I kind of do the opposite of this. lol It’s like,
Random person: “Legion was the start of retail!”
My brain: “No, because I liked Legion because class halls and cool weapon = yay!”
XD I logically get what they (and you) mean, though. But yeah, I don’t think any one expansion was really the breaking point. It was a growing experience. It’s like … when does a child become an adult? There really is no defined thing. People will say “18th birthday” but it’s not really then in nuance, ya know?
And even if so, there’s not one defining moment that makes people go from an immature 12 year old to a responsible adult with a job. There were so many stages and “bad” things during the “good” years of someone’s life.
You can trace roots to retail all the way back to BC if you really want in the form of badge gear and the root of profession specializations.
Anyway, random rant and I’m not even disagreeing with you or anything. XD Just adding my take. I dislike retail now, but I do know I’ve found something from every “retail-ish” expansion that I’ve personally found fun and thought made the game better.
Exactly. I’ve never played a game that I liked 100%. It’s always a cost benefit analysis. Even vanilla. There are many things I didn’t like about it. BC was better than Vanilla. Wrath was better in some way then BC and worse in others. For me WoD was where it began to go down, each expansion getting worse and worse until the bad parts out weighed the fun.
Most of the things that put me off is the overall story, the visuals, and how Blizzard does wrong to their customers. WoD was a perfect example of this type of failure. The DK tier looked like rainbow puke on some kind of robot, the writing was bad… (why didnt we just destroy the dark portal?) and then they also removed flight while selling flying mounts and lying to players about immersion and being out in the world. Once you experience the world the first time it doesnt have the same impact the second time around, and there was no reason to go out in the world so people stayed in their garrison mostly getting mythic gear from the mission table.
RDF isnt even in the equation of why WoD was a failure. Its not even part of the equation for cata. In fact I would argue in pvp tank with vengeance stacking caused a lot of issues, as well as Tol’Barad being such a poorly designed battle. It was so imbalanced in favor of the defenders and they took out mass summons that people just stopped playing.
Cata without RDF would be a waste of time. So many loading times and flight paths. Each zone is going to have a loading time because you get there from a portal, and then you have to flight path or even just fly to the dungeon and then have another loading screen.
today i did H++ dtk. The dps was so bad we couldn’t kill trollgore. The leader was in full quest greens. Heck, might have boosted to 80… total group dps was like 9k
But I thought such bad groups only happened with rdf?
I know what you mean, retail has gone so far from everything that was wow to me that I only play classic (wotlk) even though there is no rdf and that was one of my favorite wow features. I felt like dragonriding was the only redeeming quality for me for dragonflight, well, after I got enough glyphs. I just liked soaring around lol.
this is not a problem in lfg. This was intended. Did you never hear of a magical day in a place called wailing caverns?
No? one day a group of 5 brave adventurers found each other in lfg.
And not 1 of them was a proper tank. And one person, no longer working at blizzard btw, asked a dude to tank off spec. Not setup for it, but they said yes.
2 things that made this story so funny.
WC is not later dungeons. Wrath and even tbc dungeons are not WC.
Also, LFD if implemented like it is in retail will pull a proper tank. YOu phase in as the spec you signed up as. My say DK’s changed spec on the drop in no manual input by me.
Auto changing based on your available dual spec would be cool, but that also sounds like a lot of effort for the classic team.
But this also doesn’t work quite as well until Cata/Mists and later, where certain specs are locked to a role, like I believe in Cata Blood became Tank, and only tank. Frost for example, can both be tank and DPS, and Blood can certainly DPS to an extent in Wrath as well.
I played through Cata, and it was a long time ago, so I can’t say my memory is perfectly clear! Do I vaguely remember having to find dungeons before being able to queue for them? Was RDF available immediately?
I honestly don’t remember how/whether it affected anything at all.
I am interested though in how the design and gameplay of Cata is so impacted by RDF that it would be strange not to have it.
Without RDF the daily dungeon would have to be some NPC you’d have to go back to Org/SW for, and then you’d have to travel to the dungeon to run it, Vashjr daily? Good luck lmao everyone hates that zone as much as they hate occulus, and without the water breating/seahorse nobody is gonna trek there themselves.
Levelling wise, Cata changed the old world but the dungeons are still gonna suffer, nobody is gonna run SM/SFK/RFK/RFD/Maraudon as alliance, they are all way too much of a pain to get to.
Ive done it here before. They used to outright ban you for saying that here on the forums but now they no longer do unless they have solid proof. They run a software to check who is using those private servers and can detect them on your PC even if you are not running it so it is a VERY good idea to not log into WoW on a friends comupter if you dont know what is on there or on a computer at a gaming place where other people use it, cuz if they have those servers on and Blizz runs their software to check if you are using one, you will get perma banned and your chances of coming back to WoW are next to 0%.
i dont like those servers cuz at any one given point in time they can shut down. I play on WoW servers made by Blizzard.
I highly agree with H+ in Classic now. I will not be doing them cuz I did hundreds, maybe thousands of dungeons back in original Wrath. I did them so much that I am forever sick of doing them…like if you have a cool song and you listen to it several thousand times and then end up hating it.
So no Wrath dungeons for me. But I did think the heroics were too easy back when we did them. There were people on my server soloing them way before Wrath ended. They are too easy, very fun. but easy. So H+ IS needed. It is a fact that they are too easy and then become unfun as a result. And not only that but since this is the second time around for most of us, we now have well over a decades worth of doing WoW dungeons and also doing all those on our alts. We know those fights in and out.
And also, Blizzard actually knows about quite a few of the private servers, they are not shutting them down, what they are doing instead is finding out who plays on them and how to contact them, then they discuss things about them. A lot of the people building and also playing on those private serves are the same exact age as those who build and play on WoW servers made by Blizzard and done by Blizzard. So when Blizzard talks to these people, it’s like looking into a mirror.
Wild stab as to how they made wrath classic is they took a backup pre 3.3. added 3.3.5 patchs sans rdf (class changes and such).
cata there is no non-rdf back up. also since spaghetti codes happens, I don’t they think have the staff to remove and track bugs for things looking for it if removed.
zulgurub, zul aman, HOUR OF TWILIGHT those dungeons dropped catch up purple gear and blue currency (valor i think?) so you could buy firelands tier pieces,
all those places had RDF and you went in kill and went out even in zulgurub nothing to be amazed the community evolved and as time pases you have better prepared players nothing to be afraid of.