Please Let Phase 4 Actually Resemble Vanilla WoW

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Alright, so I acknowledge that SOD Season 4 won’t really, truly resemble Vanilla WoW… but please, devs, for the love of God…

Please do NOT turn SOD Season 4 into Retail WoW. You saw what happened in Phase 3. The entire SOD experience was utterly destroyed - there is literally ALMOST ZERO reason to run dungeons for gear, XP, or loot any longer, and the world is almost completely empty. Princess is constantly camped for the Wild Offerings. The ONLY reason most people will run dungeons is for runes… otherwise, they’ll do Incursions over and over again until they reach level. This is NOT Classic WoW and it is a TERRIBLE way to ‘honor’ the original game that broke so many world records and records in gaming.

10 levels in <6 hours is so incredibly stupid and utterly defecates on the original game… which is what brought so many people back to Classic WoW and Classic Wow SOD.

I mean, only you know what the true player count and subscriber count is… but I’m willing to bet that you lost an enormous amount of your player base in retail because those players went to Classic/SOD.

Before you sued the private servers that operated outside of Blizzard’s operating authority… you should realize that the players had a true passion for Vanilla WoW. You are doing so much damage to that game right now. It’s truly sad.

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SoD is a beta test for Classic + or whatever they cooking up next, was never suppose to resemble Vanilla WoW.

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People would lose their mind.

p1 and p2 of SoD have given the mindset that this version of wow means level fast, get some runes and show up to the raid and get overpowered gear handed to them for little to no effort. Same with pvp - minimal pvp effort for great rewards. Rinse and repeat a few hours a week. Everyone gets to be relevant in terms of gear.

For example:

If all the sudden it took 25-30 hours for fast players to achieve 50-60 and 1.5-3x longer for average players (as to resemble actual Vanilla WoW 50-60 leveling), IMMEDIATELY people will complain they are at a disadvantage and quit over not being able to jump into dungeons/raid right away - even if the difficulty resembles original Vanilla which is what people are asking for after seeing ST.

If all the sudden you needed to run, idk, DM:N for an amazing trinket with a low drop - people are going to complain they have to run some dungeon over and over to be relevant in a raid instead of looking at this as a great opportunity to run Vanilla content and socialize with friends/random people.

If all the sudden you needed to pvp like the r14 grind to get the “best” gear, people will lose it because they can’t achieve this due to other priorities in life.

It’s a lose-lose at this point. SoD now sits somewhere between Vanilla-retail and people are clashing with ideals of what makes the game “best”. Unfortunately, the majority are casuals that will win this battle in the end - which is fine I suppose. it’s an experiment after all and you can’t satisfy everyone.

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A good chunk of people got left behind and are still playing catch up.

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As much as I would like to believe SOD was a precursor to some Classic+… I can’t actually believe it. I really don’t see anything else coming down the pipe that would, in any reasonable way, resemble Vanilla WoW.

To your point Nickatina, I don’t disagree with you. Many of the dungeons in Vanilla were nothing more than “Crossing my fingers, saying my prayers that this group doesn’t wipe and I finally get the [gear] that I’ve been farming for weeks.” But, honestly, that fed into giving the game flavor, content, and social interaction with server populations. Heck, I STILL remember the names of about 20 of the players I used to play with in Vanilla.

But, you’re right… so many people are essentially expecting to level fast, obtain gear fast, and raid fast… that I suspect Blizz will give in to those voices, instead of honoring the game that had so much passion behind it.

And to your point about dungeons… I hope they make dungeons at 60 harder. I mean, we have so many advantages at 50, that the 50 dungeons are a slice of cake for most ‘competent’ players. I imagine that a SOD player at 50 with runes is likely out dps’ing most players at 60 during vanilla… with better recovery abilities, utility, etc.

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I don’t necessarily mind the faster leveling (although its probably too fast), but the gameplay loop of running in circles avoiding all mobs then turning in quests and repeat 50x is such garbage.

Its also laughable how they completely screwed up the initial gold gains as well as having multiple quest objects being unusable most of the time.

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So what? I am not sure that you are… but please do not turn this into an “Equality vs Equity” argument.

There is always going to be people “left behind” in games like WoW and there is nothing that can really be, or really should be, done about it.

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Seems like you were chasing what Classic WoW was when it came out, SoD isnt for you, go back to classic WoW if the slow pace/shet drops is what your craving

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Zul’Farrak and Mara have pre-bis boots for rogues/hunters/ferals
ZF has the pre-bis paladin weapon
Princess is endlessly farmed for the RING not the Wild Offerings, Offerings are better in ZF not Mara
You have both rep and PVP rewards that are significantly strong pushing people into both those content.
Mara also has strong caster sword and shield now.

People are literally farming their pre-bis out of these dungeons. What exactly are YOU doing???

You have a terrible view of what Classic is. This is EXACTLY how Era went. And Era was massively different than original vanilla. You do realize that the original vanilla experience was NOTHING like what you described. Your view of what “Classic” is seems to be heavily flawed based on bias confirmation from other forms of the game you played.

Yes, because mages weren’t already doing that before this. Definitely nothing to look into for those mage and paladin leveling strats that sit in a dungeon and farm elites solo. That’s TOTALLY the way the game was meant to be played.

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You might be correct… BUT… Blizzard has been introducing some of these “retail” elements into Classic WoW. So, whatever you seem to think I am chasing… Blizzard really isn’t offering it.

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Agreed.

What I think would be a great change for p4:

Rework all 50-60 quest rewards and level 60 dungeon gear drops. Make them better than ST gear and keep MC/Ony/any new raid closed for 2 weeks or so (retail does this. not trying to compare or make it retail, but at this point we aren’t vanilla anymore, so why not give it a try?).

And of course make the 60 dungeons relevant to updated gear and runes so you can’t just do a Baron run in 8 minutes. I’m not advocating making them hard like mythic dungeons, but equal difficulty to the Vanilla experience.

By doing this, people don’t need to feel rushed and compare themselves to players that can clear content in 24 hours. And it t still gives hardcore players a chance to race and gear up, as well as farm and do open world content.

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Idk based off your posts seems like you want everyone to suffer and level and get items like how it was in Vanilla WoW, pretty sure the devs said SoD is pretty much a playground for them to see what works and add new things in and was never suppose to resemble Vanilla/Classic/Retail.

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Wild Offerings gets people in the dungeons. I enjoy incursions. I think the Devs are doing well for the most part. I’m excited for p4. Im disappointed that raids are only 20 man but SoD is in good hands, imo.

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People just follow BiS lists off WoWhead and download all the addons/WA to play for them then cry nothing is challening in the game

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Wow… not only is your post so incredibly condescending, but it is completely wrong on so many fronts. Let me help you since neither language comprehension, or reading, seem to be your strong suit.

“Zul’Farrak and Mara have pre-bis boots for rogues/hunters/ferals ZF has the pre-bis paladin weapon.”

Notice… I said, “ALMOST ZERO.”

“Princess is endlessly farmed for the RING not the Wild Offerings, Offerings are better in ZF not Mara”

I know FOR A FACT, that groups are farming Princess because it is a VERY QUICK way to get Wild Offerings. I have the “RING” and have been a part of a number of groups, including Discord groups, that don’t need the ring but are doing Princess for offerings or the epic drop. TRY AGAIN.

“People are literally farming their pre-bis out of these dungeons. What exactly are YOU doing???”

I don’t know… you tell me? My gear is pretty good for pre-ST.

“You have a terrible view of what Classic is. This is EXACTLY how Era went.” Really? When did YOU play Vanilla WoW - I mean, the original release back in 2004. I’ll wait. I played in 2004, and there was NEVER an opportunity to mindlessly run loops of ‘pick-up’ quests to level 10 times in 6 hours. Please, I beg of you… please tell me what part of Vanilla WoW had that. I’ll wait.

“Your view of what “Classic” is seems to be heavily flawed based on bias confirmation from other forms of the game you played.”

No, I didn’t play other versions of Vanilla WoW… I played Vanilla WoW. I know exactly what I am talking about. What are YOU talking about?

“Yes, because mages weren’t already doing that before this.”

Okay… one class. What about the others? Seriously dude… you are making about as much as sense as Joe Biden when he rambles off on a tangent.

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Kind of seems like maybe people learned what the best optimized way of leveling/getting loot in the almost 20years since Vanilla came out

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Which CLEARLY included the Emerald Incursions that were in the original game… oh wait…

AND ‘buying’ honor through populated PvP events that occur every 3 hours… in two different zones. Oh wait… again…

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I’m curious how the SOD team managed to beat the ST raid when they were designing it.

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I mean I’m not an advocate of saying SoD is like retail, but it’s closer to retail than Vanilla/Classic at this point.

For example:

Overpowered abilities that require the throughput play style of Cata onwards to be successful in a raid - as evident in the new ST raid.

Monotonous grinds for reps that are gatekeepers to powerful gear/items/runes in the case of SoD. I mean look at the incursion - who the Hell looks forward to doing these? We finally figured out how to get 3k rep an hour and after getting almost to revered, I vowed to only step foot in there once a day for the daily until exalted or they rework them. They are that terrible in my eyes. These grinds are very similar to some retail grinds, except at least in retail I can’t think of anything this bad or boring.

PvP gear is easy to obtain for little effort.

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Why? What number of hours is reasonable for 10 levels, and what makes that so?

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Don’t get me wrong, I get that you have your own opinions and preferences and perspective on things, and that you’re expressing them with your post. I think that’s great, and it’s nice to try to understand each other.

There are a lot of things about SoD that I think sound or seem like they are not in the spirit of Classic, whatever that may mean, and I sometimes feel as though they are guilty pleasures, like incursions, for example.

Thanks to incursions being what they are, I can level and play more variety of classes in max level content and experience more of SoD that way than I would if it wasn’t as easy to level and gear up.

On the other hand, a huge part of what I like(d) about Classic was the world, the journey, and a lot of that is the slower pace of leveling. That’s a huge difference.

Idk if I would want to play SoD from a level 1 character right now, but I’m looking forward to more SoD on my max level characters, and am still (months into it) staying up later than I should, and waking up early to get more time to experience the content, because it’s that fun for me.

If I do decide to stop playing it at this point, I think my complaints would be something like this:

  • it’s too fun
  • content is coming out at a pace that is so engaging I’m happily sleeping less than I probably should
  • there just isn’t enough time to play every single spec of every single class, but it all looks so fun, I really want to

Idk, but to me, those are some pretty good complaints.

:woman_shrugging: