There is a lot of talk about not balancing anything being the classic experience. It’s absolutely not because the classic experience received constant iteration both in bug fixes AND balance. Balance patches should be grouped with content in each of the phases because a lot of classes were balanced a specific way when that content was released. It will be a completely different, and imo worse experience overall to leave it permanently anchored at 1.12.
Group the balance changes that happened up to the release of the specific things coming out in each phase. When Dire Maul comes out, the game should receive all of the balance changes that happened in classic up to that point. Same for BWL, AQ, etc.
If you really want to preserve the classic experience - this is how.
I’ve always been in the “it would be so cool to get true progression, see some of the weird quirky mechanics that happened early in vanilla” camp
It would be really hard to do properly though, and blizzard decided on 1.12 ages ago. Imagine fresh server launches requiring a different client download, that would be yikes
There is no time. They’re doing it this way to reduce development effort, and we’re two weeks away from launch. When they launch with 1.12, there’s no way they can roll that back, test that all the bugs fail correctly and release again.
As to the subject, seems like a lot of useless work to break things intentionally so that you can fix them later because some people are compelled to take the “authentic” thing to the nth degree.
The best data they have is from 1.12 and even that isn’t entirely complete and they still needed to look at videos and such. This is a major reason they just went with 1.12
Compromise is a negotiation of expectations. What I personally want is balance released exactly the same way it was in classic. What other people want is some weird thing that never existed because they think it’s more authentic. The compromise is grouping to each phase - so yes, literally anything happening other than this La La Land notion that 1.12 was the most balanced patch and should never be changed forever the end, is me getting what I want.
I disagree with you 100%. And not from a time perspective. From a balance itself perspective. IMO - 1.1 was terrible. 1.2 incrementally better, and so on, until they reached the OK balance of 1.12.
Better to just have the OK balance all along. There’s no reason to recreate terrible when you have OK simply because “that’s how it was.”
Definitely not right. The game SHOULD launch at 1.12, it should just also evolve over time because so much of the content we are going to experience received those changes before you played it. There is heaps of time before phase 2, 3, 4, etc. The game should absolutely still receive balance iteration.
That seems so trivial and silly to me. If you didn’t experience it when it happened too bad? I mean this seems like taking things way too far in the realm of reliving things. The thing most people want back from “the classic experience” is the whole concept of community and giving a crap about your main vs what is currently being played out on live. Not reliving patch notes verbatim.