Vanilla levelling is a much more involved and rewarding experience. They did everything in thier power to make levelling just a onrails exposition dump for like 18 years because the old guard left and the new ones were obsessed with raiding being the end all be all at the expense of everything else.
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Not just animations. Changing how the gcd worked with haste and a lot more. The floaty spammy nature of abilities on top of lots of abilities hitting several times in a second certainly detracted from the feel of buttons.
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Yes this is what I tried to explain to him. This is a huge change in feel of combat.
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This is a very uninformed take, but I understand why you think this - a time lapse from your last foray into Retail. I’m going to assume BFA.
Raiding is not the be-all-end-all of Retail; in fact, there was a recent period where people complained that M+ was too rewarding compared to raiding. Retail has three primary end-game pillars of raiding, M+, and PvP, and even open-world solo activities have become almost comparable in the most recent patches.
Vanilla-TBC-Wrath is far more limiting in terms of end-game activities.
Not really you’re just getting him on a technicality. His point had to do with a time where the world and therefore leveling experience for the majority players WAS the essence of World of Warcraft, it was the anchor, and the other areas were things which added depth or capstones.
So what if in recent years they expanded the “raiding is the point of the game” which they maintained for like 6 expansions or something to “now M+ is basically raiding too!”. That is not his point.
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Hilariously poor comparison. WoW does not have anything like cheat codes that completely alter or remove gameplay elements. A more accurate comparison would be a game’s sequel, say going from Kingdom Hearts 1 to 2. The base gameplay is still clear within the game’s design, but there are so many mechanical and aesthetic improvements that the original becomes less appealing next to it
You think forced tedium is what keeps people playing for longer, but all it does is make them want to quit sooner
This is what you did all during Wow (at least until BfA) … It is what you do in Wolfenstein as well, and in DOOM and … Is the feel also the same here?
OK You can have your FEEL, but the gameplay, the flavour, and a zillion other things are not the same from Vanilla/TBC/Wrath as compared to Cata.
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I would disagree with this too. Leveling was a major point of the game in Vanilla, and in every expansion thereafter, even TBC, they decreased the amount of time and focus spent there. Wrath, as an example, is exponentially faster and easier, with new ways added to completely ignore the world altogether to level (battlegrounds and RDF).
this abombshield guy always with a lot to say behind his lvl 10 character
always ppl that doesnt play the game with a lot of opinions on how the game should be
/facepalm - this is a smooth brain take.
My point had nothing to do with the literal fact of cheat codes, it’s called an analogy, and it was a GOOD analogy as well because the focus is on trading short term dopaminergic bursts of “wow that’s sharp” to something that offers a player a sense of fulfillment and long-term growth, in their personal expression of gameplay.
All Arms warriors do not play the same in WotLK PvP because the goal is not so clear, however, because of the hyper-focused design, we pretty much do in Cataclysm. There is still room for some interesting little differences here and there (using retal in a clever way still exists), but that system begins to narrow a lot.
In retail? I can’t even stand my main class. I had to change to Windwalker because of how straightforward and empty they’ve made it. Even if there’s A LOT of buttons to press, the design of the buttons has no room for interpretation or multiple scenario usage.
This is what people mean by sandbox versus theme park MMO. WoW was always kind of a more casual-friendly experience compared to competitors like Ultimate or EverQuest, and this is fine… but the gameplay itself and interaction with the world was far less on rails and that includes the way you play your class in the early days. By the point of Cataclysm, they had made a very intentional decision to shift away from this.
Do not straw man me. I am not talking about forced tedium, THAT would be world and daily quests, or things like farming AP / borrowed power maintenance. If you didn’t like the fact that the leveling experience took a long time or the world was threatening, then WoW wasn’t for you and that was that, until they changed it, and with that their game’s audience.
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are you the human male with white hair and red bandana from back in the day?
Yea cata is more like Wrath+ than Classic.
Cata is 100% Classic compared to modern retail.
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I get that cata feels different than Wotlk, but to say it feels like Retail… you havent played Dragonflight, have you?
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Lol how do you remember my WoD race and mog.
because we played together lol
you also played a lot of wls with a good friend of mine, squeezed, do you remember?
I’m aware. That’s why I said “anything like cheat codes”
No, it wasn’t
It’s not a strawman. Slower leveling requiring pulling single targets out of groups to safety, taking sometimes up to a minute to kill, with single button rotations, and requiring stopping to eat and drink after every other pull with long periods of downtime is, by definition, tedious
By YOUR definition, I like doing it, that is why I play mainly HC 
I find dungeons and BG’s tedious. Tedious is not an objective measurement of anything. It’s a taste.
Literal skill issue lmao
Awesome, glad you have that for yourself. So why are you here complaining about Cataclysm then?
Yeah I think he barely spoke English lol but he was good.
Dug into my screenshots folder from back when I still streamed a bit here you go lol:
https:// ibb. co/JC6GgmD
remove all the spaces^