Yawn just keep trying to manipulate words to fit your narrative. You’re a vanilla purist, accept that the world is changing around you and you can’t keep up, go back to era buddy. You’re just making your position worse here.
Not liking RDF is perfectly normal opinion I think the best dungeon experience for me was in classic!vanilla doing levelling dungeons and that’s how I found my guild (doing ZF) which I’ve stuck with for like 5 years now. And I have good memories of that time period I remember the top guild on the server trying to recruit me because I was playing so good in a dungeon run that interaction still makes me happy thinking about
Thats great and all, but RDF didn’t take that away from you. RDF stands for random dungeon finder, not guild finder, not friend finder. Its for dungeons, use it for what its for.
My wife met her boyfriend thru RDF.
I do think it sort of cannibalizes the natural social component of doing dungeons, but I think the game needed to add it for the convenience you do a ton more dungeons thanks to RDF even if every run blends together
Some people are social, some people aren’t. Social people will do social things, antisocial people won’t. Do what suits you, but don’t blame the other because things changed.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that is the experience of a lot of people, but perhaps it’s not just RDF vanilla dungeons just felt so much cooler and longer which made people want to interact more whereas tbc and wotlk dungeons are all hallways. With some exceptions I had some great interactions in arcatraz just cus it was such a deadly dungeon. Wrath dungeons are very lame in my opinion
RDF didn’t take away the social experience, it just enabled the asocial people to participate. People who want to talk during dungeons will, and people who don’t won’t
Vanilla dungeons, while iconic and nostalgic, were just poorly designed. Too many mechanics and classes were so poorly designed there wasn’t enough answers. People had to get creative. Dungeons took too much time to complete. Some people thought this was enjoyable, as an adult I can see that it was just poor game design, as a teenager I thought it was just difficult to be difficult.
I think whether it’s better depends on who you are and what class you play.
A lot of people just tagged along for the ride. And they’re likely the people most, harmed by class changes. From vanilla all the way to Wrath you could look and point at classes that were really easy to play (PALADIN). These people were by no means great players. But they could at least coast by doing normal modes. That’s sort of coming to an end. With increased class complexity across the board kind of pushes these people out. I’ve already pretty well noticed that people who are most likely to have abandoned the game were playing hunters, pallies and disc priests. We even had one ret pally say “you know I don’t understand ret so I’m just going to play hunter.”
And then a lot of classes do get improvements (and they’re usually the most commonly played classes). But it would be quite the stretch to say warrior is just better. While they did get tanking buffs, they stay at the bottom of the tanking totem pole. If pallies were at the bottom of the totem pole you’d say, well yeah but they have buffs (one of which can only be offered by a druid as an alternative) and raid utility and raid cooldowns. Pallies are one of the two classes with armor buff, one of two classes with 5% stats buff… whereas warriors share each buff with four different classes… the buffs (which used to be special) are now shared with 4-6 classes.
Fury also got hooped. It didn’t really go up in damage at all… and now does half the damage of arms. There’s literally no spec worse than a fury warrior it’s sub-smite priest damage now.
I think a lot of specs are having a hard time, none as bad as probably a disc priest. This is a spec that used to spam shields and maybe drop prayer of mending to bounce between the tanks (OH GAWD LET IT GO TO THE OTHER TANK). And they could top the meters spamming 1-2 buttons. Now their spells are very inflexible. To get healed with atonement you have to be within 15 yards of the enemy being attacked. If you want to be healed by prayer of healing you have to be within 15 yards of the person being targeted. So a lot of the group makeups that’ll toss casters into feral groups for the crit are really hard for a disc priest to heal now. You now have to fight with your groups and fight with your raids to stack up closer to each other.
You can try talking to an RDF group but a lot of them don’t even speak the same language
I like them but they’re designed to just run a couple times at most, if you need a specific item like something off the emperor in BRD you’re going to get sick of it
Uh this thread is all over the place, but i just wanted to reply to this
As someone that quit in wod and went to pservers for like a decade this is a very false statement.
Vanilla was always THE pserver. The best scripted, ran, hype behind it etc. Literally over a million characters were created on Nostalrius alone. Its the entire reason you are even able to play Classic.
I played every pserver xpac available, almost every server that launched in the 2010’s decade, and ill tell you wotlk was nowhere close to what vanilla had in playerbase. There were multiple wotlk options over the years and they were enjoyable, but no, vanilla servers had much more volume, attention/hype, better scripting, and it isn’t even close.
Your statement I quoted is as absurd as saying the sky is red. It isn’t lol.
You’re ignoring the fact Warmane has been around since 2009 and Nostalrius was only around for one year.
For Nostalrius word got around quick and it was at a perfect time since people were really tired of retail. Thus the explosion in players.
In terms of population they’re definitely comparable, but Nostalrius was definitely the better server. Any other Vanilla Pserver sucked.
Nah there’s literally like a dozen that were great. Yes, nostalrius was the best because it was the newest & used tech for the server that puts blizzard to shame even today. 24k online zero layers, rendering distance changes, authentic base had all the vanilla tweeks etc blizz havent been able to recreate. So it was more technically advanced than the servers that came before it.
There was a giant playerbase that hopped to all the fresh servers and when it was Nostalrius’ turn it got the most attention and non pserver players got into it, blizz lost more subs over it etc.
Your reply makes it seem like nostalrius was just a flash in the pan when in reality like you mentioned its been going on forever. AT was great, their tbc server I even liked, but as someone that had a ton of bis characters on there wotlk was not, even by factors, close to the size of the vanilla pserver audience. Including prior to nostalrius. I can name a grip of successful fresh vanilla projects if you need.
AT / WM had a different style of server and because of it stayed around as the premier wotlk realm. Vanilla phase 1 & 2 on a fresh realm you can’t really compare to another xpac. I mean look at wow subs in 2019 then fall off. I like all these xpacs, but reality is vanilla captured peoples attention more than any other version of the game in the past decade. Officially & unofficially.
Yeah generally moving beyond the 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 1, 2, 2, 2 ,3, 4, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3 style of combat where who can stand in the fire the longest and cheese the mechanics the most to look best is a move in the right direction.
Helps to though that since Vanilla was the least mechanically intensive version of the game it also has the best scripting of any further expansion.
Even the best TBC and Wrath pservers have major issues in scripting, and anything beyond that can be a mess (there are some rather decent cata and mop servers, but you can tell its much harder for them to get the scripting right)
Vanilla just felt the best to play on pservers, you weren’t running into a bug or bad scripting 10 seconds in and quitting like i have on other versions of the game.
Even WM has really bad bugs and scripting in some areas
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Yes, all of your comment is true I agree
Ah that game with the terrible localization.
Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt. Really captures the Ice Mage fantasy. At least you get to respec fire eventually andddd
Fireball, Fireball, Fireball, Fireball, Fireball…
Look if somebody loves Vanilla for the RPG elements, I totally get it. Gameplay wise? It sucks. Objectively, it sucks.
If people don’t like Cata for its overall pacing change, I totally get it. That’s fair. But class design is objectively better. Its essentially cleaned up versions of Wrath specs.
I’ll even go one by one.
FROST DK: Better, DK rune changes are a massive improvement and its genuinely the most improved class design wise.
UNHOLY DK: Same as above.
BLOOD DK: Enormous jump in design. No more “generic DK playstyle with Vampiric Blood and WotN”. Its ACTUALLY its own thing.
FERAL CAT: About the same. Still convoluted AF.
FERAL BEAR: Slightly better, Pulverize gives your Brain something to care about
RESTO DRUID: About the same as Wrath.
BALANCE DRUID: Neutral. Some people love Eclipse, others hate it.
HUNTER: Pretty much the same but slightly better because Focus beats just pressing stuff on CD. This go’s for all specs.
MAGE: Arcane and Frost are about the same, Fire is awesome with new combustion.
COMBAT ROGUE: Same with one new toy.
ASSA ROGUE: Same with one new toy.
SUB ROGUE: Better! Its finally playable in PvE and has an identity moer than "PvP spec
RET PALADIN: Combo points aren’t exciting, but ANYTHING beats “ability off CD, press ability, win”. Better.
PROT PALADIN: See above, its better.
HOLY PALADIN: Willing to concede this one. Some cool changes but combo points on a healer is finnicky.
SHADOW PRIEST: Almost the same, but now with floating purple balls!
DISC PRIEST: The BIGGGGGEST winner in the entire game. No more “PW:S, PW:S, PW:S, PW:S, PW:S”. Great CDs, atonement, you actually have to try.
HOLY PRIEST: Chakras I guess? Meh.
ARMS WARRIOR: Wayyy better. Waaaay better. Finally feels like it has an identity in PvE. Setup for BOOOOOOOOOOOM.
FURY WARRIOR: Fury went brrrrr in Wrath. Fury go brrrrrr in Cata. Fury same, press many buttons fast.
PROT WARRIOR: Pretty much the same.
DEMO LOCK: Same, but stronger. Hard to say here. The weird stat snapshotting stuff is kind a lame.
AFFI LOCK: Pretty much the same.
DESTRO LOCK: An abomination of a spec. One that is absolutely worse off. Idk what happened with Destro in Cata. Idk if they never got around to it. But it requires EVERY SINGLE CORE WARLOCK ABILITY to maximzie its damage. You have MORE dots to manage than AFFLICTION. Comically bad, big downgrade.
ELE SHAM: About the same with some new toys.
ENH SHAM: See the above.
RESTO SHAM: Much much better. Healing rain, raid CDs, more than just a chain healbot.
The gist is that if you liked how things played in Wrath (unless you’re a Paladin who likes rolling their face on the keyboard or a Destro Lock), you’ll like how things play in Cata.
You may not like the overall GAME, but the class design is an upgrade by nearly every metric.
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