Just started to play classic and liking it. Is retail still relevant?
“Relevant” is a subjective thing.
Retail is… a lot. It’s a casual-focused game now, with an emphasis on making players of all stripes attempt each raid at least once. On the one hand, it’s much easier to get a high ilevel now, with non-raid sources providing gear equivalent to what can be obtained in the raids. On the other hand, if you do get into raiding, you have to go down the rabbit hole of rng, farming multiple sources (including world quests and dungeons) for BiS pieces.
tl;dr - If you’re enjoying Classic and that’s all you’ve ever played, you’ll probably be disappointed by retail.
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I think Retail is superior to classic in almost every area. It has like 50X more content too. There are an incredible amount of quality of life features in retail that are not in Classic. I played vanilla in 2004, and I played classic last month.
I could list all the areas retail is better but that would take a long time. I think Classic has only a few small advantages.
In Classic, Players are likely to group at open world quests because they are competing for mob kills. In retail, up to 5 people can tag a mob and they all get kill credit. So players generally don’t group at open world quests unless it’s a boss.
There are no dungeon or raid queues in Classic, so zone chat is more busy with groups recruiting. In retail, you’ll generally see more of your guilds chat than zone chat. Classic allows you to pick talents from all three specs, where in retail the specs are separate.
No, retail is not strictly casual orientated. High level mythic + dungeons in retail are much harder than any classic dungeons. Mythic raids in retail are harder than classic raids.
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Hey,
I played Vanilla and the first couple of expansions back in the day. Jumped back in when i heard about classic. Thought it would be some fun. Got a couple of days /played and enjoyed it. Thought I would jump into retail and see how it was.
I haven’t logged back into Classic since.
Retail is a lot different to classic. Its far easier and more casual. I’m finding it suits my lifestyle alot better than Classic. I can play for 30 mins and achieve alot. 30 mins in classic and your lucky to finish 1 quest some times.
I started retail from level 1 again. And now into content I haven’t played before (into my 80’s now). Id recommend it, but its personal choice at the end of the day.
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Retail has quality of life changes that I think would benefit classic without taking away from the nature of classic but purists would disagree no doubt. I played vanilla originally. I’ve also been dabbling in classic and enjoying it. I still play retail and still enjoy it but it’s essentially a different game from classic.
As far as I know it doesn’t cost you anything to play it so if you’re curious you could just try it out. As Keres noted though it’s a lot. It’s a bigger game with more complexity. I’m not saying it’s harder (it’s a lot easier to level in retail for instance), just that it’s a big, sprawling, beast of a thing by now and so it can be a lot to grasp.
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