It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the developers for SoM have no idea what made Classic popular in the first place. This game is popular because of the time investment we put into our characters and it being clearly reflected to others in game through achievements and gear aquisition. This is being cheapened in every sense of the word with a faster leveling experience, faster traveling experience, and faster farming experience…for a longer raid night? Why is everyone in a rush to clear the same content that we all just cleared less than a month ago ad nauseum? Especially with the same exact raid meta, the 25% increase to boss HP just exacerbates the problem with class imbalance. Popping an extra mana potion for each raid encounter isn’t interesting. These changes are barely appealing to anyone on either side of this argument.
Fresh launches always bring players back for a new experience through class, race, faction, server, guild, personal goals, new social experiences, etc. SoM servers are going to quickly turn into those weird private servers with modified rulesets that no one asked for. There’s a reason these were the least played private servers when they were at their peak. Characters from these servers should not be transferred to classic era realms at the conclusion of SoM seasons. They are not equal experiences and I don’t think these characters should be living on the same realms if players opt to play on them.
Telling classic era players to just “play on their realms” is not a valid response to the issues being raised by some of these changes being implemented. Everyone knows that fresh server launches give every player a chance to start over and enjoy their own personal journey with their new character. As it stands now their only option is to either level on a 2 year old server with a dwindling population due to a variety of factors, or be forced to play on a modified ruleset server with no real changes that satisfy any part of the community.
Most importantly, where is the communication from Blizzard about these changes? Where are the polls and discussions? All I’m seeing are changes being implemented behind closed doors with no real direction or feedback from the community who plays the game. Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about changes coming to the Classic experience. I’m willing to have the discussion for the sake of a better experience, but not if it compromises the integrity of the game. Let’s not turn this into another version of Retail where all other content is pushed aside solely for end game content. This would fare even worse over the long term given the end game content never changes.
I like the changes. The game is going on 20 years old now. I was one of the “No Changes” crowd too for a long time, but I like where they are going with the game. I think it keeps it exciting and fresh. Just my opinion though and others have a different one.
I could agree with the polling system but I honestly want to see even more changes and I would like them to reconsider the health increase on bosses for some other way to make the fights more challenging. If I learned anything from playing classic two years ago is that it’s not a perfect game and the one thing I absolutely love about it is the world. So as long as we’re on Azeroth I think it’s better than Retail or any other expansion.
I was also a “no changes” guy. but i really hate the whole world buff thing, the time wasted, the fear of losing them, etc. I think that’s a great change, fury warriors are gonna have to earn their top dps ranking now lol
Clever. Are you implying a discussion about SoM isn’t allowed in the Classic General Discussion section when it’s announcement and implementation is going to have an impact on the entire Classic community? Not sure I agree with that, looks like Kaivax doesn’t either since he made a blue post in this very forum specifically discussing SoM, " WoW Classic Season of Mastery Design Intentions and Details". Thanks for reading.
It’s called Return on Investment. They are doing the simplest things that they think will result in the outcome they desire - an influx of subs and cash for about a year, and then maybe replicated with more rounds of tweaks. None of what they are doing takes any significant development. They’re not going to do class changes out the gate - that would take way more time and effort to get so that more people would be happy than pissed off. Maybe in a later iteration once they’ve exhausted all the easy stuff.
So it may seem like they are coming at leveling and raiding from opposite perspectives, but in reality it is having their cake and eating it too, from a standpoint of who they can draw in to sub.
This the true meaning of “fresh”. This will not be Vanilla/Classic 3.0. I’m sorry to tell you folks.
SoM is now them changing up things every year to make gameplay “fresh”.
Next season will probably be Class Balances since they won’t talk about it to us now lmao.
You are confused on what people liked about classic. People liked the world, leveling, and the community. Raids were not the main point. Lots of people never even raided in Vanilla. YES NEVER RAIDED.
Also all these changes were overwhelmingly supported in their survey by the MAJORITY of players.
Have you ever considered you are wrong, and maybe you are the minority? You probably want WBs in raids which was NEVER a thing back in Vanilla.
