The direction of the retail will be forever changed by the overwhelming success of classic. The fact that a majority of players are OVERWHELMINGLY excited for classic is a really good sign of whats to come to retail. If classic does exponentially well they will most likely reintroduce mechanics from the vanilla game back into retail because classic has no inapp purchases such as a character boost,faction change and the most cringe thing of all “store mounts”
Players want to be rewarded for the time and effort they put into the game and the fact that gear is super rare in vanilla is a massive perk that everyone is excited for. You will be rewarded for the time you put into the game. If you no life it you’ll be way stronger than someone that plays two hours a week and gets random titanforged lottery item in retail.
I look forward to gear being super rare in the next expansion and for the welfare gear to be greens and blues while high end pvp and pve gear to be epic. One epic from a mythic dungeon sounds good to me. No more random raid quality epics from world quests or other meaningless content run.
I hope in the next expansion they’ll rotate world quests out every other expansion because two expansions in a row has been really boring and taxing to force yourself to do. I can’t be bothered with boring world quests and think they’ve been a drain on player engagement. The super massive casuals will cry I’m sure but it’s needed for the health of the game.
The ONLY people that like the world quest system as it is now are people that play pokemon and never bothered to learn how to play their classes and just want participation trophies because they’ll never form a raid group or do hard content.
This is my 8th 120 this expansion and I’ve only dinged recently like 3 days ago at most and managed to get normal raid ilvl gear with almost no time investment. The free gear drops need to change. Randomly getting titanforged items feels extremely bad and players have no agency with it.
All the things that feel bad about retail DO NOT exist in classic. No random AP system that doesn’t reward you for your time invested.
My first character I was playing at launch of BFA has a 50 necklace while my horde dk that I leveled up a week or so ago has a 55+ necklace from doing the war campaign.
The same campaign that I did on my alliance dk. The fact that AP requirement has been constantly nerfed makes anyone who played from launch off and on a wasted time investment and it feels really bad. It’s like the dev’s look at a spread sheet when making choices in the game and leave out player enjoyment.