Don
World of Warcraft: Classic
- Thread starter agnes
- Start date
I don't mind the waiting around or lack of mobs. It's what made it great, join random people, play with them to help capture the mobs and work on them together.
Much slower paced, more friendly. Can't wait. A MMO that actually requires player input.
Much slower paced, more friendly. Can't wait. A MMO that actually requires player input.
Soldato
God can't even remember what guild I was in on vanilla, is that bad?
I remember we did alright, we even got right through to the eye of C'thun but didn't quite down it.
In TBC I was raiding in a guild called Precedent on Nordrassil, we were one of the top 50 worldwide guilds I think at the time. Felt a bit like a 2nd job at the time though so I stepped back after TBC and haven't really played since for long.
I don't think this kind of game can hold my attention anymore, and if playing too seriously I feel it sucks too much time up. Don't think I'll be playing Classic.
I remember we did alright, we even got right through to the eye of C'thun but didn't quite down it.
In TBC I was raiding in a guild called Precedent on Nordrassil, we were one of the top 50 worldwide guilds I think at the time. Felt a bit like a 2nd job at the time though so I stepped back after TBC and haven't really played since for long.
I don't think this kind of game can hold my attention anymore, and if playing too seriously I feel it sucks too much time up. Don't think I'll be playing Classic.
I only played Vanilla (having been mostly burned out on MMOs after EQ).
What happened/changed between then and now, for WoW? Less of an MMO in what way?
There is a lot of content, and many systems skipping it. There are very few reasons to actually head out to the world with a group of friends and gain something from it. It's over saturated and forgotten what a core MMO is. Team work. Everything outside of mythic raiding can be easily obtained and completed all from the comfort of a home city.
Hell, as a mythic raider, I'd even say once you focus on min/maxing your toon, even mythic is just a 2 or 3 night grind for a couple of hours and that's it. PvP is something I don't do much of but I know it's a dieing branch of WoW as it's all normalised and boring to most people. You don't get the same rush you did running in AV with your friends on Teamspeak barking out commands and having a laugh.
Leveling is practically brain dead grinding thanks to heirlooms, or even without it's barely a challenge anymore.
A lot of achievements to chase if that's your thing. Rep grinding is now a thing of the past and professions are VERY easily maxed out by anyone with an evening to spare and a few k gold (which is NOT a lot). Nothing feels like a true progression anymore other than increasing that stupid ilvl number. You no longer chase down a bit of gear and feel amazing as all gear up until the very specifics you need have no real use/purpose other than a very short filler until you do get the gear.
It's just too easy, too saturated with a lot of content, most of which is just fluff.
Everything became simpler and easier and geared towards instant gratification mechanics. Want an epic? Go do a 10 minute daily with one guaranteed as a reward.... talent choices? Nah just flip them around between fights. Dungeon in a far off place, just insta teleport there and back at the click of a button. When I quit my personal gold stash was circa 100million gold. Sold most of it, but it was so easy to obtain it become pointless to even have it anymore. Yea, 100 million. Compare that to vanilla when buying your first mount would require friends and family to loan you for that sweet sweet apprentice riding and mount cost.
The peak in my mind was WOTLK, talent trees with all sorts of quirky interactions.
Item stats everywhere, want a haste build? Roll with it, ARP? Go smash! Crit! More crit!
Epics between normal and hard modes were *significant* upgrades.
Fights were hard-ish by design and numbers.
Part of what made WoW fun for me was that RNG *could* screw you for weeks or months, fights where you had to chain chug pots and cooldowns... god does anyone remember doing M'uru? I was a priest at the time in maxed spirit gear, as a blood elf using every mana cooldown, pot, drums etc on cooldown none stop, and still running out of mana just before entropius, where that brief few seconds is all you had to regen as much as possible for the impending massive raid damage.
/nostalgia
Caporegime
As much as I love to think about Vanilla Wow and to this day I would rate it as the best game I have played it did have one massive negative. You needed to be hardcore to get anything done. I was the best geared Hunter on my server and used to 1 shot some scrubs but it took 12 hours of battlegrounds daily to get rank 14. Followed by hours grinding mats for pots etc for the raids. I would never be able to achieve that now with a job, children, wife etc. The game for me would be really boring. I was also quite lucky as playing a hunter I had a fantastic PVP class while not having to change much for PVE. You had those poor souls like for example your main tank where all they could do is sit on iron forge bridge because their spec and gear just made PVP boring unless you just did flag carrying all day!
As you said WOTLK was ironically my last wow title that i put decent time into and had the perfect blend as classes could viably spec different ways and the game hadn't become too easy.
Vanilla WoW is undoubtedly the best form of WoW imo, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that Vanilla WoW is a "proper MMO". Its still a long ways away from being that imo.
For reference , I consider UO and EQ to be examples of proper MMOs, amongst others. Essentially most MMOs from the golden age of MMOs (1997-2005)
For reference , I consider UO and EQ to be examples of proper MMOs, amongst others. Essentially most MMOs from the golden age of MMOs (1997-2005)
The biggest thing will be going back to another class from my DK, after WOTLK came out and DK became my main class I really fell in love with it, to have to go back to something else will be very weird.
Soldato
Ooo exciting, whos up for making a guild?
Guess we'll have to decide on servers closer to the time, but PVE or PVP?
Guess we'll have to decide on servers closer to the time, but PVE or PVP?
Why? It wasn't as hardcore as those but it's definitely a proper MMO unlike retail WoW currently
Because imo (and its only my opinion), a proper MMO should have dungeons which are not instanced, it should have risk vs reward, a proper death penalty where you potentially suffer actual losses when you die (not merely a loss of time in running back to where you were), it should lean far more toward necessary grouping and less toward soloing , which to be fair Vanilla is better at achieving than modern WoW.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it isn't a proper MMO in comparison to modern WoW, it certainly is...what I am saying is (imo) it isn't a proper MMO in comparison to the best MMOs of the 1997-2005 era, which had all of the above things.
I agree with the loss on death, I suppose in Vanilla repair bills aren't insignificant and gold isn't easy to come by, but it's not as harsh as some of the older MMOs where you would lose experience for example. I did get the feeling when I started playing Vanilla originally that the Everquest players who picked it up thought it was easy mode, but coming from Star Wars Galaxies, Counter-Strike and Diablo 2 I found it had a good balance.
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there, depends largely upon where you came from before hand. I started MMOing in 1997 with UO , so experienced a series of MMOs where there was a very heavy emphasis on community, working co-operatively with other players...often with that being a necessity, your reputation and that of your character name were important, when you died you potentially lost experience or even all of your belongings including everything in your backpack and your weapons and armour, dungeons weren't just for you and your group, they were for everyone and you would often run past many other groups in the same dungeon (which then meant that you needed to interact with them, communicate with them so that if your group wiped you could send a whisper to a nearby group and ask if they could come rez you etc), the worlds were harsh, tough and every single time you left the safety of a town in the game it really did feel like you were going into the wild, travelling across the gameworld from one town to another was a dangerous and risky adventure, rather than just a run down a road where you could outrun mobs.
So for many folk like me who came from that, WoW was a good fun game, but more of a co-op RPG than an MMO like we were used to.
Great explanation of sharding vs layering here: link.
I am and a few of my friends will be up for it too. Definitely PvP.
I am and a few of my friends will be up for it too. Definitely PvP.
Soldato
I prefer to keep my PvP to the BGs personally. AB and WSG were so much fun back in the day.
Soldato
PVP for me. I don't even really like PVP but it's a different game entirely on a PVE server.
Don
I’m defo RP (better crowd in the main), but torn between PvP and PvE (if there’s even an option).
Open world PvP definitely changes the game, but I’m not sure if I could put up with the constant threat, especially levelling in STV.
You weren’t there maannn.
Open world PvP definitely changes the game, but I’m not sure if I could put up with the constant threat, especially levelling in STV.
You weren’t there maannn.