Speaking as someone who played vanilla… Maybe it was just me, but it was irritating needing to farm content I had outgeared simply because there was one thing in there which happened to be best for some niche situation. The fire resist pieces from the one boss in BRD come to mind, as does Noxxion’s Orb, or whatever the one nature resist piece in Mara was called which also removed a poison debuff. (Over a decade later, if I never see Mara again, it will be too soon.)
It did not feel good to zone into a lv60 raid wearing lv40 pieces of gear simply because you needed obnoxious amounts of fill-in-the-blank resist just to survive. Going back to farm them felt LESS good. Even once I had gotten mine, there was always someone else in the raid (or a friend) who still needed to get theirs and so back everyone had to go to somewhere they didn’t actually WANT to go and hope it dropped.
Honestly, that whole situation felt very similar to the way the benthic pieces being BiS in Nazjatar feels now… Obnoxious.
The thing you’re missing here is perspective. Vanilla is the exact same as retail in this regard, just on a smaller scale. Anyone who continues through the raids knows there’s pretty much no Molten Core gear you care about when you’re heading into AQ40. That is called character progression. For your character to progress, you have to move past a previous level and, in the case of a max level character which has no further numeric levels to gain, moving past the previous level means moving past needing the gear in content you have already defeated.
This is the exact same as previous expansion gear being irrelevant to raiding in BfA, the example is just in miniature due to the limited scope of vanilla.
Skip this paragraph if you’re not interested in storytime. Back in vanilla, I went to Strat a lot simply because it was my favorite dungeon. One time, when fully BWL geared, I joined a group and there was another hunter there who immediately typed out “the bone slicing hatchet is MINE!” I told him “sure” without further elaborating. When we all got to the dungeon, he ran up to inspect me and on seeing my Edge of Chaos axes (and the rest) I was wearing, just said “why are you even here?” THIS IS MY POINT. Just like moving past the raids of previous expansions in BfA, once geared in BWL, I had moved past any need for the gear in Strat and was going back only for kicks and giggles. That is how the game works, in original vanilla, in retail, and soon to be in Classic.
Ultimately, you do you and enjoy yourself. However, I can’t be the only one who is getting royally tired of hearing players from both camps screaming about how one or the other of classic or retail is complete trash… almost always citing reasons that are nothing but personal opinion, completely wrong, or both. I would love if both sides stopped trying to convert everyone and just went to play whatever parts of the game appeal to them personally.
