Would you like combat with NPCs to be a more challenging experience in retail?

While playing WoW classic I found it tremendously immersive and engaging to experience combat with NPCs as a challenging endeavor with a rather slow pace. Fighting NPCs feels dangerous and requires certain cautiousness and preparation - the game encourages you to have potions and buffing items, it sometimes warrants that boosting abilities are not on cooldown. In such a setup, receiving new gear also feels to me more exciting as even slight changes in stats result in better combat performance. In my opinion, it is a shame that in retail combat with NPCs is extremely easy, encouraging mass-taunting of NPCs and close-to-faceroll style of nuking them. For me this makes the levelling gameplay quite dull and mindless.
So my question is, do other players feel in a similar way about the combat with NPCs while levelling? Would you like the combat to be as challenging as in classic?

P.S. I wish I could make a poll to survey people, but as you know users can’t make polls on the forum.

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I would prefer fewer fights (mob density is often way too high) but for more engaging fights (more often). Mop had rares out in the world that you could solo and they needed to be interupted or dodged.

I don’t remember fights in Vanilla being tough per se, so going back to that difficult for trash mobs but with more mop style rares or elites out there too.

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For me, absolutely not. Only “boss” quest mobs but still soloable. It is akin to dungeons where the trash packs are harder than the boss. Slow, annoying and disappointing. The mob density is also far too high.

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I believe even now rares and quest elites are a pleasant change in gameplay compared to regular NPCs as their abilities and their power require player to focus and pay attention to the fight. I appreciate that

I see. Why do you prefer such fights to be soloable?

Imagine thinking classic mobs are harder. Very engaging combat, waiting for autoattacks and fight mob for 15 seconds with little to no interaction just like OSRS and calling it “engaging” and “challenging”. Only challenge is not to fall asleep.

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If you have played it, you know well that both NPCs and different classes have abilities, so the claim about auto-attach combat in classic is invalid. On the other hand, while in retail one can simultaneously aggro multiple npcs in an enemy camp, faceroll abilities and easily survive that encounter without using healing, that would simply be not possible in classic, what makes the initial take about combat with NPCs being more challenging to be valid.

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With retail you can make it as easy/hard as you want it to be by just pulling more. Classic leveling experience is the most boring leveling journey of any current MMO out there and that includes FF14’s absolute slog.

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Cope much?

But I will biat. The only skill, just as you just wrote, needed in classic, is to know how to pull single enemy at a time.

In retail, if you are skilled, you can pull as much as you want and survive. Or die, if you are classic Andy.

More questions? (dont bother I actualyl wont waste more time on your copium about how “challenging” the classic is)

The number one complaint about retail WoW right now is that it is too hard. So i don’t think making it harder would go over well with a lot of people.

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If I want to do group content I will do a dungeon or raid.

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Short answer: No.

Long answer: Hell no.

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anyone in retail has lvled chars a million times alrdy, no one got time to lvl by old world anyone who wanna be efficient are just doing dungeons or buying a boost.
if you want this go play classic.

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This is one of the most subtle “retail sucks, classic better!” threads I’ve seen. Bravo, well done!

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Nope not really, I always thought during the ‘Dark Souls’ craze that people didn’t think it through.

Grind and farming won’t be magically taken away, this is an MMO after all (the creators want to milk us).
If I want a challenge there are hundreds of other games out there. So no I don’t want that in the open world. As it would turn into tedium rather fast.

Edit: Also, I was there in vanilla… it wasn’t my first MMO, I wasn’t 12 and it wasn’t THAT hard. It was a slower paced game though.

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making the fights like they are in classic would make the game easier tho. Fights in vanilla were longer but not challenging at all. Just waiting for crits, watching white autoattack numbers and pulling one mob at a time.

Tedious and longer doesnt equal harder.

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It is not about challenge, it is classic andies craving validation that “their game is the right game” and that also confirmation that “they need to be more skilled to play the vanilla”

Vanilla was product of its time, it was good gmae 20 years ago and now it provides good side activity for classic andies and “try again” HC hype community.

People who play retail wont be bothered cuz yeah we did it 20 years ago and ultimately we know where it goes - retail is product of classic. And I dont need boring yet long easy fights to feel accomplished.

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But the combat in classic isn’t challenging though, it’s just slow paced

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Indeed. If I want that I’ll go grind rares solo in DF.
Same experience (depending on class though).

Subjectively it feels that in classic the balance between amount of health, resource cost of class abilities, probability of missing a hit vs. speed of attacks and strength of attacks of npcs was different in a way that made probability of dying higher. For example when playing a class that utilizes mana in retail, it’s rather rare to run out of it, or miss hitting enemy with a spell, or see a spell resist, while it takes a few quick casts to kill an enemy.
It would be curious to compare statistics on combat deaths during leveling between classic and retail.

It may have felt like that in VANILLA (not Classic), but that was because most of us were complete noobs back then.