Why classic is considered by many as a better MMORPG than retail?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Why, so many people consider classic as a better MMORPG than retail?
I can understand that it has better social due to lack of LFG / LFR mechanism, but on the other hand if we are talking about end game HC / Mythic raid content you still get guilds mostly doing them as it tends to be easier with same people.

But even if we will count the better social as + for classic, then what else you would count as a big plus for it?

I saw plenty of times people claiming that it is also having more “RPG elements in it”. I beg to differ, I feel that my character in Classic has NO IMPACT on the world, i’m the same quest doing fellow as the very next player and next after him, all of us needing to collect 8 radishes/tusks/whatever (that quest giver has plenty of radishes or whatever he likes). There is no real storyline either that you progress.

I’m not even starting on challenging level as it was already “explained today” how hard classic content was (well it wasn’t). The whole challenging thing back then was coming from technical issues (getting 40 players that have half decent PC where with looking on the ground they can at least get 10 FPS with 300ms at most and not afking most of the time).

Not mentioning PvP, if compared to retail, is more like grindfest (the titles are not awarded to the best competitors but to the ones that have most time to do it unlike on retail).

It isn’t even worth to mention dungeons (wondering how many did +15M or similar at least).

Yet, I’m seeing “Classic is better than Retail at being MMORPG” - then please explain, why so? Be aware though, that in fact I enjoy classic, I like it a lot, as I feel pretty nostalgic in it, I enjoy leveling a lot (though it is a way more frustrating than it is on retail) and I believe, that in fact people socialize themself more than on retail. BUT, calling it a better MMORPG/game is literally bulls*it for me (unless I’m not seeing something magical in classic).

PS. I played on vanilla and never considered it later on as a better game than the next expansion.

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RPG mechanics arent story elements.

Edit: I don’t know what it is. I last played Legion but it just didnt feel like an MMORPG to me.

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Because Vanilla were the good ol’days man, you can’t understand.

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Character development is an important aspect. You feel like you can build up and customise your character, sure there are customisation options in retail, but they are much more limited, so in essence you’re basically given a choice of what turns out to be cookie cutter characters.

This certainly has its plus sides for people who want to just follow a pre-determined path to end game, but for people who enjoy the character development aspect of role playing games, it makes it feel shallow.

At some point, Blizzard also seemed to think it was easier to entice people to use 1 or 2 cities rather than spread out as they used to, this has the result of making the vast majority of the world feel abandoned. In classic, there’s not really a major advantage to being in Stormwind or Ironforge, sure Darnassus is still out of the way, but there were people who used to sit there in vanilla too.

TL;DR: Classic WoW gives some depth back to characters and the world.

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Read your own post m8 you already answered the question

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Depth? What depth are you talking about? There are bunch of NPCs saying exactly the same no matter what you achieve or how many times you killed Kel’Thuzad or how you conquered C’thun

Character development is non existing in classic, no matter what you do, you are still the very same character that you have always been, no matter your heroic deeds. You are the very same guy that can collect radishes and do Ragnaros the next morning and go back to collecting radishes the very next day.

What’s more, in classic WoW it literally doesn’t say a single thing about where some stuff comes from (bar but few books that explained it ingame), NPCs do not have any development, player itself is sitting duck that just swap gear over some period and so on.

One patch has no impact on other patches (or rather in our cases phases), as it has no impact on the next story. Literally no matter what you do, it has no impact on anything but yourself (gear).

There is literally little to none RPG development for the world / character and depth doesn’t exist

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Why it’s a better MMO, sure

  • There are no flying mounts that allow you to completely bypass World PVP if you choose to. As a result, the world feels far more threatening (on PVP servers especially) and zones are naturally more populated as a result opening up more chances of grouping up and social interaction

  • Raid consumable farming and attunements ensure that people are always out and about, adding to the above point. Guilds are more likely to do these things together and it just encourages people to always be out in the open world.

  • No cross realm/LFG/LFR means that your interactions with others actually matter more. On retail, you’re never going to run into a dungeon group again realistically. That anonymity leads people to behave much more aggressively than they would if their reputation on the server actually mattered.

  • Talent trees are much more flexible than retail. Yes there are cookie cutter builds and min maxing but you have a much greater degree of freedom to customise your character. Particularly the hybrid classes. It’s also much more rewarding getting these each level as opposed to every 15.

  • Gear when levelling is meaningful. In retail, you slap your Heirlooms on at level 1 and don’t take them off until 120. It’s awful and renders nearly every drop from questing and dungeons absolutely useless. There’s a lot of meaningful drops to acquire and that’s a great thing. Moreoever, the fact you’re not showered in blues throughout the levelling process means that actually getting a good drop from a quest/dungeon feels so much more impactful

  • Unique itemisation. Everything is just a stat stick in retail. There’s no quirky items that give you an extra auto attack or slap a debuff on the target. As a result items just feel purely numerical and it’s not very interesting in the slightest.

Is Classic perfect? Absolutely not. I’m not part of the No Changes crowd by any means. I think that from a gameplay perspective, TBC added some invaluable tools to each class and no rational person can honestly tell me that Ret Paladins or Feral Druids were made less fun with Crusader Strike and Mangle.

What Classic is however, is a much more engaging game and one that stays closer to the MMORPG format. Retail is a bizarre homogenised action MMO and better games in that style like ESO and GW2 already exist.

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I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the way you play, not what you do.
More talent choice, more armour choice (by extension stat choice), you had to grind rep to ride different faction mounts so you needed to make a choice of which ones to go for (first). To name but a few ways you had to play your character the way you wanted.

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Your character feels like growing, you have grey white blue items, not just only epics.

it looks more natural, check armor on retail everything is flashy big huge chunks of armor, in classic you start like a pleb, and end up like slightly better dressed pleb.

Lots of grouping is mandatory, but its not only for a few seconds like on retail, here due to downtimes difficulty of certain elite quests etc makes you stay grouped for longer. All this downtimes are spent socialising.

There is no timegating, you wana grind rep you grind, you dont need to wait, you wana play today 10 hours tomorrow 0 thats fine, on retail you need to complete a check list of stuff each day each week.

Gold money is also a resource which should be used smartly, not just thrown at you everywhere.

Classes are very very very different, one has summon, other has aoe, one has single target maybe offers some skips due to lockpicking, etc. No class is even remotely similar to another, while on retail many tend to reassemble a lot each other.

etc etc

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I think you’re mistaking an RPG and Scripted Story (Linear).

And here too, it’s not about that at all. Those who care about it are streamers that milk it and their sheep.
But Classic have much more to offer for other type of players other than endgame elitists. Do I want to goof around or chase some dodo for a green tathered pants? I can do that and that will be still improvement in gear quality. Do I want to go around to gather mats to craft my own jacket? I can do that (In retail I cannot cuz I need to enter raid X times to craft it with random stats).

Not creazy improvement like in Retail where player is unkillable god like killing machine. And beside endgame what even is Retail worth?

And above all, Classic is a finished product. From 1 to 60, it is an adventure.
Retail is unfinished, wicked and twisted into milking you as much out of your sub and shop slot roulette type of a game, that is never finished.
The biggest joke of BfA is the ilvl being squished to ~200, and you’re at what now? I dunno cuz not playing since 8.1 - that kind of power spike shows clearly that Retail is not designed to be finished + Extra in form of Raid progression. It is endless souldumbing grind, and what’s scary it’s designed that way.

Also, class fantasy. Oh boi how do I love my classic shaman in comparison to my retail version.

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I absolutely agree with you on 1, 3, 5 while disagree on 2,4 and 6.
Why disagree? Well in case of 2 it was more of way to keep players in game before actually taking on the challenge. I was never a fan of counting as many hours as possible in a game so for me it isn’t a good way to keep people in.
About 4 - well but it actually wasn’t. In the end, there were meta builds for each class, sometimes 2-3 builds that were useful with a one talent change here or there (e.g. due to weapon for arms warrior). You could pick talents at random but it was pointless. At least now, you can pick something depending on how you play and what you prefer to do (e.g. slow vs stun, different way of your class rotation / works e.g. how DH generates energy). Take for example DH, you can have a build right now that make oyu use Demon’s bite every time you are missing it, or you can create build that you have it as a passive and different things to get energy are better then. You can literally by just one talent change your rotation by 180. I quite cannot recall any talent like that in classic and most talents were like NUMERIC (the very same thing that you consider as a bad part in current items) e.g. increase critical strike chance by 1%.

Actually in case of Retail I feel that the numeric aren’t that much of problem, but the real issue lies in random buff up (titanforge / gem) where you have no real way to prevent / make it happen which is bizzare itself. With current patch they brought in equip item behaviors (and thye happened to appear before also) and… they are meta items now, even though they are related to grinding and you often cannot find better item than the ones from that grinding fest (e.g. boots in case of DH).

I will not comment on the things that I agree with as in fact they are spot on lol

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Well lets put it like this.
I can’t play BfA for a week without getting bored. It isn’t even a proper game anymore. It’s like a mobile game++. They wave shiny glitters in front of you and then hand them to you to for free to make you feel good and then rinse and repeat.
Just like any average mobile game.
On the other hand classic is proper game. it isn’t afraid to make you frustrated or simply just exlude you. There are quest you sometimes just won’t be able to do on your own and the game doesn’t care. Classic is constantly challenging you. And you don’t even have to be 60. Just leveling itself is great content full of challenges. Quest are simple but the world as whole is masterfully build together.
And classic IS harder then BfA. In BfA i can aggro 15 mobs and wipe the floor with them. In classic i aggro 2 and then think about running. The world in classic is dangerous. The world in BfA is a sandbox for childern where you are ment to do your daily tasks and collet your glitters. And don’t worry about being challenged…we wouldn’t want to frustrate you…you could cancel you sub because of that or something…
The danger is what makes classic experience superior to retail.
Also class identity is much superior in classic as well. I shouldn’t even have to explain why…
Of course you can still have the challenge in BfA, but the problem is you have to actively seek it out. 90% of the content in BfA is a pointless mobile gaming crap and it ruins the game as whole.

Classic is grindy but retail is grind wheel of pointless boring stuff.

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There are guns to dismount flying people but np

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Vanilla WoW was an RPG, then it shifted to a more action-y approach, which a lot of people didn’t like. Modern WoW is more of a pickup-and-play game, whereas Vanilla was, and now is, much more in-depth when it comes to managing your character.

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oh and dont get me started on class sets removal … with such a lame excuse and players bought it, it was the feature i loved most, class theme, not all were good but there was choice, class armor.

Also talents, omg talents how i missed them, each level you have a point to spend, and its not true about cookie cutter builds, you can use em how you like, there is a lot more choice and character development, retail talents are pathetic.

Also having all spells not from 1 specialisation only, but all of them is a lot nicer, spell ranks also help you actually percieve the growth of your character.

In retail often as you level you get weaker and weaker, while here you can clearly come back and see the difference, or go to some mobs 2 level.higher you could barely hit, and see the difference … In retail 110 120 nothing really changes

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Socialise like what example?

“Hi doing yzx quest? Please inv, thx, gg bb”

This i hardly call socialising at all…

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Retail is not even a mmorpg…

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I think vanilla has many flaws that make more of a anti social experience, kill sharing is missing so people have to stand in line and wait for kills, it’s not exactly something that makes the game more challenging, only more tedious. Group collectibles that makes it a hassle to group up with 3 or more everytime they need to do collect quests.

I don’t want an easier game but i do want things to get changed that discourage friends to play together, that can never be a good thing.

The Burning Crusade was a great expansion, however it added many flaws too, people were now flying around and nobody was no longer exploring the beautiful world Blizzard created. So to make classic work, Blizzard will have to go back to the drawing board and reinvent a new expansion concept, one that doesn’t change the core mechanics of Classic but still adds new content. I think its a safe bet to add in Blood Elves and all the races and lore TBC had, but without flying, you want people to explore your world.

Blizzard, if you happen to read this know that i’m a fan and i want your classic version to succeed there will never be a game like this again if you lose your playerbase down the line, but if you expect it to last without adding new content to classic then you will lose it all eventually.

The best part about this is that you can turn back time and charge money for new expansions again, but this time fans will expect you to do it better and please do not streamline talents or use the concept streamlining at all, it sure makes the game easier to balance but you end up with a game that has no originality.

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This very much. I’m absolutely against “NOCHANGE” policy as I find many additions in later expansions as a good direction (the ones you mentioned with quests are the best examples).

That’s why I find mix of classic and retail as a best outcome.
E.g. I truly believe that gearing in Classic is way more sane. Epic used to mean something, that you were good at game or whatever, right now it is faceroll where you can get an epic from “kill 1 mob WQ”. I truly hate also all that TITANFORGE out of ar*e (that’s is so insane that I truly believe that removing it even during game being live with some patch is a good way to deal with it, too much RNG - drop, + titanforhge + gem, literally 3 items out of 1 item with super low % of happening).

Yet as you mentioned there are good mehancis that should come back in the game.

Laos in case of retail - I would love to see items staying around, not being changed every new content arise (something similar to e.g. Hand of Justice being a BIS item for pretty much whole expansion while it was only a drop in 5man dungeon which sadly is not that often the case right now, though it happened to improve with arrival of Mechagon but for how? I bet till Mythic 445 rings sadly).

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Nostalgia, plain and simple. At its core, it really has nothing to do with the game at all. People always seem to want to relive the past, or claim some time period the past was better, mainly because they feel their current lives are lacking.