EQ went through 19 years of QoL improvements too, though. For example you don’t need to sit and stare at your spellbook to regain mana-- you can do it while moving! And I understand they added the concept of out of combat regeneration too, to reduce downtime.
All from what I read, I quit EQ in the beginning of Kunark and will never, ever, go back.
Oh that’s an interesting question, will there be me lucky charms? That’s one thing I will miss for sure.
Didn’t I hear they’re exposing a new API for UI modding, rather than the old (often wack and/or hacked) LUA scripting? That could be cool.
Yes, they were added in patch 1.11. No world markers, though.
I really liked Kunark and Scars. Luclin was the start of the end for me. I remember when EQ atlas was a treasured resource. And spamming sense direction.
What the fuck is the snark on these forums lately? First of all, I have been playing EQ on and off since release, and enjoy it. Second of all, I tried to make some points as to why this server might appeal to some people. 3rd, fuck off, what is even your point? Jesus fucking christ I’m sick of miscreant internet trolls.
Blizzard obviously believes there is an audience for this, they’re right, I’m part of that audience. Don’t like this server, don’t like this ruleset, WHOOPIE, don’t play it.
I Played WOW from launch straight up through the Wrath expansion. Cataclysm killed the game for me because I hated what they did to the old zones.
My account got hacked in 2011 about a year after I stopped playing and though they recovered all my stuff, I just left the account locked because nothing really tempted me to go back until now. I just got it unlocked and did so because I want to play Classic.
I’d like to play it because I can go back to the Barrens as it was (my favorite zone). I can play a Hunter with the old hunter skills and pets the way they used to be. I can play a Warlock as a drain tank again. There are a lot of reasons and nostalgia is a big part of it. They say you can’t go home again but this will be like going home. Even if it’s just for a visit, it’ll be worth it to me.
I think that WoW Vanilla was a great game, and I think it is still a great game. I think that the market has changed, but WoW Vanilla sold millions of copies, and people really enjoyed that game, some of it is nostalgia coloring a lot of the past, but there are some aspects of the game that I really miss. A lot of the ownership over your particular player shifted to gear from build. Back in Vanilla talent points mattered, and you could have 5 different warriors that specialize in 5 different things.
Blizzard has done a lot to simplify the mechanics, but I think that has hurt the feel of the game. Almost every class now has a self-heal, a CC, an aggro wipe etc. It often feels like there are now 3 classes, Tank, DPS, Healer. And you fit into one of those three.
In Vanilla that hurt some classes, as they were less desirable, and the Alliance had a pretty hefty leg-up in raiding thanks to the Paladin’s versatility in CC and healing. The Horde had the Shaman, which was a lot less useful in raids, outside of Bloodlust (you needed one or two Shamans). But Paladins made the opening of BWL a cake-walk with their bubble. Though, bloodlust certainly helped with Vaelastrasz, the encounter was balanced with the Alliance in mind.
40 man raids were amazing, I was an officer in a guild that did MC and BWL, and it was such an accomplishment, but it also felt like herding cats, and class balance issues often left you to 2-3 people from a class per raid, which was hard. I ended up being a backup, because hunters got low priority, but I was the first player in my guild to get the epic hunter quest/bow.
I think it will be interesting to see how this develops. Vanilla servers (and progression servers) are very popular, and have pretty large populations. They are free, this will be 14.99$ a month. I don’t know how you can compete with free. I personally would want to play the Blizzard version, and would not want to be pirating a game that was being offered to buy (not the case now) and I am sure the blizzard polish will fix a lot of the botting/farming/spam issues in those private servers.
I am very excited to play this, and they can count me as a legacy WoW player who didn’t buy BfA, who will re-sub just for WoW Classic (and to tool around in the new expansion).
Someone will have to start up a guild when it releases. I could probably convince a few of my friends to start up again.
I expect I will, as I liked it the first time around. I know my own response to old games and interfaces well enough to know the difference between rose tinted glasses and the other thing. But I don’t have time to play it the way I used to. Thankfully. Nostalgia hit, then move on. If I even have time for that much.
Well said.
IMO the designers really lost their way when they couldn’t reconcile the original (awesome) visions for each class with players wanting to be able to participate in all phases of the game, which was somewhere around Wrath. Bless them, they tried, but I don’t think they ever recovered from the bad old days when you couldn’t have [melee DPS, non-Warrior tanks, no Paladins, anything but resto Druids…] and had to bring [lots of Warlocks, preferably just the one Mage, exactly 3 tanks 7 healers and 31 DPS] because endgame class balance was waaaaack and encounters were tuned to be challenging even the best-prepared guilds.
Eventually all the classes just got so…flattened. Like you said, everyone gets an aggro wipe, a long-term CC, a self-heal, etc, etc. Because everyone needs to do all those things to engage with the encounters as designed. IMO, they lost the commitment to “okay so all DPS need to be able to deal with pulling aggro in some way, so let’s make them all thematically appropriate and accomplish the core utility while having their own limitations and drawbacks” and eventually ended up with “fine, here’s your aggro dump button everyone, happy now?”
OTOH that’s kinda salty old Adam talking. I had some absolutely grand times DK tanking in Cataclysm; what a fantastic class/role that was at that time. Just fabulous awesome-feeling thematic tools for all your tanking needs. <3
Anyway I’ll probably sub to this for at least a while, and/or off-and-on as time allows. I do love me some older games, it’s true.
I always thought I would love to go back to Classic, and about a year a go i jumped onto a private server and was quite shocked with how much I enjoyed it. I played it through a couple of server resets and still found I enjoyed it. The big difference for me then and now I find is that now I’m not striving to get to 60. I know what’s there at the end of the road, and so now I’m just enjoying the journey in little pieces as time allows.
I’ll be signing up when it releases. Did they mention when that is?
And this is how WoW has become more and more a single player game. Back in Vanilla, you often were forced to group with strangers, or find a guild with the same hours as you. Now, everything is automatched, and every class is self sufficient, encounters don’t need the teamwork they once did.
This is not to say that WoW hasn’t maintained a healthy level of challenge in their raids. Doing Mists of Pandaria raids with the QT3 guild on Moonrunner are some of the most fun things I have done in WoW, and brought back the teamwork and camaraderie of old WoW. But I think the game has moved even more towards single player play since then. The mythic 5-mans, etc all require a lot of teamwork and skill, but the game still lacks the specialization and party class-balance mechanics the old game had.
Another thing that I dislike about nu-WoW is the battlegrounds. I loved server specific battlegrounds, there were wait times… a bit, but the PVP weekly events would fix that. Seeing the same 30-40 Alliance guys on the other side grinding out the same PVP ladder as you was great. There was some fun gamesmanship in game and on the boards, it was good stuff. I had specifically named my pet after as a reference to an alliance player’s mother. On our server (Greymane) there was also an Alliance player who kept getting Grand Marshall, and everyone kept asking (did he not buy the gear the week he had topped the ladder? did he not know how the mechanics work? Or did he love PVP that much?)
With the PVP-matching now you always end up facing random people, and that sense of server community has kind of left the game as a whole. I loved logging in and seeing the same 3 people in Orgrimmar standing outside the bank wearing their shiny raid gear, as if to taunt the rest of us (I did it too when I got mine) while using the game as a chat program.
Anyway, I really hope that some of that old community aspect of the game is maintained in WoW Classic.
Sounds like there are quite a few here who will be one of the <50k playing Classic. Might even be 51k or 52k of us.
I think that sort of community has exited the scene along with the rest of the old days of the internet, but maybe you’ll get lucky.
At Blizzcon they said summer 2019.
Looking for Dungeon pretty much killed it for me. My dungeon companions in all the post-Cataclysm stuff I did might as well have been bots.
Of course, having a guild can render all that unimportant, but I met some pretty cool people and had some pretty epic runs outside any guild activity back in the day. It was fun.
Honestly, though, part of me just wants to be able to goof around in the pre-Cata landscape again. It makes me sad that any time I want to I can “explore” 2002 Vvardenfell or 1998 Nali or 1985 Britannia, but 2005 Loch Modan or Barrens has been lost for 8 years.
I’m kidding myself if I have time to wander around BRD for 4 hours like I used to, though. :(
And then the Rogues wanted Salv instead of Kings and you wanted to punch them.
< Former Paladin Class Officer for a raiding guild
PallyPower! Best mod ever.
Lies. Grid was the best mod ever. Macro’d all my heals to mouseover targeting. Made raid healing as a Druid super fun.
Also, like…people complain about LFD/LFR ruining the community, but for me the result was I got to do, and succeed at, dungeons and raids. Which was out of the question previously with PUGs.