First things first let’s get this out of the way. I’m happy we have classic, happy with my experience so far and more so than anything, happy for those who fought so hard for it.
I want it to be the best possible experience it can be. I’m assuming we all do. That goes for levelers, RPers, PvPers and of course, Raiders.
And that’s where my worry comes in. Classic raiding is and never was supposed to be mythic raiding. It’s extremely dated and we’ve obviously grown as players exponentially since then. Classic isn’t about brutal cutting edge raiding. People wanted it because they wanted the MMO “world” back. And we got that.
But raiding is a large part of WoW, and a large part of the player base and as it stands…it’s incredibly unsatisfying.
I want to try to be objective about it, but I feel confident in saying that Molten Core is painfully easy. There’s almost zero sense of achievement, progression and engaging boss fights just don’t really exist. Right now it feels like a weekly loot Pinata with some trash mobs to kill time. BWL will be similar in how quickly it’s vanquished, and even AQ40 and Naxx which will certainly be a step up, shouldn’t be that particularly challenging for the average player because of how much time we will have to accumulate gear.
I understand those who want no changes, though it’s already not an “authentic” experience due to the patch were playing on. But is hilariously easy endgame content really representative of vanilla wow? Is it the best thing for the player-base as a whole?
I can tell you right now, far more people quit when something is to easy than they do when something is hard. Yes, people will complain and moan about how harder raid content isn’t “authentic” and it isn’t what they’re looking for. But far, FAR more people will be genuinely happy to have meaningful raid content.
Classic has so many wonderful RPG elements, an engaging leveling experience, a relevant over-world and a flawed, yet enticing PvP system. Why not give it a solid endgame experience to round that out and give us the best “version” of the game in its original state?
Again, the mechanics will never be anything to crazy. But I feel like proper itemization, gear grinding etc. are in the spirit of vanilla. And when you can clear the hardest content in the game comfortably with half of a raid in mediocre gear…than the gear grind becomes irrelevant in PvE.
I’ve heard from many who played on private servers that the “upscaled” ones were the absolute best experiences. Some guy names “gummy” or something increased the raid difficulty on one of the servers and it seems genuinely beloved by those who played on it. Perhaps that’s the direction we should go with classic.
I don’t believe multiple difficulties really fits classic. But perhaps some kind of hard-modes similar to Ulduar that can be activated before/during the fight? Personally I’m all for just outright increasing there difficulty by a significant amount, but I’ll take what I can get.
Again, I think this would make a better experience for everybody playing classic. I think it would help retain a lot of players, which is obviously ideal for the health of the game. The number one reason people are quitting is because stepping into Molten Core and farting your way through it is kind of disheartening. We grinded through the awesome and engaging leveling experience, geared up from well-designed dungeons only to complete obliterate MC without much effort.
I know this will get BLASTED by the #NoChanges crowd, even though most of them don’t even realize that’s there’s already plenty of changes.
Yes this would trigger a lot of people, but it would make a LOT more people happy, and draw them back to the game. It would make for a better game, and why in the world wouldn’t we want those cherished version of one of the most influential games of all time THAT much better.
Again, nobody expects mythic level raiding. But moderately challenging, meaningful raid content? I think most of us would gladly welcome that change.