Sorry, I know this is maybe not the right forum… but I was wondering… why Classic+ players really hate Retail WoW? regardless of the same old reasons?
Flying
Dungeon Queues.
LFR
Etc?
2 Likes
There is a button to sell all grey items that will sell all my precious grey items,
The talent system is full of talent points for things you used to get just by leveling,
The UI design is terrible and there are floating icons all over the place,
The Achievement system and the gold buying have turned everyone into turbo zombies who pacman the dotted line to the end
The character design and story ‘feel’ worse, I know that one is maybe more subjective but at some point the game went from game to episode of the smurfs.
Streamer culture, mythic + Hamster wheel, the fishes have dried up no one can make a living as a fisherman anymore,
Toy/Mount Bloat,
leveling is too fast so each character feels cheap and disposable
I thought I was helping people but then Azeroth just up and broke on me and its like did any of my heroing help?
All my old friends aren’t there anymore and the things I enjoyed in the past don’t seem like they exist (groaning over things going wrong mostly) now it is either smooth sailing to the end or you hit a snag and people leave
The dopamine drip is overtuned and when people hit the wall they turn horrible
pvp is full of griefers just trying to squeeze the turnip for one last drop of juice
Mounts are ugly and take up too much space on the screen
lack of gm support for fun in game things like why doesn’t the orb of deception work in a predictable fashion, no help there it is spaghetti code.
addon culture I’m going to say as well, no longer about enhancing game experience but playing the game for you,
Unsupported ‘hero’ classes who never really got an update despite being core to an expac in the past,
The dragon people aint dragoning (lets face it they are just pandaren to the furries)
Whale bait culture and the barnacles it attracts like the gold carry people in anniversary right now. +Parseholes
The gold token thing has made some people wow slaves who farm gold to buy gametime and sell promoting real money transactions that they are now wrestling to pullback.
My character was featured in 0 of the cutscenes that I witnessed, I mean I get we are silent protagonists but atleast in vanilla there were quests in cities and such that people would see you doing, the game feels like its playing to you as a solo audience member now.
At first there were vendors, now its game+ shops+ shopping
phases and seasons lead to disposable quick content
*the anger; addendum potential link with energy drinks.
Updated frog models are trash. I could go on ( have through some edits), good morning!
Thread log, edit seven, it has been all day and the evening is settling in, there’s no reprise, I have another entry before the madness takes me or the things in the dark finally wear me down, this thread is the final entry, retail has brought this doom upon us all, may whatever lost sparkle of hope you madly cling to hold you warm in this our darkest hour.
27 Likes
This should be made into a plaque and mounted to the Chad, King Varian Wrynn… as a statue… That way the soy people can drink and calculate exactly when they lost their way…
3 Likes
classic have addons to do that
people in classic are not even playing with default ui, they use addons for different ui’s
gold buying in classic is more than retail
mages are boosting tons of players on daily bases, leveling in classic is just buy summon buy boost afk till u get max lvl.
there is no gm support in classic, if u picked wrong reward you’re screwed.
classic also have tons of addons.
this came in classic tbc as well, and will probably come again for anniversary at some point.
add to that, classic is just about abusing things.
people abuse items/ environment glitches and even abuse the loot system.
the only reason is:
those people can’t do what they want to do in retail, either if they lack skills or they can’t handle new things and they just want to play the characters/same system they are used on playing.
3 Likes
also people like this who enjoy retail and come to a topic asking for reasons people don’t like it and get defensive about it.
off to work, full day, have at the thread guys and dolls
8 Likes
It’s lost the soul of the game.
When I log onto retail WoW:
- -I can level to max in a couple of hours, it feels like leveling doesn’t even really serve any purpose at this point.
- -I can queue for a dungeon from anywhere in the world, get into one within a minute, then the entire group races through in under 10 minutes, nobody takes any damage, the enemy doesn’t stand a chance, there’s no risk of wipes.
- -Nobody talks or socializes anymore. WoW is (or was) a social game, so what’s the point if nobody talks? On retail, everyone is silent, might as well be muted. Anyone that does actually say anything gets trolled or reported.
- -The entire game has become about microtransactions and shop purchases and wow tokens and buying things instead of actually working for them.
- -Loot doesn’t mean anything anymore. I don’t even read the names or stats on loot anymore in retail, I just see if the item level is higher than what I’ve got. The stats have mostly lost meaning, and you get epics thrown at you for doing nothing.
- -The numbers don’t mean anything anymore either. On Classic, when you crit it’s impactful. My shaman gets a 1.2-1.5k chain lightning crit and it means something. On retail, my shaman throws out million damage crits all day long, like every other cast, but it has no impact on the actual fight, the number inflation has gotten completely out of control.
- -Class identity is completely gone. In classic, each class contributes something meaningful to a group or raid: druids for innervate, shamans for totems, so on and so forth. Each class has something no other class does. In retail, everything has been homogenized down to the last detail, nearly every class can tank and heal, and it doesn’t really matter what you bring to a dungeon.
- -Lastly, but certainly not least, travel times. Everyone teleports everywhere in retail, or they fly at 800% speed over the world, or they join dungeon queues instantly from anywhere. You never experience the game world like you’re meant to anymore, and in classic that’s a big part of the gameplay.
14 Likes
As someone that currently runs a guild on Anniversary, but also ran a deep mythic/CE guild in retail during Dragonflight this is a bit easy to answer.
I always preface conversations about this with “I do not dislike retail”. I simply don’t prefer it much. I am a player who has and will likely always focus on raiding environment as a primary source of my entertainment.
Retail:
Raids - This is my biggest CON currently. Raiding difficulty has inflated to a point that guilds outside the top 800-1200 will infrequently be able to clear the entire raid each week (meaning after prog/completion of bosses 5/6/7 they are extending to push for CE), if get CE at all. Skill ceilings and addon dependence, especially with the new and improved “private auras” have made it a disaster. Raiding has turned in a staple to get a few 100k viewers every RWF. I personally believe Blizzard went the wrong way with this. The problem is - if the same skill level players pre-Legion that could clear the entire raid then Method and Liquid would clear the raid on day one, which has been stigmatized as “bad”.
Performance - My second biggest CON. I remember when for expansion after expansion WoW played relatively well on my toasters while I was in the military/school etc. Now as a working professional with a great computer and a 3080 ti…25-45 FPS in dense population is killing me. Lots of random performance stutters…weak auras needed on bosses like Mythic Tswift to help get more than 4 fps during briars. It’s just bad.
M+/Gearing circuit - I understand they do what they can to try and keep this fresh, but it doesn’t need to be monkey’d with every single tier release. There is constant tweaking to crest/valorstone distribution…which always feels like it’s at a negative to the player when they fix it. Blizzard still seems to put all their eggs in the “If we slow down their gearing process…then we force them to play more”…instead of “Let’s find fun and intuitive reasons to encourage them to play”…and if people want to raid log for a season…so be it. That takes us into my final comment on retail:
TIME- Retail WoW does not respect your time (as a raider). Sure as a casual player you can just poke at what you want, but as someone that would like to balance raiding at a high difficulty and a real life…there is just no respect. Unless you are able to dedicate a reasonable time (more than full time working hours) weekly, you will eventually be behind a power curve. And that is the real criticism - At some point Blizzard decided it was better to try and brute force raid loggers into playing the game, instead of just respecting that they would use gaps in content and luls in raid face time to do other things they enjoy. So those player just quit altogether.
This is just my take, and like I said it comes from a heavy raiding focus, so take it as you will.
7 Likes
Everything everyone already said plus 50 different currencies ,professions are horrid now, something I have not heard anyone complain about yet but the combat sounds sound much weaker ,when i hit somebody in classic it sounds like a frying pan smacking a tree,in retail it just make a small swooshing sound.
6 Likes
I prefer classic because it reminds me of the good times
2 Likes
Its boring the gameplay especially for pallies which is my main just isnt compelling to me. The story wasnt thay great either now i stopped with retail in the dragon isles.
Scaling zones,
Meaningless professions
meaningless and not hard to get achievements mostly the proff ones.
Shared tags
personal loot
inane and fast levelling
no flavour items like ammo and feed pets,
Forced specs/talents
Everything happens at max level - like rep.
New vapid character models.
Quest helpers and golden arrows all over my screen
fast and risk free levelling
…
Need I continue? I left Retail in BfA. I doubt my reply would differ much if I bought the newest xpac.
I actually like RDF btw 
and more mail boxes
and funny recipes
and transmogging of finally all items
that’s about it
EDIT:
I forgot the new UI - No way!!!
3 Likes
I don’t hate retail wow.
I just prefer felling like a small part of a big world rather than “the champion”.
In classic I’m an adventurer, doing small things to help my faction. I like the feel of the game better.
6 Likes
I started in Cata, played MoP. Came back for 2019 classic. Played some Shadowlands.
Classic is the superior version of the game.
Class identity is a real thing in classic. All the classes in retail are basically the same.
Classic, your choices matter; you can play around with talent points and come up with some crazy off meta builds.
The world feels damgerous while you’re leveling. Retail presents no challenges to the player unless they get into Mythic raiding.
5 Likes
Retail just doesn’t feel like an RPG anymore. It’s a lobby game with a bunch of tasks you need to do in order to meet time-gated progression checkpoints to drip feed power to your character. If you miss any of those checkpoints, you’re behind, and quite often you can’t catch up.
There’s some really excellent things I loved about playing retail… specifically, the M+ and Raiding. Mechanically and thematically, it’s some of the best content I’ve ever experienced! However, the game forces you to do so much other stuff that doesn’t feel related to raiding. Let me try to give an example…
In Era, if I want to raid I can just show up. All that really matters is my character, its current gear level, and my ability to play it. My character’s gear comes entirely from the dungeons and raids I’ve done before. I can optionally get some gear crafted or pursue some reputations, which I can do at my own pace, but those power gains are small. If I want some optional extra power, I can farm consumables so I can craft items and potions that will give me an edge.
In Retail, things vary from expansion to expansion but it’s usually the same idea. In Shadowlands, if I wanted to progressmy Legendary item which was a significant power boost and effectively required to flesh out my character, I had to go do Torghast on a daily/weekly basis. In Battle For Azeroth, I had to do Island Expeditions, or the corruption event farming. These were all significant time investment tasks that didn’t feel optional.
Another significant reason I don’t play retail anymore is that the content was never ready when it was released. I stopped playing in Dragonflight Season 2. It took about 1.5 months after S1 released (over half the season) for the major issues with balance to get resolved. When S2 released, it was more of the same. They have some wonderful mechanics in retail dungeons but they often get undermined by scaling issues at higher M+ levels and they can often be progression blockers until resolved.
So retail is great for what it is, but I just don’t really want to be forced into content I’m not interested in these days. I would love to get back into the M+ game loop, but I just don’t want to do all the other things an expansion throws at me, so I don’t. In Era I can farm a couple hours a week to support my 6 hours a week of raiding and I’m happy with that.
Interestingly, I’ve always wanted a game that was M+ but stand alone without all the other stuff, and I just discovered one. It’s pretty cool! Keep an eye on a game called Fellowship. It’s a bit rough but at its current point it’s still hitting a lot of the notes I loved about M+. Could be a very interesting side game to playing Era for me 
6 Likes
its just doesnt FEEL like world of warcraft anymore, becaues its not. theres no immersion. the leveling is terrible and feels pointless, talent tree is weird, and it just doesnt really play well in my opinion. it just doesnt feel good and doesnt make me feel good playing it in the way vanilla, tbc, and wrath does.
cata was the turning point from “classic” for me. while i wouldnt call it a horrible expansion, it was by far the worst at the time and mists only marginally corrected what was wrong with cata, and after mists was steadyily downhill, although i will say that warlords wasnt terrible but also still not great.
to be fair, i havent played retail since bfa (which i didnt even finish leveling tbh) but i did try to hop in on dragonflght and made it to level 12 before i got bored and quit.
5 Likes
This is the copiest of cope reasoning.
World quests. Possible the worst thing ever made. They somehow made the daily quest system feel worse.
Classic feels like a RPG, Retail doesn’t.
Retail story sucks and it forces the crappy story down your throat. Its 100% DEI, woke, girl trash. If that’s your thing okay but its not mine. Classic you just didn’t know that the story was so it was a non factor. But when I did my HC char used the AI voice addon and the alliance story that you get fed little by little from each zone you go to until the epic climax when you bust Marshal Windsor out of BRM and reveal Onyxia’s treachery just so good and the story just felt gronded. Retail is just what god are we gonna piss off next then all the sudden I have been given a quest to kill 10 hello kitites all while waiting to I see what character I loved for the past 20 years get retcon. RIP Arthas.
Gear feels like it matters in classic, it feels boring in retail. You are just playing how many pieces can I grab so I can sim. The individual value of gear is gone. I very much hate the idea there can be multiple versions of the same piece of gear. The gear leveling system did help slightly push that way.
Gear hard resets every few months. The fact my mythic gear gets beaten by normal gear of the next patch is stupid.
The power scaling gets super inflated every expansion because 4 raid difficulties.
The mentality of scaling Mythic raiding for the world first race with the intention to nerf it later.
The Art style. They ruined a lot of class running animations in MOP and the general art style feels less warcraft and more smooth modern that just feels cheap to me.
Achievements suck. When first put in, they mostly felt like accomplishment now its how much time can we make you waste. Have you finished your 10,000 world quests? Like why does this exist. Achievements should not be how much time you can waste doing pointless content.
But all this aside, retail is still my “back up” game. And can usually bridge the gap between games.
But otherwise below is my list of wanted changes for Retail. That I still stick with today.
3 Likes
Nothing sucks the fun out of the game like daily quests and weekly chore list. I’d take the original un-nerfed TBC reputation grind over faction Renown every single time.
The story has also been garbage since “oh we forgot about this gigantic island full of Pandas”.
4 Likes
I forgot to mention this as well - Furries. Retails caters to Furries.
2 Likes
But in classic, I have a choice. I only use default UI, and the only addons I have are Questie and Cell (strictly for healing). I never use boosting and I only leveled up one main and one alt at level 50.
1 Like
this might be unpopular, but i think mists is one of, if not THE best expansion post wrath.
2 Likes