Blue confirmed they're considering balancing specs

[Perkunas]

Oh, I perfectly liked what it was back then. But what I liked about it (and some of that only came into focus when they changed them) was the slow pace. Quest chains sending you back and forth in the world, not railroading you through zones conveniently placed next to each other. Dungeons that you cleared pack by pack, not "gogogo" chainpulling everything. Attunements, even. Drawing admiring whispers when my gnome mage rode a Nightsaber. None of my "authentic Vanilla experience" is tied to actual class choices or class mechanics. And therefore I find it hard to understand why people stick to an admittedly broken balance. I could understand wanting to make sure your preferred spec works - but not wanting to make sure others don't.

Because specs worked. Raiding was not the way in which you judged a spec. Raiding was just a niche activity for the hardcore. Balance druids worked fine in 5-mans/PVP/farming/leveling. Shadow worked amazing in PVP and leveling etc. This is a non-problem.

[rda]

Those who are worried about Blizzard maybe trying to balance classes and other things - you can stop worrying about it.

From what Blizzard said about their new plan to do classic servers, it looks like they are going to try doing them by using the unmodified old server in a virtualized environment that makes the server think it is talking to the old back-end / old clients. Everything they said points to that - them for a long time not knowing how to deliver classic and then suddenly knowing (someone got the idea to do it the way above), them hiring a new team (that is only possible when the new team doesn't have to dig into the old code and can only interact with it to the spec, a dead giveaway), etc. With things done that way they just won't be able to change much, even if they wanted to.

Whether this will make classic a failure or a success is a different matter, but they almost certainly won't balance anything.

A couple of blue posts cited in the beginning of the thread mulling about maybe balancing something are from CMs. CMs know nothing, they are completely ignorable.

[Elim Garak]

Ion Hazzikostas said "vanilla is vanilla". Ion Hazzikostas >>>>>>>> Random community manager.

Whoever doubted that vanilla is vanilla? We didn't need that confirmation. They aren't doing vanilla though. And I doubt Ion is even invloved with WoW Classic.

I think the level of paranoia is ridiculous. Blizzard doesn't want to create a new WoW with a huge team that spends all day trying to balance it

That's why they will release it already balanced.

[Mosotti]

Whoever doubted that vanilla is vanilla? We didn't need that confirmation. They aren't doing vanilla though. And I doubt Ion is even invloved with WoW Classic.

He's not involved with Classic, but be sure that he's involved with more important people than the random CM. Be sure that he knows better.

And who doubted that vanilla is vanilla? All the fucking paranoid idiots on these forum and Blizzard forum and the whole universe in general.

That's why they will release it already balanced.

Yeah, keep dreaming of paladin tanks and other wet dreams

They will probably fix some retarded bugs and MAYBE they will try to do something about having many people at once in the same place at the start. Anyone hoping for major changes is delusional.

[Deleted]

For me, it's a desire to experience the raids exactly as they were back then, so as to have an accurate comparison with what people went through back then. That's why I'd prefer the patches to roll out, just as they did back then.

You will not have that experience no matter how you try, things were different in many ways back then. There were less sources of information, no wowheads or the like, not really the kind of buss guides you have now. Simply knowing some of the things alters the landscape enough to make it vastly different experience to how it was when people like myself did the content years ago.

Trying to capture it is just a dream that will not really come to pass. People have tried it, there are just too many tools outside of the game itself that alter things. I do not know a single genuine vanilla player who enjoyed the state of class balance over how things progressed over time. The class balance wasn't exactly the main appeal of vanilla. It was having less convenience, making it so that if you wanted to do things you couldn't just be utterly lazy. You also needed to make friends and contacts, you had to be social to accomplish things. Also leveling offering a form of challenge and tutorial when playing new classes was enjoyable for many.

Things that people I played with and know, missed the social aspects, the feeling of the world without flying mounts and quick access to places. If you wanted to get somewhere fast, you'd think on the route you wanted to take etc.

Balancing the classes and making the really weak and undesired classes more at par and more enjoyable to play wouldn't change anything but the PVP heroes dreams of just running about smashing things simply cause they happened to level the right class to 60. Those kind of people aren't exactly looking for an authentic experience, they are simply looking to exploit things that they've learned from people that played before, to have fun at expense of others. Most of them who played at the time, would've been the ones getting their asses handed to them.

[rda]

Balancing the classes and making the really weak and undesired classes more at par and more enjoyable to play wouldn't change ...

It looks like they won't be able to do it because of the way they are implementing classic. (See #313.)

[weedburst]

The best thing is the people here who said Legacy is going to fail and then said if they change anything it's not Legacy will still proclaim the death of legacy when the Frankenstein servers die. Basically they've already claimed checkmate when we're playing fucking Clue.

that jumbled clusterfuck of words made far less sense than you think it did. try again, and proofread this time.

[Vorkreist]

Thank god they will balance specs. We might lose a dozen trolls that only want vanilla for mage 1 shot crap and other full retard vanilla balance.
Sitting on 3 broken specs because the rest are garbage = highlight of vanilla for some severely stupid people.

[Maudib]

Whoever doubted that vanilla is vanilla? We didn't need that confirmation. They aren't doing vanilla though. And I doubt Ion is even invloved with WoW Classic.

That's why they will release it already balanced.

I can only say how elated I am that Ion is not involved in Classic. He is one of the primary reasons WoW is so screwed now.

They will not balance classes for Classic. It will truly be a vanilla experience flaws and all.