Lol. Yours is the weird take. You realize that everything in WOW started somewhere right? By your logic you could claim “pet battles” isn’t a retail feature either. It’s complete nonsense as an argument.
homogenization in wotlk required sacrifice atleast, which was the max they should have went with it. Like a rogue with lifeblood heal has to have herb as a profession in sacrifice of a better prof, not every rogue will have a self heal. It’s also on a 3 min cd. Self healing in wotlk is still nothing compared to retail cringe.
Well that entirely depends on how loosely you want to use the expression. Pets existed in vanilla they were literally nothing more than vanity items, the concept of battling them didn’t exist at all.
On the other hand CRBG was a vanilla feature and RDF was just an expansion of that same feature to dungeons.
True… And dungeon finder also didn’t exist in vanilla. So if your metric for “retail features” is anything that didn’t exist in vanilla then dungeon finder is a retail feature.
But a cross realm group finder did exist in vanilla, meeting stones did exist in vanilla, TBC tried to add a group finder tool. So there were clearly roots there for the idea of RDF beyond hey let’s just randomly do this.
I think it’s a pretty big stretch from “CRBG’s were a vanilla feature” to “Random dungeon finder” was a vanilla feature… That really is like saying Pet Battles were a vanilla feature since pet’s existed. Yea… but not really at all the same thing.
I didn’t say RDF was a vanilla feature, I said its roots started long before wrath.
Well sure. But again you could say that about almost any retail feature right? Bugs in AQ were basically the first hard mode which led to mythic raids. Baron runs were the first heroics which got us to mythic+ etc etc etc.
I’m not even against RDF anymore, but I think it’s pretty much one of the quintessential “retail” vs “classic” features. I do think the anonymity afforded by a near endless pool of x-realm players was the start of the erosion of community that we see in retail, but I now believe the benefits at least for new/leveling players probably outweighs that.
Exactly trying to claim that some of these ideas were retail ideas has always been silly. A lot of it was indeed started in vanilla. RDF being a logical extension of ideas from vanilla and TBC.
Mythic+ has its actual roots in D2 affixes coupled with D3, which is not a logical extension heroics as they are not in fact specifically tuned with different mechanics, they are just a lazy way to avoid making new content.
Mythic+ encounters do have multiple different mechanics than heroic encounters… True as they scale up in mythic key it’s just tighter tuning but heroic vs mythic is entirely different.
Mythic+ scales up by adding generic affixes and just upping stat requirements. That was not how normal mode scaled up to heroic in wrath, or for that matter even how raiding scales up now in retail as mythic raiding is a static difficulty which is individually tuned by raid/encounter.
Although I wouldn’t put it past blizzard to add mythic+ raiding at this point… obviously the retail crowd is totally fine just rerunning the same dungeons an entire expansion.
On top of the affixes mythic+ trash and bosses definitely have added mechanics from their heroic/normal counterparts.
Right they have affixes.
The affixes rotate weekly. They also have abilities that do not rotate weekly that the heroic bosses do not.
You can even see them in the dungeon journal on retail. Any ability/mechanic with a skull beside it is a “mythic only mechanic.” These are entirely separate from rotating affixes.
That is still just random affixes being applied across all dungeons, not that mythic+X for dungeon Y is specifically tuned a certain way. And I have no idea how many affixes they have now but at a certain point you used to get up to all affixes and it was pure stat scaling. And last time i even bothered with mythic+ the boss abilities were no different than just mythic bosses.
I dont guess I understand what you’re trying to say anymore lol. A Normal boss will have say 2 mechanics. A Heroic boss might have say 3 mechanics (not that you’d probably notice in either case because they don’t actually matter.) A mythic+ boss will have say 5 mechanics PLUS 2 dungeon specific affixes that rotate weekly (and may or may not actually impact the boss encounter directly.) So the mythic+ dungeons/encounters ARE redesigned specifically as mythic+ encounters.
Now from a mythic +1 key to a mythic +30 key the mechanics don’t change (except at +10 when you get an additional SEASONAL affix that doesn’t rotate weekly) but I also wouldn’t really expect them to.
Nevermind didn’t read the last sentence 
So no all mythic+ adds is random generic affixes and stat increases. And I’m not sure how a generic season specific affix is an encounter specific mechanic.
Only one affix is added, the seasonal affix at +10, and that’s the only mechanic that is actually added. That said, as you progress in difficulty you’re forced to deal with more mechanics simply because they start to matter more. You can ignore a lot of stuff on some encounters/trash initially because you’re not punished that much for doing so. But as you progress every mechanic starts to matter because the tuning becomes so tight. I wouldn’t really expect them to redesign every encounter for every key level up through infinity lol, but the increase in difficulty effectively accomplishes the same thing.
I’ve actually been playing a fair amount of retail in the last few months of downtime and the mythic+ system is actually pretty well-designed, although the rewards could be a little more compelling. I even like pet battles :P. Its just the retail community that is honestly just so disheartening
How is a generic affix that is random per season actually really any different than an affix that is random per week?
It’s still just the same dungeon with different affixes none of which are specific to the dungeon or encounter. Unlike normal->heroic.
Let me ask this, if you are totally fine with just doing the same dungeons an entire expansion but different affixes are you fine with doing the same thing for raids? Could be a huge cost saver for blizzard if they only have to make one raid tier per expansion.
That’s actually the neat thing about S4 and time-walking. They’ve started rotating in old dungeons. So like for all of S4 none of the original M+ dungeons from P1 are in the rotation. It’s all a bunch of legion/WOD etc dungeons redesigned/tuned for M+, and 2 of the Shadowlands dungeons they added in S3 (Upper Karazhan in particular is really pretty cool.) And they’ve been rotating in Legion time-walking dungeons for M+ which has been interesting though I’ve only done a couple since they don’t affect rating…
Granted they’ll have a limited pool to pull from but it still gives them a lot more to work with, without forcing them to completely redesign a bunch of new dungeons every phase… Retail is still retail… but S4 really has seen some awfully good changes.