just initially whine about ally pre-mades to seem legit and then do a 180 about how you’ve seen the light about whatever ally-centric thing you want changed. #gottem
How would this ever fly in a recreation with the strong no-change mentality of the classic community? Even the smallest changes recieve massive resistance and outrage.
Shouldn’t listen to dumb people rage. What people really want is the progression system, grinding, community, and prestige that has been lost in retail. They just don’t know how to articulate it so they say “don’t change it” because they can’t put to words what they liked and didn’t like.
People are always going to min/max or bandwagon onto whatever’s “best” (meta). The ideal solution is to properly balance the game so all choices are good which means there is no meta. A “meta” is the result of an imbalanced game where some choices are simply better than others.
In other words, don’t blame players for a failure of the game developer. We did not design the talents and we cannot properly balance them. All we can do is make the best choices available to us.
there are times when something is a fraction of a % difference and people still talk about how awful balance is. that is not blizz’s fault. it’s the fault of people who watch twitch lords say nothing but ‘x’ is good even if something else is just as good. people always said “within 5% is fine” but when it’s been like that, or close to it, people whine that 5% is literally game breaking and x spec is dead.
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only a retail min/max player could misconstrue real customization options like talent trees so badly. lol
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Yeah, I don’t think people would have too many issues if there were like synergistic comps, like, let’s say Fel Armor gave bonus to healing, so you run like 2 Locks, 1 Healer comps. That’s good. But then Mortal Strike comp would beat that but Mortal Strike isn’t useful against like… ranged CC comp or something.
The issue is that, Locks with SL/SL, Rogues, and Frost Mages are the only viable PVP classes outside of healers, and some healers are better than others.
In PVE, some heroics are really hard without a purge effect, or without CC, and you can’t use all CC (Entangling Roots, Hex not even a thing yet), and if the raids were actually difficult, you’d see everyone get dumped for Hunters and Locks, except the one utility class per party to buff them.
I think you missed the point of what I had written. Players are playing a certain way, and the company is adapting.
I’m curious… If players are playing a game in a certain way, and the developers adapt, how is it their fault?
meanwhile at the very start of classic there were paladins complaining they got accused of being a ninja cuz they rolled need on SPIRIT CLOTH because some guide said that spirit was the BiS leveling stat for them. 
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Real paladins don’t wear paper plate.
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I agree with your post and it is the reason why I refer to the current iteration as TBC Classic (Retail). I believe it simply comes from Activision/Blizzard attempting to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 2004…
MMORPGs had just started to appear on the market and were in many ways still experimental. The first three really successful ones were Meridian 69, Ultima Online, and of course Everquest. These games were really only popular though to a niche set of people. Mostly those of us who grew up playing pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs and enjoyed the prospect of playing in an online world with our friends where we could actually see all the things we had enjoyed imagining over the many years preceding these games. Most of the people I knew who played one of the original MMORPGs were either in I.T. or were in some other academic profession and if I mentioned the games to anyone else they basically just looked at me blankly.
Then, World of Warcraft launched. World of Warcraft had a clear advantage over the launch of the other MMORPGs due to Blizzard’s highly successful Warcraft series of games. The game already had a fan base and some lore associated with it and was such a success that Blizzard had issues keeping enough servers open for everyone to be able to logon and play. And as the game grew even more popular it attracted people from outside the traditional RPG game players who were totally lost when it came to the mechanics of an RPG. Thus began the guides, the metas, the add-ons to help people make decisions about systems that they just did not understand.
I feel if the game had not become so popular, we would still see a lot of personal choices for our characters and in the game as RPG’ers have always enjoyed such challenges. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who play World of Warcraft these days cannot handle making such decisions and instead look to others to tell them what to do and how to play to be successful at the game. And Activision/Blizzard being a company that wants to maximize its player base, and therefore its profits, have been slowly but surely removing as many choices as they can from the game to accommodate the new huge player base who simply cannot handle making such decisions.
I still have to laugh at the people who require Questie or some such add-on to complete quests and then get upset because the add-on chose a reward they really didn’t want. And then expect Activision/Blizzard to correct a mistake that wouldn’t have been made had they simply used their own brain instead (maybe).
Ah success… It can make some things really good, but when you have to cater to your lowest common denominator in order to keep or increase your success you get World of Warcraft - The Facebook Game edition, or what is more commonly known now as Retail!! 
Thanks.
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That’s the best!
Lol, thanks, man!
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Why isn’t that authentic? What if those folks followed guides and “metas” to the letter back in 2006? Then doing it now is authentic.
I disagree about “tired of leveling”. Boosts started in 2014 and were a sales gimmick, adding hundred of thousands of NEW subs to the game. Boost were never a feature for existing players, who had YEARS to reach max level before the new expansion launched.
The boost is part of the TBCC expansion for the same reason: for players that are NEW to Classic. After all, existing Classic players had ALMOST TWO YEARS to get to level 60 (and geared up much higher). Why would they boost a different character to level 58 with weak gear? They wouldn’t.
Anything posted here automatically becomes controversial when posted here. You could say sky is blue and people would argue that it’s white because more than 51% of the time 51% of the sky is covered by white clouds. And what about when it rains? Sky isn’t blue then, you’re being absolutist and simple minded to claim it’s always blue. Some will claim color is subjective and link to the debate about the dress that some people thought was blue and black while others thought was white and gold
No, things were not the same then. Players aren’t being authentic.
I never said boosts were new here. They came about through player demand… Then and now.
You’re kind of ignoring that this only applied to a few classes and other classes had perfectly itemised gear, which only ended up meaning that the classes with poorly itemised gear just didn’t get played.
The changes made to retail WoW were made because the game had issues that negatively affected gameplay. If you think it’s great that some classes have to put up with every 2nd piece of gear being useless for their spec then you do you, but you can’t seriously expect everyone to think that’s a good idea?
You mean the spec they wanted to play? Or the spec that the developers originally intended for said class? I know all the Ret and Prot Paladins hated gear from Classic because it all favored healing, but there was actually a reason for that. The Paladin class was originally built and designed as a support/hybrid class, just like the Shaman was. I know that concept doesn’t have any meaning any more for the Retail players, but the original “divine trinity” was healing, tanking, and support. Everyone could deal damage so specialty damage dealers were not considered part of the original trinity.
However, it turned out that no one really understood that “old-school” concept and so Blizzard dropped the idea of support classes and developed the current “divine trinity” in WoW today. A Paladin and Druid were both originally support/hybrid classes that could, in a pinch, off-tank or deal some damage but were designed specifically to support the raid where needed. The reason their gear all favored healing was because that was the easier support stat to raise in keeping with the gear, other than from talents. But people didn’t want to play them as support classes, hence why they did not like the gearing.
It is again an example, as the OP stated, of player demand changing the game. Or, to put it another way, the tail wagging the dog. 
Thanks.
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Well put. I will concede that Vanilla had som whack itemization, but that’s part of the charm.
I started TBC in almost full T1. I had the same or vbigger mana pool than I do now. Strangely, the level 55 water filked my mana bar faster than then the 65 water fills it now. I suspect spirit was added to all gear to reduce downtime.
I mean as you saw with classic the game has no longevity its expiration date set to whenever they release WOTLK. If people cared about these things they would still be in normal classic now, but no they are not they are asking for same factions bgs and salivating at the thought of wotlk already. You can keep trying to chase the dragon or realize its 2021.
- Boosts came from lazy people, not from people following metas. Receiving power leveling in dungeons from higher level characters was a very common thing even in vanilla, and especially in TBC, yet character boosts were not added until Mists of Pandaria. Dungeon boosting still requires people to play the game, and in no way excuses pay to win garbage like paid instant character boosts.
- Tokens came because Blizzard wanted to capitalize on their cheaters even more. By charging $20 per token, they can effectively raise the price of botters’ subscriptions while legitimizing gold buying for normal players and convince everyone they’re doing them a favor. Botting is still rampant, gold buying is more common than ever, and only Blizzard is thankful for it. The gold farming methods are not why tokens were added, at all.
- Talent trees disappeared because Blizzard was incapable of making all the talents in the trees worth considering. Cataclysm was just after Activision-Blizzard became a thing, so it would not surprise me if this decision came about because they were cutting costs. Even in Cataclysm (and in MoP+) there are talents that go ENTIRELY unused because they are worthless for the content people are doing, or are extremely weak in comparison to the alternatives.
- Class homogenization came because Blizzard was incapable of balancing classes properly. We’re not talking 1% differences here. All Blizzard had to do to fix these issues was something they did in WotLK: make the unique buffs and debuffs raid-wide instead of party wide. Then you would want to bring most, if not all, of the specs, and the best DPS outside of that. If I didn’t have to worry about the fact that BM Hunter does more damage while in a group with more BM Hunters, I wouldn’t feel bad about bringing a Rogue if their damage was the same.
- Mythic came about because Blizzard only knows how to increase difficulty one way: to inflate the numbers. Instead of making actually challenging content, they make the content increasingly more punishing. The random affixes were a step in the right direction in terms of making content unpredictable, but with so few to choose from, people figure them all out eventually, and mythic only leads to MORE meta slaving (because some classes are the only ones that can handle certain mechanics).
Ultimately, all of the following of metas is not what caused these changes. Blizzard is responsible for not being willing or able to create proper solutions to what they viewed as a problem.