I’ve only been playing hardcore a few hours so it would be rude of me to act authoritative on the subject. I didn’t lose a level 25 character to some random world mob swarm yet so I feel all your pain to all of those that did.
That said I figured I’d give hardcore a go, and so far it probably isn’t mechanically much different to how I would have played vanilla WoW anyway but there is definitely something magical / mystical about the experience and was curious to see what other players think:
-
Just in general it’s great to see so many people playing Classic again, I have to admit I was a massive retail Andy so pretty much sat out the Classic launch a couple of years back and missed SoM too. I tried playing Classic using the regular / normal ruleset a few weeks ago but couldn’t get a lot of enthusiasm going for it but playing hardcore has really re-lit the “flame” for me for this game. Thanks to everyone involved in creating this add-on / community.
-
Dragonflight is a good expansion for retail, but for me I just find modern WoW too boring overall now. The whole “progression” / raid logging thing worked for me ten years ago but now the whole “keep re-running the same crap time and time again” meta to advance is just mind-numbing. Appreciate this is very polarising and there’s a lot of people who like this but it’s not for me. People will also say “but what about M+”, but when you look at it objectively M+ is just the same, even more so of the same. The problem with modern WoW, like most modern MMOs I guess, is the rush to end-game and getting players in the “wheel” of end-game progress. Which is mostly pretty boring.
-
Classic on the other hand gives you a game from level 1 to 60. However if you’ve played retail a reasonable amount of time switching back to classic feels kind of dumbed down in terms of UI mostly.
-
The hardcode rules and mod add actual gameplay elements which I feel are pretty unique to the game and I think this does make for some compelling experiences which I personally have really enjoyed since starting to play this mode. I hope the other hardcore players are getting the same enjoyment too, even those who have lost level 20 / 30 + characters as a result (<3 to all of you).
I guess it’s just nice to have an actual “game” again, rather than a thin wrapper over a cash-shop. But anyway that’s my take, interested to see what other’s think. Please don’t be horrible.