Comprehensive list of rpg elements removed from WoW

[Deleted]

How do poeple feel about blizzard removing all of this stuff?

Feel free to add suggestions to things that i might have missed.


The first and most important thing is that the world felt ALIVE, it felt like an MMORPG, that is what the game said it was and that is what we got. it literally felt like stepping into a living breating world full of players and awe. no one was sat in the main city clicking menus and teleported around, people where out in the world questing, farming , grinding, pvping, traveling, leveling professions, hanging out in hubs, forming groups, doing things you know? i just cant say the same for current wow. its like a completley different game. I just cant imagine how a new player feels been dropped into the game today with its lifeless zones from past expansions, it just wouldnt have the same impression on me as when i first launched wow way back in 2005.




Rogues had to craft their own poisons with special labs spread across the world.

Rogues had to buy vanishing powder from vendors touse the vanish ability.

Rogues had to buy blinding powder from professions or auction house to be able to use the ability.

Rogues could deactivate traps.

Rogues had to train lockpicking by opening lockboxes around the world. Special gloves even existed to help you.

Stealth used to have levels and could be more or less effective. Items such as Nightscape Boots helped you being less detectable. Also, as they were sneaking, rogues moved slower when stealthed.

Hunter started without any pet and had a quest to teach them how to tame one, enhancing the link between them. Now they automatically start with one. Same for Warlock and their first demon.

Hunter could use Eyes of the Beast to see through the eyes of its pet.

Hunter's had to be out of combat to set traps.

Hunter's pet had an happiness bar and a loyalty property to manage by feeding them with appropriate food. If done wrong, the pet would do lesser damage or even leave you.

Hunters had 3 pets max. Each ones feel special. Now they carry a whole zoo in their bags.

Hunters couldn't attack in melee range with ranged weapons.

Hunters could use melee weapons alongside ranged weapons.


Bows and guns require ammunitions you had to craft/buy and put in special ammo bags. This could lead to awkward situations

Warriors and rogues were able to use ranged weapons.

Warlocks had to get and carry soulshards in special bags
.
Warlocks had a Detect Invisibility spell.

Warlock's Ritual of Doom needed four other people to summon the Doomguard... and one of them was randomly sacrificed! With great power came great responsability.

Warriors had different stances and had to switch between them during combat for maximum dps.

Shamans could use two handed weapons.

Death Knight's Raise Ally spell bring back people as... ghouls!

Druids turned into tree form to heal.

Priests had 2 uniques Racial abilities.

Mages, Warlocks and blacksmiths could craft various oils and grindstones to buff weapons.

Paladins could be played only by Alliance while Shamans were only for Horde. this made alot of sence from a lore point of view and added alot to faction pride and place.

Weapons require skills, including hand fighting. If you equipped a kind of weapon that you didn't know yet, you needed to use it a lot before doing max DPS. You also needed to see a weapon trainer first.

Speaking of trainers, you had to see a trainer in town to learn your new class skill/spell. Now it automatically spawn in your action bar as you level.
Some spells only worked on specific mobs, strengthening the lore. Paladin's exorcism for example was to be used against undead/demons while now it works the same on any mobs.

Magic/fire/frost resistance gears were useful against specific boss. Once again it strengthen the lore. Some mobs had fire resistance too and/or were weak against frost spells. Frost resistance gear was vital against Sapphiron etc.

Classes were a lot more different: in term of rotation, but also some didn't have any interrupt, or any cc, or any group buff etc. In the same way, lots of class, especially pure DPS, didn't have a single heal. Now almost every class has the same set of interrupt/cc/heal/group buff.

Mana and health regenerate way slower, so you NEEDED to stop and eat/drink every few fights. Food and drink actually mater, and mana for DPS caster mattered too. When's the last time you bought normal food in game?

Spell levels (Holy Light 1, Holy Light 2 etc.) existed and were useful to manage your mana.

Each classes has unique quests to unlock specific stuff: mounts for warlocks and paladins, postures for warriors, druid's forms, poisons and Certificate of Thievery for rogues etc.

Every classes had an extra equipment slot where you put your libram, sigil, throw, totem, idol, wand etc.

Original talent tree allowed hybrid class to freely mix healing, tanking and dps abilities (even if it wasn't often imba!).

According to your race or spec, different weapons meant different abilities: maces used to stun, axes had extra crit chance, swords were faster or had a chance to double strike...

There where specific class quests you could obtain through raiding and dungeons that lead you on epic journys throught the world and really tested your ability with that character, Rhok' delar was a epic bow but had legendary status to the hunters that used it.

Gear rarity actually mattered, green items where uncommon, rare items where actually rare and epic items where actually epic.

There was no transmog in vanilla or bc, so you could actually see the gear that players where wearing, you could tell if they where a fully kitted out pve raider, a veteran of pvp, or a dungeon goe just by looking at them. further adding to the immersion.

Gold was scarce, it took a LOT of time to save up 10g. Now you can literally make thousand of gold in a day.

Mounts had different speeds. Now they all go to your max speed. Also summoning mount took twice as long (3 sec vs 1.5 sec now).

Leveling took way longer, so the focus was more about the journey, less about the destination.

Quests most of the time had you traveling to different zones to finish different quests and pick up new ones, most of the time you never spent an enitre level in the same zone , you where constantly traveling from zone to zone as was everyone else, further adding to the immersion.

Mobs were harder to kill: you could fight a couple of them but pulling a whole group often meant death. Same for rare mobs that requiered a group. Now you can easily pull 5-10 mobs and solo any rare you encounter while leveling.

No instant mail, even to alts. Now there are mailboxes every 20 yards in every cities

You couldn't have Alliance and Horde chars on the same PvP server, which helped faction pride.

Keys existed. To open special doors you had first to find the key, ask a rogue to picklock it, have a blacksmith craft a key or use an engineer's charge.

Servers used to be completely separated. This made realm communities and personal behavior extremely important because if you did something like ninja loot, you were labelled as "that guy" and were responsible for your behavior. At the same time, everyone knew who the best players on the server were in PvE and PvP respectively. The server was your world.

Housing was tested in early alpha (as seen in this video): players could buy/build their own house in Stormwind/Goldshire.
Being part of the Brew of the Month Club rewarded you with a monthly sample beer.

Players used to be automatically dismounted when they entered waters... But gnomes were the only ones to be also dismounted in shallow waters, such as Zangarmarsh or Swamp of Sorrows.

Basic campfire required simple wood and a flint.

Mounts costed a lot of gold and once you got one you had to have it in your bag to ride it. there was 60% speed mounts and epic mounts that had 100% speed, and getting an epic mount was considered a massive achivement since it cost 1000 gold, that was a LOT back in Vanilla.

Reagents (candle, feather, stone...) were needed to cast lots of utility spells. Some could be simply bought but others needed farming all around the world.

Auction Houses were local. At start, only Ironforge (for Alliance) and Oggrimar (for Horde) had one. Also goblin's AH were neutrals so they were used by smugglers to trade rare items between factions.

You need to travel to dungeons and battleground. Now you don't even need to know where they are.

Breathing bar was shorter and quests that required you to go under water didn't auto-give you water breathing buff like now.

There was no instance in the world: If people were in the same place they see and could help each others.

Quests objectives weren't displayed on your map. Quest items didn't sparkle (or had an outline) and quest givers didn't show up on the minimap. Also quest mobs didn't have their names highlighted for you.

Many Raids required you to be attuned to them so that you could enter, some involved quests in different dungeons or raids in order to complete and reqired a decent amount of efford to complete, it added a sence of progression and progress that the game sadly lacks today.

Lots of group quests so you have to, well, make group while leveling.

Four Dragons of Nightmare were hidden around Azeroth and required raid-sized groups to be defeated.

Some of the most powerful spells were only learnable from rares Codex. They dropped from dungeons or raids but weren't BoP so you could trade/sale them.

Expansions or some raids used to be announced with huge pre-release events, like The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj, Dark Portal Opens or The Scourge Invasion. This was abandoned after Cataclysm. They were truly massive as the whole realm was participating.

One of the most epic quest-chain had a cooking recipe reward. You needed a group to loot the mats from elite chimeras.

Rare recipes required you to travel all over the world, either to find/buy them or to do special quests and even dungeons to unlock them.
For example you needed a priest to mind-control a mini-boss to teach you Enchanted Elementium; now it's just a drop.

Some crafting recipes (Sulfuron Hammer, engineer Jeeves/Chopper, some food...) required lots of work and mats. Now it's just a couple, rarely 3, max.

Sound logical, but you actually needed a fishpole to fish, a knife to skin, a hammer for blacksmith etc.

You had to level gathering before getting to the next zone. Now tou can skin/gather in Draenor even if you're level 1.

You need the actual mats to be in your bag. Now you can have them in your bank and craft anything in the wild.

Alchemists and jewelcrafters needed alchemy labs to make some of the best flasks and reagents.

Some professions had sub-specialisations: Blacksmith could specialize in weapon-smith or armor-smith; Alchemist could become transmute, potion or flask masters; Engineers could focus on goblin or gnome recipes. (some of those specialisations still exist but aren't updated anymore)

Skinners could skin either normal leathers or scales (used for mail armor). Now only normal leather exist.

Some creatures (like Onyxia) required special tools to be skinned, which rewarded you with very rare scales to craft unique gear.

Blacksmiths and engineers could craft Skeleton keys and small bombs that you could buy to open lockboxes or doors.
Only enchanters could, well, disenchant items.

There used to be a weekly Kalu’ak Fishing Derby in Northrend.

In Alpha there was a Survival Skills profession used for making campfires and torches. Torches were used for scouting darker areas, such as Duskwood (you couldn't see anything past 20-30 yards in front of you).

Weather was alot more prominant in some zones barrens, for example was mostly sunny but sometimes rained, Felwood, it rained alot winterspring was often heavy snow, ect.

Night time on servers was alot darker than current wow.

World PvP ranks) with specific rewards like gear but also repair discount or access to a special World Defense channel.

Alterac Valley lasted for hours or days at a time, with lots of PvE quests included, You could even summon bosses to fight for your side! (You can still technically do it but it's not relevant anymore)

You could loose honor if you killed civilians from opposite faction.

You had halls of valour that you could enter in capital citys (sw, orgrimmar) after obtaining a certain pvp rank, that sold all of the high level pvp gear. it added to faction pride and made you feel like a real champion of your faction.

When hard raid mode was first introduced (in Ulduar), it was done via in-game action, ie: you had to do trigger specific things during an encounter. Now it's via a click on a menu. (this kind of gameplay removal -World of MenuCraft-)

Some raids couldn't be entered directly, you first had to do long and epic questlines to unlock them. Now you can even kill a boss before knowing about his story (Isthar in HFC for example).

Dungeons were real mazes that could take hours to complete. Now it's mostly 3 bosses separated by corridors that took less than 20 minutes to defeat.

No more reforging (too complicated for ppl, let's remove it? -blizzard)

No more gemming (finding a new piece of gear and gemming and and enchanting it it was so satisfying, why did they remove it??)

No more enchanting (we still have enchanting, it's just nowhere near as good as it once was)

Class / spec design sucks (rogues no longer feel like rogues, Shadow priests no longer feel like shadow priests etc)

No more PvP vendors

No more world PvP

No more Horde v Alliance city raids

There's no huge PvP area like Tol barad or wintergrasp.

World quests are just Daily quests.

No honor or conquest points.

No Valour points.

No justice points.

No exploration.

No RPG elements left in the game.

Leveling is just a stroll and takes a matter of hours to get max level, its literally trivial at this point.

The glyph system has been removed.

AP grind is a pointless waste of time.

[Deleted]

Enhancement shaman is now a viable spec with its own mechanics and not a dogshit talent tree unlike Vanilla.

Trumps all your arguments.

[potis]

Stop riding on your useless nostalgia.

Game was shit then,its shit now, its the same exact game.

Level-->Farm Gear-->Farm more Gear-->Level->Repeat.

It was new, we know it, it was un-datamined so you had to search for stuff.

Times change, adapt or fuck off, stop breaking balls.

It was a RPG, now its ARPG, dont like it, dont play it.

I dont miss the old days, i was part of the few that saw most if not all of Vanilla, sure i didnt see four horsemen/Sapph/Kel but it didnt matter as much, saw everything else.

Game was a pile of shit compared to what it is today, what todays WoW needs is a slowing down.

Take away datamining and Dungeon Journal and there is your Vanilla experience back all anew.

But there is also the average player never doing anything more than 5 dungeons a week because they are all lost and no gear ever drops.

[Jotaux]

I started playing on a TBC server to pass the time till 7.2.5 and I have to say the game has improved 100x since TBC.

[Brewhan]

welp that backfired op

[Kynario]

Great list... I miss like 75% of these things.

They've removed core RPG elements from the game. Damn this list makes me sad. Some of the QoL are great, but at the cost of other things.

Before you go on to argue that "it was way too tedious, and took too long", tell me what game doesn't need long-term investment to achieve great things? Even games like Skyrim require over 200-300 hours to experience them in-depth. That's comparative to the time it took me to level up to 80 in WoTLK, about 8-10 days played.

[Eazy]

They deleted things that people were mad about and add new things that people are mad about.

I didn't like making poisons, buying them or even putting them in my bag, but it felt more like RPG.
I think that they've done that because it was too much time-consuming. People right now want to level asap, get the gear asap, do the content asap, they're not longer savoring it.
Can you imagine doing all the chores(poisons/ammo etc. etc.) and then doing WQuests/Dailies/farm AP? People nowadays would go mad, so they deleted them.

That's a shame actually...

[omeomorfismo]

funny how you call AP pointless grind in the same list where you praise frost res gear for sapphiron vanilla, the most time consuming gating in wow history.
ironic.

[Camthur]

Wow, great list. Well, if the list is "Things that were a pain in the ass and are not missed by most people" anyway.

[tikcol]

Enhancement shaman is now a viable spec with its own mechanics and not a dogshit talent tree unlike Vanilla.

Trumps all your arguments.

That's just silly. They can make a class viable without removing all the RPG elements from the game.

Silly or intentionally thick

[Deleted]

The glyph system has been removed.

No its not stop cryin and move on you TROLL ;

[Airlick]

The game is just different from what it used to be. Flavor spells like Summon Doomguard, Far Sight etc. were great. Stance dancing was great fun. It's a shame Blizzard killed class identity in many aspects for the sake of streamlining. But then, things like ammo for hunters or poisons for rogues were a pointless waste of time. Resistances will never come back, or Blizzard would have to put in some method of bypassing boss resistances so that some specs wouldn't be gimped - they can't afford to have that in an x-pac where rerolling specs is harder than before.

[Deleted]

Well this is a hard topic. As others mentioned it, some good things got removed, some good things were introduced, so, eh.
I played from Vanilla release up until "mid" TBC, then returned for a bit in Cata, then returned mid-WoD (still playing), so I "lived" most of what you mention. I miss many of those, but I'm not sure I'd trade them in exchange for "current day features", if you know what I mean.

[Deleted]

Damn, thats a good list. and yes you are right. they removed almost every RPG aspect...

[jaber2]

I am just glad to have been there to see the changes, also glad to have been on the same guild the entire time with same friends of over 10 years.

[Draeth]

Like a third of your list is stuff that's objectively, factually wrong, and another third of it is stuff that's just gameplay changes, not RPG elements.

[Deleted]

its easy uninstall all addons don't google anything, don't use flying, don't use lvl gear or lfg and "enjoy" the game...

[Ghazar]

You started the post with some RPG elements and quickly switched to *anything that's different*.
The class specific stuff (class quests for pets, abilities, mounts) is a valid point, but it's a double edged sword. Walking for hours through a high level zone as a warlock just to kill a single npc was not fun, so with it gone it's an obvious improvement, but at the same time a little bit of RPG is gone, which when added up with other instances of the same problem makes the game a bit more soulless.

But your example of spell ranks? Has nothing to do with RPG, it has more to do with pure game mechanics.
Stuff like instanced zones? You still see a bunch of people anyway, you just don't see thousands of them, in fact making the game MORE roleplay friendly?

Four Dragons of Nightmare were hidden around Azeroth and required raid-sized groups to be defeated.

Are you trolling?

Gold was scarce, it took a LOT of time to save up 10g. Now you can literally make thousand of gold in a day.

And the market adapts making it just a number. If you don't like numbers with many digits that's your thing.

Mounts had different speeds. Now they all go to your max speed. Also summoning mount took twice as long (3 sec vs 1.5 sec now).

This improves RP sooo much... just like having 50 tigers and elephants in your backpack.

I could quote 70% of the post to respond to every specific thing like mana regen (annoying game mechanic - has no effect on RP), valor points, badge of justice.

You can make a post describing what you like and WHY in certain things, but masking your irrational nostalgia-driven love for vanilla/tbc behind roleplaying, and listing every single thing that has changed since then regardless of what it means, just shows me that you don't really want to play this game anymore, but you're addicted... or ofc you can just be trolling which means you are successful.

[Nnyco]

more than half of that list arent even rpg elements

[Deleted]

You forgot 1 thing. legendaries used to be legendaries, now everyone has tons of them. If someone had a legendary back then, he was a GOD on that server.