Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Makabb]

Wasn't leveling in vanilla mostly centered around fetch quests? And people still loved it? Why? Because its Warcraft? Are they masochists? What is WOW's secret? It's basically EQ1 set in the Warcraft universe.

becuase it's the diablo 2 kind of addiction, early wows had the diablo 2 like skill progression which they butchered today,running bosses was akin to diablo 2 boss runs, pvp was fun, I think the casualised skills started in cata, but the signs of decline were already starting with WOTLK when they were streamlining skills and abilities, the flying mounts basicaly destroyed exploration and any sense of scale of the world.

With every expansion the game got more casual and easier and instead of a mmo, you were playing a mmo single player game.


Maybe even TBC was already starting decline but I cannot say as I have started in TBC and not in vanilla.

 

[Makabb]

 

[Beastro]

Wasn't leveling in vanilla mostly centered around fetch quests? And people still loved it? Why? Because its Warcraft? Are they masochists? What is WOW's secret? It's basically EQ1 set in the Warcraft universe.

I don't know.

Beyond the enjoyment of having a break from EQs old pace of exping in an MMO there was much to WoWs lving process I found appealing.

Such as ?

Wasn't. Wasn't.

This bloody vertigo and my typos. If I waited for my head to feel better to post (and do pretty much everything else) I wouldn't be posting here at all.

 

[Scyrito]

That aside - can any informed gentlemen inform me on the power level of Bala Druid in PVE/PVP during vanilla days? I remember there were "oomkin" memes, but thats about it - druid has always been my fav class, and I'd just luv to try and get that dreamwalker raiment - its sorta childhood dream, really. Same question, for viability of enh shaman.

Balance was one of the many totally neglected specs in vanilla. You had one mediocre nuke (Wrath) and a stronger one with a way too long cast (Starfire) along with two dots (Moonfire and Insect Swarm) that dick jack all damage. Actual moonkin form wasn't even in the game until a later patch, the "ultimate" talent in the Balance tree was Hurricane; a thoroughly mediocre aoe. Itemization for the spec was total crap as well, there was a serious lack of spelldamage leather (back then spelldamage and healing were separate secondary stats) so if you wanted any serious offensive power for your druid you had to get cloth with the damage stat. Not to mention all tier sets for hybrid classes were healing oriented, until some slight hybrid love with AQ40 sets.

In PvE it was a joke spec, though marginally playable I guess. In PvP the cast-times fucked you over hard. Best bet was to run a resto spec with investment in balance for SOME damage, which hardly felt like playing a damage dealer. The spec did become slightly better as later vanilla patches rolled in, but not even close to being "good".

There was some potential if you could find a guild clearing BWL/AQ40 that didn't mind giving a druid spelldamage cloth armor and just stacked that shit. There were some meme'ish videos of a balance druids in full cloth damage gear floating around at the time, with Moonfire direct damage critting for 1k or so which was hot shit at the time.

Overall, balance only became a proper spec at Wrath of the Lich King.

 

[Makabb]

 

[Zetor]

Funny thing about dungeon finder, the first (crappy) implementation of meeting stones in 1.3 autofilled groups for dungeon_x. Then in 1.5 it was added to innkeepers, meaning you could just queue from Org / IF for any dungeon without the need to socialize or anything -- the only thing it didn't do compared to modern LFD is teleport everyone to the dungeon and give some extra reward after the dungeon is finished (oh yeah, and the % damage boost for having randoms in your LFD group). more stuff here

Of course the group matching / filling algorithm was kinda crap, and the system wasn't marketed at all; most people didn't even know about it. So all Blizzard needs to do is just take the current implementation of LFD and retrofit it for the upcoming Classic Servers, that's how it was supposed to work in the first place, right?! /troll

 

[Makabb]

What is amazing how with every expansion instead of adding new skills and abilities and building on top what was already there they were removing skills and compressing everything into one. Usualy there were 3 skills and they combined all effects into 1, every level you would get a new skill, last time i played it you would get a new skill every 3 levels ?
That was part of the fun of leveling, that you would get a new toy to play on every level.

 

[LeStryfe79]

I'm playing a Panzerkin. You all had to see this coming.

 

[Lacrymas]

That aside - can any informed gentlemen inform me on the power level of Bala Druid in PVE/PVP during vanilla days? I remember there were "oomkin" memes, but thats about it - druid has always been my fav class, and I'd just luv to try and get that dreamwalker raiment - its sorta childhood dream, really. Same question, for viability of enh shaman.

Don't expect a raid spot in any serious guild as a balance druid. Not viable in PvP at all. The only viable druid spec is resto. I wouldn't take an enh shaman to a raid, I'd force them to go hybrid resto/enh, but my guild took 1 enh shaman because he was an officer.

Why not just recreate the game as it was in 1.12?

That's not a very good idea. 1.12 was when almost all classes had had an overhaul and were much better at their jobs. That's when they made Chain Heal a smart heal, propelling shamans to the top of the healing charts. This makes the already easy raids even easier. I'd start at 1.02.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Fuck no, I ain't runnin' for senate!!!

Oh, wrong thread. Sorry.

 

[Jarmaro]

They already confirmed they are targeting people who never played Vanilla (majority of WoW players) and it will be diffrent from original, the least will be no bugs, no cross realm and dungeon finder also.
For sure they will upgrade graphics and characters models.
Will it be proggresive realm though?
It would be the best if they made Vanilla, BC and WotLK. I don't much people want to play on Cata, MoP is too fresh.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

They already confirmed they are targeting people who never played Vanilla

Where? Their only interview says they're not targeting casuls. Because casuls would hate it.

 

[Andnjord]

Well, I guess I'll give this a try. At least a month of tourism and then we'll see what happens.

 

[yeye]

Hybrid classes were all healers in vanilla. All their dps trees were dogshit. And they all wore cloth healing gear. I sure as fuck won't be playing paladin like I did back in the day. If they start off with how things actually worked in the early patches with 5 minute blessings, I don't think there'll be anyone playing paladin at all. Funnily enough, it was the most popular class in my guild throughout vanillla. People who rage about class balance in today's mmo's are in for a treat when they see their favourite spec can't even do HALF of what actual good specs in vanilla can do.

Best class to play in vanilla was warrior. They were the devs favourite class through all of vanilla and the only ones who were an actual hybrid spec. Fury for amazing dps (no hybrid tax here), arms for great pvp and prot obviously the only tank spec in the game. Wanna raid? Just switch to prot and someone will take you along for Majordomo or whatever.
Rogues were second best, cause of stealth and two good dps specs. Great in pvp, great in pve and with a more fun playstyle than casters.

All the other dps classes are next because they could at least farm without a 100g respec cost to make up every time they want to go kill stuff in the world. Pretty boring shit though. I'd say warlocks are the best here fun-wise.

Healers (so priest, pala, shaman, druid) are dead last cause they couldn't farm for cash so they'd have to respec into their awful dps spec(50g) and then back(50g) when they actually wanted to do a dungeon. Farm dungeons? You depend on other people then. As a dps class you could always just walk over to tyr's hand and go at it if you had a couple hours to waste. Priests were the best of the pack here for sure.

 

[Lacrymas]

Shadow is great throughout the game, we always took 1 shadow priest for Shadow Weaving. Although what I would have done is make a priest go hybrid shadow/holy as they only need to cast rank 1 mind flay every half-minute or so to keep the debuff up, no need to be heavy shadow. Undead shadow priests with engineering are powerhouses in PvP, immense self-healing, great damage mitigation, silence, great utility, great damage (in pvp that is).

Whether all healers wear cloth depends on what patch the game is going to start. If it starts at 1.02, yes, if not then only paladins are forced to equip cloth because their sets suck for healing.

 

[Deflowerer]

Can't they do the same as Runescape 2 Classic does, by having community vote for any patch improvements / expansions going forward?

 

[Zetor]

Speaking of pvp, both priests and warlocks are fucking terrible in vanilla and BC if you play alliance. glhf trying to fear, MC or seduce (succubus) the eleventy billion undead rogues who can pop a break and 5-second (20-second before 1.6, lol) immunity every 2 minutes! Especially fun before the introduction of pvp trinkets and the horrify effect on deathcoil.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Speaking of pvp, both priests and warlocks are fucking terrible in vanilla and BC if you play alliance. glhf trying to fear, MC or seduce (succubus) the eleventy billion undead rogues who can pop a break and 5-second (20-second before 1.6, lol) immunity every 2 minutes! Especially fun before the introduction of pvp trinkets and the horrify effect on deathcoil.

I remember playing a Warlock in TBC, sacrificing Succubus and spamming A SINGLE BUTTON of Shadow Bolt for #1 DPS.

On a second thought fuck Vanilla and TBC. 3 skills in a row and that's it.

 

[Metro]

The flip side is that warlock fear rarely broke against non-undead. I remember WSG matches where I'd have multiple dots on my head, a succubus beating on me and taking a shadowbolt to the face while still feared. Good times.

Anyway, I'm assuming there will be a modest amount of balance changes. I doubt this will be 'pure' legacy.

 

[Xor]

I'm filled with mixed emotions here - on the one hand, I would gladly pay money for a classic experience, for a number of reasons. Better support, no risk of an abrupt shutdown (rip Nostalrius), hopefully less chinese gold farmers and hackers, etc. I also think Blizzard wouldn't tolerate the shit that certain guilds got up to in Nostalrius where they would roll opposite faction toons to fuck with other guilds trying to do Kazaak, for instance. And despite people's insistence otherwise I don't believe Vanilla is best played on a server with 15,000 active players.

On the other hand, this is modern Blizzard, and I'm absolutely certain they'll find a way to fuck this up. And since they're offering classic servers, one would have to be naive not to realize they will start aggressively going after vanilla private servers which will be directly competing with this service.

I wouldn't even mind updates to Vanilla. Bug fixes, certainly. Support for more modern addon features. What I would like most of all is to see new content in the style of classic WoW. Huge dungeons and raids. I could probably even tolerate a dungeon finder if it wasn't cross-realm. If they add badges, though, I'm fucking done.

So has blizzard finally admitted they've had the source code for vanilla wow all this time, or are they scrambling because their expansions keep failing horribly to retain players for longer than a month and they're finally out of tricks and ideas?

Of course they had the source code. Even as far back as 2004, any medium to large professional programming project would use some kind of version control system. That was never the problem and I don't think they ever claimed it was. Maintaining code that was written 13 years ago for old hardware was always the biggest concern.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

I thought the biggest issue was the contrast between vanilla wow and current wow would highlight the massive decline?

 

[Makabb]

I thought the biggest issue was the contrast between vanilla wow and current wow would highlight the massive decline?

it will, that is why the current wow players are so salty.

This might be a slow preparation for the future to discontinue the 'current' wow becuase it is a too big mess, it will be slowly dying and they will be shifting team and resources into the 'classic' wow to make new content.

 

[Cunt destroyer]

Blizztard could actually transform the game by disabling any and all addons on classic servers, thus solving the problem of starting vanilla raids being too easy, but knowing them they would be too scared of the butthurt it would cause.

 

[Makabb]

If the main game crashes and burn thanks to this, it will be the best thing.

It's like even Blizz is hinting in their classic trailer by rewinding everything and starting from the first cinematic that none of it happened.

No one expected that Blizz will do this, so in the future we can expect the unexpected.

 

[Jimmious]

I expected this to be a remake of the initial WoW with new textures etc. But apparently it's only servers that will run "classic" versions? FFS aren't people extremely bored of WoW anyway by now??