You are describing WotLK and for the most part, TBC too, though TBC did have actual elite/group quests that are larely impossible to solo from a level appropriate player.
I dont care what they did to the 1-60 zones, they are faster to level in and atleast they’ve changed, theres nothing interesting about the x’th time you kill hogger or find mankrics wife, if thats the experience you want, SoM is still there, its open, ITS PLAYABLE RIGHT NOW.
As for the actual zones that matter, ie the 80-85 ones, Hyjal is heavy on rails, but the others arent, Uldum and Vashjir are lowkey some of the best leveling zones in all of wow.
So no, WotLK is not an extension of Vanilla in questing, it is separate from Vanilla and somewhat diffent from TBC as quest hubs werent always linked by flight paths and there were far more unsoloable group/elite quests.
Wotlk questing is llargely reduced to a solo ventue and only in extreme circumstances does the game expect you to be doing the content while in a group, much like Cata.
Sounds like you want to play retail, the game scales with your character progression, diablo-lite, man i wish i could grind these world quests over and over for higher ilvl gear, dungeons too!
Lmao, this swamp this is my meta, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
Also asking for stat scaling to be completely thrown out the window :wesmart:
You mean how that is absolutely not the case? If you want an absent antagonist, look for Illidan or KJ in TBC, Arthas’ prescence in northrend is immense, did you even do the quests, did you even explore the world, it is literally a design blizzard (on record) chose to pursue, to put Arthas IN the questing experience.
Yogg, KT, Malygos, the Keepers, Sindragosa, the San’layn.
Do you even play the game?
I mean in the old World, not in the new Cataclysm zones.
I don’t “want retail” - this is my compromise to give people who want CATA stuff something with it not impacting me and the old world at all.
I disagree with most of what you say in your other post too.
I WANT to be able to find the wife 100 times if I feel like it. This is why I came to Classic, because I like this version of the world. I currently have close to 30 characters between level 20 and 65.
I mostly hop between them. I prefer the Vanilla content, which is why I haven’t bothered to level beyond 65 on any character yet.
I mostly like to level alts, level tradeskills, play the economy. Quest. Dabble in PVP (well - I did more then dabble in Classic Vanilla) in a world where I might die if I’m not careful and where it’s fun.
I don’t want a return to something that I’d have to come to terms with like I did when I realised how on-rails and repetitive Cataclysm levelling was. The same 3 quests over – one kill stuff quest – one kill a sub-boss quest – one gather stuff quest – all about 15 seconds away from the quest giver.
It was a terrible design for a game and was designed around plot delivery and getting to endgame expediently, the very antithesis of WoW Classic.
Why would I play SOM? I’m enjoying slowly levelling a variety of alts. Who wants to start again?
If you think the plan for Classic was to just or mostly to relive the raids, then I’m not sure waht to tell you. It was always about the design ethos and going back to versions of the game when it was still good.
Honestly no matter how many changes they implement to cata I won’t play it. I have no desire to play one of my least favourite expansions and the first expansion I quit the game in. I wasn’t hyped for classic just so I could play through every single retail expansion again. It’s a lazy move if blizzard goes down that path and I don’t see many people joining them along it.
Cata had a big step, but re-playing Wrath has shown me it took some major steps away from vanilla and toward retail.
Primarily with the complete segregation of the playerbase by having multiple versions of the same raid. Nothing screams vanilla like 4 versions of the same raid.
It also heavily started the “play the patch not the expansion” philosophy with copious catchup making old content obsolete.
Then of course drastic homogenization of raid buffs. Unique things like WF totem had to be changed into a boring passive shared with DKs.
This actually did the opposite in wrath. By having multiple difficulties you got a lot more over lap between the hardcore raider and the casual raider as there was more opportunity for them to mix.
It also provided a lot more content for casual players since blizzard never really kept up with making separate content in vanilla and TBC(but they did try)
This existed in vanilla and TBC as well. It was less obvious back in the day since people were trickling into the day over the duration. But in classic with virtually the entire player base front loaded it was pretty obvious to see both the catch up mechanics in vanilla and TBC as well as how people got piled up waiting for the next content patch(just like in wrath)
Yet noone can explain why this is boring. I still a mix of all classes in my raids in wrath so homogenization hasn’t really happened.
Dire Maul was added later with better itemized gear that was used for catching up. The 20 man instances were catch up gear for players behind on 40 man raiding. The dungeon set upgrade was added later as catch up gear as well. This catchup making older content less relevant has existed as long as WoW has.
Vanilla had a ton of catch up mechanics. Dungeon sets got upgrades, dungeon loot got upgrades, ZG, AQ 20, heck before resilience pvp gear was also in there.