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“Endless” progression. In my opinion, even though the “borrowed power” systems of Legion and BFA needed some tweaks/caps, they at least provided an in-game reason to keep doing things like M+, to the point where being 3rd best in the world (from a RaiderIO perspective) as both Guardian and Arcane, wasn’t even something I was striving for, it simply happened as a result of “natural” gameplay. Classic WoW achieves something similar, with how “grindy” it is, but it isn’t truly “endless.”
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The world/aesthetic, something which is currently missing/underutilized in retail, where content is primarily “indoors” (raids, delves, dungeons, and Horrific Visions). I’m not saying to purposely/unnecessarily revitalize/utilize certain zones/artwork, but it’d be nice if that were an option/weaved in, like Manastorms in Project Ascension, but “official,” and without the “jank.” This is probably something especially desired by those who, like me, tend to only really enjoy the aesthetics of maybe one or two raids/zones each expansion.
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Also, in the vein of “aesthetics”/things that just naturally/viscerally feel good, certain spells/builds (from Classic), such as the more nature-themed abilities of druid (Insect Swarm, mushrooms, green Wrath, Hurricane, etc.) still seem better/more fun than the “astral” direction Druid went. Also, while certain abilities, such as Symbiosis were “accurately” pruned, others, such as Claws of Shirvallah, would be nice to have, even though it’s tied to Draenor, an expansion not generally viewed fondly, which could even potentially be “skipped,” just so “Legion Classic,” one of the best versions of the game, alongside Wrath and TBC, could be enjoyed that much sooner, and that’s even taking into account Legion Remix, which probably won’t be sufficient. Speaking a bit more on the systems in Legion, if stat templates weren’t a thing, Legendaries/Titanforged dropped/occurred maybe 7% more often, and the pools weren’t diluted with ones that were objectively bad/useless, and AP wasn’t infinite, it probably would have been the best expansion of all time. Also, something like the “transferrable” Legendaries introduced in 7.3, would tie in well with the current warband system.
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Professions. It’d be nice if at least one more main profession could be learned on each character, even in Classic, probably in total limited to somewhere between 3 and 5. While the “experience” of say Blacksmiths making rods that are used by enchanters (in Classic) is “fun/immersive,” it’d be even more fun if I could have engineering, smithing, and mining on the same character, which would then more easily enable “cool” things like roughly 3 minutes in on WillE’s “Vanilla WoW used to have the most WEIRD items” video. It would also be nice if some of the “bot impediments” to mining/herbalism in retail could be looked at. While it is fun to sometimes fight something while gathering, it’s not really fun to get knocked back, slowed, have to run around (in circles) collecting stuff etc. It’d also be fun, at least in my opinion, if nodes could always have 3 or 4 uses, in all versions of the game, as only 1 or 2 feels bad.
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Itemization. “Controversial” take, but bring back things like hit chance and resistances, even if they’re easily “itemized” around, perhaps always needing only 3% or something, with extra perhaps converting into something related, like crit. it’d just be nice to have more variability in terms of items, because the ones in retail are boring af compared to some of the stuff in Classic, which is even boring when compared to some of the stuff on private servers.
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Players/layering. Another potentially “controversial” take. In cities it’s fine/immersive to have lots of players simultaneously, but in the open world it might actually be better to naturally have (unless grouped) only a handful of players visible simultaneously. This would probably help with the recent mob tagging issues, as well as potentially lag, especially for pvp.
that’s awful
2 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALOuAr2lPxk
Also related: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mKrQPQPAmtA I’m someone who would rather “theorycraft” AND mindlessly grind stuff, as opposed to just mindlessly grind stuff.
Why 3-5 limit? My character is so dumb he should only know one profession but there are mages who should be able to learn 10
It’d be a little bit annoying/pointless to micromanage every armor profession on one character, as well as every gathering profession, but I’m not completely opposed to no limits on professions.
I guess in this age of WarBand WhatEver I wonder why they have not asked for account-wide professions
That’s a decent option/alternative, but somewhat immersion breaking unless there’s a reason why all of your characters know how to do something.
I agree that all of it is immersion breaking to be honest, my characters suddenly being best friends with people they never met, for example renown
I can’t say I have not benefitted from the convenience but if I were an RP-style player I think I would be bothered
Storywise, it kind of makes sense, with Horde and Alliance increasingly working together to face existential threats.
Unrelate, I love your name, my guild name is the same kind of thing
Thanks, that’s the main reason I keep it as my forum name. I also jokingly used stuff like the inappropriate version of “McConnellPet” for the things I tamed.
TLDR: The answer has nothing to do about the game and everything to do with how much younger everyone was when it launched.
That’s what made it good. It was 20 years ago and all we had was wow and the problems of 20 years ago. Wouldn’t you want those problems back now? 
I think “objectively” that’s not the case though. For example, even though Legion was one of my favorite expansions, some of the Saurfang cinematics from BFA were “objectively” better.
Basically, in addition to Draenor, the quality of WoW really did start to noticeably decrease after the first patch of Shadowlands, (some would even say the start of Shadowlands with Ion’s infamous “pull the ripcord” blunder), and here we are currently, with people making video after video about how bad 11.1.5 is.
20 years ago, do I keep my current body or everything is from 20 years ago? And do I keep the money? And computer
If so yes I would go back and start a business where I rent out my “supercomputer”, and also buy so much more bitcoin
This is something I really really disliked about other MMOs, I don’t want to only see a few people. I also don’t want to see floating names take down raid bosses. Maybe it’s my age starting to show but when things get laggy it doesn’t bother me so long as it’s playable
what made WoW good? each class feeling unique, and the world/enemies feeling like they made sense (for the most part).
like, back in legion, every thing we did, felt like it made sense. look at the raids, we took care of the emerald nightmare first, because it was the smallest threat (compared to the legion), but if we did’nt take care of it, it would become a bigger problem later. we freed suramar, and helped the nightborne because if we did’nt, the nightwell would be used to usher in the legion-invasion proper. we helped fight helya, because the aid odyn gave us would help bolster our weapons and armor (a lame reason, but a reason none the less!). and we beat helped the legionfall so the legion would stay pushed back to the tomb of sargeras… where we invaded it, so we could stop them from activating the avatar of sargeras and destroying the world (and then we kicked the crap out of kil’jaeden to prove a point/send a message).
tl:dr, everything we did in legion, fed into defeating the legion, and made sense.
but personally, i think it was the classes feeling unique (which i did’nt really talk about, but whatever) and the world/enemies being consistent/making sense.
Didn’t read anything OP said, but what made WoW good was that fact that it was groundbreaking for its time and that’s it.
If Shadowlands was the very first iteration of WoW, would it be considered better than Classic?
One could argue that each expansion should be compared to the original (classic) lest it be acknowledged that the bar was raised and along with it expectations.
Fair, linking Bellular’s vid again, roughly 2 min in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALOuAr2lPxk That was just one way of addressing those issues.
I also liked that leveling was such a big part of the game and level scaling hadn’t made leveling up feel like a mistake yet