What made classic wow better than current?

[Akka]

Minor things like naxx level pvp gear when only MC and BWL is opened kappa.

Naxx level PvP gear ? That makes no sense, there was one PvP gear in Vanilla, it was available when BG were introduced and it never changed.

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To be a proper tank in vanilla you had to throw 11 points into prot tree and that's, basically, it. You could tell a dps warrior from a tank only by gear and only be asking them to pop LS

11 points means no increase in threat. I somewhat highly doubt it.

[Effenz]

Naxx level PvP gear ? That makes no sense, there was one PvP gear in Vanilla, it was available when BG were introduced and it never changed.

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11 points means no increase in threat. I somewhat highly doubt it.

You'll doubt it because doubting it fits in with your agenda.
Most warriors were fury throughout vanilla.
Just like most paladins were ret till vengeance (?? glowy hand shit)

[jugzilla]

We don't need you to validate jack shit to be honest. I understand just fine why some people like Vanilla, I mean some of their arguments have been beaten to death. However I personally draw the line at people like you calling PS an authentic Vanilla experience.

Damn, some people get emotional

[Charge me Doctor]

Naxx level PvP gear ? That makes no sense, there was one PvP gear in Vanilla, it was available when BG were introduced and it never changed.

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11 points means no increase in threat. I somewhat highly doubt it.

PvP gear was buffed in naxx patch (or maybe even earlier), because it was shit compared to PvE gear at this point.

For late-vanilla - maybe. But all tanks through AQ raids were fury. It doesn't mean that tanks who waste 30 extra points in prot weren't viable - they were, but they performed hardly any better than fury tanks. Last stand and +10 defense is what you needed from prot tree. Stuff like conc blow, SS, less-threat-for-sunder, revenge stun, etc is a total waste.
It was gear that mattered, and since SS was shit until the very last patch of vanilla (read: whole vanilla), no one in his sane mind picked it for raid tanking. It costed more threat than (improved) sunder, it gave less threat, it didn't scaled = it was shit. Better pick a deathwish than that.

[Effenz]

So rogues/wars/mages instead of just rogues/wars? gotcha

[Charge me Doctor]

If you didn't get increased threat and shield slam you were a bad warrior. Your threat = more DPS for the entire raid since they don't have to hold back. Both Shield Slam and Revenge have higher threat modifiers than Sunder Armor. If all you did was spam sunder you really didn't do your job especially well. Sunder is a filler only to be used if shield slam and revenge isn't available and you're at high rage, or if for some reason your sunder stacks fall off or are missing.

Yep, that's what you do in private servers because they are tuned not how it used to be in vanilla.

Quick googling around - wooot, he is not using shield slam? And what is it on his bars? Mortal strike? What buttons does he press? revenge, sunder, heroic, taunt.

My whole point is that it didn't mattered what you specced into, if you were a warrior - reagrdless of your spec - you could tank, just grab your gear, charge in and spam revenge, sunder armour, heroic strike and shield block. It was more than enough to hold aggro and "be a good tank".
It may be changed in 1.12.1, with all the buffs to shield slam, and blizzard being "why are tanking warriors not specced into tanking tallents?", but i can't recall anything from naxx because of server drama, aka "kick this russian filth" and "go crawl into russian guild" from people who i used to raid with.

[Akka]

PvP gear was buffed in naxx patch (or maybe even earlier), because it was shit compared to PvE gear at this point.

Guess it shows how little attention I ever paid attention to PvP, I didn't even noticed that ^^

For late-vanilla - maybe. But all tanks through AQ raids were fury. It doesn't mean that tanks who waste 30 extra points in prot weren't viable - they were, but they performed hardly any better than fury tanks. Last stand and +10 defense is what you needed from prot tree. Stuff like conc blow, SS, less-threat-for-sunder, revenge stun, etc is a total waste.
It was gear that mattered, and since SS was shit until the very last patch of vanilla (read: whole vanilla), no one in his sane mind picked it for raid tanking. It costed more threat than (improved) sunder, it gave less threat, it didn't scaled = it was shit. Better pick a deathwish than that.

I know about putting most of the talent points in non-prot tree (our own tank had less than 20 there), but I doubt people who played prot only put 11 points instead of 16-17. I don't see how it could be reasonable to tank without the 15 % buff to threat, and not having Last Stand and one point in Improved Shield Block is just nonsensical for a tank.

[Kyanion]

Feels diverse enough to me.

Oh yeah almost everyone is undead on the Horde, real authentic Vanilla experience lemme tell ya! What your graph does not show is what level these people are. There could be an over abundance of level 1 bank alts for all we fucking know.

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Guess it shows how little attention I ever paid attention to PvP, I didn't even noticed that ^^

I know about putting most of the talent points in non-prot tree (our own tank had less than 20 there), but I doubt people who played prot only put 11 points instead of 16-17. I don't see how it could be reasonable to tank without the 15 % buff to threat, and not having Last Stand and one point in Improved Shield Block is just nonsensical for a tank.

The point is things were different in actual Vanilla as opposed to PS Vanilla which is the point he was trying to make. He is spot on with the PvP gear as well. It is a lot different being in a 1.12 patch using updated gearing/talents/patch changes compared to when people were doing the content with the gear available at the time during early MC/BWL and so on. From what I've heard when people talk about their raiding on Vanilla realms things like MC and BWL get blown up in record times, that really wasn't the case back in the day. A lot of it is knowledge about how everything works but a nice chunk of it is QoL changes to talent systems and updated gear in a later patch.

[voidillusion]

Oh yeah almost everyone is undead on the Horde, real authentic Vanilla experience lemme tell ya! What your graph does not show is what level these people are. There could be an over abundance of level 1 bank alts for all we fucking know.

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The point is things were different in actual Vanilla as opposed to PS Vanilla which is the point he was trying to make. He is spot on with the PvP gear as well. It is a lot different being in a 1.12 patch using updated gearing/talents/patch changes compared to when people were doing the content with the gear available at the time during early MC/BWL and so on. From what I've heard when people talk about their raiding on Vanilla realms things like MC and BWL get blown up in record times, that really wasn't the case back in the day. A lot of it is knowledge about how everything works but a nice chunk of it is QoL changes to talent systems and updated gear in a later patch.

You don't have enough indepth knowledge from the relevant Private servers. Different realms have different timelines, different realms are on different patches. If you play on one that currently is on Patch 1.8 then you have the relevant stats for that patch, the same goes for the other realm that is on the release patch. In fact, just recently one of the realms that is on the release patch had incorrectly pvp gear on vendors with patch 1.11 stats and they patched it to the correct status.

My point is, nothing is perfect, vanilla during it's retail time wasn't perfect, and there some private servers that really, really do a awesome job at trying to deliver the most identic blizzlike experience as possible.

Regarding MC and BWL you are correct, they were nuked ultra fast and there were some complaints about mechanics not working as intended and some undertunning, again, something that can be corrected and also happens from time to time on retail. As long as the ppl doing the work are aware of it and adjust it i don't see the issue.

[Kyanion]

There's a level graph at the bottom of each picture.

I see a graph and something that mentions level 24 but no context as to where on the graph that is. It seems like most of the characters are low level? Beats me

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My point is, nothing is perfect, vanilla during it's retail time wasn't perfect, and there some private servers that really, really do a awesome job at trying to deliver the most identic blizzlike experience as possible.

Regarding MC and BWL you are correct, they were nuked ultra fast and there were some complaints about mechanics not working as intended and some undertunning, again, something that can be corrected and also happens from time to time on retail. As long as the ppl doing the work are aware of it and adjust it i don't see the issue.

And my point is that those PS are not actual Vanilla. They are Vanilla-Lite, Vanilla-Like but not Vanilla. I'm not saying retail was perfect but people weren't complaining bout mechanics not working properly in MC and having everything nuked down too fast.

Like I said, I get it. I know why you guys like Vanilla and want to play it. You don't have a legit Blizz sponsored/created Vanilla to play and seek the best alternative. One of my problems is people using those Vanilla-Like experiences to try and saw that is how things always were 10-12 years ago.

[Turaska]

Vanilla WoW made you commit to a character, a lot of work had to go into it... there was no shortcuts, no easy rides, no rep boosts, no character boosts, gear was much much harder to obtain, dungeons were much harder, raids were much harder (organizing 40 people to do something is much harder than you think)

Yet those are the things that made it great, I'd literally pay for a Vanilla WoW experience again, I will not use private servers though... even if they are made out of love for the game.

Ideal Vanilla WoW for me

Everything Vanilla except for a few tweaks

- 20 person raid cap limit instead of 40
- stats updated on gear so useless stats are replaced with more useful ones (yea, I'm look at you Spirit, who was on almost every piece of damn gear regardless of class)

Everything else I'd keep the same as it was back then

[Niwes]

I'm not sure. It shouldn't take as long as ten years for that to sink in. I think it had to do with changes to the game that made that part more noticeable in that case.

same oppinion here.

ofc the mmorpg genre was freh in 2005 for the mass audience (star wars galaxies and ultima existed long before for the mmorpg crowd). after the hype of wow mmorpg elements influenced every fukin game out there (even sports games). so mmorpg stops relative early to feel fresh. and as above said every expac is the same in its core.

but i dont think thats the reason the playerbase lost half of their ppl. i have a few reasons for that:

1)
every day a new 12 year old kid is born, never played a mmorpg. the wow universe could be a great thing to a 12 year old kid. will say: there are always new ppl which are not "through" all the wow stuff and have the repetitive feeling after expac nr 35272635.

2)
you have a crowd. called ppl playing EXACTLY that game or genre they like most. and they playin it because of it is IT. they not even dont care when every xpac is the same with different color/world/quests/bosses, because thats what they like, no, they even WANT that behaviour. so why they should leave ?

3)
statistic wise the "half playerbase lost, bc of gettin old" argument can not survive.

so, my oppinion is, like the quited one, they changed things too much, lost a great part of their crowd, to target the mass audience. but they do not get as much out of the mass audience, as they would get out of a directly targeted crowd. this is mostly because the mass audience standard casual gamer play that game 2-3 months and leaves the game forever. imo they underestimated the value of long term customers playing the game cause of they are the crowd of the game.

you can see this when you look at the subscriber numbers. exactly at the moment they start targeting the mass audience better, it goes down down down. before (mid-last Wotlk) it was up up up.

imo blizzard made a huge mistake when they changed their targeted audience to a mass audience. the jerks of all trades never left the casino with full bags of money, at the end of the day.

[Daffan]

This is so completely bass-ackwards it's pitiful.

Catch up mechanics are utterly essential to the game. Leaving them out is fatally flawed. Newcomers are simply excluded, and in today's MMO environment would just quit. Blizzard knows what happens in this situation; the failure of BC end game content demonstrates what happens. BC would have seen sub collapse had the game not still been pulling in lots of new players.

Ahhh here we have Osmeric who still hasn't absorbed all the facts after months of posting the same reply.

You know what else TBC did not have? Flex, premade finder, CRZ, heirlooms or b.net. Which meant max level organization was much, much harder to do and most people spent a lot longer leveling.

Additionally, end-game content for average player did not revolve around raiding . As crafting, normals, heroics and other avenues had higher % relevanc. Not that it's bad now that the game revolves around raiding, just different proportions then and now.

*I'm a huge fan of alt catchup and stuff like that tho, doing same stuff on Alts is horrible.

[deniter]

Vanilla WoW made you commit to a character, a lot of work had to go into it... there was no shortcuts, no easy rides, no rep boosts, no character boosts, gear was much much harder to obtain, dungeons were much harder, raids were much harder (organizing 40 people to do something is much harder than you think)

Yet those are the things that made it great, I'd literally pay for a Vanilla WoW experience again, I will not use private servers though... even if they are made out of love for the game.

Ideal Vanilla WoW for me

Everything Vanilla except for a few tweaks

- 20 person raid cap limit instead of 40
- stats updated on gear so useless stats are replaced with more useful ones (yea, I'm look at you Spirit, who was on almost every piece of damn gear regardless of class)

Everything else I'd keep the same as it was back then

Instead of removing stats they should make them more useful. Spirit was heavily nerfed before launch because it was too strong on some classes. In guaranteed blizzard style they went from one end to another and nerfed it to the ground, rendering next to useless. Still, spirit is far from useless stat.

With the raid size cap i agree completely.

[Niwes]

Vanilla WoW made you commit to a character, a lot of work had to go into it... there was no shortcuts, no easy rides, no rep boosts, no character boosts, gear was much much harder to obtain, dungeons were much harder, raids were much harder (organizing 40 people to do something is much harder than you think)

Yet those are the things that made it great, I'd literally pay for a Vanilla WoW experience again, I will not use private servers though... even if they are made out of love for the game.

Ideal Vanilla WoW for me

Everything Vanilla except for a few tweaks

- 20 person raid cap limit instead of 40
- stats updated on gear so useless stats are replaced with more useful ones (yea, I'm look at you Spirit, who was on almost every piece of damn gear regardless of class)

Everything else I'd keep the same as it was back then

if you add wotlk-mop class mechanics instead vanilla class mechanics (4level frobos frost mage, healonly druid, shadowbolt lock, sunder armor sunder armor sunder armor warri and so on), then i accept.

[Kyanion]

Yup, lower levels to the right, higher levels to the left.

To be honest I'm not sure how useful that graph is then. We don't know how long those people have been around for, how many characters are on the same account or anything of use. Not that we get much info from Blizz on any of their metrics either but mmo-champ used to be good at breaking down armory for some useful data. I mean we had the info from that dead realm that had 2/3rds of their playerbase was warriors/rogues with most of their characters on the server not 60 after being open like what, almost a year? So *shrugs* dunno what to make of it other than warriors/rogues/mages are more popular on Vanilla-Lite than they were in actual Vanilla.

[Niwes]

Ahhh here we have Osmeric who still hasn't absorbed all the facts after months of posting the same reply.

You know what else TBC did not have? Flex, premade finder, CRZ, heirlooms or b.net. Which meant max level organization was much, much harder to do and most people spent a lot longer leveling.

Additionally, end-game content for average player did not revolve around raiding . As crafting, normals, heroics and other avenues had higher % relevanc. Not that it's bad now that the game revolves around raiding, just different proportions then and now.

*I'm a huge fan of alt catchup and stuff like that tho, doing same stuff on Alts is horrible.

sign that. including the last part, which is same by me.

[Osmeric]

Ahhh here we have Osmeric who still hasn't absorbed all the facts after months of posting the same reply.

And yet Blizzard, who has all the data of what players actually did, obviously agrees with me, not with you. After BC they never toyed with removing catchup mechanics. The data were obviously quite compelling.

[voidillusion]

I see a graph and something that mentions level 24 but no context as to where on the graph that is. It seems like most of the characters are low level? Beats me

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And my point is that those PS are not actual Vanilla. They are Vanilla-Lite, Vanilla-Like but not Vanilla. I'm not saying retail was perfect but people weren't complaining bout mechanics not working properly in MC and having everything nuked down too fast.

Like I said, I get it. I know why you guys like Vanilla and want to play it. You don't have a legit Blizz sponsored/created Vanilla to play and seek the best alternative. One of my problems is people using those Vanilla-Like experiences to try and saw that is how things always were 10-12 years ago.

Ofc it's not vanilla, being vanilla like is already a good step in the right direction. Please don't use the mechanics argument Kyanion, there where and still are countless examples of under/over tunning or just simply broken fights in Retail Vanilla, Legion or any other.

[Effenz]

Ofc it's not vanilla, being vanilla like is already a good step in the right direction. Please don't use the mechanics argument Kyanion, there where and still are countless examples of under/over tunning or just simply broken fights in Retail Vanilla, Legion or any other.

Broken fights like what? I can count 1 broken fight and 2 overtuned fights in the history of the game. C'thun, Kael and Vashj, respectively.