Nope, you’re quite correct.
It’s like old school car guys who are like “Carburators are so much better, I can spend 20 minutes swapping the jets out and washing the whole thing and getting better fuel to the engine for more power”.
And I’m like “What, sorry, couldn’t ear, I literally pressed 2 buttons on my keyboard and remapped all my fuel ratios for every part of my rpm range in less than 1 second”.
Goodness, no thank you. Having tried a bit of Classic and suffered the DK starting zone, I absolutely remember why I had a graveyard of alts that died either in TBC or WotLK. Old style questing is horrific; low drop rates, no direction unless you have an addon, time wasters (like the DK interrogation quest) and items that take up your inventory as you’re collecting them for the quest.
I’m happy people have Classic, but good God I would never want that questing style back in Retail.
Well I consider Wrath of the Lich King more retail. The quests were already starting to become retail like. I’m talking about vanilla. The quest are much better. Retail and WotLK DK starting area are the exact same thing to me. Needlessly wonky. So I guess I’m tangenting a bit with this.
I guess I didn’t make it far enough to see when they got good, but by level 14 I was remembering why only this character made it through the Classic - Wrath slog. I hated every minute from level 1-14 and honestly didn’t find them easier than Retail, especially again because there’s no marker on the map for where to go.
Cataclysm was when the modern quest design started, and it’s when I started playing the game more and had more alts. Definitely prefer the Cata-present day questing by comparison.
Side note, another reason I hate the Classic style of questing:
The “gimmick” style quests that got their start in WotLK with vehicles and proliferated in Cata and beyond are one of my biggest gripes with retail. They’re never amazing and their replayability is almost nil.
Of course this is just opinion. Like I said, questing in Wrath of the lich King is just like retail to me, as a purely vanilla player. There’s essentially no difference other than it got worse and worse for every expansion that came out. Whereas now it’s including phone game mechanics too making it even more obnoxious.
But yes, to me, Wrath of the lich King has lots of retail bad quest mechanics. Of course it probably wouldn’t be aparent to anybody who really started playing around wrath. Not sure.
One of the reasons there’s so much disagreement on what era of the game was better is because it’s so different per expansion as you move through them. They keep trying to reinvent the wheel with every mechanic so anybody who started playing during one of these expansions is going to love those kind of mechanics. Where as anybody else who started elsewhere is much more likely to despise them. This is because they are essentially almost different games. They seem to be a company that wants to change a successful product because they think they can make it better. It’s extremely rare that companies can actually succeed in that. Instead they just end up making a different product that gets its own following. That’s what’s happened with a lot of these expansions.
So the player base is divided on what is good and what isn’t good – because wow is essentially a collection of different games.
This is pretty true. It’s interesting to see who says what time period was best for WoW, especially since I’ve lived through all of them.
Blizzard does like to reinvent the wheel, and they usually fail. Legion artifacts were the first and only good version of borrowed power (imo) and it’s still comparing a rotten fruit to garbage piles. I can say the game having been sped up is a good thing in the modern age; people don’t have time to fight the low drop rate boss that many old quests had. But that is still just an opinion. That’s why I’m glad there are two versions of the game for people who enjoy the other kind of questing, but I will absolutely disagree with ever bringing that type of questing back into the modern era.
Except vehicle quests. Those can go burn and disappear for good.
“You think you do, but you don’t.”
Yeah I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. You know, one of the things I loved about vanilla questing were the constant kill quests. Go out and kill x number of boars. And of course I’ve heard about such questing mechanics as a negative over the years. It seems almost implied that such a mechanic is bad design these days.
But I love it. I find it relaxing. It must fill some compartment of OCD I have to cross off the 12 boars from my list. The last thing I want to do is interrupt that relaxing questing to go on YouTube to try to figure out how to use some temporary gizmo a goblin gave me to blow up something I have to move across the screen in 30 minutes after using some vehicle that is actually bugged and I can’t figure out why the quest isn’t working. Gahhhh!!! Just tell me to kill 12 boars!!! Etc etc hah
I will say I like the quests that just have you killing things. The collecting quests in Vanilla were the big problems, because it could take a long time to finally get the last one so you’re stuck at 19/20 for a while which always hammered my OCD into pure frustration with each kill not giving me the last drop to round that number up, haha.
After the first few I stopped even bothering.
Yeah good point about the collecting quests.
That’s where I picked.
Vanilla, TBC, and to a lesser degree WotLK also don’t dribble out quests at a mind numbingly slow pace. Do a crumb quest to open up a hub (or don’t, because the crumb quest is actually optional) and pick up 8-12 quests all at once and then go out into the world and adventure for 45m-1h without any interruptions.
Starting with Cata questing has a practically never broken cadence with the infinitely repeated cycle of [Pick up 3 quests] → [Do quests] → [Talk to NPC]. The only exception is when your quests are handled by a talking head that pops out of nowhere instead of an NPC. It’s so monotonous and personally I find it more grating than even Vanilla gather quests with unnecessarily bad drop rates.
Ugh Cata sounds awful. I’ve never tried it and don’t intend to. It’s really unfortunate how easily this stuff happens in large companies. People have to justify their jobs to people that really don’t know anything about game design. So they have to come up with these “great new ideas” instead of just coming into the boardroom and saying “We plan on doing the same thing over again but with new material”. Well, we can’t have that now can we!?
Always gotta try and reinvent the wheel, cause that’s what the financing wants to hear.
Not just you! I had my prime time in WOtLK with server first LK and officer in top EU guild! But now I just feel the same as you. It feels old and clunky in comparison to SL 
How long does it take to get the Mount?
How long from making a DK toon, do its story quests up to the Mount Reward?
Biggest flaws that hit me upon replay:
1> WC3/RTS was still fresh in my mind when LK was current. So when it says “look for the Forge”, I kinda KNOW what it should look like. But this is TERRIBLE for new players as the Forge maybe looks like the thing it should be, but the other buildings don’t really look like anything. You end up just wandering around and THAT SUCKS.
2> For all the wandering around to figure stuff out, the mob density is WAYYYY too high. Either task me to constantly be in combat, or to figure things out. Not both. It’s FRUSTRATING.
3> There are buildings in the “middle” of the map that you have to interact with, and then your next quest chain is to interact with those buildings again … except it’s the set of THE EXACT SAME BUILDINGS that are at the VERY EDGE of the map. Without the new “quest markers” to tell you where it is, I spent 10-15mins looking around the middle of the map wondering “this is the right building… where the eff is the quest???” I finally gave up and hit Wowhead and was like “what a joke… it’s the SAME BUILDING but in a different AREA???” It’s BAD DESIGN.
4> It did a good job of not being too hard or too easy. It just feels VERY DEPENDENT on being made for an already existing player and not a total n00b. I think that could be argued either way for a class that originally required you to already have a background, but just coming back to it after all this time… it was just FRUSTRATING.
I still don’t understand the POINT of this promotion. People that want to play LK-Classic are going to play it. You don’t need this promotion. People like me… you just left me with a HORRIBLE taste is my mouth and a strong reminder to NEVER TOUCH IT. Is there some other audience?? Am I really supposed to believe people were on the fence, and THIS is supposed to win them over??
Hard to believe…
The point is to get Piddy another mount. Who doesn’t want Piddy to have another mount?
Too bad retail doesn’t have the same heart put into it. Class design is so horrible these days.