The difficulty of classic comes from trying new things and enjoying the journey, which is why blizz idea of doing new raids is great. New raids that people havent theorycrafted to death provide that fresh “challenge” feel that still can become easy over time. Its a win win
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SoM came out when TBC was launching, people had just finished playing Classic and most didn’t want to do it all over again.
I would imagine this is not the case in Classic.
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Timing.
They released SOM 6 months after we had just finished classic and were right in the middle of TBC. I remember clearly thinking “Damn SOM looks great but why now? I’m playing TBC”
I didnt bother to play it as I’m sure many others didnt as well.
I’d play it now in a heartbeat though, So again, its all about timing
Biggest factor for me was that the raids were much harder, particularly for horde, but the rewards were the same. I got bored of grinding consumes for raids we’d normally just faceroll, only to have the same old DE fodder drop.
The timing was also really bad, from memory they dropped the SSC and TK nerfs, and BT, around the time when raid casual guilds were badly haemorrhaging players. People were returning to TBC in droves, or rerolling on the megaservers to find better raid guilds.
Having PvP gear be easier to obtain was also a big mistake, raid groups also dried up from people grinding ranks afk in AV. It took less effort than the raids, and the rewards were better for some classes.
That’s the beauty of classic. Any comp is good enough to beat all content. The end game instead is speed clears which are hella fun
I really wish I had played SOM. Looking at the changes they made to classic I feel like it would have been the perfect game.
But sadly blizzard released SOM only a few months after we had just spent 1.5 years in classic and were deep into TBC
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It was fun. It was a ton of farming mats until they made the engineering/herb/mining change.
The raids were quite fun. Only finished full AQ40 hardmode up to twin emps but there were some fun fights!
The mind control crap in Naxx was a little much. Not fun when you want to pump but some dude has an abom doing like 10x your damage.
I played SoM but left when we’d done MC a few times.
I mained a priest as usual - the changes to the raids were pretty boring - just made the fights longer with extra boss health and some of the big buffs removed. Early on when not in fantastic gear it meant endless farming for consumables - flasks and mana pots. Hours of time - not something I wanted to do for pretty boring content Id recently done again. I came back after a while when some changes had been made - but I can see why SoM had big problems.
Pretty much this. They went after the e-sport crowd. It would be nice if one version of WoW wasn’t all about more challenging and difficult content. Some people just want to chill out, relax and have fun playing a game.
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Myself and my guild members chose to play WOTLK classic over SoM. The pull of playing with people I knew was more important to me personally than the content we chose to do. It sounds like a lot of those same people are interested in doing SoD so I will likely be there more than Cata Classic.
Honestly, for my SoM guild it came down to raid design.
We had a blast clearing SoM Molten Core… It felt like it was roughly on par with the harder parts of Naxx 40 and we had to legitimately progress through the bosses, but it never felt impossible.
Then BWL’s raid changes where announced, and what literally blew up our guild was Chromagus.
Basically, it looked like the meta was going to be “get a protection potion for each of fire/nature/frost/shadow and prepop them all before the pull, while having a backup ready to go for in fight usage” … Basically it was going to cost ~120g per pull, per person, in consumable usage and like 10minutes of prebuffing per pull. Our guild lost about 25 people and disbanded within the week of that info coming out.
Many members where already close to burning out because of how much they where spending on just MC consumes… and at least 8 guildies ate temp bans for gold buying to support their consume usage which hurt heavily too. Everyone else was basically no life-ing the game to fund their consume usage (except me, I was an alchemist… I made BANK)
Because it wasn’t just a copy paste of 2 year prog vanilla servers.
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They didn’t do anything to fix pvp gearing. Forcing pve to pvp is always a gigantic turn off for a large amount of players.
And yet… that’s when the game was most fun.
Getting an awesome sword from a raid boss then taking it into BGs and dominating was always so much fun
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The concept of SoM would have completely succeeded without BG’s. The way PvP gearing was handled from the beginning was a dumpster fire, which ruined world PvP as a result (as well as no longer needing needing to run early Raids as people have said above). Other than that, it really didn’t fail.
How did the PvE servers fare? Were they dead? I’m thinking of rolling PvE tbh.
Was well before that. SSC/TK launched on Sept 15, 2021. SoM launched Nov 16, 2021. WOTLK didnt launch until Sept of 2022.
Ppl were still progging the first real raid tier of TBC, with holiday season starting in a week (a very known dead time for MMOs especially WoW Classic). It truly was the worst possible timing for a season to launch.
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I don’t know about that…
Putting pvp gear in at the start was a big mistake, but that wasn’t why som was such low pop.
It was definitely the reason som didn’t peak at phase 4, because everyone got bored and quit before bwl came out.
Making multiple servers for no reason was also a big mistake. They also didn’t make their adjustments quick enough as far as alchemy was concerned, so people were farming a ton just to do a buffed MC for the same crap items they can normally get without popping 2 flasks a raid and 60 mana pots. The work wasn’t worth the reward for a lot of people. All that were left were the people who intentionally wanted to see the raids. Majority just wanted a fresh server to play on
World pvp is always way higher on world buff servers so there really wasn’t much of a reason to do it for the memes and reputation. There was just world bosses which the same 3 guilds fought over.
Som was just low pop. It wasn’t great timing and people weren’t fond of the som model itself
Completely disagree. Vanilla WoW is an amazing game and infinitely superior to retail despite it being easy, not because of it.
Vanilla is amazing because of the old world, the leveling, classes are unique and distinct, the world PvP, the general rpg and mmo feel, etc.
The raids do not need to be on the level of mythics, prenerf TBC and SoM difficulty raids are a perfectly fine balance to be enjoyable by the vast majority of players. It’s a difficulty level that is accessible to everyone eventually, but still requires you to think, plan, coordinate, and pay attention to clear the content which makes them more enjoyable over a longer period of time.
The thing with asmongold is he can’t comprehend that some people don’t enjoy the “quality of life” and class homogenization over the years, it’s easier for him to understand some people don’t want hard content, so he projects this on the entire classic player base which is laughably false.
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The entire reason why people like world buffs is because they trivialize the raids. SoM had harder raids and SoM flopped. I stand by my assertion: Classic players dont want harder raids.
We may need to see a buff to the SoD raids because of the boost of power from our new found abilities but that buff shouldn’t at all go overboard.
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