I personally don’t really consider ZA a proper raid, which could helm a full duration phase. It’s fun for what it is and does have a few genuinely good pieces, however it doesn’t really present much of a challenge gearwise or intellectually, with the average gear being more SSC/TK levels. To me at least it always felt more like “Catch up for Sunwell” than a proper batch of content you can really sink your teeth into.
One upside of this pace of content that i’ve noticed is that people are a lot less inclined to go on extended breaks after the content is cleared and we pretty much never felt like the raids ahve outstayed their welcome, unlike some incarnations of retail over the years.
I’d still say it’s worth spending more time on than friggin Dire Maul, and yet we had more time between Dire Maul and Blackwing Lair than between ZA and SWP
Well, we had some raids lasting as long as 9 months in retail, which is frankly excessive probably. However, 1 extra month certainly wouldn’t have hurt. Unlike in Vanilla, there’s more stuff to do in TBC - partly thanks to dungeons being more relevant, and partly because raids are much more worth doing even with alts and such. And yet, again, we ended up spending less time on TBC than on friggin Vanilla. I hope the trend doesn’t continue in WotLK, as well.
I can’t speak much to how well paced Vanilla Classic was since i didn’t play it during that time. As we’ve established more time is not necessarily a good thing.
TBC is not done yet. And i suspect it won’t be til at the very least august/september, for the pre-patch. WotLK i kind of suspect that Naxx and ToC would be on the shorter end, while Ulduar and ICC would be the long flagship phases, as those raids are very well liked, long and quite difficult.
Ultimately, the right pace is somewhat of a subjective assessment - I just wanted to indicate the kinda contradictory and baffling handling of Blizzard for Classic so far. All we can do is give our feedback as to whether we’re okay with the pace or not. Personally I was so far, at least up to phase 2 of TBC, but I feel like phase 4 certainly could’ve lasted a bit longer since I do have alts and this is perhaps the best time so far since 2019 to actually have, use, and gear up alts. And ftr, 3 months isn’t a “full duration phase” for a tier to begin with. I’d say 5-6 months is. But, again, subjective.
But heres simple way to see if season was long or short:
Open arena point calculator (such as https://tbc.wow-tools.com/tbc_arena_calculator)
Select all items that you want to buy on your class
Put 2k rating into 5v5 bracket
Add at least 2-3 weeks to the number you get, since most people wont have 2k in 5s from week 1
???
Profit
I was one of the people asking for classic servers pretty much since WotLK ended, always thinking blizz would just get free cash from content they already have without any additional work …
I seriously didnt expect they can ruin things this hard, I dont think you could mess it up this hard, even if you actively tried …
Well, running 4 months of kara+gruul+maggy certainly was not fun either. Of course if your guild progressed these raids until the last couple weeks before T5 release you may feel like it was rushed.
For the majority of players these phases are definitely not rushed, as every raid has been cleared pretty much on day 1 if you are in a better guild or during the first week-two in a mid-tier guild. I can only see someone arguing TBC being rushed if they struggle with clearing content and thus need a longer period between each phase. Rest are already bored of the bosses and spend their time doing speedruns or other useless “fun” as there is no challenge otherwise.
WotLK will likely be the same unless they tune up the hardmodes from Ulduar and onwards to be much harder than what they were originally.
Other systems (like DKP and SR or roll +1) don’t allow a single person to basically get full BiS before everyone else saw a speck of loot, aside from extremely unlikely instances of RNG and raid composition. I can sorta understand a MT getting prio on some items, but the only ML guild I’ve been so far in Classic has regularly outfitted all their officers (many of which are DPSers, not tanks or even healers) before everybody else.
Does the guild have good performances? Yes, but we’ve also seen one of said officers quitting halfway through P1 after having won a bazillon items while many other guildies were still waiting for a single piece. The guild I’m in doesn’t have the same level of performance, but is also a lot more fair when it comes to loot distribution - which also means we handled occasional quits much more easily. And either way, I’d rather be in a less performing guild but where I actually get gear and I am actually treated like an asset to the guild than being in a hardcore guild where I’m basically working for the officer core and living off the scraps, no matter how good at their game those officers are.
Right, still, loot distribution system should value attendance, if someone has more than other - it means they have higher chance for loot.
Perfect loot system doesn’t exist since you can’t tell what will happen in the future. I stopped caring about that because any player can leave guild / stop playing at every moment.
I understand the people who need more time to gear up or even just enjoy the game but u gotta admit that t6 content was trivial at best and if there wasn’t insane loot it would be boring af. And on the matter of classic players being disrespected by rushed content; I can get behind the fact that classic can be played slowly to just enjoy but in my opinion the most hardcore people who are acting like absolute holes are classic players who actually care too much about the game. If u ask me its all those people who are responsible for the state the game’s in. Being greedy and thinking all about themselves causing gdkps to be the only alternative for people without friends ingame, basically making it impossible for new players to join anything other than phase 1 content. We can clearly see who’s the one benefitting from this kind of behaviour. Trust me its not the retail player who’s gonna sub for 2 months to try classic out and quit after. Sadly its all of us classic players that minmax, join gdkps and all that. Sad but true
I mean, I stopped caring after dozens of these I couldn’t let stuff like that get to me.
I’m talking as warrior prot who passed Gruul’s shield to 2 prot pallas which stopped playing week after getting a shield. I got mine in the middle of T5 after farming Gruul since 1st month of T4. At least Bulwark dropped for me quick enough
The insinuation is he’ll just take a break until WotLK and get his “promotion” to morning shifts right on time to join back and be funneled Wrath loot.
Agree 100%. Looked forward to TBC ever since they announced Classic Vanilla, only to have them throw it down the toilet is less than a year.
All thanks to Actiblizz listening to the retail zergers speedclearing tiers and complaining they’re bored. TBC will exist 1 year and 3 months. There are patches in retail that have lasted longer ffs.
I dont think it´s because the crybabys. They are probably not the majority of players. Blizzard probably just wants to boost their Q4 and WOTLK will do just that.
Comes down to their greed yet again.
Speak for yourself please. I started out in TBC as a newcomer to the game and when I dinged 70 on my ret pala Sunwell was around the corner. Even then I had enough time to slowly grind my way through all the dungeons for the rep, do Kara weekly and do Gruul every so often. I didn’t get any further than that because I was still clueless about my class and the game. This changed in Wrath, the expansion I played from start to end.
Ever since they announced Classic I hoped they would re-release TBC. Looking at the forums here and on Reddit or mmochamp I knew I wasn’t alone. Classic Vanilla was out for a little less than 2 years, and I had hoped TBC would get the same lifespan. Hell, TBC has more content than Vanilla.
I don’t care about people that are already bored with a phase 2 months in. They can go level alts or play another game for all I care. As the OP states TBC will be gone after they release Wrath, we don’t even get ERA servers so you see how much Blizz cares.
How long will TBC have been out by then? A year and three months. This was my dream expansion, the one I wanted to re-live. The patch from SoO in MoP lasted longer than the entirety of TBC Classic… Go figure.
after dozens of these I couldn’t let stuff like that get to me.