Should Forever be harder or easier than original Classic?

WoW: Forever WoW: Forever General Discussion
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One thing I’ve been thinking about after watching the beta is where Blizzard intends Forever to sit in terms of difficulty.

So far, levelling appears quite fast, XP seems generous, and some of the new zones/content look easier than comparable areas in original Classic. Obviously this is still beta and tuning can change, but I think the overall direction is worth discussing.

Personally, I think Forever should probably be slightly harder than original Classic rather than easier.

That might sound strange when Classic already has a reputation for being slower and more punishing than later versions of WoW, but players today are in a completely different position from players in 2004.

We now have twenty years of game knowledge, optimisation, quest guides, Discord communities, better hardware and reliable internet connections. Even if Blizzard reproduced the original difficulty exactly, the game would effectively be easier because the players are much better equipped to deal with it.

To me, part of what made Classic work was that the world offered some resistance. Pulling another mob could matter. Caves could be dangerous. Elite quests encouraged grouping. Sometimes you had to stop and think about how to approach something rather than simply moving from one objective to the next.

Forever obviously shouldn’t mean “no changes.” I think there’s plenty Blizzard can improve, and finding a middle ground between Classic and some of the improvements made in later expansions is probably sensible.

However, I think they should be cautious about taking too much inspiration from the later-expansion philosophy of making levelling faster and the outdoor world less threatening. A large part of the reason Classic became popular again was that many players specifically missed that older style of world.

There is also the question of longevity. If Forever is intended to remain at level 60 and keep people interested for years, I’m not sure making the journey shorter and easier helps with that. The levelling world needs to remain somewhere players actually spend time and have experiences, rather than something they quickly get through before reaching the “real game.”

I’m not suggesting every normal mob should be difficult or that levelling should deliberately become tedious. There’s obviously a balance. But I think the target should perhaps be Classic difficulty adjusted for modern player knowledge, rather than Classic difficulty made easier.

What do others think?

Should Forever be harder than original Classic, about the same, or easier?

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Easyer. 85 % of the playerbase have never even sniffed to true vanila. Those of us that has 80 % of us do not want to go back.

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wow, the other 100 threads you guys spammed in the last few hours weren’t enough yet?

NO, it should not be harder than original vanilla, stop thinking that a masochistic dream of a few people will attract anything more than a miniscule percentage of the playerbase…era servers are dead enough as proof it doesn’t work.

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If there really have been dozens of threads about difficulty, that suggests it’s a genuine point of discussion rather than something only a tiny number of people care about.

Forever has an opportunity to keep the strengths of Classic while improving it. Making the outdoor world easier and levelling faster risks undermining one of the main reasons people wanted Classic back in the first place.

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My personal opinion is that it should stay the same “difficulty” leveling wise. I also find “difficulty” to be a misleading word for it, because it’s not really about that. It’s a lot down to more limiting rather than being difficult.

I personally love classic because I feel like I am playing the game while leveling, and not just breezing through with zero thought of feel for the game, making leveling feel completely pointless and unrewarding like retail leveling feels (to me).

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no, it’s just the same few people posting non-stop about it.

era is already the smallest serverbase at the moment, why have another near dead “superslow” server, sod and tbc aniversary where more popular.

just accept it, there’s not enough young no-lifers subscribing to make that a useful game.

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Should be about the same imo, open world, dungeons and raids.

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This is the first thread I’ve made about difficulty. I have noticed you’ve commented on quite a few of them yourself though including saying levelling was “maybe bit too fast up to 10”

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I totally agree with this, i can accept same level of danger, but a bit harer would be really cool!

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Agree with author it should be slightly harder, or at least the same.

Now it’s easier and faster.

Retail players keep crying about this but the moment they will be 60, they’ll be just crying about content. Leveling is content. Let’s not rush it.

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it’s you order and aylish in every thread, i’m just fishing, so had some time!

by the way, the new zone is amazing, pretty and i died 3 times on my hunter twice in caves with bit too heavy respawns, ones on elite quest mob.

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I’m wondering a bit why some people here define Era as the proof for slow levelling not working.

Just tell me, how long Era exists? How much new content has it got in that time? How often does the average altoholic level a new character to lvl 60, just to end up in the usual raid/pvp treadmill? And how will doing the same content for several not end up as boring and uninteresting and lead to people quitting?

So how do all these years of neglectance manage to be important for a different, new game with a new and different idea of progression?

So yeah, I would see Forever making levelling a lot tougher. And for my Endgame, I wish for more interesting quests* and the chance to scout new regions, not boring repetitive raiding nor pvp

don’t need to have any fancy rewards, when Blizzard manages to bring Housing to Forever, too. Just some heads on a plate I hang at a wall or something

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In terms of leveling - whatever. Truth be told, outside of hardcore variation, all WoW versions are trivial to play before endgame. People leveled characters in vanilla without picking a single talent or visiting a trainer, because they didn’t know about them. I prefer slower leveling, but anything works, really.

In terms of end-game. I have experience with Anniversary vanilla and Anniversary TBC. Both versions are not very complicated. Some bosses are, some are not. I think that guild of good players (not the best ones, but somewhat competent) should spend 20 attempts at every boss, before killing it and 50 attempts at last boss. That would be my golden standard. Fast enough as not to burn-out and slow enough to enjoy the progression. Guild of bad players should not complete the full content at all and guild of exceptional players could progress a raid in a single week.

But I’m fine with trivial raid content too. It just causes degenerate play, that’s what I don’t like. Players are trying to speedrun, parse, and these activities are ones I don’t like.

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Harder than what? If you locked world buffs out of Anniversary Naxx then the amount of people who killed KT would have been cut down by 70%. Vanilla content wasn’t hard but it was a big time sink, world buffs made it faster and cleaner. I think that raids should have more mechanics but nothing over the top.
In Vanilla at least guilds during AQ would clear AQ, BWL, and MC so having them too over the top would make raiding painful and would cause burnout.

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Author is mainly talking about leveling.

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It should be enjoyable, I don’t really feel making it an arbritrary hard grind is really helpful. Mobs also don’t don’t need to fall over with one hit.

Having said that I can’t really comment, have reached level 13 and am still on floating starter isle but the levelling has not been fast.

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would help to state the class you play, as some classes progress faster at some points in the grow-up period, and the time played might also help in evaluate your information

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I am a Skyborne Druid, current running around as a bear since level 10.

I am currently stuck waiting for a bugged quest to see the last of the story on the starter isle.

I am treating this like the journey matters rather than rushing through, I have done nothing min max and have just worked my way round the starter isle to complete all the quests/see the story.

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are you saying ERA is hard? roflmao, there are many things about era that should artificially make it much easier for new players. and using the numbers of a game that has been out for 7 whole years with no updates as an example for why that game is bad is the dumbest thing i’ve read on the internet in a long time. retail doesn’t even last 2 months without new updates and vanilla has been out for well over 2 decades at this point. but sure lets poison the game that is supposedly delineates from classic with limp wrist philosophies from the new game that needs constant updates to stay “exciting”.

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The ease and speed of levelling genuinely worry me.

Considering extra XP buffs, gear we get, numerous extra quests, etc. It should be harder and slower.

I feel they should use the new Legacy system to provide pathways to buffs and simplify the game. So it becomes easier and quicker over time, the more you play and more Legacy points you earn.

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