What about TBC do you think people will be most surprised by?

[ozzynclyde]

Very early on I think some mages and priests will struggle with gear balance. They will be juiced about their crafted gear but are being one shot by some mechanics because the barely have 5k hp. Stamina is crucial in early t4 for these two classes.

[ClassicPeon]

You pretty much have the same tools you have now while you no longer need to stance dance for Thunderclap and it gets a talent that significantly boosts its damage, but doesn't scale with AP, either.

I just checked the numbers on the max rank Thunder clap in TBC and it does about 123 damage, with Imp. Thunderclap which increases its damage by 100%, it's going to be 246, even with the threat multiplier from defstance & defiance, that may keep threat off very weak AoE, but not stop a lock that's spamming Seed.
And if you can't bring strong AoE, then what's the point of doing it? Any time you gain is lost by the healer having to sit down and reg.

Of course, Cleave and Tab target Devastate is a thing, but that's not going be to something your average warrior will pull off properly, disregarding that your group will most certainly adjust their playstyle around it.

I just don't see that working for the playerbase at large, it basically requires the warrior to be an above average player while also requiring the entire group to play around it, to deliver a worse payoff than a Prot pally.

I'm pretty confident that most prot warriors are able to tab target and spam dev in between tc and cleave.

The added threat from def stance and no rage loss from stance dancing leads to a whole lot of more threat. As far as i remember we can also charge in defensive stance meaning more burst threat.

+ things like MD from hunters (and possible from rogues?)

[Kralljin]

The added threat from def stance and no rage loss from stance dancing leads to a whole lot of more threat.

the rage loss still exists, albeit in a diminished form.
You keep 10 Rage baseline and can talent into additional 15 via talent, said talent is hardly useful for prot outside of that.

As far as i remember we can also charge in defensive stance meaning more burst threat.

That's Wotlk.

+ things like MD from hunters (and possible from rogues?)

MD is kinda iffy because Hunter AoE isn't that great in TBC and rogues don't have tricks until Wotlk.

[schwarzkopf]

How bad of an expansion it was, and how they will be itching for LK classic as soon as the portal opens.

[Akka]

I just checked the numbers on the max rank Thunder clap in TBC and it does about 123 damage, with Imp. Thunderclap which increases its damage by 100%, it's going to be 246, even with the threat multiplier from defstance & defiance, that may keep threat off very weak AoE, but not stop a lock that's spamming Seed.

I don't think anything in BC is tuned to be able to hold threat on a lock spamming Seed.
And if we get pre-nerf HC, we won't go AoEing mob in dungeon, at least not until we massively overgear the place. Many pre-nerf mob can litteraly two-shot a clothie, and holding a whole group can make a tank implode.

[czarek]

Still w8ing for WoW prime time called WOTLK.

[Inukashi]

While TBC was really an awesome xpac I don't think people might be surprised by the positive aspects, but they might have forgotten these:

Some of the most fun mechanics in tbc came from the old netcode. Like the MS-Warrior Swingtimer abuse.
I'm pretty sure this will be fixed in TBC Classic and therefor the MS warrior will be boring as hell.

Epic Moments like Gruul getting tanked by a rogue because you could get > 100% dodge at the start of the xpac are also fixed.

Some might have forgotten the 'hybrid 15% tax' and wonder why, whatever they do their class just can't get up to the dmg of a mage/rogue.

How bad arena pvp in the beginning was. Retri's main dmg source, the seals could be despelled. You could outheal a retri by applying a hot and just purging him.

Manaproblems for DPS classes where still a thing, even though they gave everyone a utility to fix this it was always strange to use. Like enhancement shaman's ultimate talent was a mana-reg talent, not a dmg talent.
Retri's got mana through getting healed, so they had to dmg themselves with Seal of Blood and so on.

[Zyky]

The impact of the "bring the class, not the player"-philosophy that is important for certain fights in TBC progression. Not looking forward to benching my good players and bringing others because "we just need that extra shaman here" or whatever.

Based on their statement over Leatherworking drums, I'm half expecting them to alter the whole shaman situation. I'm also fully expecting them to fix the switching groups around in combat bug. But we'll see.

[shise]

Hard AF raids. People mocked Classic raids but in reality AQ40/Naxx were close to impossible without world buffs. This time around we don't have world buffs so we'll see only <1% clearing Sunwell again.

That was the best part of BC. You had different guilds clearing different content, made the whole expansion feel very alive and created a ton of different guilds. Even clearing BT we still needed rings or weapons from SSC or someone missed a piece from TK... And of course everyone always needed something from ZA when it came out and months later.. So you had up to 3 active raids easily, and then ofc alts on Kara.. pugging Gruuls... It was plain perfect.

One raid difficulty and less content but in quality > All the new complex and tunnel vision modern systems from today.
That is what people will realize and get surprised by.

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The impact of the "bring the class, not the player"-philosophy that is important for certain fights in TBC progression. Not looking forward to benching my good players and bringing others because "we just need that extra shaman here" or whatever.

To be honest, it was not so much like that. In high progress you always had every class available anyway, so you´d set up groups where all your core members would raid.

Today you still need certain buffs, and so players who want to raid adapt too.

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hit rating

And weapon skills! Specially in BC with more weapons around.

[Kralljin]

Based on their statement over Leatherworking drums, I'm half expecting them to alter the whole shaman situation. I'm also fully expecting them to fix the switching groups around in combat bug. But we'll see.

Doubt it, leatherworking is just one of those things that didn't really spread into the playerbase at large until near the end of TBC, it's similiar thing to World buffs.
It was unintentional, but Blizzard simply didn't bother to fix because they would then have had to rebalance SWP, as a lot of guilds used them in that raid especially.

Shamans being that useful however, that's not really something you can say was unintentional, people caught on that pretty quick and is a part of how Shaman was designed in TBC.
One might bring in the Wotlk Bloodlust, but that's big change and not even going to solve the issue entirely because totems are still quite strong.
People are also stacking Shaman in Classic, despite Bloodlust not existing, Priests are kinda the superior healer but the totems just carry the day here.

If you make all them also raidwide, that will be a huge overall buff to playerpower, because an Ele + Enhance will buff your entire raid with their extremely powerful buffs and then you'd probably also have to make every partybased buff raidwide, like Battle shout or Moonkin aura.
It would also open the door for very degenerate comps, imagine a comp just full of Locks with an Ele & Balance druid to support the entire raid.

Also, it might flip the healer Meta completely, Resto Shaman is so strong because raidhealing and its buffs, with bloodlust / totems being raidwide and the requirement to bring an Ele / Enhance, Resto might get overshadowed by Holy priests in terms of raidhealing, CoH and PoH are still quite strong in TBC.

[Shamypriest]

Assuming this question is specifically about people who did not play classic but plan to play BC:

leveling: I think many people who did not play classic or are used the cadence of later expansions are going to boost their character to 58 with the expectation that one long binge will get them to 70. There will without a doubt be people who do weird things to hit 70 far faster than most others, but the leveling cadence of BC is very much in line with Classic. Some time back I leveled to 70 in... another context, and it's every bit like Classic leveling 2.0. I expect the average player to need around 50 hours to level 60-70, not 10 or 12 like it has been the past several expansions.

dungeons: I think both people who didn't play classic and people who did will hit BC heroics expecting them to fall over like classic dungeons. Some of the TBC heroics are actually pretty nasty and definitely harder than any of the Mythic 0 dungeons in current retail. The harder dungeons probably sit around Mythic+5 which is quite hard if you're still in leveling gear. I expect a lot of people to roll in expecting to cleave things down and have their tank get torn to shreds in 3 seconds. Also lots and lots of people will die to assassins and bombs in Blood Furnace.

[ClassicPeon]

the rage loss still exists, albeit in a diminished form.
You keep 10 Rage baseline and can talent into additional 15 via talent, said talent is hardly useful for prot outside of that.

That's Wotlk.

MD is kinda iffy because Hunter AoE isn't that great in TBC and rogues don't have tricks until Wotlk.

I'm talking about being able to do thunderclap in def stance without having to stance dance. There is no rage loss.

Hunter burst aoe with multishot + volley is actually quite decent. Its not the same as mages or warlocks but that would make it batshit overpowered.

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While TBC was really an awesome xpac I don't think people might be surprised by the positive aspects, but they might have forgotten these:

Some of the most fun mechanics in tbc came from the old netcode. Like the MS-Warrior Swingtimer abuse.
I'm pretty sure this will be fixed in TBC Classic and therefor the MS warrior will be boring as hell.

Epic Moments like Gruul getting tanked by a rogue because you could get > 100% dodge at the start of the xpac are also fixed.

Some might have forgotten the 'hybrid 15% tax' and wonder why, whatever they do their class just can't get up to the dmg of a mage/rogue.

How bad arena pvp in the beginning was. Retri's main dmg source, the seals could be despelled. You could outheal a retri by applying a hot and just purging him.

Manaproblems for DPS classes where still a thing, even though they gave everyone a utility to fix this it was always strange to use. Like enhancement shaman's ultimate talent was a mana-reg talent, not a dmg talent.
Retri's got mana through getting healed, so they had to dmg themselves with Seal of Blood and so on.

i dont think a single one of these bar perhaps the pvp one will suprise anyone

[shise]

Regular Joe will cry at Lady Vashj fight

Nah, silly Weak Auras will probably take over and kill proper communication for the most part.
I mean, WA is good, I like it, but too much is too much.

[Flurryfang]

That the whole "felreaver scary" thing, wasn't actually a thing unless you played with your camera about 1 meter from your ass and had no sound on whatsoever.

Everyone who didn't play with console cameradistancemaxfactor 5 on, why?

Talking as a person, who puts on autowalk a lot, and as a person who sees people still doing it today, i think the felreaver will take its portion of lives xD

[Gasparde]

No, it's not actually gonna be any harder than Classic. Yes, it will be roflstomped just as hard as Classic was. Yes, raiding back then was indeed all about being able to handle one mechanic with 20 people playing at 5000ms and 12 fps and with just about 0 knowledge of the fights and even less communication skills. Yes, this will turn out exactly the way Classic did with all the wannabe elitists only inviting X to their normal Shadow Lab runs because it's totally undoable without a perfect setup... despite it being very much doable with any fucking setup since the entire expansion still never throws more than 1 simple af mechanic at you.

[RobertMugabe]

1. Yes, you should have leveled that Druid.

Won't make that mistake this time. Might even level 2

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No, it's not actually gonna be any harder than Classic. Yes, it will be roflstomped just as hard as Classic was. Yes, raiding back then was indeed all about being able to handle one mechanic with 20 people playing at 5000ms and 12 fps and with just about 0 knowledge of the fights and even less communication skills. Yes, this will turn out exactly the way Classic did with all the wannabe elitists only inviting X to their normal Shadow Lab runs because it's totally undoable without a perfect setup... despite it being very much doable with any fucking setup since the entire expansion still never throws more than 1 simple af mechanic at you.

tbh it was TBC when the raids began to be more complex, especially Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau will feel like a modern raid already. However all of that content will definitely be roflstomped anyways.

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I think the thing that will surprise people the most is how boring tBC is. It is one of the worst expansions ever made.

Not one of the worst in my opinion, but I am sure that many people will get pretty bored of TBC very soon. TBC overall, unlike vanilla, just isn't all that much different from the last previous expansions and most of the time design decisions from back then are for the most part still valid today, though all of that was still version 1.0.

I am currently playing on a TBC private server and I am having a lot of fun. However it is striking just different everything instantly feels compared to vanilla (EXCEPT classes).

[Akka]

the rage loss still exists, albeit in a diminished form.
You keep 10 Rage baseline and can talent into additional 15 via talent, said talent is hardly useful for prot outside of that.

I think he meant that you can thunderclap in defensive stance and so don't NEED to change stance.

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No, it's not actually gonna be any harder than Classic.

Of course it will be. Even if it would end up easy, it will still factually be harder than Classic.

[AeneasBK]

Talking as a person, who puts on autowalk a lot, and as a person who sees people still doing it today, i think the felreaver will take its portion of lives xD

How about the "I'll autofly to TK and grab a drink" ... comes back a few minutes later than anticipated due to w/e reason "Oh I'm dead in the fatigue zone a few leagues out into the nether...."

[Bumkin]

1.how bad retri palas were (my main was pala in tbc and i tried to play ret but had to switch to holy)
2.how long and hard heroic dungeons were
3.how slow the cheap flying mounts were, 60% speed
4.how cool the atmosphere was, maybe its just nostalgia but TBC had the coolest music/landscape/story

[MrPaladinGuy]

How easy everything is because people aren't on potato pc's with dial-up internet.