Does anyone remember the bad things about WoW vanilla, which is what caused most of the patch content improvements in the first place? Does anyone remember the balance issues? Here’s a short list of 10 things I recall that people were always bitching about:
Paladins. Too OP due to 2H hammer. But no real role in dungeon groups or raids.
Grinding gold for first horse purchase. Ugh. Oh, and Paladins got a free one I think.
Eating/drinking after every pull. Also, bandaging.
Slow gathering/mining, etc.
Slow crafting. Having to craft bandages. Hundreds of them. Also, the quest to advance to the next bandage level.
Buffs/spells requiring purchased items to be usable.
No Flying.
No sharable banks. Welcome to Mule Altsville again.
No LFG - covered in previous posts above, but bears mentioning again. This can be a big deal considering people cant just go respec their Druid to be a healer when you can’t find one for a dungeon.
Tedium: Training all the weapons skills by use. Running back to cities to get new spells.
There’s more. Add your own memories to this list. I just don’t see this being hugely successful.
Paladins. Too OP due to 2H hammer. But no real role in dungeon groups or raids.
A: Played Horde. Did not care, Hated Pally bubble in PvP.
Grinding gold for first horse purchase. Ugh. Oh, and Paladins got a free one I think.
A: Did not mind. Sense of accomplishment. I remember getting to 1,000 gold for my epic. Guild members went nuts.
Eating/drinking after every pull. Also, bandaging.
A: Did not mind. Did not bandage (Priest). Make friends with mage for food/water.
Slow gathering/mining, etc.
A: Did not mind. Sense of accomplishment.
Slow crafting. Having to craft bandages. Hundreds of them. Also, the quest to advance to the next bandage level.
A: Priest.
Buffs/spells requiring purchased items to be usable.
A: Do not rightfully remember this one.
No Flying.
A: Thank goodness. You might have an opportunity to socialize with a player again.
No sharable banks. Welcome to Mule Altsville again.
A: I still have a mule on my account. Not a big deal to send greens via mail.
No LFG - covered in previous posts above, but bears mentioning again. This can be a big deal considering people cant just go respec their Druid to be a healer when you can’t find one for a dungeon.
A: Great. This made guild members become far more invested in each other in order to run dungeons.
Tedium: Training all the weapons skills by use. Running back to cities to get new spells.
A: The weapon thing was shite. Running back to BUY skills/spells was again a sense of accomplishment.
EDIT: Had to save so I am coming back to this. One of the major things that was removed from WoW was the sense of accomplishment and community for me. Making everything easy to obtain killed my desire to level or further my character. Adding in LFG tools and dungeon finder made the experience of running instances far more impersonal. Does anyone else remember that when LFG was created how damned difficult it was to run instances like Sunken Temple on level? You would get random idiots who did not know how to play their characters who would cause wipes constantly. That is why all the 5 mans got nerfed shortly after adding in the LFG tool. I liked planning pulls, having to mind control mobs and knowing that every step was a challenge. I hate the impersonal, do not speak to anyone, AOE everything down to get to 3 boss mobs type instances that everything became once Dungeon Finder was implemented. Great, more people got to see the content but the content was no longer fun or challenging.
I hated that even more playing as a healer, as tanks took it as personal challenge to see if they could run out of your healing range or force you OOM. Even if you told them not to.
In addition to the above specific things, there is a huge general change in WoW over the last 5+ years that has ruined the game for me. I tried to play a bit in summer 2017 and again summer 2018 and gave up fast both times. The reason? The game, at least until you hit the uber-raid Mythic+++ level is no longer a tactical experience with meaningful threat and challenge in most fights and is much more about timing, rhythm, rotations, and burning through stuff as fast as you can. After trying it a bit both of the last two years, I can say: HATED IT.
Old WoW had many many downsides and there’s a ton of quality of life things they could implement without ruining the experience of classic WoW. And the heart of that experience to me was that original WoW was a tactical playing experience: judging how to pull/how many to pull; crowd control; actually needing to use cooldowns to win key fights rather than to KILL MOAR FASTOR; significantly different tactical experiences for different classes; significantly different play experiences solo vs dungeon.
The reason I remember that classic WoW experience fondly is that it was memorable, not just chugging content like cheap beer.
And one thing to keep in mind: I am normally not a gamer who prefers “uphill both ways” gameplay and who feels like anything easy is no fun. I like easy. But new WoW is not just easy to me, it’s boring. And most of all, it’s really about reflexes and timing rather than decision making. Old WoW was a decision-based game that also rewarded quick decision making. But at heart, it was a tactical game, not an arcade game.
But new WoW, to me, is really just an arcade game with lots of social media hooked to it.
Also, for anyone thinking about “getting the band back together” for WoW classic, you must read Kings of the Wyld, by Nicholas Eames. Highly recommended.
Vanilla WoW had a thousand problems. But it was a particular game and at some point live WoW stopped being that game. I like the game it was to begin with.
Will it succeed? We shall see. Either X number of players goes for it or they don’t. Blizzard evidently feels it’s worth the investment.
I have a wildly different opinion of everything on that list than you but this entry is uniquely baffling to me. What on earth does flying have to do with not socializing? If anything, flying let me socialize more easily because I didn’t have to run to find a mob-free zone to linger in while chatting.
One huge factor in my interest in WoW Classic is I have no intention or desire of playing WoW for a long continuous chunk of months, evar. Instead, when I talk about “getting the band back together” I’m thinking of reassembling our pipe-hittin’ crew of Horde junkies, leveling up painfully uphill both ways, doing dungeons as we go, touring the level 60 dungeons, and then declaring victory. There’s a bunch of nostalgia there, but if we do this right, it’s going to be amazingly fun.
As an example, I was initially going to say “make Strath our little punk dungeon and then declare victory.” However, I have now remembered one of Gordon’s old unfulfilled wishes: the One Night Non Stop Full Black Rock Depths Clear. One group, one night, every meaningful boss in the entire joint. Aw yeah.
Then I will return to the unexpected bounty of good TBS that has hit recently. But for a few glorious months we shall rock as in days of yore.
I too am eagerly looking forward to this. I and my crew never did raids, but we did every 5 man dungeon many times. I have lots of fond memories of Dire Maul and others. @Sharpe hit the nail on the head with it, at the time, being a tactical game with each class being a different shaped cog that helped move the engine. Each encounter being a tactical puzzle, not just overwhelm and dps it down. The pulls, the saps, the sleeps, the charms. it was all beautiful.
I too have tried numerous iterations of the current WoW and found it lacking. Every class begins to blend together, same impact, perhaps different sprites. Your build doesn’t matter any more unless you go X path.
Really, thats where Blizzard went wrong -listening to the customer who wanted X class to do something that another class can do. Well, among other things that they did wrong…
I think the highlight, the zenith of the game for me was Burning Crusade. Everything after that went downhill.
Ever meet anyone running to and from a quest hub? Or romp around and see a PvP battle starting up? Or just have a random player message you for help with a quest? I randomly bubbled a warlock who was running for his life from some mobs in the Plaguelands. He said thanks, I buffed him, we struck up a conversation and I ended up healing for his group in Scholomance later that day. It went well, I logged in again and as soon as I did he messaged me to see if I wanted to do another instance. I did, he asked me if I wanted to join his guild and I ran with those same guild mates for the next two years. That kind of interaction does not happen when you are flying in the air. You can chat with people you know but you do not meet new people.
None of those things are meaningfully affected by access to flying. But yes, I’ve seen plenty of other players wandering around and it’s never led to any sort of meaningful interaction. Sometimes we teamed up to share credit for a quest kill, that’s about it.
I can buy that there was more interaction in dungeons back in the day, for people who could actually get groups together and somehow luck into those groups being competent and organized enough to complete content, and that cross-realm instancing has reduced continuity of community, but I just do not buy that flying had anything to do with it.
Nope, flying had hugely negative long term effects on the game and the community. Same as LFD. Convenient yes, but I’d much rather play a game without them.
Oh god. All of this talk of classic games has prompted me to reload Dark Age of Camelot. And I’m enjoying it. So very different from the convenience MMOs of the last decade. Please send Trig with an 8 man to rescue me if it gets its hooks into me again.
Edit: The splash screen music sent chills up my spine, yet again. Help me?
Hmm. I’m in for Sharpe’s “level to 60, oh god why is it so hard, kill the endgame dungeons” event. I never could power through to 60 at release, mostly due to not having friends, and it’s always been a little bit of a bummer.
Those things are all significantly affected by flying. The physical act of running to and from a quest location, and remember WoW vanilla had longer runs, is an entirely different experience than flying to the site, killing 6 mobs and lifting off again. The only thing that is the same is the actual killing of the mobs themselves and even that has changed markedly due to AoE pulling.
You can not interact with someone when they fly by so fast that you can not even get their name.
Yes, there was just so much need for interaction in going between quest targets that I’ve never done it in 14 years of playing WoW. At quest targets, sure. Between, nope. What there -was- is pointless busywork, which they’ve brought back in spades. If that’s your bag, more power to you, I guess.
This is just utter nonsense. The single best change they ever made was to add flying.
