Balance the classes. Keep the content the same. Just stop.

[RapBreon]

So, they can also look at the class representation in raids (since that was the only real end game back then).

This is not a good assumption. Raid participation was lower back then that it is even now. PvP, Dungoneering and just derpin' about in the overworld were things Blizzard expected people to spend a lot of time on. These were also factored into balance.

If people are taking twice as many Mages and Warlocks, it's obvious that the Warlock utility tax is too high, and they can respond by buffing Warlock damage numbers (or nerfing Mage numbers). All of that can be done without changing the actual rotations or mechanics.

With the way Vanilla worked, that's impossible. An individual Warlock would have to approach a Mage in DPS otherwise you'd still stack the same way. Intention was Warlocks/Shamans/Paladins/etc were 'force multipliers', they as a SINGLE UNIT, actually contributed more to the raid than actual DPSers did. But because they were a force multiplier, you wanted limited numbers of them. This is of course assuming your group is min-maxing. With how easy Vanilla raids were, this did not need to be the case at all, you could bring NO Mages ONLY Warlocks and clear easy peasy.

Lets say you adjusted the tax % for Warlocks compared to Mages, now you have to retune almost every Dungeon and Raid in the game and possibly look into PvP. Whilst also impacting Mages 'optimibility' (I dunno I made it up) in non-raid content.

Edit: Eh, you're fighting fifteen billion fronts at the moment, don't feel pressured to respond to me.

[chrisnumbers]

One change leads to many. That's what expansions are for.
"I just want this one change"
"Oh and this one"
"Yea same, and also throw in this one"
"Hey guys me too, I want this one"

[Soon-TM]

It's hilarious that people like you think it's really that simple. It's not. Balancing classes is probably one of the most challenging aspects of this game. You really think you know better than their team that's dedicated to making balance changes?

I'd like to add that even today, with 13 years of experience and a lot of "streamlining" done to the game, the balance team still fails spectacularly sometimes. Class balance in Vanilla was, in many senses, much more complex than today, so there is a high chance (imo) that they will fail HARD if they start tinkering with it. Even if they get it fine, it would very likely result in something quite different to what Vanilla was, and would thus alienate a lot of (possible) returning players. Only for what? To grab the attention of a bunch of tourists who will never make it past 40, I guess.

[RapBreon]

Class representation also has ZERO to do with balancing. For instance, the highest possible dps class right now is pirate rogue but it's so RNG based that it has hardly any representation. On average, they're fine. But no one wants that much RNG in their dps.

Wait what? I only stopped playing a month ago and they were the worst (I'm a Rogue main and I love pirate spec).

[Nitros14]

Vanilla just isn't the same. Classes aren't homogenized to the same extent, classes that don't bring utility really don't bring utility.

[RapBreon]

I'd like to add that even today, with 13 years of experience and a lot of "streamlining" done to the game, the balance team still fails spectacularly sometimes. Class balance in Vanilla was, in many senses, much more complex than today, so there is a high chance (imo) that they will fail HARD if they start tinkering with it. Even if they get it fine, the result would very likely something quite different to what Vanilla, and would thus alienate a lot of (possible) returning players. Only for what? To grab the attention of a bunch of tourists who will never make it past 40, I guess.

Well I'd say trying to balance for 'parity' but not 'parity of numbers', is actually harder when you consider how subjective and situational utility can be. That is precisely why they moved towards class homogenization, it's far easier to control. It's probably the only way to control.

[RapBreon]

They're the worst because of the RNG. They literally have the highest possible dps. (maybe single target only).

I thought that's what you meant. I had to be sure though. Yeah hitting that upper ceiling takes some real...impressive luck so to speak. Or a real short fight!

[munkeyinorbit]

stop moaning as if this is a major issue.

you can't have classes being useless and not being selected for vanilla content. that is just silly argument to want that the same.

keep all the content the same and just introduce balance to the classes which given the years of exp at attempting this, Blizzard should be able to achieve to some extent.

at least enough of a balance that everything can be cleared assuming you know how to play your class/spec and are geared.


very simple solution and not a reason to be screaming the sky is falling.

It sounds like you want WotLK instead. There are plenty of private servers you can get your fix on. "Balancing" the specs will destroy Vanilla's flavour. If you don't like it, maybe you should leave Classic to the players who can handle it.

[runique]

stop moaning as if this is a major issue.

you can't have classes being useless and not being selected for vanilla content. that is just silly argument to want that the same.

keep all the content the same and just introduce balance to the classes which given the years of exp at attempting this, Blizzard should be able to achieve to some extent.

at least enough of a balance that everything can be cleared assuming you know how to play your class/spec and are geared.


very simple solution and not a reason to be screaming the sky is falling.

The vanilla experience is similar to that of a psychedelic drug. You may think you understand it based on the description, but you don't truly know the experience until you've done it yourself. And this experience would not be the same at all with balanced classes.

[Villager720]

It's so odd! I wasn't aware the word "classic" meant "something containing lots of modern adjustments/improvements".
Learn something new everyday!

[Zyky]

why am i the probleme?

i accept vanilla for how it was , that is was made it new... i dont expect to play there for 10 years.. but just to play something where evrything was not free...

i enjoy leveling a class that is not OP but at least it showed the motivation and the class poeple realy wanted to play , its not like today where poeple just play FOTM classes .

back in vanilla when you played ret pala you knew he wanted it and had fun with it... it was not because it was op it was about having fun with what we had , and that is exactly what poeple want


i think many poeple are sick of getting evrythign for free , i like to grind xp and know i earned my level and not oneshot evrything until 110 ... getting a mount at level 40? god damm it was fucking amazing why? cause walking was slow maps where big questr send you over all the maps even flying took 10 min +


if we start to want class balance this will only be the start and then it wont be vanilla anymore...


dont get me wrong vanilla was totaly broken and unbalanced... but i still had fun cause it was new and i am happy to get that old feeling back to have to earn my stuff

If you don't want classes to be balanced don't play at all and go to some no name mmo, Blizzard Devs in Vanilla knew and admitted that certain classes were brokenly bad, do you know why they didn't fix anything back then? Hint: It wasn't to "preserve vanilla". It was because they had an extremely small team and had to pick and choose what they did, if I'm not mistaken the original team for most of vanilla was roughly 13-15 developers. That's why when Burning Crusade came out many classes got buffed into viability, because they had the chance to do a huge overhaul. For Classic to succeed then it needs to be fine tuned, not the piece of shit that Private Servers used for 'Legacy'. To all the people saying "this won't be like vanilla wah wah" You're right and it shouldn't be 100% like Vanilla because Vanilla is pretty garbage between the massive frame skips, buggy spells that only worked 70% of the time(like Blink), and terrible class balance. This isn't 2004 anymore and they obviously aren't stupid enough to just copy all the code and toss the servers up next month, they're going to fine tune it, that much is common sense.

[Deleted]

Mature, very mature. Also, you are the one twisting reality because you want your favorite spec to fit into every aspect of the game. That was never the intention in the original.


No. It couldn't unless it was a low level dungeon.


If you don't like PvP, you choose different spec. That's as simple as that. The "bring player not class" led to the situation where there are basically no classes, just tanks, DPS and healers.

You asked for a list, I gave it to you. But apparently all you wanted was to shit all over someone because you apparently think Vanilla was in a perfect spot balance wise.
You twisted the entire thing to fit your blurred vision, rather than accepting the fact some classes/specs just weren't as good as others, or directly useless in a competitive environment. What are you gonna do if you dislike PVP as a DPS shaman, heal? There's a reason you went DPS in the first place, but you can always switch spec, right? Because it's obviously the same ;D

[Boshusan]

I took some time yesterday to take look at the original WoW manual. At chapter 6 "Classes", all are described with their good points, but when one is the best in a domain, it's written black on white: the rogue is the better melee fighter and the mage the better caster, from a damage perspective.

Then Druid is praised for its versatility, the paladin for his auras and spells to sustain his comrades, warlock has cool tools, etc. So that game is deliberaty group oriented and not designed at a race in the DPS meter. Nothing is "broken", that's raid tunnel vision implying that the real game "starts at level 60" and only raid metric performance matters.

There's much more than that, for example the best experience you can have during the journey from 1-60 is playing druid, imho. I know some players like the AH game, others just want PvP at level 20, role-playing, etc.

I'm more in favor of a better itemization than a balancing that will never hit the mark for a subgroup or another.

[xcitng]

But, there's lots of other people that want to play Vanilla but want to be able to viably play a Prot Pally or a Shadow Priest, don't want to be 100% forced into healing on certain classes, etc., etc. There's a spectrum of people interested in Vanilla servers, and the game doesn't belong solely to the people who demand 0 change whatsoever any more than the live game belongs only to hardcore Mythic raiders.

Blizzard's going to want to maximize the amount of people playing Vanilla servers to maximize their profits, and you have to accept the reality that this will involve some movement to adjust some things. Pure numerical class tuning is one of those things that is perfectly reasonable. The reality is, no matter what they do, it's not the same game anyway. You can't go back and erase the 13 years of experience that people have with the game and the content, and that extra knowledge alone is absolutely going to change the way the game plays out.

- - - Updated - - -



The 2000 HP is also a number that they can easily just tune down. So is mana regen. It's much simpler than you're making it out to be.

Those people don't want to play vanilla then, they want to play the current game at level 60 which is available to them if they choose to cap XP.

I hope they don't give in to the maximising profits part just to satisfy the crowd that doesn't actually want vanilla.

[Torrasque]

The massive division in the already small "vanilla" community just keeps getting bigger, doesn't it?

[Wiedzemir]

You asked for a list, I gave it to you. But apparently all you wanted was to shit all over someone because you apparently think Vanilla was in a perfect spot balance wise.

It's rather ironic considering that you are the one attacking me so far because you apparently don't like the reality of vanilla WoW where different specs were meant for different things. The idea of homogenization and "bring payer not class" came much, much later.

You twisted the entire thing to fit your blurred vision, rather than accepting the fact some classes/specs just weren't as good as others, or directly useless in a competitive environment. What are you gonna do if you dislike PVP as a DPS shaman, heal? There's a reason you went DPS in the first place, but you can always switch spec, right? Because it's obviously the same ;D

You are the one attempting to twist a completely different class design philosophy in the WoTLK+ "raid or die" one.
Of course not all specs are as good as others. Just like in legion some specs are better then others. Or are you denying it?
Considering that in vanilla classes had unique abilities and utility, differences were more prominent in different situations. There was no one spec fits all though.
However "directly useless in a competitive environment". Competitive environment? What are you talking here about since you disregard PvP as useless right away. You're clearly fully focused on raiding and if a spec isn't meant for raiding, then it must be useless, according to your logic. I merely pointed out that this is simply not the case. There was no such thing as "competitive PvE" in vanilla. A couple of guilds were rushing towards to end boss but that was about it, no one gave a shit. There was no Mythic dungeons with timers like today, no Mythic raids. Eventually everyone would clear everything because raiding in vanilla was about gear and persistence, nothing else.

And yea. I used to spend a ton of gold to switch between PvP and PvP specs all the time. If you wanted to min-max then you had to respec all the time. Many in my raid group never bothered though, with the exception of healers as healer specs are supposed to heal, nothing else, just like in a classic tabletop RPG.

Also I played a few "useless specs". Survival Hunter in battlegrounds for example, awfully weak damage output, but the sleeping shot was amazing for CCing critical enemies and just messing with people and having fun. It was a fun thing to play. However, if you'd buff its damage it would be an enormous overkill. Same with balance druids, everyone moans about how terrible they were with mana, yet it never stopped them to be quite powerful in PvP.

You are the one seeing the world through the prism of a damage meter which is the only thing that matters nowadays because classes have no unique utility anymore and basically the same. It's like playing Diablo, loot and bigger numbers, nothing else matters.

- - - Updated - - -

The massive division in the already small "vanilla" community just keeps getting bigger, doesn't it?

Not really. These are 2 different groups. One group wants vanilla WoW and another "I hated vanilla WoW but since blizzard is re-releasing it let's change things I hated".

[Keltas]

But, there's lots of other people that want to play Vanilla but want to be able to viably play a Prot Pally or a Shadow Priest, don't want to be 100% forced into healing on certain classes, etc., etc. There's a spectrum of people interested in Vanilla servers, and the game doesn't belong solely to the people who demand 0 change whatsoever any more than the live game belongs only to hardcore Mythic raiders.

Blizzard's going to want to maximize the amount of people playing Vanilla servers to maximize their profits, and you have to accept the reality that this will involve some movement to adjust some things. Pure numerical class tuning is one of those things that is perfectly reasonable. The reality is, no matter what they do, it's not the same game anyway. You can't go back and erase the 13 years of experience that people have with the game and the content, and that extra knowledge alone is absolutely going to change the way the game plays out.

Shadow priests had a spot in raids, they brought a shadow damage increase and while not as much dps as a mage or warlock, still brought decent numbers.

If you gave them the mana pool and damage of a warlock or mage, they would become the ONLY ranged dps worth bringing. You'd bring 1-2 token warlocks for sbolt debuff and curse of shadows, and stack spriests.

They had amazing multi dot potential and the cost of their DoTs/DoT cap was the only thing holding them down from being gods on multi targets.

They could even start to replace healers because they could provide a shit ton of passive healing with VE.

You can't just drop mana costs by 20% on the hybrids without throwing everything up in the air.


Being the top of recount isn't and wasn't the only thing that mattered. If they cave in and let everyone be on the top of recount, you'll push out all the pure dps because they brought nothing outside of damage. All the hybrids brought something powerful enough to justify at least one spot for them. If you want to roll a shadow priest, that's fine, you'll probably even find a raid spot because they were useful. You won't be swimming in women from your big dick dps, but you will have contributed just as much as anyone else.

It's a real rpg, where everyone contributes in a different way. Being the one doing the "most" according to one single metric in one single game mode is not at all what it was about.

[Soon-TM]

Seeing the massive "OMG MUH RET / ELE / KITTEH DEEPZ" QQ going on, I realize how much damage was done to the game with the infamous "bring the player, not the class". It's been the same with Arenas, or flight, two seemingly cool features at the beginning, but that seriously harmed the game in the long run. Features that cannot be eliminated without huge amounts of QQ, cf. some people ITT.

[metamodernist]

Very strong opinion on changing classic wow. If you dont like the classic you don't have to play it and I didn't see any reason from you really. Btw, In classic wow all classes are needed more than in retail.

[Deleted]

It's rather ironic considering that you are the one attacking me so far because you apparently don't like the reality of vanilla WoW where different specs were meant for different things. The idea of homogenization and "bring payer not class" came much, much later.

You are the one attempting to twist a completely different class design philosophy in the WoTLK+ "raid or die" one.
Of course not all specs are as good as others. Just like in legion some specs are better then others. Or are you denying it?
Considering that in vanilla classes had unique abilities and utility, differences were more prominent in different situations. There was no one spec fits all though.
However "directly useless in a competitive environment". Competitive environment? What are you talking here about since you disregard PvP as useless right away. You're clearly fully focused on raiding and if a spec isn't meant for raiding, then it must be useless, according to your logic. I merely pointed out that this is simply not the case. There was no such thing as "competitive PvE" in vanilla. A couple of guilds were rushing towards to end boss but that was about it, no one gave a shit. There was no Mythic dungeons with timers like today, no Mythic raids. Eventually everyone would clear everything because raiding in vanilla was about gear and persistence, nothing else.

And yea. I used to spend a ton of gold to switch between PvP and PvP specs all the time. If you wanted to min-max then you had to respec all the time. Many in my raid group never bothered though, with the exception of healers as healer specs are supposed to heal, nothing else, just like in a classic tabletop RPG.

Also I played a few "useless specs". Survival Hunter in battlegrounds for example, awfully weak damage output, but the sleeping shot was amazing for CCing critical enemies and just messing with people and having fun. It was a fun thing to play. However, if you'd buff its damage it would be an enormous overkill. Same with balance druids, everyone moans about how terrible they were with mana, yet it never stopped them to be quite powerful in PvP.

You are the one seeing the world through the prism of a damage meter which is the only thing that matters nowadays because classes have no unique utility anymore and basically the same. It's like playing Diablo, loot and bigger numbers, nothing else matters.

- - - Updated - - -



Not really. These are 2 different groups. One group wants vanilla WoW and another "I hated vanilla WoW but since blizzard is re-releasing it let's change things I hated".

It's obvious you are a PVP player, in which case there are still some classes that perform significantly better.
You linked some random druid in full AQ40 gear messing with people, but that's still nothing like a arcane power fire mage or a fury/arms warriors could do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl_iQHxwtpM

And why do you lol at the remark about a competitive environment? Sure everyone were terrible in Vanilla, but when the Classic servers release, I can promise you people will take progession a whole lot more serious now than they did back then. There will obviously be a race to bringing down the different end bosses first etc., and people will be logging every raid like they do now, unlike back then. Why bring a DPS class that only does about half of a mage/rogue/warrior if it doesn't buff the raid/debuff the boss? Sure your average Joe guild wont care at all, but people that are serious about the game will most likely not accept DPS specs that barely outperform tanks, just like people reroll these days to the FOTM classes for progression.

Same shit applies to those who will take the PVP system serious. Why make a group of terrible classes when X and Y are significantly better and will wreck your group setup? The gap between classes in retail wow is not even remotely close to the gap we had in Vanilla. Loads of specs were obviously just an afterthought from Blizzard's part, like Rets pretty much just auto attacking all day.

And yes, you literally asked for a list just so you could shit all over it with your superior experience/memories.