I came in during patch 1.6 so things may have been fixed up by then, but I hit 60 on this character without touching roughly half of Azeroth. When I got Loremaster in WotLK there were a ton of quests in EK and Kalimdor that I still had to do.
I’m talking about how at least until you unlock threads of fate, the primary questlines are non-optional. If you skip any of it you’re going to run into trouble later. This wasn’t a problem until Cataclysm — in Vanilla, TBC, and WotLK the way you hit cap was mostly irrelevant. A character that leveled spamming dungeons the whole way was functionally equivalent to the character of a quest completionist.
This comment is hilarious. Rose-tinted glasses are a hell of a drug. Classic was hyped for a few months, and then completely died. Same thing will inevitably happen with TBC. Nostalgia is the driving force here, not it actually being a perfect game, or that much better than retail.
Agree with this. When made this account so didn’t get in trouble on my main server, rolled a dr00d with pre patch. Mangle, was… AWESOME!
Kept to my dr00d through the rest of TBC after that. Could tank everything, even Illidan by the end after gearing out fully. But that was mostly due to our healers.
You are totally and utterly out of touch with reality if you think Classic is ‘Completely dead’. You just don’t know what you don’t know. Ignorance is a hell of drug.
Well it looks like I’m going to have to do some dreaded classic leveling. I didn’t care for classic, but tbc is something that I’m actually interested in playing.
Ok, threads of fate will suck, if you skip the intro quests. But just doing a few dungeons as you level, and should be fine. Just because you skipped the intro content, doesn’t mean the quests still aren’t there. How I got this DH up to 60 so quickly, then a mage, now making a second DK, but as a Kul Tiran, and already leveled my Dark Iron Paladin to 60.
The main issue I have, is the main quest time gating, waiting a week for each one from Bolavar.
Burning Crusade was when WoW’s end game raiding drifted away from weight-of-numbers and into objective performance.
The slimming of raid sizes meant raid spots came with the inclusion of actual mechanics and some degree of nuance to raid encounters. And, in turn, raid spots had to be “earned” to a far larger degree.
It was also when WoW’s pvp started to become competitive. Early arenas were flawed but still had their place, but TBC arena’s definitely struck a cord where “Murder the dude in 3 seconds” wasn’t the viable strategy; a lot of comps were about carefully applied CC & mana wars, rather than completely unhealable damage trains.
I agree but I think the worlds lack of scaling is better I’m on the fence with talents because putting 5 points into +5% damage and saying I had a choice to choose something else is silly but I do like having talent trees vs I dunno, retails talent shelves There’s some stuff better in the classics but some stuff is better in retail, ideally they could be smooshed together to make a great end product but I don’t really trust Blizz to get it right and so I’d rather they keep the design philosophies separate.
Where should I start? If there is any place I would really start to explain why burning crusade is great is the zone design. The expansion takes place in a broken, shattered world. And blizzard does a great job predicting that. Rocks are seen floating into the twisting nether, parts of the planet are slowly being torn to pieces. The enemies all are shown the effects of being in such a broken world, the orcs that we’ve seen before are completely different from the fel orcs, which are now red skinned some with spikes protruding from area’s such as their spine. The boars have similar effects to them. And that’s just talking about inside the zone. There is also the amazing contrast that is shown, you have Hellfire which is just a red wasteland. Then there is zanglamarsh which is a big giant swamp that is being drained by Illidan’s naga forces. Then there is shattrath which is a bastion of all kinds of different races that have been put into the predicament of living together due to it being the only main sanctuary in the surrounding area’s. And shattrath also has it’s share of turmoil shown through the aldor and scryers. The zones are beautiful, the music surrounding it is also beautiful.
I think scaling has its place, but it doesn’t necessarily belong everywhere. For instance I think maybe scaling would work well in daily areas, which are meant to be accessible for all players, but should boars in Hellfire Peninsula be wrecking you after beating Black Temple? Eh…
The main strength of the old talent trees, for me, was the ability to put together specialized niche builds for things that didn’t fall into the mainstream buckets. Yes, the raiders and arena junkies use cookie cutter builds. That’s orthogonal to the ability to use other builds.
Yeah, I have no idea why so many folks get so invested in the idea of one or other being the “one true WoW”. They both have their good points, and a smart game designer should be able to take those good points and implement them in a way that minimizes downsides.
Zangar is great. Awesome chill alien environment with good music with the non-intrusive questing style of “grab a hub and go out and quest for an hour”.
I’m on the fence with talents because putting 5 points into +5% damage and saying I had a choice to choose something else is silly but I do like having talent trees vs I dunno, retails talent shelves 
There’s some stuff better in the classics but some stuff is better in retail, ideally they could be smooshed together to make a great end product but I don’t really trust Blizz to get it right and so I’d rather they keep the design philosophies separate.