WoW Classic Season of Mastery Design Intentions and Details

[Jastall]

It's funny because Vanilla original design was the opposite of “Faster Progression and More Challenging Content”.

Also one point of having Classic servers was to finally have permanent characters. To not have to restart our character everytime the pserver we were playing on got closed for some reason. Which is also funny.

Your characters in the baseline Classic servers are as permanent as it gets, these aren't getting removed.

Issue being that not very many people actually want to just run Naxx until they die of old age. Hence fresh/seasonal servers.

[Tealghara]

Your characters in the baseline Classic servers are as permanent as it gets, these aren't getting removed.

Issue being that not very many people actually want to just run Naxx until they die of old age. Hence fresh/seasonal servers.

The classic era servers still exist for ‘just as it was’ gameplay and permanent chars.

You're kinda missing the point about the lack of interest of starting againand again on a new server, but okay.

[twothe]

Blizzard still doesn't understand how random loot works after all these years.

Just to give you a bit of an idea: in my guild currently on TBCC we got 1 caster dagger from the prince (with 4-5 Karazhan runs per week), 0 caster weapons from Gruul and 0 caster weapons from SSC in about 8 month of raiding every single week. That means that literally everyone but one Mage is currently still wielding the pre-raid bis item in the 2nd raid tier, which easily is a difference of 10% dps for every single caster DD. All just because weren't particularly lucky on the loot rolls.

On WoW Classic season several guilds will simply not be able to participate in the race, because the random loot system will disqualify them with a dice roll.

[Tealghara]

WoW wasn't designed for competitive raiding in the first place. This is the reason behind random loot, it was a trophy not a necessity. Now because some people want to race, these shiny bits are too important.

Raiding is just a glorified soapbox race.

[Sinured]

You're kinda missing the point about the lack of interest of starting againand again on a new server, but okay.

you miss the point that the majority, not the unimportant loud minority like you, want the fresh over and over experience.
people are hopping from pserver to pserver for over 10y because of it.
some pserver had season servers and people loved them.
but hey, i love you, you must be a great person thinking "lolz what i think everybody thinkz lol!11"

[Tealghara]

I've been hopping from pserver to pserver for 10 years, because pservers got closed by B., some admins got corrupted, some projects forked into separate projects and on and on ...

It's funny how we still have these talks after how many years now ? "You're the loud minority ! I'm the majority". I'm just stating my experience and the one from my guildmates and people from my server.

You're the one calling yourself "the majority" and at the same time telling me "you must be a great person thinking "lolz what i think everybody thinkz lol!11"". Quite delightful.

[Utrrabbit]

I'm not sure a lot of people were asking for an accelerated timeframe to the point of rushing everything.
I mean, one of the main looking-after point of Classic was the possibility to relax and play at your own pace without everything being reset every three month. What this "Season of Mastery" does is the opposite.

I would have loved the change in raids (debuff limit, original boss abilities and NO WORLD BUFFS) during Classic. Now ? It's too late, and bundled with accelerated shit that is a complete show stopper.

Actually the accelerated time frame has been a HUGE thing asked for by people in the circles I run with. That being said most if them are from pservers where the entire lifespan of a server from mc to full naxx clear was only 3 to 4 months than the server was reset.

- - - Updated - - -

ok well you clearly don't know what you're talking about when you say they listen to players about retail decisions




it's really not that simple. The loot situation as it stands just won't be healthy for the player count, loot keeps a lot of people playing. In your scenario even when the player is chill about loot perform well, there may not even be the correct items dropping to reward them. Bad RNG and no rewards will eventually burn out any type of player.

It is not retail players asking but hardcore pserver players who have played nothing but vanilla for the last 10+years. The average life span of a pserver from mc to naxx was about 4 months. Longer than what blizz is doing. If blizz did what the majority wanted season of mastery from start to finish would be about 4 months long.

Ok lets see what they added that players asked for

LFD/LFR (was asked for in vanilla)
summon stone (was asked for in vanilla)
Garrisons
World quests
Flying (was asked for in vanilla)
Zone/mob lvl scaling
Mythic raiding
Valor

Their is more but I am at work and do not have time to list them all

[Azerate]

Seasonal Classic definitely needs more changes, and not just cosmetic bullshit a regular player doesn't care about. It needs crazy changes akin to those of D3/PoE/OSRS.seasonal games. If it's just slightly faster XP, slightly stronger bosses and more hp on them, no one's gonna care except for like 1000 people.

[Yeorgaki]

Surely they will increase reputation gains right? Amongst many other things that once took x amount of time to complete, they'll now be on the impossible side unless you play day and night and don't have a job or a life.

[Alydael]

I would like to see them add multi tap and transmog.

I also think it would be great if they actually added more to classic. Maybe a new wing in a dungeon or raid. Some new bosses, more quests.

There were things that didn't make it into each x pac, maybe they could start appearing.

Maybe at the end of the Season of Mastery, one new zone opens with new quests, a dungeon, a small raid, a related bg, etc.

Maybe they could add a new zone or update the old zones now and again.

We already: played Classic then we replayed Classic. It was just as easy to beat as we all said it would be. They shouldn't just repurpose it again with a few new bells and whistles (what's the point?). If it is coming back it should represent a very clear evolution of design. Season of Mastery clearly doesn't atm. They have basically just made a few adjustments.

There is potential here.
The problem is that Blizz often has really good ideas, it is the way they implement it that is just God awful and half the time runs counter to the original purpose. Like VP in M+ People were complaining about lack of gear dropping. So they implemented a "catch up bad luck system" as VP in M+. Sounds great, right? Idea was good, implementation was terrible (did the devs that designed that VP system even ever play WoW?) Only problem was that you needed to time all plus 15s to upgrade the gear to a respectable level. The thing is if you timed all 15s, you didn't need that gear at all.......... Literally made zero sense.

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Seasonal Classic definitely needs more changes, and not just cosmetic bullshit a regular player doesn't care about. It needs crazy changes akin to those of D3/PoE/OSRS.seasonal games. If it's just slightly faster XP, slightly stronger bosses and more hp on them, no one's gonna care except for like 1000 people.

I agree. We played Classic, then we replayed Classic. We said it would be easy, it was. If they want to relaunch it again (for a third time now) there needs to be a clear evolution in the game, not just the few adjustments under the hood that the Season of Mastery currently has.

There are so few changes, it isn't enough to draw anybody besides the people that love Classic and will just keep playing it over and over and over as you drop it. You don't need to change for those people, they will just keep playing........

Basically, they are in the process of deciding who this would appeal to. As is, just the Classic Die harders. There is just not enough new stuff and changes to draw anyone else atm.

[Aphrel]

welcome to original classic wow

Welcome? I killed him in vanilla lol. And that was with worldbuffs during our first couple of kills (mainly ZG+Ony).

As did every other guild on our server that got that far. The meta of late naxx progression in vanilla wasnt very unlike what we saw in classic.

Just half the amount of warriors you see and subtract 10% dps for latency issues and you got vanilla naxx.

[duster2]

WOW dying faster than I thought... Blizzard will definitely find multiple ways to monetize it for the next 20 years. Diablo 2 resurrected says Hi!