Originally Posted by
Rollcage8
Directions weren't written in second paragraph, if you read vanilla WoW quest text you would realise when it said "Go talk to Blah Blah" it didn't even tell you what Map he would be on. You can argue that is lazy or bad, I don't care. I'm just stating that is what it was like and it was much harder to find a quest mob or item for a quest. Tooltips didn't list the mob was a quest drop either, so if it was collect 10 bear bums, you wouldn't know it was the right bear until it dropped one on your 10th kill.
Addons were adding convenience and were basically cheating. Cheats are always a great way to lower a games difficulty.
Mobs killing you isn't bad game design, its a challenge to the player. Forcing cooperation between players, getting consumables or crafting better gear were all valid strategies to handle death during questing. Leveling in vanilla you cared about Armour class, because it stopped you from dying. None of that is valid in Legion, mobs die when you look at them and I couldn't care less about crafting armour to beat a zone mob. Do health potions still exist?
10 silver was expensive during the start of the game, Once gold farmers became rampant and gold inflation kicked in, then no it wasn't a huge deal.
Weapon skills are nothing like artifact gating, they were a Role playing game effect, you had to go and get taught to use a Gun in thunderbluff, then you killed stuff to level it up, now you were a gun toting Troll hunter. It wasn't required, it was to role play a gun shooting troll. You could smash out weapon skill bars through "clever exploitation" as you say. That doesn't nullify that a brand new player couldn't just use a gun on his troll hunter and had to earn it with silvers and time.
Higher travel time often meant "go find thunderbluff" no addon GPS built into the game, Thunderbluff was fog of war. It was mysterious, unknown. Go Find It by Using Your Legs. It was hard when you first did it, because you didn't know where to go and making a wrong turn could mean 10-20 minutes backtracking on foot.