I dont get it.
Classic is so much better than retail in every way!
But everything about retail is better. Thr zones… the music… the story telling… the retail game is so much better than classic in almost every way.
But something just makes classic the better game. I really cant put my finger on it bit classic trumps bfa…
I like both games but retail is just missing something that classic has.
Interesting. For me the lighting effects and music in Classic surpass those of Retail.
Same goes for the art style.
Storytelling also seems less dumbed-down and with less hand-holding in Classic. 
For me everything is better in Classic. I just don’t like retail game design in almost every way.
Zones? Let’s compare deserts. Tanaris is a desert. Just sand. From west to east just sand and dunes. That’s how desert looks like. Voldun? It’s supposed to be a desert, yeah. But it’s packed with things on every square meter. Does it really look like a desert? Absolutely no. They made things just to make things. Not to represent a desert.
Graphics? Well, you might call Classic cartoony, yeah. But it’s absolutely separate style of cartoon from retail. It’s kind of realistic. Thrall is an ordinary orc with ordinary height. Take retail. Tyrande is some kind of gigantopitec, she’s taller than every other elf. Models in retail are just laughable. It was peaked in Pandaria, but even now it looks significantly different from Classic style. And I like Classic style much more.
Story telling? It became a joke in retail. Story was one of the main reasons I stopped to play retail at all. May be some people like it. I hate it. It’s not the same WoW I liked. They murdered this world. I’ll just pretend that nothing happened after Classic.
Actually it’s hard for me to find even a single way where retail is better than classic for me.
In classic I actually have to play
In retail I afk LFR and tag world quest mobs for loot, no effort
The only thing retail has over classic in my opinion is gameplay, the whole watch your character autoattack for 90% of the fight and press 1 button gameplay that classic has feels more like it belongs to something like runescape, a telltale sign of the fact that vanilla wow was a Warcraft skinned Everquest port, Everquest a game where people regularly would take breaks in the middle of raids because their character just had to be left by themselves doing an animation loop that required 0 APM from the player.
Class tuning is also at the worst point in history, when Mage, Warrior, and Priest are basically the only viable classes and every other class simply exist to support them, why even bother having other classes.
Essentially, Classic has the RPG portion of the game down, Retail has the Video Game portion down, Classic is good but it feels too close to a pen and paper RPG than an MMORPG imo
It’s the overabundance of streamlining, convenience and homogenisation that drags BFA down.
You don’t really need to talk to people, you don’t really have to pay attention to storylines, you don’t really have to weigh up the pros and cons of your class (the only deciding factors now are A) is this class actually developed and B) does it do mythics and raids).
It only really beats Classic in terms of graphics, gameplay and quest design.
Don’t we already have this thread and many similar ones?
The problem with bfa in difference to classic is i think best told with this example:
How many invisible pots are there in the game now, i think like 1 per expansion?
They kill their last expansion everytime, as hard as they can. For unknown reason they just want to invalidate it all, what then only leaves emptiness behind.
Exception transmog and mounts and pets… but they are not progressive. No useful enchant, no useful pot, no useful gear to craft, cause heirlooms…
More importantly: You can’t. At least while doing content.
You can only either type, or hit keybinds with your hands. And when you have to hit an ability every second, you can forget about chatting, even if you’d love to do it. At best, you can hit a macro with a pre-determined text.
The problem is only exacerbated by the downright ancient chat design that won’t let you unfocus the chat box with a simple click so that you can interrupt and resume typing fluidly.
The only way that works out is voice chat. And voice chat, with strangers? Yeah, no.
15 years of bloat, diverging player demands, changing developer (and publisher) focus and investment, and a player base who has grown 15 years older and have different expectations and goals for playing, piled on top of absurdly unrealistic demands that somehow all previous content should still be relevant and that nothing should ever be left to history.
But the biggest problem with retail is… that people can’t stop talking about it on this forum.
Difference is:
Classic is a finished product. It is designed to be completed, once you obtain something it’s yours to keep and it wont be diminished power-wise in the future. There is no grand evil to defeat, we have adventures in the world. Quests vary depending on the giver. Literaly “here is a game, go play it and complete it” sure it can be grindy, but there is a goal to the grind.
Retail is unfinished, and it’s designed like that. It wants you to stay logged, doing unrewarding chores with minimal input - but you have to do them to keep with the pack. Forget 95% of a game, cuz only “Endgame is a real game”. Why quest? Just Island Expedition and kick whoever is 3rd wheel right before you’re done. Why Raid when you can see it all in LFR while afking and watching YT on 2nd screen. Why going for better gear when it’s gonna be replaced in 3 months by a World Quest reward. Why playing one character when you can play 10 at once by just doing weekly m+?
The difference is in design philosophy.
One is made to immerse yourself and complete, other is to “hook” you and keep you hooked.
Ehhh…debatable.
There is a lot of evidence that shows that a lot of Vanilla is unfinished.
The pointless raid/dungeon entrances scattered around the world, the fact that a lot of classes have weird abilities that go nowhere or make, have design philosophies that don’t work or are just built weirdly (like Shamans having parry as a talent way down the enhance tree and loads of skills that cause a lot of threat, Paladins having a tank spec with no taunt and a DPS spec with no reliable damage, Warlock being entirely unplayable on release etc).
It’s not so much that Classic is finished, more the fact that it was made in a time where games were expected to have an end goal where you could stop.
Problem there being, classic is just a snapshot of early retail. It’s doing the same, just less refined and with a (for now) definite end point.
I tell you what would make retail near perfect.
I could be here all night adding to the list, but these are my biggest concerns.
That’s what I meant by “Finished”.
Everything can be always tweaked, that what the patches are for. But there is a clear end goal - and that’s what Retail is missing.
Retail early is not even close to Classic - wtf.
There is no character progression in early Retail, no gear progression as all quest rewards give same amount of stats or even weaker than you wear. The mobs are of no challenge, freely pull packs of them and shroog it off…
Retail in 95% is a forgotten / abandoned product - and it shows while leveling. Only endgame matters apparently.
And a result of the designers really not knowing how their design worked in practice until a few millions players had tried it and settled for a certain playstyle. Ie tank+healer+3dps (which left any idea of hybrids up in the wind) and after players had tested and theorycrafted and guessed until they found a way to make broken mechanics work. Some of which got nerfed (downranking spells to overcome limited spell variety), others which got incorporated into the class as actual mechanics (aimed shot weaving for example). Some ideas, like shamans tanking as mentioned, just got dropped (besides a special case during tbc), others got turned into equally viable options (pally and durid tanks).
Early vanilla was a mess. 1.12 less so. But as anyone that ever looked at these “prebis” lists can say, it doesn’t make all that much sense that you should cherry picking specific items from lower levels just because some mechanics were allowed to scale freely with others (like HoJ) while others weren’t. Nevermind mentioning the mess that gathering NR for AQ was.
I do wish content wasn’t quite as dead set into specific mechanics over and over just to ensure a perfectly predictable amount of required tasks. Ie, “another boss that forces a taunt rotation so both tanks have something to do”. Retail content piles on mechanics, yet somehow (though this is based on not having played retail since 2014 or so) somewhat feels like they fall into “encounter type x, y or z”. But that’s still somewhat unavoidable.
You need people in Classic to succeed. Retail is pretty much a solo game until Mythic content.
Sorry… I was too busy watching this lvl 40 classic mage pull 10 mobs and kill them with barely a scratch…
Again, no, you’re not going to be able to have a 15 year old game have the same sort of progression for a new player (or character) as you spent 15 years on. That’s entirely unfeasible. But neither was that really what my comment was about.
Also, looking at how people actually play classic, with “lfm for cleave group, easy massive xp” and “lfm, -my bis from a list I found on the internet- is reserved”, then yes, pretty much only the “endgame” matters to most.
Did it during leveling in vanilla? Well no… because few had any idea what the game after max level would even look like. But even with what the journey getting to 60 was, we still spent most of our time in that lvl 60 endgame, grinding out t0 (because we didn’t know better), then raiding world bosses, MC and onwards.
Players like me who came from UO didn’t expect an “end game” at all, were maxing out a skill merely meant you were a bit stronger.
Bullsh*t like this gets so tiresome to read. It’s your own choice NOT to play you imbecile…
You could also do any of the content available that DOES require you to play… but it seems you and all the other losers using this argument are not smart enough to figure that out thus LFR is right where you belong.
Tend to agree, still you can pug 10/10 MC and Onyxia easily enough at least, though that’s also an artifact of A LOT of people having done this content in vanilla or on pirate servers.
I might have picked a bit too large a classic server though, as the population is so large you barely even recognize guilds, far less individual players, outside your own guild.