If Classic isn’t going to evolve to TBC then later, after some time, a game with Classic system and more interesting content and gameplay could be a brilliant idea. I don’t see anything bad in balancing classes, changing useless talents and abilities (survival hunter), adding new abilities (retribution and protection paladin), adding new talents and unfinished zones and other content to Classic WoW, telling more lore and story. It could be a seperate game. There is absolutely nothing bad in it and whoever thinks there is, simply isn’t rational for the least.
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Blizzard isn’t going to put money into that and into retail at the same time. For Classic+ to happen Classic would need its own subscription and also a dedicated team of content creators and developers, which, to be honest, I don’t really see in the foreseable future. Activision loves the idea of Classic because they are monetizing nostalgia, but I see unlikely they’ll go further than that if that means investing big quantities of money and resources. They have retail for that.
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The problem is what to do with it. All the unfinished zones are finished in Retail, so should they take the zones in a different direction? What would those zones contain? Level 60 versions of Retail content? New content? Then which version of the story is the real one?
How would this content be distributed? As an expansion? If no, then what would be the incentive for Blizzard to create it? They are already losing money on every player that goes for Classic instead of Retail.
If there isn’t a new level cap, how will you control progression? Will this be content that’s tuned for fresh level 60s? What about people in raid gear who will just steamroll it. If it’s tuned for raid gear, which raid? Naxx gear is much more powerful than MC gear.
All in all, it’s just a huge number of questions. At the end of the day, people are playing Classic because they want the Vanilla experience. Adding new stuff to the game may seem like a good idea, but it sets us on a dangerous path towards a second version of Retail.
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Also… “so what are we doing this week?” - “new recruits so we’re doing MC+bwl+aq40+naxx+new raid1+new raid2+new raid3, so we can’t do actual new raid 4 content now, oh and we need to do some 5 manned ony runs for world buffs”.
At some point you end up with either an absurd gearing up path (it was already somewhat absurd by the time of naxx), or with tbc and later style catchup with negates those early raids and causes crying from people who hate to see content being made redundant.
Then just keep the progression horizontal. Keep Naxx gear as the power cap and have newer content slot between tiers or be on par with them.
Yes
I think the vast majority of people would like to see Hyjal with a Classic style questing system and Uldum without the ludicrous Harrison Jones questline that utterly ruined it in Cataclysm.
Both would be canon
Diverging timelines/universes as seen in RS3/OSRS. I mean can you sit there and tell me this sort of thing has hurt Marvel or DC over the years?
Horizontal
Some could be
It’s inevitable they’ll steamroll some. That’s why having some content as difficult or even harder than Naxx is important too.
See RS3/OSRS. This has been done before and done successfully.
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Agree, GW2, TESO has a horizontal progression of content, and it works very good.
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It’s easy to explain. Parallel universe, like Draenor.
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See, the issue in vanilla is, a lot of classes are capped by the availability of gear. If you just throw in more gear of similar quality it will allow some classes to improve more than others. As (like AQ40 once people realised one could burn consumables to make up for the small gear quality delta) would more content just be ignored entirely to take the jump over to what gives better gear.
But sure, overall it could work, but not as simple as you imagine.
why would they release classic+ ever when theres aready perfect tbc + wotlk ready to release
I also wish for Classic +, but I doubt they will do it, because they are looking for the easiest ways to make money and that means they are more likely to release TBC and WoTLK, which I dread, but if they force it upon me and don’t allow me to play Classic anymore, I will just unsubscribe.
You mean, not getting stronger, just getting new shinies?
I think there is no need to do more “classic” games.
The point was taken… people play classic for 2 main reasons…Nostaglia and the fact it is hardcore.
I think what blizz should do is take some stuff from classic and put then in the next patch of retail. Those stats are according to me
1.Talent points
2.Hard mobs (you cant kill 2-3 mobs at the same time without CDs in classic)
3.Green-Blue-Epic gear matter… in Retail u only see epic gear and that lose the whole point of having those items
4.Professions matter. Some of the BIS items are crafted and some items were mandatory to proceed in the raids (Fire resistant craftable items ect)
5.Resistances played its part and were vital.
6.Combat rng with mobs that parried dodged blocked and ofc HIT cap
7.Gather able mats were unique and only one person could gather that herb/node.
There are a lot other things that doesn’t come to mind right now but the feeling was that game was hard and whenever you achieved something it was more rewarding.
Yeah, as previously said by someone, it works very well for TESO and GW2, perhaps a CP system similar to TESO can be implemented, or similar to GW2 we could have masteries dedicated to new zones, so instead of flying we have grappling points around the world that we can hook up to.
Way back in Cata, I had a discussion with a friend of mine. We were reminiscing about some amazing times we had at Crossroads. And the incredible amount of joy we felt finally getting our epic mount after having been 60 for months. He left at this point to play vanilla private servers. Something I wasn’t interested in. Not because of vanilla, but because of it being illegal, and I feared that somehow it could compromise my current WoW account. Anyway.
One of our discussions was what happened to the community we were a part of? I mean people naturally quit and leave, this happened even in vanilla. But it was different, the game’s mechanics made communication superfluous. Running into other people was an annoyance most of the time. A whole slew of system, small and a bit bigger slowly added to the decline of community, which I later found again on Argent Dawn (because it’s RP)
So what was the hypothetical we came up up? Well, we asked ourselves, what would the game be like, without the streamlining and QOL changes?
Plenty of things have been added, but I feel many of those have had a detrimental effect on the world. I’ll list it here in order of appearance from what I remember, at least.
Flying Mounts: The idea when it was first announced, along with the joke on voice chat. (You’re finally going to figure out that that hot Night Elf chick that’s been dancing on the mailbox was actually a dude on the other end of the microphone) it sounded amazing. But it sort of trivialized the content and the world. Once you’re max level and have some gold. You fly over the world, it’s handy. Very handy. But it makes the world feel a lot smaller.
I mean, I am playing classic again now, and the world feels huuuuge. Even bigger than it feels right now including all the expansion worlds. So, flying turned out to be less than awesome in the long run.
Of course faction homogenisation, when I first started playing, I absolutely despised the Alliance. I’ve never had more faction loyalty than during vanilla. And I was actually -not- excited for Paladins on the Horde and Shamans on the Alliance. It lost a lot of the faction flavour (not to mention Priest unique skills)
Daily quests, whilst the idea was and probably still is lauded, as it gives players things to do during downtime. Near the end, especially with the MGT/Sunwell patch and the island of dailies (forgot the name Quel’danas?) Gold was easy to come by. I of course didn’t have gold. I didn’t start making plenty of gold until wotlk. But it started in TBC. Gold became more and more easily and readily available. To the point where it wasn’t really a resource to manage anymore. You leveled up? No longer have to pick and choose which skills to go for first. It added cool stuff, like gems and sockets. So, all in all a good expansion. Not many negatives.
Cross-realm battlegrounds, no longer did I fear running into certain people, for I no longer recognise people within battlegrounds. And there is something to be said about running into the same people, little rivalries and friendships are more easily made. Of course this system would later be implemented in LFD and LFR too.
The merging of healing and spellpower was one I didn’t much fancy.
The removal of resistances, immunities and homogenisation of classes are all negatives. Right now, class design feels like ticking boxes.
CC: check
CC Break: Check
Selfheal: Check
Defensive: Check
Movement speed/charge: Check
Specific spellpower things like shadow, fire, frost, arcane. Reagents having to be used.
I mean the list goes on and on.How would WoW have been if the same design philosophy was used all throughout its lifespan. I’m not against change persay. I’m just firmly in the camp of community focus. Going to a dungeon, or raid, should require a lot of preparation. And if you do not have the time to do that every week. Then why not raid once a month. Working towards a goal I feel is ultimately a lot more rewarding.
But this is just me of course.
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Classic should stay as it is because that is why it has been made. Classic isn’t a new IP, nor is it a new expansion. Its a static representation of how WoW started.
If they start messing around with the classes it is no longer a representation of Vanilla.
If they add lvl 60 content, even if it is original scrapped content, they change the balance of the game. Which is that it is oriënted at the journey to lvl 60 and not on a massive clod of endgame.
You accuse people of beeing irrational up front because deep down you realise that in fact your own approach is irrational.
Classic is a representation of Vanilla. People love it to bits as it is. Stop trying to change it into this wet dream endgame monstrosity. We already have one of those! 
Honestly if they keep the core values of classic alive and add more content I’d be over the moon.
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I’d love to see them take Classic forwards, maintaining all that makes Classic what it is. Blizzard has a second chance at doing it right this time!
I also see no reason why you can’t increase the level cap to 70 in e.g a ‘Classic+ expansion’, It just needs to be made so that the Lvl 60 Raid gear isn’t rendered obsolete by Greens in the first few levels above 60. Yes, those in Naxx gear will have an easier time up to say level 65, when maybe blues start to equal lvl 60 Naxx gear, but that’s fine, they earned the right to have an easier time.
Well, they already said that TBC servers are beeing talked about.
Don’t have to butcher Classic for that a second time.
I’d love it if they add more content to classic servers beyond Naxx, but stay true to the Vanilla game mechanics.
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Vertical progression is a never ending slippery slope with the current design because you’re resigning yourself to making old content obsolete, which is a huge shame. TBC became all about Outland and the 60-70 content and retrospectively that was the wrong path to take. Just look at BFA, you have this ‘World’ of Warcraft with 90% of it being unused. Azeroth, Outland, Northrend, Cata Zones, Pandaria, Draenor, Broken Isles - all irrelevant.
There are two potential solutions to this.
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You apply level/power capping to every zone, effectively like a world wide Timewalking mechanic where your stats are squished to each era but then you run into the issue of the gear you acquire. If your MC raid gear can just scale up in power to 70, 80, 90 raid gear, you risk invalidating newer tier items and even raid design in general because people will always take the path of least resistance. If they don’t scale up with you, then the content is still obsolete. This method is certainly possible though as has been proven in the Destiny series with the infusion mechanic. This has allowed all content to maintain relevance while keeping a continual vertical progression. However, if this approach was applied to WoW I’m afraid to say that current Vanilla raids would need re-tuning with regards to difficulty. It’s simply unavoidable because this system hinges on Raids being of roughly equivalent relative difficulty.
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Level cap stays at 60 and horizontal progression is applied much like in Guild Wars 2. Under this system new content would slot alongside or in between current tiers with Naxx remaining as the ‘power cap’. Different set bonuses on raid gear etc while keeping the raw stats from increasing overall. The difficulty you run into here is appropriate tuning. How do you keep the new content challenging for people in full Naxx gear while keeping it reasonable for people in MC gear? There’s a certain inevitability that some of this content would be relatively trivialised by the most dedicated of players which is why this system would require a slight squish between the tiers as the gap is too large to work with.
Both systems have their pros and cons, however merely copying the approach we’ve seen in the past would be hugely detrimental moving forward.