TL;DR: SoD isn’t bad, it just strayed way too far from vanilla, and as such, it has me highly doubting Blizzard’s ability to deliver a proper Classic+.
note that this is purely from a PvE perspective because I didn’t touch PvP at all. Which turned out to be a good choice as far as I can see, because there was just endless crying about class balance, with certain classes (cough SHAMAN cough) being absurdly broken in PvP, and the damage being way too bursty leading to a “2 shot meta” for the majority of the game’s life.
Anyway.
Phase 1: Fantastic. Vanilla with some light changes here and there, and renovating an unpopular dungeon into a neat little 10-man “raid”. A bit disappointed that most of the new runes were just copypasted TBC/WOTLK/retail abilities, but overall, the game still felt like vanilla just with some new abilities tossed in and some fun tweaks here and there. The concept of having a really low level cap was also pretty neat. Was interesting seeing people minmax BIS gear setups at such a low level.
Phase 2: Pretty much the same. A few more tweaks but still largely “vanilla”. Maybe closer to TBC class balance/design. Gnomer was pretty fun, even if some of the itemization / sets were dumb (a set that gives NEGATIVE stamina? For classes that already have low HP? what the everloving fug were they thinking) and some of the bosses were pretty difficult / coordination-heavy for what was supposed to be easy casual raiding.
The player count looked like it took a nosedive here, but that is pretty easily explained. Back in phase 1, many people (myself included) had leveled a bunch of alts because getting to level 25 was very quick and easy, so it wasn’t uncommon to have one person getting parses uploaded for 4+ different characters. When phase 2 came out and the level cap jumped to 40, suddenly it’s much harder to maintain that many characters, and thus, many people didn’t bother. The playerbase didn’t drop, it was just Warcraftlogs having inflated numbers in phase 1 due to so many people having lots of alts.
Phase 3: And here’s where the [Kraul Guano] hit the fan. Incursions were just a mistake. The concept was nice enough, but the execution completely demolished the “vanilla” feel of the game. Infinitely repeatable quests allowing you to just endlessly farm guaranteed gold in one place, and with the absurd exp/hr you get from them, every other form of leveling became obsolete overnight. The world is now dead and empty (past level 25) because everyone is spamming incursions to max level. I really don’t understand how Blizzard didn’t see this coming. ANYONE with more than a week or two of experience with this game, would have known that a brand new source of leveling that is over twice as fast as any other method, would kill the other leveling methods. A Blizz dev himself said that players will always take the path of least resistance, and Incursions are so much less resistance than questing/dungeons that it’s laughable. These should have been daily quests from the start, not infinitely-repeatable.
And with all the other changes, no longer did SoD feel like vanilla. You had classes with tons of WOTLK/Cata abilities, 100% exp boost, infinitely spammable quests that obsoleted questing/dungeon grinding and most methods of gold farming…more and more, it felt like Blizzard was changing the game to appeal to retail players. More and more, the things that made vanilla, “vanilla”, were being stripped away, leaving us with Cataclysm game design but in old Azeroth.
And then there’s ST. It launched with zero PTR testing and came out absurdly overtuned, with the devs outright admitting that they just estimated how much health things should have. Even the sweatiest sweat-drenched sweatlords could not clear the raid; bosses had more health than Patchwerk, and we were only at level 50. Trash also had insane amounts of health, leading to it taking forever to clear. Blizz scrambled to hotfix-nerf it over the next couple weeks, but that still didn’t solve the issue with trash taking forever, or the stats on the gear. Speaking of the gear…
The new ST gear was barely better than Gnomer gear, so there was really not much point to even do this raid in the first place unless you wanted one of the epic weapons or something. By the time blizz buffed the gear to be better than gnomer gear, most people had quit the game or were on break until phase 4. Too little, too late. With the nerfed the boss health, the amount of trash just became even more glaringly obvious, because it’d be 15 minutes of trash and then 45-90 seconds of boss. The week-long lockout and transition to 20man weren’t all that great either; lots of people were expecting everything to be 10man, and now they suddenly had to find 10 more people for their guild raid roster. I kind of expected the raid size to increase at some point, but not at level 50. I was thinking for max level.
Phase 4: Honestly? Not too bad, at least compared to the dumpster fire that was phase 3. The new Blackrock Eruption dailies were pretty fun, and unlike Incursions, they were proper dailies instead of just being infinitely spammable. Plus they gave an easy way to farm Thorium Brotherhood + Hydraxian Waterlords rep, two things that were really annoying and grindy in vanilla.
…but I wasn’t really a fan of the “heat levels” in MC. Heat 2 wasn’t too bad, you could easily meet the FR requirement with a couple pieces / enchants. But Heat 3 requiring 226 FR or you just die? Horrible. A binary, pass/fail, “get this exact amount of resist or you unavoidably die” is legitimately the worst and most un-fun implementation of a resistance gear check in the game’s history, and goes against the very basis of how spell resistance works. Farming pre-raid bis and then ditching it for fire resist greens/blues wasn’t fun. Even with 6 pieces of Tier 1, you still needed at least 3-4 more pieces of dedicated fire res gear + fire res enchants, all to pass an invisible “get 226 resist or you die” gear check. Resistance gear has always been and SHOULD always be, taking more or less of it depending on your raid’s needs. Take more to be safe and slow, or take less to be fast and risky. Not an exact number pass/fail check.
The “new boss” was literally just a meatball with 1 mechanic. I say “1 mechanic” because the best way to do the fight was to just fear/CC the adds and zug the boss. So the entire fight is literally just stacking the whole raid on one spot and moving left or right every 20 seconds to dodge the meteors. This was the best Blizz could come up with?
Demonfall Canyon was a nice concept, but the idea of it being a “new dungeon” was kind of dashed by the fact that it was just an existing open-world location turned into an instance, with all the mobs being existing models. Plus the fact that the loot was super lop-sided in favor of melee, so caster DPS/healers had little reason to run it. Good idea in theory, just executed pretty badly.
Phase 5: Whew, no more stupid fire resist requirement bull. Now we get Mythic+ styled mechanics instead…which were kind of underwhelming tbh. There was no reason to ever pick Red or Black, unless they were the weekly bonus, so most weeks you’d just do Bronze/Blue/Green. Bronze effectively did nothing, Green was just “one person run out” every 30 seconds or so, and Blue was just “a few people stack” every 30 seconds or so. The raid was still a pushover even with these new mechanics tacked on. Even the Black that added “mythic” mechanics, most of the fights were still the same. Chromaggus is the only one that really requires you to use a different strategy, the others were barely changed. Even with these “hardmodes” the raid was still very easy.
Designing the raid around 20 players but allowing you to bring up to 40 is pretty interesting though. Effectively allows you to scale the difficulty more precisely; making things easier by just bringing more people, but that also means more loot competition. Pretty neat system. I like it.
Phase 6: Alrighty, AQ time. Usually this is when Vanilla populations start dropping off because of the content being much…less liked. But honestly it felt fine. All of the new SoD abilities/class balance made AQ40 much less of a pain than regular vanilla. The changes to rep requirements were also very welcome, leading to people actually using those AQ20 armor/weapon/sets for once, since you don’t need to grind to friggin exalted anymore. The Timeworn system was pretty neat too. Allowing classes to either use tier pieces or non-tier pieces for a separate bonus is a cool idea.
The AQ hardmodes were, again, a pushover. I get that the devs outright said they don’t want to design challenging content, but when even the “hardmodes” are completely puggable, it’s kind of odd. At least the only hardmode rewards are cosmetic items, that’s something I will credit them for.
Adding in worldbuff items is also a brilliant idea. Honestly similar to ideas I had about worldbuffs in the past, where instead of getting the buff itself, you would get an item that grants the buff to your current group/raid. This combined with the War Effort being endless so that you can keep turning in stuff to exchange for worldbuffs, also helped keep the economy booming with people farming cloth and other stuff to sell on the AH so others can buy them to pay for worldbuffs. Rare instance of an idea working to help multiple parts of the game.
Phase 7: Oh boy, Naxx. The big challenge everyone is looking forward to, and…borrowed power system. The hell? Who was asking for this? One of the specific things I DIDN’T LIKE about retail, was the frequent use of borrowed power. An entire system of scaling health/damage buffs that only works inside Naxx. Why? For what purpose? Who was saying “hm yeah SoD is fun but you know what it needs? absurd number inflation to WOTLK numbers”. They were originally planning on going up to seal rank 10 which would have tanks with nearly 100k health and DPS doing 50k+…thankfully the devs had at least a tiny bit of foresight to cap the seal at 7 instead.
Again the “hardmodes” are kind of a pushover. The only one that is actually dangerous is the Construct Wing mechanic; the others range from “mild annoyance” to “literally automated with a weakaura”. Sapph and KT are the only bosses with new hardmode mechanics and they’re both pretty simple. Bosses fall over in less than 2 minutes and often times skip entire mechanics because of this. The whole raid is legitimately easier than WOTLK naxx which is pretty astounding.
Also the 6pc set bonuses only work against Undead, which again, makes it borrowed power that only works inside Naxx. Yeah, these bonuses work in KC and Strat/Scholo, but those are easy 5mans that get steamrolled even without these set bonuses. This implementation of set bonuses that only work inside Naxx, means that you end up with a “naxx bis” gear set, and “everywhere else bis” gear set which is just awkward. Hell, even inside Naxx itself, the whole Spider Wing is almost entirely beast mobs, so your 6pc doesn’t work against them. Getting a bunch of Naxx gear only to have it be worse than AQ40 gear in the next phase? Gross. Another example of why borrowed power systems are awful and should never be used in WoW, much less having them directly tied to gear/set bonuses.
Phase 8: The new quest content and questing area was nice, giving us a long-requested contiuation to Scarlet Crusade lore, and an expansion upon the Tyr’s Hand area, even if it’s mostly just copypasted from WOTLK areas. Even though the questline only took about an hour to complete, there was still some interesting stuff to be done. Some nice new goodies for professions, including fun toys for Engineering. Rocket boots, my beloved.
The raid though…good god, what a clown show. They apparently learned nothing from phase 3, and decided to put out another raid with 0 PTR testing. Surprise surprise, it came out massively overtuned and Blizzard had to scramble to hotfix-nerf it after launch. Groups were going into this 20man raid with 30-35 players and still getting hard stuck on the second boss, due to how absurdly overtuned it was. Just became a whole nerdstorm across social media, with the people who actually tried the raid pointing out how overtuned it was, and people who didn’t even touch the raid just spamming “git gud git gud you’re just bad you just want everything to fall over and 1shot day 1”. Because apparently there’s no middle ground between “1shot everything day 1” and “95% of guilds getting stonewalled on the 2nd boss”, everything has to be extreme polar opposites. There were plenty of people insisting the tuning was “fine”, but when checking their logs…30-40 player group. Yeah. A 20man raid requiring 30+ players is not “fine”.
Even the few guilds who DID manage to clear 8/8 with 20 people, admitted that they were having to swap group comps between bosses, stacking certain DPS and healer classes that excelled at each boss, and even then, still killing the boss after it enraged.
My guild of 25, who had previously cleared every bit of hardmode content with no issues, went in on release night and proceeded to wipe over and over against the first boss. Full world buffs, full consumes, doing mechanics mostly-properly, and yet we were just being overrun with adds in phase 2. Our best attempt was barely getting to phase 3 with like 10 adds up. They just had WAY too much health and even with all DPS hard focusing them, we couldn’t keep up with their respawn rate.
The next lockout, Blizzard finally nerfed the first two bosses, which made them go from “impossible” to “pretty easy”…but the rest of the instance still felt really overtuned. In a group of 26, we were still not even coming close to meeting enrage timers on the next 3 bosses. Even on Mason, supposedly the easiest of the bunch, we were doing the mechanics just fine and yet hitting enrage at 20-25%. Again, full world buffs, full consumes, six extra people, and still not even coming close to the DPS requirement. It was still overtuned as hell.
The final wave of nerfs saw the enrage timers on the later bosses increased by a couple of minutes, some reduced HP on the 3rd/4th/5th bosses…finally allowing 20-25man groups to have a fighting chance of beating them. Aggrend originally said that the intent was to gear up with the early bosses to slowly progress on the later bosses; only now after a dozen nerfs is that finally possible to do without bringing 10+ extra players. That kind of design philosophy is really flawed to begin with; requiring gear from the raid, to clear the raid? That’s dumb. Being stonewalled by weekly-lockout raid gear drops is something that should only be a thing for world first bleeding edge retail mythic clears, not default-difficulty Classic.
I see people defending the overtuned difficulty with “they made it hard so you don’t just clear the raid once and then quit”…okay, so it’s artificially extending the game’s life? Even so, Classic has never been about clearing the raid once and then quitting; there’s plenty of people who like to gear up and push parses higher and higher each week, and/or do the raid some more on alts. This concept of “people will clear once then quit” is not based in reality, and it’s especially wrong when using it as an excuse to keep a raid horrendously overtuned to the point where guilds are forced to do 30+ player groups just to clear this “”“20 man”“” raid.
That’s the other thing- SE wasn’t “hard”, it was overtuned. The mechanics aren’t difficult, the problem was almost entirely bosses having way too much health and enrage timers being unfeasible for 20man raids. So to claim that the devs intentionally made it this way to force a longer progression period is pretty much admitting that the raid was made to be artificially difficult.
Not to mention, EVERY OTHER max level raid was easy. MC was easy. BWL was easy. AQ was easy. Naxx was easy. But now all of a sudden SE is painfully overtuned and requires you to bring 5-10 more players just to have a chance of clearing it? Why the sudden change in design philosophy? What happened to “soda and pretzels raiding” ?
Again, it’s like they learned nothing from phase 3 and decided to just put out an untested raid a second time for keks and giggles. Why did “no PTR overtuned raid” need to be tested a second time? We already know how this turns out.
Overall, the running theme of SoD seems to have been “let’s throw random crap into the game and see what happens”. Some of that random crap turned out to be nice, and some of that random crap turned out to be not nice. Mage healers and warlock/rogue tanks? World buff items? 10man leveling raids? Really neat ideas. Incursions and MC heat levels and borrowed power systems and untested overtuned raids? Nah. No thanks.
The one important point I’m making here is: SoD deviated so far from vanilla that even calling it “classic” feels wrong. Leveling is super fast and done almost entirely through incursions and dailies, instead of questing and dungeons. Classes are fairly homogenized in that everyone has aoe, everyone has defensive/offensive cooldowns, everyone has movement abilities and self heals…Cataclysm class design. Gear is really streamlined too, which is both a positive and a negative really. Positive in that there’s no more “instant d/e garbage loot”, but negative in that everything is bland and samey. No longer is there hype over items like mageblade or onslaught girdle or Ironfoe or even Thunderfury, because items are all standardized and made to fit into the WOTLK style of itemization where newer raid = better gear, and outside of some niche exceptions, every new raid is almost an entire gear reset. Every new raid’s gear is the same as the last raid, just with higher numbers on it.
SoD was originally marketed as “vanilla with changes” but what we ended up with was “Cataclysm in old azeroth”. Is this BAD? Not really, no. It’s just distinctly not vanilla at all anymore. I wanted some tweaks and light changes, not a complete removal of everything that made vanilla unique. I wanted classic plus, not cataclysm minus.
To make an oversimplified food analogy, I wanted vanilla ice cream with sprinkles, and what SoD gave us is chocolate ice cream with m&m’s, fudge, peanuts, cherries, caramel sauce, whipped cream, jelly, a whole banana, and a tiny little swirl of vanilla. Is that bad? No, it’s not bad. It’s just not vanilla. It’s not what I wanted, and not what the game was originally advertised to be.
“but but but…SoD is just a testing ground for the REAL Classic+!”, is what people are using to defend all these strange design choices. Let’s ignore how that is admitting you’re paying $15/month for a beta test; my real point is that lots of the changes made in SoD were pretty definitive proof that the devs have no idea what made vanilla unique and special. If they wanted to do a “classic+” properly, they would have done it right to begin with instead of spending over a year “”“testing”“” things that are obviously broken, bad ideas like Incursions. It doesn’t take much foresight to see how some of these ideas are awful ones that shouldn’t have ever been implemented in the first place.
Almost every distinctly “vanilla” thing about the game was stripped away and replaced with Cata / Retail game design. The slow and steady leveling, the dangerous open world, the feeling of being weak as a player and overcoming challenges against all odds, the socialization and group questing, the classes having distinct niches/strengths/weaknesses, early raid gear still being relevant in later raids…all of these things are gone. SoD barely even resembles vanilla anymore, outside of being set in the vanilla game world. It fell for the same pitfalls that retail did, in that everything unique and interesting was stripped away to make the game more streamlined and “balanced”.
Nobody who knows and understands vanilla would ever implement an instanced questing area that obsoletes normal questing/dungeons. Or implement a binary pass/fail resistance check mechanic for an entire raid. Or implement a borrowed power system that inflates health/damage numbers to absurd levels. Or homogenize all the classes so that everyone is good at everything. Or make leveling so quick and easy that you can just breeze through it in a week with no challenge whatsoever. (I get that SoD is a temporary seasonal game mode, but still.) Or buff player power so much that 5mans are an absolute joke that can be aoe-facerolled in quest greens, or even ENTIRELY SOLOED by some classes.
For me, half the appeal of vanilla is that it has “roughness” to it. There’s weird, janky design. It’s broken and unbalanced but in a fun and interesting way. You’re weak as a player and the world is dangerous, making it feel more satisfying when you overcome a challenge despite the janky undercooked class design. The devs were just kind of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, but without 20 years of game design to look back on and copypaste, so they were mostly just winging it, or getting inspiration from other games (Diablo, Everquest, etc). Vanilla is a mess, but a fun and interesting mess, hence why we’re still playing it over 20 years later.
With SoD, the devs have shown that they would rather sand down all of the roughness of the game and give us a very streamlined and “balanced” game, just like retail, so I can only assume that any theoretical “classic+” from this dev team is going to be the same. I’m not asking for them to be perfect on the first try, but every single phase of SoD pushed it further and further and further away from vanilla. They had so many chances to course-correct, but instead just continuously made the game more and more like retail.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a BAD thing, it’s just not what I wanted and not what the game was originally marketed as. I’ve always said that the idea of “classic+” is sort of doomed to fail because everyone has their own idea of what it should be, and…yeah, I’m kind of making an example of myself with this write-up. My idea of “classic+” is apparently very different from Blizzard’s idea of “classic+”. I want vanilla with some light changes and tweaks to its pain points, whereas Blizzard seems to want Cataclysm game design but set in old Azeroth.
Given how SoD turned out, I currently have very very little faith that any “classic+” from blizzard will be the “vanilla with some tweaks and light changes” that I want.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I now await the clockwork “not reading that, glad for you / sorry that happened” comments and people moaning about how long this is despite me clearly indicating that in the title.