This thread is titled “calling the purists out”, and although I would probably post it today with a different, less confrontational title, I believe some (most?) of this stuff is still relevant, even if the “purist” group I am talking about in this thread is mostly extinct. I’ve decided on creating the topic again in the new forums, if only to gauge how the community currently feels about this stuff.
Here it comes:
It is my opinion that the entire “NO CHANGES” movement is based on a misconception. I agree with not fixing what isn’t broken, but I have reasons to believe that at 1.12.2 the game was irredeemably broken, and those who want to relive the “Vanilla experience” as it was will want it changed.
The problem with 1.9 and the patches that followed it is that Blizzard’s focus shifted from developing an immersive, mysterious world that players are meant to gradually master to making sure that every player had a fighting chance of getting into AQ40 before The Burning Crusade came if they played for long enough, previous content be damned. This thread is supposed to explain the problems that effectively turned Vanilla WoW into a different game long before its expansion was released, and why you should be concerned.
PROBLEM 1: changed itemization
It is commonly said that before 1.10, stats didn’t really make sense, or rather, most commonly-found items were loaded with stats that didn’t really help the classes those items were designed for. Mages, for example, have no need for intellect and spirit, and every Nostalrius BiS list comes with a preface stating that because of that, +hit, +crit and spell power are the only stats worth getting. That fact turns mages’ molten core and dungeon sets utterly useless: despite having defensive value and intellect, those items provide virtually no dps increase in a molten core/blackwing lair encounter.
People forget, however, that it wasn’t always like this. At the beginning, the hit cap was pretty much unreachable and very few items had +spell damage on them. Additionally, talent trees also provided much less dps than they would at 1.12.The result is that the overall raid dps was a lot lower at the dawn of WoW, which meant less mechanics/phases were skipped and more healing and decursing was needed. The end result is that encounters that take five minutes in private servers usually took much longer in the live version: Nefarian was a 15-20 minutes encounter. With encounters that took that long, mages would invariably run out of mana, and suddenly all that intellect and spirit made sense: intellect would greatly increase your mana pool, and spirit would guarantee that evocation would restore it fully. “Of The Falcon” items are less nonsensical if there is a chance your hunter will actually run out of mana. Other classes had similar itemization challenges, and all of those were removed by tier 0.5 and other grotesquely overtuned dungeon items.
PROBLEM 2: catch-up mechanisms
Although catch-up mechanisms existed before 1.10, most notably in the form of Dire Maul, before 1.9 every character was supposed to progress through content in a linear way: you got to level 60, did some BRD and Lower Blackrock Spire runs, then Scholomance/Strat/Dire Maul, then progressed into Upper Blackrock Spire, then Molten Core/Zul’Gurub and so on. Once The Burning Crusade was announced and it became clear that even dedicated players would struggle to reach the end of the game’s content before the expansion was released, an effort was made by Blizzard to streamline dungeons and make high-end gear more reliably farmable. Instead of mostly greens, bosses from easy dungeons now dropped blues only, and sometimes even purples. That mostly invalidated Molten Core as a cost-effective way to gear up, and even Zul’Gurub was mostly abandoned in favor of running the same few dungeons repeatedly. A game that once turned PvE progress into an epic, year-long quest was now operating under the assumption that any content that came before the current patch was outdated and should be abandoned.
PROBLEM 3: threat
The way threat worked in Vanilla was one of the best ideas Blizzard ever had: you could greatly out-dps your tank, but there was a cap to how much you could damage the boss before it one-shot you and you couldn’t engage adds as soon as they came out. Fresh adds also had the tendency to go for the healer. Threat added a layer of complexity to every fight and made sure that only by listening to each other and planning the encounter beforehand could you ever hope to complete the harder encounters. Additionally, a major decision had to be made by your tanks: should they focus their build on dps, in order to generate as much threat as possible and maximize the raid’s dps ceiling or should they be an uncrushable wall of a million hp? Because of those variables, there was a place in the game for druids, paladins and even shamans to tank. Their role would usually be different from the warrior’s, who would usually handle the main boss, and in most situations you would prefer a warrior over a druid but speccing into feral, for example, was a good way to provide good dps along with offtanking abilities (as long as you knew how to powershift). Depending on the boss they were currently progressing on, some warriors tanks abandoned the protection tree after taking a few essential talents and went straight into arms, so they could use Mortal Strike and keep the boss on them.
1.11 carried with it one of the biggest changes in wow’s history: Shield Slam now did much more damage and generated more threat per rage than Mortal Strike could ever hope to. Threat suddenly became an afterthought: your fury warriors could go crazy at any point of the fight, your mages could abandon their threat-reducing talents and the boss would never leave the main tank. That meant that whatever classes could do the most damage were the best, period. There was no utility that a balance druid could ever hope to provide that would be better than the extra dps brought by an extra rogue or mage. Warriors, a class whose purpose was to tank, was suddenly the best dps in the game once they had Naxxramas gear. They were also the only viable tanks, with no other class ever coming close: they had the most armor, they were uncrushable and uncritable, they had Shield Wall AND they generated the most amount of threat (although paladins with smart itemization could beat them in AoE threat).
PROBLEM 4: Cross-realm battlegrounds
Cross-realm battlegrounds were a welcome change when they were announced, but the overall effect has been, over time, detrimental to the community aspect of the game. You no longer knew your allies or your enemies and every battleground’s outcome became pretty much random because when you are by yourself, farming HK’s is always more fun than teaming up to take a tower.
IN SHORT
It is my belief that 1.10 and the patches that followed it destroyed Vanilla WoW as we knew it. It is also my belief that true Vanilla players will want some changes to be made in order to keep the original experience intact, and that the private server community wants an easy-mode game in which you have access to +spell power dungeon items and craftables at release and in which everything up to C’thun is not only puggable, but facerollable.
To someone outside the two main “Classic factions” that might be reading: don’t think for a second that purists are “classic players” while non-purists are “retail players”. Most purists I have seen posting know next to nothing about Vanilla. They think they have the game figured out but if you placed 40 of them in green gear at Molten Core’s entrance they wouldn’t be able to clear the first pull.