Classic vs Retail: Less is more, or restrictions create character

Lore Story Forum
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I want to talk about how the restrictions and limitations of Classic created a far more cohesive and immersive world than what is currently on offer in retail. First off, Classes. Classic is far, far more restrictive in terms of what race can play as what class, with the only notable exception being Gnome Warrior. You can really tell a lot of thought was put into the selection of available classes for any given race. Speaking of Gnomes again, gameplay wise what they are really lacking is a healer class of any sort. Gameplay wise having Priest or Paladin Gnomes is sensible enough, but the Vanilla Devs at Blizz held off. Why? Because culturally Gnomes are very scientific. Why would they pray for divine blessings when their entire culture is based on scientific endeavor?

Compare that to Goblin Shamans. Even now, after all these years I still shake my head at this decision. Shamans are all about natural order, ancestral spiritualism, and tribal ritual. Goblins are greedy, destructive, mechanically-minded money grubbers. Ferengi in Fantasy form. On top of that Horde already had 3/4 of their original races have access to the Shaman class. There was no need for Goblin shamans. There is no believable excuse for Goblin shamans. It’s just careless and immersion breaking.

Let’s talk more broadly about narrative and world building. In Classic you did not have voiced characters and grand cinematics telling you how dire a threat demons were. Demons were a threat because you almost always encountered them in difficult areas, and these encounters were few and far between. More than that, there were Greater Demons. Elite Monsters of incredible power and demonic ability. In the Blasted Lands, or parts of Northern Kalimdor these guys were rare, mean, and required teamwork and effort to bring down.

From this and other world building you get the impression that the Burning Legion were an other-worldly demonic threat. They created the Old Horde, Scourge, and leveled Dalaran with a wave of the hand. The idea of players, even named characters, facing Sargeras was laughable. Like expecting the Fellowship to face Morgoth when they could barely claw victory from his lackey, Sauron.

But in Retail we get Legion, where the titular enemy gets beaten and bludgeoned like any other mook force, with a grand ending cinematic where we zip past Sargeras in the Millennium Falcon…exactly the kind immersion wrecking comic-book styled tripe Vanilla so expertly avoided by treating demons as the ultimate enemy, with only lesser demon spawn capable of being slain by a lone character.

There are many, many more examples of this but I think there are definite lessons to be learned from not having access to almost all combinations of class and race, as well as the merits of a far more subdued and subtle approach to world building.

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I will argue that this is because when WoW first released it had no overarching storyline and things just more or less happened. The grand story of Vanilla was Warcraft 3. And that’s fine.

The problem however, is you can’t just have the players fighting random bandit kings in caves and Blizzard was clearly itching to tell Warcraft stories again. I present exhibit A, TBC, when Blizz was trying to tell an overarching story in an mmo for the first time.

It took a few years to not suck at it but Blizz now knows how to tell a story. Being good at it is a separate matter. But as stated they didn’t want to simply make giant sandboxes with random villains sprinkled throughout forever.

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Sometimes less is better.

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Magic, at least in WoW, has always had its own scientific component. More precisely, magic just has happens to be how the natural order of things is in WoW. Learning healing would be like learning another art form.

Goblins like making deals. The elements have things they want and clearly you can make deals/compromises with them.

You cannot just keep killing nameless mooks forever, and in Blizzard case they wanted an actually finality to many of the story started in Warcraft 3. Which meant everyone from the Legion, the Scourge, Old Gods, to heck, now Sylvanas, is suppose to have an end.

We did the same thing with every force we meant in vanilla. To the point that the Scourge were ultimately still beaten and their leader in EK, Kel’thusad, got utterly wrecked.

To say there are no subtle world building in WoW, at least now in BfA seems abit false, there are things that will ultimately shape how the next few expansion will go down slowly creeping here and there. The most notable obviously is the Shadowlands and my guess is our ultimately conflict with the Void Lords are slowly being sprinkled as well.

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A lot of this sounds likr nostalgia googles sbd not understand how science would react to magic.

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It’s it important to separate the concept of magic, from the universal forces. The reasons gnomes had mages was because arcane magic is a force of order. It operates with laws and logic. If a mage performs the same incantation twice in the same stable environment, then the results will be identical.

During vanilla, the light wasn’t really magic. It was largely about faith and willpower, not scientific law. There was no guarantee that praying the same prayer twice would result in the same effect.

By that logic, however, any race could become a Shaman just by making deals with elementals. Elementals are also known for sharing their power with shamans for the betterment of the world, for maintaining the balance, not exploiting it.

Then again, a number of class options for goblins seem more comical than serious. Take goblin priests. The ones I remember seeing in quests were like those scam priests you see on TV.

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I mean at this point, yes, any race can be a shaman. That could be said of any class.

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Which makes the classes and races less flavorful.

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Or it allows for new flavors. If anything, there is a good chunk of people who prefer none of the classes be race restricted. And some who prefer less restriction(like myself). As an example, people hated when shaman/paladins were no longer faction exclusive. That particular change allowed new stories to be told. Similarly new class/race combos allowed for new stories to be told. Like gnomes getting the hunter class and you having a gnomish hunter follower in Legion.

Personally, I was ok with the goblins shaman and generally like the look of their totems.

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It would require Blizzard to take a look at the races and not hat them all to a particular class, which I don’t necessarily see as a bad thing.

Take for example, a bunch of draenei npcs are some variation of a Light wielder. Which is fine, that’s their culture. But there is very little legitimate reason why a dreanei can’t decide “I’d rather stab my enemies in the back.” You could argue that it doesn’t fit their culture, but I’d counter “Then why is it okay for them to bludgeon someone’s skull open while being fueled by rage?”

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I always thought that draenei and tauren couldn’t become rogues because they’re huge and have echoing hooves. They are not built for being sneaky.

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The more a class is shared among many races the less special it becomes as it gets kind of a generic thing anyone is able to achieve.
Which is why to this very date I still hate that my druidsm is given as a token present to other races every couple expansions.
Or the fact that, in the effort of giving priests to many races, they fell under the Holy Light them. That’s a good reason I like Classic because it reminds me that NE Priests are in fact Priestess of The Moon able to channel Elune’s power onto the battlefield via Starshard/Elune Grace.
They tried giving Paladin a different flavor depending on which race you choose but as usual they got hit by homogenization and as of Legion they were pretty much all “Silver Handy” to me.

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Kultiran Rogues waves at you with their huge gigantic bodies while stealthing their way away from consistency! :rofl:
Of course I know they are rogues because of the Pirate theme but it doesnt make it any less wierd.

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That’s the excuse Blizz likes to use to justify not having certain race/class combos.

I present to you, Mishka, the draenei rogue operative of SI:7. It can happen. But Blizzard like to use the excuse of flavor to restrict it. And I get why, from a pen and paper RPG standpoint. But to me, it stops holding water when they do things in game that clearly go against it.

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Touche, I forgot about Mishka.

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I gave up halfway through BFA tbh.

To the subject at hand, it does seem odd on Ally side that NE druids would let other races in on their secrets, since for thousands of years they wouldn’t even let their own women into the Cenarian Enclave. (And yes, this does play into Lilyas’ backstory.)

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And that is all due to a a bunch of retcons to make WoW work. As far as I can gather, they just straight up removed the whole males = druids, females = warriors/priest thing and apparently female druids just existed as long as druids were a thing.

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This is true to an extent—we can now have Gnome hunter npcs with unique personalities that play into the intersection of those two ideas, and players who really like the idea of roleplaying gnome hunters get more freedom.

As a Night Elf mage who rejects all things traditionally Kaldorei, I appreciate the value of that choice.

The trade off, though, is more homogeneity between races and fewer ways for players to express themselves through meaningful character creation choices. The more the races are exactly the same, the less they express.

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Or it would make each class more flavorful by providing each race’s unique take on it.

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Which would be amazing if Blizzard would actually take time and implement those unique takes on each race/class combos.
They should look at how Classic enhances this race/class feeling and try to bring it back to Retail. And as many have suggested over the years they could provide cosmetic glyphs to reflect the uniqueness requiered to make each race/class feel special.

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