Straw Poll: Which early changes led "Old WoW" to become Retail as we know it today?

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
21

Very well-thought out and comprehensive poll.

For me, the particular point when modern ‘Retail’ WoW manifested was in Cata, and it involved:

  1. Simplified talent tree.
  2. The Mastery stat.
  3. Linear quest progression.

Another key point occurred in MoP:
4. Shift in focus away from dungeons and towards alternative content. In MoP, this was primarily scenarios. But in later xpacs we got mission tables, world quests, island expeditions, warfronts, torghast, etc. I like dungeons. They are my bread and butter in WoW. But more importantly, from my perspective, this shift in focus towards creating new features meant that less time seemed to be spent on creating new content.

The next point occurs in Legion (an xpac I generally enjoyed, but which did introduce some problems):
5. Borrowed power systems. I enjoyed them in Legion, because I enjoyed being powerful. But subsequently, transitioning from Legion to BfA, it became self-evident that borrowed power systems were a terrible, terrible idea.

The next point occurs in BfA:
6. An increasing overabundance of randomised gear. This simply doesn’t feel rewarding to me. Whereas making lists of BiS gear and seeking them out in a targeted way… does.

These all mark divergence point, where the game increasingly ceased to appeal to me. This is different from being objectively bad. I just felt like I wasn’t Blizz’s target audience any more.

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22

Not sure on old vs new per say but IMO MOP was the last good expansion and the last good product from the WOW franchise.

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23

This is 100% the feeling most players have whether they admit it or not. What made the game so good back in the day was not the 40 player raid size, the fact flight didn’t exist (vanilla), or even that LFD was not added to the game. It was the lack of invalidating previous content just because a new raid tier made its way to the public. As soon as WoW adopted the ‘play the patch’ mentality is when this game started dying.

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24

I would add this the biggest problem with WoW is that everytime theres a new expansion they upend and redo all the classes, talents and game mechanics so drastically and never seem to get balancing right often because they continue to make massive changes to class mechanics when all thats needed as surgical fix to itemization for a class or a modest buff.
Imagine if every 1-2 years MLB or the NBA or the NFL drastically rewrote all their rules no one would be interested in those either.

2 Likes
25

  1. Pre-AQ loot was best; not talking the actual loot itself but the way loot was done before stupid class tokens.

  2. Rated PvP was a mistake, and I love rated pvp, but it never belonged in a game like this.

  3. Gear gaps between raids that in a “vanilla world” as a reference for power factor are greater than 5 item levels.

  4. Multi mode raids, different sizes raids, different difficultly raids…, all a big ugly mistake.

  5. Class design

Class design offensive CD’s; let’s use all expansions not just CV retail. Avenging wrath style power adders, heroism style power adders, and power adders that stack on top power adders is basically how you play modern wow. Because of this the characters feel weak unless they have the cooldowns stacked and up.

Class design defensives.
Every class has basically a shield wall or plaladin bubble of some kind; worse are those that can be used while in CC because its reactive rather than predictive. Reactive abilities are the worst possible design because its too easily scripted, botted, and makes those classes less interesting and leas awesome to be seen played well,

Class design Crowd Control.
RNG CC’s like mace stun or frozen chill effects, blackout, etc; these aren’t goid designs, but swing the hammer the other way and hammer of justice clones are garbage design also. CC should always require either Setup, like combo points, A risky cast time with penalty for lock out, rooted target (deep freeze) stealth (sap) expensive resource cost and at the cost of alternative resources like off current target gouge killing existing combo points. Some changes that really hurt the game were dumb things like Glyph of sheep, glyph of blind, or rep not breaking on paladin DoT. Regarding cast CC such as Sheep, Clone and fear; frankly the cast times are too short,

Class design AE and multi target,
Way too much multi target AE it down diablo style class designs from late vanilla onward. Frankly AE should be very expensive and server use in only specific situations. Its honestly very lazy play that only becomes a ridiculous thing with gear. This is everything from multi dotting to spamming blizzard, to WW cleaving; its just poor design to have this be so often the best possible option to kill targets.

Class design standard abilities.
Why does every ability in later versions of wow have to contain some kind of DoT, debuff or just, something extra? Its so dumb and sloppy because it was how in versions of wow like wrath that we ended up with stupid things like glyph of sheep, because every use of abilities has some kinda DoT and often its AE… Another thing that it may sound counter intuitive, more numbers flashing on screen is not more better. What we do like are seeing our abilities that are supposed to do damage (like frost bolt) deal that damage in an effective way without the need to stack up tons of power adders.,

Class design mobility.
Not every class should have Blink, Sprint, Freedom, charge, etc, etc,. Class mobility in TBC is about perfect excluding druids who have way too much given their power factor. Feral charge was a bit too much provided they get to basically be immune to roots, snares and sheep.

UI problems and Addons.
Want to fix this?

  1. Talk to the people who build tidy plates, threat plates and make this standard.

  2. Disable the use of things like power auras, weak auras, etc.

  3. Kill off addons like DBM and heal bot because these force you to build content around the use of these addons,

  4. Seriously improve the in game customization of the UI, include ways to improve how bag space is viewed, how buff timers can look, debuff timers can look, and make it possible to move their positions.

  5. Build your own website that does what WCL does, only make it also score things like interrupts, buffs used in reference to the other classes in raid that gained its use and credit that to the caster, etc., the composition score should be the real story because it is the real story.

  6. Mop style Pvp resilience back on pvp gear… However with a twist to kill off dampening nonsense; resilience also nerfs healing by the exact same value as damage.

3 Likes
26

While I haven’t been happy with certain elements of the game/design from the get-go (Vanilla), it wasn’t until MoP xpac sometime that I was finally convinced to quit playing WoW completely (until Classic) & delete my original characters/account. Part of it was also likely just general WoW burnout, since I had started playing at launch in 2004.

27

I agree with you so much. I didn’t include scenarios because, at least at first, it didn’t feel like they were very popular. It could be that I just wasn’t aware of it (helps that it’s more of an individual thing), but even during Mists, it still mostly felt like leveling, dungeons, raids, PvP and dailies were the main content in the game.

Warlords just felt awful in every conceivable way, and really to me, sums up the way Retail feels overall. You sit alone in your empty instance interacting only with NPCs, and it’s the NPCs that get to go out and adventure and quest while you just sit there and delegate. You could build up your Garrison and farm materials from it, but that material farm felt similar to shooting an animal in a cage and calling it a “hunt”. Even when you would play with other players, no one talked or socialized. I disliked Mists of Pandaria, but I think Warlords is probably where WoW became completely unrecognizable from the experience I had known and loved for years before it.

Just to be clear by the way, these things definitely would’ve been in the poll, but they definitely occured long after “Old WoW” had gone in my perception, and I assume in most peoples’.

Yeah, that was pretty pivotal for me. When I played in late TBC and throughout Wrath, it always felt like the current states of the game “respected” old content, for lack of a better word. Old content wasn’t relevant like it was before, but it still felt like it was actually present in the world. People used to run old content and level through the lower zones. There was so much more connectivity between patches and even eras. It was in Cataclysm where I first started to feel a strong disconnect between what was current and what wasn’t. And in Mists, it just started feeling like each discrete point of time in WoW existed in its own universe.

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28

without LFR, they would have had to stop developing raids. Not enough of their customers were using the expensive content. They said that outright. Cata’s tuning level did more to mess things up than LFD ever did. I liked old Scarlet Monastery and other dungeons so much better than the revamps… The absolute worst thing they did to retail was level scaling. It took away progression from most of the game. Raiders like moving up through bosses, getting stronger as you go. Alt’ers like moving up through zones, getting stronger enabling you to move to new scenery. scaling takes away that sense of achievement in moving past zones. Its like making all raid bosses have the same mechanics and difficulty, raiding would be boooring.

29

What? Not sure I follow.

30

Maybe the actual right answer…

31

WotLK did the start of a number of things that directly led to retail WoW.

Larger emphasis on log in rewards via dailies, emphasizing smaller rewards that promote logging on every day instead of putting in a certain amount of time/effort.

Class toolkits start to become more homogenized via buff overlap.

Multi tiered raid difficulties allowing more people to raid so more can see the content.

Gear adjustments that start to push the game more toward valuing ilvl over itemization.

WotLK happened to have a pretty good balance of hardcore and casual activities, but unsurprisingly the casual activities were the more popular ones, and the following expansions all continued to push the line more and more toward what retail is today.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all.

I’m not even against QoL improvements. I just think they shouldn’t have gone further than they did in wrath (other than making everything cross server. I think that was generally a great idea)

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32

many old school players did quit wow despite any changes due irl reasons, therefore many new people joined, time changes and player mentality changed.

prove of that? anyone who’s been here know how awesome Classic/tbc 2005~2007 was, compared to classic/tbc 2019~2021 which is all about bots/gold selling/buying/boosters at every direction, no socializing at all due the fact of everyone being greedy & selfish with tons of reserves and pay to do anything, and almost everyone just wanna get things done by any mean necessary.

so it’s not the game fault, it’s the player behavior

on the other side, you guys talk about retail as if it’s a dead game or evil game.
apparently you aren’t aware that right now you can get more friends in retail to socialize with more than you can get in current classic, it’s never about the game it’s always about how players re-act toward & In the game.

as for me, what kills any game is “real money trades” that what change people & that’s what make the game dies.

33

I don’t think it was any one change but was instead a change in direction that started in wrath but was fully formed in WoD. That being the change from an MMO to a singleplayer game. I think once I was sitting in my garrison, using my mine and garden for resources, queuing for dungeons & raids it was fully the solo player experience.

The only time I had any reason to interact with other players was for my weekly raids. Since most of my gold was earned through table missions I really had no reason to ever see other players or leave the garrison.

34

Oh, there’s no doubt about that. I just miss the days when game design meant you could create challenges that required effort rather than every moment of development time being dedicated for the sole purpose of profits for your corporate shareholders.

They would’ve had to stop developing new raids, but not because it would be impossible. Despite the record low sub numbers, Activision Blizzard has been more profitable in recent years than ever. It was because they had to hit certain internal metrics of return on investment that they “wouldn’t be able to” continue creating raids. It’s why they fired 800 employees from Blizzard the very same year that Bobby Kotick was awarded with a $200 million bonus.

I feel like “Gameplay first” is nothing but a desecrated memory. Generally speaking, I really do feel like the Classic team is doing right by us and I’m filled with hope that being acquired by Microsoft will mean a positive direction in the future, but this company feels like an empty husk of what it once was. The simple fact that so many of the important people there fled – not the industry, but the company itself – feels like a strong indication.

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35

WoW lived and DIED with WC3 story-line
and it ended with Wrath
everything else is just fan-fiction tier
and terrible design

36

I managed to have fun in Cataclysm, but I can’t say I really disagree with that. :stuck_out_tongue: Everything since Arthas died has felt outlandish and just different. Reminiscent of the difference between Disney Star Wars and George Lucas Star Wars.

37

That was my plan. 2 things changed. The removal of lfd from wotlk. Because of that i planned to stop at end of tbc. Im on grobulus and have been waiting for the isle daily quests since they anmounced vanilla. Now its here. At the same time i decided to quit at the end of tbc was the same time as the new dragon expansion. I am interested in that now. I skipped shadowlands all together. First exp that i didnt at least buy. Thought i was done for good but the new exp looks like they are trending back toward classic style.

38

Why would raid finder ruin the game for you? That makes as much sense as sayimg you watched a video of a boss kill on youtube so u lost the will to play. The gear was wothless. There was no sence of accomplishment. The only purpose it has was to allow every player the opportunity to see what the raid content was. Someone allowed to see the raid ruined the game for you?? That is just weird.

39

Yeah, I honestly can’t even imagine what that boardroom meeting must’ve been like. They were really out of touch at that point.

40

Glyphs are one addition that let to retail. Glyphs was a decent implementation of borrowed power because it didnt vanish. Come warlords Blizzard gutted the system to make way for their #GlyphsImprovedThatVanishWhenTheExpansionEnds. Another addition that led to the Borrowed power crap was technically Atiesh. Atiesh>Valanyr>Shadowmourne>legendary capes>Legendary ring>Artifact weapons>Azerite. The premise of a lore significant questline item eventually transformed into the garbage borrowed power system.