Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Vineri]

Again, don't assume that GW2 model is the only model for having no holy trinity. [Insert failed MMO here] failed and had the holy trinity. [Insert failed MMO here] failed and didn't have the holy trinity. Ok, i understand you don't like GW2. But, because it does not crucify the no holy trinity model, why is the no holy trinity model bad?

And no. Ever since Wrath of Fail, Blizzard has taken the holy trinity model in a much different direction. Every tank should be equal, every healer should be equal, and every dps should be equal. In other words, for pretty much any fight, i should be able to substitute a frost mage dps with a subtlety rogue dps. For obvious reasons, this model fails.

Now, in late vanilla, they were planting the seeds for this model. No longer are druids hybrids that can adapt to certain situations; they are now healers. Why? Because the community never saw it effective to play the way Blizzard intended it to be played.

I liked the hybrid idea. I don't like the homogenization ideas, if that is what you are getting at. Hybrids were a better avenue, IMO, and certainly added to uniqueness and identity amongst the playerbase.

That era might have seen Blizzard trying to model their game into something else down the road, but little did they know at the time, people were watching. The transitional time was more liked than the end result, IMO.

[parcus]

GW 2 had a lot of potential, but they never gave the non-trinity model a chance. I remember that at first dungeons were difficult and mainly a matter of zerging from the GY, later on they removed the GY zerging, but in the process they made them all easy. Had they balanced them properly and not allowed the GY zerg at first, I think GW 2 PVE could have worked. Then there was the dungeon with 40 difficulties I could not give a shit about. One of my biggest MMO disappointments. Also that was part of the reasons I didn't bother with wildstar (NCSOFT fucked GW, so I could only expect the same).

[Laqweeta]

Most of the time,private servers tend to have a Wotlk 3.3.5a private server along side a cataclysm one.But there a vast forms of customization(Like lvl 255,All Gm server,Funservers and more)in this servers and mostly are Wotlk,second i think is vanilla but honestly i never bother looking.

There are quite a few popular 1x Blizz-like WotLK servers out there! But yeah, most of the extreme customization you've mentioned is usually always WotLK.

[RickJamesLich]

I have played on a vanilla server. While BWL was 'current' content for that server, my guild, which was by no means great (or even good) killed Nefarian in 4 attempts. Once loot was handed out, i hearthstoned, and then logged out, and never logged in to that server or any of these other shitty vanilla servers. I have seen a bunch of 70s and 80s die more to BWL Nef on retail. How do any of these vanilla servers represent vanilla WoW (outside of leveling)? MC and AQ have fallen just as easily on this server and every other vanilla server.

Nost was so far off from providing a vanilla experience. Why would Blizzard install a Nost clone that you can play on and brand it as vanilla? Don't get me wrong, i love private servers (if run for no profit). It's a great opportunity for amateur game developers and game designers to explore their talents. But, i cannot see Blizzard implementing a Nost-clone. It makes more sense for them to expand on their timewalking concept.

IMO Nost provided the Vanilla experienced but improved upon the best parts. World PvP was most prevalent during vanilla for example, on Nost you could find a battle in pretty much any zone at any time of the day. STV for example, I died literally every 5 minutes to PVP action, and it wasn't that I was being farmed, rather the whole zone was a fucking battle lol. I remember fights for Azuergos kills where you'd have three 40 man raids of alliance fighting three 40 man raids of horde. That stuff just doesn't happen on retail... pretty much ever.

That being said all of the interesting stuff from vanilla was revived. From 40 man raids always having funny shit going on in their vent, to chinese gold farmers returning, to actually wiping on trash in 5 mans because some noob would pull extra packs, to really having to put in effort to get a good set of gear, to late night ZG pugs that couldn't get past the spider boss or the blood lord. As for MC being easy, no disagreements there, minus that there were guilds that still had trouble and some that still couldn't get a full BWL clear by the time Nost was shut down. I jumped around and was in a few guilds, most of them didn't have too much trouble in BWL but I did regularly join pugs that would wipe in 5 mans, UBRS, and even ZG bosses.

As for the timewalking concept.... who actually finds that fun? What made those dungeons interesting was that you could die in them, timewalking just brings those dungeons back and turns them into AOE fest. As for why the developers would bring back vanilla, well.... millions of players have left wow... why not try bringing some of them back?

[Darktbs]

There are quite a few popular 1x Blizz-like WotLK servers out there! But yeah, most of the extreme customization you've mentioned is usually always WotLK.

The best one i ever played was a server that increased the talent points one gain after each level.After you reached lvl 80 you could have all talents from all trees.

[stomination]

The question is why do people keep coming to this thread if they clearly have no interest in Vanilla? This is pretty much the only thread in this forum talking about this, you have the other 99.9% of the threads to read about things that interest you. Unless modern wow isn't really all that interesting.

Something something take away dev time and money to be put into the expansions. That and blizzard competing with itself.

[stomination]

So uh...is this the best worst MMO-C thread of all time? I think it's a very good contender.

it ranks with the flying one. Which u cant fly in vanilla either. odd how ppl complain about things.

[Gilthresa]

Υes, it was. I played Vanilla, did both organized PvP and Raiding, and I still play Vanilla to this day together with my wife.

People in my guild on the Vanilla server I play, are all about my age (30's-40's) and all Vanilla veterans. There is a big difference between people who play Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK in private servers and the people who play retail. The latter are mostly children and teenagers.

This is no surprise, as Retail "WoW" has been purposefully designed from Cataclysm onwards to cater to children and teenagers. Pokemon, Kung Fu Pandas, hundreds of different mounts a la" My Little Pony", game mechanics getting simplified to the extreme, blanket removal of any kind of challenge during levelling and dungeons, class homogenization, game world being trivialized, professions made extremely easy etc.

Veteran WoW players in my age group don't consider Retail WoW worthy of their attention as it is far too easy and too socialist to be worth it. There is no sense of achievement in Retail any more. Everyone has everything. Such a world might appeal to children but it is far too different from real world to appeal to people in my age group.

I don't think I have seen someone spew more shit in one post than you just did. I honestly can't even take it serious because your rose tinted glasses are shoved so far up your arse you don't even know what your talking about.

[DesoPL]

I doubt Blizz will announce anything on Blizzcon or worse ever, why? They might lose too much money from subs, mounts for real money etc.

[Relapses]

I don't think I have seen someone spew more shit in one post than you just did. I honestly can't even take it serious because your rose tinted glasses are shoved so far up your arse you don't even know what your talking about.

These incredibly hypocritical ageist pro-Legacy posts conjure images of Cranky from Donkey Kong Country for me.

[slaise1]

I don't think I have seen someone spew more shit in one post than you just did. I honestly can't even take it serious because your rose tinted glasses are shoved so far up your arse you don't even know what your talking about.

Its not rose tinted glasses when you for a fact enjoy a game compared to the next one

[stomination]

Its not rose tinted glasses when you for a fact enjoy a game compared to the next one

Yet its the same game. An expansion isn't a new game just an addition. Stuff gets changed in all mmo's in patches and expansions. But its still the same game. Its not named wow 2 3 4 5 6.

[Eleccybubb]

Its not rose tinted glasses when you for a fact enjoy a game compared to the next one

Oh please. That poster that he quoted was just making really underhanded remarks towards retail players. Calling out shit like the game caters to children and nobody in his age group play it yet plenty do among the other crap that was spewed. Be prepared to take shit if you are gonna throw it. If it's ok for him to start on retail users then it's ok for people to start on him for spouting nonsense.

[Kolvarg]

Yet its the same game. An expansion isn't a new game just an addition. Stuff gets changed in all mmo's in patches and expansions. But its still the same game. Its not named wow 2 3 4 5 6.

Just because it's named the same thing (it isn't, one is named "World of Warcraft", the other is named for instnace "World of Warcraft:Legion"), doesn't mean it has no differences.

It's the "same" game, but it plays very differently.

[Deleted]

I'm enjoying Legion, having a good guild to run mythic+ and raids with helps a lot, I'd probably be a bit bored if I didn't have that. On the other hand my main char is pretty well geared now (854) and the grind for artifact traits is getting enormous for ever decreasing rewards since I've already picked up the important traits. I mostly just need to log on for the emissary cache, raid nights and when I want to do some mythic+ so I've been messing around with some alts in my down time. I'm not complaining, the raids and dungeons are a blast, I'm having more fun with wow than I have for a long time.

I'd still love a legacy server to come out so I could have an alt there instead. I played around a bit on a private server and the world did feel bigger and more epic, frustrating in parts yes but also satisfying. The pace of the game felt much slower then and that's nice. I wouldn't permanently switch over to legacy servers since the end game is definitely inferior to what we have today, however the journey itself was more enjoyable and would be a nice change of pace to go back to sometimes. I'm sure there are lots of current players who would agree with me.

[Deleted]

I'm enjoying Legion, having a good guild to run mythic+ and raids with helps a lot, I'd probably be a bit bored if I didn't have that. On the other hand my main char is pretty well geared now (854) and the grind for artifact traits is getting enormous for ever decreasing rewards since I've already picked up the important traits. I mostly just need to log on for the emissary cache, raid nights and when I want to do some mythic+ so I've been messing around with some alts in my down time. I'm not complaining, the raids and dungeons are a blast, I'm having more fun with wow than I have for a long time.

I'd still love a legacy server to come out so I could have an alt there instead. I played around a bit on a private server and the world did feel bigger and more epic, frustrating in parts yes but also satisfying. The pace of the game felt much slower then and that's nice. I wouldn't permanently switch over to legacy servers since the end game is definitely inferior to what we have today, however the journey itself was more enjoyable and would be a nice change of pace to go back to sometimes. I'm sure there are lots of current players who would agree with me.

This is the only pro-legacy argument I can agree with. +1

[RickJamesLich]

SO Nost was fun because people had fun in vent, gold farmers and bads wiped in groups.......I dont even know what to say to that.

Nah, because it provided a world pvp experience and a social experience that retail is unable to do.... and it brought all the fun/funny stuff back as well. Plus the stuff was appropriately tuned so you could die if you made mistakes, without the need to add in 4 or 5 different versions of the same dungeon/raid.

[Vash The Stampede]

Yes I'm sure you premeditated that WoD was going to be bad. Stop bsing dude. I severely doubt you are that clairvoyant especially when you are proceeding to bash a game you have no clue about.

There's so much information flowing that it's hard not to see how the game will play. Back in MoP, I saw the trend the game was going and didn't like it. Things like Flex, which turned into normal rading for WoD, and pushed MoP normal as Heroic, and MoP Heroic ad Mythic. Classes had hardly any changes from MoP, unless removing spells is a major class change for you. There was also the anger players had for MoP having too many dailies, and it wasn't hard to see they shifted that over to the Garrison. This with a recreation of TBC content but with time travel, told me that WoD was going to suck. You don't have to believe me, you just have to wait until March 2017, given Blizzard doesn't do anything before then like they did in WoD with buying game time with Gold, which is something I didn't expect them to do.

They are trying to gauge subs with an addon that most ppl aren't using anymore that the site the data on is asking more ppl to use it on several realms because its not tracking there.

So basically its data is way flawed.

All statics are flawed, it's how you interrupt the data. WoW Census does indeed have flawed data, but it must have some sort of relationship with the sub numbers that we don't know about. I know a few days ago it show 3m players and now it's down to 2.8m. It seems every 2-3 days about 100,000 players go missing. I doubt that WoW Census goes down, while Blizzard subs go up. When one goes down, so will the other.

Just to give you an idea, around mid September WoW Census showed 4.4m and now it's 2.8m.

was vanilla really that good and fun?

Depends on what kind of player you are. Epics aren't freely given out, and respecing costs gold. There's hardly any casual content. You can use lower mana costing versions of the same spell, to conserve mana. No LFR, no pet battles, and no achievements.

I highly doubt the reason is because they are worried it would separate players or become more popular. If anything people would get bored of Legacy over time because even if it's a progressive server once the final raid such as Naxx for vanilla and Sunwell for TBC is out and people have spent time levelling alts and farming consistently then what? There would be a drop off eventually and resetting it won't help because after a few resets people will not want to do it all again. No matter what just like retail legacy would have a drop off of interest as well. It cannot be helped.

Vanilla WoW and modern WoW are so different that it might cause a reaction with the community. Some in favor of that play style and some against. The question is how many would be for it? If more people favor Vanilla style of gameplay, people will vote with their wallet and Blizzard doesn't like that. Especially don't like being told their gameplay style has been wrong for years and needs to undo it.

[RickJamesLich]

Everything you have listed could be recreated, even if it is not presently on retail. World pvp can return. 40 man raids can return. Chinese farmers can return (but, why?). Difficult 5-man content can return (and i think it has, i don't play legion, so i don't know). Difficult leveling can return.

Things Nost doesn't emulate well or at all, but represent vanilla, also can return. Long nights in a 40 man can return. Heterogeneous class design can return, as well.

Could world pvp return? Probably not. We haven't seen it return at least and it's been well over a decade so I think it's safe to presume that it won't. The closest thing we saw is blizz removing flying mounts in WoD but then adding in garrisons so you never needed to go into the open world... but they did in fact relent on the flying mounts thing which is really what killed world pvp in the first place. 5 man dungeons could return.... not sure about legion but I pretty much played up to WoD and 5 mans have been dead since the Cata ZG stuff.... but didn't really get bad until MoP. Remove LFD, put in mechanics and mobs that can kill you.... for starters. Do the mobs still not aggro if you use CC? lol.

There's more though, the economy... which was ruined by WoD, I just can't picture blizz being able to bring that back unless they reset everyone's gold count to zero. Professions offering interesting tools, whether it's blacksmithing offering specializations that can make the person money back after investing the time, the mithril insignia, all of the tools from engineering, things like the bloodvine set bonus, etc. Or how about the concept of it taking time to get a full set of epics? I've had toons back in wotlk that I could get decked out with full epics within a day of hitting 80. It's pretty much been the same since then. Are these types of changes possible?Sure, are they going to happen though? I highly doubt so.

I still think it is the best for Blizzard to expand upon it. Just because they are aoe fests, doesn't mean they have to be. They can be better tuned. Nost didn't know how to tune their raids; not because it was impossible, but because they chose not to. You can choose to better tune content.

IMO if they do timewalking the only way it would be interesting is if they actually made it so you only had the abilities that were available back at that time. Something like that I think would make a lot of players suddenly interested. They *could* do that... maybe... lol, but will they? I wouldn't mind at least if they were appropriately tuned, but it doesn't seem like blizzard feels like being bothered. I can honestly say though that almost none of the folks that want legacy servers would be happy with the time walking stuff. As for raids not being appropriately tuned on Nost, I'd have to disagree. IMO they were tuned very close to the level blizzard originally had them at and if there was a difference, it wasn't noticeable.

[papajohn4]

I fail to see why advertising here is even necessary, since Reddit has an entire subcategory devoted to WoW private server discussions, without certain loyal Blizzard fans trying to regulate what gets talked about ... alot of pro / con discussions for servers, etc. It's largely the go-to place for such info - easily found via google for newbs as well, just sayin'.

Thats exactly why I said that I wouldn't advertise a pserver here... I just happened to name 1 pserver on my post, but not because I wanted to advertise it... What if I mention coca cola in any of my posts? Does that mean I am advertising cola? Is people so afraid of pservers that if someone mention a name of a pserver they get nervous or something? I dunno.. Also the pserver I mentioned (and for the sake of defenders I am not saying the name again), is already very well known to the people who care about legacy servers..

btw I am quoting a post from reddit about vanilla which I agree 100%

In retail, your character is a killing machine and the degree with which you pilot him determines his effectiveness. In Vanilla, your killing machine has auto-pilot, but you have to build the machine.

Vanilla was an entirely different genre of game. Similar to MTG, or Hearthstone, or DnD, a lot of the fun of Vanilla raiding came from planning and preparing. Vanilla was not an action game like modern WoW, nor was it trying to be. It was trying to bring the classic DnD/tabeltop style RPG to a real-time online environment.

There was a lot of depth to speccing and gearing your character. While there were plenty of cookie-cutter specs and stat guidelines, if you wanted to be exceptional - you had to be switching out gear for each boss trying to balance dps/healing with mana regeneration.

Contrary to popular belief, not every player was running the "1337 best PvE min/max talent spec". For example, if a druid in your guild already has improved MotW, there's little reason for you to also spend 5 talent points there. There was a lot of room for creativity, and building your character to have the desired amount of effectiveness in raids, farming, and PvP. Your character was very much your personal creation and a reflection of your playstyle.

Finally, a thing of note: Vanilla was much more than raiding, and it was ultimately a failure of the way 40-mans were designed that led to the "boring rotations". In 5-mans players were constantly using most of their spellbook, and situational awareness, reaction time, and general "skill" and knowledge of the game and your class would prevent wipes consistently (which were punishing and could easily break up a PUG).