I ask namely because I always wanted to be able to attempt to go for Scarab Lord. Then I found out about the “Tabard of Mastery”, which is literally just the Tabard of Frost (which I’d gotten back in the day), but was added specially for Classic for the Season of Mastery.
Those two instances of FOMO are enough to upset the OCD part of my brain, where I feel like my character will always be “lesser” than he could have been, if I had just been playing at the right time (although for Scarab Lord, also a lot of luck outside your control).
I know the Anniversary servers are popular, but I can’t for the life of me understand why. Dual-spec makes it kind of inauthentic to the real Classic experience, and we already know it’s going to move into TBC (beyond that? who knows). At least with Classic, you know you’re in it for the long haul, and your character will hopefully be preserved indefinitely, making the investment of time and effort seem much more rewarding.
Classic is the sacred cow, so they’ll probably do fresh servers every few years (while ignoring permanent BC and WotLK requests). It’ll be hilarious when we have nine simultaneous versions of “classic” all at various stages ranging from BC to Shadowlands - essentially selling you the same game over and over again.
You can’t understand why an overwhelmingly requested feature like dual spec is popular? Or why a Classic server offering that is progressing to a beloved WoW expansion is popular?
It’s not that I don’t understand it, or that I think it’s a bad feature. It does fundamentally change the game quite a bit. I think that’s a great addition to SoD, and I’m down with it being part of its own thing. I just wouldn’t want “Classic” itself to change. I think part of its appeal is that it’s a preserved version of the original game, warts and all.
But to be fair, the most authentic version of Classic you can play is a patch-progression private server. Blizzard’s Classic helped fill in many missing holes in private server data, and has essentially helped shape private servers into the most accurate play by play of vanilla that is currently possible. The problem of course is that private servers are mostly run by trash people and population is garbage.
This may not be possible. The game uses a modern client which by itself changes how “Classic” works. Two examples: automatically joining raid when you enter a BG and the countdown timer in a BG at the start of the game. Both came much later, the countdown timer was heavily inspired/stolen from Rift so at least 2011’ish.
The game is on a very late talent patch and version of classes which changes everyday things a lot. Being on a modern client makes addons possible that couldn’t exist in Vanilla and the old macro system made it possible to do things you can’t do now.
The best they could probably do is go back to patch notes and make the class and talent changes close to what they would have been for each major patch (phase). That sounds like a lot of work and they would probably get it wrong. Besides, these forums are always inundated with requests for things from later versions of the game. Those who would like a true “Vanilla” version might be the minority.