Classic Plus "Unpublished content" requirements

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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It is great time to define altogether what are the YEAs and NAYs of acceptable Classic Plus content, folks.

You may have already seen it on that site or reddit https://www.warcrafttavern.com/wow-classic/news/blizzard-is-considering-some-larger-changes-to-classic-era-servers/

Basically Blizzard’s making a poll the way they did before classic-BC development. This time it’s about the future of Classic Era, the servers which won’t follow the BC path.

Would they stay frozen as NoChange servers forever? Should they get quality of life ““improvements”” ? (something very moot in my opinion.) Or should they get Unpublished content that diverge from known WoW path?

We can guess that with such questions, the devs will anger the NoChange people, who would not oppose to ClassicPlus if it were on dedicated servers otherwise.

Yet the last question is a bit stealthy, “Was it right to separate BC and Classic Era?”, imo it’s a way to test stealthily how much the playerbase accepts WoW existing in simultaneous differing versions. So possibly, also both as Classic Era and Classic+Unpublished.
This does give an excessive weight to the “do-not-divide-the-community” complaints, which are irrelevant in my opinion. But at least the result of Pro-Change replies will be a hard minimum, and they’ll be able to compute it with the “dividing” acceptance and the “NoChange players core” hardness in order to prepare Classic+Unpublished dedicated servers.

Something that worries us is such new content may be including just the Cash Shop, pet battles, and they’d call it a day. Or worst: alternative levelling 60-70, powercreep gearing, and more insidiously, irrelevant story and lore (from the Retail Warcraft universe).
I’m pretty sure nobody want these.
And not everyone is willing to play ClassicPlus nevertheless.

So this thread addresses Classic+Unpublished appreciators.
We guys have to claim again what features of core Classic have to be kept in “+Unpublished” version and what are expandable.

What are your ideas?

Our expectations may not be exactly the same, as -they- warned us here on the forum, but at least I’m sure we can draw a consensus line of the ClassicPlus core mindset.

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Here are some thoughts we can talk about first.

GAMEDESIGN globally

  1. Max level 60 forever.
  2. Horizontal progression : diversification of gameplay instead of power-creep.
  3. Development and releases by patches, not expansions.

GAMEPLAY and mechanics

  1. New PvE gear in the scope of power of AQ/Naxx stuff
    -allowing new specs and builds to become relevant and enjoyable, but not outperforming former specs and builds.

WORLDBUILDING and story

  1. Prime purpose of enjoying new quests and exploration of the world.
  2. Stick to the genuine Classic Warcraft lore, world and cosmology
    -including the older Warcraft RTS’ lore.
    -picking some pinches of the RPG-books scrapped lore back here and there.
    -keeping the Classic Era WoW lore intact, as a priority.
  3. No Time magic into the story. Ever.
  4. No One-Player-Character-to-save-the-world stories. Massively multiplayer driven story, instead.
  5. Diverge from the Retail Universe into a full-fledged Rebooted Classical Warcraft Universe, like if it were a movie remake from scratch. New characters, old cosmology, nothing you could say “Retail have already done this way” (or as few as possible).(*)
  • I am about helpless regarding classic PvP features or improvements so share yours!

( * ) If you’re interested in this point, you can read this:

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It will be interesting to see how and where this poll ends.

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This won’t really happen unless you would have seasons and new character or new level 60 gear every season. You can exaggerate resistance gear to force people to use different gear for different instances but that’s not that fun…

WoW engine allows for only specific types of content.

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It can happen just like it happened in ESO and, if I trust what I read, also in GW2

What

sorry it barely makes sense to me, how can the engine forbid the way you want to write your quest texts lol, what do you mean?

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What does quest text has to do with “Massively multiplayer driven story” you wanted? It always will be “go there do this” and at rare occasions you will have to group for an elite mob and that’s all.

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Yes, yes and this is something to preserve, imo, the point was about the worldbuilding.

I’m contrasting it with regards to Retail stories, you know, “you are the only adventurer on earth and you save the world by yourself o great hero”, which happened since Cataclysm at least, that ruined the story totally in WoD (you may know, the infamous “garrison” and its so-called “unique” general, you, “the Player-Character”.)
It is a core feature of a MM oRPG that feeling of being just one mere traveler into a much bigger bunch of adventurers, inside a much wider world, isn’t it ?

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Classic already uses that non-hero vocabulary.

If you care about quest text then maybe… Questing experience is rather more important than how the text looks like (although obnoxious quest giver behavior can be annoying).

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Don’t get me wrong, but what would be the point in gaining this gear, if it’s the exact same power as AQ/Naxx?
Usually for a RPG, you play to get stronger ideally.
Otherwise, you’re just going ------------------- instead of going up.

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Old Outlands as a Classic patch instead of new Outland as an expansion.

Same for Emerald Dream. The old good one, not what happened in Legion.

All Caverns of Time instances up until WotLK, plus the long-planned War of the Ancients raid, similar in style to Hyjal (I really loved the Hyjal aesthetics, music, and vibes)

An alternate positive ending to the story. Fandral gets decorrupted, Malfurion returns and marries Tyrande, Plaguelands slowly getting healed, something is important is discovered in Uldum that lets you open the Dark Portal into old Outlands, Burning Legion gets repelled from there, Blasted Lands calm down and slowly return to the swampy environment, Searing Gorge and Burning Steppes volcanic activity calms and vegetation returns over time, Tanaris and Silithus water sources are slowly refilling, Varian Wrynn returns in good state, and the war between Horde and Alliance officially ending (but only in lore, PvP servers remain PvP, guards of hostile cities still attack on sight, etc)

The Classic-to-WotLK era really had that long chains with positive ending. I liked how some bandits infesting Northshire eventually led to killing Onyxia, some new species of insects in the Barrens eventually led to C’thun, some undead invasion eventually led to killing Arthas, some monsters in Blasted Lands eventually led to killing that dark naaru in Sunwell Plateau and the epic RP event that followed.

They should do the same with the unfinished storyline threads. Uldum, the entire druids thread, and others.

As for the gameplay and progression:

  1. Some new item slot definitely
  2. New stats - supercrit chance, multistrike, versatility, etc - to combat hard capping
  3. Bosses having higher effective level - so that when calculating crit or hit chances, they count as level 65, etc.
  4. Boss levels being visible to the player, as well as built-in UI that shows actual effects of stats (actual crit and hit percentage against level 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, and 65 monsters, actual mana gain from intellect, etc)
  5. Spellcasting skill - effectively weapon skill for offensive spells
  6. A lot of items from new content would contain weapon skill bonuses
  7. Rebalance the numbers to make meme specs viable, and give some decent gear to them
  8. A mechanic that will let you level past 60, but not through usual questing or killing random mobs - only raid bosses and PvP achievements would give you XP after 60, and it will be a very slow process. So that one day the actual level cap might end up being let’s say 70 and raid bosses being 80 (with items that give +40 to weapon skills), but old content will still be significant for fresh 60s. And of course higher level bosses would give a lot more XP than lower level as a catch-up mechanic. So imagine level 63 bosses giving 10 XP, level 64 bosses giving 20 XP, level 30 bosses giving 35 XP, or something like that, and you need 1000 XP for level 61, 2500 XP for level 62, 5000 XP for level 63, something like that.
  9. Change to PvP ranking system - only 20% of your score goes from the amount of HKs, and the rest from your win rate. Imagine, an ELO score with MM that matches you with people around the same ELO score, and if you win, it grows, and if you lose, it drops. And during weekly reset, rank points are calculated the same way as today, except that your rank points from honor are 5 times smaller and you also get rank points from your current ELO score. And, of course, your ELO score also drops/resets over time to prevent passive rank increasing by avoiding PvP.
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If they actually get a team in flavor of keeping it “classic” then yes 100% I’d even pay money for that.
That being said, if they bring out their own devs on it, hard pass there.

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They could do the zones/dungeons as they planned before levelling got nerfed.

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One word of advice: keep Reddit out of it.
Seriously, they ruin everything.

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I think this could be a good opportunity for them to implement Karazhan raid in Classic, like it was originally intended before they decided to make it the entry raid for TBC instead. Also, we could get the Karazhan Crypt as a dungeon.

Hyjal could finally be used as a zone as well. Plenty of positive changes could be added in order to enrich Classic without ruining the experience.

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Naxx kind of makes it hard to fit yet another raid tier at level 60. They could replace raids but that’s even less likely. More likely they will change some rules for existing content and if that goes well they may think about something extra.

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Yes, but they don’t necessarily have to make Karazhan drop higher ilvl items than Naxx. It could simply be added as an alternative, and would provide more variety for the end-game raiding.

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Still some sort of power creep. In more modern expansions they solved it by scaling stamina between tiers where as vanilla has a double problem with it - for once they don’t have that stamina scaling between tiers and more so the stamina is set to low allowing for a lot of PvP one-shots as well as problems with raid design - hard to deal damage to a raid that is relatively low on HP versus time needed to heal. This was addressed in TBC and WoTLK… and raid logging is boring :wink: if anything they should do something more fun…

… like if you start a Tauren you are a Horde character. But what if you could start a Tauren that was part of the Cenarion Circle or Twilight Hammer, or an Orc that serves under Rend command and UBRS is your main hub? …

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That could actually be pretty exciting! I’d love to join the Cenarion Circle or the Argent Dawn.

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Same power, but not the same way, not the same effects.
So the players can try new things, new builds, experiment, enjoy a new emergent gameplay.

When you are max level you are max level. And you can still enjoy the game but perfectioning and mastering the end game with the tools that are there.

This is a mechanic aspect and also a story-driven aspect to handle carefully. We already saw how ludicrously wrong it went on Retail. No Classic player want to be the Savior of the Universe all by themselves.

Absolutely this. Naxxramas is quite a hard raid for the casual.

I wouldn’t go as far as playable Twilight Hammer or Dark Horde, but definitely yes the diversification of the RPG experience is the main point of all this.
I’d say, let’s implement more customisations based on what is possible for the NPCs, unlockable by quests to introduce “hiring” new subraces or people (that would be a reroll this way). Wildhammer tatoos, Revantusk and Zandalar skins, for example.

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But how exactly would you do this?
Hit % - Crit %?
There’s only a certain amount that you can exactly do with gear.

I solo’d Nefarian, I am the savior :slight_smile: