Why to play Classic?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hey yall! Scott Noob here!

I was hoping to get some information about why I should play Classic over Retail from those of you who like it.

For context, I’m a noob who has only played WoW off and on since WoD, and even then, I never even got a single character to max level, I always just did questing until I was bored.

Now, however, I’m deep into Shadowlands and I love it, and I’ve even played a bit of Classic as well, and I love both of them.

Why I like Classic

From what I’ve experienced, the flow of the game was much different, slower paced, and more meaning behind each action, everything felt like an achievement.

Beyond that, I really like playing games in order, experience the story as it happened, so being able to go back and see the world as it was and to see the story unfold with my own eyes is great!

Why I like Retail

I LOVE collecting things. Mounts, pets, toys, transmog, achievements. The sense of progression and being able to look at my collection and go, “Yeah, look at what I got” but also being able to have a checklist of more things to add to that collection is one of my favorite things about the game!

What I like in both of them

I’m a big roleplayer, any chance I get to RP is great! I still like to do content and PvP, even hoping to get into more hardcore stuff, but there ain’t nothing like getting into character while doing all of the above!

So much variety! All the races, the different classes, different way to play the classes, there is just so many ways to play the game! I like to have one of each class (one of each spec in retail) as a different race and get as much variety as I can in it because I want to experience everything I can!

Why I’m having difficulties

I have an itch to play Classic and go through that experience, seeing what lies ahead, but I feel like it will take so much time to invest in Classic, and unlike Retail, I won’t have a Collection system to be able to look back and justify my time spent. Of course I have the memories of the story and having fun, but it would be nice if doing some things in Classic unlocked collections in Retail.

With things like PvP seasons and their limited rewards, and weeklies and such to keep up with, Retail demands a lot of time unlike Classic.

My final questions

What keeps you spending more of your finite human time into playing Classic over Retail? Do you think I should take the plunge? Or would I regret spending all that time in Classic? Did I put too much effort into this post? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a gnome? Zug zug?

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If you attempt to find an answer to your final question, I will have to kill you.

As for the remainder of the post, I enjoy classic because it’s an adventure where you choose your own path. Retail is so guided and streamlined that it’s no longer fun for me. Even the gear has lost it’s uniqueness in retail.

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If you have to ask, classic probably isn’t for you.

Classic requires an immense time commitment if you desire to play at the high/top end.

If you do put in that immense time commitment, your reward is that you will attain the ability to really maximize your class/abilities in PVE (parsing in raids) or PVP (in BGs).

There really isn’t a casual collection aspect or something like that to keep you entertained.

It’s more about just putting together the absolute best set of items and dominating either aspect of the game.

At least that’s what it’s about for me, which is why I’m loving classic and last time I checked this character has 100+ days played.

Classic is grindy, everything takes time to achieve. Things are a bit simpler now because you can skip some of the worst gear grinds (running arena hundreds of times for SGC or dozens of runs for HoJ).

Even ranking isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was, and not anywhere near as necessary unless you need some of the still BIS gear pieces for PVP.

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Just play if you want to, you can pick it up and play at any point. It’s not something you have to invest a huge amount of time to if you don’t want to push the endgame. But if you try and push the endgame (do AQ40/Naxx or rank in PvP for example), you will need to dedicate more and more time.

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I think for me, I wouldn’t go for being the best of the best, in Retail, the only reason I’m pushing for a high rank in PvP is because of the rewards, like cool armor or a spider mount.

For Classic I feel I would mainly do it for an experience over mastery, like seeing the old content like dungeons/maps that aren’t around or the same anymore.

Do you think it’s a considerably less amount of time to do that over reaching for the top?

I’m not sure what that means, but I assume it’s like a hard version of a raid or something?

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Yeah for sure. Classic really allows for any type of playstyle, but to really be one of those people that shines (in either PVE or PVP), you really have to put in crazy amounts of time (or had to I should say, it’s quite a bit easier to rank atm than it was before, but other things are quite grindy; and nobody’s just going to hand you your class’ final BIS items, those will take a lot of work to get to).

If you desire a casual classic experience, then yeah you can honestly just enjoy seeing everything up to level 60, join some pug raids or a solid guild progressing through Naxx after getting some ZG/BWL/AQ40 items.

There’s really just a big gap between casual play and hardcore play in classic from what I’ve seen, and there’s little in-between.

Either you really go to be one of those people that puts up crazy numbers in raids or BGs or otherwise stands out, or you’re one of those people that’s just there to see things for the nostalgia and to play through things in the way that the game played 15 years ago.

There’s not really much in-between though from what I’ve seen.

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That makes a lot of sense, the game is fun, but if you wanna be good, you gotta put in the work, I like it, thanks!

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At the moment, I’d probably just wait if you want a casual “relive the nostalgia” experience.

The best casual experience will probably come when they do a new set of classic servers with the TBC release.

Leveling up with everyone else (and progressing through MC/BWL/AQ40) is the biggest part of the charm of the casual experience if you’re not there to get the best gear and dominate BGs/parsing.

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Ahn’Qiraj 40 (there being a smaller 20 man version as a different raid) is t2.5. Molten Core/Onyxia is t1, Blackwing Lair is t2, and Naxxramas is t3. These are the raids as broken up by release date and the tier gear that they drop.

Basically, if you want to do the highest raids (as in vanilla - up until Wrath - you didn’t skip raids, you go through them for strong gear and there weren’t any catch ups to bypass them), you need to put in time.

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Is that confirmed? They are adding TBC? And as separate servers?

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No, we really have no idea how they are going to handle TBC. Technically it’s not even confirmed they are doing TBC yet.

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Thats not truth though?
You want to get max level in retail? You can do it by doing nothing but dungeons, doing nothing but pvp, doing nothing but pet battles, doing nothing but questing in the open world, doing nothing but collecting resources in the open world.
Oh did i mention you can choose between over 7 expansions from 1 to 50 and after finishing your first 60 char in retail you can also do the late zones in any kind of order?.. Ya

Want to hit max level in classic? Kill packs of mobs or do quests whcih are about killing pack of mobs. Thats it. On basically the same zones everytime.

You gotta be lying to say classic is less streamlined than retail, even the amount of viable specs are ridiculous in classic.

It does not. I can count in my fingers how many ret paladins/spriests/boomkins i saw raiding. I was part of over 4 cores and personally knew players of over 15.
It is frankly impossible to solo queue pvp content either unless you love being stomped by premades almost all day. And if you premade there is basically no pvp going on most of the time you just farm the same 2 aks guys spamming in gy.
There is no big RP community either.
All classic offer is raid logging.

Man i’ll be completely honest with you, ok?
Classic right now is very unwelcoming to any new players. First off if you aren’t in a megaserver you aren’t even gonna have a descent leveling experience at all. You know why?
Because as much as the nay-sayers love to deny it, you will basically see nobody leveling around, tryhard alts will be busy being boosted and you will take over 5 hours to make a group to a gnomeregan dungeon run in servers that were classified as “high pop” 5 months ago.
And even in a mega server you will still se very few people around and some dungeons you will basically never find a group for.

Just to contrast here in classic there is no real hard work on pvp side, you just keep spamming bgs and doing them as fast as possible to have big honor/hour so you can progress the ladder. No skill related whatsoever, you log in, you stay logged in spamming hks on the screen and thats it and you do that for over 40 or so days played time

When Hawne said it is a lot of time commitment he means it, thats all the endgame experience in classic, aside naxx everything is extremely easy but the amount of gear drops(or drops in general) is ridiculous low so basically you just keep investing time till you get what you want. No real skill needed for 99% of the content. There is also no catch-up system so gotta suck it up and pray for rng drops as hard as 8.3 rng drops, thats how bad it is.

You will barely socialize, your character power will be stuck for months and there isnt much to do aside tedious meta-play.

If your really wanna try classic just do it if they announce fresh classic servers, at least you will be able to form bonds with a living community. Else your experience will be terrible and you will regret and give up before level 40. because you will barely see old dungeons and will have nobody to quest within the old maps most of the time.

Right now, just stick with SL.

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All the collectibles in retail are an illusion. It’s a trick by Blizzard to make you feel like you are accomplishing something and keep you in the hamster wheel. You don’t really gain anything from that stuff.

The purpose of an rpg is to make your character stronger. The purpose of an MMO is to socialize. You should be doing one of those two things to make your time in WoW worth something. Both for the best results.

I don’t like retail. I hadn’t played since Pandas and tried to jump back in in BFA. The game is so much different that it just doesn’t feel like WoW to me. Add that to the multitude of confusing systems and the anti-social player base Classic is an easy choice for me.

Classic is a very loose, open game. You will find more success if you set goals and focus on achieving them. For example I wanted the hat I’m wearing and I ran Strat as much as I could while working on my secondary goal of raising my Argent Dawn rep.

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It’s not, but the most logical answer is that TBC will come. Whether or not new Classic servers will be opened to replace the now-TBC ones, we have no idea.

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I agree with that, that’s why I don’t play single player games, because at the end of the day, it’s just pixels on a screen, but with multiplayer games, you are interreacting with real people, that’s why I like RP so much!

As for the hamster wheel, that’s dead on, I used to be addicted to so many games that had limited time cosmetics, now I can control myself and just enjoy my time with it as something to keep me busy rather than my reason for existing.

As for growing stronger, it’s nice, but only to achieve a goal, like getting a cosmetic or something, otherwise I feel that’s another hamster wheel, because the strength isn’t permanent, but it does help you turn that collection wheel better! :smiley:

That’s a shame cause I would play on the RP server!

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Yeah I mean, I’d echo the fact that classic isn’t welcoming to new players at this stage (especially being phase 6 with all the max geared players aiming for T3 in Naxx).

If OP just wants a casual classic experience, waiting for the next set of fresh classic servers is the way to go.

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Well the way Classic is supposed to work is that eventually you will hit permanent strength. At whatever level you of time commitment you can make to the game you will reach your max strength and be able to enjoy it. For a casual player like you that is probably a mix of AQ20, BWL, and ZG gear. It really depends on if and how Blizzard handles the TBC release.

My understanding is that you will find more lower level characters to run around with on an RP server. I could be wrong about that but from what I’ve heard they are more interested in rolling alts. On a more traditional PvE or PvP server Classic is not really the sort of game that lends itself well to playing a bunch or alts. You are better off picking one class and one spec and focusing most of your time to that.

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That makes a lot of sense, a very set in stone goal.

Oh for sure, absolute altoholics. I like making a random character with Retail’s new character creator and picking a random race/class and thinking up a story, always a lot of fun.

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You can still absolutely play right now. Other than having some difficult getting groups for dungeons and hard quests, there’s not a huge difference. Play on a PvE server and you can enjoy the slow, methodical, and comfy leveling.

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If I was new, I’d join that big group of “rerollers” that had like a couple hundred new toons going. I forgot which server that was on…