Honest question, not to start a discussion about what version is better since this is subjective anyway.
If you happen to play both: why?
Cheers!
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Simple answer: Pre-Cata Azeroth!
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So much difference. Then again I havenât played retail in 2 years.
Retail is just such a busy game, I donât mean with players but things you have to or can do. Iâm not even sure whatâs going on in retail now anyway, Itâs almost a different game to classic.
Iâll give you an example, whatâs dragonriding? I honestly donât know. My highest level character is 54 in retail.
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It is, 100%.
More interactive way to fly with abilities and a sort of combo point system. itâs 3x faster than regular flying but you have to actively fly so canât just afk.
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yea ! preparing character for Cata
I play Era only: The world, professions and progress mean something -
no scaling, no share loot/kills etc. No golden Quest arrows, bling and imposing tracker ⌠use your brain. You play game â In Retail game play almost itself.
I not play Retail since BfA. and not going to ever again.
I too stop play Wrath when Cata hit, then stay in Era/HC only.
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I play both
Retail for collecting mounts, pets etc
Classic Hardcore for the challenge
Season of Discovery for the class roles and abilities and fresh vanilla experience
Wrath of The Lich King Classic for I donât know what really
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Classic has the more traditional RPG elements, retail doesnât
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I logged into retail a couple of years ago. Found myself in Dalaran - the Legion (or was it Draenor?) version.
I had no idea what to do there or how to get out of that city and back to Stormwind.
So after running around for like 5-10 minutes I gave up and logged off again.
No, it is a completely different game, and it is in no way intuitive for returning (or new?) players.
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Or it could have been the Northrend Dalaran to make it even more confusing. There is a portal room next to the inn.
But even if you managed to get to Stormwind itâs very confusing where you go next. The mobs and quests scale to your level if your level is within the zone level range. If you are 5 levels above you one-shot everything including elites.
In Classic you have 1 or 2 options for your level. In retail you can talk to Chromie and have all previous expansions scale to level 60 which doesnât help you meet other players from your level range. And you donât want to meet them because leveling is dull and shallow.
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They changed this recently. You get teleported to sw upon logging in after a long time offline and you get pointed in the right direction. Until level 60 (cap is 70) you can choose to level in the expansion of your choice so no more linear leveling in terms of expansions.
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Itâs mostly because the modern-day Retail is bad, not because classic is so good. For example:
- Terrible Retail lore, zone/enemy design, writing, visual design, bad immersion. New stuff (especially post-Legion) doesnât even feel like WoW since it was developped by new people unrelated to real Blizzard and it looks like Clash of Clans or something
- Extreme competitiveness and toxicity
- Unobtainable stuff. Why would I do any âmeta-contentâ (transmog, achievements, titles, mounts) if thereâs so much stuff that other players have and Iâll never be able to obtain?
Classic doesnât have most of those issues. Yes, pre-cata Azeroth is largely a boring, development-wise unfinished dead place devoid of content and soundtrack with poorly designed quests, zone layouts, graveyards and flight paths. None of the above applies to TBC and Wrath zones, though. But hey, at least itâs WoW, unlike Retail. So if you want to play WoW you play Classic.
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They are three seperate games for me to be honest.
There is the âClassicâ Warcraft I played as a teenager, Vanilla WoW & TBC.
There is then the âtransitional WoWâ I also played as a teenager & early 20s of Wotlk, Cataclysm & MoP. These kept a lot of the things that were good about Classic but also added a lot of stuff I wasnât a fan of.
Then thereâs WoD onwards or âRetail wowâ as Iâd call it. By this point it just became a different game, one Iâd try and never enjoy.
Thatâs it really. I enjoy classic wow. Thereâs a lot of stuff in it from back in the day I feel doesnât work so well in 2024 and it doesnât really feel the same as it did back then either, arguable if itâs even the same game or possible for it to be (ship of theseus and all that) . But the fundamentals of the gameplay are largely the same and I enjoy it, itâs for the most part a chill game.
The transitional WoW I was up for trying but after playing Wotlk I decided itâs not for me. I didnât enjoy Wotlk the first time round and history repeated itself with many of the factors that led to Wrath being quite bad (imo) that could have been avoided were repeated. Great if you like Wotlk but not for me. I did not mind the start of Cataclysm and I enjoyed what I played of MoP but if they do progression servers again I wonât play them.
Retail wise, just never got into it. I havenât played a retail expansion since Legion and donât really have a desire too. I may try the new âtrilogyâ of expacs they have that seem to be geared at âwrapping upâ warcraft, but I could just as easily not bother.
For me World of Warcraft is as it was 2004-2008, arguably perhaps somewhat until 2014. After this I donât recognize it. For others itâll be totally different and thats ok.
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I play Classic because itâs a completable game.
Iâm a completionist- perhaps not obsessive, but I certainly try, within reason, to complete every quest, to obtain what titles I can, to achieve raid glories, fill my mount collection⌠and so on. Iâve done every quest in Northrend, Iâve done all but the BT attune in Outland⌠you get the idea. Ditto the old world.
In Era/Wrath, there is still little enough content in the game that a new player can catch up and acquire, with few rare exceptions, everything. You can attain parity with other players on the order of months, not years. I appreciate that sort of thing.
I think Retail is a far better game, but it hurts the completionist in me to know that I can never catch up to the twenty years of backlog Iâve accumulated. So I donât even bother.
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So true.
Many people do not realise how (nearly) unobtainable content is probably the worst plague of Retail. There are two forms of progress in WoW: gear and everything else. One of the two is meaningless since it is reset every 3 months. The other one is not possible to catch up on because there are so many things that are nearly or quite literally unobtainable. And the older Retail gets, the worse it becomes.
As soon as a person is bored with gear progression in Retail they try to do some âmeta contentâ (mounts, transmogs, quests, toys, achievements, titles, reputations etc). And they very quickly realise that they will fundamenteally never have even remotely close as much as those who have played the game for a while have. And they just leave.
In classic there are almost no such things, with the abhorrent exceptions of Arena mounts, Wrath raider mounts and the Black qiraji mount (the last one should be mercilessly deleted from the game IMO)
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Retail is too complicated, too many changes overall and classes have so much abilityâs i donât even know what to press anymore. PvE is so complicated with all the mechanics and videoâs you have to watch before understand it a little bit and PvP has been so unbalanced for many years it was just not fun anymore.
For me WotlK (and prob Cata) is perfect because the game was improved compared to Classic Era but has not changed too much. The raids are fun, and PvP is great and balanced. Some small talent tree changes that improved every classes gameplay. The game is simple but not incomplete and too much time consuming like in Classic Era. You were not forced to do PvE as a PvP
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The cold irony is that due to a general increase in player power and mechanics like Timewalking, you ostensibly could do anything you want in a fraction of the time it might have originally taken a player. Even absolutely stupid FoSes like [Hero of Shattrath] become eminently doable with that.
The problem is that the catch-up is purely a chore. You cannot combine enjoying current content with the task of emptying that hideous backlog. You cannot funnel spare raid and dungeon currencies into old appearances, mounts and more. You cannot funnel the time spent doing old content into current power. Objectively, going back to an old expansion to see what happened and complete it is the wrong way to play as it is now.
And if you so much as hint at the fact itâs a bit daft to keep certain rewards indefinitely time-gated or to have you solo old raids in the hopes of getting a 1% drop instead of offering an item-level âsyncedâ mode to experience old raids as intended and obtain said old rewards today, a veritable army of people will pipe up to let you know you can pound sand for wanting the cool thing you were ten years late for.
Classic it is, then.
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Both are fun especially current hardcore. Classic warlock is fun but ik playing shaman in hc atm which Iâm enjoying more then I thought. They feel meh in retail (same as lock tbh)
its pretty simple
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdvxcf3lFY
Gear progression mostly. If have geared a character on Classic ERA. I donât have to worry it will be outdated within the next couple of months.
Also you have to do stuff in the actual world (Azeroth). There is plenty to do, farming, getting worldbuffs, PVP etc.
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