I’m Basîl, resident boomkin in Exit Strategy (Benediction[A], formerly of Heartseeker[A].) A few days ago I was selected to be a part of the community council forums, and so far I’m one of just two (from what I can tell) representatives for Classic (compared to ~40 retail reps.) Invites aren’t done going out yet, but in the meantime, I’m doing my best to collect as much information, anecdotes, and opinions on how people feel about the state of the game to further pass on to the devs in the CC forums.
I’d like to tackle some tough topics head on; botting, RMT, the WoW Token, raid nerfs, the economy, and expand upon server xfers (see more here: State of TBC Servers ) as well as QoL changes you’d like to see ingame, and how we can better move forward going into ( the probably happening) WotLK Classic and future SoM seasons.
If anyone has any feedback about Classic as a whole (Classic Era, SoM, TBC all included) I would love to hear it for an upcoming post of mine. The last thing I would want to do is accidentally ‘further my own agenda.’
Feel free to ping me, reach out to me ingame, quote me, etc anytime there’s something you want me to see otherwise. Cheers, thanks in advance!
How about the myriad of things that broke in game (not talking about addons) when the Classic Era servers were updated to 1.14? Lots of missing/broken/not working reports have been submitted but very few have been addressed. Would be nice to get some word on when that work will be tackled/completed.
Does a 20:1 ratio accurately reflect the population of the retail to classic player base? As a classic gamer, this makes me sad. I don’t think the classic TBC issues are any secret, you just named them (minus raid nerfs, idc much either way tbh). We can have a couple hundred people echo the problems in this thread, Bliz might fix one, 18 months from now.
I’d like to add a couple of issues, from my point of view, regarding SoM since it’s new. I think Blizzard missed the mark and blatantly contradicted the idea of SoM by allowing R14 gear in the game (and twice as easy to obtain). The whole point of the season was to make raids more difficult, and they did, but six weeks from now every semi-serious toon will have R14 weapons. It destroys the spirit of “fresh”. Instead of farming your pre-bis and/or T0.5 set, you’re sitting in AV’s all day. Blizzard should’ve kept the BG rep gear in the game, and removed honor completely.
That brings me to my next point. Do away with BG premades. You had it right with the 5 man cap on BG premades. This includes AV premades as well. In classic you had alliance 40 man premades, now you have 40 man horde premades. It’s boring for both sides.
Lastly, I think SoM should’ve kept world buffs. Most of the hardcore players (that SoM supposedly is to attract) enjoyed raiding with wbuffs. That’s more of an opinion rather than an issue though.
I’m only playing TBC but i will make a short list of things that I think need fixing from a gameplay perspective (I won’t talk about server health)
First of all, I think that some changes that aren’t completely true to how retail TBC was are needed for today’s playerbase. As long as they don’t take away from the spirit of the game, I think it’s fine to have some changes. A large portion of the playerbase today play to compete on warcraft logs and speedruns. That is just the nature of playing a game that is “figured out”, the players find new ways of making the content meaningful.
These are a list of things I think should be changed
Duel spec (added to tbcc) - This is pretty popular and I think it would encourage PVP participation and world pvp.
Make T6 (bt/mh) content challenging- On the PTR at the moment, these raids are a complete joke and don’t provide any challenge whatsoever. I know that these raids were not as hard as SSC/TK prenerf originally but they should be tuned up to be more in line with the difficulty of those raids.
Reduce the phase 4 time - A long phase 4 would contribute to a content draught and cause players to quit if Phase 4 goes for too long. I believe the length of phase 1 caused a lot of people to quit out of boredom.
Remove battle chickens from the game - This lvl 45 trinket from classic is way too strong and it negatively impacts the game, resulting in content that is trivialized with high enough dps. This also affects parsing, which as I mentioned is a big part of why people play classic.
If blizzard thought drums were worth nerfing, then this should apply to chickens aswell (27% haste for 4 mins). This will continue into wrath if nothing is done now.
Going into wrath, I would like to see some changes
Change random dungeon finder - I’m not sure on what the solution is to this, but RDF makes the open world feel dead. It also creates very toxic player interactions, where people just speedrun through dungeons without any communication. Maybe make RDF only for heroics? which gets me to the next point.
Make Heroic dungeons much harder. Heroics are a complete joke in wrath. You literally just pull all the mobs to the bosses and aoe everything down. Even in fresh 80 gear it’s way too easy, once you get raid gear it’s 10x worse.
Tune the heroic 25 mans to be harder. These heroics should be a challenge and with today’s players, they will be looking for one. If players don’t like harder content, they can do the normal modes.
I have a few, very simple and extremely popular requests.
Dual specialization would be an amazing addition, ala Wrath of the Lich King. It would breathe new life into the game for many of us;
Add back to the game the ability to summon people to raid instances - this was removed and it didn’t make much sense, just seems like an useless change that only harms QoL;
Add 40yd drums back to the game - since Tinnitus was introduced, there’s no point anymore in having weak drums since Leatherworking is no longer necessary for every raiding character;
Full on retail-like LFG feature, for dungeons and raids. The current LFG tool is unfortunately really useless;
COMMUNICATION - this one is big. Blizzard doesn’t talk to the Classic community at all. T6 PTR was just randomly dumped and taken down with no notice. Nerfs and buffs are announced and players are never heard. Classic players feel completely ignored.
Address Chicken, I think limiting to 1 squawk buff Is probably a good compromise.
Merge Server or give free transfers to everyone. Most players are going to mega servers that are 9-1 faction ratios and the new players are all the dominated faction.
Allow people to farm scrolls in a better way. I would like to see farming scrolls be more like firewater in classic. This would help people farm there consumables.
Communication of changes and a roadmap of more minor changes.
Have a heroic and non heroic raid. This would allow guilds to be able to have hard content if wanted and easier content for other players.
Change heroics to be tuned in a more fun manner. A lot of people dont enjoy heroics due to effort/comp needed to complete them.
If you want changes like heroic modes and LFG just go play retail. If you cant clear the content, to bad! People pushed for classic wow to remain classic so leave it alone.
I think a PvP dual spec that is only active in PvP instances (and only changeable in capital cities to prevent abuse like changing specs on the fly to accommodate different arena comps, etc) is a good middle ground between 0 dual spec like it is now, and the unlimited dual spec like it is in wotlk. This would help make PvP more accessible and give people a reason to log on and keep the game (and the economy) flowing. A LOT of people (myself included) already don’t PvP solely because of the cost; even barring that, having to wait until your raid guild is done with raiding for the week to PvP feels bad.
I’d love to hear people’s takes on that idea in particular.
If we had dual spec, I’d want it available outside of BG’s so I could have one spec to farm and one to raid. Would be totally useless to someone who doesn’t PVP otherwise.
I totally agree, I personally would use a farm spec + pve spec if given the choice, but assuming they decline to add in dual spec early, I think having a pvp-specific middle ground is the next step towards compromise. I’d far prefer to just have dual spec no strings attached added in before anything else regarding it
Looking at ironforge population seems like only a smaller subset of players actually pvp. Would be a nice change for a few. I also think from a technical standpoint this would probably be harder to implement and classic resources are very low
Your about to see how easy a un nerfed BT is going to be. Will be easier then Vashj and KT. Allowing people to increase the difficult will help people have a longer progression window
LFG tool promotion that i see in this thread is awful. What made classic classic was its necessary communication and talking to people to get anything done. LFG tools are just another way for ppl to afk and not put any effort into actually looking for something and making the game more single than multi-player. it strips away communication and community. there won’t be any more LFG and people talking to one another if an improved and more reliant lfg tool is in place. who wants that? no one. having problem finding dungeons? then we should enable free transfers or merge servers. lfg tool isnt the answer for that.
I like the idea of dual spec. it would mean more tanks could tank since most are doing PVP for their PVE gear when it is not raid days. Would help with less raid log too imo.
I also support making content more challenging for future phases and more communication on when nerfs/releases are happening (please give us actual info instead of “surprises”). If making it challenging is seen as gatekeeping, then implement it where you have x amount of time to do it “hard mode” and then like a month or so before next phase its nerfed for casual access.
Ill admit i have been playing on a wotlk naughty server lately, so I know what harm RFD does. Although I think that having dungeons so easy in wrath amplifies the problem.
As for duel spec, couldn’t you just make it so it can’t be used in arenas to avoid exploitiation or maybe put a cooldown on the time you can switch specs?
For SoM please looking into a dedicated server for hardcore.
Just check Obsidian Edge ‘non official hc server’ for how successfully it has been, and I’m sure an actually official hc where 1 life = death would be even more popular