So there is a lot of speculation on what will happen after MoP Classic, there was a questionnaire going around and everything basically listing the potential future of Progression Classic. Merge into retail, WoD Classic or permanent MoP servers.
I think and hope they will do WoD Classic. When the retail WoD released I was only 12 and couldn’t really play it, I would love to experience what it was like and only heard good things about the raids (I am mainly a raider guy).
My opinion is that people were bugged by the lack of content and garrisons, which is similar to Cataclysm. Dragon Soul was not a great raid and was way too long before MoP. Same thing with HFC before Legion. And thats probably what really makes people hate expansions, lack of content. Cataclysm wasnt bad at all in my opinion despite all the hate and prophecies of classic dying during it, but it was the 2nd most popular expansion after WOTLK for raiding and PvP at least.
WoD will surely be the same. Challenge modes, amazing raids, quick leveling, tons of stuff to do in the garrison, invasions etc. All cool but only if its in a similar timeframe to Cataclysm Classic so it doesnt get stale.
And it will be the bridge to LEGION Classic which many think is an amazing expansion, again same thing happened for Cata-MoP (“bad” expansion to suffer through to be ready for “good” expansion to enjoy).
And they could really outdo themselves and add in all the unreleased planned content for original WoD, making it the best expansion ever probably (highly unlikely tho).
Let me know what you think and want to happen. I see no problem in releasing WoD Classic, its free money for Blizzard.
Was one of the biggest prunes of abilities and skill expressions, if not the biggest(?), in WoW’s history. The class designs were complete garbage, because Blizzard listened to the complaints about CC in MoP PvP, which led to a huge lack of CC in WoD. The diversity in abilities, as you can see is very diverse right now in MoP Classic, was also pruned, which essentially moved gameplay difficulty way more over to the mobs & bosses when compared to previous expansions, while it left PvP with those overly simplistic class designs as a consequence.
Then Legion came. It didn’t really improve much in terms of class designs. A little bit, but not much. It was still not even close to the diversity in MoP, and still a lack of CC (except for rogues). There was a lot more content to do in Legion though, compared to WoD. Especially the legendary weapons were mostly well-received.
WoD lost so many players in an unprecedent short amount of time, that they stopped reporting proper player figures ever since in their fiscal reports to shareholders.
iirc it was like half of the player base in the first quarterly report, which is why they stopped reporting it. They’ve used obfuscation methods ever since.
First it peaked at the release because the cinematic was the best they ever made and then it fell down, but after that we dont know what happened because as you said they didnt release numbers anymore, maybe it went downhill in the start and then up again then down again. Legion big spike I assume and then it continuously maintained because it was good… my evaluation.
Anyway, I think WoD would be a good mix-up from the alt-unfriendly MoP we have right now. Very tedious to level a lot of characters. I only got 4 90s as of now.
To me and many of my friends MOP is the last “classic” expansion. We missed back in the day for many reasons. There is literaly no point of going further, because every expension from now is a worst version of retail. I loved Legion and dont hate Dragonflight, but i dont see any reason why play these instead of retail.
WOD was so bad and boring, it almost killed the entire franchise. Besides raids at max lvl it become a mobil game where u have to pay a monthly fee…
People also said this about cataclysm onward, calling everyone that plays past WOTLK playing classic a retail Andy - does not really change anything. WoD is still different to retail, you dont even have M+ which is a big part of retail at least for me.
Thats just the garrison / shipyard. And some people also find it fun to min-max these to get gold. Gold farming is like half the reason I play the game. Doing all the followers with gold bonuses and farming the followers, optimizing everything is fun imo.
To re-experience legion because you couldn’t when it first came out, that’s my big reason. If you dont like it fine.
Looks like u dont understand the problem with WoD. Garrison/Shipyard problem is not that they existed, but that there was nothing else. There was literaly 0 reason to go outside of your garrison and farm or do something “fun”. The most effective way was to get lot of alts to max lvl, build up your garrison/ship and farm farm farm. They even have a mobil app for this xD (or maybe it come in legion). As i remember u can do around 5k gold/day/char even more with Shipyards. If u got 4 max lvl char (i got more than 10) that was 20k/day and the gametoken was around the same price. I literaly paid the next 3 expact + monthly fee, bought every mount and cosmetic from AH, bought overwatch, warcraft3 etc with that gold. (thx blizz)
I started wod when tanaan jungle was already in the game (almost last patch). That was fun, but i have no idea stil this day what ppl do until that point in time. Checking the subscribing numbers they played anything but wow:D
If blizz want to make this work they need to do WoD “remake” not classic, or even better merge 2 expansion into one. Legion was the better WoD anyway, so merge them to become one giga expansion.
I have 15 characters with some combination of Tailoring/Inscription/Alchemy which are all not my mains or alts I play, they are just profession bots, and I wanna get all of them to 90 and max out the farm. So yes “only” 4 out of 19 characters I have on the realm.
There was lots of rep, achievement, profession stuff to do. You had to do things outside of garrison to get certain levels for buildings I remember. So yea at some point if u have all there isnt much to do regarding ore farming or herbs or whatever. Maybe I am ignorant but I dont think garrison in itself was at fault, just that there was no main city (the one next to the battleground is a joke).
Merging 2 expansions together would either mean releasing them after each other which would not be a merge or releasing them at the same time which means WoD content is useless becaus legion is there. Or you just want to have WoD to level and then piss off to broken isles?
I think WOD releases as a cheap thrill before Legion, and it does have some good content it just didn’t have enough for a full 2 year expansion period, because they abandoned ship on WOD to develop Legion.
A shorter WOD with some positive small changes could be good, the raids and dungeons were great and Ashran had a good period where a tonne of people played it to gear up alts, it was generally a fun time.
This is true but misleading, WOD sold like hotcakes and hit an all time high sub count on launch, so successful was its marketing hype train. Even if WOD had lived up to expectations it would have never held all those players, it was a bubble waiting to burst before the expansion even launched.
For it to have lost all those subs required it to have gained record numbers beforehand, it’s not like it lost numbers from where MOP was, it gained millions of new/returning players on launch.
iirc Bellular used to do some breakdowns of the quarterly/yearly reports back then, to provide some insight past the obfuscated numbers. So if anyone is curious, then they can dig through the content from back then, because people still wanted to know what the real numbers were back then. You can probably find forum posts about it too, from back then.
All in all though, WoD was a huge failure. If you want the specifics, then there’s content from back then that provided some context and insight into just how bad it was.
I mean I played WOD on launch and for its entirety, I remember it well. WOD had a rough launch because too many people were playing it, then it had a lack of content stemming from them abandoning and retconning it to allow Legion to happen, this had already began during the WOD beta.
But WOD had great raids and dungeons, I would class Blackrock Foundry as a top 5 raid of all time and Hellfire Citadel was fantastic too. WOD losing players was inevitable even if it had been good, but it just so happened they let it rot to work on Legion, so the loss was even worse.
But as a short expansion for Classic? It’d be decent.
That has nothing to do with my point. Cata is far away from retail and WoD also is. Some say Trial of the crusader is where retail starts, some say its legion, some say its Cata, I dont really care as long as the game is fun.
And I am not surprised Cata had a falloff with over a decade of negative propaganda. Also raids got too hard for classic boomers who rather level 300 hours and then farm 5 different resistance sets for another 100 hours.
No, just don’t. They should remaster this expansion, especially Chris Metzen as a work on the flaws of expansion he took lead of and then he and his team 1 jumped the ship to polish Overwatch 1 in 2016 leaving WoW in incompetent and understaffed hands.
Add capitals, zangar sea bosse, new locations for garrisons and twisting neither zoness. Add train system back into the world of Draenor and of course raid tier of city of Shatrath. So much cut content that can be done better with modern tools at Dev’s disposal.
This will be the last classic expansion for me, I enjoyed the revamp of 1-60 while having the LFG tool in cata but I didn’t like the linear progression of quests of 80 to 85 , it just wasn’t sand boxy enough, the TBC had it nailed perfectly as far as exploration and questing was concerned. MoP leveling is horrendous , too linear and too much phasing, I won’t be repeating any of that nonsense which only gets worse in further expansions.
Like others have mentioned I think classic really does end at WotLK.