I’m enjoying Classic and I would not play retail in its current form.
In my opinion Retail is a mess. They have destroyed the world with so much random crap. You can fly everywhere, teleport everywhere, press a button and instantly get into a raid (which has no difficulty at all). Leveling is pointless since you can’t die unless you disconnect and there is no sense of community at all. The lore doesn’t make any sense anymore (wtf were they thinking with WoD?). The only good thing about retail is its raiding aspect (ignoring raid finder), which I think it’s excellent, but way too time consuming for me right now.
Taking away heirlooms, raf, crz, wow tokens, e.t.c. isn’t going to fix the issues retail currently has nor would I want to play a version of the game where I am still working my way up to the exact same content.
I have a huge list of things that need to happen before I touch retail again. I have my doubts that any of them, let alone all, will happen. So my answer to you is no.
Agreed. Been back every exp and lvl is dull. Power gaps between talent points and meaningful new skills are big. It got to the point I think i would have to run around naked to feel the same sense of danger in most cases. At least until you got to the last 10 levels.
Yeah, it was definitely a typo on my part, I’d obviously meant A Realm Reborn. I’ve gone back to edit that up. My main point was everything else, the mention of FFXIV was purely as an example
As someone who has leveled in vanilla, retail and now classic I can honesty say that retail leveling is boring, unrewarding and mostly a single player experience. Unless you farm dungeons, and then it just reverts back to being boring. The removal of the talent tree gimped any sense of progression while leveling. Gutting things like weapon skills removed any reason to change things up. Heirlooms made it so you never have to change out gear while leveling. Removal of talents made all classes feel one in the same. Addition of some sort of heal to pretty much every class did the same. You can’t even get differences in pets as a hunter anymore as they are all standardized. You get a different skin…that’s all. Cross realm anything took away server identity, sharding/layering again made it a single player game in which you rarely see anyone. Warmode just finished destroying whatever was left over of server identity that cross realm hadn’t already crapped all over. You like wpvp? Oh, I’m sorry this faction isn’t doing too well in pvp atm so they turned warmode off. Forget the fact that until a year ago it was a pvp server and you might have chosen that server for this very reason. But wait maybe we can bribe them with some shiny crap to get them to turn it back on. Professions…not sure why they are even in retail anymore as they are next to useless. There’s a ton more I could go into but I don’t think I really need to. For me, there is no comparison in leveling. Vanilla/classic will win every time, and it’s not even close.
I see it as more of a religious faith. Just as there are many thousands of religions, sects, cults, and whatever else, there are a large number of possible features that people have on their “must have/may not permit” list, to the extent that hardly anyone would share the same list. And yet every one thinks their list is the only possible valid list!
I would not play on pristine servers. I tried to like retail in a couple of its iterations after WotLK. I just never enjoyed any of them. Granted, the only one I gave a real concerted effort to like was BFA. I wanted to like it. I wanted to get back into WoW, but BFA just didn’t do it for me. Now I’m playing Classic and I can’t get enough of it!
What I like about Classic:
talent trees
I don’t level out of zones before the stories and quest lines are cut off and some carry to the next zone for me to level in.
some quests require me to group with others. This would probably be annoying after the server matures (especially if the story lines were cut off because the quest became overly cumbersome to complete)
What I don’t like about BFA:
AP
repetitive World Quests
Cross Realm instances (BGs okay though)
lack of talents
having to use a 3rd party site to see if something is an upgrade - I prefer just having the main int/agi/str etc. not weird abilities and stuff tied to gear.
In general:
I like flying
I don’t like super-grindy stuff that’s repetitive. I don’t mind if it’s just for achievements or shinies. I do mind if content is locked behind it.
I don’t mind new expansion gear rendering last expansion’s gear obsolete
I don’t mind LFG or meeting stones, but I think cross-realm LFG broke community feeling and consequences. I also never dealt with raider. io and the like, so maybe my opinion would change if that is a necessary consequence of LFG.
I pretty much just want engaging stories to follow in the game and a variety of new and fun things to enjoy with my friends.
If they did all of that and had no restrictions/caps I would play retail on that server or at least try. I hate the conquest caps in Retail. I log in on Tuesday and by Wednesday I am capped so I log off the next 5-days. All of their artificial caps that slow everything down suck. My feeling is that, if I want to grind all day and try to work my a** off to gear up, then I should be able to. Sadly, that’s not how Retail is setup.
Everything has caps so that the people who want to play a lot, or simply can play a lot, are equalized with those who won’t or can’t play more. I hate that so much.
A pristine realm as described would just be Retail, with all the faults of Retail…just slower to level.
Leveling speed isn’t the problem, especially now that scaling allows you to complete zones without out leveling them…the problem is that leveling just sucks in Retail because the class design and the cutting of interesting items/RPG elements/professions/Cata era destruction of everything/rise of meme zones.
Considering that retail and classic are 2 completely differen’t games, having retail on a realm with specific rules wouldn’t entice people to play it if they already can’t stand retail.
