Classic is for a year, TBC is for life

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Not much to look forward to in these dark days of lockdown, isolation, and staring at the same four walls day in, day out.

BUT

It looks like TBC is on the horizon.

I cannot wait. I absolutely cannot wait.
I’m burning with anticipation for the Burning Crusade. Once I’m in Outland, that’s it. It’s for life, or at the very least until Blizzard decides to pull the plug, hopefully some time in 2050 or beyond.

You can keep your fancy shmantzy WotLK, TBC is the real deal. TBC is for men, and also for women, and whatever other hominids may become capable of holding a mouse in the immediate future.

Right from that uber-epic first impression of Hellfire Peninsula stretching out before you as you enter the Dark Portal, with the demon lord being pummelled, and pummelling in turn - to the tranquil, eerie, tripped-out ambience of Zangarmarsh, the lush, rolling plains of Nagrand, that somehow just screams “For The Horde”, even if you’re Alliance - right through to the gloomy, dark mosh pits of Shadowmoon Valley. There’s a vibe, there’s a delicious feeling of immediacy…

I love TBC. It’s more than a perfect game, it’s a perfect experience.

Of course other players will find plenty to be upset about. World buffs are no longer a thing I guess… but we can be sure some new ‘META’ will be dreamed up by an influential content creator, and every min/maxer and their dog will race to copy it, so that it becomes the only way to complete content. We can be sure it will be every bit as ridiculously esoteric as having a Horde alt mind control you in Orgrimmar, and we can be sure it will be discussed to death in disparaging tones, even while umpteen zillion players copy it.

We can be certain that Kharazan will be cleared in the first week - to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; and yes, if you fly on a PVP realm, likely some laughing boy will slowfall onto you, dismount you, and watch you fall to your death. Night Elf Druids will have a ball shadowmelding, and flying away from danger, leaving would-be gankers shaking their fists like an old codger screaming “get off my lawn”. And yes, the launch will be shockingly bad, with Hellfire packed in like sardines. Yes, layering, and likely sharding will make their return.

You know what? I don’t care.

Bring on the Burning Crusade.

28 Likes
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I agree on this. TBC was where I started, so I was excited to try vanila. But I always played as Prot Paladin and in vanilla it is basicaly bad spec. There are also other things thaat bothers me like world buffs, consumables stacking and boring reputation rewards and farming. In TBC all of this main issues I have with classic atm are fixed. I can’t wait to play again.

3 Likes
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As I said there will be something, something or other that replaces the world buff mentality. I don’t know what it is, but it will be discovered, and then adhered to rigidly by the hive mind.

Drums are being mentioned a lot as the new ‘META’, but I don’t think a consumable that gives 5% haste is going to make a huge difference.

It will likely be something along the lines of a Shaman discovering that wearing a Santa hat, and spamming Far Sight while running counter clockwise around a totem in Ghost Wolf for precisely 14 minutes, while a Hunter kites a Fel Reaver and kills it precisely 8.6 metres from the group, in perfect synch with 22 Wariors switching to Wind Stance, and summoning a Shardblade causes a glitch where the whole raid gets a 17% Spellpower buff.

That sounds likely to me.

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I was a hardcore raiding nerd in TBC so will see it from the more casual side this time. Hopefully it’s still good then.

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My hardcore raiding days are long done. I’m as casual as casual can be. Did all that in WotLK, got my Kingslayer title, after that I just generally fell out with raiding. Quite frankly it bores me - having said that I might do Khara, I have a soft spot for Khara.

I have several long-term goals for TBC, none of which involve raiding, but at least some of which involve a lot of PvP.

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What are your goals?

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  1. Make a Draenei Mage, and run her to Elwynn Forest to level so as to avoid the crowds, and also the crowds in Outland during launch week.
  2. Level my Hunter to 70.
  3. Finish all remaining quest content.
  4. Farm enough gold for the fast flying mount.
  5. Begin Netherwing dailys in order to get my Netherdrake.
  6. Level Leatherworking to max.
  7. Begin the months of intensive farming required to make Ebon Netherscale Armor.
  8. Battlegrounds, battlegrounds, more battlegrounds.
  9. Seriously consider setting up an arena team, after getting appropriate PvP gear.
  10. Alts, alts, more alts…
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You’re not wrong about how TBC feels. Even today if I go to Outland in retail (which I don’t really play anymore) it just feels like… home.

I started too late in vanilla to really do any vanilla end game stuff, so this was also a great experience to be able to re-live classic stuff. But TBC was the one where I really started to enjoy WoW. Raids (first time going to Kara… oh the feels!), running around Zangamarsh (absolutely one of my favorite zones), doing heroics as a hunter who was constantly trapping, or resto shaman with group that didn’t have good gear making those heroics somewhat challenging and fun… killing Uvuros alone as a heroic/Kara geared restoshaman… :laughing:

TBC just offered so much to me and even then I couldn’t experience it all! Can’t wait to fight hordies in Hellfire Peninsula all over again :grin:

4 Likes
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Classic is for 1 year, tbc is for 2 years and wrath is for life.

Fixed it.

Agree with almost every perspective you have just with the next expansion and that delicious frozen lake.

I will however be playing a TBC shaman for the first time (earliest I played 1 was wrath) so itll be an adventure none the less and 1 I intend to relax and enjoy.

2 Likes
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I mean, the problem with worldbuffs isn’t the “world buff mentality”. What you call like that is just, well, minmaxing. The problem is that world buffs are terrible and whoever scripted them should feel bad about themselves.

Sure, drums have their own shares of issues, but they’re neither as strong nor as annoying to get and keep as world buffs are - they’re basically a consumable with a prof requirement, that’s it. As for the rest of the minmaxing stuff (like, say, enchanting relearning), it’s so unimpactful compared to wbuff that it hardly matters.

I personally prefer TBC to WotLK in the long run for a variety of reasons, but both are so far better than Classic that it’s not even a contest for me. The only people I hear that seem to prefer Classic are world PvP fanatics.

1 Like
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Would you not agree that min/maxing is, in itself a mentality? A particular mindset?

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I agree, but I don’t think it’s a problem in itself as long as the min/maxing strategy is fun in itself - which would be, in a good game. That’s obv not the case with Vanilla and wbuffs.

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Agreed, and also on your earlier points. There’s nothing inherently wrong with min/maxing. After all it’s just a way of minimising the disadvantages, maxing the advantages. Not bad as a life philosophy either.

Issues come when the content itself does not take it into account, when developers neglect to compensate for players’ tendency to ‘game the system’, for want of a better term.

I also find the whole idea of ‘metas’ distasteful too - an unswerving path all must follow to get the best result. Makes content seem more like putting together self-assembly furniture; but I guess that’s a personal opinion.

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I mean, as long as the meta is varied enough that people don’t feel pigeonholed in only 1-2 choices, what’s the issue? There’re plenty of good games with metas that feel fun and diverse to play.

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No issue really I guess, as I said it was just a personal opinion. I’m one of those people who tends to always do the polar opposite of what the game expects me to do, and just beat my own path through the bushes at my own pace, poking into every nook and cranny along the way.

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get out the house, nothing is stopping you.

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It may surprise you to learn that there’s a big Covid-19 pandemic going down, and that the UK is in the middle of a lockdown.

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could’ve fooled me

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Well I assure you it really is.

In terms of going out, the best I could realistically do is walk aimlessly around the housing estate, which is about as much fun as it sounds.

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If ppl can minmax they will.

TBC isn’t going to be much different than Classic and the same will be for WotLK when it comes out.

Overall I hope we’ll end up with all these incarnations of the game to play.