The only changes I would personally like to see - opinions

[Better]

Dot cap/specialisation item sets is different then this though. Classes should stay the same and not be tuned differently simply because they are already fine how they worked and people liking how they played back then. Something I really liked was Shadow Priests having their own racial spell (e.g. Fear ward, DP, Starshards etc) alongside Humans having extra weapon skill, WotF being really strong in PvP. I am against class tuning, racial tuning or class changes in general, I however would like to see system changes like these and not for the sake of change, but to see a lot of issues solved with class balance in the first place. Niches have to stay niches, but those niches need to be viable, else it isn't a niche but a liability.

Except DoT cap/item sets would very easily be on the list of things I just mentioned. You don't think they matter, others will.
You're asking to change specs that were in your own words a liability, and make them a niche instead. That's a class change. You're just making it in a roundabout way. Like it or not Vanilla had a lot of specs that were dead. Some people find that to be part of the charm.


EDIT:

Would you think people would be more accepting if they would be rolling out changes like these slowly over time if people wouldn't mind seeing the change?

On this earlier note, I think if they did something like OSRS did, and slowly had votes on what could, and couldn't be added AFTER releasing a 100% vanilla experience it could maybe work. Depends how much dev time Blizz wants to put into this, or if they plan to just kinda have it as a side project. Problem then becomes the players that don't like whatever addition you make, and suddenly "it's not real vanilla, and the game was so much better before the changes, etc."

[Deleted]

Hurr durr everyone should be able to do everything hurr durr.

This happens when child is force fed bullshit about being unique, special and able to do everything all its life. This is literaly what happens with people claiming that making class rebalance is a good thing because it will allow people to play what they want. Sorry, Vanilla WoW is game that was made in different times - times in which games didn't cater to players. There was no hand holding, raids with different difficulty settings allowing everyone to clear the content, daily quests giving free gold and other things like that.
There were things that player HAD to do to achieve his goals. There was no "everything for everyone". You wanted PVP as a warrior? Arms. Do DPS? Fury. Same with every other class - there always one spec better for PVP and one/two for PVE. Soon people will start to complain that you need to be frost as a mage in MC and it hurts fire mage community.

[Hitei]

1st change. Would mess with the balance of the game overall, and would require an entire rebalance of every raid.

It actually doesn't really mess with overall balance much. A shadow priest able to use dots is still going to DPS below say a fury warrior or rogue in late gear. You aren't actually gaining all that much by bypassing the debuff limit when it comes to overall performance in a raid environment. If you're bringing in additional warlocks because you can put up more dots now, you're removing things like mages and the afformentioned melee dps, so your damage is staying about the same.

The difference for a 40 man raid will be deadly poisons (certainly some extra damage, but not all that much) and maybe the off-hand dot or two from your original 1-2 warlocks brought for curses and single spriest brought for the warlocks.

I'm guessing you'd see less than 10-15% DPS increase across the board (A lot of your damage is mages/warriors, who aren't really gaining a ton by upping the limit). Easy enough to bump the boss HP 20% (this should probably be done anyway to compensate for modern players, better knowledge of the game and more min-maxing across the board), and then you have a much nicer raid experience where people can actually use their abilities and some classes are slightly more viable to bring to a raid.

The limit was one created by coding/programming limitations, not one implemented out of intent to disallow ability use.

[Ehrenpanzer]

Greetings,

There have been loads of talks for balance changes or not and how pure to keep Vanilla, generally on the bigger scale to numbers. Generally I don't agree with these but I do want some changes personally.

1) Dots and Hots not capped on targets, e.g. minions and monsters had a cap of amount of Dots available on a target, same for heals. This made a lot of specs irrelevant and even in some cases a whole class (druid) which I would like to see changed to atleast allow it to not overwrite other debuffs.

2) Updated graphics off by default, can be toggled on. This doesn't interfere with anyone's gameplay and gives options. I would probably still use the old graphics, but would not mind others using it.

3) Have alternative set effects and slight stat changes for hybrid specs so they are not always pidgeonholled into it. Doesn't matter if the stats can be suboptimal, just a small change in things like spell pen and spell hit, defence stat etc. Could even be something like threat or mana cost reduction for that matter :>


That is like the only thing I want to see changed, what are some Vanilla purists opinion on these and what is the opinion from the people that would like to see small change? I am against rebalancing the classes and would like to see the niches staying (e.g. Paladin AoE tanking, warrior ST) but I think this would help a lot of classes and specs to get into the metagame without changing the core.

I'd say just for practicality purposes (uber purists are living in a dream land) that tanks at least need some work. Or else every guild in Classic is going to stall and die on 4H if not sooner. Really, how many people live under the delusion that EIGHT warrior tanks are going to show up every raid, not to mention ALL have 4pc

[Mormolyce]

If you want something to be 100% Vanilla you'd have to play on a wonky aspect ratio and maybe even on DSL as well alongside gold farmers falling from the sky in Ironforge to make a website name.

Ahahaha, I remember that one. Weren't they still doing it in Wrath?

[Shisui-kun]

It actually doesn't really mess with overall balance much. A shadow priest able to use dots is still going to DPS below say a fury warrior or rogue in late gear. You aren't actually gaining all that much by bypassing the debuff limit when it comes to overall performance in a raid environment. If you're bringing in additional warlocks because you can put up more dots now, you're removing things like mages and the afformentioned melee dps, so your damage is staying about the same.

The difference for a 40 man raid will be deadly poisons (certainly some extra damage, but not all that much) and maybe the off-hand dot or two from your original 1-2 warlocks brought for curses and single spriest brought for the warlocks.

I'm guessing you'd see less than 10-15% DPS increase across the board (A lot of your damage is mages/warriors, who aren't really gaining a ton by upping the limit). Easy enough to bump the boss HP 20% (this should probably be done anyway to compensate for modern players, better knowledge of the game and more min-maxing across the board), and then you have a much nicer raid experience where people can actually use their abilities and some classes are slightly more viable to bring to a raid.

The limit was one created by coding/programming limitations, not one implemented out of intent to disallow ability use.

Well argumented and I wholeheartly agree with the last point, hence why I am pretty much for the change. However, some people would prefer to see things unfold first probably, so would you think it might be wise to have Blizzard poll stuff like this?

I'd say just for practicality purposes (uber purists are living in a dream land) that tanks at least need some work. Or else every guild in Classic is going to stall and die on 4H if not sooner. Really, how many people live under the delusion that EIGHT warrior tanks are going to show up every raid, not to mention ALL have 4pc

This is a tough one considering it was one of the very strange fights where you had to have warrior tanks stacked. Could be fixed by tier sets I suppose to a degree. Defence caps were mostly a problem for bears, not necessarily threat if I am correct and Paladins simply didn't have enough ST threat generation but excelled at AoE.

Ahahaha, I remember that one. Weren't they still doing it in Wrath?

I'm not sure if they still did it by then, but it still happened in TBC at the very least. It always gave me a laugh though! Always in front of the bridge before the AH in Ironforge :'>

Hurr durr everyone should be able to do everything hurr durr.

This happens when child is force fed bullshit about being unique, special and able to do everything all its life. This is literaly what happens with people claiming that making class rebalance is a good thing because it will allow people to play what they want. Sorry, Vanilla WoW is game that was made in different times - times in which games didn't cater to players. There was no hand holding, raids with different difficulty settings allowing everyone to clear the content, daily quests giving free gold and other things like that.
There were things that player HAD to do to achieve his goals. There was no "everything for everyone". You wanted PVP as a warrior? Arms. Do DPS? Fury. Same with every other class - there always one spec better for PVP and one/two for PVE. Soon people will start to complain that you need to be frost as a mage in MC and it hurts fire mage community.

Neat

[Ehrenpanzer]

This is a tough one considering it was one of the very strange fights where you had to have warrior tanks stacked. Could be fixed by tier sets I suppose to a degree. Defence caps were mostly a problem for bears, not necessarily threat if I am correct and Paladins simply didn't have enough ST threat generation but excelled at AoE.

Bears: Scaled insanely with +armor gear, BUT, that virtually didnt exist in raid gear in leather. It CAN be done, but the sheer amount of work and luck it would take to get the gear to be able to tank raids would be better spent gearing a warrior, which would be better in every way (in terms of tanking) seeing as druids cannot: Push crushing blows off, be crit immune, cannot parry and cannot block. Basically, druids were good at low per swing damage physical bosses that did not involve tank swapping (wanna take a guess at how many of those there were? ^_^ )

Pallies: Aoe threat sure.. need a taunt? You are going to die.... Not to mention the every 30 or so seconds running oom, then the aoe threat falls off VERY fast.....

[Hitei]

Well argumented and I wholeheartly agree with the last point, hence why I am pretty much for the change. However, some people would prefer to see things unfold first probably, so would you think it might be wise to have Blizzard poll stuff like this?

Depends on your perspective, honestly.

If you are a diehard purist, polling is the worst option imaginable, because the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, and the greater majority of the vanilla crowd, are in favor of reasonable changes. If you want reasonable changes then polling is completely in your favor. Anything posted by blizzard directly would seem a massive amount of traffic, and anything with a massive amount of traffic is going to trend away from the hardcore and skew in favor of reasonable change.

This could sort of be seen with that big reddit poll.

Somethings everyone agrees on (no LFR, no flying, no increased XP, raid instance releases delayed, later dungeons delayed, etc.) but the more reasonable changes (classes getting balance, Battlegrounds introduced early, linked flight paths, guild banks, etc) rapidly approach 50%+ in favor of change.

So: Sure? But no-change folks probably won't be happy about it.

[Deleted]

reasonable changes (classes getting balance

What? People realy don't understand how game balance works or are just pretend to be ignorant? Change one class a bit and you need to worry about everything that is even remotely affected by that class. PVP, raids, mats/gold farming... It doesn't magicaly change one thing without any impact on other things. Like earlier someone claimed that removing debuff limit won't change much... Like realy? have you ever heard about warlocks not being able to use DOTs because of that and losing quite a bit DPS because of that? Removing this limit is direct buff to warlocks in terms of DPS.
Same with other "reasonable balance changes". Change one thing and you will have change another. And another...

[Aggrophobic]

Greetings,

There have been loads of talks for balance changes or not and how pure to keep Vanilla, generally on the bigger scale to numbers. Generally I don't agree with these but I do want some changes personally.

1) Dots and Hots not capped on targets, e.g. minions and monsters had a cap of amount of Dots available on a target, same for heals. This made a lot of specs irrelevant and even in some cases a whole class (druid) which I would like to see changed to atleast allow it to not overwrite other debuffs.

2) Updated graphics off by default, can be toggled on. This doesn't interfere with anyone's gameplay and gives options. I would probably still use the old graphics, but would not mind others using it.

3) Have alternative set effects and slight stat changes for hybrid specs so they are not always pidgeonholled into it. Doesn't matter if the stats can be suboptimal, just a small change in things like spell pen and spell hit, defence stat etc. Could even be something like threat or mana cost reduction for that matter :>


That is like the only thing I want to see changed, what are some Vanilla purists opinion on these and what is the opinion from the people that would like to see small change? I am against rebalancing the classes and would like to see the niches staying (e.g. Paladin AoE tanking, warrior ST) but I think this would help a lot of classes and specs to get into the metagame without changing the core.

So you want to rebalance the entire game then? As thoes small changes would mean they need to change gear, bosses, world content, orther classes as well and so on.
Yeah, thats just stupid.

[Hottage]

1. No, requires re-balancing every fight.
2. Yes, predicated on the fact it's optional and has no effect on those who want original graphics - that includes the classic animations and rigging being unchanged.
3. No, that was part of the classic gameplay experience and would change balance.

[Shisui-kun]

What? People realy don't understand how game balance works or are just pretend to be ignorant? Change one class a bit and you need to worry about everything that is even remotely affected by that class. PVP, raids, mats/gold farming... It doesn't magicaly change one thing without any impact on other things. Like earlier someone claimed that removing debuff limit won't change much... Like realy? have you ever heard about warlocks not being able to use DOTs because of that and losing quite a bit DPS because of that? Removing this limit is direct buff to warlocks in terms of DPS.
Same with other "reasonable balance changes". Change one thing and you will have change another. And another...

Just imagine that one Warlock in your raid even doing 95% of the warriors, mages or rogue's damage due to Curse of Agony, the horror
They only serve as CotE bots in raids ofcourse with decent dps, can't have that because "reasons".

The only issue so far seems to be Rogues with poisons and maybe Ignite later on, but that is going to happen to a degree or played around regardless. Dot cap removal only affects 40 man raids to an extend and even then it's minimal at best. Design philosophy =/= Tuning.

So you want to rebalance the entire game then? As thoes small changes would mean they need to change gear, bosses, world content, orther classes as well and so on.
Yeah, thats just stupid.

Dots wouldn't change any tuning and it was already possible for classes to do certain things, e.g. non warrior tanking but right now is unfeasible. Set effects barely need any change for that matter either, since they were class specific and could even change with specialization in mind, so almost no drop changes.

1. No, requires re-balancing every fight.
2. Yes, predicated on the fact it's optional and has no effect on those who want original graphics - that includes the classic animations and rigging being unchanged.
3. No, that was part of the classic gameplay experience and would change balance.

Requires rebalancing for nigh to no dps increase or just because there will be something else available than mages, rogues and warriors and the odd warlock? To be frank, the damage of those were high was because most of them were pure classes (except fury) and hybrids had lower damage, with and without the dot caps and would still be lower even with set bonus, as can be seen in Tbc. They brought utility instead, which the healer variants also provide, so barely any change in that regard.

[Aggrophobic]

Just imagine that one Warlock in your raid even doing 95% of the warriors, mages or rogue's damage due to Curse of Agony, the horror
They only serve as CotE bots in raids ofcourse with decent dps, can't have that because "reasons".

The only issue so far seems to be Rogues with poisons and maybe Ignite later on, but that is going to happen to a degree or played around regardless. Dot cap removal only affects 40 man raids to an extend and even then it's minimal at best. Design philosophy =/= Tuning.

- - - Updated - - -



Just imagine that one Warlock in your raid even doing 95% of the warriors, mages or rogue's damage due to Curse of Agony, the horror
They only serve as CotE bots in raids ofcourse with decent dps, can't have that because "reasons".

The only issue so far seems to be Rogues with poisons and maybe Ignite later on, but that is going to happen to a degree or played around regardless. Dot cap removal only affects 40 man raids to an extend and even then it's minimal at best. Design philosophy =/= Tuning.



Dots wouldn't change any tuning and it was already possible for classes to do certain things, e.g. non warrior tanking but right now is unfeasible. Set effects barely need any change for that matter either, since they were class specific and could even change with specialization in mind, so almost no drop changes.



Requires rebalancing for nigh to no dps increase or just because there will be something else available than mages, rogues and warriors and the odd warlock? To be frank, the damage of those were high was because most of them were pure classes (except fury) and hybrids had lower damage, with and without the dot caps and would still be lower even with set bonus, as can be seen in Tbc. They brought utility instead, which the healer variants also provide, so barely any change in that regard.

You change one number you need to change them all. All classes were not design for raiding and doing top DPS. Vanilla was never about that.
If you want balance, play retail.

[Deleted]

Just imagine that one Warlock in your raid even doing 95% of the warriors, mages or rogue's damage due to Curse of Agony, the horror
They only serve as CotE bots in raids ofcourse with decent dps, can't have that because "reasons".

The only issue so far seems to be Rogues with poisons and maybe Ignite later on, but that is going to happen to a degree or played around regardless. Dot cap removal only affects 40 man raids to an extend and even then it's minimal at best. Design philosophy =/= Tuning.

Yea... 1 warlock xD

Plus all other DOTs from all other classes. Not much, but I'm pretty sure none of you realises how much impact those tiny bonuses can have when combined and multiplied by 20-25 DPS in raid.

There's a reason why people are min/maxing - because every 0.5% of anything makes a difference.

[Akka]

If you want something to be 100% Vanilla you'd have to play on a wonky aspect ratio and maybe even on DSL as well alongside gold farmers falling from the sky in Ironforge to make a website name.

Hate to break it to you, but Vanilla could already be played in 1920x1080.

That being said, the debuff limit is something that is a bit between the bug and the feature - it was clearly existing only due to technical limitation, not design, and they increased it each time they could.
I wouldn't be opposed to remove it, but yeah it would require some rebalancing. So, well, I'm fine either way.

[Shisui-kun]

Yea... 1 warlock xD

Plus all other DOTs from all other classes. Not much, but I'm pretty sure none of you realises how much impact those tiny bonuses can have when combined and multiplied by 20-25 DPS in raid.

There's a reason why people are min/maxing - because every 0.5% of anything makes a difference.

Tell me which other classes were brought that had dots then? It wasn't a moonkin, shadowpriest, ferals and even affliction warlock for that matter. The only debuffs used were ones that improved damage of the already stacked classes, even talents like impale and deep wounds were specced out of. All those classes were underperforming even with the Dots available and brought utility instead of dps. Those specs weren't taken because of the Dots, what makes you think it changes any numbers then?

And 40 mans in general ran 2 Warlocks, thus 5% representation. 0.5% makes a difference yes, until you realise that it's already a downgrade to get a dot based spec compared to other specs, so the net increase would either barely be anything or might even go down in trade for some utility.

[khazmodan]

Greetings,

There have been loads of talks for balance changes or not and how pure to keep Vanilla, generally on the bigger scale to numbers. Generally I don't agree with these but I do want some changes personally.

1) Dots and Hots not capped on targets, e.g. minions and monsters had a cap of amount of Dots available on a target, same for heals. This made a lot of specs irrelevant and even in some cases a whole class (druid) which I would like to see changed to atleast allow it to not overwrite other debuffs.

2) Updated graphics off by default, can be toggled on. This doesn't interfere with anyone's gameplay and gives options. I would probably still use the old graphics, but would not mind others using it.

3) Have alternative set effects and slight stat changes for hybrid specs so they are not always pidgeonholled into it. Doesn't matter if the stats can be suboptimal, just a small change in things like spell pen and spell hit, defence stat etc. Could even be something like threat or mana cost reduction for that matter :>


That is like the only thing I want to see changed, what are some Vanilla purists opinion on these and what is the opinion from the people that would like to see small change? I am against rebalancing the classes and would like to see the niches staying (e.g. Paladin AoE tanking, warrior ST) but I think this would help a lot of classes and specs to get into the metagame without changing the core.

Most people just want D&D, meaning debug and done. I just don't trust the current developers to do any changes without screwing it up, examples: revision of Deadmines, many ruined zones since Cataclysm, getting rid of flying as if that is going to save the game, denial of community problems created by LFD,LFR,CRZ, denial of motivation problems created by excessive RNG, denial of the reality that the follower system will never be fun content.

[Akka]

If you are a diehard purist, polling is the worst option imaginable, because the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, and the greater majority of the vanilla crowd, are in favor of reasonable changes.

That's just a fallacy, because "reasonable change" is completely dependent on the person. Case in point :

Somethings everyone agrees on (no LFR, no flying, no increased XP, raid instance releases delayed, later dungeons delayed, etc.) but the more reasonable changes (classes getting balance, Battlegrounds introduced early, linked flight paths, guild banks, etc) rapidly approach 50%+ in favor of change.

"classes getting balance" is a VERY controversial subject. Not only many people consider that the imbalance was part of the game, but others (like me) consider that yes the classes could use more balance (like they did in TBC) but know that it's easy to fuck up the game and don't trust Blizzard to actually give balance without breaking the spirit. There is also the point that "balance" in Vanilla was very different than in current WoW, because the game was more varied and not focused only on "DPS, HPS, Effective Health". Support classes were a real concept, and as such "balancing" a class was not just "give it moar damage !".

Trying to pass "class getting balance" as "reasonable change" tend to make me think you're just trying to put your opinion as fact.

Oh, also : linked flight path were in Vanilla. I don't know WTF people who claims weird shit like "Vanilla means 4:3 resolution on screen" or "Vanilla means no keybindings" or "Vanilla means no linked flight path", but it seems some people get their head a bit too far into the meme.

[Shisui-kun]

Most people just want D&D, meaning debug and done. I just don't trust the current developers to do any changes without screwing it up, examples: revision of Deadmines, many ruined zones since Cataclysm, getting rid of flying as if that is going to save the game, denial of community problems created by LFD,LFR,CRZ, denial of motivation problems created by excessive RNG, denial of the reality that the follower system will never be fun content.

Hence why we need a decent (ingame?) polling system and get a baseline, barebones Vanilla release where we can implement stuff like this that wasn't really a bug, a feature but more a design limitation.

Hate to break it to you, but Vanilla could already be played in 1920x1080.

It was horrible to play on 1920x1080 though, even if you had like a 6800 ultra or something. 512mb on a videocard was pretty expensive even in 2005 and was slightly higher priced than the current midrange cards, not mentioning the price of screens back then as well, don't think a lot of people ran with that resolution back then ;p

That's just a fallacy, because "reasonable change" is completely dependent on the person. Case in point :

"classes getting balance" is a VERY controversial subject. Not only many people consider that the imbalance was part of the game, but others (like me) consider that yes the classes could use more balance (like they did in TBC) but know that it's easy to fuck up the game and don't trust Blizzard to actually give balance without breaking the spirit. There is also the point that "balance" in Vanilla was very different than in current WoW, because the game was more varied and not focused only on "DPS, HPS, Effective Health". Support classes were a real concept, and as such "balancing" a class was not just "give it moar damage !".

Trying to pass "class getting balance" as "reasonable change" tend to make me think you're just trying to put your opinion as fact.

That was something I generally liked. You had shamans bringing windfury for their group, shadowpriest bringing VE for their group, Innervate for druids and even Paladins that were not Holy brought some interesting stuff. Dispels being unique as well and you have a solid uniqueness to every class.

[Akka]

It was horrible to play on 1920x1080 though, even if you had like a 6800 ultra or something. 512mb on a videocard was pretty expensive even in 2005 and was slightly higher priced than the current midrange cards, not mentioning the price of screens back then as well, don't think a lot of people ran with that resolution back then ;p

Blizzard game have always been pretty lenient on the requirement side. You could totally play in 1920x1080 at release, and the limitation in WoW has usually been more about CPU or Internet connection than GPU.
I had friends playing on 1920x1080 over Dark Age of Camelot FFS, and I transitionned from 1280x1024 pretty quickly too.

Wake up people, Crysis was released in 2007, that's only one year apart from Vanilla. Fucking Crysis. THAT thing was NOT lenient on requirements, unlike Blizzard games, and yet I could play it at 1920x1080 (and I had the same computer than the one I started Vanilla with) too.
So claiming gaming rigs had trouble to run Vanilla, I can only make a weird face and ask "what did you smoke ?".