Why are any of us playing a 14 year old re-run of a game if we don’t in at least some way want to be able to make decisions with a degree of certainty as to their outcome? We know what’s going to be good so we play what we know is good. We know how insane(ly fun) the late game scaling is and want to get to experience that. Pushing down the power ceiling is a major departure from the spirit of Classic so far. If they want to set Classic up to be a divergent splinter of Wow’s history then why not start with the expansion that most people already have a ton of issues with (Cata), and not meddle with one that is regarded as the zenith of WoW.
The power gap in ICC definitely exists, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it is currently in Sunwell (wont let me embed a link here, but check the all boss aggregate at the 99th percentile for Sunwell), where the highest performing spec is doing more than double that of the lowest. Hyperbole about viability is just that - hyperbole. With the exception of a few outliers on the high end, in ICC the majority of dps specs exist within a ~15-20% power band. Then there are a few outside those parameters on the low end that could easily be addressed with targeted adjustments. Pushing down the power ceiling for the second half of the expansion is making the content less accessible for less well organised guilds, and pushing people out the door is not in the game’s best interest.
And what company, exactly, is doing these balance changes? Because balance changes are exactly what they are. So we’re going to have modern Blizzard, who can’t balance server populations, balancing what was arguably the most balanced expansion we had? History repeats itself, as you say. No thanks.
And who is Blizzard to advocate balance changes? Who’re you? The whole point of this was:
We do not want “new”. We want what was there. That was the unsaid agreement in funding the trademark term “Classic”.
This doesn’t matter. Blizzard’s input doesn’t matter. That’s not how the game was.
And that context is all that’s important. It’s the only guiding stone we have to prevent changes from being purely based on:
If you don’t like how it’s “solved”, go play a private server or wait for SoM, but don’t you see how SoM already got canned? That’s because most people don’t want it, so we’d all appreciate it if you’d stop changing the game for yourselves.
You do not know how to balance the game better than the original devs nor does Blizzard. Get your ego out of the equation. That’s what led to retail.
And it will always be “solved”. Are you going to change raids to “solve” those too? Are you going to change class balance itself because PvP metas have been “solved”? Of course, now the door’s open - and it’s what you want, so why wouldn’t you? The entirety of the problem you’re presenting is not solved by the item level squish you’re proposing, so you will inevitably need more changes based upon what you like and not what the game actually was.
Then you do not know what you’re talking about because we all signed up for a ‘solved game’. We knew what we were getting into the moment Classic was announced, the moment TBCC was announced, and, so we thought, when WotLKC was announced. We don’t want your version of the game, we want the version of the game. This slight-of-hand that you’re trying to pull is pure ego and pathology. You do not know better than the original devs. Blizzard doesn’t. This is fact by retail. If it wasn’t then there would’ve been no desire to see an old, untouched version of the game in the first place.
It gets us to the original version of the game - which is what we all consented to upon the release of OG Classic.
Then you are ignorant if you don’t consider the source. You just said you don’t trust someone and then go on to say that you trust them in this specific instance. Why? Oh, because:
Your opinion is not basis for how WotLK was. Blizzard’s opinion is not the basis for how WotLK was. We do not want WotLK to be contaminated by opinions. That is how we got retail. We do not want that. We want WotLK, hence why we’re here.
Here’s your reasoning:
Here’s mine:
We don’t want Blizzard balancing the game. They destroyed it once already. You are not going to make a difference in their judgements, you are only going to help facilitate them if you agree with them. Oh, and look at that:
Who’s going to be doing those? Slippery slope indeed. No thanks. No thanks at all. Stop with the ego. You don’t know better than the whole of the OG dev team. Don’t.
This is a completely disingenuous argument. If the goal is to relieve the authentic experience, whether we can 100% attain that or not, the effort is still to try to do so. Is it going to be completely authentic? No, but 85% authenticity is better than completely trying to throw it out the window because of what you want. That was the intent of classic, to try to relieve that authenticity - whether it was realistic or not, not to give you or Blizzard the power to “suggest how to make the game better”. If we wanted a game like that we’d be playing Retail.
That’s all well and good, but how did you attain that goal? Was it by the means of trying to relive an authentic Classic game? Why, yes, yes it was, because without the facilitation of the effort of achieving an unreachable goal, you wouldn’t have what you wanted.
No, it isn’t, because you have the same set of hands in the cookie jar doing the #changes. Consider. The. Source.
The whole point of this wasn’t for you to be a “teenager” again, it was to play the original version of WotLK. Put whatever meaning you want on that, it doesn’t change the means of achieving that meaning - which was replaying OG Wrath. You are now working to change that because of you and what you think. Stop getting your ideologies and opinions mixed up with the only objective standard we have: WotLK as it was.
The gaming culture has nothing to do with 12 item levels. The game is not a modern game, it is an old one. We’re not going back and updating Mario on the OG Gameboy because “gaming culture has changed” yet there are speedrunners who absolutely slaughter it.
There are guides, there are min-maxers, there are gold farmers. These things are more prevalent today but if you don’t think these things existed back in WotLK then I don’t know what else to tell you. Furthermore, this is no grounds for changing a game that we all consented to not changing at the start when we made our initial investments for you or anyone else.
The people who agree with you, that’s who. If the game goes after the final patch for WoTLKC then we would want OG Wrath more than we already do because there’s zero chance of getting another shot at it - and that was the original purpose. We did not sign up to play your Wrath, we signed up to play the Wrath of the Lich King.
Gauge interest.
At the conclusion of the authentic iterations of the expansions.
Dishonest claim. Classic would die slowly if you kept progressing because the game naturally lost subscribers in those proceeding past iterations. Matter of fact, they died for the exact reasons you’re proposing to implement, that being retail-grade #changes.
So if you really don’t want the game to die take your changes and put them in Terenas’s urn where they belong.
I completely agree, I’d prefer they just left everything as it was and let Ulduar sit for an extra couple of months - but if they’re insisting on doing something to make it relevant longer than it ought to be I’d rather it didn’t make the rest of the expansion less fun.
And have glaring issues for example like in vanilla that literally pushed out classes and spec that were right behind others but because 50 dps is such a big space apparently they suck??? That doesnt make a good game unless you play specific classes and fill your raid with them. Its BAD DESIGN. How about you play the low tier class and see what happens. I bet you didnt and didnt for a reason … if you think its because you couldnt clear content you’re mistaken it’s because people are so narrow minded they can see past their nose. We were horde 2nd on our server for naxx … 1/2 the healers still in blues and nowhere near a perfect comp. Gues what … we cleared it imagine that AND at the time we down KT we were 9th in the world for amt of deaths on the kill which was 0. Again, imagine that… Its the mentality of these sweats that ruin the game exploiting design flaws.
WotLK is more balanced than Vanilla and TBC, but it was still an unbalanced mess, even in its last patch, which was meant for the last tier and season, not the whole expansion.
Private servers have shown how its not balanced at all when guilds bring 10-15 affliction locks to do 0 light Yogg or how Warriors completely dominate in Season 8 and even Season 7.
The one who proposed the iLvl squish idea is literally a dev that worked on original WotLK.
The whole “what you want” thing can be said about you too. No one has any issues with many of the changes that were done. No one complains about 3 tier pieces dropping from bosses. No one is really complaining about rets getting both seal of blood and seal of vengeance. No one had any issues with them increasing arena points and honor received in Season 4.
I doubt you yourself have a problem with those, so just going at it with the mentality that you don’t want any changes is either hypocritical or just disingenuous.
I’ve mained this holy priest since day 1 classic. Feel free to check my logs going back to week 2 mc and world 41 naxx. My alts were a hunter and feral druid… so you lose your bet. I don’t understand what your naxx progression, or mine, have to do with the discussion.
Pointless ramblings aside… Even if you are right in your opinion that it is bad design, it’s the original design. Making changes to it is asinine when the original intent with these re-releases was to stay as accurate as possible to the source material.
Players will sweat and “exploit” design flaws regardless. How would these changes in any way fix that behavior? If anything it runs the high risk of introducing more flaws to “exploit”. In the end, I don’t see a reason for them to muck around with design changes the first time around. That kind of stuff belongs in SoM.
And yet how many classes are viable in a PvP environment? None of them are unviable. Specs? Holy priest. Demo Warlock. Even Combat rogues and Blood DKs have their fair share of cheese they can run. Name me a better expansion because I see you haven’t done so in your reply.
Right, a dev with the absence of the other devs that more than likely kept them in check.
No, it cannot, because the unspoken agreement that every single player consented to at the start of Classic was playing the game as it was, not as any one group saw that it “should be”. You are the one betraying that consent by suggesting changes that you want. There are changes that I’d recommend if I had been one balancing the game - but I wasn’t, nor were you. Yours is an ego-based argument, one where you insert your opinion into the matter. Mine is based on promises made, the likes of which you are breaking.
That is incorrect, you full well know people complained.
Of course I do because, once again, it is changing the game how you see fit. This was not what was consented to. People entering in BC full well did expect there to be Paladin Seal discrepancies, etc.
I do not want any changes. Most people did not. Why? Because that is what they consented to. It is completely arrogant to assume that people want what you do. It’s even more self-centered to superimpose your sentiments that directly go against what the playerbase consented to by subscribing to the trademark word “Classic”.
People are blatantly stating that they would have no problems with zero changes. Most of them are, from the RDF crowd to now the majority of people in general (because nobody wants you or Blizzard balancing a game that was indeed the most balanced form of WoW we’ve had).
You bring Aff locks to a Yogg run, but can those Aff locks also 1v1 a DK? I doubt it. Can those Aff locks line up burst with an Ele? Destro does a much much better job. So you’re telling me Aff is good at a particular set of things to the point that it can exploit something? Cool. Death Knights can solo 5-man quests in leveling blues and greens. Should that be looked at as well? There’s something broken about every class in WotLK and I’m sure “in your opinion” you’ll find many of them that need “fixing” and many of them that “don’t”, but that’s the thing about Classic proposal:
It wasn’t to be based on anyone’s opinion, it was to be based on the past. You and Blizzard and a few others are the ones condoning these changes because of what you want. That is pure selfishness to change the terms based on your own ideologies and preferences because not only does it disregard the original word promised, it puts your ideas and sentiments above all others.
Of course it is if you did anything major in wow classic because the only reason it got done was because of the size of the private server community players on a specific realm. Remember the meeting? Why do you think it was announced after?
Which was a meta class … hunters were used for every pull … feral druids were great tanks … try playing a resto druid enh shaman or paladin tank … see my point? You literally played meta specs only.
BUT when you can see what the design flaw will have for an outcome which has a large effect on the playing of the game why would you not want it to have it to include the whole server and not a portion of it. Nothing wrong with sweating games i do, but i also see clear design flaws that should be fixed period and would have if they knew the outcome of it before it happened. We now know.
I have many people in my guild and discord who did not play meta things and managed to gear just fine in Classic.
Because it was one’s word to release the game and not “my version” of the game. People asked for these “flaws” and all when they beckoned Blizzard to re-release an older game.
No, we really don’t. We did not know layering would lead to megaserver nonsense, but now we have dead servers and horrible server balance. Here we are. The changes implemented thus far have been more damaging than remedying. We do not need more of them.
I’m just gonna follow you around and remind you. You feel the need to get the last word, your posts are not based in reality, and your only personality trait is being angry.
Being angry doesn’t make you smart.
Stop thinking that by being angry you are virtuous or noble.