What made classic wow better than current?

[Charge me Doctor]

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.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?quest=129
Bring Parker's lunch to Guard Parker. He patrols the road leading to Darkshire.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?quest=304
Kill Balgaras the Foul and bring his ear to Longbraid the Grim outside of Dun Modr.
Many of my soldiers died in the battle of Dun Modr. My own brother perished when the West Bridge over the Thandol Span was destroyed. Aye, the Dark Iron dwarves are a devilish breed. From what Roggo was able to gather, the leader of the thugs in the Wetlands is a warlock named Balgaras the Foul. He is quite a coward, sending his soldiers to do his bidding but hides in his camp on Direforge Hill, to the southeast.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?quest=4733
Take the Sea Creature Bones to Gwennyth Bly'Leggonde in Auberdine.

Do you want me to continue?
Directions were written in quests, it almost always tells you where you need to find someone unless it's fucking obvious from the context.

It always says which bear bums you need to collect. Bear bums comes from Bears, Dire Bear bums comes from Dire Bears, Bear Form Druid bums comes fro, Bear Form Druids, etc.
Well, saying that addons are cheats will take you places.

Monsters being engaging - yes, it's a good game design, but monsters attacking for 56-76 when you have 260 health and they are clumped together in packs of 3... it's a bad game design, because being a shaman with 260 health and being a warlock with a pet with 1k health forces not cooperation, but /lol from warlock who takes all quest mobs because he needs the drops and doesn't need you.

When leveling in vanilla you equipped literally anything that has more stats on it. oes this piece have 1 stamina more? Yes? Gimme. No, i don't care that i'm a warrior and this is a robe. No, i need intellect to rise my weapon skills faster. No, i don't care that you are a healer" - this is vanilla.

10 silver was expensive for a level 10. At level 10 you don't need weapon skills.
Off course weapon skills are nothing like artifact gating, they are pure RP element that affects gameplay in negative way (aka - it makes you character weaker)

"Thunder bluff" had a giant marker on world map on top of mulgore, iirc, you just looked at where conveniently placed mountain ranges in each and fucking every location disconnects and go there

[Atrea]

I don't know.

Maybe it was the primitive game mechanics; like Rogue poisons with stacks, or soul shards taking up actual physical item slots.
Maybe it was leveled weapon skills, or attunements linked to reputation grinds (or attunements themselves, for that matter.)

Maybe it was the thrill of fighting against an invisible (without the use of a very primitive form of an addon we use today) number, and if you exceeded that number you died (at best), or wiped the raid (at worst.) This was made double fun when things such as "taunt immune bosses that required a tanking swap" existed.

Or gear with completely useless stats on them. Or gear that was inferior to your other gear, with the exception of it having resistance stats on it - which was how content was often gated.

Maybe it was having quests for one zone, on one continent, have to be picked up in another zone, on the other continent.

Maybe a raid with 8 bosses, with 3 of them having identical models, while several of the others were the same model as trash in that same raid.


I swear, the people who act like it was better back then must have been playing a different fucking game than I was.

[Droodid]

Hey, he may pretty well be farming zul'theraze or whatever the sword from zul'farrak was called for 5 level straight

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Why do you miss these things if you can and should do them on live server?

You don't have to now with group finder. I rarely see anyone forming any kinds of groups except for those who want to do Mythic +(low) and require absurd requirements.

[Charge me Doctor]

You don't have to now with group finder. I rarely see anyone forming any kinds of groups except for those who want to do Mythic +(low) and require absurd requirements.

It doesn't mean that it somewhat forbidden, if you miss these things - do them. Gather people around while leveling, as you may be would do in classic, run some dungeons (existence of dungeon finder doesn't mean that you have to use it and can't create groups of your own), you still can interact with people, it's even easier to do now than it was before. People just choose not to do so

[wych]

Immersion. Sense of accomplishment. Social Interaction.

Pretty much, even things which weren't streamlined or perfectly optimised so you could fly through questing or a dungeon added to the feeling of a world. Rather than feeling like you're on rails through a linear experience as you do right now. "Kill 10 mobs, pick up 5 items, free 2 prisoners" hand in at the quest hub, onto the next area to do the exact same things.

Blizzard have spent years streamlining the game and removing RPG aspects in favour of convenience and laziness. Everything just seems so perfectly optimised to get you through the game as quickly as possible (unless they timegate something) and for me it takes the magic away of part of WoW.

The genie is out the bottle in the main game now, you can't get the immersive RPG feeling that WoW used to have no matter what they do. Thankfully it's still alive in Vanilla versions of the game.


Ultimately some people prefer the newer version of WoW, upto them, you do you at the end of the day. We live in an age where everything has to be bitesized, and doesn't require time commitment. 6 second videos on Vine, 140 character messages on Twitter, 10 second pictures on Snapchat. Everything is about convenience and speed now, so I don't blame Blizzard on one level for appealing to that current generation and direction of society

I just wish that for the many of us who prefer the old style, Blizzard opened up an option for us to play

[tyrs ankle]

Pretty much, even things which weren't streamlined or perfectly optimised so you could fly through questing or a dungeon added to the feeling of a world. Rather than feeling like you're on rails through a linear experience as you do right now. "Kill 10 mobs, pick up 5 items, free 2 prisoners" hand in at the quest hub, onto the next area to do the exact same things.

Blizzard have spent years streamlining the game and removing RPG aspects in favour of convenience and laziness. Everything just seems so perfectly optimised to get you through the game as quickly as possible (unless they timegate something) and for me it takes the magic away of part of WoW.

The genie is out the bottle in the main game now, you can't get the immersive RPG feeling that WoW used to have no matter what they do. Thankfully it's still alive in Vanilla versions of the game.


Ultimately some people prefer the newer version of WoW, upto them, you do you at the end of the day. We live in an age where everything has to be bitesized, and doesn't require time commitment. 6 second videos on Vine, 140 character messages on Twitter, 10 second pictures on Snapchat. Everything is about convenience and speed now, so I don't blame Blizzard on one level for appealing to that current generation and direction of society

I just wish that for the many of us who prefer the old style, Blizzard opened up an option for us to play

What immersive rpg action, dare I ask?
The ability to fuck up a talent tree?

[wych]

What immersive rpg action, dare I ask?
The ability to fuck up a talent tree?

For starters the world itself. It's huge, beautiful and there's danger around every corner. Same with dungeons, whilst Blizzard has improved their graphical quality, they're just AOE fests that you fly through nowadays. There's no feeling there compared to something even like Deadmines, where one wrong move deep in enemy territory and you're fucked. Even reaching the instance portal requires effort and co-ordination. You have to fight your way through miners and their overseers to get to the entrance

Now when you level, it's grab your heirlooms and mount ASAP, and storm through as fast as possible so you can reach the cap. Maybe you'll chain run a through dungeons, port in from anywhere and blast through it with AOE, all the quests are available at the door and everything is linear. For me, the journey in WoW is gone nowadays, it's all about the destination.

Then there's the more personal RPG elements. As a hunter having to feed my pet and keep it healthy, and watching it's loyalty rise as our bond grows as we grow stronger together and build trust. Treat it wrong and it will grow sick of me and run back to the wild. Making sure i'm feeding my gorilla fruit because that's the diet it lives on. Making sure i'm stocked up on arrows before a dungeon run in case I run out midway through. Or as a mage realising your fire spells are no use against a fire elemental so you have to adapt to fight.

As I said, for people who want convenience I understand the route they took. They don't wanna waste time finding a vendor that sells grapes and wasting bag space on it, but for those of us who didn't care about just rushing to the end and didn't mind dying a few times whilst leveling/in a dungeon, the modern game just isn't the same.

[Kyanion]

For starters the world itself. It's huge, beautiful and there's danger around every corner.

Can we stop with this kinda junk? It's huge, spread out, lots of running between mobs, plenty of safe spots on roads and then there is the danger of 'auto attacking mobs' and perhaps mobs over your level. Woo.

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There's no feeling there compared to something even like Deadmines, where one wrong move deep in enemy territory and you're fucked.

You are right, TBC heroics are far better, Cata heroics (pre-nerf) were better. I'd say some of the affixes in M+ make for a much scarier dungeon than a patroling mob in freaking Deadmines.

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Then there's the more personal RPG elements. As a hunter having to feed my pet and keep it healthy, and watching it's loyalty rise as our bond grows as we grow stronger together and build trust.

You mean press the feed pet macro and not really care about it outside of that? K. Sorry, I could give a shit about my pet in Vanilla because I could just rez it when needed and throw it a piece of whatthefuckever and move on about my killing.

[Akka]

Here, after last night Nighthold and the few M+ I could stomach, let me add another big points about why Vanilla was far better :

- Less efficient and numerous AoE. With less ability to spam damage over a whole group, and AoE which were usually coming at an opportunity cost, you had to make more informed decisions about it, and often had priority targets taking precedence => more interesting gameplay.

- Much more variety in how you approach fights depending on your class. Legion feels kinda identical whatever the class (your damaging abilities look different, but don't really work differently, and the approach is usually just about doing a rotation). The fact they removed buffs, debuffs and normalized rotations is certainly not helping.

I've found gameplay rather boring in WoD, and utterly boring in Legion.
Now I guess some drooling moron is going to tell me that liking different approaches to fight and not liking AoEing constantly is because "nostalgia" (and not because, well, I don't like mindlessly AoEing and like having variety), but well, "nostalgia" retards aren't retards for no reason.

[voidillusion]

Here, after last night Nighthold and the few M+ I could stomach, let me add another big points about why Vanilla was far better :

- Less efficient and numerous AoE. With less ability to spam damage over a whole group, and AoE which were usually coming at an opportunity cost, you had to make more informed decisions about it, and often had priority targets taking precedence => more interesting gameplay.

- Much more variety in how you approach fights depending on your class. Legion feels kinda identical whatever the class (your damaging abilities look different, but don't really work differently, and the approach is usually just about doing a rotation). The fact they removed buffs, debuffs and normalized rotations is certainly not helping.

I've found gameplay rather boring in WoD, and utterly boring in Legion.
Now I guess some drooling moron is going to tell me that liking different approaches to fight and not liking AoEing constantly is because "nostalgia" (and not because, well, I don't like mindlessly AoEing and having variety), but well, "nostalgia" retards aren't retards for no reason.

It's nostalgia, you're wearing rose tinted glasses, nothing about vanilla was better, thread closed, report to mods, etc...

Good impersonation or not really?

[InfiniteCharger]

Basically all of WoW classes were easier and faster to level than classes in UO or EQ or even Lineage. WoW has always been an easy game. That's a fact. It was designed as such, with the intention to be designed as such.

It was easier than those games but not easy in an absolute sense.

If that was the case, then by all measures, everyone would have been at level cap and outfitted in purples by the launch of TBC and they were not. So by that standard, vanilla did not make it easy to hit end game content and "finish it". The level of skill and commitment required to get to that level was far beyond the average player.

It is far 'easier' now to get into raiding than it ever was in vanillla because WOW today is a totally different game. Few people in today's game are starting from level 1. Few people today are not already at max level from a previous expansion. Few people are not already knowledgeable of the game mechanics and their class. So it is impossible to even realistically compare the two games.

[Desparil]

I've found gameplay rather boring in WoD, and utterly boring in Legion.

Pinnacle of engaging gameplay it makes lfr look like most fun thing ever.

[caffeiine]

The level of difficulty in the game.

[NorthWay]

The ability to fuck up a talent tree?

Yes. Seriously. Failure has just about been designed out of the game nowadays. I find it sad and a sign of the times - "everyone is a winner, diplomas to everyone".

Blizzard could have chosen to help you not fuck up a talent tree by suggesting your next talent or auto-selecting it for you and make you have to go out of your way to do it Your Way. But they did it the usual heavyhanded Blizzard way and ripped out the old and put in their new "streamlined". Then they tacked on the talent switching and sold it in as a unified solution.

[Akka]

It's nostalgia, you're wearing rose tinted glasses, nothing about vanilla was better, thread closed, report to mods, etc...

Good impersonation or not really?

Well, Poe's law is in full force in Vanilla thread, so...

[Sansnom]

Yes. Seriously. Failure has just about been designed out of the game nowadays. I find it sad and a sign of the times - "everyone is a winner, diplomas to everyone".

Regarding the talent choices, that is a problem due to the snobbish nature of the player base. If a player is not running the optimal build, they can considered to be noob by others.

Blizzard could have chosen to help you not fuck up a talent tree by suggesting your next talent or auto-selecting it for you and make you have to go out of your way to do it Your Way. But they did it the usual heavyhanded Blizzard way and ripped out the old and put in their new "streamlined". Then they tacked on the talent switching and sold it in as a unified solution.

Pointless. Some players will choose what they consider will give them the best performance, either by experience or an external source. There is an expectancy that other players will also make the same informed choice. So in the end, there really is no real choice to make.

The only way choice can be introduce is if they do not provided a performance boost, or is very very situational. In which case, some players will ask what is the point if the talents does not boost their DPS/HPS/Doodaa by x%.

[InfiniteCharger]

One thing that was different with the original game versus the current expansion, is the concept of item scaling.
Greens were dominant on most players through most of the leveling content. Blues were considered major upgrades to that.
Purples were absolutely rare and orange was almost unheard of and each corresponded to the amount of difficulty required to obtain it.
Blues meant some form of group content or long quests involving group content. Purples only came from raiding. Orange came from class specific epic quest lines and were very rare drops and even harder to complete. Now blues are almost irrelevant and purples are given out by almost everything.
This takes away from the feeling of progression.

One on hand you could argue that since most players were starting at level 1 in vanilla it made sense that there was more of a progression from green to blues and then ultimately to purples. Now that most players are max level and lore wise champions of Azeroth, it kind of makes sense that greens and blues wouldn't be a significant factor in their gear progression. But again this goes back to the fact that Vanilla and Legion are really two different things and it is hard to compare apples and oranges.

[tyrs ankle]

For starters the world itself. It's huge, beautiful and there's danger around every corner. Same with dungeons, whilst Blizzard has improved their graphical quality, they're just AOE fests that you fly through nowadays. There's no feeling there compared to something even like Deadmines, where one wrong move deep in enemy territory and you're fucked. Even reaching the instance portal requires effort and co-ordination. You have to fight your way through miners and their overseers to get to the entrance

Now when you level, it's grab your heirlooms and mount ASAP, and storm through as fast as possible so you can reach the cap. Maybe you'll chain run a through dungeons, port in from anywhere and blast through it with AOE, all the quests are available at the door and everything is linear. For me, the journey in WoW is gone nowadays, it's all about the destination.

Then there's the more personal RPG elements. As a hunter having to feed my pet and keep it healthy, and watching it's loyalty rise as our bond grows as we grow stronger together and build trust. Treat it wrong and it will grow sick of me and run back to the wild. Making sure i'm feeding my gorilla fruit because that's the diet it lives on. Making sure i'm stocked up on arrows before a dungeon run in case I run out midway through. Or as a mage realising your fire spells are no use against a fire elemental so you have to adapt to fight.

As I said, for people who want convenience I understand the route they took. They don't wanna waste time finding a vendor that sells grapes and wasting bag space on it, but for those of us who didn't care about just rushing to the end and didn't mind dying a few times whilst leveling/in a dungeon, the modern game just isn't the same.

levels 1-100 are irrelevant content right now, I'm fine with that.
The changes to talent trees were to stop useless people from being unable to their roles. Yea it's fun to want to be a hybrid 20/20/20 paladin, it's 10x less fun to group with one.
RPG games aren't about stupid micromanaging of resources, lol. And again, changes to make sure that shitters and feeders wouldn't be useless in group content, the games premier feature.
Please please don't give the rpg resist spiel because if you aren't upset that you can't chuck potions/healing spells to obliterate undead, you're fake.

And as much as you don't wanna admit it, leveling was trash back then, I leveled 3+ chars to 60 in vanilla, and it was a chore each time. Leveling in Legion at least gives you a coherent story in every zone you're passing through; no inane grinding; no travelling across the world for stupid amounts of time looking for breadcrumbs so you could continue leveling. Vanilla, just like today was based on the endgame. They just realized that a 7 day level time was bad.

also suramar city as a whole > deadmines pre instance portal. And honestly, noone was careful in the deadmines, ever. Don't kid yourself and don't lie for the forums.

[Osmeric]

Yes. Seriously. Failure has just about been designed out of the game nowadays. I find it sad and a sign of the times - "everyone is a winner, diplomas to everyone".

What you're feeling there is the sense of betrayal the privileged feel when their privilege is negated.

The game is no longer designed in such an objectively bad way, even if that defective design was attractive to you.

Continue to describe this as the end of the world; that's also part of Privilege Betrayal Syndrome.

[Akka]

What you're feeling there is the sense of betrayal the privileged feel when their privilege is negated.

Or it might just be the lack of interest in succeeding at something which can't be failed.

But I guess your head is too far stuck in your ass when it comes to this subject to allow anything but repeating your broken record like a drone, mulishly ignoring all reality and arguments that contradict your chosen outcome.