase 2 felt like a cage where just a bunch of lab rats waiting on a blood moon that ruined a entire zone’s biggest asset… the feeling of uncertainty… the jungle sortve…like the movie Predator with Arnold… you dont know who is hunting you… while you are hunting someone else… but then you turned it into Vietnam where and everyone is running through the thicket yelling I got to find Bubbaaaaaaaaaa attempting to get to their friends to do PVP.
Phase 3 just feels like the area that the Jailer is watching you from shadowlands. Nightmare Incursions go to this point… yeeee xp… that point… yeeeee xp woohoo… gold son… dolla dolla bills yall. While sure that ez peasy lemon squeezed zone is just a bunch of people on a hamster wheel all day and they can get to the finish line much quicker… blowing the top of that mountain that was ST with dynamite… then bulldozing it down until it was a kid’s ride at the local festival sortve detracted from the material.
Dont get me wrong 4 million hp… wow… sure that may have needed a nerf… but nerfing everything after that was sortve… meh. As a gamer that has been here since the beginning you really created the same feelings that Ahn-Qiraj raid had back in the early days (not the pre stuff the actual raid)… to some extent… and well… I was excited to be able to participate in that challenge… but by the time my raid night came around it was turned into Raid Finder.
Everyone wants to talk about how easy Vanilla is… well… everyone’s first time around that game… I promise you it wasnt easy… its years of harvested information… every single detail of bis… every single detail of whats great… to get to that point of making it a face roll… but our first time around in BWL… Ahn Qiraj… Naxxramas even… it wasnt the Frames… it wasnt the limitations of the hardware… it was the unexpected material we were going to and the bar to reach it… and I felt like you really met that with Sunken Temple (4 million to 2.7 million nerf… I likened to the C’thun nerf)… I felt like if you had taken a step back there and just let it breath… for a couple weeks… it wouldve been a great “lets see where this goes” for Discovery… because you don’t even know if the mindset of the gamer wouldve went from I cannot… to I can… and thats truly sad that you pulled the plug on that one… without giving it at least 2-3 weeks to soak in.
