SOD Feedback for the Potential “Classic+

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Let me start by saying It’s great that the devs are trying out new things for classic wow. I’ve had a lot of fun playing season of discovery but as it progresses I’m finding it more and more difficult to enjoy. I wanted to provide some feedback based on the assumption that SOD may in fact be the precursor to a long term classic+ experience.

I’m coming mostly from a paladin’s perspective here but you can apply the same feedback to other classes.

THE SEASONAL PROBLEM

This is one of the major problems IMO. We’re putting all this time into our characters but for what? Are they deleted when the season ends? Do we get moved onto era and our gear wiped because it’s not compatible?

The very nature of seasonal gameplay seems completely at odds with an MMO like world of warcraft where the core gameplay is based around character progression and longevity. When considering how many new items and changes SOD has introduced this appears more problematic. Characters and their gear are no longer compatible with vanilla so a straight up transfer there doesn’t seem like an option?

If this is in fact the beta for Classic+ I’d actually prefer if the characters didn’t get migrated to classic+ servers because of how many major design issues have caused problems throughout the season. (Players exploiting and accumulating masses of gold etc…).

A better reward might be that any player who reaches 60 on SOD receives a token on the classic+ server for any character they create. Maybe it’s a unique undershirt or glow effect for their main weapon which they can choose to use if they wish. At least that way the integrity of a fresh classic+ server is retained.

I think the dev’s should be quite clear on what the end game scenarios are here so players understand what the value is of their time.

CLASSES

Personally, I think classes have gone too far. Rogue tanks, mage healers just do not gel with the vanilla experience. Class changes would be better kept minimal otherwise you risk things becoming to confusing and unituative. In classic there is already a lot to learn and understand. As well as knowing your own class, you also need to understand the synergies between yours and others. Minimal changes could be the best solution here. They don’t have to be perfectly balanced, so long as class fantasy is retained and only reinforced I’d expect that would make most happy.

I can only speak from my main which is a paladin but all I would hope to see is:

  • A handful of new abilities to make tank and dps viable (crusader strike, taunt, avengers shield)
  • A few minor tedium / QOL improvements like blessings duration increased to 25 minutes and greater blessings to 50 minutes

I suspect most would be happy with a similar level of light changes to improve other classes.

QUESTING, DUNGEONS AND LEVELLING

  • No levelling boosts or XP boosts. I understand the nature of seasonal which requires this but if classic+ becomes a thing I think at max the sleeping bag (+3%) but increase the cool down to 24 hours. I really like this quest chain and more stuff like this would be great
  • More class specific quests. For example, the paladin quest to unlock verigan’s fist is great. More like this for each class to unlock new armour and equipment.
  • SOD really lacked new quests and questing hubs. I would really hope this to be added and be a core aspect.
  • Over time, open up new zones with new dungeons and raids all within the original warcraft 3 lore. There is so much untapped potential here. I really would hope for the devs to lean into the darker aspect of the Warcraft story (Scarlet Crusade, plagued zones etc)

GEAR & COLLECTABLES

  • With the new dungeons, new gear and weapons to unlock. End game items could be used to help reinforce more variation in class specs. (E.g shockadin, pala etc…). Gear doesn’t have to be stronger, it just needs to offer new ways to play.
  • With new dungeons and raids mounts, pets and other collectable items could be added to farm. Rare stuff keeps players engaged for longer. Time lost proto drake for example or all of the rare hunter pets in Northrend. Even slightly recoloured or retextured mounts that exist in the game. So long as the new stuff feels lore friendly (no bee mounts, flying pigs etc)
  • Introduce new legendary items to the game which require a lot of work to get.

PROFESSIONS

One thing I would love to see for blacksmiths is a way for them to reforge low level main weapons to make them usable end game. This could be a very expensive, and maybe something only doable once per character. It requires the player to go on a long quest chain which ultimately requires them to get a blacksmith to reforge the weapon to make it an epic max level item.

This IMO is a great way to add a new activity end game but also provides the option of making some of the real cool early / mid game weapons still viable end game. One of my favourite swords in the game is sword of serenity and I would love to wield that end game! I’m sure others have their own personal favourites.

EVENTS

Other than the seasonal problem, I would say this is where SOD has failed the most. Incursions are awful. A lot of the event stuff is unclear and requires you to watch a ton of videos to get. They also feel at odds with the core aspect of vanilla as it forces you into a relentless grind. I won’t dwell on this too much as everyone knows this by now.

I’d love to see more events but they should be treat more like dark moon fair. Maybe once or twice a month a zone in either continent becomes a PVP hot bed or some sort of PVE event happens. The winning faction gets a world buff.

WORLD BUFFS

Remove world buffs or have it set so you do not need to be in a capital city to get them. So long as it’s your faction everyone should benefit.

GDKP / BOTTING

If it wasn’t for botting I wouldn’t be opposed to GDKP but as it stands with no real solution to botting I think removing it was a good thing and hope this persists. Of course I’d prefer they just had a more active defence against botting and gold buying but it’s not looking good on that front.

OTHER

Dual spec - Great!
Barber - Great!
Forced server balancing - Great! Big positive for PVP servers.

Ultimately, we’ve had quite a few new things to try out in Seasons of discovery but I MO for Classic+ we need less changes and more new stuff.

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One exp boost would be needed to make leveling better than vanilla leveling.
Questing is too slow by far, even in SoM with the +30% on quest exp there was no use of questing if you want to avoid wasting your precious time.
Mob grind and dungeon spamming is always the winner.

But not if they changed it somehow like this:
Exp from killing monsters -25%.
Exp from completing quests +100%.
Then people will finally start leveling the way it was intended. And it would be fun for most players. Explore the world and do the stuff that makes leveling interesting, but without the feeling of “i am wasting so much time with these quests”

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I guess my point was based around classic+ not being a seasonal experience.

That way, levelling doesn’t need to be rushed and retains that classic feel where it is a core part of the experience.

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True, but we both know that ppl will still use the dull rush methods as long as blizz do not change the disturbance in the balance between quests and mobkill exp

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You’ve hit the nail on the head here.

The key is that we want more “new” classic stuff, with less changes. It’s a subtle but key distinction. Sadly SoD has missed this by going too far with class changes and power bloat.

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people just asked for shadow priest, boomkin and maybe feral (dps) dudu, enhancement/elemental shaman, prot/ret paladin classes to get some slight adjustments to bring them up to par with the other classes for a potential classic+.
but the devs took it way overboard by giving literally every class a bunch of new stuff and basically completely remade the game with rogue tanks and mage healers around among other weird new specs.

its just not recognizable as vanilla anymore… my shaman is functioning wildly differently than he would in a vanilla setting, i.e i’m dual wielding instead of using a 2H, i got a million buttons to press all the times because of maelstrom constantly procing.

don’t me me wrong, i like that there’s more buttons to press other than windfury weapon every 5 minutes + totems + stormstrike and earth shock on cooldown, but now its like… keep track of this buff, refresh flame shock, make sure to hit buttons in correct order for maximum maelstrom stack gains, go go go no mana break shammy rage, like i am ****ing starving for open GCDs atm because there’s constantly something to mash, it has just become a game of whack-a-mole.

i love the tank side of shaman, but i feel like they piled stuff on that was totally unnecessary in the other aspects of enhancement (dps) - namely dual wield and maelstrom… i would very much like to have avoided having my class revolve around those 2 specific things, but that’s what i’m gonna have to deal with until 2h gets brought up to par, which is 6 months in the making by now, so i have given up hope, and even then i am still tied to revolving around maelstrom weapon.

i get that we were supposed to “go nuts” and “experiment wildly” but its obvious at this point that it has gone too far, and the drastic changes the devs are making to reel it all in feels mega awful as a player that has to take the brunt of any nerfs that come along with that.

there are basically no classes in the game who are happy about what’s going on atm.
maybe its just growing pains, but that’s another point to be made about the game; it sucks having to reinvent the wheel every time a patch comes out.

when i logged on yesterday i felt like i had to basically relearn the way my class works because the changes made changed the playstyle entirely, for all the dps specs + the tank spec.

wild stupid :poop: like flat out removing cast range on my spells like are you serious bro. that’s just unheard of, overpowered class or not… how in the world does that make any sense in a vanilla setting.

don’t even get me started on elemental which we all know are now a machine gun bazooka combo of a powerhouse, and i’ve grown a hatred for the spec since i appear to be on the receiving end of whatever the devs do to nerf it, even though i don’t play the spec, its MY tank spec that ends up suffering because they refuse to just rework powersurge / flame shock / lava burst combo…
like maybe address that instead of gutting way of earth for the gazillionth time just because you allow elemental access to it?

terrible way of dealing with the elemental pvp problem.

/rant.

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this also has a lot to do with them doing patch phases in tiers.

so 25 - 40 - 50 - 60.

in a world where you can go from 1-60 people are much more open towards questing because dungeon grinding gets tiresome after a while, but with only 10 levels to gain per phase, its something people do en mass just to get it over with and get to the “real” game.

they absolutely gutted the leveling experience with this formula, and the fact they haven’t given us a vendor with old runes to compensate for this very new style of doing content is just awful.

like “alt friendly” my absolute rear end bro.

i was disappointed to see that they actually had the gall to make the ring runes something we have to go out of our way to get like the runes that come with spells, like, are you kidding me bro? `
flat out hand that to me please or make it the definition of trivial to obtain them, like “go talk to X npc in major city and bam now you got it”… this worldwide scavenger hunt they have sent us on every phase is old now, and the runes are less exciting than ever before, so it just doesn’t feel good to get them.

i understand the runes that gives a powerful spell being a small ordeal to gain, but +5 to axes rune? bro that’s not exciting at all… i’m all for going out of my way to get feral spirits, but for real man… :rofl:
oh and btw. the exciting runes are locked behind max level content - AGAIN - so i can’t even take a break from my usual routine to maybe go “get one on the way there” if you catch my drift… i have to get to lvl 58+ first.