Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Metro]

If you want to play for about a month just to see what it was like? Sure. On a regular basis? No. Raiding is not worth it. And five mans are better in retail with Mythic+

 

[Metro]

Some time before Ulduar (is this what the next raid dungeon was called after Naxx?), like it says in my post. Not on launch of wraith, I had school exams or smth before I could get back to it.

So... yeah... you were carried through the first raid tier when it was four or five months old. That doesn't translate into Naxx 2.0 was so easy people were clearing it in green gear in the first month.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Wrath Naxx was pretty damn easy though. I believe world first clear occurred within 24 hours of the release of the expansion somehow. Contrast that with just one expansion prior (BC) where raids would take over a month for the first clear.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

imagine wasting hundreds of hours of your finite life leveling and gearing up in this piece of shit game just so you can be on some loser's stream for a few seconds

 

[Metro]

Wrath Naxx was pretty damn easy though. I believe world first clear occurred within 24 hours of the release of the expansion somehow. Contrast that with just one expansion prior (BC) where raids would take over a month for the first clear.

I mean... sure, by a top no-lifer guild (and I think it was more like 2-3 days). I'm going off of the average player.

TBC didn't really start off with a proper raid tier (Tier 4) outside of Karazhan and Gruul/Mag. Tier 5 raids required attunements. As Naxx was recycled the top raiders had little problem replicating the same encounters they ran dozens of times prior. Kael/Vashj, however, were notable steps up from Classic raid design.

 

[Absinthe]

As someone who has never played WoW, and knows very little, good idea to get into Classic WoW now?

WoW is a lot more boring than people make it out to be. I'm just warning you now. Combat is repetitive. Grinding is highly repetitive and is honestly designed by no-lifers for no-lifers. PvP is unbalanced. And it's got more walking than any walking simulator you can think of, and the walking is slow too. Mounts and flight paths help with that, but even then it's still slower than most walking sims (spending minutes riding around from destination to destination in-game is pretty normal), Mage Portals (Druid has 1 portal too), Warlock summoning, and Engineering trinkets (on a ginormous 4 hour cooldown) will help with that a bit. Professions are imbalanced too (and most of the crafting professions are frankly not much good while leveling). WoW succeeded more as a social phenomenon than as a game. A lot of people looked down on WoW when it came out as the ultimate MMO for casuals (which reminds me, the average WoW player is retarded and this is going to be worse when you're dealing with hordes of people who have only played new WoW and thus have preconceived notions of how to play WoW but no notion how combat mechanics like threat work).

Lastly, Classic WoW will only be out on August 26th (if US) or 27th (if not). Getting "into it" now just means you're signing up on the waiting list or hoping you get into the closed beta. Some people claim launch day is an experience that shouldn't be missed. Others will tell you it's retarded to sign up for those kinds of godawful queues, server instability, emergency maintenance, and so forth.

 

[shihonage]

^^^^ the opinion of someone who never played any other MMO and has nothing to compare to ^^^^

In reality, warts and all, classic WoW is still the best MMO on the market.

 

[Absinthe]

Now that's the opinion of a fanboy you got there. WoW was never the best MMO on the market. It was simply the most casual, the most accessible, and the most popular. WoW's definition of hardcore didn't revolve around skill but absurd amounts of repetitive grind and no-lifing. Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, persistent world servers on NWN 1 & 2 (which are basically mini-MMOs) all do better. If you want a hardcore grinder, classic Mabinogi is better too. It has retarded amounts of grind too (it's a Korean MMO, you can grind that shit for years), but at least the gameplay demands an actual degree of skill instead of mindlessly spamming your shit and waiting to ding up like a retard and things like blacksmithing are actually useful as you're leveling.

I also can't help but notice you failed to dispute any of my criticisms of WoW.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

imagine wasting hundreds of hours of your finite life leveling and gearing up in this piece of shit game just so you can be on some loser's stream for a few seconds

Though the WoW section does produce some golden moments of sheer trailer trash degeneracy.



With rage like that, nigga would've been a stellar Warrior lolol

 

[GrainWetski]

WoW is a lot more boring than people make it out to be. I'm just warning you now. Combat is repetitive. Grinding is highly repetitive and is honestly designed by no-lifers for no-lifers. PvP is unbalanced. And it's got more walking than any walking simulator you can think of, and the walking is slow too. Mounts and flight paths help with that, but even then it's still slower than most walking sims (spending minutes riding around from destination to destination in-game is pretty normal), Mage Portals (Druid has 1 portal too), Warlock summoning, and Engineering trinkets (on a ginormous 4 hour cooldown) will help with that a bit. Professions are imbalanced too (and most of the crafting professions are frankly not much good while leveling). WoW succeeded more as a social phenomenon than as a game. A lot of people looked down on WoW when it came out as the ultimate MMO for casuals (which reminds me, the average WoW player is retarded and this is going to be worse when you're dealing with hordes of people who have only played new WoW and thus have preconceived notions of how to play WoW but no notion how combat mechanics like threat work).

Lastly, Classic WoW will only be out on August 26th (if US) or 27th (if not). Getting "into it" now just means you're signing up on the waiting list or hoping you get into the closed beta. Some people claim launch day is an experience that shouldn't be missed. Others will tell you it's retarded to sign up for those kinds of godawful queues, server instability, emergency maintenance, and so forth.

Vanilla WoW was definitely the casual MMO in 04/05, but compared to the trash that is active these days it's actually far from it. Having to travel the world is a very good thing, not a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you're playing on an empty server or if you want "the ultimate MMO for casuals". Vanilla is also nowhere near as grindy as you make it out to be unless you're going for rank 14. In fact, modern WoW is far more grindy since that's all you can do and there's never an end to the grind.

Balance is just boring. PvP balance is what lead to every class doing everything in modern WoW(everyone has to have a self-heal, interrupt, stun, movement ability, damage cooldown and so on). If you want that shit, you go play an FPS 1on1 with only 1 allowed weapon. Classes in MMOs should be unique, not balanced. All the retards obsessed with balance are fucking stupid.

 

[Lacrymas]

You don't have that much stuff to grind in vanilla, and all grinds can be circumvented by enough gold. The worst grind I did while playing on Kronos was for Cenarion Hold, and I didn't participate in 95% of it since everyone was doing it and I just alt-tab sat in a raid group while others were killing shit. I did it to get the Priest healing weapon from AQ20. And I think it was kinda pointless in the end because AQ20 gives ridiculous amounts of rep per run. Apart from rank 14, the other grotesque grind is the bug parts for the scepter quest, which I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. Other than that, even if you grind for everything, like consumables and rep, it isn't THAT bad, in the sense that it doesn't take obscene amounts of time. A few guildies of mine managed to get exalted with ZG the day it was released.

It's true that GW1 is (was) a better MMO and EQ a better RPG than WoW, though. EQ has too much grinding and GW1 is dead. So much for that.

The combat is a more complicated matter. The main attraction of it is that WoW has good "kinaesthetics", i.e. it's smooth to play, like all other Blizz games. Even though you do go through the same motions while leveling, it somehow doesn't get so repetitive that it gets boring. At least combined with the different quests and zones + dungeons here and there. I really have no explanation as to why, apart from that it's responsive. When I've tried to psychoanalyze myself on this matter, since I'm allergic to repetitiveness, I've found out that WoW strikes a peculiar cocktail in which every ingredient feeds into the others. When in a given moment the combat is repetitive, the accumulation of items makes up for that, when both of those dry up, the social aspect (if you are into that sort of thing) brings you back, then inevitably comes the new content, so you have something new to do, then you have the AH minigame where you try to squeeze as much gold from the market as possible. It's a psychological trap in other words, but not in a malicious way. Vanilla is not designed to be like those Korean MMOs where easily addicted personalities are caught in a loop.

You can't have PvP without balance, at least some semblance of balance. Like in many games, Blizzard inevitably fell into symmetric balancing that ruined PvP forever. Every healer must have a dispel, every DPS an interrupt, everyone a stun, etc. This is not only boring and makes the classes pointless, it's also basically impossible unless the classes are perfectly symmetrical and have the exact same abilities, because even small inequalities are immediately felt at least by the top players and FOTM classes/comps pop up. It's better to have hardcounters up to a point than to give all abilities to all classes, but it should be taken care to not have 1 comp that hardcounters everyone else, like Warrior/Druid in TBC or Paladin/Death Knight in WotLK. 3s were better in this regard, though, and that's why 2s were excluded from titles. Different categories were probably a mistake, only 3s should've existed in the first place. My point is that balance is important, but the attempt at symmetrical balance is dooming.

As I've said before, vanilla's problems (economy, raid schedules, guild politics, raid mechanics, rank 14 grind, lack of meaningful PvP) can only be felt by the top players, so it's not surprising that many people aren't affected and are excited to play it again.

 

[Absinthe]

Vanilla WoW was definitely the casual MMO in 04/05, but compared to the trash that is active these days it's actually far from it.

That's because the trash that is active these days aspires to be WoW. It is no surprise that WoW does WoW better.

Having to travel the world is a very good thing, not a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you're playing on an empty server or if you want "the ultimate MMO for casuals".

Sure, travel is nice. But usually only one or two times if you're familiarizing yourself with a new zone. I remember fucking AFKing on a regular basis while I autoran in specific directions because it was that fucking dull. Flight path chains are also a good time to AFK the fuck out. WoW's travel times are simply excessive and boring. There is no real value in all the walking and riding around because nothing happens anyway. I ain't joking when I say that WoW's got more walking than any walking simulator you can think of. The best way to avoid that travel shit is to teleport around if possible and grind money so you can just pay Warlocks for summons, even though they hate getting PM'd all the time for summons, but you will still walk a lot.

There is a reason why so many other MMOs use waypoint systems and the like, and it isn't because they're trying to be casual. It's because they're trying to cut down on the boring shit.

Vanilla is also nowhere near as grindy as you make it out to be unless you're going for rank 14. In fact, modern WoW is far more grindy since that's all you can do and there's never an end to the grind.

Honor grind, raid grind, dungeon grind for rare drops (which can have you running the same dungeon over 20 times), reputation grind, and there are a couple other forms of grind too. And it's pretty common to discover you need to grind for something or another to make your build/class work. For instance, rogues need to raid BWL because their T2 gloves are must-haves for PvP. Druids need to raid for much of their feral gear (and feral weapons only start to drop from AQ onwards, unless you're raiding world boss dragons) for their PvP performance. And the classes that don't need end-game gear still tend to benefit from it too much to ignore it. The grind will creep on most WoW players. There are ways to avoid most of the asinine forms of grind (unless you're among the unlucky bastards who need specific gear) with decent planning, I'll give you that, but your gear will still be far behind the players that do grind.

Balance is just boring. PvP balance is what lead to every class doing everything in modern WoW(everyone has to have a self-heal, interrupt, stun, movement ability, damage cooldown and so on). If you want that shit, you go play an FPS 1on1 with only 1 allowed weapon. Classes in MMOs should be unique, not balanced. All the retards obsessed with balance are fucking stupid.

That's not good balance. That's just balance as done by retards (make everything excessively equivalent and call it a day). Go play Guild Wars 1 sometime. It's a pretty well balanced game and yet classes are unique.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The only good thing about walking around in WoW is for PK fodders. If you have no interest in World PVP and stuff there is 0 reason people walking around is a good thing. When nothing happens its boring as fuck.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Walking around in Vanilla WoW was cool for a little while if you were a fan of the Warcraft RTS games and seeing the world you've been playing in for a decade fleshed out properly. I remember if you flew from Stormwind to Ironforge you'd see an Altar of Storms from WC2 along the way or ziggurats in the Plaguelands. But after a few months you do start to mentally check-out when traveling.

I can't imagine playing Vanilla on a PVE server. You need that thrill and excitement of being attacked at any moment to make the constant running around not turn you into an alcoholic.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

WoW is a lot more boring than people make it out to be. I'm just warning you now. Combat is repetitive. Grinding is highly repetitive and is honestly designed by no-lifers for no-lifers.

Having to travel the world is a very good thing, not a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you're playing on an empty server or if you want "the ultimate MMO for casuals". Vanilla is also nowhere near as grindy as you make it out to be unless you're going for rank 14. In fact, modern WoW is far more grindy since that's all you can do and there's never an end to the grind.

How many hours /played does it take to get to max level in vanilla?

 

[Parabalus]

As someone who has never played WoW, and knows very little, good idea to get into Classic WoW now?

If you're out of school you won't have enough time to achieve much, better to pass. Or share an account.

For instance, rogues need to raid BWL because their T2 gloves are must-haves for PvP.

You could have put on a weapon chain on your OH, swap when needed (warriors).

 

[Ninjerk]

WoW is a lot more boring than people make it out to be. I'm just warning you now. Combat is repetitive. Grinding is highly repetitive and is honestly designed by no-lifers for no-lifers.

Having to travel the world is a very good thing, not a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you're playing on an empty server or if you want "the ultimate MMO for casuals". Vanilla is also nowhere near as grindy as you make it out to be unless you're going for rank 14. In fact, modern WoW is far more grindy since that's all you can do and there's never an end to the grind.

How many hours /played does it take to get to max level in vanilla?

I've seen a screenshot by Joana of 4-5 days, and heard a rumor there is one by someone else that is dramatically less (but requires a lot of cooperation with others e.g. summoning and portals).

 

[Lacrymas]

If you can be twinked at every level, have potions and enchants, and have people to boost you and summon you - or just have people kill the mobs you tag - I guess you can shave off a day or so from Joana's record. Joana's run was on a fresh server.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Ok but for the average Joe? 10-15 days /played?

 

[Lacrymas]

If you don't know what you are doing and are just randomly stumbling on quests, yes, but if you do, around 7-8 days /played while doing dungeons and without rushing is a reasonable estimation.

 

[Cromwell]

But after a few months you do start to mentally check-out when traveling.

you couldnt in classic at the startz because you landed on every fucking flight point. I dont know about others but I would agree that WoW would be fundamentally boring if it werent for your server community, after blizzard murdered that and people I regurlarly played with left the rest of the game just wasnt as exciting for me anymore and I quit.

 

[Ninjerk]

But after a few months you do start to mentally check-out when traveling.

you couldnt in classic at the startz because you landed on every fucking flight point. I dont know about others but I would agree that WoW would be fundamentally boring if it werent for your server community, after blizzard murdered that and people I regurlarly played with left the rest of the game just wasnt as exciting for me anymore and I quit.

Completely forgot about that.

 

[hivemind]

I will not be playing this trash game after all

the horrible class balance makes me just not want to play content that has already been pretty much solved

see you on classic + or TBC

 

[Syl]

Ok but for the average Joe? 10-15 days /played?

Yes. For a player with good knowledge of the game, it's 7-9 days (mostly solo). Can be 20 days if you don't know what you're doing or like to take your time.

 

[Wilian]

Ok but for the average Joe? 10-15 days /played?

Around so. When I did my last no rush run and leveled professions while running some extra dungeons & helped out some pals with other stuff it was around 13 days of /played