Skill vs time in classic/retail

I think one of the biggest differences that hasn’t been discussed much between retail and classic is that how for the most part in retail you need to become more skilled to progress further. You want to do high level mythic raiding, get the best pvp gear, or clear the highest level mythic +, you need to play better.

In wow classic there is a very different system, where fundamentally to progress what you need almost always is more time. I mean yes it is possible to be so bad you can’t clear a dungeon at all, but that is exceptionally rare. For the most part you play more, you progress more, and get ahead more. Doing a perfect dps rotation will increase your time efficiency a bit, and let you clear dungeons faster, but ultimately if you want pre-raid BIS what you need is time to run those dungeons a lot, and extra skill/knowledge only really reduces the time requirements for the most part.

I think for a lot of people this more time based reward system has a lot of appeal. Especially in the sense that pretty much just logging on, and playing is always pushing your character forward. Even if you aren’t someone without a job who can play wow 24/7 it just feels really good logging on, and making real progress towards goals. Goals, that are really achievable for almost anyone.

Personally i think retail could maybe do with taking a step in the classic direction, although i know for most mythic raiders the Idea that your average player could get a piece of mythic level gear even if they put more time in to get it is very unappealing. I think a system where increased skill lets you get rewards faster is better than the current system where a very high skill cap is required to get rewards of a certain level full stop.

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Skill in classic and retail :joy:. Made my day .

Nah, I’m good thanks. I’d play Classic if I wanted to play Classic.

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Well Seymoor, I made it - despite your directions

Here’s the main issue with retail that creates a lot of other issues because of it.

Too much high end gear.

you as a player, can spam mythic 10’s over and over again and potentially be done with a full 430 gear set in a week, even if you don’t get a single titanforge.

This massive over the top drop rate which is caused by the ability to spam these dungeons more than once a week, unlike how raids are, results in gears losing their value and instead, titanforging and warforing being what counts. RNG on top of RNG isn’t fun and people will resent it. And also since now we have too much gear, there’s no value in high end items. you see someone with 430 ilvls and be like, meh. Who cares…

While back in the day, someone with a bunch of raid items would have been considered to have an amazing gear.

There are other arguments as to how gear mattered more and you felt in and all, but generally i think it all comes down to how much of it we have in retail.

So even though the contents in retail are A LOT harder than classic in terms of mechanics, the rewards just don’t have the same meaning to it.

Classic is a time sink, good for a quick nostalgia shot but nothing attractive if you look for long term

That’s just untrue.

Running a +10 mythics is not hard, especially considering you don’t even need to time it to get the same shot at the loot as someone who times a +20.

Retail has multiple layers of difficulties from straight up brain-dead solo world content and queueable multiplayer activities to the very endgame raids that require certain dedication.

If anything comes to “full stop”, it’s classic, offering none of the layers of difficulties that retail does.

This is just horribly untrue. The chances for an individual player to get a piece of gear from a 10 out of time is 40%, whereas your chance of getting a loot drop from a 20 in time is 100%, not even remotely “the same shot”, you could say both have a shot at the same base gear, but one is guaranteed and with and additional 40% chance to get 2 pieces of loot.

Yes, you think, not the playerbase. The worst thing that can happen to retail at this point is trying to make it like classic. At this point it progressed way further than classic, which makes it completely impossible to be like it (thank god). The result would be two huge crowd that don’t want to play it. Classic fanboys still wouldn’t play it because its not classic, and most retail players don’t want to do anything with classic.

Classic is a simple time sink combined with a running simulator, retail has more complex systems to keep on top of, dailies and other things to manage along with your own skill level, esp. in M+ where there are timers and instance effects at play.

As I said in another topic, classic is a product of its time. Different products for different appeals. Let classic be classic and retail be retail.

This is the element that appeals to me. I can forget “skill” vs. “time”, and care less about how it is achieved than that it is achieved.

Whatever content you do, whether it’s Heroic, or questing, or random BGs, you pretty quickly come to a not-so-glass ceiling. M+, for the section that enjoy it, and I suppose AP (does anybody enjoy getting AP?) may be seen as almost-exceptions, but they’re not much.

Professions, which used to occupy a lot of player-hours, have been trashed.

In recent expacs, the devs have given us a vast array of things to collect, but many people don’t have the collection bug, and even those who do can mostly fill up their coffers in their chosen area reasonably quickly.

I understand that there needs to be a cap - a hierarchy of caps - on power growth for the duration of a patch, but really since the only progress in this game is power, it does leave everyone at some point with the feeling of “well, I’ve gone almost as far as I can go this patch, given what I like to do - why bother logging in?”

I don’t have a solution, but I know it is a real thing, across most of the demographics of the game.

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