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

[Orby]

They'll do the trilogy. I think up to WotLK... cannot imagine many people clamouring form Classic Cataclysm though :P

[Cempa]

I honestly don't understand why people herald WOTLK as being so good. Maybe because that's when they started playing, a.k.a Wrath Babies? Here's some perspective from someone who raided Vanilla --> TBC --> WOTLK.

WOTLK gets released. Getting to 80 is a joke, with easy quests, elite group-quests that could be soloed all over the place if you were good (except the Arena in the frost-troll area). We walk into Naxxramas25, and we 1-shot everything while wearing our Sunwell Plateau gear from TBC (because triple-gem-slots is OP). We realise Sapphiron's aura did more dmg in Lv60 Naxxramas when we had 4k HP than in WOTLK when we had 25k HP. Malygos was OK, but some people got put off because of the vehicle portion of the fight. Sartharion + 3 drakes 25man was the only decently challenging content we had, as a raiding guild that had cleared most of Naxx in Vanilla and all of SWP in TBC.
Vault of Archavon is a PUGable Loot Pinata that rewarded current Raiding and Gladiator gear. Casualization of the game has begun, with raiding gear and Gladi gear dropping from bosses that were disgustingly easy.

Ulduar gets released. Stellar raid, amazing aesthetics, amazing bossfights, introduction of Hard Modes etc and so forth. Noone complained, everyone loved it. Alas, it lasted very, very little.

TOTGC is released. Boring raid. 1 room, no trash mobs. Limited attempts. Gated bosses. Only hard part was getting Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, which we never got, cause Anub'arak was a bitch (Tribute to Dedicated Insanity was where you 1-shot everything).

Then, lastly, came the dreaded 13 months of ICC. THIRTEEN MONTHS. Gated progress, piss-easy bosses, except the end-wing bosses of each wing, these being Prof Putridice, Blood Queen Lan'Athel and LK25HC himself. Huge need to run 10man HC as well as 25man HC because some loot from 10man HC (which, mind you, was on par with 25man Normal, i.e ilvl264) was damn good. Getting Bloodbathed and Frostbrood Vanquisher was fun, I guess, but a raid with 13 bosses where only 2 of them were of any decent challenge, and 1 (LK25HC) was an amazing bossfight that needed hundreds of wipes is not the definition of a "good" raid. Ulduar, was a good raid. Thorim/Hodir/Freya/Mimiron hardmodes were amazing. Yogg + 0, Algalon, the list goes on. Even the Iron Council with its different ordering of killing the bosses was a very nice tribute to the Bug Trio in AQ40.

I'm not even gonna mention Ruby Sanctum, that was just....irrelevant.

Hence, for a veteran hardcore raider, WOTLK was not a good expansion. The starting tier was a joke, Ulduar was amazing, TOTGC was shit, ICC was shit bar 3-4 fights that were spectacular. I'm not even gonna start about WOTLK's "Heroic" dungeons, that were a far-cry from TBC's excellent Heroic dungeons. You could wipe in Shattered Halls HC or Shadow Labyrinth HC in T6 gear, if you played badly. In WOTLK? As a bear tank in full 277 gear and my 284 weap from LK? I could practically solo them. This was also when Mionelol (kudos if you remember who he is) started his solo projects, if I remember correctly.

So...yeah. WOTLK was bad, for a veteran. I'm sure for a new player who started in WOTLK it was amazing. But for us, it was not.

As a raider I stopped after having some of my best gaming moments in Ulduar .. Why? The rest was no where near as fun!

I shifted over to PvP/alts.

[Erolian]

I honestly don't understand why people herald WOTLK as being so good. Maybe because that's when they started playing, a.k.a Wrath Babies? Here's some perspective from someone who raided Vanilla --> TBC --> WOTLK.

WOTLK gets released. Getting to 80 is a joke, with easy quests, elite group-quests that could be soloed all over the place if you were good (except the Arena in the frost-troll area). We walk into Naxxramas25, and we 1-shot everything while wearing our Sunwell Plateau gear from TBC (because triple-gem-slots is OP). We realise Sapphiron's aura did more dmg in Lv60 Naxxramas when we had 4k HP than in WOTLK when we had 25k HP. Malygos was OK, but some people got put off because of the vehicle portion of the fight. Sartharion + 3 drakes 25man was the only decently challenging content we had, as a raiding guild that had cleared most of Naxx in Vanilla and all of SWP in TBC.
Vault of Archavon is a PUGable Loot Pinata that rewarded current Raiding and Gladiator gear. Casualization of the game has begun, with raiding gear and Gladi gear dropping from bosses that were disgustingly easy.

Ulduar gets released. Stellar raid, amazing aesthetics, amazing bossfights, introduction of Hard Modes etc and so forth. Noone complained, everyone loved it. Alas, it lasted very, very little.

TOTGC is released. Boring raid. 1 room, no trash mobs. Limited attempts. Gated bosses. Only hard part was getting Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, which we never got, cause Anub'arak was a bitch (Tribute to Dedicated Insanity was where you 1-shot everything).

Then, lastly, came the dreaded 13 months of ICC. THIRTEEN MONTHS. Gated progress, piss-easy bosses, except the end-wing bosses of each wing, these being Prof Putridice, Blood Queen Lan'Athel and LK25HC himself. Huge need to run 10man HC as well as 25man HC because some loot from 10man HC (which, mind you, was on par with 25man Normal, i.e ilvl264) was damn good. Getting Bloodbathed and Frostbrood Vanquisher was fun, I guess, but a raid with 13 bosses where only 2 of them were of any decent challenge, and 1 (LK25HC) was an amazing bossfight that needed hundreds of wipes is not the definition of a "good" raid. Ulduar, was a good raid. Thorim/Hodir/Freya/Mimiron hardmodes were amazing. Yogg + 0, Algalon, the list goes on. Even the Iron Council with its different ordering of killing the bosses was a very nice tribute to the Bug Trio in AQ40.

I'm not even gonna mention Ruby Sanctum, that was just....irrelevant.

Hence, for a veteran hardcore raider, WOTLK was not a good expansion. The starting tier was a joke, Ulduar was amazing, TOTGC was shit, ICC was shit bar 3-4 fights that were spectacular. I'm not even gonna start about WOTLK's "Heroic" dungeons, that were a far-cry from TBC's excellent Heroic dungeons. You could wipe in Shattered Halls HC or Shadow Labyrinth HC in T6 gear, if you played badly. In WOTLK? As a bear tank in full 277 gear and my 284 weap from LK? I could practically solo them. This was also when Mionelol (kudos if you remember who he is) started his solo projects, if I remember correctly.

So...yeah. WOTLK was bad, for a veteran. I'm sure for a new player who started in WOTLK it was amazing. But for us, it was not.

Its probably worth noting that all content included in this post will no longer be challenging or really relevant in that sense to modern wow players who have continued to progress. So I'm not sure challenging PvE content will ever be the draw for classic servers unless they start to pump them out and get to more recent expansions quickly. Its really about nostalgia, community and pace. The hardcore or experienced group of players on each of these servers will pretty much be rolling most content upon release. I think 25hc lk would perhaps be cool to watch without the raidwide buff but I suspect people will just stack classes and gear specifically for that and it'll turn out to be a lot easier than we thought back then when it was all new and unexpected

[Usernameforforums]

As long as there're enough people on each expansion server to keep things alive and going, why would you care?

I dont care, but am i wrong?

[Zarator8]

I dont care, but am i wrong?

You still haven't even explained why would that be a problem.

[Mosha]

I dont care, but am i wrong?

Yeah you sort of are wrong... If someone doesn't want to play vanilla anymore they aren't going to just stick around with vanilla and go "Well this is all I got so I guess I'll keep playing"... they will just quit. Also, if someone wants to play vanilla forever and this is the game they want to stick with, they will stick with vanilla regardless of whats released.

This isn't splintering the community, this is opening up communities for people who might otherwise not be playing wow.

See if you made two classic wows and they were both vanilla and lets just say one had alliance shamans and horde paladins and the other didn't. THIS would be splintering the community. Because both are the same version of the same game but just slightly different. If you had just one server then they would all likely just stick to that one. When you are talking about almost completely separate games then this is no longer the case.

[Recovery]

Can see it ending with WotLK. Not much reason not to bring out WotLK as well though. WotLK still added more depth to the game (deeper talent trees, glyphs, dual specialization etc.) as well as QoL changes that were actually good (mount tab, pet tab, faster mounting etc.) as well as having mostly good raids, at least towards the end. Cataclysm did away with a lot of this which is why it ultimately failed.

Would be a reasonable end as well as this would mean you have both a pre-Cataclysm and a post-Cataclysm world to explore.

I mean alot of people are forgetting even the simple fact that ACHIEVEMENTS werent a thing until wotlk. lol. You literally couldnt even flex until then.. Thats huge.

[Mosha]

I want patch 3.3. I want to kill Arthas on heroic. The rest of it I don’t really care about.

I care about this far more than I care about experiencing the new systems from TBC.

NGL I am excited for wotlk just because of pvp, but I will for SURE be raiding ulduar if I can get into a group. HOW YOU NOT EXCITED FOR ULDUAR BRO WTF

- - - Updated - - -

I mean alot of people are forgetting even the simple fact that ACHIEVEMENTS werent a thing until wotlk. lol. You literally couldnt even flex until then.. Thats huge.

I mean... you could flex pretty fuckin hard as a rogue with glaives on an amani war bear and glad title...

[Recovery]

I honestly don't understand why people herald WOTLK as being so good. Maybe because that's when they started playing, a.k.a Wrath Babies? Here's some perspective from someone who raided Vanilla --> TBC --> WOTLK.

WOTLK gets released. Getting to 80 is a joke, with easy quests, elite group-quests that could be soloed all over the place if you were good (except the Arena in the frost-troll area). We walk into Naxxramas25, and we 1-shot everything while wearing our Sunwell Plateau gear from TBC (because triple-gem-slots is OP). We realise Sapphiron's aura did more dmg in Lv60 Naxxramas when we had 4k HP than in WOTLK when we had 25k HP. Malygos was OK, but some people got put off because of the vehicle portion of the fight. Sartharion + 3 drakes 25man was the only decently challenging content we had, as a raiding guild that had cleared most of Naxx in Vanilla and all of SWP in TBC.
Vault of Archavon is a PUGable Loot Pinata that rewarded current Raiding and Gladiator gear. Casualization of the game has begun, with raiding gear and Gladi gear dropping from bosses that were disgustingly easy.

Ulduar gets released. Stellar raid, amazing aesthetics, amazing bossfights, introduction of Hard Modes etc and so forth. Noone complained, everyone loved it. Alas, it lasted very, very little.

TOTGC is released. Boring raid. 1 room, no trash mobs. Limited attempts. Gated bosses. Only hard part was getting Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, which we never got, cause Anub'arak was a bitch (Tribute to Dedicated Insanity was where you 1-shot everything).

Then, lastly, came the dreaded 13 months of ICC. THIRTEEN MONTHS. Gated progress, piss-easy bosses, except the end-wing bosses of each wing, these being Prof Putridice, Blood Queen Lan'Athel and LK25HC himself. Huge need to run 10man HC as well as 25man HC because some loot from 10man HC (which, mind you, was on par with 25man Normal, i.e ilvl264) was damn good. Getting Bloodbathed and Frostbrood Vanquisher was fun, I guess, but a raid with 13 bosses where only 2 of them were of any decent challenge, and 1 (LK25HC) was an amazing bossfight that needed hundreds of wipes is not the definition of a "good" raid. Ulduar, was a good raid. Thorim/Hodir/Freya/Mimiron hardmodes were amazing. Yogg + 0, Algalon, the list goes on. Even the Iron Council with its different ordering of killing the bosses was a very nice tribute to the Bug Trio in AQ40.

I'm not even gonna mention Ruby Sanctum, that was just....irrelevant.

Hence, for a veteran hardcore raider, WOTLK was not a good expansion. The starting tier was a joke, Ulduar was amazing, TOTGC was shit, ICC was shit bar 3-4 fights that were spectacular. I'm not even gonna start about WOTLK's "Heroic" dungeons, that were a far-cry from TBC's excellent Heroic dungeons. You could wipe in Shattered Halls HC or Shadow Labyrinth HC in T6 gear, if you played badly. In WOTLK? As a bear tank in full 277 gear and my 284 weap from LK? I could practically solo them. This was also when Mionelol (kudos if you remember who he is) started his solo projects, if I remember correctly.

So...yeah. WOTLK was bad, for a veteran. I'm sure for a new player who started in WOTLK it was amazing. But for us, it was not.

You mean the ICC gunship fight wasnt the most amazing boss fight youve every participated in while playing wow? What? GUNSHIP gets no mention? ARE YOU KIDDIGN ME? That fight made wow.

[Recovery]

NGL I am excited for wotlk just because of pvp, but I will for SURE be raiding ulduar if I can get into a group. HOW YOU NOT EXCITED FOR ULDUAR BRO WTF

- - - Updated - - -



I mean... you could flex pretty fuckin hard as a rogue with glaives on an amani war bear and glad title...

I guess that true.. But you would be surprised how many people didnt even know what a glad title were.. I literally cant even tell you how many times in BC I was chilling on my merciless nether drake while rocking a glad title.. and got the whisper "how you get that"? Sure people were amazed by the mount.. But there was no recognition amongst them.. Most of the population didnt even know how it was obtained..

Those were the glory days though.. Where things you obtained through pvp werent also obtainable through pve. I was so disappointed when they took the glad drake in wotlk and reskinned it nearly identical and made it a reward form the icc meta achiev.. sad sad days.

BOO HOO awesome looking mount that we cant get cause we dont know how pvp werk. Okay guys, look, get a few relatively achievs in ICC and well give you the mount.. Thats fair right?

[Mosha]

Ulduar is intriguing, yes, but ICC is where I started to raid. That place is basically holy ground to me. I remember it taking forever to get a group set up, then when we got inside the atmosphere was just stunning to me. The Tyrion voiceovers, the trash, I loved it all. It's the only raid I ever go back to in game, and usually I get sad because it's waaaayyy too easy. I would love to re-experience it with the skills I have now.

Oh dont get me wrong ICC was fucking amazing. I actually love the time locked, death limit thing they had there. It made for really fun progression.

- - - Updated - - -

You mean the ICC gunship fight wasnt the most amazing boss fight youve every participated in while playing wow? What? GUNSHIP gets no mention? ARE YOU KIDDIGN ME? That fight made wow.

I loved the gunship fight but honestly I don't think it has anything on Ulduar fights. Christ leviathan alone, the first boss entering the fucking place, was SO much fucking fun.

[Nak88]

I agree with the posters above. ICC was a hell of a raid, one of the best I've ever seen. Can't wait to play it again.

[gutnbrg]

so i take it u werent a WOTLK fan....

[Will]

Going any further with "Classic" is like a dog chasing its own tail. It's stupid, and pointless, and you end up back where you started.

Oh don't be ridiculous. Just because they start down a path, doesn't mean it has to be followed to the very end. Or are you suggesting grown adults lack the ability to get off the train at a midway station?

[Jurwi]

Listen here Aizen mate, I'm sick and tired of twats like you slurring your utterly irrelevant opinions on these forums when clearly everyone isn't AIZEN. This is NOT World of Aizen right mate and if you think you're gonna stop me from sailing to Northrend, assaulting the shores and marching upon Icecrown merely to cry over an enemies death you're out of your mind. Have a fucking cuppa and sit down lad.

Rant over.

Wait, so it's World of Angrydave then? How come Angrydave can voice his opinion but Aizen can not?

[Sardoc]

Oh, they will do TBC and WOTLK, because that's what the fans want (and will pay for).

We all know they need easy projects for guaranteed profit after failure known as Warcraft 3: Refunded.

On a side note, I've already backed up my original Diablo 2 game and installer, in case they pull another dumb stunt.

[Zarator8]

Wait, so it's World of Angrydave then? How come Angrydave can voice his opinion but Aizen can not?

Maybe because Aizen is pledging for Angrydave to not get the version of WoW he (and many others) wants, rather than the other way around? Just saying.

I mean heck, if by some twist of fate there was a massive movement demanding to play Cataclysm after WotLK comes out, I'm pretty sure Blizzard would comply. And rightfully so. If there's one thing the pservers taught Blizz is that you can't stop people from playing what they like

[Mosha]

Maybe because Aizen is pledging for Angrydave to not get the version of WoW he (and many others) wants, rather than the other way around? Just saying.

I mean heck, if by some twist of fate there was a massive movement demanding to play Cataclysm after WotLK comes out, I'm pretty sure Blizzard would comply. And rightfully so. If there's one thing the pservers taught Blizz is that you can't stop people from playing what they like

This is way down the line, but I can 100% see them doing something similar to EQ after we run through wotlk. Just find different ways to run vanilla-wotlk

[Jurwi]

I mean heck, if by some twist of fate there was a massive movement demanding to play Cataclysm after WotLK comes out, I'm pretty sure Blizzard would comply. And rightfully so. If there's one thing the pservers taught Blizz is that you can't stop people from playing what they like

Naturally, yes. Though I kind of doubt it will go past TBC Classic anyways. It will probably already have much lower player numbers than Vanilla Classic. I mean heck, tons of guilds in Vanilla Classic are already struggling with their rosters because people lost their interest. Including the one I'm in.

[Will]

Naturally, yes. Though I kind of doubt it will go past TBC Classic anyways. It will probably already have much lower player numbers than Vanilla Classic. I mean heck, tons of guilds in Vanilla Classic are already struggling with their rosters because people lost their interest. Including the one I'm in.

That post contains so much wrong it's painful to read.

Please read the actual thread and some of the great points and facts people have provided, not least of which are the following takeaways:

- wrath private servers are historically far far more popular than vanilla and tbc ones put together, despite all 3 early games (and later ones too) being offered. It makes literally no sense whatsoever not to capitalise on that from a business AND fan service perspective.

- vanilla servers can be condensed down if it comes to it. We currently have what? Over 30 per region?

- many people who want to play classic TBC or wrath have absolutely zero interest in classic vanilla, so those kinds of people aren't even playing classic anyway. I am waiting for TBC onwards because I find classic uninteresting. Many people only play classic because they hope for TBC and the same will apply for wrath. These people constitute an audience for TBC and wrath who won't detract from the vanilla playerbase.... Because they're not playing it to begin with...

- people will lose interest in classic over time regardless, if they haven't already. That's not going to be the fault of them re-introducing TBC or wrath. The difference is with TBC and wrath on the table, they might be retained in some capacity, as opposed to lost as customers. Some are only playing classic because they hope to advance to TBC, and the same logic will apply to wrath. They'll just quit if it hits a wall. (The number of people who will want to progress beyond that to Cata will be much much more limited).

- I highly doubt TBC classic will have lower average player numbers. It'll possibly have a smaller initial surge, because classic was an oddity as most players started playing on the tbc and wrath era, but by extension this means most players would play TBC and wrath in a heartbeat over vanilla. Those are widely considered the 2 most beloved versions of WoW for a reason.

- even if everything else I wrote is false (which it isn't) it would still be worth it for blizzard to do wrath again because I shit you not, the surge of resubs to work required ratio is way too good to pass up. It's easy money, easy popularity, and it can be release-timed to plug lulls in retail. They're still a business. Their goal is easy money.

- a lot of vanilla guilds might also be struggling with their rosters because, umm, raids require a colossal 40 players? That's a noteworthy point, considering BC and wrath consecutively allowed smaller raid sizes to increase accessibility. Fielding enough players was an issue even back in actual vanilla. Vanilla is a logistical nightmare by modern standards.