The biggest problems I recall being prevalent in TBC stemmed from a lack of competitive game play. The game design trended towards the casual player who didn’t need to invest any time into striving for rewards. In a sense, the rewards lost their prestige and sense of accomplishment. I’m going to list two areas that I believe will offer Blizzard the best avenue for success if they want to retain a larger user population.
Heroics and raiding content was trivial.
I would consider adding a “heroic” / “mythic” level of content to attract a larger audience. WoW Classic has not brought a surplus of a NEW generation to the video game… The people that have returned to the game have experienced it before and will rapidly fade away if the content lacks stimulation.
PVP Mistakes
The arena matchmaking system rewarded players who took advantage of the beginning of the season and then retired until the next season. There was no rating decay for people that stopped queuing, so any logical person who wanted to secure their title would climb the ladder quickly and then quit playing to retain their position. I would put money on this being abused if nothing is implemented to prevent this.
Dispelling/purging was the single most important spell to cast. The mana cost isn’t significant enough to be jeopardizing, so it was abused. There’s a reason why dispel protection was added to a majority of classes in later expansions and then turned into a cooldown… I’d hate to see this remain a thoughtless mechanic that rewards players who can click the button as fast as possible.
i really hope they learn from the first 95% of classic and do buffed content. facerolling new raids on day 1 in an hour gets old. yes its 15 year old content and everyone knows the strats but it can still be tuned higher
I keep seeing people talking about dual spec as a good thing. These legacy servers are my first time playing the game so forgive my ignorance, but is the dual spec people are asking for the same as how dual spec works in retail today where you can just switch but it’s all or nothing? Because I really hate the idea of having to go all or nothing and not being able to put 5 points in that tree or 10 in that one to complement your main spec…
In retail you don’t actually have talents. You have little gimmick abilities that you don’t even necessarily need to play any of the specs. The Dual Spec i’m referring to is the one released in WOTLK, and its as you say, ‘all or nothing’. Example, lets say you’re a paladin offtank in a raid, but the next boss doesn’t need an offtank. You simply switch to your holy or ret spec and heal/dps for that fight, then switch back to tanking spec. Talents are extremely important in TBC (And wrath) just as they are in classic. Each point is important and there really isn’t much room for moving things around in a PVE environment.
I don’t think it was that simple during it’s first iteration.
You couldn’t just swap to dps spec in raid but had to visit your class trainer i believe.
It also wasn’t all or nothing like I think the OP was describing meaning even with dual spec you could split your points between all 3 trees and not just be locked into 1 specific tree.
Dual spec was basically a great way for PvE and PvP specs to coexist, and absolutely helped tanks and healers solo when they needed to.
As long as you weren’t in combat or in a BG/Arena, you could switch at will. Your resource bars just reset to 0 (so you’d have to drink) and you lost specific buffs.
Uhh you can’t say something was so important to arena and then claim it as a minor change when you want to either add dispel protection or add huge mana costs or colldowns to the dispel abilities. That would be a huge change and not a minor one.
Dual spec is the ability to setup talent templates that you have filled out which can be swapped between i.e. changing from having all tanking oritented talents one moment and then 10 seconds later you have all healing oriented talents.
I forget the length of the cast but it’s similar in length to hearthing. You cast that ability and it swaps over to your other predetermined talent setup and presto! You’re now a healer or dps or tank or a pvp setup.
Making the mana cost 10-30% more would be enough to make people question their game play decisions. Like I said, there’s a reason why Blizzard made significant changes in future expansions. I’d rather see something change now instead of experiencing old problems again.
Is this where I start with the slippery slope argument? The same argument the #nochanges crowd and vanilla lovers repeated every time someone asked for changes to classic wow. I believe we should leave TBC and eventually Wrath alone, as they were and might be.
They don’t really need to add an additional tier, they could just go with the original Kael’thas and M’uru fights before they re-tuned them repeatedly.
Lack of competitive gameplay? Are you trolling? TBC raids were the hardest raids in warcraft history pre nerf, and certain heroics were unplayable unless you had certain gear, skill, classes and luck. As far as pvp goes, arena season 3 had the largest representation of pvp in WoWs history. S3 and S4 you had to have ratings for weapons and shoulders which put them out of reach for the majority of players. The main problems with TBC was earlier seasons 1 and 2 every class and mechanic was constantly changing because arena was new and classes were balanced around pvp not pve during TBC. Classic offers ZERO competitive gameplay. ZERO. That is why it has lost interest. People want to do hard raids, hard heroics, and competitive pvp, something Classic cannot offer.
Ridiculous change. The DR are not the same in TBC than on retail. Also, dispel on retail remove everything. Dispel in TBC remove x2 debuff.
The actual difference between a good and a great healer in arenas is often the ability to dispel your partners. It’s part of the gameplay around arenas in TBC.
No, because if you keep que’ing and you win, you will go up in rating. This is only the case if there is a very limited amount of teams que’ing.