First impressions from playing the stress test

[HuxNeva]

I did not get into the beta, so all I have to go on is the stress test environment. I tried getting logged in during the stress test window itself, but gave up after 40 mins of repetitively being stuck in queue, waiting for the server list, trying to log into the realm and being disconnected. Next day login went smooth. I made two characters, one Horde side, on Alliance side, and played them for about 2 hours each. These are my subjective findings.

- There were a lot more players active Horde side (Orc/Troll zone) then Ally side (Dwarf/Gnome zone), like 5 times as many.

- The experience was mostly smooth and bug-free, yet laggy from Europe

- I still feel the old graphics aged well and still prove the art department was always great.

- Questing will have you stand around for a long time if you insist on doing it, competing with hundreds of others to tag the same mobs. Layering seems to do its job as it is by far not as bad as fresh realm openings on popular private servers. You can easily avoid it by just grinding up a level or 2-3 and get ahead of the curve.

- Layering does keep you and he players together nicely, but you will see mobs phasing

- Node spawn rate (herbs and ore) is very fast. This could be because while there were many players few of them bothered with gathering.

- Mobs drop a lot of grey gear, and later quests are very lucrative. At the end of around 2-3 hours of casual play, I'd have about 2 gold left, without doing any AH and having bought all the best vendor gear and bags.

- The world is tuned very easy. You can handle mobs 2-3 levels above you, and getting unintended aggro on a few mobs around your own level is easily recoverable. I guess this was always he case, but I just did not know how to play years ago. The world tuning feels way more easy than what I experienced on 'Blizz-like' private servers though. Playing Ironman on retail feels much more difficult, but that might also be psychological as dying means game-over in that case.

- The 'community' is sadly as bad as I expected. Incessant one-up man-chip on "I'm more hardcore Vanilla than thou", I guess in part the streaming classic 'influencers' are to blame for this toxic 'influence', intermixed with walls of anal thunderfury and guild invite spam. I hope the player 'ignore' lists are limitless.

- Grouping up / making 'friends' is as easy as on retail. Just inspect a toon, give them a piece of gear they can use, or a potion, enchant, food or an elixir, and start a chat. It is sad that people are so unused to being helped out. This has nothing to do with the game, it is just that people seem so IRL conditioned to see others as 'competition' rather than partners.

Overall I realy like the Classic leveling game. It is very simple and slower paced. While in theory you could do that on retail as well, it would always be nagging in the back of your mind hat you are deliberately gimping yourself by playing with self imposed restrictions (no heirlooms, or only greys etc). In Classic that 'but you could ...' is blissfully absent, which to me is one of the main features. People that will go in expecting an 'as it felt back then' experience are in for a rude awakening though. You can't unlearn 15 years of knowledge and experience.

[draynay]

Hard to comment on difficulty when the level cap is 5.

[Veknazel]

You can handle mobs 2-3 levels above you, and getting unintended aggro on a few mobs around your own level is easily recoverable.

What class did you play? I assume not a warrior or rogue.

[StillMcfuu]

- There were a lot more players active Horde side (Orc/Troll zone) then Ally side (Dwarf/Gnome zone), like 5 times as many.


- The world is tuned very easy. You can handle mobs 2-3 levels above you, and getting unintended aggro on a few mobs around your own level is easily recoverable. I guess this was always he case, but I just did not know how to play years ago. The world tuning feels way more easy than what I experienced on 'Blizz-like' private servers though. Playing Ironman on retail feels much more difficult, but that might also be psychological as dying means game-over in that case.

Orc/Troll are #1 and #2 (maybe #3 behind Undead) in popularity while Dwarf/Gnome are the 2 least popular races for Alliance.

It's level 5, it about as hard as it was originally, really everything about Classic is going to be easy until you get into harder more compact areas or you quest outside of your level range. Also private servers didn't have accurate recreations of the Original experience and were often tuned harder than originally intended.

[Charge me Doctor]

What class did you play? I assume not a warrior or rogue.

I played paladin and could pull about 5 mobs together while to 50% health and at level 4 or so. A friend of mine could pull 2-3 mobs together (because he was starving for rage) without any problems. We even killed hogger with 5 players at level 5 with a paladin, priest, warlock, mage and a warrior.

[HuxNeva]

What class did you play? I assume not a warrior or rogue.

I did play Hunters this time. You are correct that difficulty varies in early levels, although tbh I have played those on private servers and the main difference is downtime due to more eating between pulls

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Orc/Troll are #1 and #2 (maybe #3 behind Undead) in popularity while Dwarf/Gnome are the 2 least popular races for Alliance.

It's level 5, it about as hard as it was originally, really everything about Classic is going to be easy until you get into harder more compact areas or you quest outside of your level range. Also private servers didn't have accurate recreations of the Original experience and were often tuned harder than originally intended.

Grouped up with another lvl5 hunter, and we could easily farm the lvl10 gnomes outside Gnomergan.

[Shaetha]

Orc/Troll are #1 and #2 (maybe #3 behind Undead) in popularity while Dwarf/Gnome are the 2 least popular races for Alliance.

It's level 5, it about as hard as it was originally, really everything about Classic is going to be easy until you get into harder more compact areas or you quest outside of your level range. Also private servers didn't have accurate recreations of the Original experience and were often tuned harder than originally intended.

I think the biggest in it not seeming as hard is people actually knowing game mechanics. I remember when I first started not wanting to train shadow spells because I was stuck on the D&D idea of having limited spell slots.

[FelPlague]

I did not get into the beta, so all I have to go on is the stress test environment. I tried getting logged in during the stress test window itself, but gave up after 40 mins of repetitively being stuck in queue, waiting for the server list, trying to log into the realm and being disconnected. Next day login went smooth. I made two characters, one Horde side, on Alliance side, and played them for about 2 hours each. These are my subjective findings.

- There were a lot more players active Horde side (Orc/Troll zone) then Ally side (Dwarf/Gnome zone), like 5 times as many.

- The experience was mostly smooth and bug-free, yet laggy from Europe

- I still feel the old graphics aged well and still prove the art department was always great.

- Questing will have you stand around for a long time if you insist on doing it, competing with hundreds of others to tag the same mobs. Layering seems to do its job as it is by far not as bad as fresh realm openings on popular private servers. You can easily avoid it by just grinding up a level or 2-3 and get ahead of the curve.

- Layering does keep you and he players together nicely, but you will see mobs phasing

- Node spawn rate (herbs and ore) is very fast. This could be because while there were many players few of them bothered with gathering.

- Mobs drop a lot of grey gear, and later quests are very lucrative. At the end of around 2-3 hours of casual play, I'd have about 2 gold left, without doing any AH and having bought all the best vendor gear and bags.

- The world is tuned very easy. You can handle mobs 2-3 levels above you, and getting unintended aggro on a few mobs around your own level is easily recoverable. I guess this was always he case, but I just did not know how to play years ago. The world tuning feels way more easy than what I experienced on 'Blizz-like' private servers though. Playing Ironman on retail feels much more difficult, but that might also be psychological as dying means game-over in that case.

- The 'community' is sadly as bad as I expected. Incessant one-up man-chip on "I'm more hardcore Vanilla than thou", I guess in part the streaming classic 'influencers' are to blame for this toxic 'influence', intermixed with walls of anal thunderfury and guild invite spam. I hope the player 'ignore' lists are limitless.

- Grouping up / making 'friends' is as easy as on retail. Just inspect a toon, give them a piece of gear they can use, or a potion, enchant, food or an elixir, and start a chat. It is sad that people are so unused to being helped out. This has nothing to do with the game, it is just that people seem so IRL conditioned to see others as 'competition' rather than partners.

Overall I realy like the Classic leveling game. It is very simple and slower paced. While in theory you could do that on retail as well, it would always be nagging in the back of your mind hat you are deliberately gimping yourself by playing with self imposed restrictions (no heirlooms, or only greys etc). In Classic that 'but you could ...' is blissfully absent, which to me is one of the main features. People that will go in expecting an 'as it felt back then' experience are in for a rude awakening though. You can't unlearn 15 years of knowledge and experience.

1. funny because all the videos i saw alliance was much more active
2.yeah after the first like 3 hours
3. uhhhh no not really, idk if you know but the default graphics are not the vanilla graphics, you need to clickc the classic button in the bottom left
4. yeah prrty much
5. no you dont see mobs phasing, literally there was only 1 count, and it was actuallty a vanilla bug called zone locking
6. they were that fast, just not many people cared about gathering in this
7. yes thats about how it was, issue is you were locked at 5 and just farmign for hours, instead of actuallty leveling, meaning having to buy new skills, and get higher gear
8. yes welcome t low level, at low level you could always take mobs a few levels above you, as you got hgiher it got much harder though. and yeah private servers are wlel known for being shit. and ironman on retail feels harder cause the world is based on you having talents and greens and blues, not whites and no skills
9. yeah welcome to the classic community

[lonely zergling]

You got so much gold on stresstest because you were at level cap and all the xp from quests got transformed into gold values.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

You can "handle" mobs 2-3 levels above you.

If by handle you mean nearly die and would die if you pulled more than one. Which you will. Plenty. Once everything becomes hostile to you.

[StillMcfuu]

I did play Hunters this time. You are correct that difficulty varies in early levels, although tbh I have played those on private servers and the main difference is downtime due to more eating between pulls

- - - Updated - - -



Grouped up with another lvl5 hunter, and we could easily farm the lvl10 gnomes outside Gnomergan.

And I was soloing lvl8s+ on a warrior. In vanilla I used to solo world elites on my warlock by dotting and chain fear them.
Game has always been this way.

- - - Updated - - -

I think the biggest in it not seeming as hard is people actually knowing game mechanics. I remember when I first started not wanting to train shadow spells because I was stuck on the D&D idea of having limited spell slots.

That too, that will play a huge role come raid and max level dungeon time. But the game itself was never difficult. Maybe punishing would be a better word, if you consider bad pulls being a death and long corpse runs. But if you did what you were supposed to do it was easy.
Especially at level 5, hell even lvl30 dungeons were easy.

[HuxNeva]

You got so much gold on stresstest because you were at level cap and all the xp from quests got transformed into gold values.

Good point.

- - - Updated - - -

You can "handle" mobs 2-3 levels above you.

If by handle you mean nearly die and would die if you pulled more than one. Which you will. Plenty. Once everything becomes hostile to you.

Not really. Handing one lvl8 as a lvl5 hunter you don't lose much health at all. In fact, I barely if ever had to eat. I did have an elixir of minor defense on. 2 mobs, no problem, more became iffy solo if they were all lvl7-8 and you had no space to kite much.

[Alex86el]

Man, the only bad thing i noticed was that there were more Horde in Elwyn Forest than there were Alliance.
Same with Classic streams. There's like 3 playing Alliance, rest is Horde.

Blizzard really need to do something about this.
Though i understand they cant just undo like 10 years of Horde dev hype and marketing =\
Everyone wants to join the cool kids bandwagon. (then whine about the long BG queues)

[Fathr]

Man, the only bad thing i noticed was that there were more Horde in Elwyn Forest than there were Alliance.
Same with Classic streams. There's like 3 playing Alliance, rest is Horde.

Blizzard really need to do something about this.
Though i understand they cant just undo like 10 years of Horde dev hype and marketing =\
Everyone wants to join the cool kids bandwagon. (then whine about the long BG queues)

Sounds good to me as I will be going Ally this time around (like I originally did in Vanilla, but turned Undead after BWL due to enfatiation with the UD mage casting animation )

[Phuongvi]

So I just realised that doing the cactus quest on Orc side was a pain in the ass just clicking on the cactus, you know, wait 3 or 4 seconds just to pick that shit.
I didn't realised through the years they nerfed the picking time on items

So basically I did not do a stress test but a welcome to reality test

[WowClassic]

Hm what should I trust, my own eyes after watching hours of beta streams and listening to the views of trusted people like Venruki or someone who played a stress test for a couple of hours at level 5. Such a tough decision.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I think the tuning is probably fine.