Alright, I did not see this one coming to be honest. So far, pretty impressed with this announcement. Let’s break this down:
-
World buffs (like Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer and others) disabled in Raid instances
Interesting, this will change the meta in raids completely, and WILL give that Vanilla raiding feeling 100%. No more rushing down bosses, you’re gonna have proper Prot tanks in defense gear this time around!! -
Restoring mechanics that were removed early on to some Raid bosses
This will help to accomplish the above, restoring raids to their original launch difficulty, instead of the 1.12 difficulty (many nerfs) -
No boss debuff limit (up from 16 debuffs in WoW Classic)
This is extremely interesting, removing a mechanic that was there only due to hardware limitations of the time. With debuff limits removed, literally every class/spec can now use ALL their abilities and debuffs/dots or whatever in raids. Affliction Warlocks, Shadow Priests, you name it will become something entirely different. There will be no World buffs, but with all these debuffs in place by all the classes and special items in the game, there will be an entire new level of min-maxing. -
Increased health on bosses, to offset player buffs and the removed debuff limit
This is of course needed to compensate. Health should be increased by a considerable amount due to 1.12 classes/debuffs. I hope they tune this tough as hell! Ragnaros with lvl 58’s in green gear (remember APES world first?) forget it!!
Then however it gets a bit scary:
'Due to Season of Mastery’s faster content release cadence, we’re also planning several improvements and changes. These include:
Faster leveling:
We’re planning on increasing experience gains from what they were in the first iteration of WoW Classic. Our current plan is to set them close to what the 1-60 XP rates are in Burning Crusade Classic™ with a bigger focus on quest XP increases.’
Faster leveling seems a bit out of place compared to the other changes. With all those changes that will dramatically increase raid difficulty to hopefuly Vanilla levels, the game will be pretty hardcore, also considering it’s a full restart. You see, I know many ‘casual’ players that were still working hard on their characters in Classic when it abrubtly came to an end. These players are not all that looking to start completely over again after putting in all the work. They are pretty pissed off actually. Knowing that the same will probably happen AGAIN after 12 months is not gonna attract those players. Thus I feel this new version of Classic is pretty much going to be aiming at the more ‘hardcore’ half of the playerbase that enjoy ‘going at it again’.
Players that already know the game well can level up to 60 already in no-time. We have seen that with the release of Classic. Players that are new to the game will need to take their time to really learn their class well, that was exactly what the lengthy leveling experience of Vanilla accomplished. Especially this time around it will be important, since there is no more ezmode facerolling through MC fully loaded with World Buffs. You will need to know how to play your class!
Because of this, I feel this change is a bit out of place and unnecessary, I rather see original leveling speed.
Hold your breath again:
‘#### QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATES
In addition, we’re planning on introducing certain improvements that weren’t in the original WoW Classic release, but that we think can help create a better experience, such as:’
‘* Meeting Stones converted to Summoning Stones’
Alright, I am not completely sure what this means. Does this mean that the Meeting Stones (that were not active in Classic) are now going to be working as in TBC, allowing to find a group and then allowing to summon players to the dungeon? I am not too sure if I like this or not, if this would take away importance from the Warlock class then I’d say this is a negative. Making groups automatically can be useful but spamming the chat has it’s charm of course.
‘* Increased Mining and Herbalism nodes
Realms tend to be more densely populated in WoW Classic compared to the original 2005 design. Increasing gathering node spawns should provide a more consistent economy this time around.’
Makes sence, flasks will be more important than ever without the world buffs. If the server population is bigger then there should be more spawns, and less if the population is smaller.
All of this is very interesting to say the least, and mostly positive to me. Let’s have a little bit of a talk here, since I alone possibly cant predict all of the means of impact these changes are going to have on the game. What do you guys think??