Hopefully yes, but the more cynical and perhaps realistic side of me thinks Blizz will use classic as an excuse to double down and make even more extreme changes to retail. “If you don’t like x system just go play classic where it works differently”. We all WANT to enjoy retail. Classic has a finite amount of content and, as we saw from the first pull first kill Ragnaros, that content is not as mechanically challenging and won’t keep us busy forever.
So what should retail take from classic in an ideal world?
Make leveling dangerous. It’s fine if most players can’t hit the new level cap in less than a day /played. Every quest being a re-skin of the last and how we can pull everything in a 30 yard radius with no real risk of dying is just boring. This is a video game… we need opportunities to fail outside of the hardest endgame content.
Remove titanforging and maybe warforging as well. The way gear matters in classic and how good it feels getting a targeted upgrade after a ton of grinding vastly outweigh the instant gratification of “yay I won the ilvl, tertiary stat, socket slot machine of retail”. Having true BiS is satisfying. It’s ok for players to set a goal with a real finish line and eventually be DONE gearing until the next batch of content comes out. There has never been more to do in WoW than there is in BfA; you shouldn’t need psychological tricks like an endless gear treadmill to keep us playing.
Revert forced personal loot. Keep it for queued content, let us choose between personal and need/greed in premade dungeons, and add master loot option in premade raids. No idea why on Earth Blizzard ever thought they needed to take that freedom and strategy decision from guilds.
Bring back tier sets and never do anything like Azerite armor again. 1 piece of AP gear is ok. Legion artifact weapons were pretty cool and if it was JUST the heart of Azeroth for BfA as it works in 8.2 that’d be fine. Having FOUR gear slots related to a timegated AP grind with traits that aren’t remotely balanced and only give the illusion of choice at the cost of making raid gear less relevant is absurd.
Imo that’s really all it would take to make retail an amazing game again. Group finder is a good tool and even LFR isn’t the end of the world. It’d be nice if they could do away with sharding and merge/layer realms as needed, but that’s probably not a huge deal to most people.
I think the game was fine up until WoD personally. I didn’t mind all the QoL stuff added to the game up until WoD. Legion and BFA changed the game into something all together different.
I think this is why people started wanting older versions of the game, that had more similarities with Vanilla.
There are a lot of elements that were pulled from Diablo 3 that were in Legion and BFA. I just think a portion of the player base doesn’t like those systems in their MMO.
That’s not really learning from Classic so much as taking note of what didn’t work in BfA. Personal loot forced on raids was really just a tool to slow down raid progression.
Lvling will never be dangerous just because of character toolkits. Classic just didn’t provide the means of dealing with multiple enemies at once effectively.
Make leveling dangerous? By doing what is the real question. Making mobs bullet sponges and raising their health? Making me walk so I can’t avoid them? Taking away my abilities so I have less to deal with them with? Making them do things such as dismounting me, and stunning me, or putting them all over the place?
Because to me it sounds a lot like pruning my abilities, making mobs super annoying, continuing with the mindset of Pathfinder. Not sure most people would enjoy that.
Class design is what they should learn from (design, not balancing, as Vanilla is very imbalanced). Classes were fun and unique back then. I forgot how much more complex they were compared to BFA classes.
They took away a lot of hybrid/fun skills, which was a terrible decision.
Layered RNG isn’t fun. If you want something to be rare, just make it flat out rare.
The base leveling experience should be timeless and NOT tied to any particular expansion.
“Anonymous stat blob” gear isn’t fun or motivating.
It doesn’t hurt anything for class spellbooks to contain niche abilities.
It could be as simple as making stuff hit harder. They don’t have to be boosted to dungeon elite levels or anything, just enough so that they might kill you if you’re not paying attention.
Because I’m bored, I’m going to take your post and use it as a base as to what I hope they learn.
Make leveling interesting. Taking upwards to a month or two to go 10 levels (outside of some hardcore grinding) is not a good game make. In all honesty, the leveling for the last leg (the most recent expansions) is fine. They need to work on everything before I’d say WoD.
I’ll agree, they should get rid of Titanforging and bring back more targeted loot drops. I also say Bring back Badge Gear so that if RNG decides it’s not going to be on your side, you can still get gear. Like seriously about 98% of all the gear related issues would be resolved if they just brought badge gear back.
I’ll agree with this, as I feel it’s an offshoot of the above issue where to force people to do content. Which again, bring back badge gear, this wouldn’t even be necessary.
I’d say they should have never gotten rid of Artifact Weapons at all but that ship has sailed. What should be done is take what people liked about Artifact Weapons and apply it directly to the character. Wouldn’t that just be talent trees? Yes, it would be talent trees. Figure out a way to make them go from level 10 to cap and we’ll be good to go.
Like I can’t stress enough how much things went to pot once they removed badge gear and was suddenly shocked people stopped running dungeons when there wasn’t something to get from them.
Totally agree! I think MoP still had the essence of what made WoW still special for a lot of players. I keep screaming from the roof tops that the Diablo devs they brought onto the team in WoD and their ideas are the real reason so many players are unhappy with the game atm.
Well if that’s the case imo it’s already like that. When I was originally leveling, I couldn’t mindlessly pull the whole zone in areas. I also saw a lot of complaints and dead bodies when Nazjatar was just released and people hating the idea they were getting wrecked. I mean of course areas like Boralus and Zandalar are trivial now but that’s even with scaling. A power increase is expected imo. It sounds like people pretty much want them to act like dungeon mobs 24/7 out the open world. You don’t got a tank? Well you’re screwed, sorry.
110+ is reasonably dangerous, though around 115 it gets annoying because bad stat scaling turns everything to damage sponges.
I’m leveling a monk that’s currently at ~75 though, and so far I’ve not encountered anything that’s posed much of a threat. Seems like every other pull is 4-5 mobs.
Agreed, TF and WFing is so rare that it’s not even an issue.
They even specifically said it wasn’t meant to be grinded for, it was meant to give you something to look forward to like if you’re in a mythic guild and have that on farm.
In MoP on my monk, our guild used to have mythic SoO (back then heroic) on farm so we’d full clear mythic for anyone who doesn’t have BiS yet and then sell heroic and normal runs. Was pretty boring as I had BiS so I was only there for the team but had they not needed me, I wouldn’t have even bothered to log into that toon.
All it takes is a group of 4 in a dungeon that are all from the same guild/group of friends and the 5th person they invited gets royally screwed. Same goes with guilds. You get a GM/Officer whose bestie just joined the raid and suddenly the master loot rules go out the window for the new person.
No. Just no. I’m ok with personal loot, because it’s also tradeable (although this new thing where you can only trade it if it’s a “downgrade” needs to go).
Not really. It was hard the first time through because it was new and we had crap for gear. I’ve funneled so much gear to my alts now there’s no challenge leveling anymore. Getting to 120 is just a grind I have to pick and choose WHEN I feel like doing it. So far, I only have 5 level 120s, with about 5 more I just don’t make any time for because the content has gotten stale.
Have you try to solo General marstone while leveling or pulling 2 mobs more around him that surround him? most the mobs in wod hit hard. 2 to 3 shatter hand grunt can easily kill you. Beryl hunter in northrend are hard hitting mobs. I can go on.