Hey love the Seasonal aspect of vanilla servers, have some thoughts on how to expand. Realize that it's too late for season 2, but what to do.
First of Season Forever servers
We need a Season “forever” server to transfer characters to after a season has passed. This is to be able to do eny real alterations to the game to work. We do not want to screw up era servers, let the purist have them pure.
New content and alterations to the game will be implemented on the forever server after the season. This is a place for us Vanilla only players to hang out between seasons.
Items, crafting recipes and spellbooks (or a specific version of them*) that consist in a season and no longer is available in the game will be legacy items and have a flavor text reading something like “Season of the south seas”
After a season ends and the characters get transferred to the forever server, all soulbound items become unbound and you can send them to another character on the account. This is so you can transfer them to the “main” character.
The forever servers will become wild west servers after a few years, and it will be a glorious place to hang out in waiting for the next to start out.
* Buffs and nerfs, different procs or items or redone in any way.
For the actual next Season
Class balance
This can be done without changing anything in the talent trees if you don't want to mess with it. Adding new items, enchants and spell books will sort this out just fine.
Be creative, use class restricted gear gear, make enchants like mana leech on melee hit and use and abuse Druid Idols, Paladins Librams, Shaman Totems.
Passive examples:
Totem of stormstrike
(Debuff on target after stormstrike hits)
Spell damage taken by target increased by 15%.
Last 30 charges or 15 sec.
Tomem of replenish
Gives you 100% chance to enter a clearcasting state after critically hitting with a damaging spell.
The clearacting state reduces the mana cost of your next damage spell bu 100%
Active examples:
Libram of reckoning
Use: Inflict holy damage on target and force it to attack you.
Range 10 yards cooldown 15 seconds.
Libram of the Crusader
Use: An instant strike that causes 100% weapon damage as Holy damage and refreshes all judgements on the target.
Another example:
Belt of the Ogre smasher
waist
350 armour
10 strength
10 stamina
Passive: Your mortal strike no longer leaves a healing debuff on target. Instead it does an on hit effect: Your attacks ignores 500 of your enemies armor for 10 seconds. This effect stacks up to 3 times.
Requires warrior and level 58
General balancing
Replace weapon skill on items as stats found on gear (keep the talents).
Also replace racials with the same formula.
An item with 0->4 ws gets one critt% or an hit% with that specific weapon.
An item with 5 or more ws gets one critt% and a hit% with that specific weapon.
This will make people stop being soft forced to pick a certain race, and will also open up more weapon types to actually be used.
It will also nerf melee characters' damage.
All items with % spell hit or melee hit will just have hit % on them.
This will help hybrid classes that can't reasonably get hit capped for both spells and melee. It will also ease up early gearing as you can as a melee fighter use a suboptimal piece of gear with int and hit% to reach your hit cap.
Intellect should give some give some spellpower. Maybe in the line of 1 spell power for every 2 intellect. This will ease up leveling and also give healers some damage on the gear. And also buff the casters.
Physical range dps (Hunter)
Give them new arrows on patches.
Bwl: Dark iron Bullets/ arrows
AQ: Silithid Chitin Bullets/ arrows
Naxx: Something, something
New pet ability learned from the trainer
Avoidance (Passive)
Decrease damage taken by creatures AoE effects by 80.
Can't be targeted by creatures spells.
Dots
Make them be able to critt
Nerfs
Stop totem twisting from working, it's just silly.
Rework Manual crowd pummeler, wolfshead helm and items that break the game.
Big elephant in the room
PVP to have high rank pvp gear in the game from the start destroys raid progression and makes the game boring for 90% of the people.
If you insist on having the same system in the game at least gate the ranking so that you can't get it early.
Example:
Release max rank 7
Bwl patch max rank 11
Aq patch max rank 14
If you reach rank 7, 11 and 14 you will never decay to a lover rank then that. (For the gating and to give resting plateaus for the none hardcore rankers)
Another elephant in the room
Faction restricted classes. This really hurts faction balance and also makes the raids harder to design.
Consider letting the Dwarves be shamans and the Cows be paladins.
Or even better, make a quite lengthy quest chain (Started at level 10 or so) that lets you switch factions. Gain diplomat status with your former enemies and get hated by your old allies.
Quality of life
Guild bank
Able to link professions
Timed runs?
Add in game support for timestamping both raids and dungeons.
A high score (top 5) could be on a sign outside the dungeon/ raid.
Soul of iron
Also add an Soul of Gold buff that you can take,
No mailbox, no auction house and no player trading.
And a Soul of the wolf, no grouping. (Would be interesting)
So for content
My suggestion is that season 2 becomes the Season of the few. Focusing on content for smaller groups.
Add heroic dungeons of all dungeons. Don't have them in from the start. A few of them in every patch. It will be fun for raiders and non raiders, it will for sure give us a lot of cool new gear. How about a max level version of Ravager or a legendary runeblade of Baron Rivendare?
This will also work as catch up gear as a bonus.
Rated arenas, just get it in there.
2vs2 3vs3 and 5vs5. With its own gear progression.
Season 3 and forward
Keep adding content, season 3 can be Season of south seas, new aria, new raid and dungeons. Add water mounts, like (run speed) rafts, 60% Boats and 100% sailing boats. So we can freely explore the pirate islands.
Season 4 can be Season of the Scarlet Crusade, new aria, new raid and dungeons. Reworked Crafting.
Season 5 can be Season of Medivh, (Karazhan of course)
Season 6 can be Season of Grim Batol
And so on.
These are just a few of my thoughts about the future of seasons, hope you atleast like some parts of it. /Giny