Firstly, let me just get it out of the way that I know my opinion about this is probably going to be extremely unpopular. (I’ll be shocked if they aren’t) Also get ready for a long read.
Now, lets take a look back at Classic. Classic wow did so many things that people loved and honestly made it WoW. I feel over the years WoW has lost its way. Especially after BC. Not everything that retail has done over the years is negative. There are many QOL changes that occurred that made it more appealing. But here are some things that need to change in retail:
Difficulty/Challenge: WoW classic has this. You have to use your brain while questing, or doing dungeons. you have to watch for PATs in the open world and dungeons, you have to use your CC’s in the open world and dungeons, you have to communicate to your party who is going to do what. Which makes the game easier to get drawn into. Retail version has pretty much none of this. Retail version used scaling to make the game more challenging. This is lazy. It needs to go.
Gear and stat changes: Bring back the good ol’ spirit, intellect, health, and stamina stats on gear. Base mana on casters is not fun. I don’t feel like my character is progressing. With classic I love seeing my mana numbers going up with gear, and enchants. I love feeling like my character is slowly getting stronger and better. Again, current design is lazy. You guys removed these stats on gear because you said it was too hard to balance. (The devs before ya’ll did it for years and made it work.)
Abilities: Give us as many as you can. I remember when expansions released and I was so excited to get new abilities to play with. Never once did it cross my mind that I had too many options. It’s nice being able to learn a class and make mistakes. It’s nice to have pointless spells that just sit on a action bar untouched. The fact is, I don’t need you to hold my hand, and give me 5 abilities to use so I can’t mess up.
Time gating Content: This goes with #1, and #4. The original WoW was out for over 2 years and a majority of the players base was still progressing through the content. You didn’t have to time gate things because people were going through content too fast. Don’t get me wrong… You still had those people/guilds that rushed the content, but by far less because most people were content with slowly progressing through the content with their guilds. (And that was fun) Think about it… slower progression means you don’t have to rush content out so fast. (Which that’s how the game feels now. rushed…)
The UI: Why did you change my UI? The first time I logged onto the Classic I was so happy to see my big UI back. I absolutely hate the new retail UI. I want my bigger action bars back. I want them to go fully across the screen. You don’t even allow the option to change it back. This is something I could just never get over.
So to the retail dev team. Take a look back. I honestly wish you guys would just go straight back to the roots of WoW. Go back to what made the game what it was years ago. The game was hard, and time consuming, but you had one of the highest sub counts ever. Now the game is easy, dull, and you can run through the content in no time. The sub counts are probably at an all time low. (I don’t know…you stopped showing them when they started to drop.)
Like I said… a lot of the QOL changes are amazing. But you changed the base gameplay way too much. Go back to the roots.
Do you have a source for this, or are you making assumptions? And if you use the whole “classic hype” thing and try to apply it to retail, stop right there. Two different playerbases.
These sort of claims are always questionable because they’re so opinionated. Share your opinions, but stop trying to back them up with things like this you think are accurate when in reality you have nothing to back it up.
This whole “Darn those casuals” mentality is pretty toxic, not going to lie. I don’t see the issue with having content for both, but that’s just me. Some of us don’t have time to no-life the game these days, and just because it’s a playstyle you dislike doesn’t make it invalid.
I agree with this. To add to it, the idea of being able to quest anywhere and have mob scaling along with me makes it feel pointless to even level because the things that I’m fighting are always going to scale to my level.
I would disagree with this. If a 15 year old picks up a game, it’s more than likely going to be Fortnite or League of Legends. The player base now is mostly the older generation who played in high school or college and is now 30+ with kids, a mortgage, and a full time job.
We play the game because we love it and it has been a part of our life for so long. A lot of us grew up with it, and to be honest it has probably gotten a lot of us through some tough times. We’ve built a relationship with it, and we love it. I’m sure there are some hardcore players out there still, but I personally don’t have 20+ spare hours per week to raid like I could when I had no responsibilities.
I would guess that there is a large player base like myself.
As a casual, I also get the opportunity to push M+ keys and this is what I enjoy doing because it gives me a challenge.
I see a lot of the changes as QoL changes and am glad to have some features in the game without having to download 3rd party mods to see common information.
You can still have a life and play the game just fine. Just because you have a life outside of the game doesn’t mean you should just be handed or rushed through content. I grew up playing this game with my dad. Note, at the time my dad held a full-time job, and ran his own business. He was perfectly content with slowly going through the game. It took him 4 months to hit level 60. But, when he logged on he always had stuff to do. He enjoyed himself. When we reached level cap, we joined a guild that struggled to push content but we had fun as a group. We celebrated our successes, and dealt with our defeats. It felt like a cozy second family.
You’re right. Today I’m 27 years old, have a family and fulltime job working 40-80 hours a week. My dad is now 59 years old, and still works fulltime. Yet, we still don’t want to rush content. I don’t need to hit level cap in 20 hours. If it takes me 3 months, that’s what it takes. As long as I have content that is challenging, that’s alright. The mindset of hitting level as fast as you can, and then rushing content as fast as you can has in a way ruined this game. Back in the day we never hit Heroic raids, but we had fun in the normal raids with our guildies. They were challenging as well.
This would make you a casual player. If you’re not rushing to complete content and dedicating hours upon hours to the game, you are casual. Can you hold all of that and be a mythic player, top tier, racing for world first? How about a gladiator? No? Then you’re ‘casual’ to people here.
I’d rather not have content locked exclusively behind those that want to run 20+ keys and only mythic raid. That’s what I’m talking about, and that’s why when I see “those dern casuals, we need harcore only”, I speak up. I don’t think many people even realize what casual means nowadays.
Also, in regards to leveling? After having gone through the same content 30+ times, I’m glad for it being faster and having looms. The beauty of things is allowing multiple playstyles to run at once. If you want to slog through leveling, you can–don’t put on looms, and take time to read every single quest. But don’t try to push the rest of us to run at your speed. We all play in a different way.
I guess you’re right. I never really thought of it that way.
I never had any problems with things like that. I feel like Looms were a great addition to the game. They required you to have a toon that has done the content before. So, if you’ve done the content before there is no need for it to take months to level a second class, and for the leveling to be a bit more relaxed. But if it was your first time playing, you got the whole experience of the difficulty. Unless you grouped up with someone. But all those things were optional. If you wanted to use looms, you could. If you didn’t, you didn’t have to.
Once you hit level cap looms became pointless, and the real difficulty started. Nowadays though the game is so mindless it hurts. There honestly is no point to level, or getting better gear with how things scale.
No it wasn’t.
Vanilla WoW was the easiest MMO during its time. Games like EQ, DAoC, were all brutal in how the player interacted with the game. Step out of here with this nonsense of it being hard and time consuming. It never was, it was the most casual version of an MMO you could find.
Blizzard’s audience is the same as it was before. Casuals. I wish people like you would stop pushing a false narrative. Classic was NEVER difficult.
If the Retail team looks at Classic and tries to copy it, I predict that they will take all the wrong lessons from it. Why would a team that has made really gigantic errors post-MoP pick the RIGHT lessons from Classic? They have bad judgement. Looking at Classic won’t change that.
yeah, I honestly don’t have high hopes for this dev team. Blizzard needs to go back and rehire some of their older devs. It won’t happen, but something along the lines of it needs to happen.
Yeah, I don’t know there. I’m not happy with how BfA is now either, to be honest. I think people are really upset with the RNG-fest and titanforging stuff more than anything, which I understand. It just doesn’t feel rewarding, and the fact that you really don’t get upgrades from doing higher end content like you’d expect seems…off, I guess? I have no incentive to go for any of that, I should say.
I feel like for the people that do push the really high end content, the gear should be kinda a larger upgrade gap than it is. It doesn’t really feel that way now, and there’s no challenges to work for either (like mage tower last expansion, or the challenge modes previously).
It all just is kinda…bland. (these are my opinions though, I understand if people disagree)
I would say that if three to six months from now if people are, on average, spending more time on Classic than on retail, start shifting towards the group inspired (but not required) gameplay, add back the RPG elements that were removed because some Elitist Jerk “didn’t even have it key bound”.
Basically, make changes to the game that the majority of players would enjoy.
If 3 to 6 months from now Classic is a wasteland and people are spending more time in retail, “You think you do, but you don’t” guy will have the last laugh, after all, and we can start expanding the functionality of the companion app so you can level your fishing from the toilet (or your character, I guess). We can all celebrate with a $50 Blizzard store bear with an “I told you so” golden banner.
The things you mention aren’t what are making classic popular, it’s nostalgia. That’s it. People remembering the struggle at the start. There is still a struggle just at the endgame.
However if that is what you enjoy I wouldn’t object to them ‘evolving classic’ with the expansions but retaining the system of equipment stats, skills as they are in classic, etc. That way people get to choose what they enjoy.
You should have more likes OP but most of us who would give them are either playing classic or on the classic forums (this is my first time in this section for a week plus?)
Most people here will just get salty reading your post especially when they have no one left to play with on retail.
What a weird version of reality you’ve created for yourself
But to the OP’s points:
The difficulty/challenge isn’t unique to Classic. Remember how they had to downtune heroics at the start of Cata? Those heroics remained relevant for quite a while, too. If you’re comparing strictly Classic to current Retail, though, then yeah I suppose you’re right insofar as the “difficulty” being the lack of tools that Blizzard gave to accomplish what you were trying to do throughout the course of leveling. The more tools you were given in the higher levels, the easier that became to the point where you were facemelting packs just like leveling through Retail. So I can only half agree with you here.
Why they changed and trimmed stats could be attributed to a lot of things from appeasing theorycrafters who used to make whole spreadsheets of calculations for min/maxing to simply making it easier to design and create more gear to making it easier for players to figure out how their stats applied to their build so that more people could participate in highest-tier content. It was as much a QoL change for them as it was for us, I think. Bringing it back would turn more players away from doing or being accepted into high-end content because they don’t have the specific max numbers that others would require in their groups. I don’t do that content but from the complaints about “How do I get AOTC when I need AOTC to get it?” and RaiderIO sort of lend credence to that logic in my mind.
I’m on the fence about abilities. They certainly do make actually playing a class a lot more fun, or worse depending on people’s personal preferences, but from Classic on forward regardless how many skills there were there was still a set rotation to maximize DPS or threat. The only thing that changed between then and now is how many buttons you have to push to do it. People used to make whole macro lists with a rotation just so they could do it by pushing 1 button instead of all of them. The only time that didn’t really apply was in pvp.
I want to say that people were still progressing through content at the end of year 1 and 2 in Vanilla because the game was still new, and had competition. There was a drive to get new players and the majority of that progression was being done by new players. That said, however, I couldn’t agree more that forcing players to wait to play the game is a counter intuitive model and very frustrating for people who just want to play the game. I hate it.
I think the UI change had something to do with graphics resolution updates throughout the years. I remember there was once an option to revert it. Idk if it’s still there I haven’t looked. But a lot of people use UI add-ons that completely changes everything, anyway, so it ends up being kind of a moot point in the end.
Those are my thoughts on your points, and I could be right or wrong idk. I know that there are some things I miss from the Vanilla days, and the BC days, and the Wrath days, etc. etc. on up the list - mostly the feeling of how those expansions progressed because it was new and exciting - but the pros don’t outweigh the cons enough for me to give up where Retail is and is headed. I’d like to see them do things differently going forward, ESPECIALLY with regard to time gating and rep gating content (such as the main dumb story of the xpac), but I don’t think that going backward is the right answer.
The choice to change this wasn’t a QoL change for us. It was simply and QoL change for them. I never once had a problem getting a group because I didn’t have enough spirit, intellect, or +heal. Most players never had a problem with this because most players didn’t aim for high end raiding right off the bat. You slowly made your way to it, and you did it with people that fit your play style. Again, I think you’re forgetting whole point of what WoW used to be. Every game has those that max and min stats. However, the devs of those games don’t just remove the stats altogether to make their lives easier. When this change occurred it wasn’t a problem for us. It was problem for them because they could no longer balance it with how crazy our numbers got. This was strictly a them problem, and they took the lazy route to fix it. It took a feeling of progression away.
Oh well I definitely can’t disagree with you in that regard especially in terms of PvP seeing them try to balance things using tweaks all over the class list would’ve been otherwise comedy if it weren’t such tragedy. I concede to that point. You’re absolutely right.
especially in terms of PvP seeing them try to balance things using tweaks all over the class list would’ve been otherwise comedy if it weren’t such tragedy. I concede to that point. You’re absolutely right.