What are your favorite elements of Classic that Retail has lost?
Story Scope
One of my big issues is that in Retail the story scope has gotten too big. We are all ‘the champion’ in retail, rubbing elbows with the likes of Sylvanas, Thrall, and Malfurion. The majesty story is lost when you are just saving the world again.
No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved! You know?! For a little bit. I feel like the maid: “I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for, for 10 minutes?! Please?! – Mr. Incredible”
Classic did not feel like that. In Classic, you were just another person of your class. When you saw characters from the Warcraft 3 story, it was a big deal. Most of your time was handling smaller problems facing smaller communities. It was fantasy on a more granular scale.
Speed of Retail
Where playing Vanilla was like a leisurely Sunday drive, playing Retail is like a rabid squirrel overdosed on caffeine.
I recently logged into my warrior to play him for a while, the rotation was a constant barrage of ‘click this now!’ and ‘do that now!’. I was easily pulling 8 mobs at once and not batting an eye.
In Vanilla (and Classic) pulling 3 mobs at once mostly likely was your death warrant.
“The world went and got itself into a big damn hurry” – Brooks, Shawshank Redemption
This speed also transcended into travel speeds. With portals to everyone being found in every major city, and epic flying mounts – most of the immense world of warcraft is never seen. When was the last time you actually set foot in crystalsong forest? In classic, even traveling around the world by bird takes a while, and you still get to appreciate just how massive it is.
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Sadly this is the group that retail catered to, and now people complain about it if they ever try to change things.
Even the recent change in portals got people complaining because they might have had to spend a few extra minutes traveling somewhere.
I remember a while back seeing some threads about how “Retribution isn’t fun until you have enough haste because there aren’t enough buttons to push”.
Personally I miss the small touches that added to the RPG elements. Things like needing wood to start a campfire, or ammo to fire a ranged weapon.
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Depth of content. I preferred the game when there were so many uses for professions… weapon stones/oils, craftable gear that was actually usable and desirable, first aid and anti-poisons, lockpicking leveling, feeding your hunter pet and training new ranks by training other animals with it, weapon skill leveling, etc.
The game now seems so shallow… get gear go raid. Everything else is completely optional… and not just optional, irrelevant.
It comes down to the RPG element of the game is gone. All the little things gave depth to the game… i wasn;t in a hurry to kill the raid bosses… the journey was more rewarding.
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I forgot all about that. You needed like a flint and tinder and wood right? I remember my excitement about getting the upgraded enchanting rod that I would be able to use for a long time.
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C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y, it will be nice to get a random buff from strangers and odd whispers if i wanna group up, YES I WILL GROUP lol
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As I mentioned in another post, it is simply those relationships that you form because that quest is super hard and you invite someone to your group.
Counter-intuitively, the harder it is and the more times you die, the more you end up chatting in /p
We gotta come up with a strategy. What if… you pull those mobs around this corner and I try to sheep the last one?
Okay, lets try that. Are you /r?
Let me buff, I’m /r…
Incoming!
That is the game so many of us want to play again. I don’t really care that much about Kel’Thuzad, I want to experience that kind of MMO again with other people.
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Leveling was an experience! People were actively attempting to gear to the best of their ability at each and every level because it made questing/PVPing/dungeons so much easier and more fun.
Seeing the twink brackets removed from Retail just shows how far we’ve faded away from the beauty of how this game originally was. Twinks weren’t a problem in Vanilla. They were something to aspire to. Now people just expect to be hand fed experience until they’re max level and then farm AP.
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At the end of the day the addiction to the game is playing with other people. It really is, make no mistake.
We clear to the end and some mage has done a stellar job, clearly a party MVP, only scumbags are not going to let him have the +spell power gloves. Grats bro, please add to friends!
The special sauce isn’t the 30 mechanics per second, or anything like that. It is taking people you met in the game, got attuned and after clearing all that awful trash you are finally facing Lucifron. You can feel the bloodlust and greed on a raid facing a boss that has items they want. That first Lucy kill on the Classic reboot is going to feel so good.
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I agree. Classes also feel very bland in comparison to Vanilla. Take a spell like Mind Vision. This was not crazy powerful, but was really cool. It gave a unique flavor to the class.
Lots of classes has ‘flavor’ spells or abilities that just were pruned.
I also remember spending time leveling up a particular weapon skill just to keep it up to speed, or go get hit a bunch to get my defense skill up to par.
what has retail retained from classic
The name… that’s pretty much it.
Everything being balanced around end game is causing harm to retail’s leveling experience.
Classes depending on gear like Legion weapons or current Azerite leads to them feeling incomplete and stripped down during the leveling process.
Mobs also need to be made more dangerous, but without necessarily making it take longer to reach the level cap.
Simple answer, a lively world.
The loudest applause from a BlizzCon reveal I’ve heard in years.
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retail lost my sub.
do not know if classic will get it.
My biggest issue with retail is that the awful Play Conditioning. The game doesn’t adequately prepare the player for the “end game” during the leveling process.
Let’s put it this way, if you’re going to run a marathon you need to condition yourself in preparation for it. Go out and jog/run every day before the marathon so that you’re conditioned for it. If you sit around on the couch every day before the marathon, you’re going to be at a severe disadvantage. Play Conditioning works in the same way more or less, though mentally and not physically.
My experience with the game (let’s use Cata as an example) now is that nothing in the 1-84 content prepares you for the 85 content. Mobs are never a threat to you, you don’t need to communicate with people in dungeons in order to achieve the objective, gear is thrown at you like candy, mechanics in dungeons aren’t punishing and the pace of the 1-84 content is like lightning. Then, suddenly, when you’re level 85 things start to slow dramatically. You do some heroics and get better gear but now you’re in a sort of limbo where the obvious next step, raiding, seems like a huge hurtle. Why? Because nothing in the game has prepared you for what raiding is like. Now suddenly you’ll need to get potions, enchants, consumables and more. You probably rarely used any of these things during the leveling process. Now you have to communicate with other players in order to down a boss, mechanics are punishing, trash will kill you faster than anything you’ve encountered up to this point. The most striking difference might just be time investment.
I’m not saying that raiding was hard or anything, but it becomes a completely foreign concept to new players nowadays because it’s just so unlike the rest of the game.
In Vanilla raiding is just a normal next step in the progress of your character. It’s got a much smoother transition and comes naturally after the leveling / gearing process. You have already been introduced to consumables, potions, enchants, teamwork, patience and time investment. Really the only difference between the game you’ve been playing up to this point and raiding is more time and more investment.
Zones used to be designed in ways that made them feel worth exploring. You’d find quests on your own in the unexplored corners of the map. In the plaguelands, you would find hidden Scarlet strongholds or mysterious troll ruins occupied by walking mummies. You’d find mysterious people in caves who would send you on dungeon quests with mysterious motives…
It just felt a lot more like you were discovering things in Classic. If you wanted a specific item, you had to see the quests through to the end. Objects and rewards were allowed to be totally unique–remember the trinket that would give you a shadowy aura and slowly kill you if you equipped it? That was a fun and unique item that had practical uses as well as a great flavor aspect.
Nowadays, there’s a defined formula for questing: Find a new place, there’s a quest giver out front who gives you two quests, then two more, then a finishing quest. You almost never leave that region to finish any quest.
Vanilla sent you all over the world; you’d find yourself in Tanaris, in Feralas, in Tirsifal Glades, and you’d have incentives to comb the world for unexplored corners in the hopes of finding unique stories and characters. And you often did find them.
It feels like modern WoW doesn’t really have a sense of wonder or mystery. In transforming most zones into “overarching plot lines” like a single player game, a lot of the sense of adventure was snuffed out. What happened to meeting Tirion as an old hermit, discovering all sorts of aspects of his former life, then being sent to a completely different zone to break his son free of scarlet brainwashing? Even the questlines in modern WoW that send you to multiple zones feel formulaic now. There’s always some special instanced version of the zone that reminds you that you’re not really “there,” you’re just partaking in a scripted scenario.
Subs.
Though i am surprised i had to be this far down to see it