The very tail end of it. Most of “the stuff you hate” actually happened in Cata. They were testing the waters at the end of Wrath when they figured a lot of people were taking a break after beating ICC.
It can be, very easily.
But the devs have to realize they were wrong to do what they did to the game in WoD. Judging by their egos, unlikely.
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Still started in wrath even if at the end.
Only small parts of it though is what I’m saying.
The major stuff that really made people leave WAS actually done in Cata. Most people try to blame Wrath for what we have today, and that’s simply not true.
Cataclysm was the beginning of the end. Legion was where they tried to pul it out of the fire, then they dropped it back in for two expansions.
Now they need a stellar 10.0 to get the game back on track.
Fingers crossed.
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In wrath you got your heroic badges from daily dungeons and the weekly kills/quests. You could buy heroic level gear and set pieces with them. The PVP grind was easy, you either did arena or you got your points from the 1st win of the day… Or… you ran dungeons while controlling WG to get stone keeper shards. Archavons vault was the place to be too.
It was not very difficult at all. I played on the small side of a small server. I never had trouble getting groups. There were always pugs going. If for nothing else people wanted those badges.
Maybe in vanilla or a little more in TBC, but in wrath? It was extremely alt friendly. You could rep up with whatever faction and mail your alts the shoulder enchants. That’s unheard of ever since.
Heirlooms? It made leveling alts trivial. They even added tabards so you could gain reps.
I’m going to respectfully disagree with you here. I still love going back to the classic games and leveling for the feeling of the experience. The only reason I don’t stay there is because of how outdated it looks and how it’ll never be updated.
MANY of us absolutely loved that RPG experience. Obviously you are not somebody who appreciates it. But that is what made those classic games great. Not the end game, because the end game was super stale. You raided, you ran dungeons, you PVPed, or you logged out. The current game is exactly that, but with far more world content to do.
The only thing the older games did better was the leveling experience and perhaps the profession systems. Both started losing value in MoP.
There’s no leveling progression now, none. There are no RPG elements. I don’t even know why it exists currently.
Another point to make. You seem to think everyone’s feelings revolve around raiding. That’s not the case. Yeah, it’s more casual when it comes to raid stuff, but the majority of this game has never played for raiding. Never.
No I’m 100% serious about TBC being a better game than retail…. You’re trying to tell me the leveling experience is good in retail? You clearly have no clue.
The level experience in classic tbc are far better. The feel of the world is much better and you actually feel like a part of the world…
Retail leveling omg for one the gam devs haven’t thought about it one bit it’s gross…. So for you to say the leveling is bad in the old games come on….
The leveling took foreverrrrr in those expansions it wasn’t that it sucked it’s just that it took forever, if you had friends doing endgame and you wanted to play but had 3 months of leveling to do it that was guna suck and they eventually made it way faster to level and added things like boosts.
Well now ima list reasons why tbc is better.
- Playable characters.
No matter what content you enjoyed doing there was a character for you. Classes had deepened tool kits and mechanically felt good and rewarding to play when you were able to master your class. If there is one thing I can say in Warcraft I feel happy to play classes in tbc. I could do absolutely nothing but just run around and kill random npcs, trying to farm gold. Which takes me to the next point…
- The way players interact with the world.
You knock the old games saying you can only kill one monster at time. The leveling experience in classic in tbc is how the game should be… the new leveling where all monsters are the same level. You just aoe everything down and never have a chance to die… it’s not even an experience….
3 better gear progression.
Every piece of gear you get in tbc makes a meaningful impact on your character. Even if it’s just leveling through Outland getting the quest rewards every piece of gear you get feels good.
Meanwhile in shadowlands I litterally had my pvp gear on I have war mode on so it’s scaling to a higher level but I get a piece of gear that’s almost as high level as my war mode gear with bad stats and it just felt like garbage. There is no gated systems that prevent me getting any gear in the game I want. I can que up arena, bgs, people can carry you in dungeons or raid and get you caught up immediately to the end.
Or if you are like me you can do bgs and arena and get full geared in no time and be competitive.
These are basically all gameplay from 2007 that is BETTER than what we have in slands in 2022 and it’s basically the whole entire game.
You’re quick to say I’m being hyperbolic but I’m really only being 100% honestly as someone who has probably years of game time in the game.
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i’m a retail andy ( started in BFA ) and Classic leveling is very very good , the gear is more exciting to get too
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No. I don’t think WoW will ever be as good as it was in the past. In fact i am waiting for them to fill us with a bunch of bs this next announcement. They’re all talk anymore.
You’re 100% wrong then.
I played TBC when it was originally live and I’ve played it now.
Retail leveling is a FAR better experience. You are just DEMONSTRABLY wrong here.
This is also a lie. If you believe or think this, I doubt you ever have actually played Retail. They added heirlooms because they understood that as the levels climbed higher it was getting harder to level through EVERY expansion. In WoD, however, they finally took a step to address the game in an individual expansion and made the leveling experience easier. They furthered this in Legion and carried it through BfA until they FINALLY added Chromie time, and did a level squish of all previous expansions for Shaodwlands AND they created a new starter area for people to learn about the game AND their class a little bit, and then drop them RIGHT at their capital city so they can get straight to the action.
No, they did not. There were several classes and specs that were just broken and unplayable. Anyone that tells you that Enhance Shaman in TBC and Wrath are “good” and have a “deepened toolkit” that “mechanically feels good” is just straight lying.
Other specs and classes, such as ANY Rogue were broken in the opposite direction, where they were CHOSEN classes in PvP because they would just destroy other players AND they still did very well in PvE content. Mage was up and down, where Fire was good one patch, then Frost was, and Arcane was just straight garbage all the way through. The classes and specs were all over the map back then and needed a LOT of work to get where we are today.
No it isn’t. That’s not how power progression works. After this long in Azeroth gaining THIS much power, we should be demigods in our own right, OR we should be dealing with forces OUTSIDE of our world where they are so incredibly powerful that WE get destroyed in a blink.
That’s a straight lie as well. It would take an entire SET of gear for it to feel like your power changed. Going from dungeon gear to FULL raid gear felt like ACTUAL power progression in TBC and Wrath, not just a single piece.
You sound more like you’re just confused about what gear is or isn’t good for you, and it scares you, rather than the simplistic “X gear gives you X stat, is good, not bad”. Yeah, well, sometimes when you play games like this that’s not always cut and dried. If you’ve ever played a D&D session, sometimes you get a piece of gear that gives you a good ability, only to find out later it has a hidden curse you didn’t detect. That’s harder to portray in a game like WoW, so they do that by putting in a myriad of “one-off” powers that may or may not be good for the situations you find yourself in (think of a trinket where you went “is that something useful or no?”)
I want you to understand something here:
I’m not just disagreeing with you. I’m calling you dishonest.
You are being SERIOUSLY dishonest about how TBC was/is and how Retail currently is.
I played TBC. I played Wrath. I KNOW how they were, I KNOW what was good and what wasn’t. If you think you’re trying to pull one over on anyone here, you are ABSOLUTELY wrong.
The game changed to what we have in Retail because it needed to change, they kept some of the things that worked and threw a LOT of stuff out that didn’t.
And saying otherwise is complete dishonesty.
I’m done here, carry on in your nostalgia.
It’s subjective. We all enjoy things differently. Take a breath and relax lol.
Sure.
Don’t make raiding require 17 mods, hours up hours of prep and not have 20 minute boss fights with 16 phases.
Delete mythic raiding. The players that raid mythic do not contribute enough revenue to get the amount of dev time they get.
Make content for casuals… you know the bulk of the playerbase.
Bring back tier sets and no borrowed power outside of tier.
And maybe have a good story
I’m not going to sit here and quote your post but I did level a characters in original tbc, mop, legion and bfa pre chromie.
I will tell you that before the chromie thing when I leveled my 3RD ww in bfa. I was able to find a good enough experience, I think I played through wotlk. Because I never played that before, made use of things like the experience banners, experience potions from the war front vendors in bfa and at that point it’s okay.
So I’m telling you this because I do have pretty recent experience honestly leveling in retail and giving you the straight up comparisons.
With use of some of the items and choosing the content you want to do, it makes it a pretty casual leveling experience. You could never leave org and que for dungeons the entire time.
As far as actually playing through the zones in classic and tbc that is a game in its self. Leveling your professions. It’s something myself and many others have gone back and probably did many times because it was good content.
Now you’re on about telling me shamans are trash have no toolkit come on kid. They have everything and it only gets better going into wrath getting insta heals and hex. 2 dispels, dispelling totems, ranged slows, aoe slows, can wear a shield, long range damage, healing. Party buffs, blood lust elemental totems for soloing elites and burst.
You clearly haven’t played the game at all if you don’t think enhancement shamans have a deepened toolkit. Dumbest thing I’ve read in awhile.
Every piece of gear does make a huge diference changing two pieces of gear on my feral druid makes my Armor go from 8000 to 12000. Sitting here tryna tell me one piece of gear doesn’t matter, when your belt breaks in a dungeon and your dps goes down hey maybe one piece of gear matters lol.
Every time when I’m doin those out land quest I get new piece of gear I’m equipping it checking out my stat differentials seeing which is giving me more crit and ap meanwhike keeping me in my hit cap. The gear feels better. You are wrong about everything you’ve said.
Also the enhance toolkit mannnn, the grounding totem, wf totem, purge, mana spring. Shamanistic rage, tremors. In tbc you can spec into 50% slow deduction for pvp which also gives you more Armor making you pretty tanky. I have 50% dmg reduc right now with my shield and I’m not even shield spec anymore. Or am I speced into booster Armor.
Shamans have a deepened toolkit and the fact you said they don’t and you told me you played tbc twice im telling you that you are a liar. You’ve never played the game you don’t know what you’re talking about.
in a word…nope.
A lot of people playing retail now after all that has happened are either very young or part of generation z. Last time I played in retail, I was in a guild and most of them would be 5 or 6 years old when TBC was out. The thing is, Blizzard is catering towards younger gamers, old timers like us have no place in retail anymore.
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The game will never be as good as it used to be because it’s actually not possible.
Most people who have played the game since then, didn’t have even close to the amount of responsibilities and stress in their lives that they do now that they are older. Those same players now have full time careers, a wife, kids, etc that will never allow them the time they used to be able to put stress free into a video game.
You also didn’t need remotely as much skill and knowledge of the game that you do nowadays just to play CURRENT content. Back then most classes rotations were 2-3 buttons, bosses had nowhere near the mechanics and were more or less a gear check rather than a skill check.
The only way this game gets back to its former glory, is to develop it from a far more casual friendly mindset that applies to the majority of the playerbase. Content is designed around the 1% now, with barely any content for the other 99% that’s actually enjoyable. But each patch where that 1% has to dedicate as much time and effort into it, leads to burnout that will even slowly kill off those players when they realize it’s not healthy or sustainable to play that way.
You will never get the stress free time you used to have with WoW back in the day again. No matter what they do. You will never log on without a care in the world, where the only thing you have to worry about is going to school and playing WoW. Now you get home after a shift at work, have to shower, cook dinner, play with the kids, bang the wife etc. it’s always at the back of your mind that there’s something else you need to be doing, so anything in WoW that you don’t like gets amplified because of the guilt that you should be doing something else.
You used to use WoW to escape your real life and the stress of it. Now the game is developed to amplify that stress
I aslo started in bfa lol
I disagree with some of the stuff here. I have played my paladin through tbc classic and the attunements were really nothing. Eventually they removed them but it was hardly a grind. Getting flying in retail is much more of a grind than any tbc attunement. The raids were pretty fun but are fairly easy now. We are clearing BT and MH in about 4 hours total, spread over two nights, sometimes we will do a ZA bear run after (10 bears already in guild!). I do miss some of the harder raids of retail (heroic and mythic) but other than that, the classes feel more distinct in TBC.
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No. The best you can hope for is the game director and lead writer eventually end up being fired when Microsoft takes over and then you have to hope that Microsoft themselves doesn’t just come in and ruin the game more which is always a potential result that no one seems to think about.