Going further than tbc would be pointless wouldn't it?

[Ragedaug]

Cataclysm changed so much, it doesn't feel "Classic". So we don't need to re-do that. And as so many folks have noted, Wrath feels like the ending of the story that began in Warcraft III, so it would feel odd to end at TBC.

Talent trees still existed, old gear and recipes weren't changed, all the original quests & zones were still in the game. Wrath is a good place to end Classic Servers, hoping Blizzard keeps all 3 up and running, so that I can hop on to which ever experience I feel like having that day.

[Niwes]

whta i dont like, or at least not understand yet how i will manage it for me, is the upcoming of that „second path“ in terms of achievements and collections. i invested all my time in all my toons and my collections (foremost mounts but also some pets) and foremost all my achievements on retail.

as much as i love that second path or the possibility to play again a better wow world (at least for me), it totally distracts me when i think about doing ALL THAT STUFF again. its not the invested work alone or the effort to repeat that. its to some degree just unique. all what i did and saved on blizz servers as my wow career... it feels shit to repeat all that.

that is, as silly as it sounds, the most driving away factor for me.

if they some day link achievements and collections of retail and TBC upwards, and make em „accountwide“ between both game versions (retail and the classic line), heck i would play hell out of TBC.

[Kaibhan]

While the game peaked in wrath for me, I can definitively see a rotating expansion thing where keep starting classic servers every couple of years and rotate some up.

[Heathy]

whta i dont like, or at least not understand yet how i will manage it for me, is the upcoming of that „second path“ in terms of achievements and collections. i invested all my time in all my toons and my collections (foremost mounts but also some pets) and foremost all my achievements on retail.

as much as i love that second path or the possibility to play again a better wow world (at least for me), it totally distracts me when i think about doing ALL THAT STUFF again. its not the invested work alone or the effort to repeat that. its to some degree just unique. all what i did and saved on blizz servers as my wow career... it feels shit to repeat all that.

that is, as silly as it sounds, the most driving away factor for me.

if they some day link achievements and collections of retail and TBC upwards, and make em „accountwide“ between both game versions (retail and the classic line), heck i would play hell out of TBC.

personally Ill always think of my priest as my main and there is nothing stopping me jumping back into a retail expansion and carrying on, I played my priest exclusively from classic to bfa, I didn't play wod, and i never changed mains.

for this rerelease of classic it gave me the opportunity to do that, switch mains, and switch factions with a fresh start. ultimately you just play it for as long as it interests you. I joined a guild that is progressing very well in classic we have fast clear times, ppl log in, ppl are active and they put in effort. its fun to go through classic with a more skilled version of yourself. back in classic i think i was a very good healer, but, the game runs a lot better these days, hardware is better, inets are better. it is fun to experience the game with these things in mind. better performance, players are more skilled. its unique. its not the same as it was the first time, but the raiding is more focused and more co-ordinated.

there are various things that I probably won't do again, I probably won't for example, rush to do the daily and mount farming in tbc, I would probably like to eventually try timed ZA runs, but farming those dailies, i might try to get exalted but i did it once and I don't really care if i do it again or not. same as the netherwing, I might try to slowly grind it out but i'm not bothered if i finish it or not. really i'm not too bothered about what my flying mount looks like for me a large part of the enjoyment is simply raiding. taking a group of dudes into content and having everyone grow that cohesion to where you crush the content with minimal fails.

[kail]

Stopping at Wrath makes the most sense. It was the expansion before the Azeroth rework, marks a bit of a need trilogy that ties up the RTS storyline, that and if they continue to Cata and beyond, there would be too many legacy servers that might fragment WoW users even further.

It all comes down to demand. If enough people want Wrath, Cata, etc. servers to play on to make ATVI money, it will likely happen.

[Zarator8]

It's a fair question. I feel a system similar to old school runescape where the community votes and a change requires 75% majority is a good starting point. Or they could just bring up the 2 most contentious issues which is LFD and looms. These 2 things are generally, widely accepted as the 2 big changes that had a mostly negative impact on the older philosophies. looms trivialised levelling, and LFD removed a large social element in addition to making the world also feel emptier.

I honestly don't see that big of a problem with heirlooms. Heck, even here in Classic, I often bought multiple blue items for my alts to basically simulate what heirlooms would have done for them in WotLK (sans the exp boost, ofc). I just don't see why it's such a big problem that some people prefer to make the levelling experience for their alts a more trivial experience. They're going to do so anyway (as I said before), and if you don't want to you can always avoid using heirlooms. It's not like, say, not using flying or anything as big as that - a lot of people levelled alts without heirlooms in WotLK (for example because they still needed emblems for their mains but also wanted to make use of rested exp etc.)

I'm all for considering an OSRS-style voting mechanism for a "Classic plus" experience, but first let's roll out the game as they were. Who knows, maybe once people see some of these things as they were in TBC and WotLK they might realize they're not as bad as they are in Modern WoW.

[Alcsaar]

Its highly dependant on the person. I'd actually rather WOTLK be released over TBC, but I'm willing to wait for the cycle.

[Airlick]

I honestly don't see that big of a problem with heirlooms. Heck, even here in Classic, I often bought multiple blue items for my alts to basically simulate what heirlooms would have done for them in WotLK (sans the exp boost, ofc). I just don't see why it's such a big problem that some people prefer to make the levelling experience for their alts a more trivial experience. They're going to do so anyway (as I said before), and if you don't want to you can always avoid using heirlooms. It's not like, say, not using flying or anything as big as that - a lot of people levelled alts without heirlooms in WotLK (for example because they still needed emblems for their mains but also wanted to make use of rested exp etc.)

Heirlooms are just a part of a problem that was trivializing levelling. Other things that happened in WotLK was reducing XP needed and turning most elite quests into regular ones. Also, mounts had their cost reduced and were available from level 30. Before WotLK, levelling was an integral part of the game and an experience by itself. New players were robbed of that with these changes.

Now heirlooms weren't a terrible idea, but their implementation wasn't good at all. Even if you got some blues for your alts in vanilla or TBC, it was really just a minor boost most of the time. Heirlooms, on the other hand, were straight-up OP. You could literally one-shot mobs with them, and I'm not talking one in a million 5x WF procs, just regular AA crits. The result was that people could get past levelling without ever using most of their skills, and they entered max level content without a slightest clue - and with heroics being almost equally faceroll, they didn't have to start learning until raids or max level PvP. So if you wanted to PuG, you had to pray you're not getting a mouthbreather's alt that hasn't used a BoP on their paladin a single time for 80 levels.

Heirlooms didn't just invalidate levelling as a learning period, they also completely broke BGs for new players. Sure, vanilla and TBC had twinks, but you had to blow hundreds/thousands of gold to make a twink then, it took so much more effort and getting required items in time wasn't a given, either. In WotLK, you just needed some badges you could farm in two days, and then fill the build up with some BoEs/drops. And then with heirlooms being so much stronger than blues, you ended up with hunters 3-shotting any non-twink without a single thing they could do about it. Meanwhile, there was a slight chance of beating a twink pre-WotLK, or at least completing some objectives before you get killed.

Hell, I didn't know how much of a problem heirlooms were before I started thinking about it now.

[Mosha]

Heirlooms are just a part of a problem that was trivializing levelling. Other things that happened in WotLK was reducing XP needed and turning most elite quests into regular ones. Also, mounts had their cost reduced and were available from level 30. Before WotLK, levelling was an integral part of the game and an experience by itself. New players were robbed of that with these changes.

Now heirlooms weren't a terrible idea, but their implementation wasn't good at all. Even if you got some blues for your alts in vanilla or TBC, it was really just a minor boost most of the time. Heirlooms, on the other hand, were straight-up OP. You could literally one-shot mobs with them, and I'm not talking one in a million 5x WF procs, just regular AA crits. The result was that people could get past levelling without ever using most of their skills, and they entered max level content without a slightest clue - and with heroics being almost equally faceroll, they didn't have to start learning until raids or max level PvP. So if you wanted to PuG, you had to pray you're not getting a mouthbreather's alt that hasn't used a BoP on their paladin a single time for 80 levels.

Heirlooms didn't just invalidate levelling as a learning period, they also completely broke BGs for new players. Sure, vanilla and TBC had twinks, but you had to blow hundreds/thousands of gold to make a twink then, it took so much more effort and getting required items in time wasn't a given, either. In WotLK, you just needed some badges you could farm in two days, and then fill the build up with some BoEs/drops. And then with heirlooms being so much stronger than blues, you ended up with hunters 3-shotting any non-twink without a single thing they could do about it. Meanwhile, there was a slight chance of beating a twink pre-WotLK, or at least completing some objectives before you get killed.

Hell, I didn't know how much of a problem heirlooms were before I started thinking about it now.

Just throwing this out there, heirlooms were not an issue at all IMO in wotlk.

The only heirloom available that most people got were shoulders chest and weapon. All of which gave you a whopping 20% xp rate. On top of this you could obviously only have heirlooms once you hit end level and not just end level but you had to do quite a bit of end level content to even purchase them. So realistically you had to have your main character be fairly up to date before you were worried about getting heirlooms.

So it ‘trivializing’ leveling is a pretty far stretch.

Other things that happened in WotLK was reducing XP needed and turning most elite quests into regular ones.

The reducing xp seems like a fairly good compromise. At that point they had to level through Azeroth, tbc, and wotlk content which if they DIDNT reduce rates this would have taken foreeeeever. Especially for new players this would have made them get exhausted with leveling. 1-60 is one thing 1-80 is a whole other beast.

Also btw tbc did away with most of the elite quests, and for good reason. A big portion of the population was already end level. Making groups extremely difficult to find to kill these elite quest, so scaling them to normal quests was a decent change at the time. At least in my opinion I understand if those were annoying but for new players they wouldn’t even have known.

Also, mounts had their cost reduced and were available from level 30. Before WotLK, levelling was an integral part of the game and an experience by itself. New players were robbed of that with these changes.

How does heirlooms or making ground mounts quicker to obtain ruining the leveling experience?

Everything else you’re saying really has got me believing you are confusing different xpacs. The three heirlooms you got did not make you 3 shot anything at all. They were equivalent to dungeon blues, you would find plenty of items that were better for the time being but you obviously never replaced them. Same concept holds true for the bg thing. They made you better, for sure, but how you’re describing them is just simply untrue.

And the ‘people hitting max level without using their abilities’ is really really dramatic. Three items on your character that are at dungeon level gear won’t make you turn into some BfA like leveling speed god.

[Lazuli]

Well that was weird...WTF did I just read?

Multi #278903173912649821649182 that got banned after 4 posts.

If anything they should stop after wrath not bc, it was peak of WoW for a reason. Its an epic story with awesome class design and zones. Its the only classic server I am really interested in but would probably play BC too because classes had more active abilities then and better balance. Class design only got better until the end of wrath then peaked again in MoP then went to shit soon after, though WoD design wasn't horrible it was far more enjoyable than legion-bfa design..

I was too much of a pvper to seriously raid in anything until cataclysm when I main tanked as blood dk for my guild, so I missed out on raiding in anything except a little in vanilla and some casual pug in wotlk. I would love to get the chance to go full tryhard in everything now. I really miss 10m raiding too it was perfect for my small guild of friends.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

As long as people want it and it’s profitable for Blizzard it isn’t pointless.
For me personally MoP was the best expansion, sure it had flaws but it had a lot of high points- arguably the best the game has ever been.

[Zarator8]

Heirlooms are just a part of a problem that was trivializing levelling. Other things that happened in WotLK was reducing XP needed and turning most elite quests into regular ones. Also, mounts had their cost reduced and were available from level 30. Before WotLK, levelling was an integral part of the game and an experience by itself. New players were robbed of that with these changes.

Uh no. Most of the changes you mentioned were made solely to keep the 1-80 leveling experience about as long as the 1-60. And turning elite quests into regular ones was done because it was impossible to find a group for those. Heck, it's already hard at this point in Classic.

Now heirlooms weren't a terrible idea, but their implementation wasn't good at all. Even if you got some blues for your alts in vanilla or TBC, it was really just a minor boost most of the time. Heirlooms, on the other hand, were straight-up OP. You could literally one-shot mobs with them, and I'm not talking one in a million 5x WF procs, just regular AA crits. The result was that people could get past levelling without ever using most of their skills, and they entered max level content without a slightest clue - and with heroics being almost equally faceroll, they didn't have to start learning until raids or max level PvP. So if you wanted to PuG, you had to pray you're not getting a mouthbreather's alt that hasn't used a BoP on their paladin a single time for 80 levels.

Uh no. The difference between a character with 3-4 heirlooms (which is about as much as you could have in WotLK - chest, shoulders, weapon and trinkets. And ring if you're tryhard, but that's about it) and a character twinked with BoE blues isn't really significant if you update those BoE blues every 10 levels or so. The ease you talk about has more to do with the fact characters grew steadily stronger from Vanilla to WotLK due to the various talent/class changes, while mobs stayed pretty much the same. Even when you level your first character, mobs in WotLK hardly pose the same kind of challenge they do in Vanilla (and, to a slightly lesser extent, in TBC).

As for people "entering heroics without a clue", I'd like to remind you that we're still talking about alts. Every person who levels up with heirlooms has done the standard leveling experience at least once. Unless you're implying that I have no idea of how to use, say, my rogue just because I always had it decked out in blues and even a couple epics throughout the leveling process in Classic and TBC. Which, considering my personal experience, sounds kinda silly TBH.

Heirlooms didn't just invalidate levelling as a learning period, they also completely broke BGs for new players. Sure, vanilla and TBC had twinks, but you had to blow hundreds/thousands of gold to make a twink then, it took so much more effort and getting required items in time wasn't a given, either. In WotLK, you just needed some badges you could farm in two days, and then fill the build up with some BoEs/drops. And then with heirlooms being so much stronger than blues, you ended up with hunters 3-shotting any non-twink without a single thing they could do about it. Meanwhile, there was a slight chance of beating a twink pre-WotLK, or at least completing some objectives before you get killed.

I can agree with this, except I honestly don't give a damn about low level BGs. And the convenience of heirlooms in WotLK, for me, vastly outclasses the inconvenience of "ruined" low level BGs. I wouldn't have done them anyway.

Hell, I didn't know how much of a problem heirlooms were before I started thinking about it now.

Maybe, if you think about it a bit more, you'll see why many of your points are pretty moot.

[Mister K]

Cataclysm was a good expansion. People were just pissed that they couldn't chain pull and aoe everything down without using CC. Cataclysm made players have to think and plan again. And the world revamp was well done. And it had a good villain. Why is there so much hate for Cataclysm?

Hell no, Cata was awful and I know this sounds like "Group A: NO YOU" "Group B: NO, NO YOU!" but it really was. WotLK was riding the Classic/TBC train but it was still great. Thereafter the game has been going downhill. Although I did enjoy RET DPS in WoD, I mean was pulling fat charts on World of Logs.

[Dizzeeyooo]

but the biggest impact of all, was in PVP, where Wow Arena was even removed from the MLG lineup, so i would hardly say the E-sport scene "thrived", more like "shriveled" even tho wow arena was more popular than ever amongst the players, this was NOT reflected on the E-sport scene

This happened in Cata, not WOTLK.

personally me and all the guys I play with in PvP think back to TBC when we think of historical matches, Orangemarmalades 1v3 will never be forgotten.

This happened in WOTLK, not TBC.

so considering you obviously didn't play either of the expansions very much, what made you post this?

Irony detected

[Will]

I think any community votes are going to be twisted right from the start, first off, because of the fact that only a minority of players posts or follows forums, and many of those who do are more interested/competent. It's not going to be a good measure of general opinions among the silent majority, which might just want to keep LFG, while the vote may be overwhelmingly in favour of removing it. Blizzard could just spam all accounts with the poll, but that also doesn't guarantee the poll will be accurate - many of the people that aren't THAT into WoW will ignore it, and since quite a few people have multiple accounts, they might use them to twist the results in their favour.

My point is just that it's risky and you can't really base the development of a game (or changes in a re-release, in this case) on opinions of people that aren't really qualified for it.

I repeat: it worked for OSRS. Still does today.

Hosting such a poll on the forums would be silly, but yes, they could indeed email players, or host the poll on their site, advertised by the bnet launcher.

Multiple account users aren't a huge issue, they're a minority who have multiple active accounts.

Again, I repeat, this type of system has worked well for other games. Players of an old game are absolutely in a great position to know what they're talking about. I don't need a video game development qualification to have an opinion on things like LFD or heirlooms and whether or not I like them... That's just silly.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't like the idea of significantly changing old xpacs. Where do you draw the line? For example, I don't think they should remove LFD, but I think they should remove welfare epics in order to force new characters to run old content before jumping into current tier raids. Then other people could be lobbying for nerfing DKs, magecleave in arenas, tweaking Naxx, etc. You can't satisfy everyone and everyone would rage at changing different things, even if some of the changes were pretty obvious.

Of course you can't satisfy everyone, but you can satisfy a majority. Welfare epics are a far less contentious point.

I mean I get your arguement, where is the line drawn and all that, but if we get wrath servers I literally guarantee you a vast majority of people would prefer them not including LFD. It's just simple. No need to over think it with what ifs and what elses.

This idea people spout that if you make one change, it must start a snowball effect is absolute nonsense. You can indeed make a single change and stop there. Furthermore, if they did theoretically poll us, and only a fraction of people responded, by polling a mixed user group they still get a better impression than none whatsoever.

- - - Updated - - -

Other things that happened in WotLK was reducing XP needed and turning most elite quests into regular ones. Also, mounts had their cost reduced and were available from level 30. Before WotLK, levelling was an integral part of the game and an experience by itself. New players were robbed of that with these changes.

Both of those changes were in TBC... The level 30 mounts were in 2.4.3, which was 4 months prior to wrath release. The easier leveling was 2.3 IIRC.

[Thelin]

The end would have to be WotLK - The culmination of the "Warcraft 3" storylines.

It's clear that after the WC3 source material was exhausted at the end of WotLK that there wasn't really a great plan for a follow-up. Deathwing is forgettable at best, hated at worst. I'd say until Legion the game really didn't have a single memorable antagonist. I'm not sure it's a coincidence that subscriptions started their steady slide downwards after WotLK, and only spiked again for longer than the launch window for Legion.

I hate to think the game is THAT tied to memorable storylines, but it appears it may be. While some of the more die-hard story folks appreciated Azshara, I don't think she was enough to bring people back to BFA. N'Zoth was too deep into the least friendly expansion for newcomers and alts ever made (and it's not even close - the catchup mechanics just aren't anywhere near enough when coupled with the insane RNG).

If there's anything about Shadowlands that concerns me, it's that it's a whole new batch of players, and they're taking the story off the rails for the first time.

To be fair, warcraft 3 was released in 2002. There are entire new demographics of people who are playing WoW that were not even born when Warcraft 2/3 was released so to them the ''original'' source material/storylines might not mean all that much. I was playing the original Orcs
& Humans at release so I'm dating myself. Also considering how a lot of the original storylines were jumbled as hell there very mostly a few core storylines that truly make sense. I think for me the nostalgia factor of WoW dies after WoTLK mostly because between the first 3 those are when I'd be at the gamestop @ midnight to pick up my copy and frankly outside of Legion ( I skipped MOP entirely) most recent expansions aren't my thing. At this point I'm not sure the game is really for me anymore in terms of how much time it would take to really get where I'd want to be (competitive raiding again). I tried it in BFA but its just too much to keep up with.

[erifwodahs]

they shouldn't have released classic then if that is the case.
For me they should do a poll after WotLK what expansion to re-release next. They would have my money on MoP and Legion for sure. I still hate pandas, but I am not that kid who didn't play the game because of a race anymore. I hear it had great class design and ToT was great. I hear.

[clevin]

There are three (and really only 3) options that make sense if they're going to go past Classic in the first place:

1) run through Wrath. This finished the RTS storyline and it comprises the old world set of expansions (since Cata redid the world).

2) Run through TBC. Wrath changed a lot of things about how you played (AoE DPS became important, CC much less so, Naxx, etc). Classic and TBC are similar in play style philosophy, Wrath was the beginning of the change (es 3.3 when LFG was introduced)

3) Simply re-release the entire series. If you're going to do Cata, there's no reason not to re-release MoP, etc etc.

[Heathy]

they shouldn't have released classic then if that is the case.
For me they should do a poll after WotLK what expansion to re-release next. They would have my money on MoP and Legion for sure. I still hate pandas, but I am not that kid who didn't play the game because of a race anymore. I hear it had great class design and ToT was great. I hear.

not for priests, I played a priest throughout and that chakra system was 100% shit. its no wonder it got changed/removed. basically turned priests into warriors with stances. aoe healing stance/ single target stance / dps stance. it was just terrible for a healer. you either spent most of your time in your single target stance (and didn't bother changing at all) or needing to swap stances to aoe heal. pfft. its just extra GCD's. for very little gain. it didn't add anything to the class and it just made what you did naturally prior to that system require more steps/more button presses to achieve the same thing you did before chakras were added.

[Yorimar]

going further then classic is already pointless... inbefore we get legacy servers for current expansions...