What are the MAJOR differences between Classic Vanilla vs TBC vs WOTLK vs Retail?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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This is something I’ve always seemed to have trouble on getting an answer to. Everyone has their favorite classic version. The issue I run into is that when I ask people to tell me why they have their favorites? Why play it over say retail or another classic version? That’s when things seem to break down. And people seem to struggle giving answers that could help shape the form of the game.

Every expansion has differences

  1. Setting
  2. Balance

So I don’t consider these viable forms of feedback. As I don’t think it gives a clear direction of what specifically an expansion “does right”. And every retail expansion these things change.

So to you what makes each expansion that expansion. Why play Vanilla over TBC? Or over wotlk? Or over retail? And vice versa.

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Yes.

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vanilla is purely team-based. Minimal play outside group content needed if you don’t want to do it.
TBC is mostly team-based but play outside becomes needed for convenience. Epic flying farming, dailies etc.
WOLK is heavily balancing teamplay with solo play. Achievements make it a rat race at times. Community becomes a meritocracy.
Retail heavily depends on personal preparation, both in game and in terms of addons, Ui etc. Team effort is reduced to simply following addon and raid leader calls.

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What is an example of solo play that’s in TBC that isn’t in vanilla?

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Daily quests for making gold

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yes, daily quests (blue !) is one of the unique introductions in TBC. nearly all dailies are soloable.

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So for the following.

Vanilla -

  1. Add in Daily Quests (solo)
  2. Add in Arenas
  3. Add in 20 man raids
  4. Add in Heroic Dungeons

Would that make vanilla very close or equal to TBC?

Likewise

TBC

  1. Put in a greater focus on consumables
  2. Put in a greater focus on specialized gear (resist type stuff)
  3. Add in more group questing

Would that make TBC very close or equal to vanilla?

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Raid/Dungeon difficulty. Leveling experience. Player mindset. Social structure.

Both have positives and negatives. Retail is more end game focused with difficult content, where as Classic, you get the whole package, leveling, dungeons, raids, but is way more casual in difficulty.

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I’ve seen social structure a few times now. Could you go into what exactly that means? Like in terms of how guilds work?

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Interesting question. Hard to explain really. I think the main thing is player mentality here. I suppose both games have similar social structures.

Classic’s casual nature makes the game feel less cut throat and people are generally just there to hang out and relax and enjoy the experience.

Retail has always felt more stressful in nature and breeds a lot of toxicity in a high end content due to its competitive spirit. Turn over can be extremely bad in Mythic raiding guilds due to high stress.

Both are great games in there own way. Both have flaws, but retail is def less player friendly in certain ways.

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The goal of original vanila was just reach level 60 and just casual pvp. No arena or most people dont even raid. Each expansion pushed player into raid and raid more or just arena. Then add mythic plus after legion. Now retail is purely raid , arena and mythic plus.

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Every expansion with flying mounts is already retail

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Classics do numbers right. Retail inflated too much to the point where it needed to squish multiple times.

The stat squish in retail MADE OUR CHARACTERS WEAKER. My clear speed of cata raids in Legion went from 15 minutes in firelands to 45 minutes making mount farming feel gross.

In classic getting upgrades feels better because there are less random procs going on with your damage. As a frost mage there’s frostbolt icelance and that’s it. You don’t have ice shards flying in or trinket procs that scale from spellpower or set bonuses that also do things or your artifact power item of the expansion having some chance on hit effect. It just creates a cluster mess of numbers.

In vanilla classic mages only have frostbolt but it felt more interesting to get upgrades. More mana meant you could frostbolt for longer. There was a game of using mana gems and pots just right to last the full fight. When your frostbolt moves up from 1000 to 1100 to 1200 to 1300 it feels good. There is a visual of your power actually growing which is great to see.

Raiding was better in classic too. It was more casual based and didn’t take itself too seriously. I think this is a better approach than trying to make people die 20 times on each boss in a slog feast. It’s nice to have 1 raid that everyone walks into or doesn’t walk into. Not having LFR mythic heroic flex whatever.

Normal raids only cause people to get more addicted to the game, LFR causes people to play whenever they like and quit whenever they like. It’s why cata started draining subs.

Also by Wod the difference between heroic normal and LFR gear was so little I didn’t really care. Just getting full iL700 was good enough.

In classic you wanted the best gear because it would improve your daily farming speed and your low level dungeon clear speed. It could also improve your pvp set or just make dungeons fly by faster. The difference between a full naxx25 gear player and a greens and blues iL190 player is pretty big.

In retail there isn’t really a +100% more damage if you collect all the raid tier gear instead of settling for blues and greens. In retail you can get full LFR gear and get +90% more damage and miss out on 10% from not getting normal/heroic/mythic. But you can still farm old raids really fast in full LFR gear.

Pvp is more unbalanced which means more fun. Balanced pvp is never fun, it means all the classes have answers to all the other classes. In wrath classic each class has a weakness and a strength. Arcane mage for example is the weakest 1v1 class but the strongest pvp dps glass cannon.

There’s also the fact you can use pve epics and legendaries to gain a huge advantage. Pve gear has more damage than pvp gear but you don’t get resilience making you squishier. Because pve gear would have 2 secondary stats usually like crit and haste and pvp gear is just crit and resilience. Also pve gear set bonuses from tier sets could be utilized as well if the bonus is strong enough.

Retail removed just about every RPG element that made wow feel like a video game version of dungeons and dragons. Hunters don’t need ammo. Quest are conveniently designed to be done in 5 minutes always. Warlock pets don’t need special books. Talent trees are just boring spells you choose. Character customization is very bland.

In wrath classic you have so much to customize. You can choose glyphs, talents, gear for pvp do i want 10% resilience or 15%, if i take 10% i can do this much more damage ect. It’s a min/maxers dream.

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this is why MMOs were way more fun back then, because people PvP’d casually and it was fun. Runescape wilderness etc…

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So if I try to summerize here

  1. The itemization process/methodology was more satisfying/enjoyable/rewarding. Which trickles down into content being more enjoyable.

  2. The whole normal, heroic, mythic system of scaling the difficulty of the same dungeon wasn’t great and didn’t produce a “good” community.

  3. Class design feels more unique and fun. Which means PvP was more fun.

  4. PvE gear was “good” in PvP and preferred

  5. Set bonuses/items that were more interesting/beneficial

  6. Various RPG elements. Regeants, ammo, etc.

  7. Quests were more interesting and not just exp granters. But felt like proper quests

  8. Talent trees were better/more fun.

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If your mount flies, you’re playing retail WoW.

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i feel like classic era is just more straightforward. I did the deadmines quest, i beat deadmines, deadmines is by all means done, at some point i will have all the most powerful items from it if i choose soo to keep doing it. And expansions add stuff.

Retail feels like you never beat anything aside mythic raids which are soo hard i just dont find them fun at all, just stressfull, and the fact i had to beat it in heroic or normal makes the feeling worse because i did beat but i didnt cuz lol… and expansions literally erase other expansiosn features or replace them entirely.

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So you’re not a fan of the “same dungeon but more difficult” design. So the heroic features introduced in TBC and wotlk you’re not a fan of?

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Retail has a lot of anti-mmo and anti-rpg features.

  • LFR (Quit trying to be a single player game and encourage social interaction)
  • LFG
  • Transmog (Huge incentive killer. You can just make yourself look “cool cap”. Then there’s no point in getting the new raid gear because it won’t make you look cooler. Whereas if you’re forced to wear blues and greens and you look like a clown then when you upgrade to tier you’re going to look way cooler in comparison. Transmog replaces cosmetic upgrades you get while playing the game…with a vendor)
  • Level/Power scaling (in an RPG??? come on…)
  • Flying (The real problem here is that a cube has more volume than a square has area. Flight turns player movement into a cube. More room to move around, less player interaction, world feels barren and devoid of players.
  • Phases (Do not hide players from each other for the sake of storytelling. This isn’t Skyrim. This is an MMO)
  • Catch up mechanics (What’s the point in getting gear if all of it is just obsolete and trivially replaceable in the next patch? This is a major reason why I don’t come back. There’s no point in gearing when in a month or 2 there’s going to be free welfare gear that’s better. Vanilla didn’t do this. The gear you got mattered until the next expansion came out. And that’s how it should be. A 2 year window of time to get tons of gear. Not a few months.

Issues with Classic

  • Layers (Do not hide players from each other. Period)
  • Flying
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Yeah I think the Catch up mechanic point rolls into the itemization concept. Which I see mentioned A LOT. So that is 100% a huge point of difference between retail and the 3 classics. How they approach items, rewards, the methodology, etc. Gear matters beyond the current patch date (which means the content continues to matter). The gear feels more impactful and rewarding.

I can see why they went the route of catch up mechanics. They probably saw that players joining “late” to an expansion were behind and struggled to keep up. But I also don’t think that in the scope of classic, essentially resetting gear progression to get everyone on the same level via catch ups.

They should have worked on rewards more so that items found inside the 1st raid would still be good or at least playable in the 3rd. And since raids are on a weekly reset, players are incentivized to keep playing the first raid as its another chance of a gear upgrade. Or at the very least they need to low the “gear gap” between the different tiers so that one tier doesn’t outshine previous tiers to such a degree?

It’s a hard solution because I think any solution has its own pros and cons. But if classic wants to keep its identity, it can’t go the retail route of catch ups.