Wrath was amazing (as was BC, if I’m being honest - man, Karazhan was awesome), but I maintain that flying and LFD ruined the game long before anyone realized it. Retool Wrath and BC with no flying or LFD and I’m there.
The fact that I can’t fly in BfA is the main reason I’m no longer logging in.
Flying was and is great.
Flying does tend to make a lot of stuff trivial.
I would not have experienced a lot of dungeons without LFD. Of course, they way they get played is in a rush so I didn’t enjoy them as much.
I really enjoyed TBC, but Wrath went too far down the “turn the entire experience into a rollercoaster/theme park ride” for me to enjoy it.
Then again, I unashamedly enjoyed vanilla which puts me firmly in the minority.
I wonder if they could offer a flag now that like PvP moves you into a single shard with everyone else that is no LFD/LFR and no warforge/titanforge.
Tried and failed to get into the stress test this afternoon - servers just not showing as up.
Which, if you think about it, is probably the most authentic experience you could have with Classic WoW.
Were you invited?
Yah. Eventually got in but kept failing at character creation.
Heh. Well, when WoW launched there were queues to get into servers. EQ was the king with 200,000+ subscribers. I think WoW zoomed past that in a week or two.
I dunno, they had like 8 million subscribers before BC dropped, I think a lot of people liked the game. I am nuts for Vanilla (and TBC, WotLK)
I don’t think flying ruined the game, as it was pretty pricey to get in BC. You ran around most of the areas on foot until post 70, then got your mount to help travel to instances/farm.
LFD kinda ruined things, same with LFR, it kind of minimized the need for a guild and community to see the content.
It was both a solution and a problem. Lots of players never saw much of that content because getting in a random group for a dungeon wasn’t easy. Once it was trivial, the need for guilds went away for a lot of players.
The problem I always had with guilds was the raid schedule. Maybe I can’t make it three weeks in a row. I’m an adult, a parent, with a full-time job. I have stuff going on. And maybe when I don’t I still want to watch a movie or go out and play tennis or see a buddy at a bar.
There really isn’t any answer. LFD is probably a better answer than no LFD, but it creates a new problem.
The problem with getting a random group was no-one wanted to play tank, and the few healers were generally shadow spec priests.
I was a rogue initially but after getting to 60 and starting MC, I levelled a feral druid that swapped to resto at 40ish.
Getting a group as a rogue was difficult (I only got to see Maraudon because of friends), getting a group as resto was laughably easy.
I suspect classic will have a higher proportion of tank/healer chars, which will hopefully translate into more accessible 5mans.
I’m going prot warrior from early on, my brother is going either holy priest or resto druid, and we’ll be filling in our 5mans with friends/randos.
Tank shortages are real. Nothing to be done about that.
I’m very likely going to main mage like I did back in the day. They’re everyone’s favorite dps, so dungeon groups won’t be that hard.
Likely warrior as a second toon (or maybe primary, if tanking for randos isn’t awful and/or I have a guild that likes running dungeons). Not sure if I’ll take to warrior tanking like I did DK tanking in Cata.
Heck I’ll be all in on Wow legendary – but I don’t want to play a tank. Who needs that aggravation?
It is a special kind of annoyance lol.
Keeping a guild – especially a raiding guild – together reminds me of keeping a 10-piece band together. I am sure that only a small handful of players saw the raids.
LFR/LDF I think solved that problem, but exacerbated the problem of people in general being dicks. It made tanking and healing even harder and less fun with the GOGOGOGO mentality.
Maybe more like a 40-piece band.
You really do see the worst of the worst in LFR, at least that was my experience the few times I ran it. Absolutely no regard for a fellow player.
And people bitching about your DPS output, threatening to kick you. Or your heals. Or how you’re not keeping the mobs off the healers. They are not the easiest things to be a part of.