this is what i discovered. i enjoyed getting back in classic, but found myself missing some of the QoL “advances”. i couldn’t stop playing vanilla, i am able to stop playing classic. by the same token, i had trouble going back to retail. after getting another taste of vanilla, i found retail’s ‘world of chorecraft’ to be even more exasperating.
having lost interest in BfA, and not fully recapturing the magic of vanilla in classic, i’ll wait out the end of my account time tinkering with both.
if blizz recaptured some of the magic with retail (define magic for yourself as you want) would you fully commit to coming back to retail?
Sure, but i’d take it over the current talent tree so leveling feels more rewarding
for most classes you get nothing new after you get your wod talent, which feels awful for those 20 long levels, let alone the long gaps between talents
Emphasis added. This is something that I greatly miss. I had to go to another game to find class design that was more flexible (ESO). I know the community didn’t allow you to experiment, but for solo content it could make the game more fun to try something new.
ESO is quite cathartic for me after the Legion class changes drove me away from WoW for most of Legion. In ESO, any class can wear any armor type and use any weapons even though there are clearly optimal builds out there that I would need to use if I wanted to go very far in terms of group content. It’s fun to have the flexibility to try something different when I’m off doing my own thing. If I want to start doing group content then I’ll min/max while doing that content then go back to a build I enjoy.
I don’t expect WoW class design to ever be nearly as flexible as ESO, but I do wish we had about the same amount of flexibility as Cata (or maybe Wrath, although I didn’t play Wrath so I don’t know for sure) instead of the current horribly over-pruned classes with additional weapon restrictions that need to go away (2h frost, 2h ww monk, dw unholy/blood, SMF fury, etc.).
of course. i would love to see blizz make the next x-pac along the lines of classic. make the journey important again. make both primary, and secondary professions valuable. bring back progression.
i think blizz kinda got to the point they were listening to the loudest voices and they were all wanting QoL that when they finally got it they ended up stopping playing so everyone else that wants a good rpg to lose ourselves in are kinda out in the cold. i always kept up my cooking and fishing and first aid on my alts until legion ruined the professions with crap. but my mains this time have stuff maxed and it feels good. even if i don’t use anything from it. would be nice to actually use the stuff outside of instances.
Are you saying that the people in the forums don’t play the game? Of course they do… and I’m not even talking about the forum complaints… I am talking about the complaints in alpha, in beta, in community feedback from 3rd party sites, and in all the various places a player could take their complaints.
You have to be delusional to believe there was ever a disconnect with the MAJORITY of the playerbase and the people making decisions. THE ENTIRETY of the game is based on player feedback. The DEVS don’t make decisions based on what they believe is in THEIR best interest… it is done with the MAJORITY of the playerbase in mind. That’s what you zealots need to understand… the game is the way it is because a MAJORITY of the playerbase wants it that way… the forums here are a SMALL minority of the entire playerbase so these complaints are just folded into a bucket filled to the brim with all the other various methods the devs use to formulate their opinions on the state of the game (including playing the game themselves and listening to the professional game testers they hire to do these sorts of analyses).
Yeah, the problem with streamlining is that if it’s applied too vigorously, nothing is left. It’s like polishing a stone: in moderation, it makes the stone more beautiful but take it too far and it’ll erode the stone down into a shiny pebble.
Those players are a part of the same bubble that populates WoW GD and no, I don’t think their opinions are always representative of those of the masses. Alphas, betas, and community forums self-select a crowd that is far more strongly opinionated than the average player.
If that were entirely true the controversy around flight and pruning never would’ve come to pass. Very few people were asking for either and most actively opposed them, yet the devs railroaded those changes through anyway. Both were self-serving: no flight makes it easier to build zones since they’ll only ever be seen from the ground, and pruned abilities and talent trees means less time and money invested in class design.
We had flight (which was absolutely player directed)… the NO FLIGHT contingent is actually the WORLD PVP contingent that voiced a massive whine in beta, alpha, and the forums… and blizzard looked at the game and said, we’re not going to remove flight, but we’ll give these helmet wearing short bus riding folks a bone and put it behind an artificial wall of time and reputation. Guess what, there was still no world pvp even when everyone was on ground mounts for each of the last three expansion… so that whole debacle was worthless… as far as the skill trees and talents, its a mixed bag. I don’t see the point in having skills or talents that are worthless to me in end game (which is what they got rid of)… ultimately, though the decision to prune was made due to expansions… if there had never been expansions, there wouldn’t have been a need for skills to be pruned. But without expansions we’d be stuck playing retail’s feeble, slow, and mentally disabled brother, Classic.
Before I say anything else, bravo for posting a Classic vs Modern post that isn’t a thinly veiled bash of one or the other and instead trying to have a reasonable conversation. We’ll see how long it stays that way 
Completely agree. We need something closer to actual talent trees but also something where the choices are flexible and not confined to cookie cutter choices.
The whole reason Blizzard moved to the current incarnation of talents was allegedly to do away with cookie cutter builds and allow for real choice, but they botched that through two notable mistakes - 1) by making some talent choices clearly superior to others in the same row and 2) by allowing near instantaneous talent changes, rendering the actual choices close to meaningless because you can just change them on a whim (or as your hardcore guild expects based on a given encounter).
Yup, this is a good point. Personally, I find Classic swings a bit too far to the other end of the pendulum, but there’s a lot modern wow could learn from the classic reward system. For example, do we really need to craft purple gear so easily? That can be replaced by catchup gear that’s easily obtainable no less?
Though to be fair, some of this can be fixed by just changing the color of the gear. Fresh 120 purple gear is just gear following the same stat progression as green gear but with a purple border for whatever reason. The actual color of gear has become increasingly meaningless; its all ultimately derived by item level now.
Personally I wouldn’t want to see the painful inefficiency of questing in classic show up in modern (oh, you just ran back to Ratchet from Boulder Lode Mine? Cool. No go back there and do this other thing), but I would welcome subzones with all elites and whatnot.
Modern actually has this, but its pretty rare and easily ignored for the most part. There was a spot in Tanaan with all elites, and somewhere on the Broken Shore as well. Or the azerite patches in BfA that have all 120 mobs that don’t scale down. The problem is these kinds of areas are designed for “endgame” rather than tackling during the leveling process, so it doesn’t really serve as a tool to make the world feel more dangerous.
As someone who played Vanilla, the walking everywhere got old fast for me (and actually was the biggest reason I stopped playing classic), but I can see how it’s far less irritating for you.
The low flying flight paths I actually think is due to classic/vanilla being a game world that was not built with the expectation that players would have access to flying mounts. By limiting flight to specific paths and keeping those flights low to the ground, the art team was able to minimize how much time they needed to spend doing work on the tops of things.
This is actually part of why you still can’t fly in the Blood Elf and Draenei starter zones - they weren’t built with the intention of players flying over them and they’re so rarely visited that its hard for Blizzard to justify giving them a top down makeover.
I wish after Garrosh was ousted that Org had gotten a tad less… spiky. I can’t come up with in-game explanations to keep the place as it is, though I’m sure the actual reason is the art team didn’t want to redo Orgrimmar again.
Questing in classic is grinding mobs and some,quests. People didnt like that so it was changed in retail.
I agree with not giving you everyrhing you need, but providing alternate paths to get what you need…that seems lacking in retail.
Retails levelling sucks because its like 9 xpacs all piled on top with no attempt to create a coherent story path. Classic doesnt have this issue.
Most of the other stuff was changed out of necessity with good reason.
And lets be realistic. Most the people raving about classic…its because of the fresh start, streamers hyping, and nostalgia more than anything else…not because classic was the best or whatever
My problem with your comparison is that level boosts make you think to yourself “wtf am I doing… this is a waste of time” in retail.
I have zero desire to level in retail due to boosts.
What I like about the classic way of professions is that it isn’t easy to make good gear, but it isn’t impossible either. You can farm for patterns, you have to go out into the world and farm different types of mats and then you can make gear that has specific stats.
Currently in retail, I haven’t bothered to finish leveling my tailoring because of a couple of reasons. First, you have to farm a ton of 220 Eternal Ornaments and they are collected in the raid, and Breath of Bwonsamdi which comes from BoD. Second, not only is the gear BoP, but it has random stats. So you could do all this work and end up getting something that is completely useless. It is very demotivating to do all of that work and end up with garbage.
I don’t want this either, although I must say, I have seen a lot of the world because I’ve had to travel all over the place.
When I mean zones have a mixture of different level mobs, in classic, they aren’t confined to one area up the mountain where low level people are not going to adventure (WoD was famous for this). When I travel through zones in classic looking for mobs, I often see a progression of levels of that mob. I was in duskwallow looking for lobster people. Some were yellow, some were orange, and some were red. All mixed in. So you had to think about how to proceed vs in retail, you just stay out of the elite section.
I just got my mount, and yes, I was excited about it. However, I find myself missing walking to an extent. When you walked, you interacted with people more. When I ride, I can’t even buff them. Also, when I walked, I was more likely to stop and help someone who was struggling. When riding, I often don’t even notice they are struggling.
However, I would not do away with riding or flying in retail. I do appreciate it even more now having spent 40 levels walking 
“Modern WoW – Kul Tiran Warrior, levels 34-58”
This seems like an issue; modern WoW very much begins with the current expansion experience, presently 110. They provide the free boosts for that reason. Community and progression systems are all geared towards that expectation, rather than the legacy elements.
I think this is slightly towards the side of exaggeration, but regardless, if we assume this is true then Blizzard is consciously discarding all the content they’ve worked on prior to the current xpac and expect players to do the same.
Not only does this mean Blizzard is actively tanking the ROI on their own work, but they’re giving new players less and less reason to start playing WoW.
However, one of the reasons I’m not convinced your take is completely accurate is the nature of the Heritage armor achievements for allied races, which explicitly steer you to level without any boosts. This is a conscious choice by Blizzard to have players who have already played through old content to go back and play through that content again.
Old content is there, but it’s secondary-- and over time, changes to the structure of the progression (like the MoP talent system or the zone scaling) were developed with optimization for the current play-bracket in mind. That, along with depopulation of lower areas, has knock-on effects on how lower level content is unlocked.
Think Legion. Legion had a whole AP grind system with artifact research unlocking over time, along with the order halls. A new player hitting 100 - 110 will blaze through it without really engaging in any of those systems very long. They’re not really functioning the way they once did-- and there are patches in place, giving full artifact research at a particular point, but the curve is wildly different. And obviously, nobody’s going to spend very long thinking about Obliterium Ash or the Netherlight Crucible. Already in BFA, they’ve kinda moved away from Azerite in favor of Essences.
It’s not like those levels are going to be ripped out of the game, but you can’t really experience some elements that they were designed and balanced around when those level brackets were the live game. That makes playing through older content feel like a thinner, wanner version of what it once was. They’re not above setting a few quests there or taking money for an achievement to run through it all again, but development focus continues to center on the current level bracket and in particular the current endgame.
If you’re judging WoW by the state of playing through old content, you’re not judging what they’re actually doing and how the devs expect most of the playerbase to be engaging with the game. There are going to be spots where it feels like there are holes, or pacing issues.
There’s some valid criticisms of retail in there, things that have been addressed by other people just looking to improve Retail.
However, classic is very boring. People say that it’s “More rewarding.” but it’s really not, most of the difficulty comes from broken specilizations, and itemizations being wonky. And basically you walking around in white / grey gear for the most part the first 10 levels makes getting even a really bad green feel better.
It’s like someone who is addicted to really stomped on drug. You crave it and crave it not realizing just how poor the quality is. Then you get a slightly better batch and the high increases incrementally but you are so used to really crap purity that this small increase in potency is a massive reward.
Classic is like that… really horrible for the first 10-15 levels that the moment you get a green you think to yourself that this is the greatest thing you have ever accomplished, not realizing that the whole time you’re being groomed to expect less and less and be super happy with even a slight reward.
Back from work… let’s see what has happened here.
Thanks, I do try to keep things sane… but it’s easier said than done to keep things on track. That being said, I’m half-surprised that it hasn’t gone haywire yet… usually doesn’t last half this long. Here’s hoping it stays on track.
I can absolutely say this isn’t the case.
I actually have MULTIPLE level 110 alts across various classes (including a Blood Elf, so I could go after that for the Artifact Armour set rather than Kul Tiran), and no real desire to play them at the moment. I genuinely preferred working on the lower level alt. Not to mention that there’s barely any difference gameplay-wise between a level 40 character and a level 110 character (and it doesn’t change that much again at level 120).
… funny thing, I’d argue that leveling through lower level content is more engaging that working my way through the current expansion right now. Maybe I’m bitter a bit, but it hasn’t improved that dramatically.
Me too… I would love to revert to the old talent system, or at least something much closer to it, and if the level squish “leak” is true, then that would present a wonderful opportunity for them to do it!