Originally Posted by
azarak
Of all the expansions to compare to <insert current expansion to complain about here>, why is vanilla WoW the one many people argue are the best? I can kind of relate to WotLK/BC even though there is still vastly much more to do now than back then, but vanilla onestly was a sad attempt of a game compared to Legion. Maybe it was cool back in its time, but when I look back, I see a game that:
-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...
-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.
-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.
I mean I could go on all day and the only benefits I see are from nostalgia goggles and can never be fixed outside of a completely new game:
-The game is new, so everything is interesting and unknown.
-People first playnig the game were much younger, so things are of course going to be more "magical" to younger kids. I myself was like 12-13 at first.
Honestly that's all I can even think of, after staring at my screen for 5minutes. Outside of nostalgia, vanilla is just objectively the worse "expansion" (yea, it's not an expansion, w/e). I'm legitimately curious to hear what anyone has to say that was nice about vanilla as opposed to now. Oh, and try not to say things that blizzard has tried reintroducing recently and it tanked horribly because nobody liked it.