My proposed changes for next Classic Fresh/Classic + (2019 player perspective)

[Eleese-pyrewood-village]

Hello, after playing Anniversary Servers since launch these are some changes I would like to see for the next Classic Fresh or Classic +.

Major Changes

1. Alliance version of Warchief’s Blessing. One thing I noticed with these Anniversary servers is that there are less people playing melee (Rogue/Warrior) compared to 2019 Classic. I think part of it is people knowing servers go to TBC and that those classes aren’t in huge demand there, but also with how cumbersome it is to get WCB on Alliance it makes playing a melee less attractive for some people.

I can speak from my own experience playing a Rogue in this game it is not fun playing alongside others who get WCB because you simply can not compete on the meters with them. And at some point that becomes your carrot for playing. So to even the playing field on Alliance and make filling raids easier, adding an Alliance version of the Rend buff would be nice. You can call me a casual if you want but I did not feel like farming 50g or whatever every week and then dealing with potential misfires on the mind control or whatever. Now I will agree there is some emergent gameplay arising from people offering a Rend selling service, but I think the greater point that needs to be addressed here is the favoritism of casters on Alliance because they don’t need Rend to compete.

2. Fear Ward baseline for all Priest races on Alliance. Or, allow Priests to pick their own class-specific racial. So you can pick Human and choose Fear Ward over the human specific Priest racial.

So a lot of people aren’t gonna care about this one because its an Alliance and Priest specific issue. But basically this is a unique case of there is no other Race + Class combination that has the potential to get you excluded from raids. Playing a Priest as a non-dwarf on Alliance can and will get you excluded from raids at times. This is clearly an oversight, as there is no way the original developers intended for Fear Ward to be this desirable.

Of course then people will just go to the next strongest option, which is Human because of the buff to Spirit. But to that I would say: Ok, but you can still play Dwarf or Night Elf and get invited. Because a 5% bonus to Spirit doesn’t matter, just like how Human Mages lacking 5% intellect doesn’t really matter. So its impossible to pick a “wrong” race for Priest in this case. Additionally Dwarf may still be BiS for PvP so remains a strong contender for meta-chasing people.

3. Buffs to meme specs. A pretty obvious change, but I would like to see adjustments to make specs that are rarely brought to raids or even dungeons like Shadow Priest and Ret Paladins more viable. I don’t want to see Feral Druids top the meters or anything like that, but I would like for all the underpowered specs to get minor buffs, like maybe remove the threat modifier from Mind Blast and nerf mana costs of the Shadow Priest.

Minor Changes

1. Make certain materials drop from additional sources. Season of Mastery did this thing where you could find some important materials such as Elemental Earth from herbing or mining. Basically I want to see a change like that so that certain mobs that drop these materials, like the Earth Elementals in Badlands, are less valuable for max level players to farm. Another way to address this issue is to increase the drop rate of these materials on high level mobs. For instance, the Earth Elementals in Silithus, that are in the high Lv. 50’s, have a 2% drop change for Elemental Earth. Meanwhile the Earth Elementals in Badlands have a higher drop rate, while also being lower level, thus easier and faster to farm.

This could address issues where levelling players get bottlenecked in certain zones doing certain quest chains. The typical example is Badlands where the Earth Elementals are heavily contested by max level players who are farming them because they offer the best drop rate of the extremely desirable Elemental Earth.

2. Dual Spec should only work in cities. I know people aren’t going to like this one, because most people love quality of life, I guess. But being able to switch specs anywhere doesn’t feel very old-school RPG-like. That’s the kind of game we want to play, no?

3. Addressing certain egregious examples of consumable stacking. The obvious example here is Boggling Root. We’ve reached a point where people will farm and use these because there is no buff cap anymore so they can unironically be used in raids now. My issue with this is well, the absolute ridiculousness of it. No I don’t think a +1 damage increase consumable is a big deal. But at the same time, if I had every other buff in the game (which I don’t, see point 1 on Major Changes) I would probably farm this too. And at some point between getting all the world buffs and all the million consumes in the game it’s just a tad too much preparation and min-maxing for Classic raids. So maybe things like Boggling Root should be made to not work on max-level characters or something.

4. Slightly harder raids

No I don’t want SoM levels of raiding where world buffs are removed and raids buffed at the same time, that was obviously a terrible idea. But as the game keeps getting easier (See: Chronoboon, Buff cap removed, debuff cap removed, Dual Spec added, etc) the raids stay the same difficulty since 2019 Classic. SO I think it would only make sense to adjust the numbers a little bit. Not talking about huge mechanic changes, but maybe just some number tweaking. Obviously you have to be careful because I don’t think Classic raids need to be too difficult - the fact that they are 40 man raids adds enough difficulty on its own.

[Karici-gehennas]

The community is so divided, everyone has an own opinion about how the game should be. For me, its only the quality of life changes that make sense. And even tho’ i like hardcore pve and sweating, i dont find having no buff/debuff cap limit a good change because it can go crazy like you said with the boggling roots.
I can agree with wcb for alliance, like mos was. fear ward for priests, sure. and kinda thats it. i would add potions stacking to 20, making summoning stones work, dual spec just in capital 100% agree, or like 1h cd and not usable in raids. Mages having tables, locks being able to put healtstone fountain and summoning portal and being able to summon inside raids. thats all i would put into the game.

[Dranina-hydraxian-waterlords]

@Eleese-pyrewood-village

Dual Spec should only work in cities. I know people aren’t going to like this one, because most people love quality of life, I guess. But being able to switch specs anywhere doesn’t feel very old-school RPG-like. That’s the kind of game we want to play, no?

This is the only one I’d agree with.
I do not want easier gaming. for me most of these suggestions are the opposite of Quality.

[Etly-argent-dawn]

With regards to world buffs, I think that they should be reworked in a way to make them not mandatory for majority of raiders. Easiest way would be to remove chronoboons and make them tick offline, so the only way to get full set of buffs is to get them all just before the raid. That would require significant guild effort which most guilds will not do and most pugs will not even think to do. This naturally will make all world buff issues to matter less, while providing emergent gameplay for the most hardcore guilds. Things will especially be interesting in PvP servers.

Without world buffs, raids will be slightly more challenging, which is a good thing, of course. I zerged Ragnaros on the first raid week. Player power is overwhelmingly broken and world buffs are part of it.

With regards to fear ward, I think that better way would be to make this ability ineffective for raid mechanics. It should work for PvP and for dungeons, but for raids, Alliance players should find another ways to handle fears. That’s another factor to improve raid difficulty. I can’t bubble to survive Vael debuff, so nothing wrong about raid mechanics ignoring some player abilities.

I don’t have strong position regarding “meme specs”, but I feel that with modern community, situation won’t change as long as they’re under-performers. And overtuning them will change Classic landspace drastically which is not necessarily a good thing. So maybe do some very careful targeted buffs in Classic style (e.g. add Libram for Protection Paladins which provides taunt and put it behind complicated questline), but meme specs should remain meme specs, just less ridiculous. Or may be don’t do anything, if someone wants to tank, they need to level warrior, everyone knows that, so nobody harmed by it. May be nerf warrior DPS a bit, they are just broken, which again would make raids more challenging.

I’m strongly opposed to dual spec. It should not exist in Classic, simple as that. The only thing that could be improved is to somewhat limit respec cost for low level players. It’s natural to experiment with builds, when you’re leveling and respec cost prohibits that. My solution would be: allow to reset one talent point for fixed cost. This cost should be relative to the current level, e.g. 2 silver per level (1 gold for 60 level, 2 silver for 10 level, 20 silver for 20 level). Of course it should only work near trainer. And reset all talents cost would be derived from this cost (1 * 51 = 51 gold).

I don’t think that limiting people from farming Boggling Root is a good thing. That’s what RPG is: you can use all tools at your disposal and it’s not game breaking. So no, do not change anything here. Only crazy people farm Boggling Root, let them be. It’s a perfect example of emergent gameplay and nobody harmed by it. If you think that you need game developers to keep you from farming Boggling Root, you need to rethink something.

[Gamerlord-firemaw]

@Dranina-hydraxian-waterlords

@Eleese-pyrewood-village

Dual Spec should only work in cities. I know people aren’t going to like this one, because most people love quality of life, I guess. But being able to switch specs anywhere doesn’t feel very old-school RPG-like. That’s the kind of game we want to play, no?

This is the only one I’d agree with.
I do not want easier gaming. for me most of these suggestions are the opposite of Quality.

classic wow (and maybe even more so in tbc) are already as easy as it gets. The main difficulty in wow is convincing people to play long enough to level to 60

@Eleese-pyrewood-village

Hello, after playing Anniversary Servers since launch these are some changes I would like to see for the next Classic Fresh or Classic +.

Major Changes

1. Alliance version of Warchief’s Blessing. One thing I noticed with these Anniversary servers is that there are less people playing melee (Rogue/Warrior) compared to 2019 Classic. I think part of it is people knowing servers go to TBC and that those classes aren’t in huge demand there, but also with how cumbersome it is to get WCB on Alliance it makes playing a melee less attractive for some people.

I can speak from my own experience playing a Rogue in this game it is not fun playing alongside others who get WCB because you simply can not compete on the meters with them. And at some point that becomes your carrot for playing. So to even the playing field on Alliance and make filling raids easier, adding an Alliance version of the Rend buff would be nice. You can call me a casual if you want but I did not feel like farming 50g or whatever every week and then dealing with potential misfires on the mind control or whatever. Now I will agree there is some emergent gameplay arising from people offering a Rend selling service, but I think the greater point that needs to be addressed here is the favoritism of casters on Alliance because they don’t need Rend to compete.

2. Fear Ward baseline for all Priest races on Alliance. Or, allow Priests to pick their own class-specific racial. So you can pick Human and choose Fear Ward over the human specific Priest racial.

So a lot of people aren’t gonna care about this one because its an Alliance and Priest specific issue. But basically this is a unique case of there is no other Race + Class combination that has the potential to get you excluded from raids. Playing a Priest as a non-dwarf on Alliance can and will get you excluded from raids at times. This is clearly an oversight, as there is no way the original developers intended for Fear Ward to be this desirable.

Of course then people will just go to the next strongest option, which is Human because of the buff to Spirit. But to that I would say: Ok, but you can still play Dwarf or Night Elf and get invited. Because a 5% bonus to Spirit doesn’t matter, just like how Human Mages lacking 5% intellect doesn’t really matter. So its impossible to pick a “wrong” race for Priest in this case. Additionally Dwarf may still be BiS for PvP so remains a strong contender for meta-chasing people.

3. Buffs to meme specs. A pretty obvious change, but I would like to see adjustments to make specs that are rarely brought to raids or even dungeons like Shadow Priest and Ret Paladins more viable. I don’t want to see Feral Druids top the meters or anything like that, but I would like for all the underpowered specs to get minor buffs, like maybe remove the threat modifier from Mind Blast and nerf mana costs of the Shadow Priest.

Minor Changes

1. Make certain materials drop from additional sources. Season of Mastery did this thing where you could find some important materials such as Elemental Earth from herbing or mining. Basically I want to see a change like that so that certain mobs that drop these materials, like the Earth Elementals in Badlands, are less valuable for max level players to farm. Another way to address this issue is to increase the drop rate of these materials on high level mobs. For instance, the Earth Elementals in Silithus, that are in the high Lv. 50’s, have a 2% drop change for Elemental Earth. Meanwhile the Earth Elementals in Badlands have a higher drop rate, while also being lower level, thus easier and faster to farm.

This could address issues where levelling players get bottlenecked in certain zones doing certain quest chains. The typical example is Badlands where the Earth Elementals are heavily contested by max level players who are farming them because they offer the best drop rate of the extremely desirable Elemental Earth.

2. Dual Spec should only work in cities. I know people aren’t going to like this one, because most people love quality of life, I guess. But being able to switch specs anywhere doesn’t feel very old-school RPG-like. That’s the kind of game we want to play, no?

3. Addressing certain egregious examples of consumable stacking. The obvious example here is Boggling Root. We’ve reached a point where people will farm and use these because there is no buff cap anymore so they can unironically be used in raids now. My issue with this is well, the absolute ridiculousness of it. No I don’t think a +1 damage increase consumable is a big deal. But at the same time, if I had every other buff in the game (which I don’t, see point 1 on Major Changes) I would probably farm this too. And at some point between getting all the world buffs and all the million consumes in the game it’s just a tad too much preparation and min-maxing for Classic raids. So maybe things like Boggling Root should be made to not work on max-level characters or something.

4. Slightly harder raids

No I don’t want SoM levels of raiding where world buffs are removed and raids buffed at the same time, that was obviously a terrible idea. But as the game keeps getting easier (See: Chronoboon, Buff cap removed, debuff cap removed, Dual Spec added, etc) the raids stay the same difficulty since 2019 Classic. SO I think it would only make sense to adjust the numbers a little bit. Not talking about huge mechanic changes, but maybe just some number tweaking. Obviously you have to be careful because I don’t think Classic raids need to be too difficult - the fact that they are 40 man raids adds enough difficulty on its own.

Fear ward doesn’t really matter in raids. Elitist guilds don’t want more than 1-2 rogues anyway. For pvp stoneform & desperate prayer are way stronger. One of the main reasons dwarf priest is a good filter is that you have to either not care about performance or be ignorant when you pick anything other than dwarf as a priest.

Mind blast threat is not even a factor in what makes shadow priest viable, mana management is also a tiny issue. The main issue just stems from the lack of aoe, raw dps & the utility basically requires there to be 4-5 locks, but even then you could just use a heal priest with shadow weaving talents, as you generally want more healers for trash & they can dps on bosses, where applying shadow weaving would matter.

Retri also suffers from mainly pure damage, their saving grace is how bad holy paladins are compared to priests, but there is a lack of priests, so unlike tbc switching out a holy pala won’t mean you get a good healer(priest) instead. Again ret pala you can just use a healer on trash that nightfalls on bosses. The same story basically applies to enhance.

Most of these hybrid specs would benefit greatly from merging physical & spell crit, which ties into one of the main reasons it’s so boring to play without world buffs (apart from just not being able to parse) and that is the lack of crit (or rage gen in the case of warriors), especially for classes like locks, warriors & fire mages that scale non-linearly due to buff/debuff uptimes.

All hybrid specs are fundamentally busted, which largely stems from their weak talent trees. Unlike the non-meme classes you would barely notice a difference in performance from a hybrid (healing or dpsing) using 0 talent points.

[Nicolayy-firemaw]

I agree with pretty much all OP points. The consumables could easily be fixed by TBC system, you get food, two elixirs OR flask.
In fact basically every single complaint in OP is fixed by TBC (except it fixes world buffs by simply removing them). We may as well just play TBC pre-patch with gradually unlocking raids and world buffs enabled, as I have been suggesting for years now.