Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Lacrymas]

Not in the sense they are gonna kill the boss for you. Vanilla bosses outside of the end bosses are really, really easy in terms of mechanics and what to look out for. Most of the time it's just a DPS race and when your entire rotation is frostbolt, frostbolt, frostbolt, there's not much to stop you. At most what Blizz can do is challenge the healers by buffing damage and health across the board, making fights take longer. It still won't be logistically challenging, but at least the healers will do something else besides spam flash heal and renew in an attempt to outheal each other and meterwhore.

 

[J1M]

There's a fairly good case to be made that WoW Classic is not for those top-tier guilds that cleared it when it was fresh. It's a nostalgia community.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'd say vanilla caters a lot, like a loooooooooooot, to the top guilds. In the sense of character advancement at level cap that is. Sure, it takes a while to get your epic mount if you grind for it, and there are a few rep grinds you can do here and there for some epics, but that's it. When you get pre-raid BiS gear, the content dries up. The power divide between a top-tier geared character and pre-raid BiS is immense once BWL is on farm. BWL is technically clearable for not-so-good guilds with some effort, though, but before I left Kronos, only 5 guilds had killed C'thun, and we had him on farm for like 2 months at that point. Top guilds are also the only ones who can kill world bosses.

Granted, leveling and gearing up pre-raid takes quite a while, so there's that. I don't know, I have no idea how vanilla is going to be received by the majority of people once they get to level cap. It's going to be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.

 

[GrainWetski]

It still won't be logistically challenging, but at least the healers will do something else besides spam flash heal and renew in an attempt to outheal each other and meterwhore.

That never happened in my guild in vanilla and I was a resto shaman. You actually had to worry about your mana in vanilla. I remember using rank 1 heals a lot.

Maybe I'm remember wrong and you just spam heals like you do for the last few expansions? I doubt it because regen is so different, but I guess it could be the case. Or is it a paladin thing? I only ever raided as horde.

 

[Lacrymas]

Oh, we did downrank, but we downranked flash heal. At first, before you get some good gear going, yes, you'll have to conserve what little mana you have, but once you are BWL-geared, you just spam flash heal and renew in an attempt to meterwhore and please the loot council. As a Shaman, you spam chain heal, whether downranked or not. You (generally) don't meterwhore only on the last bosses because they are longer and you have to be a bit smart about it, but that's it. You certainly can attempt to pick and choose what heals to use at any point, but you'll very quickly realize you aren't doing anything except stop casting because everyone else is using their fastest heals to try to meterwhore. This is my experience in Kronos, I didn't play a healer during the actual vanilla, but I doubt it will be completely different in Classic, just because this is a symptom of the 1.12 talents/itemization. Also, keep in mind that I was in the best guild on Kronos, we got a bunch of server firsts after BWL, so this might not be the same for every guild.

And before anyone says "but private servers got everything wrong" a) no, they didn't get everything wrong in the context of how Classic is going to play out, aka 1.12 talents/itemization, it was close enough, and b) ok, we'll see if Classic is tremendously different.

 

[Metro]

I played a healer back in 2004-2005 (Paladin) but damned if I could remember much of anything from 14 years ago. I probably downranked but I remember the big thing for Paladins was stacking crit because there was a talent that refunded mana for crit heals. Also Paladins were mostly main tank healers so I just stood there and spammed.

 

[Cyberarmy]

My role as a druid "healer" in raids was mostly curse clansing and rebirthing. Other than those some casual rejuvenations here and there. Not the experience I want to replay.

 

[GreyViper]

Regarding MC, it depends how fast they can crank out dark iron gear from the main tank and off-tank. If im being honest from level 60 raids that I did mostly were world dragon bosses(3way fight alliance vs horde vs dragon), capital raiding or the defense of Crossroads and Zul Gurub with The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj 20 coming second.

 

[frajaq]

It's gonna be interesting to see:
1)The amount of initial players
2)Faction balance in PvP servers (and the influence of streamers on them)
3)How many will remain after level 40 after people realize just how much slower the pace of lvling is

 

[Metro]

I'm debating whether I want to start up in the initial wave because it's going to be a huge clusterfuck. And a lot of people who will probably quit when, as you note, they realize they can speed to level 60 in two days.

 

[MapMan]

Holy shit playing with streamers on the same realm must be a nightmare. Ever played in a guild with a female member surrounded by 5 beta orbiters? Imagine that but on a realm-wide scale, with hundreds of orbiters. Normally, I never watch streamers for any game. Out of curiosity I checked some wow classic streams and it's so bad. The streamers don't even bother talking about the game anymore. They just collect donations and talk about e-celebs. I want to die.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Shitheads like him are one of the biggest impediments this game has to being good.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Asmo is the walking encyclopedia on wow content. And is a good entertainer.

 

[Absinthe]

MapMan, a problem like that is easily resolved if you play on PvP servers. All you need to do is streamsnipe the streamers (ie. use the stream to locate them and gank the shit out of them through the wonders of world PvP). Today's WoW mods have hair-trigger tempers though so you could get banned, but as long as you get a reasonably wide group of people to world PvP and start ganking streamers (coordinate through vent or whatever the fuck) the streamer will eventually give up on attentionwhoring all over your server. Either the streamers start implementing delays (which are not enough to prevent streamsniping and will annoy the stream chat, reducing their channel's popularity) or they pack up and leave. Honestly you don't even need a stream to snipe someone. All you need is one guy on the other faction using that WoW command that tells you what zone a player is in and you can make some solid guesses based on the zone in question to narrow down their position some more and gank them.

None of this will solve the more gaping problems WoW has, like the banalshitboring combat, ultra-repetitive grinding, extremely slow travel speeds (This is why Warlocks are WoW's taxi), and lazy PvP balance issues. And then there's the fact that probably the overwhelming majority of players on your server will be drooling morons who will wipe your party doing stupid shit over and over again and roll on items they don't need. People these days pretend like classic WoW was some kind of hardcore MMORPG, when in reality it was the ultimate casualfest with a really shitty endgame because that part was designed by EQ nolifers for EQ nolifers.

 

[Lacrymas]

The grind is overstated. The only grind you *have* to do is the leveling, everything else has alternative methods. I do agree the endgame model isn't good, though, and it gets worse the further you get into vanilla.

 

[Absinthe]

All the best loot in WoW is raid loot. And raiding is just the most famous grind. There's also honor grind for PvP (which gets insane if you want to push past R11 for PvP epics), rep grind for factions (which can take weeks), super-repetitive dungeon grinds for rare drops (which can take months in extreme cases), and gold grinding (by far the easiest option) for whatever BoEs you need (most of the good loot is BoP though), consumables, talent resets (for PvP and PvE), and mounts. If you do the research and get clever you can collect a solid set of items from dungeons, BoEs, and 20mans, but the best items are still gated behind endgame raiding. If you're playing a Druid you're going to be fucked when it comes to feral gear unless you do endgame raids, esp. AQ40 and Naxx, since those are the places where actual feral gear starts to drop. Even for PvP, the best loot is raid loot. PvP epics are about on par with BWL raid loot, despite the severity of the honor grind. AQ40 and Naxx drop much more powerful items.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I'm looking forward to this, I do miss the retardation and spectacle of 40 mans.

I'll prolly play an orc lock.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Holy shit playing with streamers on the same realm must be a nightmare. Ever played in a guild with a female member surrounded by 5 beta orbiters? Imagine that but on a realm-wide scale, with hundreds of orbiters. Normally, I never watch streamers for any game. Out of curiosity I checked some wow classic streams and it's so bad. The streamers don't even bother talking about the game anymore. They just collect donations and talk about e-celebs. I want to die.

This one is much more realistically drawn by the way:

 

[hivemind]

assmongrel is stupid, looks like a fucking rodent and is terrible at the game, I have no idea how the fuck he has any sort of following, absolute game ruining cancer with all the orbiters

on the other hand soda is hot(i wish he'd breed me tbh) and is actually quite good at the game and like while popular and can organize world pvp he doesnt have loser zoomers giving him free shit, truly the patrician choice

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

looks like a fucking rodent

He traded his humanity for the entirety of wow's knowledge.

 

[Metro]

He doesn't know anymore about WoW than I do. At least as far as Classic goes. I stopped playing regularly in Wrath.

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Metro]

Because no one can carry him to a win in a duel.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Cringy video. All mages he duels are wasting a blink after a nova, and then also don't have time for 2 icebolts. And yet they still win. Lmao.

 

[Absinthe]

That guy is fucking terrible. He thinks it's his gear. It's him. He doesn't know how to play, at all. His opponents are trash too, but still do better than him. And while Warriors are considered shit until they get geared up at 60, that doesn't apply to level 30 twink PvP where Warriors can aggressively scale with gear while all the casters are hard-pressed to find any +spell damage or +healing at all.