Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Gregz]

"World of Warcraft: Classic drove the biggest quarterly growth in subscriptions in the franchise’s history."

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ac...is-falling-despite-strong-results-51573167200

 

[Lyric Suite]

You think you do, but you don't.

 

[Sykar]

Just played a little of Classic WoW and it became apparent why it is so much superior, at least to me, to anything past WotLK. Most important part to me is that you start out as a gimp who who slowly grows more powerful but more importantly since there are no retarded markers all over the map you have to actually get involved in the story and read the fucking quest texts. After WotLK? Just accept the quest and follow the yellow markers. Reading quest texts? What for, you are handheld like a little retard. Nothing requires effort, it is just an epic wankfest. Also you have to actually interact with people to tackle harder content and not just press dungeon/raid finder button, join, play, loot and be done with hardly saying more than "Hi and "Goodbye". Classic dungeons where a challenge which could take an entire evening to clear especially when you are in a pug and not well coordinated and inexperienced. Clearing all parts of Stratholme in such a party can take a couple of hours even.
Also the game has been streamlined to an extreme. Everything niche as been removed, any kind of thought like using lower rank spells to preserve mana or for utility like level 1 Frostbolt has been removed too. Hell you actually have to think if you want to buy every spell right now or wait and concentrate only on important skills so to gain gold quicker for your mount skill.
I could go on and on but really, Classic to WoTLK was enjoyable, with TBC being the high points where my only real gripe was epic flying mounts because they gained insane fly speeds.

Summa summarum, WoW instead of becoming refined became dumbed down to such an extreme that you have to be a blithering retard to fail in anything but the toughest raids.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Epic flying speed isn't really an issue in TBC when you factor in the fact that the zones are designed with flying in mind, i.e they are quite big. The travel length is relative to Vanilla zones with an epic mount since the Vanilla zones are actually quite small. Wotlk had the same thing as TBC where the end game zones were designed with flying in mind, so getting that flying mount felt like a nice upgrade. Doesn't feel like that in retail anymore because the newer expansion zones are small again, and full of flight points.
Simply put TBC is perfection. It did everything right.

Edit: There's also great irony in all these people experiencing Classic and saying how much the game has been dumbed down, when at the time WoW itself was considered a highly dumbed down MMO.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

He should have said "you think you do, but you probably don't, but if you actually do, you're a retard" and linked them to some cookie clicker

 

[Beastro]

with TBC being the high points where my only real gripe was epic flying mounts because they gained insane fly speeds.

When I returned to the game briefly in 2007 I was puzzled by their introduction. I never got far to try em (only played a week or two before RL fucked with me big time) but the way I understood them they free up everything for you and can eve be used in Azeroth? I didn't get bringing in something that powerful and how it would impact the game world with the very first expansion.

Edit: There's also great irony in all these people experiencing Classic and saying how much the game has been dumbed down, when at the time WoW itself was considered a highly dumbed down MMO.

Fuck yeah. Play most any other MMO before then and it's a shock. It really threw me going from EQ to it, especially how easy corpse recovery was.

 

[Sykar]

Epic flying speed isn't really an issue in TBC when you factor in the fact that the zones are designed with flying in mind, i.e they are quite big. The travel length is relative to Vanilla zones with an epic mount since the Vanilla zones are actually quite small. Wotlk had the same thing as TBC where the end game zones were designed with flying in mind, so getting that flying mount felt like a nice upgrade. Doesn't feel like that in retail anymore because the newer expansion zones are small again, and full of flight points.
Simply put TBC is perfection. It did everything right.

Edit: There's also great irony in all these people experiencing Classic and saying how much the game has been dumbed down, when at the time WoW itself was considered a highly dumbed down MMO.

But the game was and is not just TBC. It also killed world PvP. But I agree, TBC was overall the best era of WoW. For me it goes like this:
TBC > Classic > WotLK >> Rest(Major decline started with Cata)

For many people WoW was their first MMO experience so they have no way to compare WoW to EQ. I also question EQ being the be all end all of MMO design as some of its proponents proclaim. I think WoW, despite being very overrated by the press, did a lot of things right, but also quite a few things wrong, professions being a big one for me. I wonder of something happened during WotLK. TBC was a clear trend up, trimming much of unneded fat(=tedium) without compromising difficulty. WotLK started some soft decline but was still fine. Cata though and especially Pandaland turned WoW into retard friendly game where you can get shit just for logging in.

 

[Beastro]

I also question EQ being the be all end all of MMO design as some of its proponents proclaim.

It wasn't and far from it. A lot was solid to give the player freedom to make their own way, but the other side of the coin that made it good was they didn't know what to really do with the game. Raiding wasn't the end game and was but one thing thrown in originally. That changed with the expansions, but even that took till the second expansion to really get the raid dungeon design right. Add on top of that how the player base didn't know what to do by and large leaving there less "mass" of raiders to drive that aspect into the ground and the result is that much of the fun was had from everyone learning as they went along.

That apexed with the fourth expansion. After that the devs knew what to do and the playerbase got sucked fully into the "clearing content" mentality while increasingly complaining that the game was drifting from what they loved.

That's the sad conclusion I've come to: Even if you were able to create a new game like EQ in its heyday it still wouldn't play right because the playerbase now simply knows too much about MMOs that they wouldn't play it the same way. They'd jump to cutting the fat too quickly trying to work out what's best and most efficient ASAP rather than taking the good old laid back path of just playing the game.

 

[Hobo Elf]

You're right in that you can't emulate peoples' behavior of the yester years. Classic WoW pretty much proves that. It's Vanilla-ish WoW but with the retail mindset of rush rush gotta get that BiS ASAP. That said, EQ's depth didn't come from the players but from the game design. Class design in EQ and other old MMOs blows WoW out the water. There were so many different and cooler niches of class roles that have been simplified down to the boring holy triangle in WoW. Of course you can't really have classes anymore that are solely for crowd control because people want to do damage and they couldn't fathom a class that isn't able to solo.

 

[Sykar]

The trinity system is garbage and utterly boring. I barely raided for the reason that much of my skillset, slows, roots and AoE, were completely and utterly useless except for some gimmicks like zombies at Gluth and I refuse to play something else on my frost mage or respecc.

 

[J1M]

Every expansion announcement I am hoping they announce a fourth combat role, but the game really does appear to just be in maintenance mode with 100 artists on it.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Every expansion announcement I am hoping they announce a fourth combat role, but the game really does appear to just be in maintenance mode with 100 artists on it.

Why? They would just be crowbarring something in purely for the sake of adding something, rather than filling a void that exists.

 

[KazikluBey]

I never got far to try em (only played a week or two before RL fucked with me big time) but the way I understood them they free up everything for you and can eve be used in Azeroth?

No, flying mounts could only be used in Outland and then also Northrend until Cataclysm revamped Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.

 

[J1M]

Every expansion announcement I am hoping they announce a fourth combat role, but the game really does appear to just be in maintenance mode with 100 artists on it.

Why? They would just be crowbarring something in purely for the sake of adding something, rather than filling a void that exists.

Because the game is stale and could use the application of some crowbars.

 

[Metro]

So I've been leveling a paladin but my biggest issue is the popularity of Classic. I joined a friend on a later created server (not one of the Classic launch day servers) but it's still absurdly crowded during normal hours. I go to a zone, at least a dozen people killing shit and doing quests in a given area. Waste time moving to another zone. Same result. People already grouped up. If I stop, it'll be due to that. I can't level in the middle of the night.

 

[Beastro]

So I've been leveling a paladin but my biggest issue is the popularity of Classic. I joined a friend on a later created server (not one of the Classic launch day servers) but it's still absurdly crowded during normal hours. I go to a zone, at least a dozen people killing shit and doing quests in a given area. Waste time moving to another zone. Same result. People already grouped up. If I stop, it'll be due to that. I can't level in the middle of the night.

Be careful falling out of the surge. I did taking my time and it got annoying looking for dungeon groups because so many are leveling up at the same time.

 

[MajorMace]

You're right in that you can't emulate peoples' behavior of the yester years. Classic WoW pretty much proves that. It's Vanilla-ish WoW but with the retail mindset of rush rush gotta get that BiS ASAP. That said, EQ's depth didn't come from the players but from the game design. Class design in EQ and other old MMOs blows WoW out the water. There were so many different and cooler niches of class roles that have been simplified down to the boring holy triangle in WoW. Of course you can't really have classes anymore that are solely for crowd control because people want to do damage and they couldn't fathom a class that isn't able to solo.

Yeah I'm sure Everquest would be swarmed with millions of players if they released a remaster today. What a gem.

 

[Alphard]

How many hundreads of hours have you already wasted to press the same 2 buttons to kill the number N mob with the same
artificial stupidity
And to gather 15 boar tusks with 20 % drop rate?
Such meaningful content

 

[J1M]

If you want to know people's /played just ask nicely.

 

[MajorMace]

Video Game forum's users wasting their time, you say ?
How uncanny !

 

[Jasede]

Ghastly! My monocle nearly popped whilst I was perusing the morning Financial Times.

 

[Jasede]

I think I will reroll DPS rogue or huntard. Warrior DPS is brainless and you don't get to raid unless you start your own guild, are very patient or have a lot of time as a tank.

So far my favorite MMORPG experience has been raiding as an assassin in EQ2 during SF and TSO.

Maybe you guys can recommend a game for me based on what I like:

I liked about that that the assassin had 34+ skills that you all had to use in any given fight. There were more than 8 hotbars on my screen, given buffs and consumables. There were 3 DOTs to keep up, 2 debuffs, poisons. Almost every attack was positional or stealth-only. One of the signature skills, Fatal Follow-up, did more damage the more backstabs you did in the last 7 seconds. But you can only backstab stealthed. So there's a skill that deals damage and stealthed you, there's a CD that stealthes you after every back-only attack, and so on. It was really fun.

The best part about EQ2 at the time was that, if your gear was bad, you could still do better than a bad player in great gear easily, just by playing better. It also has so many buttons, abilities and skill trees. My Assassin had not 3 specs to choose to put points into, but an entire 6 different tabs of various trees. You had 200 talent points.

Why isn't there a game like that? I want to excel as DPS again. I've tried in WoW Retail but it was really simple. My balance druid achieved top percentage parses easily even though I had no WoW experience. As long as you move correctly the rotations do themselves. The challenge is mostly in executing orders and learning the best cooldown usage in fights. This is in Mythic.

I miss EQ2 when it was good.

 

[J1M]

I think I will reroll DPS rogue or huntard. Warrior DPS is brainless and you don't get to raid unless you start your own guild, are very patient or have a lot of time as a tank.

So far my favorite MMORPG experience has been raiding as an assassin in EQ2 during SF and TSO.

Maybe you guys can recommend a game for me based on what I like:

I liked about that that the assassin had 34+ skills that you all had to use in any given fight. There were more than 8 hotbars on my screen, given buffs and consumables. There were 3 DOTs to keep up, 2 debuffs, poisons. Almost every attack was positional or stealth-only. One of the signature skills, Fatal Follow-up, did more damage the more backstabs you did in the last 7 seconds. But you can only backstab stealthed. So there's a skill that deals damage and stealthed you, there's a CD that stealthes you after every back-only attack, and so on. It was really fun.

The best part about EQ2 at the time was that, if your gear was bad, you could still do better than a bad player in great gear easily, just by playing better. It also has so many buttons, abilities and skill trees. My Assassin had not 3 specs to choose to put points into, but an entire 6 different tabs of various trees. You had 200 talent points.

Why isn't there a game like that? I want to excel as DPS again. I've tried in WoW Retail but it was really simple. My balance druid achieved top percentage parses easily even though I had no WoW experience. As long as you move correctly the rotations do themselves. The challenge is mostly in executing orders and learning the best cooldown usage in fights. This is in Mythic.

I miss EQ2 when it was good.

To excel at DPS in an MMO the most important skill is finding your way onto the loot council.

 

[Jasede]

Nah man, at least in EQ2 it wasn't 80 percent loot 20 percent skill. But it's possible that people just weren't as good because it wasn't as popular so I had more room to shine.

Classic is a solved game and the best moves are known well in advance; you can't really develop your own skill priorities unless you want to be suboptimal. And DPS that is good always strives to be optimal.

 

[Absinthe]

You can always play Feral Druid if you want a more involved DPS routine. As long as you're willing to farm Manual Crowd Pummelers, master powershifting, and gear off-set items aggressively you should be fine. Also, some of the raids are actually better with Feral Druid tanks than Warrior tanks because Feral tanks output so much threat (with Manual Crowd Pummelers) that the raid isn't threat-capped and can therefore kill the boss faster, but this is only a good idea for the raids where the boss isn't liable to one-shot you with a crit. Remember to pool rage pre-fight (leave a mob around or have a Warlock summon an Infernal or Doomguard so you can tank it to slowly max out your rage before engaging the boss). The other perk of playing Druid is that you can find a party as a tank. The downside of feral is that itemization gets awkward and you farm a lot of Manual Crowd Pummelers, and that they tend to go OOM quickly in dungeons unless you go out of your way to gear int and/or carry potions.