Since the announcement of Classic, there’s been a lot of buzz about #NoChanges and “authenticity.” Many of the same folks will follow guides and “metas” to the letter. In the end, I feel they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Large groups of players following metas has lead to many unpopular changes. There’s a strange sense of irony here, though… folks really should have seen all this coming. After all, anyone who’s been playing since before Cataclysm should recall some of the big shake-ups.
Boosts came from a combination of folks being tired of leveling and to allow new players to jump in the fray with their friends. I’m not sure why folks were surprised we got a boost for TBC, considering how crazy the dungeon boost meta has been
Tokens came from player demand, and to curb 3rd party gold sales. The AoE farming techniques and jump/stealth runs that were so heavily used in the beginning caused some issues with the economies on servers. These same techniques could also be used by the gold farming companies. Would we really be that surprised if tokens were to show up?
Talent trees disappeared after Cataclysm because people were following build guides more and more as time went on (Ghostcrawler confirmed this in an interview, linked below) and many talents went completely unused https://www.engadget.com/2011-12-08-ghostcrawler-on-seeing-the-forest-for-the-talent-trees.html
Class homogenization clearly came from the performance-based metrics players use throughout all content
Mythic dungeons and raids came about because folks figured out how to min/max fairly well, which trivialized a lot of content
So, the upshot - if you like retail, keep following those metas. Each expansion we get in the Classic series will be that much closer to retail for ya, they’ll just have new twists.
the one where you realize your constant trolling on wow forums will never truly prop you up against your crippling depression. You show your a$$ here every day yet you still cry yourself to sleep. Why do it if it doesn’t work?
Another indication of how metagaming will lead to Retail-like changes:
Gear!
Look at how the itemization changed over the years.
We have Classic gear… even the raid gear was filled with spirit and each tier had only one set for each class. It was almost as if the devs intended for each tier set to work do a degree across all specs of each class. People figured out what stats worked best for each role, and started gearing that way, ignoring the apparent intention of the devs
If you look at the itemization in TBC, there are tier sets for each spec now, and spirit is gone off of most non-healer gear. This trend continued on into TBC. Folks still geared based off of a stat priority, sometimes ignoring how the devs intended us to gear
During the Cataclysm pre-patch, they gave each class incentive to wear their class-specific armor. Plate for warrior, paladins and death knights; mail for hunters and shamans, etc…
In modern retail, they’ve simplified the stats, and made it so the pieces convert to the ideal main stat, based on your spec
I didn’t think I minded jump/skip runs and im on the fence about them currently. I think players taking the time to learn the strats of a run like MARA and stuff is pretty interesting. I enjoyed watching people do it myself and learning. I like the hunter kite with princess/aligator boss in there as I thought it was clever and took a bit for my slow brain to learn the route with all the turns lol. The other hunter one took alot of planning and practice but then became easy in classic. (not a mage and never got boosted by one so I can’t speak for them).
What I hate is all the skips in normal/heroic TBC dungeons that really don’t save time with the slightest error. I did a SP “jump run” where you jump off the bridge really only skipping a max of 3 mobs that don’t hit hard. Well… Quag wiped us due to our 2 pallies not dispelling poisons… twice… and they still wouldn’t clear the mobs instead of jumping, missing, and running back to try again… We had people failing the jumps myself included once since the pat turned around LOL and really would have saved like 30 minutes just by killing the mobs… I wish people would stop min/maxing and just play the game how it was intended for fun.
Gold farm aoe runs that at least take thought I have to think about more. I know the real reason there are so many prot pallies for scholo farm =) but with the economy on my server at least the way it is, i dont think aoe gold farms will be too impactful with primal/profession gold making vs straight aoe mob runs of old content. but thats TBD when the player base settles and we have more set communitites with the same people logging in daily/weekly instead of a mass of players that returned and will eventually burn out.
Talent trees was an attempt at allowing the player to make a bad decision, thus making skill-gap between players wider (also lowering gear component barrier because if you tune something for bad player in good gear, good player in lesser gear can do it). But players now have more information and in general more skill. Reduction of talent trees was OK, but removal of some spells was a bridge too far. Unlike talents, which are set, situational spells could be activated at a given time without respec. So even if they had very small window of usabaility, using it at that time felt rewarding.
I’ll agree to the first lart if the statement. The second part is laughable. Skill matters so much less in Classic PvE since everyone stacks things in their favor to such anextreme degree.
I agree with this. I was thinking of doing a fresh 1-70 with no addons other than bartender and not using any guides for that character, playing something totally new and just figuring things out as I go. I think that could be an alternate fun way to play the game (if there is a community out there for that lol).