How do people come up with this nonsense. What they’re doing is very much in the spirit of Vanilla. Just a bunch of interesting, fun abilities for players to try out and have a blast. Not the overly balanced, diluted, boring Retail experience of an e-sport game.
But where was all this outrage when Blizz shoved crap like Mythic dungeons into Wrath? It’s amazing how people aren’t upset about stuff like that, but somehow bothered stuff like this. Don’t like it? Classic Era still exists. Seasons exist for whacky scenarios.
It’s not in the spirit of vanilla at all. You obviously haven’t played vanilla much. Vanilla has very careful conservative tuning. Not random huge multipliers on everything. It also has strong class and faction identity which has be completely demolished. Utterly braindead take. Amazing.
In any event, Classic Era is right over there for you for your carefully conservative tuning. Seasons are for fun. This will be fun.
By the way, unlike 90% of the people posting here I actually played Vanilla. And this is how it felt. Mystery, intrigue. A simple video game people didn’t take super seriously. If you think this Season is reminiscent of Retail, you’re nuts. It’s much more like Vanilla.
Most people are actively posting here are actively playing vanilla right now on era.
I also remember playing vanilla when I was a little kid, and how each expansion dota became better and better relative to wow, until during wotlk I just quit until 2019. (except for trying a few expansions for a couple weeks each to be reminded of how bad it had become)
Era is basically vanilla - we just have more information and the server is a bit more mature.
SOD is without a doubt retail development mindset. Era is vanilla. Labels don’t really matter though, and are mostly subjective in these cases, all we want is our era to remain unaffected by these proposed changes.
Classic is NOTHING like Vanilla was. Gameplay wise yeah it’s similar. The playerbase could not be more different. So I welcome this Season which actually embraces that Vanilla aura of mystery and intrigue and emphasis on fun over balance.
And I wasn’t a kid in Vanilla. I was in my mid-20s. I remember it very well.
The players you meet in your journey are somewhat irrelevant to game design.
I met great people in both vanilla, 2019, and era - but that has nothing to do with slapping retail abilities on era toons and somehow pretending that it has any resemblance to vanilla.
It is a retail minigame.
If they wanted to do something inline with the spirit of vanilla there were so many better options.
It was a deliberate choice, it would be crazy to think it was done out of ignorance.
It is basically the same game with more knowledge and developed server - perhaps you are a different person but the gameplay, values, mobs, and likely even the code is likely extremely similar.
When I say retail I don’t mean any specific game I mean the idea that we can just throw more stuff into the game and it will make it better, without thinking about the core identity of classes and the value of their defined roles.
I love how people have been complaining about how classes are pigeonholed into certain roles in Vanilla. So Blizz does something about that, and people still complain. If you want every tank to be a warrior, play Classic Era. That’s not what the Season project is for. It’s for experimenting.
Nah, the game is better when no one plays certain specs.
Yeah and this isn’t Vanilla. It’s a seasonal server. The important part is the design philosophy. An emphasis on fun is what Vanilla was all about.
If you think Retail is just throwing in crap without thinking about the effect, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s RIDICULOUSLY overanalyzed and nitpicked down to the tiniest little thing. They would never just throw dozens of abilities into the game and say ‘let’s see what happens’.
If you actually care about what era players have been discussing prior to all these recent announcements, spend some time reading the old posts in these forums.
Either way, best of luck to you, you are in the era forums and confused about why players don’t want retail changes on era. We never did, and have been making anti class change posts long before SOD was announced.
The standard response to people asking for blizz to do something about the pigeonhole you mention was: “go back to retail”.
He’s usually on these forums hating on Blizzard for everything they do so the recent turnaround is weird.
I played A LOT of Vanilla and A LOT of Classic and some Era. As in from the release day of Vanilla and every day after that until TBC. I was in a tryhard Vanilla guild, we didn’t just “explore and mess around” or whatever. Think the 50 DKP minus raid leader whenever mistakes got made (I’ve since been in guilds that are more chill).
Then I played Classic a lot. So I probably have way more experience from both of those time periods so can I actually compare.
Anyway, I think Blizzard is trying to make things fun and shake things up. I don’t think this is some sort of a devious plan or something. How it’s going to play out or if it is going to “feel like Vanilla” I don’t know yet but I will try it.
Vanilla was never a game where classes had a bunch of choices though. That came later. Warriors weren’t stacked like in Classic or Era but not many people played ret paladins or feral druids as DPS in raids in Vanilla. I remember doing things like going into lower-level dungeons with 2 hunters and a rogue and a shammy and clearing them but being able to do things like that has never really stopped.
