Yep. I’ve boycotted Arena since they were released to protest the direction of WoW PvP starting in BC.
I think classic gives you a more engaging experience with your character and the game itself.
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Class Identity. Modern WoW has 4 classes - tank, healer, ranged DPS, melee DPS. In Vanilla every class had unique, mostly non-spec-specific utility that made them desirable regardless of what the meters said.
Importance of Community and Player Reputation. No LFD/LFR, only a single difficulty for everything. No catch-up mechanics. Rep / material grinds that can’t reasonably be completed by one person working alone. Vanilla WoW was hailed as a revolution in MMORPGs by catering a lot more to solo play, but I think WoW has progressed too far in the other direction. Modern WoW is a solo game you play with other people.
Raiding / Loot Mystique. Only the best players got to see the later raids. Blizzard sees this as a failure but I think it actually drove the community aspect to an extent. You want to raid Naxx 40? You better be good, experienced, and prepared. You see someone in fancy, matching gear? You know they’re an end-game raider or PvPer. Today everyone looks good but at the same time you can’t really tell anything important about anyone just by looking at them. Having even a single purple item was a major milestone and something to be proud of.
Much Better Feeling of Progression. The slower pace of leveling and the fact that you gained a talent point every level and new skills every other level just ‘felt’ a lot better to me. Training skills, researching builds, saving up gold to earn your slow mount at level 40 - it just made me feel more invested. Outleveling a zone before you finished all the quests just never happened. Farming resistance gear. Traveling all over Azeroth (the slow way) to do a quest chain, or just to do a dungeon. These are all things that got optimized out of the game but the feeling of any sense of real progression seems to have gone with it.
BIG 5-mans. Vanilla dungeons were awesome and I am sorely disappointed that Blizzard decided to go to short 5-mans in BC and never looked back. To this day, Vanilla dungeons are still my favorite. The old Sunken Temple, BRD, Wailing Caverns. Yes they took forever but with the overall slower pace of the game it was appropriate and well worth the effort.
11 Likes
I’m looking forward to seeing and exploring pre-Cata Azeroth again. I only had a couple years of pre-Cata 1-60 questing (Wrath baby) and many more years of post-Cata Azeroth and questing.
Also I like leveling and I like professions. While I dabble in dungeons and raids I don’t focus on that “endgame” content and I like the fact that leveling 1-60 is a major part of the game rather than something you need to get through ASAP to get to the start of the “real” game at max level.
I’m looking forward to a feeling of power progression again, where mobs that were challenging at 30 will disintegrate at 55.
Also I remember (although I have forgotten more than I remember) that pre-Cata questing was less linear and more “sandbox”-ish than what’s out there now.
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Like you, I actually do enjoy the current game, but I’m also very excited for Classic, and will likely play that more than BfA once it’s released.
I’ll start with what I like currently:
Mythic + dungeons and the raids, especially M+. Working with people to overcome more difficult content is fun for me. I like the idea of island expeditions and war fronts, but they didn’t hit the mark.
Now for what will have me spending more time in classic over the modern iteration:
- The entire trip to max level matters again. 1-59 isn’t something simply to get out of the way before the “real” game starts.
- Dungeons in general. In retail, they are a joke until you hit max level and start doing mythic and higher. I miss having to actually use some strategy and not just roll through everything by pulling all mobs into a pile and AoE’ing them into oblivion. Running dungeons in vanilla and TBC are what made me truly fall in love with WoW.
- Professions matter again. I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone that would declare BfA professions to be useful outside of alchemy.
- Server community. We’ve sacrificed this in the name of convenience with the automatic cross realm LFD feature. I’m grouped with people I’ll never encounter ever again from other servers to faceroll dungeons. 95% of the time they don’t even respond to the “Hello all” I say at the beginning of every run or the “Thank you everybody” at the end.
I don’t feel that the trade was worth it. - Classes feel much better. To play devil’s advocate here for BfA, I feel like the devs are starting to try to move away from the homogenization from the last several years of the game, but there’s a long way to go yet. The classes I play now basically use 3 or 4 abilities almost exclusively.
Edit: Adding Progression to my list for Classic. I feel much more invested in my character because I feel like my character is growing during the leveling process. The way talents are spread so far apart in retail (and don’t make me feel significantly more powerful anyway), they don’t give me any sense that my character is getting better. The overall lack of abilities also contributes to this.
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No sharding
More choice in talents
More community than today although I am sure not like it was
No more chasing the rabbit. There’s a cap which allows for more character development and not feeling one has to race.
Smaller world which will help with community
Character of a person will count a lot more
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I love the pacing of classic wow. Slowed down and immersive, it gives one a chance to truly soak up the atmosphere. I like how you are just a lowly peon at the start of the game, slowly working your way through the world. In terms of character progression, it’s not as interesting to start an expansion as a world renowned champion of Azeroth. I love exploring the enormous continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. So many zones! Expansions cannot match the amount of content and diversity provided in the base game. I love the sense of danger in the open world, the fact that small mistakes would easily lead to your death. I love the fact that zones DONT scale, there should exist areas that are too dangerous for you as you are leveling. I love how little wow classic holds players hands in comparison to the modern game. It’s okay that a video game is challenging and frustrating, and difficulty should not be a setting controlled by the player (aka: lfr, normal, heroic, mythic). There is one version of each dungeon and raid, no training wheels. I love the sense of community, the need to interact socially with others on your server in order to form groups to complete content. Your server was your universe in classic, these were the players you would band together with or compete against throughout the original game. I loved that there was only one version of each item, no titanforging casino mini game. I loved that there was no transmog option, what a person looked like in game could tell you a lot about the content they’ve accomplished. I loved the old talent tree systems, that allowed for more variety and experimentation compared to the condensed current talent trees. BFA did not even add another talent row, there has not been much class progression in BFA. The Azerite traits for the most part are uninteresting and don’t spice up the gameplay. There is an extremely strong sense of class progression in classic wow. Very noticeable as you are leveling.
I know this is subjective but the best way I could sum it up is classic wow doesn’t try to make you like it. It exists to be enjoyed by those who can acquire a taste for it. While BFA has been designed to make sure everyone will enjoy it. Sometimes going for mass appeal can make a game lose its flavor.
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Just gonna pick one, and that’s very slow and deliberate questing. When I recall back to the RPGs I grew up playing, it was common that I’d progress on the main story and get wholloped, have to stop and think about what to do to beat it, get better gear, or grind a bit to get stronger. This is normal in Classic—hit Westfall and you’ll soon start getting quests that make you slow in your tracks or that you put on the back-burner til you’re strong enough. Feels like an actual RPG.
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Flex
Flex raiding kills the attendance demand. Guildies will show for raids but if they don’t show, no big deal. At the point the raid group switches to Mythic they are doomed.
Ultimately, it’s the need for guilds that has been removed. I miss the small, tight knit, group of friends content. I realize that vanilla has 40 man raiding but small guilds will still thrive in Classic.
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I played Vanilla/TBC/WotLK quit. Came back tail end of WoD into Legion. It’s just a completely different game. Vanilla was an RPG and Legion was an arcade shooter version of WoW.
I leveled an alt from 15 to 95+ completely standing still in Stormwind. I had no idea who I grouped with and it didn’t matter. I had no idea how to do leveling dungeons cata+ but breezed through them without strategy or CC. No mob in the game threatened me while questing and I usually could 2-4 shot mobs.
I never had to eat food or water as my passive regen + abilities were sufficient for continued play.
At level 110 I had less abilities on my hotbar than some level 40’s in Vanilla.
Gear at 110 was a joke. You could do the hardest mythic +15’s back during Emerald Nightmare and all that gear is made obsolete by catchup mechanics that reward waiting until the end of the expansion for the best loot.
New spell animations and new character models is a huge turn off. I’m used to the game looking a certain way and that art has more soul in it than the new higher detailed items. I think Warcraft 3 looks better than Warcraft Reforged. It’s not the number of polygons, but the style/theme/character of those polygons.
They destroyed my home of Azeroth by twisting the zones and adding flying in Cataclysm.
Vanilla had no cross realm sharding. I was starting to get annoyed by phasing in WotLK as well.
7 Likes
In classic, I just want to try the slower gameplay focused on leveling. I want to spend a week in Elvynn Forest leveling my professions, farming resources, doing class a quest, just exploring. It seems like retail wow is all about rushing it, and even if you slow down, there is no need to slow down, it’s always effective to just rush.
I’ve recently tried an alt where I picked a class / race /faction combo I never played, forgot about LFG and heirlooms and pretended that a low level crafting profession can benefit me. It’s fun, but I’d like to play a game where I wouldn’t need to pretend.
I do admit the possibility it will all go stale very quickly too. But I plan to play classic as I play an alt. Just relaxation.
Retail has become too arcade-y for me. Things got stripped off to make it as easy as possible to get into action, but it does belittle the action itself, since there is no weight of preparation to it, and there is no point in dedication.
3 Likes
Hello All,
I have played BFA and Legion. I actually enjoyed BFA quite a bit. I’m very excited for Classic wow and will be switching over to mainly playing classic once it goes live.
Here is what I like/am excited about for each game:
BFA:
- I really enjoyed the story mode questing system the first time through. The quests are getting more immersive, filled with cut scenes and dialogue. While I enjoy this type of gameplay, it is not fun to do more than once.
- The spell graphics/zones/ and models keep continuing to amaze me, as an animation artist in real life, I really appreciate the detailing they put into everything in BFA/Legion
- I really enjoyed the concept of warmode, and loved the random pvp encounters while leveling up my allied race. But at max level, far too often was it a gank fest, I rarely encountered natural 1 vs 1 pvp in max level warmode.
- Finally, I love allied races, and I don’t mind them being gated behind rep and quests - nothing wrong with working hard to unlock something IMO.
Classic:
- Classes were more fun and unique
- leveling felt more rewarding for your toon, you feel stronger and stronger with each level and learning new spells from your trainer/talent trees is something to look forward to.
- Class quests were important and fun - unlocking bear form for example, having to speak with the great bear spirit in moonglade, added a lot of class fantasy
- Armor upgrades felt impactful, even getting a new green item made a difference.
- professions being relevant
- 1-60 zones being relevant
- people passing by you on the street being relevant
- low level dungeons being relevant
- twinking
- class buffs
- making friends
- having spells outside of your spec
overall, classic wow feels better. Everything you do feels meaningful. leveling up, getting a new spell, finding new gear, making a new recipe, building friendships, the list goes on, this is why I will be switching over to classic.
BFA feels too much like a console story mode solo player game. You run through it once and then put it on your shelf. Nothing really worth repeating. I felt little to no character progression leveling through BFA, even getting new gear each week felt hollow.
5 Likes
Server community. The good, the bad and the ugly that comes with it.
In essence , guilds/server becoming the face of the game again.
LFD would have been a great, had it been a server only implementation.
The same reason I prefer playing poker with my friends at a card table over playing video poker on my phone.
1 Like
That’s a very complicated answer that will take some time to explain.
Most of it ties into the interaction between class design and content design. By content, I do not just mean raids or dungeons, but everything that isn’t in a spellbook or talent tree. Classes in vanilla were designed to be very different from each other, rather than all of them fitting into the same paradigms of tank, DPS, and heal. These three roles still existed, but were entirely secondary to your role as your class.
It is the complete opposite in modern WoW; rarely do you look for specific classes, you just look for the role, which speaks about class and content design.
There is very little in the way of unique, diverse abilities among classes in modern WoW, with its philosophy to just “gut anything that isn’t necessary.” Whether something was practical and useful is not really an objective point one can make, because it requires projecting one’s own ideals of success and content worth doing on other players. That is to say, those niche abilities that classes used to have were loved for a reason; they gave people a way to play their class in a classical RPG sense, with competition as a secondary goal.
Content design was changed over time to reflect the changes in class design. You no longer have areas where individual classes feel unique and desired beyond the throughput they can throw up on screen. This is why, despite being the most balanced WoW has in ages, the discrepancy between classes can seem massive; the only goal is throughput, and the only thing a class can provide is throughput, then there is nothing anyone has to make up for their lack of tuning.
In the past, even if your class didn’t have the best healing or DPS, it very often had sought-after utilities to make up for it. In vanilla specifically, there were also items that could help make up for it(Nightfall, for a big example.)
Over time, the endgame inside of instances took more and more of the spotlight, making activities out in the world(such as farming, questing, and crafting) less important. All activities became a metaphorical arrow sign to point one into the raid instance. This is actually why WoW became increasingly popular in the BC/Wrath days; it appealed to the broader spectrum of gaming audiences, namely the competitive sorts.
Originally, WoW was not really designed with competitiveness amongst players as its driving motive. It was one’s choice to be competitive, with both content and class favoring either decision. Cookie-cutter talents, for instance, were a community-made myth. Yes there were optimal talent set-ups for particular situations, there always will be no matter how you spin it, but the bar in vanilla content was actually rather low in terms of required throughput. In a way, this competitive mindset is responsible both for WoW’s successes and mistakes.
In vanilla, you could set your own goals, and feel both challenged and rewarded by them. In modern WoW, there are very few goals because too much is focused around raids or mythic dungeons. Very little out in the world is of any real challenge or importance. Something WoW has lost is the ability to provide a challenge without relying on competition as the only driving factor to do this challenge. Challenge has become very “impersonal” in a way.
You look at WoW today, and everything has competition as its driving factor. Raids, dungeons, PvP(obviously), and even professions for the sake of AH competition. Professions are a big peeve of mine, with crafting professions in modern WoW having their entire philosophy built not around crafting anything good, but by making money from selling to enchanters to DE. Instead of crafting to improve yourself or make money, the only purpose of crafting anymore is to make money. In the older days of WoW, before LFG, crafting was the casual way to gear yourself, and the gear you could make was good indeed. It wasn’t the best, of course not, but it was very far from worthless: better than anything most quests would give.
Now, this leads into gear design, which ties into, say it with me: class and content design. It resides somewhere in the middle. The philosophy for stat and gear design in vanilla WoW was far different from today. The intent for every stat to have some benefit for everyone; the weight of this benefit all depended on other gear you had, the consumables you had, your class, and how you were specced.
That is not to say all stats were equally beneficial, but that they provided different benefits. You would not want much spirit on a paladin at level cap, but having some while leveling would help with health and mana regeneration. Builds and gear sets for leveling were important then, as it was for dungeons, farming, raids, PvP, you name it. You could either spec around a certain set of items, or set a spec and go after items that benefitted it. In modern WoW, you just sim what puts out the most theoretical throughput.
Cookie-cutter talents were indeed a thing towards late wrath and cata, but that was because of the changing class and content design straying away from unique classes, and more towards just filling one of three roles.
The leveling experience was also an important, and challenging part of vanilla WoW. When you rolled a character, the game put you through itself in a way to make you become attached to it. The old talent system was very good for leveling, as it gave a sense of steady progression along the way, a noticeable “reward” for getting another level. Nowadays with scaling, another level is too arbitrary; you can’t outgrow content and overpower it, and there is no active interface with one’s character when they level up; everything that they need is just automatically given to them. I often forget class trainers exist in modern WoW.
There were real choices in vanilla WoW, and they did matter very much, because it was built to be an RPG. You don’t play DnD just to meta-game and be at a competitive edge, you do it to build…well…a character with their own flaws and strengths. As a fiction writer, it’s a very similar concept to creating a memorable character; it’s not about what strengths a character has, but how their weaknesses are challenged, and how they get over or around them them. It’s about the trying, not the triumph. This does not translate well into a competitive, sporty environment.
Your character in an RPG has stats, abilities, and numbers that are all symbolic representations of who they would be if they were real. You could very well build your character the way you want, for the bar for most content in vanilla was rather low in throughput demands, but it was ultimately the competitive mindset of the broader crowds which snuffed this RPG sense out. That hunter rolling on warrior tanking gear may seem like an idiot, but you don’t know how they’re trying to build they’re character. You don’t pay their subscription.
There are choices, and you cannot have true choice if there is no tangible consequence, difference, or reward.
In modern WoW, you do not really have much choice because the choices either don’t change anything, or the content is all the same. Myself as an unholy DK follows the same build no matter what raid or boss, no matter the dungeon, no matter what I’m doing in the world. There’s very little I can do to build my character how I’d imagine him; I am forced into how Blizzard(and the community to a degree) wants to see a DK.
Finally, to conclude it all, there is a matter of the grind. Modern WoW has so many arbitrary gates, diminishing returns, and timers, keeping all players near the same pace of one another, that your own personal persistence is worthless. They’re not my parents, nor my doctor; if I want to grind until I have a stroke, then give me the freedom to do so. Vanilla WoW greatly rewarded persistence and patience, modern WoW rewards rushing.
9 Likes
Soul shards
Class quests
Basically, the RPG part of MMORPG. Modern WoW is nothing but a lobby game designed around being a vehicle for eSports.
Having to use CC and not just race through an instance like it’s a daily chore.
Forming a group manually and traveling to dungeons. This ties into the lobby game thing.
I understand why the Dungeon Finder was added, but ultimately it not only led to the lobby-game design of today, but exacerbated all the worst qualities of WoW’s player-base due to the increased anonymity and lack of accountability. Make no mistake, Vanilla’s community was not the sunshine and roses a lot of people around here would have you believe, but it was a lot better than what WoW has now - not because the player-base was more mature, but because there were some consequences for misbehavior. Or, at the very least, you could learn who, and who not, to run with, instead of every group being a new set of randoms.
There’s more, but those are the big ones.
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Permanent progress. In classic my character’s progress will never be reset. My gear will never get replaced by next xpac quest greens.
My class will never be arbitrarily changed because “reasons”. I know EXACTLY what my class will be. It will never be gutted, nerfed, or pruned.
The ORIGINAL world, before the disgusting abomination that was cataclysm changed it.
Choices have consequences. Each class cannot do everything and my choices matter. Like a REAL RPG.
No welfare epics. No LFG, LFR, and server reputation matters, a LOT.
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2h enhc, same server bgs, shaman/paladin faction locked, unique classes/abilities (everyone doesnt have a silence/interrupt etc), getting epic gear felt like you accomplished something, reduced mobility (melee is actually melee without a dozen gap closers), sentry totem and several other small things but i feel im getting long winded.
I felt like I joined an exclusive club when I got my UBRS key. Combine that withthe fact that I was a holy priest and I was a hot item.
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WoW has disappointed me for the third time in the same way with BfA. Wrath to Cata, Mists to WoD, and Legion to BfA. Each was a transition from a great expansion to a far lesser one.
Legion had flaws, but overall was better than most. The insurrection questline alone is almost worthy of being a game in itself. The class quests were interesting enough to get me to level up almost every class for the first time.
BfA is worse in almost every way. Its only accomplishment is resurrecting world pvp with the combination of incursions and Against Overwhelming Odds, and even that they are screwing up.
This is the third time I’ve been actively looking for a new game. This time, that game happens to be Classic. Irony.
Things Classic has that retail lacks:
Community. If you need some random person, you value them. This isn’t just a product of removing LFD/LFR. The beginning of LFD was not cross realm. Many times in Wrath I zoned into dungeons with people I knew, sometimes even people in my guild. That was actually community building. I met people on my realm I didn’t know. When it went cross realm and people were anonymous, that eroded community. In Classic, you needed people.
Classic wasn’t twitchy. Retail has gone down a rabbit hole in terms of twitchy encounters that don’t challenge top raiders but pose a significant obstacle to many. Twitch or die really has no place in an mmo. Even the Lich King’s Defile didn’t instantly kill you, and that remains one of the most challenging encounters. Classic had subtlety instead. The difficulty lay in the one or two mechanics, the over-arching mechanic of threat/dps/regen, and the deceptive challenge of getting 40 people to coordinate.
Dungeons were a significant portion of endgame. Even though by mythic+ standards in retail, Classic dungeons are unrewarding, but they’re like mini raids. The lack of a race mentality is a major plus.
A lot of the other points made I don’t share at all. Chiefly talents. The illusion of choice is real – people have calculated even situational builds like the optimal builds for pre and post shield slam threat. Even for fringe builds, one merely needs to look it up. The only real choice is to ignore google and make a suboptimal choice.
Class abilities are the other thing I don’t see as an inherent benefit. Class homogeny has no real weight as an argument when raid homogeny is the alternative. When it virtually doesn’t matter who you bring to a dungeon, and when you’re virtually assured of having everyone represented in a raid, class uniqueness becomes academic.
I’ll be treating Classic as a side mmo, based on how I feel about retail. That may get me labeled a tourist, but I doubt it’ll stop me from clearing Naxx like everyone else.
1 Like