It was their first attempt, but to think they didn’t try would be a bit extra
I can say with decent confidence that making memes raid viable is absolutely the worst design philosophy to approach classic+ with.
Any classic+ centered around class changes will probably be bad. It will suck up all dev time, have horrible moments, and at best just be the same we have today.
Classic+ needs to be about making Azeroth bigger, new dungeons, battlegrounds, MMR, etc.
Snap back to reality, please.
People are expecting way too much out of the small team working on Classic. The reality is that Classic is not a priority at the company. We get the scraps.
I know many people dont think hybrids are good, but those pare those who just raid log and effectively do not play wow.
Consider a moment the intended design of the classes for vanilla wow as stated in VERY early Beta interviews. They focused on Leveling, Small scale Dungeons, World PvP and Battlegrounds. They made mention of Al, these things but made no mention of raids.
Raids if you’re not aware were introduced very much last minute and were a total rush job pushed forward by Developers (players) brought in from EQ. These players made developers wanted raids in wow and here we are today.
Some will tell you PvP was the afterthought, but this couldn’t be further from the truth because it was declared in early beta to be a component that took longer than expected to go live. This is in tradition with OG blizzard’s policy of “when its done”.
Now contrast this with the class kits who effectively see near 100% use in BG’s unlike Raid from Vanilla and frankly even to this day in retail where raids do require more yet have never used as much of the class mechanics as PvP.
WoW is and always has been a game designed to PvP, and the PVE was included because its how you level, but also a thing to go to war over, its something to get the players into the game so that the battleground Q’s pop and the blood flows for the blood god.
With all this in mind the Vanilla classes are near perfect, and I trust no one at blizzard to make even the slightest change for the better.
Anyone with knowledge of Vanilla’s game design can discern that the SoD runes do not exactly follow the original philosophy.
Want to know what would? TBC abilities/talents, as they directly build on top of Vanilla’s. Classic+ would benefit best from implementing TBC abilities/talents which Blizzard can now do (after some trial and error) with making changes on a version without affecting Era.
Of course they don’t, and neither do the changes people are asking for here. When I say Vanilla wasn’t centered around just raids…that’s not an opinion. All aspects of the game had value. People would do well to go watch some old vods of Kevin Jordan streaming.
And these servers will progress to TBC in like a year. 
I wouldn’t change anything to it because I think all the imbalanced flaws it has tend to has quite a bit of charm. Skill and RNG are not mutually exclusive, skill can also involve RNG, like in card games, poker, etc. Classic wow is a lot like this, the skill it takes is a mmorpg-tab target one, but it’s still very different and has a lot of skill cap and skill expression within that, despite its flaws. I would say often those flaws tend to help make the game feel special and help reward rough pre-planning for potential circumstances that can unfold, but can acknowledge why it wouldn’t be everyone’s taste. Just like retail, it’s a very different game.
Many of us here know the many lies of ‘no changes’ and kept seeing changes. There shouldn’t have been any changes or as little as possible, but people seem to completely ignore that sometimes the slippery slope is real and power creep can happen in a myriad of ways for the worse. It seems someone is always asking “why not X?” death by a thousand cuts.
For classic+ I think hybrids and some balancing should be in order, just not as much as SOD did, as you say. However, I fear Blizz is going to be listening to the wrong crowd, whether it’s people on reddit or the legion of streamers who think their community and opinion is better than most while they seemingly get it half right.
I am for classic+ with some proper balancing but are we going to get it? Probably not. We’re surrounded by people who thought retail arena players who picked up vanilla game for the first time years ago were the best players when it was very obvious they weren’t and had a lot to learn. These ‘best players’ were messing up on the basics. Perceived ‘authority’ and assumption can be a funny thing.
They actually reduce the number of viable and competitive PvP specs in the game.
If it were possible to Play Vanilla paladin in TBC scaled up for TBC in respect to skill costs but retains EVERYTHING vanilla in respect to its original talents and abilities; Paladin could compete with Priest, Rogue and Mage in respect to arena, and would have 7 easily viable builds.
But alas, TBC neuters paladin.
Other classes are in a similar situation with fewer viable PVP specs.
Keep abilities/talents as they were in Vanilla, but add TBC talents on top with any necessary adjustments, then we’d have the best of both worlds.
Part of the problem is many of the 41 point talents and the talents to buff them are so powerful they force you 41 deep.
Take for example in TBC rogue gets Step in the sub tree; After this there is really not much else you will see from rogues; they will always play step and they will always select the talents to increase damage on hemo and increase AGI by 15%.
Its basically more the same for every single other class, just some get fried way worse than others.
But do you trust Blizzard to do anything? I dont.
I am interested in a balance patch that is with the CLASSIC magnitude
SoD is way too much. Cool idea, but no one asked for this.
people just wanna play the game the way it was released. season of discovery is the testing ground for classic+ vanilla tbc and wrath will always be replayable the way the were
To many changes happened already imo.
Changes to the classes/specs would have to be very conservative and only selectively target things which don’t properly serve their intended purpose.
Like removing the 2-stack on Enhance’s Stormstrike debuff. It’s not even worth the mana to press for the debuff it offers your group, its only worth is as an auto reset so you can fish for a second chance to windfury another player to death in PvP.
I don’t think any class or spec is designed so poorly that they require anything added to them.
See the problem with this is, the devs literally never consider the pvp implications of buffing classes. It always ends up being a cluster F (see SoD).
Speaking of SOD, go play it. It has all the class balancing.
Yep, nothing else needs to be said here also:
TLDR?
Classic purists don’t have reasoning; they only have rationalizations.
Like, unironically. They’re all deluded morons who argue in bad faith at the best of times. You aren’t going to get some cogent reflection from anyone who is against a bunch of class fantasies being allowed to play the game.
They are like a primitive tribe with a water purification ritual that includes 35 steps, of which only 4 are necessary. There’s nothing you can say that won’t end up with them digging their heels in or plugging their ears, because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
It’s an absolute tragedy that Classic has been shackled with such a toxic ball and chain, but they’re not going to suddenly see the light after 5 years. People who want the actual Vanilla experience are just kind of SoL because these degenerates have clung like barnacles on a ship to the base game we need to modify to achieve that experience.
Why not -
BECAUSE WE DONT WANT TO GO OOM IN 30 SECONDS
Thats them alright
This is an “Anniversary” launch of a game.
It is not a wishlist version of WoW, it is not Classic+, it is not “Build a Classic”, it is not “Community Driven Development”. You are playing a re-re-release of a game that was a specific way that lots of people like playing.
Also the people who whinge about not raiding as Ret, or Shadow, or OOMkin come off as selfish derps who don’t realize that every class has a spec that is not good for raiding, most classes get one spec for raids - even Warriors basically all raid as a very similar spec.
SoD took it way too far. Like asking to borrow a saw to cut up a down tree limb, and someone drives up in a giant industrial metal cutter of some kind. I agree with the point of the OP, it’s weird how almost violently angry people STILL get after 20 years about the thought that ret or ele might actually be useful in some way, in a Vanilla environment instead of… whatever mutant SoD is.