What you disliked in Vanilla?

[BSwitch]

I've thought a lot about this. I even just deleted a big post outlining the few things I dislike. I think, in the end, the lens of Retail is what will paint my impressions of those systems I don't like, but if I view those systems through the lens of Classic, an MMO-RPG, any system I may not like actually is a system that contributes to the RPG element of the game.

Weapon skills, for example - does it suck when you get to 51, do AV, get Ice-Barbed Spear, and have your Polearms at level 20, when they need to be closer to 300 (that was the 60 cap, right?) Sure. There is tedium in levelling a new weapon type. You know what else there is? Immersion. This is someone who is not skilled at that weapon type and must practice the proverbial 10,000 hours to get good at use. I love that! Jeez, I levelled my unarmed to cap in Wrath to get the achievement! It may be nice to pick up a weapon and who cares, you're just great at it, but the RPG aspect for me far outweighs the hurdle, and in fact I'm looking forward to it.

Corpse runs - another tedious thing, but it makes more RPG sense that your ghost would spawn at a spirit healer in a graveyard rather than magically appearing, alive and well, at the beginning of the instance.

Anything I may not like for one reason or another, if I look at it through an RPG lens immediately becomes something I'm not only ok with, but I'll be happy that it exists the way it does. This is a different game from Retail, and always will be. I have no doubt that I'll complain about this or that once I'm actually there, but anytime I do, I'll take a step back to look at what's bugging me, and I'll know that even though Retail may have addressed and changed that specific issue in the modern version of the game, the magic of what Classic is will more than make up for the inconveniences.

I'm just kinda too optimistic about Classic

[Gavll]

That it ended

This guy knows

- - - Updated - - -

No, that's a case of you not finding the tons of quests available. They DO (and did) exists.
For someone lvl 35 Alliance side, there is Shimmering Flats, early Badlands, early-to-mid STV, Desolace, Arathi, late Southshore, Theramore. Plus the Missing Diplomat chain. More than enough to reach early 40.

I never used guides, I just did the quests I found, and when I had only orange/red ones in a zone, I went to visit other zones in my level range. And that was with not knowing the game and most breadcrumb quests not being implemented yet, now you get many pointer to other regions.

Yet again : there was never a time where you would run out of quest of your level. I will gladly (and already have in fact) agree that many were hard to find, or far away, or locked into chains that you would need to find the first link, or that it was inefficient to go get them, but there ALWAYS is enough quests existing in the world, whatever your level, for you to not run out of "yellow" ones.

I think people conflate "running out of quests" with "I can't be arsed to do these quests/don't like the zones they're in". I remember grinding my last level in WPL in vanilla. Not because there weren't quests in EPL or Silithus but because it was extra time and effort to get there and I hated those zones.

[Outofmana]

Shadowpriest raiding?

You could pull aggro at any bossfight with a few MindBlasts, no matter how long you waited wanding the boss. Every caster had mana issues and without massivly overgearing bosses with ultra short fight times, the reality was you had to use your wand for short time periods, nothing special about that. But the aggro issue made Shadowpriest basicly unusable in raids for anything else than combatressurction (AFK) or for doing nothing but Pain+Wanding, basicly AFKing again.

Using manapots, manafruits, manawhatever you had to farm anyways as any mana user, was zero issue, since it was a requirement for any kind of raiding. Healers had to farm all those buffs with healspec, spend hours and hours for each raiding hour, what kind of DPS player would show up and not use anything in the raidfight???`

I guess you could get yourself a spot in a one-time-family and friends raidgroup and just leech your way for a single clear. Would you call that raiding? I would call it in todays WoW a sold boost run, with a bit of "social engineering" you did not have to pay gold, but calling such thing raiding in vanilla is questionable at best. ^^

Again you're basing this on 'tanky-tanks' in vanilla building no threat which was the norm back in the day for basically every guild, meanwhile vanilla has been thought out better for ages and you currently have maintanks without a shield equipped even and starting the fight with 100 rage and half or sometimes even full DPS gear equiped, threat is a non issue on pvt servers anymore and wanding is laughable, I can shadowbolt on the pull.


It's problematic with 16slots though, since even that is thought out by now (many if not all guilds will use a debuff list come classic), and it's sometimes hard to find a spot for shadowword pain, making playing a spriest even more boring, and using 30+ manapots a raid isn't something that is fun to sustain farming wise, which is totally different from any other caster.

My point though was merely that to compete as a warlock, you'd need to have the 'stars align' almost, a single thing missing from your raid, being a shadowpriest quitting (which somehow happens a lot) or not being there for a raid, or having only 2 locks for the night, meaning Curse of Elements for your 6 mages, and Curse of Recklessness for your 20 melee, and no Curse of Shadow, or not being assigned to PI, even missing one thing made competiting for either external dps logs or competition within your class or caster role impossible which you knew in advance of the raidnight when you saw the roster.

That's why I said the game could do without the annoying Warlock curses, but immediately saying this, I ask myself what the point is to have 3 warlocks in the raid, so I guess even removing curses would hurt the class balance at this point I take it back.

[Gavll]

Grinding.

Nowadays, I'm 25. When I started playing WoW I was about 13-14.

Basically end of Vanilla/start of TBC.

When you're young and you have a lot of time you're naive and anything entertains you. Thus grinding for a child isn't really a problem...

But for an adult with not a lot of time, I know for certain I don't enjoy anything about grinding and putting so many "empty" hours into the game. It feels like such a waste. Otherwise Vanilla is indeed magical. Core RPG elements are still in tact and the sense of community are very strong aspects of it.

But grinding isn't empty hours. It's farming your gold for consumes or herbs to sell etc. It might be a chore but there's almost always a goal. The fact that it was a chore, makes the reward at the end seem better too

[Akka]

I think people conflate "running out of quests" with "I can't be arsed to do these quests/don't like the zones they're in". I remember grinding my last level in WPL in vanilla. Not because there weren't quests in EPL or Silithus but because it was extra time and effort to get there and I hated those zones.

Yep, that's why I repeat the part where I point that it can be inefficient.

[Juggsa]

High warlord grind
Engineering items in pvp. Not back then but for Classic, these Will get overexploited to a point that wasnt known back then. Making engineering a must for classic. That aint classic for me, it wont be the same. Engineering Will ruin pvp. I know many disagree.

[Gavll]

High warlord grind
Engineering items in pvp. Not back then but for Classic, these Will get overexploited to a point that wasnt known back then. Making engineering a must for classic. That aint classic for me, it wont be the same. Engineering Will ruin pvp. I know many disagree.

It's just the meta now. If you want to PvP at a high level, you need those Iron Grenades. I wasn't using it on a PServer until I got into a fight with a hunter on my CB/Prep rogue and we both blew all our CDs but a clutch grenade stun at the end won him the fight. After that I levelled engineering.

[RobertMugabe]

Pugging anything. So you get a group together for a run and someone dc mid run. If you are lucky you have a mage to get to a city to find more but if not you have a solid 45 min wait time for a replacement.

That's still even an issue today. I was just reminded yesterday why I quit pug raiding: After 1 wipe on conclave (we also wiped at the very end) every russian player left the raid (both tanks, 1 healer and a couple DPS) and then we had to start searching again which took us more than half an hour and the RL started to invite players that didn't even know where the entrance to the raid was, just to get going. Of course we wiped right at the start and then the raid disbanded.

I think this issue is worse today, because back then you'd mostly just pug dungeons (and wasn't an LFG channel introduced later on that could be used anywhere in the world?) and you'd be pretty much forced to be in a guild if you wanted to raid (or you'd join a raid that consisted mostly of members of a guild). Nowadays there's really no incentive to form or join a guild unless you want to do mythic raiding, which I'm sure (relatively speaking) almost no one in this game wants to.

[Najnaj]

That's still even an issue today. I was just reminded yesterday why I quit pug raiding: After 1 wipe on conclave (we also wiped at the very end) every russian player left the raid (both tanks, 1 healer and a couple DPS) and then we had to start searching again which took us more than half an hour and the RL started to invite players that didn't even know where the entrance to the raid was, just to get going. Of course we wiped right at the start and then the raid disbanded.

I think this issue is worse today, because back then you'd mostly just pug dungeons (and wasn't an LFG channel introduced later on that could be used anywhere in the world?) and you'd be pretty much forced to be in a guild if you wanted to raid (or you'd join a raid that consisted mostly of members of a guild). Nowadays there's really no incentive to form or join a guild unless you want to do mythic raiding, which I'm sure (relatively speaking) almost no one in this game wants.

THre were several channels introduced by players but just like with the LFG channel, no one used them. You needed to go back to Org or Ironforge where all the people were. (and yes to all newcomers, SW was not the main ally hub during vanilla as onlt Ironforge had an AH.) Today you have the LFG tool which will make a difference for normal raiding and lower content.

[Akka]

(and yes to all newcomers, SW was not the main ally hub during vanilla as onlt Ironforge had an AH.)

Little nitpicking : only IF had an AH at the beginning. In late Vanilla, SW and Darna got their own (though SW one was not in front of the bank, but a bit farther, in the back of the main square).
The real reason IF stayed as the main Alliance hub after that was both habit, and because it was the closest capital to raids (it was closer to Blackrock for MC & BWL, it was just aside Menethil with its ship to Theramore for AQ, and it was by far closer to Plaguelands for Naxx).

[Aphrel]

spawntimers. waiting for things to spawn sucked then and it will suck now.
I didnt like the way worldbosses worked. All the top guilds competing for one boss. Sure the world pvp that arose from it was awesome, but almost never actually getting the tag first and the griefing of other guilds even on your own faction taunting the boss to face it towards your raid was just annoying.

Spellpushback, it kinda sucked tbh. Not saying it should change, just saying its annoying as fuck.

[Tekkommo]

No belfs.

/10 char

[bloodkin]

Hybrid classes (such as druid) where often forced to go heal in raids, DPS and tank specs required an above average amount of effort to do decent damage. The offset was that in PVP, some specs would actually work ok. Respeccing was expensive, but with how limited talents where (compared to later expansions) and the amount of bad talents, it wasn't that bad. Having warriors absolutely dominate as main tanks, while being a pain to level was some weird design (probably a design oversight).

The whole 'bring the player, not the class' shouldn't mean that all classes should be homogenized to the bland collection of copy-paste specs that the retail game has now, it should mean that each class is able to perform as good as any other in that particular role (dps/tank/heal), but also do it in a different way than other, and each spec or class have it's unique toolset, so that some diversity within a raid is desired. sure, 10 man raiding will have far less diversity than 20 or 40 man raids, but at 15 to 25 man raids, it shouldn't be unreasonable to have at least 1 of every (original) class.

If blizz ships the game with exactly the classes and class balance as the original, I wouldn't be that upset. But I would probably stick to warlock or shaman, or some of the other top classes, it makes life a lot easier.

[bloodkin]

spawntimers. waiting for things to spawn sucked then and it will suck now.
I didnt like the way worldbosses worked. All the top guilds competing for one boss. Sure the world pvp that arose from it was awesome, but almost never actually getting the tag first and the griefing of other guilds even on your own faction taunting the boss to face it towards your raid was just annoying.

Spellpushback, it kinda sucked tbh. Not saying it should change, just saying its annoying as fuck.

I also hated collection quests from mobs, where the droprate was abysmally low. Slow spawn times are already annoying on their own, it just gets exponentially worse of you also have to farm some quest item with a 10% or 5% droprate.

Worldbosses could also be a pain, but the way the system worked was alos part of the experience, as getting the tag and the kill was a challenge on it's own.

[Maudib]

I started in TBC, but I played warlock then and the thing I hated most of all was farming soul shards and having reduced bag space because of the shards.

Same for hunters and ammo... however.... both classes had pets to tank. It was a trade off. Locks had to go farm them prior to raids,, hunters had to spend gold to craft/buy ammo.

Many of the things people say they don't like... were the "inconveniences of a fantasy world". If you want an immersive experience... then you need to feel the pain of existing in the world. Instead... people got used to saying... "Doing this is stupid, doing that is too slow, doing the other thing is boring..."

Now so much has been removed for "convenience sake".. and now we have a world that is bland, fast, shallow, and people are complaining that the classes are homogenized and the game isn't immersive.


Vanilla was certainly flawed... but it was beautifully imperfect.

[bloodkin]

collection quests are ok, if they make sense. Having to farm vital organs such as harts, should have close to 100% droprate (animals without harts don't function that well), but things like eyes should be somewhat less (missing an eye isn't that strange).

[Whistl3r]

The community believe it or not, and sure this is anecdotal from my end, and I understand it wasn't for everyone, but I know a lot of people who had the same experience.

Contrary to what many think, if you were doing top end raiding, the guilds could be rather...fractious. With a small amount of loot, a large amount of players, and a desire to get in on the content meant many egos got out of hand, some players believed they were essential and could make decisions for absolutely everyone (to everyone's detriment but their own), and many raid leaders were stil quite young, and all the arrogance that went with it.

Honestly, the time schedules required as a tank in a top end server first guild, it was...painful at times. Also, the amount of poaching that went on between guilds was quite high as well. Heck, there are still famous videos of ninja looting then the officers joining a rival guild that promised them more on youtube.

People like to think Clasic was some amazing community of like-minded players banding together, but my experience was mainly a cesspool of egocentric assholes (a few nice guys though I still chat and play with), who thought the world revolved around them.


This, and the "WoW celebrities" like Kungan (or whatever his name is), Dives, and other egotistical asshats thinking they ruled the roost, made the game quite a cesspit at times.
ALso

Ha, I liked this. It's actually so true. Community was total the best and the worst thing.

[Shadowsgrace]

Having to run to Flight points 1st to learn them. I understand the reason behind it, I mean you shouldn't be able to fly to a place you've never been to before, doesn't mean I have to like it.

[tikcol]

High warlord grind
Engineering items in pvp. Not back then but for Classic, these Will get overexploited to a point that wasnt known back then. Making engineering a must for classic. That aint classic for me, it wont be the same. Engineering Will ruin pvp. I know many disagree.

It's a trade-off. The beauty of the thing is that professions really mattered. You can have engineering and another profession, most players will pick a gold generation profession such as herbalism but then they miss out on a crafting profession such as tailoring for example that would make them stronger in PvE. Considering there are BoP crafted gear and bonuses from crafted sets that you need tailoring for.

As for myself I can't play without engineering anymore as a primarily pvp focused player and that's ok because even tho I'll have an advantage in PvP, my DPS in PvE will be inferior.

If you like to grind or play the AH you can also forego the gold generating profession. It's all about choices.

You need to choose, you can't have it all.

[VincentWolf]

I just played through vanilla few years ago on Kronos so memories are very fresh.
- Most of specs being unusable is the biggest vanilla problem
- Not enough spells to be fun, TBC was perfect in that regard, wotlk/cata were already a messy clusterfuck.
- Too many "special" items that could turn the tide of battle, like engineering grenades. Expect all pvpers to run with engi items and abuse the fuck outta it.
- PVP system was downright horrible
- BLACK LOTUS. All of it.
- No draenei :'(