late phase 4 was probably the goldylock zone for “ideal time to start SOD” tbh.
phase 4 was when things finally picked back up after 3-4 months of phase 3 (which was so awful the game almost died entirely, and im not exaggerating) and its also where the end-game content (aka fun) began (mc, bwl etc.).
phase 1 was great, big launch, lots of fun to be had.
phase 2 was… less great but it was alright.
phase 3 made phase 2 look good, hell it made retail and cataclysm look good, which i suspect might have been the intent.
phase 4-5-6-7-8 have all been very good (if we ignore the glarring pvp issues in this game).
so yeah.
i mean, in phase 3 we had a huge content drought that lasted 3-4 months, and this all coincided with cataclysm “classic” being launched… and just as (i suspect) intended, the SOD playerbase got funneled into cata, where the in-game $$$$ store is.
its almost like they were actively trying to make the game worse in order to herd the sheep over to their “real” product (cata/retail).
now, MOP is coming out… and guess what… they announce that SOD is basically over, and throw a free lvl 85 boost for MOP at players, as if their intent wasn’t already painfully obvious enough, what they’d like their playerbase to do.
they’re trying to pass this boost off as a generous gift, but in reality they are clutching their hands in prayer just hoping you take said “gift” and move over to a version of the game where the in-game store is more or less always in your face.
in other words; its to their own benefit… they’re simply feeding the cow so they can keep milking it.
fool me once, shame on you.
fool me twice, shame on me.
Eh I wouldn’t be so sure considering I was a Cata Player. It was very clear it’s not exactly their priority. Compared to tweaks and stuff done to SoD Cata Received very barebone support ever since the start. Bugs remained in for weeks and communication was sparse making era and SoD Phase 3 look like they’re being actually cared for. Shame because I actually enjoyed zones, dungeons and Phase 1 raids. Hell I’d go as far as to say I preferred Dungeon ZG more than Raid version.
so yeah, in essence, the SOD playerbase was stuck at lvl 50 for 3-4 months, with really harmful content such as infinite incursion farms and a very poorly tuned raid which was brutally overtuned on arrival and nerfed into a joke soon after, leaving us with basically nothing to do and no challenge posed by raid content.
like it was really bad… its one of those “gotta have been there to witness it personally” kinda things because i honestly can’t do it justice through explanation.
in regards to cata being barebone abandonware DOA content;
that is a bit surprising because the devs themselves said they were deliberately shelving SOD temporarily in order to focus on cata and “give it time to breathe”.
SoD got mostly worse as the time went on, especially PvP suffered.
Why make PvP servers when the balancing on that has been literal garbage?
The top 3 contenders of being the most broken were literally the best classes to roll every phase bar the first one. Shamans just had every stat as a tank shaman whilst keeping their stupid high damage output, Balance druids and hunters had either loads of HP and selfsustain or one of it.
You clearly had the TOOLS at your DISPOSAL to limit certain abilities and tiersets on players in previous phases as it was shown with the ranged hunter AQ tierset not being a machine gun shortly after hunters used that. Not like that damped hunters much as they just spend the remainder of the SoD experience. But when Cat Druids were good for a week in P7 due to Rake, it got instantly nerfed.
Tanks in PvP should’ve never gotten the “Defender’s Resolve” buff to begin with, you had the tools to make that not work on players. Yet it was ignored.
Ret paladins got nerfed more times at max level than Boomies, Hunters and Shamans in the entirety. A DPS spec that was basically full time melee in PvP and PvE got nerfed more times than 3 ranged specs and it wasn’t the best class to play in PvP to begin with.
People would’ve understood if there were nerfs towards the Shockadin playstyle, but not retribution who was limited by the sheer amount of ranged classes, long CDs on Bubble/BoP/HoJ/Repentance/Steed.
Horde Racials or Purge (Shaman’s Ability) were never nerfed but Bubble was, Horde got PvP favortism from Devs.
PvE wasn’t much better with recycled content like the first 3 phases, or mandatory FR in MC. BWL and Naxx were actually peak raiding experiences alongside BFD. AQ was bad, SE and ST suffered from tuning issues.
As a lot of other people have said, the ability to transfer our characters to Cata/MoP would’ve been nice instead of or in addition to the boost.
However my main question is will there be some kind of server transfer option for our current characters on the Cata servers? My guild all have characters on there from before SoD started and we want to group up but we’re scattered over multiple servers, some PvP some PvE, and a lot aren’t going to be able to pay to transfer characters over so it’s a shame we’d only be able to continue to play together with the 1 boosted character.
Either that or just improve the cross-realm support to allow mail, AH and dungeon/raid grouping (I think similar to retail) as that would all go a long way to alliviating the issue we have.
First of all. Anniversary is currently at Blackwing Lair if I Recall correctly so SoD characters would be very much ahead of the curve. Second of all… We have ERA server. Something people clamour for every single expansion why do you all act like it’s over and would rather downgrade to Vanilla state?
So you were fully prepared to lose your power and identity just to maintain I dunno name and looks? Isn’t Era Server exactly that? Place where our characters can stay with all the toy they received over SoD?
For me, it was the most fun times for wow I’ve had in years (I had fun in 2019 classic but due to community, did not play warrior so it sucked gameplay-wise). Of course not all things went great but it was a REALLY good try and they delivered something that was fun to play in a classic setting.
No it’s not, put down your pink colored glasses and let reality set in, classic the word itself implies that it is as it once was, after cata the old world was ruined and then it wasn’t vanilla aka classic anymore…
When you decide to develop a classic+, hire qualified product and project managers first.
Also i hope someday i can see patchnotes and dev comments not on twitter/youtube, but inside game client.
I’m pretty confident this was not the case. At least not intentionally. The Classic team is very small and they have to not only work on progression Classic but also SoD at the same time. Cata launched in an unacceptable state, they completely skipped over the elemental invasion event, other classes abilities were available in your profession tab. It was a complete, unmitigated disaster. SoD suffered because they were too busy putting out Cataclysm fires to give it the attention it deserved.
I’m hoping once MoP is done they move progression characters over to retail or keep them on MoP era rather than go to WoD, then they can focus more on Classic+. I think their team size is perfect for the kind of flexibility Classic+ needs but they can’t juggle that AND progression AND Anniversary (Which will hopefully not need any maintainance but who knows).
What they really need todo is make sod progress to TBC era but keep lv 60, and later add wotlk as well and make it one big classic era sod cluster, u’ll never be bored for along long time …