Laziness. It could have been so easily fixed to better (although not perfectly, and that’s fine) represent Vanilla WoW raiding - all they had to was change elements of the 1.12 client from the outset to be more in line with the earlier patches of Vanilla. I refer primarily to talents and itemisation.
Itemisation I think is the bigger issue - I’m more understanding of the desire to use the classes as they were in their final state although the content should have been tweaked (numerically) to reflect this. By just spawning 1.12 Fury Warriors from the outset they created a meta which never existed as by the time Fury was at all viable in vanilla (1.11 I believe) guilds didn’t just have a roster of geared fury warriors to pull out of thin air. This is true of other classes too but to a lesser extent.
Gear is, however, the bigger issue and further exacerbates the class issue. Dungeon loot was massively buffed as AQ40 released in Vanilla which is the gear that Classic wow released with. It baffles me how few people seem to know this or acknowledged it. To illustrate just how much it was buffed, Mage pre-bis in 1.12 (and therefore classic) has 20% more frostbolt dps than mage pre-bis prior to AQ40 in Vanilla. I think people would talk about this a lot more if Blizzard had just slapped a -20% health and damage debuff on every boss prior to AQ which is effectively what they did.
Heck, I play a Paladin and much of my BiS or near-enough BiS loot is still dungeon blues. The only way to be ready for AQ back in the day was to have a near enough entire roster of people farmed out in BWL and MC gear. My guild only first cleared BWL 5 weeks ago and we’re ready to go.
Yes, the sweaty tryhard crowd would have cleared this content (although maybe not in 17 minutes) without issues even with old talents and items but you’d have created a more fulfilling experience and progression curve for the general player base.
I know the ‘old Blizzard wouldn’t have released a game with these failings’ thing is very much a dead horse by now but it is once again true.
TLDR; bad company is so bad they can’t even copy their old games properly.
How are asmongolds subs gonna feel good about themself then when they collect mounts on retail? Gotta make it so easy to rush it 1 year before shadowlands.
Pre order count for shadowlands is prob all time low for any expansion because of classic and share holders are prob raging.
Do you think wowhead wouldn’t have BiS lists and cookie cutter builds for patch 1.1? Do you think killing Rag with one submerge and Ony with 2min long air phase would somehow be worth it to have EVEN MORE broken classes and specs?
It’s very good Blizzard didn’t listen to the likes of you.
Vanilla was never hard, how many times does it have to be repeated. People learned about the eye beam on C’Thun after that one funny wipe when they run in. People struggled with 4H because they lacked 8 decently geared tanks with Reel to guarantee taunt, not because the encounter is intrinsically difficult.
I’m more understanding of the desire to use the classes as they were in their final state although the content should have been tweaked (numerically) to reflect this.
I agree with the post above. If they would have only fixed itemisation to reflect proper vanilla this game would have felt more difficult. But also remember that back then we didnt run dungeons with flasks and consumes for 100+ gold on a single raid, that was only for the Elite like Nihilum etc. At most I would use a ony buff in the old days if I was lucky to catch one. Now its all set up to rush through in 30-60 min.
On top of that you also have the privat server community coming from buffed servers (numerically on bosses) crushing through content easily in Classic. I hope blizzard does something to adress this but im not sure.
Yes, I READ IT, and I repeat: Rag with submerge and Ony wih 3 breaths in 2 min air phase wouldn’t make the game better or more fun. Having no spellpower on gear other than greens of frozen wrath would not make playing mage more fun or more satisfying. You STILL wouldn’t wear T0 gear or whatever like in the old days. Everything would still be theoricafted to hell and back. Just less fun.
Why are you repeating your Straw Man argument? OP said it would be more in-line with the earlier patches. That’s what OP want. That feeling of authenticity and enjoyement of playing earlier patches when it was not easy on top of easy. You then make a Straw Man argument about rag and ony machanics and stuff that is irrelevant to OP.
You are basically just saying “you think you do, but you don’t”…
Can you imagine the AH prices of ‘Of the Frozen Wrath’ gear in this scenario?
It would make clearing the instances more rewarding and satisfying for the standard player. One massive myth that gets bandied around is that players found PvE hard in vanilla. It was a meme back then that most players spent most of their time brain afk spamming one button but progress was still slow because there were a lot of gear-walls. Ragnaros is a great example as I remember progressing on it well - it was essentially a lot of 5-10% wipes because the raid was slowly overwhelmed by lack of throughput, mana issues and general raid damage. This was removed completely in Classic because Rag is not tuned for the gear people do it in. It wasn’t mechanically hard but it was rewarding because you had to slowly develop the output of your raid to be able to handle it.
I don’t understand why it’s so controversial to argue that content in an MMORPG should be tuned for the gear it’s done in. It’s game design 101.
Vanilla was always easy in terms of mechanics, most bossfights aren’t mechanically challenging compared to the modern game, but there were a lot more number checks.
The re-itemized gear, higher use of consumes and world buffs means that the raid is outputting much higher DPS, especially when combined with that people understand how to gear characters now and what rotations to use.
Part of me is wondering if they did it this way in order to let more people experience the old content.
You could be onto something here - they probably don’t want people to be progressing through Classic content at a reasonable rate and then not be interested in their retail expansions, store mounts and $$$ boosts.