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.