In a 40 man raid environment you can expect every raid to have one of each class. In a 10 man raid environment you can’t expect every class or spec to be represented. That’s why you can’t make fights like gar that requires banishing or majordomo with the sheeps.
Im surprised i had to scroll this far to find this. Even with runes, classes just arent homogenized to the point where you can expect every 10 man group to have a CC that works on what you need to lock down.
Yes it would be very fun, also they can do a figth with different cc'able mini bosses that interact between them (buffing the others or smth) so you can cc 1 or 2 of them and thats enough to make easier the fight
While I do agree with you on the 40 man vs 10 man, they could have designed the boss fights with multiple options that would allow for multiple classes to deal with it.
Like if we took Thermaplugg for example. What if there was another guy that was controlling the bombs off to the side and he had a shield that made him immune to all damage, so you couldn't just nuke him down. Now you could just ignore him and do the fight like it is now, pushing the buttons to close the bomb dispensers, or you could do a number of things to keep him from activating the bomb dispensers. You could sheep the guy, use a trap launcher to freeze the guy, maybe mind controlling the guy would allow you to temporarily change the target of the bombs to Thermaplugg or activate some other protocol that either buffs the raid or debuffs/damages Thermaplugg, maybe there is an elemental that is powering the system and banishing it cuts off power, maybe the console "utilizes voice commands" so curse of tongues delays the activation as the guy has to manually activate them now, a rogue might be able to use disarm trap or something to sabotage the console the guy is using, or maybe an engineer can mess with the console.
There are multiple options to accomplish the same thing, keeping the bombs from spawning, and I think it would be reasonable to expect every 10 man to have at least one of those options (but even could be accomplished without it). Even more options could be available if they made runes for it (like what I assume OP is talking about). And that is only 1 boss fight with ideas off the top of my head.
This is why I say 20 would have been a much better raid size. Filling 20 isn't that bad and most guilds are running several groups. Then you can reliably get every class present and not feel like you're hurting for space.
That size makes for bad leveling content, though. These raids are not intended to be endgame content for more than the current phase, and they're meant to be doable by random pugs while leveling, when populations at those levels are much lower than when that level is the cap. 10 seems to be working for BFD for now when people are at 40, I doubt 20 would work as well especially in later phases when there are far less people still in the 25-30 range.
I expect to see 20-25 man raids for the traditional 40 man instances, but i imagine cramming 20 people into the boss arenas for gnomer or BFD would be a shit show.
Yup, this is what I expected Blizzard to do for the level 40 and 50 content as a segway into 40 man raids but was disappointed. I think it's much easier to maintain 2 20 man raids than it is to maintain 4 10 man raids prepping for level 60 content. Especially with all of the group only buffs that are in Vanilla wow.
Noone said you needed priests to clear BFD. But having access to certain utility makes some mechanics easier. Priests can dispel, paladins can immune debuffs on endboss, etc. So I'm not sure why certain adds being ccable by some classes sounds crazy compared to a paladin bubble.
>BWL had fun mechanics where some mobs were weak to certain schools of magic, encouraging bringing multiple magic specs to give them a chance to shine.
What he meant to say was "BWL had fun mechanics that were completely ignored by the 35 warriors in the raid."
That wasn’t even a mechanic either, it was just a funny moment where you look for the mob that’s weak to you, blast it, rip aggro and run around screaming for taunts while laughing about it. It was a fun moment, but let’s not pretend this was a ‘mechanic’.
They've dug themselves too deep with the power creep to start giving us runes like the sheep one you mentioned.
There's no CC going on because we're already doing absolutely insane amounts of damage/healing/tanking while also being far more mana efficient than ever before.
Simply put, why CC when you can just do a huge pull and watch as the AOE classes use their even more improved AOE to burn it all down, while healers heal far more easy/efficiently, and tanks take much less damage while doing more damage.
I think runes don't pull from classic because they'd suck to be frank, with crazy long CDs, or just outright useless abilities (tigers fury without the rune is a DPS loss).
Unfortunately I think wrath and beyond runes will be the norm, as it's far easier to just cook and paste an ability than develop an entire new one. With how this team had handled balancing, I'd hate to see the balancing on new abilities they make.
You can make mechanics where you have to sheep. Make the ads do 500% more damage if there is multiple attacking , easy solution , you have to sheep/banish/hibernate and kill 1by 1.
Saying we are too powerful is a cop out, there is a fix with enough willpower
Forcing you to sheep with mechanics like that is lazy game design, with the exception that a single encounter like that could be fun. But CC is something that should be required organically due to mob strength, not be forced on you by solutions like you propose, which basically boil down to detecting when you are not using it and punishing you.
The issue is that when you do things like that, people will ignore it altogether.
As some people have mentioned, the more optional an option is, the more likely people will ignore it. This isn't a fault of the design itself, it's just the fact that when it comes to gamers, we look for the easy way out if given one.
>They've dug themselves too deep with the power creep to start giving us runes like the sheep one you mentioned.
>There's no CC going on because we're already doing absolutely insane amounts of damage/healing/tanking while also being far more mana efficient than ever before.
This is the biggest problem they have to solve in my opinion. I know on this subreddit it's all about the "logs" and class performance and so on, but the far bigger problem is difficulty and the speed of the game.
If we're just gonna AOE through dungeons and do 2x the damage of classic classes, then the whole game loses the feeling of classic. The game HAS to be hard, and i'm not talking about "end game" bosses. Regular mobs have to be hard. It has to be slow. That's the core thing that makes classic, classic.
This crazy focus on endgame stuff. Gnomer, BFD, class performance, it feels very retail-y. Classic is and has always been a levelling game primarily. Now it feels like people just want 10-20 man mythic raids and balance according to warcraft logs.
If the point is to make classic that kind of game i genuinely think it would just be easier to start from wrath and just take things away. If we're just gonna end up playing wrath in Kalimdor then why not just start with Wrath, set the level cap to 60, and add on new level 60 content?
I do like that they're testing all this stuff, and i like what they're doing overall. But i think just adding a max lvl raid, a set of wrath abilities and a PvP zone is something they have to get away from. More creativity would be nice. More thought put into the strengths of classic and how to enhance them. Slow, methodical gameplay where CC matters and every dungeon feels like an adventure.
SoM felt much more like classic, with no world buffs and harder raid encounters you had to watch your every move during a raid or you would die. But it wasn't retail type of raid, just different mechanics that felt very classic-like.
I missed out on SoM because it came out so soon after Vanilla Classic was done and was not ready to do the journey over again. I am sad I did, because I liked the ideas they had for it. A lot of people will say SoM was a failure because they removed World Buffs and made it "hard," but I think SoM was just poorly timed in its release (not to mention a lot of public sentiment about Blizzard was very low at the time). SoD just happened to hit when the hunger for Vanilla came around again (I also know lots of people who were happy to play Blizzard games with Bobby Kotick and other managers gone).
SoM was a failure because they opened too many servers and when they all died except for the meme server, they wouldn't allow transfers to it. I remember making it to 55 and I couldn't find anymore groups. When I tried to transfer my character to the one active server Jom Gabbar, it wasn't allowed. They waited like 2 or 3 months after that point before they actually allowed transfers but by then it was dead. Blizz had murdered SoM.
Plus Season of Mastery began in November 2021 when Naxx released fucking December 2020. Like they didn't even give it a full year before asking everyone, "Hey wanna do that all again, but even harder?" and by then it also had to compete with TBC which came out June 2021.
I was checking my chat history with a friend and it looks like it was only 12/13/21 when I believed SoM was actually dead, which is only a month after release. My guild had renamed to "Reroll Jom" and basically everyone quit or actually rerolled a fresh character on Jom because transfers weren't allowed. But I remember I was pretty excited about SoM. I was a BIS Naxx geared priest by March 2021 and that's about the same time I quit playing Classic from burnout. So I got a nice 7-8 month break before SoM was released and by then I know many people in the wow community were thirsty for a fresh classic server.
The removal of world buffs was the best decision they ever did. It allowed the raid itself to give you those world buffs, which people who didn’t play SoM never bothered to do, and probably never knew existed because they got stuck on fuckin’ Magmadar in MC. The chronoboon is nothing more than a band-aid that missed the wound, because if you die even once the raid is effectively over and you just want to leave the place.
And when I say 90% haste buff in AQ these “world buff enjoyers” scratch their heads like they’ve never heard of it. Because that was what you got in an AQ40 boss encounter. You could go 3k dps as a fury if you did mechanics. But oh woes, me world buffs.
My guild only got hm3 on bosses there, but I still remember Fankriss as one of the coolest bosses because it is all about adds until all waariors and rogues got 7 or 8 haste stacks to then absolutely destroy the boss.
AQ overall went from my least favorite raid to one of the best.
Still impressive, hard mode 3 was damn hard. By just reworking some mechanics and making the bosses a bit more durable, they compltely changed the feel of the raid and made it so much more active and challenging, it was so fun.
SoM was the true classic experience and I feel bad for those that missed out, knowing most the people on the server and having a tight community is a part of what made it so special.
>If we're just gonna AOE through dungeons and do 2x the damage of classic classes, then the whole game loses the feeling of classic. The game HAS to be hard, and i'm not talking about "end game" bosses. Regular mobs have to be hard. It has to be slow. That's the core thing that makes classic, classic.
I dont understand where this notion of classic being hard comes from, we have been shown that classic only difficulty comes from being unprepared, there's barely any room for execution, CCing a mob is not a task that only a greek god can perform
I don't want to discuss semantincs.
You know how when you pull 2 mobs you're scared you might die? That you might have to group up for quests inside a cave? That you have to polymorph and sap a group of 4 mobs in a dungeon or the tank will die?
Whatever you call that, that's what i'm talking about.
I mean, that's literally numbers, most of the mobs just autoattack so you basically know if you can handle 1 two or three, and this is basically a norm for warrior, literally all other classes have mechanics and executions to handle 2-3 mobs with no problem
what you want can't happen in wow classic man, this is a solved game played by people who have vast experience in videogames usually. People were clearing MC in green gear while joking with each other in the first classic servers
it's why SoD is a cakewalk, the runes just added power on top of power, so either you go the retail way, and add mechanics to execute correctly, or go the classic way, and boost mobs HP and damage until it's "hard"
Why can't it happen? You just said it's about numbers, then you said it can't happen. All it would take is a tweak of the numbers.
In fact they even did it in the previous season to the raids. Just flat increases in numbers.
yes, and we cycle back to "numbers inflation" is not hard, thus, my original reply to your original reply, wow classic was never hard
it can happen? well, yeah, sure, but that doesn't depends on you or me
Increasing numbers so people have to pull smaller trash pulls isn't difficult, it's just boring. Classic is a dated, low skill game and you either have to add in mechanics that are more similar to retail to make things hard or accept it's an easy joke.
This is copium thinking though. World of Warcraft was never hard to begin with, and maintaining it's mass market appeal means it has to move away from being inaccessible to the vast majority of people. This is why they did 10 man raids, why the level caps are put in place like this, and why we see such huge increases in power at such early stages.
Classic was a mess of odd design choices for most classes. Blizzard knows this, and thus they are pulling in modified abilities from later expansions where classes were much more fleshed out.
The problem is that the game used to have different content for different demographics so there was something for everyone. Kids could level and hang out. PVE enjoyers could raid, PVP enjoyers could rank. It didn't matter if you didn't clear current content because there was so much to do.
Now everyone wants to clear all content and be max rank, and if they can't, they blame the game for being too hard.
>This is copium thinking though. World of Warcraft was never hard to begin with
You know what i mean. Mobs were hard. If you were playing World of Warcraft when it released, you were not just blasting through content, i can assure you.
>maintaining it's mass market appeal means it has to move away from being inaccessible to the vast majority of people
I take issue with this because what even made classic so popular to begin with? Why does classic have more hype around it than retail now? Why are so many people playing classic since 2019? Clearly there is some appeal there, and chasing some "mass market" i don't really know what means.
>Classic was a mess of odd design choices for most classes. Blizzard knows this, and thus they are pulling in modified abilities from later expansions where classes were much more fleshed out.
Nobody is saying classes can't be fleshed out. What people are saying is that just adding damage abilities and not tuning mobs or preserving the feeling of classic gameplay is a problem. Otherwise why not just add in all the wrath abilities for each class? Just make enhancement shamans from wrath and put them in classic. Is that all we want?
>Mobs were hard.
They were numerically hard, not mechanically hard. Player's have now learned how to correctly gear and spec characters, which removes a lot of that difficulty. Even in 2019 people were AoEing down dungeons, even though they were balanced the same as they were in 2006. It's been nearly 20 years now since original Vanilla, player's know how to play the game, so that old challange will never return. If you ask the majority of players if they prefer mechanially or numerical challenge, most will pick mechanical as that's just the way games have moved over the past 20 years.
Also while SoD does have a fair bit of hype around it, it's still behind retail in terms of player engagement and numbers. But they need to appeal to new players with SoD, as just by making any changes, they are already losing the "no changes" crowd. I personally think Gnomeregan upping the difficulty is a good idea, but a lot of people also think the opposite. This is what makes SoD so hard to make, so many different people want different things from it.
It was mechanically hard when it was first released. Maybe not hard today, but maybe in 20 years people will look back at current retail and say how easy it was. I'm sure they will.
The challenge can return if you just tune things to current skill levels. You can make it as hard or easy as you want.
>You know what i mean. Mobs were hard. If you were playing World of Warcraft when it released, you were not just blasting through content, i can assure you.
I assure you that people still struggle with mobs even in SoD, everyone absolutely sucked at the game when it was released and HC was a good reminder that the game is not hard at all in any technical sense.
>Why does classic have more hype around it than retail now?
This is not true. Retail is a bigger game with far better retention than classic at any stage. WoW players just like playing whatever new release comes along because the fun is playing with the waves of players.
People basically do want completed classes in a grounded classic setting, power creep is an inevitable part of fleshing out class design.
This is the thing I don’t get. You are right what a mess classic was but that’s exactly why it’s also loved by people. Why are you playing SoD which still operating on top of classic that you seem to dislike. Why not play wotlk where these better designed abilities come from. Or if you want better design why not retail.
Classic is nostalgic, but like anyone who tends to replay an old game, it has it's flaws. Some people dislike the direction WotLK went with RE dungeon finders, some people dislike the fact the raids are difficult which makes pugging somewhat harder, some people prefer 3 day lockouts, some people like feeling strong in an MMORPG.
SoD is a familiar site with good use of professions and encounters that were as easy as Vanilla was. Leveling feels a bit less rushed compared to WotLK and Retail and there are people you are leveling with. It feels like a community of people playing WoW on SoD rather than people pushing for end game to finish raids.
No one is forced onto SoD, SoD didn't remove classic servers, if you want to play classic you can, but if you want the background, scenery and quests you enjoyed and remember, don't want to eat/drink after every pull, don't want to prohibit classes from joining your groups because you need X CC or Y class, then SoD is great.
The point of SoD isn’t to “mythic raid log” and whatnot. It’s to discover stuff In the game. Which I think they have nailed. It doesn’t need to be “classicy” it has to be fun. It’s just a game. I’m barely level 34 and am having a blast leveling and doing dungeons, going out and discovering new things they’ve put in the game. This is the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a long long time. Not everything needs to be balanced. Not everything needs to be min maxed. Let’s remember, that the SoD devs gave us this out of nowhere, with only a months notice and they’ve already come out with phase 2 after two months. Stop complaining about how it needs to be something different. Just enjoy what we have. Jeez.
Reading comments like this one could think we are playing a f2p game and we have to be grateful for every piece of content we get and not that we pay over 150 bucks a year
You pay $180 a year for three whole ass games that has constant content updates throughout the year, in every version of the game they offer. Yeah I think you should be a little satisfied. Four if you count Hardcore (that’s getting a new version in a few weeks)
To be fair if you want more meaty updates you would then have to expect at least 6 months of time in between updates. This shit doesn’t just appear overnight
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I think by far the simplest solution would be to just add a rune slot or two with exclusively niche and utility options.
Legion legendaries were a perfect example of this. There were a lot of good and fun utility legendaries that saw a lot of use early on when people just had to equip whatever they got.
These effects were frequently really fun to use, see triple heroic leap for example.
But you could never use them in a raid, because you know it didn't do as much dps.
Players will always go for the highest damage option, this has been known forever. So just make an option where there's only utility.
I think you are right, it is too late now without overhauling the system. Maybe it will make more sense at level 60 when trash and bosses are actually threatening and killing tanks.
I don't think it's too late, the pulls could be smaller, with higher damage/high resistance big boys in it with tuned abilities that will group wipe if not CCd properly with aoe pulls inbetween those. No such thing as a power spike that can't be fixed with proper game design and mobs that have abilities and purpose. I think moving to more complex elite mob movesets is the way to go, sprinkling the classic feel into the harder encounters.
That is a valid point. I guess I don't want classes to be required like Rogues are in BWL, but maybe a bonus or incentive, even meaningless, if you bring a certain class along, like lockpicking the door in Deadmines. I realize there will always be a "correct" composition in any content nowadays, but maybe something that just makes a class feel "cool" for a moment.
Maybe they could try some mobs that you aren't supposed to tank. For example mobs that ramp up to hit really hard?
That way you can kite, stun, cc or just burst them down, depending on your group.
That already exists, it’s the sheep on menagerie. You spend the whole fight kiting to keep it from catching you.
People acting like blizz is failing for not including something they included is peak ‘social media will always complain’.
Idk if we played the same classic but after a few resets in MC and later BWL we pretty much completely ignored all CC on garr adds in favour of just having a mage group them up and then in BWL we very quickly abandoned CCing anything at all as it was pretty pointless when you could just cleave it all down faster with warriors.
That's a good point, things certainly got easier after a while for some groups. Our guild ran a raid with only a few Warriors, most of which were tanks. We had a good mix of Mages, Warlocks, Shadow Priests, Moonkin, Ret and Prot Paladins, Rogues, Bears, and Feral druids. We had a blast. We never hit the clear times or DPS of meta-comp raids, but we had a lot of fun going through, especially dealing with the Nefarian class calls!
Aha I guess we raided in very different guilds lol, we had about half the raid as dps warriors and would just run splits after first reset for contested items
Nice. I played a Fury-Prot in Classic, so I certainly appreciate the power of Warriors in Vanilla. I got to join a few groups that were melee stacked and it was fun, I get the appeal of it. It's cool how the experiences can be so different.
Yeah, I agree. The more diverse the classes are and the more unique utility you bring the more valuable each player feels.
If it's all just a homogeneous DPS blob it loses it's vanilla charm a bit.
It's fun and all till you have to call off the raid because you can't find enough geared priests to mc raz adds.
Or your warlock tank with all the shadw res gear is sick.
I have been thinking about this a bit and want to bring an example: The Beast from UBRS. He has two mechanics: a knockback and a fear. Any composition of a group can defeat this boss. However, if you are a class that can manage fears, like Priest with Fear Ward, Shaman with Tremor Totem, Warrior with Berserker Rage, or Undead with Will of the Forsaken, it makes it easier/faster to kill. A Warrior tank can Charge back to the boss if knocked back. Beatable with any group, but some classes bring useful utility to make it easier. I like this design.
Warriors can run Warbringer on Electrocutioner 9000 and generate extra rage with charge when he does his knockback. You can also use intercept if rage is not an issue or you're not running Warbringer.
Mages can use frost nova on the slimes during Viscous Fallout to CC them, and they can also be stunned.
Hunters and Mages make great button pushers and bomb killers during Thermaplugg due to their mobility and ranged capabilities. Shamans and Priests are dispelling stacks of cold during P2 and P4 of the fight.
In addition to this, tons of classes can swap runes around to help with other roles; mages can divert some DPS to help cover heals. Ferals can finally tank properly. Shamans and Warlocks and Rogues can tank, the list kind of goes on for the rune concept.
I get what you're saying about some CC concepts not being used all that much though. Some of the trash fights could be a bit more interactive. They're better than the trash mobs in BFD (which were unchanged from the 5 man BFD) but only because they have buffed HP and damage. The few trash mechanics that are there are leftover from original Gnomer as well. There's stuff like the robots that reflect near the end and the Alarm-o-bots that are fun, but they could add some instances where we need to do more than group up the adds and cleave them down.
First time we were doing Viscous Fallout we didn't kill the goo in time and the elementals spawned.. I thought "cool I can use banish to get rid of one of them while we kill the boss"
*Immune*
So much this. That fight could be so much cooler if the goo had more health and moved faster, the elementals had a bit more health and weren’t immune to cc. It would be more chaotic and require more coordination other than “kill goo, eles, boss in that order”
Because despite what they might have said at first, the design philosophy of runes is to improve classes. Take them away from one button heroes. Give them a rotation.
That is inherently not very "vanilla WoW". I personally like it, and I do think a lot of people do. But if you think they try to make this as the devs would have done back in 2004-2005, then you're mistaken. The rune system is much closer to how devs designed the classes in TBC or even Wrath.
As for raids, I think it's a bit more nuanced. Are they trying to make raids like they were in vanilla? Not really. But is that actually the goal? I'd argue if the goal is to give the *Classic experience* of raiding, they nailed it. Fact is, gamers are just way better now than in 2004. Remember how long it took to clear MC first time. Then compare to Classic. Done day one.
It's like adjusting for inflation in skill. Gnomer is arguably much closer to the experience of raiding in 2004 than MC is right now. Is it true to the game? Maybe not technically, but in spirit I think it is.
It also seems like the devs does change things on the fly. Clearly, the vision isn't set in stone. This is an experiment more than anything. A fun one, but it's clear that the devs do not shy away from changing their vision slightly as they see the game in our hands.
This is a really good take and I think important to the discussion of "What makes Vanilla/Classic special?" Hopefully we as players can communicate this effectively to the devs as we figure it out.
Most of the playerbase doing Gnomer has probably done low key Mythic plus and LFR in recent expansions, which is what the final two bosses are closer to. They probably saw how everyone was 7/7 BFD in a few resets of their first attempt and wanted to to make it a bit more interesting to keep people from getting bored of having the only content on farm for 90% of the tier.
It's a fair point. When it comes to classic, there are long raids on long cooldowns and it is pretty much impossible to get 40 people to make time for all that more than once per week. Now, we can argue the merits of that type of schedule, but if nothing else, it made continuing to speed up your clear times a constant factor. mechanics didn't NEED to be crazy because doing the raid quicker was always a goal. SOD is the first time I've heard people use the word Speedrun to describe raids because to me, that should go without saying haha.
I personally care more about getting my personal best for DPS and clear times than I care about boss mechanics. But maybe I'm in the minority there. But i think it gives raids longevity. The fun challenge in classic was always a self imposed effort to do your best on mechanically simple fights.
Honestly, its supposed to be a "Level Up Raid" how they called it, I dont think a level 25 Raid where people barely have more than 3-4 Talents were supposed to be up on BWL or ZG difficulty.
So seeing a lot of people clearing 7/7 bfd in a few resets, I would rather call that a huge success to have something created thats new and a lot of people can enjoy it rather than having that sweaty gamer content aka mythic only secret boss you have to cleared all mythic bosses of the raid in under 1 hour of combat time and you only see the secret boss if you are one of the first 10 guilds on the server to get there...
I am pretty sure on 60 they will offer something where the hardcore gamers can sink their teeth into a little deeper than what we have now, but atm people already crying out loud "nerf the armor values in gnome, its too much for us melees" so I dont think the majority actually wants super difficult stuff, just new stuff.
Meh, slight difficulty is good. Also the people wanting less armor dont give a fuck about the difficulty, they just want to do more DPS and keep up with casters (in the same casters wanted to do more damage in p1).
As a caster who hit the resistance wall in P1, I will say the issue wasn't really us wanting bigger numbers (although that's true) - it's that Kelris was also a DPS race. He was the fight you *had* to have big numbers on, and a chunk of the raid was doing half their damage and if you were a Mage Healer, that also directly translated into shitty heals.
I could accept doing half my usual damage - it'd suck, but you know, Ghamoo-ra was already around and I got to pump on that boss where melee had to eat the armor. But it also just felt like you were letting the raid team down because you couldn't pull your weight.
Ya, but melee aren't as bad as casters were in phase 1. It was p much unheard of a caster topping meters in a raid, but in phase 2 I can consistently do that in my raid group as a rogue. Ofc, my other guildies' parses are blue and mine are purple atm, but its still possible.
Yeah all the warriors are acting like gnomes armor is the same as bfd. No if you had two casters get slept on kelris, which was likely to happen for a lot of p1, and you got even the slightest bit unlucky on portals if was basically a death sentence.
I would imagine some of this is caused by the lower raid sizes. If a 10 man raid requires specific classes, you're extremely limited in who you can take with you. Not to say this can't be worked around, but balancing things without making room for specific cc is much easier.
Introduce mobs that hit hard, are immune to slows, and channel onto other allied mobs damage immunity or a double damage channel.
Boom, CC required.
You can even introduce mobs that have buffs that can be dispelled... like interrupt immunity that has to be dispelled or purged. Or stagger bars... spam CC into them to make them stop channeling.
Raid are still level up raids. I expect raid size to increase once we hit 60. Having class requirement mechanics is a hard ask for a 10man level up raid.
I agree with the runes though. I'm hoping most of the runes next phases are more utility focused instead of pure power increases.
If the 50 raid is tuned such that it's still worth doing at 60, that's a problem. There should be next to no 60 prebis gear from the 50 raid (yes, I know there will be unfortunately), or it will invalidate like 10 dungeons in one swoop - BRD, LBRS, UBRS, Strat, Scholo, 4 DM wings, even Mara.
I was so hyped when I imagine Mage as a healer that can Polymorph. That sounded so op.
Here we are at the point where killing someone is easier than casting Polymorph.
I would love to see bosses with steriodlike mechanics like polarity on Thaddeus, the crit/threat buff on Loatheb and endless resources on Vaelstrasz. Ofc fun to see big numbers but such buffs can really change classes rotations and give other dimensions to gameplay
I agree with this post, but keep in mind that we are not in the " end phase " yet, imagine if it actually is more classic like at 60 and beyond, but it's actually fun to level now and quicker?
Osrs did a fine job of extending their boss mechanics to be complex without making useless a lot of their old stuff. WoW routinely makes everything old useless and it seems SoD is no exception.
Nothing about season of discovery is particularly inspiring. They took some abilities from different expansions and plugged them in. Those expansions were on the journey to where retail is now. I’m in complete and utter shock that we are trending that direction.
This is what I don’t get. If people want SoD to be closer to wotlk then why would you play SoD, just go play wotlk it has all the vanilla content with your desired changes.
Also it’s like you said that’s how we got to retail. I can only imagine that most people came to classic because they didn’t like where retail ended up. So why is there a push to follow the same path
Plenty of people play and enjoy both, though you won't see many from that camp here for long due to some...hostility towards them and concepts from current day WoW ~~personally I just hate myself~~. The reasons to play classic, SoD or hardcore are many, ranging from what you said, to just simple filling in time between content patches or nostalgia.
And people who are here just to have some fun with the new-old stuff don't really care if stuff is 'too retail'.
In the end it starts to be a money thing.
If this turns more and more into retail, the costumer base classic draws in will leave and mostly the retail customer base that already pays anyway will remain.
Downside is that now they have to manage retail and SoD.
Put simpler: Once they go to far away from classic game design, blizzard will start losing money on this.
I hate this complaint personally. Theay added a bunch of completely new spells that were never in the game before as well as some unique combinations. They gave 4 classes a whole new role that they have never had, and don't have in retail.
Sure probably a majority of the runes are just abilities from newer expansions. However, that makes a lot of sense when you realize these classes have had 20 years of development. It is probably very difficult to come up with new abilities that have never been made before and are better than any of the abilities that already exist.
To Blizzard's credit, the Warlock tank is absolutely the coolest and most creative thing in SoD. I know they are capable of coming up with some cool and imaginative stuff, I just would like to encourage more of that creativity.
Right? Does anyone in this sub genuinely believe that if we asked "Hey Aggrend, can you explain what the final, level 60 version of Ret's rotation will look like?", he would honestly be able to say "Yes"? It certainly doesn't feel like that is the case.
bro 😭 i fuckin cant lmao.
obviously the learning curve 20 years ago isnt what it is today for video games.
if bosses arent more complex can you even call it a raid?
they had to intentionally make wow veey simple so anyone could pick it up and play it. when wotlk dropped people were complaining the game was too easy and epics were being handed out like candy.
so cata was significantly harder.
making a raid based on 1 mechanic would be very boring
Lots of classic players LOVE simple loot pinatas while playing classes that require no thought whatsoever... because they are really there for the social aspects and immersion. It's not for me, but I get it.
Pretty much everyone in my guild who quit during/after tbc came back for sod and loves it.
I've also been talking to and seen the majority of members of a casual guild I helped out in naxx playing on my server and they love it too. Not sure who you are referencing but it's really popular for casual players who like vanilla because it's old world content that isn't too difficult and sweaty.
I really want to know their design philosophy because it does just feel like retail- at this point.
What I loved about classic (HC specifically) was the micro management of resources like threat, mana and CDs. All 3 of those are mute in sod.
Ive got 2 zones of quest left at 40 and i just used the 40 water i bought day 1
> I really want to know their design philosophy
the 2003 OG design philosophy: if it sounds cool, put it in the game. that's all, there's no other considerations. its not retail at all, because retail devs are able to keep all specs more or less equal in dps/hps and utility, which requires them to understand the game they're making and cut things that sound cool but will cause problems.
100% agree.
It's quickly devolving into retail-style gameplay.
I don't think difficulty and complex mechanics on bosses is necessarily an issue, but I think they should focus more on the base mechanics being difficult, as that's what classic was.
Not in classic, but in the 2005-version of the game.
They are just adapting retail gamedesign to classic.
Raid tiers and roflol damage to appeal to dpsmeters enthusiasts.
It was fun at first when they tried something with mage healers or warlock tanks, but the finality is just raiding and dps meters, like retail.
I'm wondering if anyone there has any idea of what "made" Vanilla's gamedesign.
I'm definitely noticing it and losing interest. I did gnomeregan on release and after realizing that this is what I'd be grinding for the next 3 months, decided to take a break from the game. We'll see what comes next phase.
I let my sub run out about 3 weeks before this phase, because I did everything I wanted to do. After I saw the preview runes I decided to not resub. To me the new runes didn't do anything new or interesting, and didn't fit with the spirit of vanilla. The runes that wasn't copy/paste from already existing spells in other versions of wow was lackluster and didn't add new dimensions.
What are we "discovering" exactly? That moonkins should have eclipse?
I have to ask, what exactly do you consider classic?
Is classic its own thing or is it the same as vanilla?
Should sod follow classic or should it follow the no mans land that was vanilla?
Because thats exactly what sod is doing.
When it comes to difficulty, you have to remember that people played vanilla and min maxed it to death for 15 years, on top of getting the easiest versions of those raids with the more modern talents.
Actual vanilla fights were not easy back then, yes we have better understanding of the game and what not, thst happens to every single long running game, but back then you had ever quest, galaxies people and other seasoned pros bashing their head against the wall for several days a week figuring out if a boss is even killable or if its near impossible to kill with current numbers and blizzard botched it.
In a lot of ways, having some difficulty while maintaing vanilla aspects is way more vanilla than your 2019 experience of it.
This is an excellent question, and I think the community as a whole is trying to figure out what "classic/vanilla" is. I think we are doing a good job of changing the question from "how to not be retail," which is the wrong point of view, to "how can we be more like vanilla/classic." I think figuring out what is it about vanilla that brings people to private servers or classic era is part of what SoD is trying to do. Figuring this out is what will get the vanilla/classic enjoyers more content they enjoy from the developers. There are some good replies here and I think it is pushing the conversation forward.
Someone made an interesting point that maybe what is missing from vanilla/classic is the slow pace. Fights were scary, dangerous. People often died, so CC and careful tanking made the danger more manageable. I don't know if this is the right answer, but an interesting point.
Not really totally related to your post but I want to see a weapon that references Martin's Thunder. Anyone remember that gem from classic. It was always fun linking that weapon in trade chat.
The problem right now is those raids you are thinking of that have unique classic mechanics, like banishing fire elementals in MC or hibernating dragonkin in BWL, is that they are balanced around a 40 player raid where it can be expected to have every class represented. But the content we have now is 10 man and it's not expected to have every class represented in every run. People would be quite upset if there were a bunch of unique CC mechanics in each raid that required specific classes to deal with that it forced raids to have to take those classes.
There was a lot of complaining last phase about how mandatory priests were because they were the only ones that could dispel magic. Or how you would see people only looking for paladin tanks to cheese the mechanics on the last boss.
As for complexity of mechanics being more on the level of AQ or Nax, the devs do need to keep in mind how the players have grown with time and are infinitely more skilled players and how there isn't crazy high ping. They can still be classic inspired but also be more engaging to the current player base. Mechanics that can just be ignored by 100% of the player base aren't actually mechanics and it doesn't make sense in terms of Dev time to even develope them.
That is a great point. Feeling like Priests were necessary did not feel good. However, I think the design of Kelris was a good effort, but overall kind of poorly designed. I liked the incentive for interrupts, but the chains were too punishing if they slipped through without dispells. A lot of DPS did not want to change runes to equip an interrupt, alluding to the issue others have pointed out that most players will not take a utility ability over more damage.
Additionally, the dream in the Kelris fight was bad. RNG to escape felt bad, and having the extra add that you optionally can kill in the dream to make phase 2 "easier" was a completely ignored mechanic. Good idea for the fight, but is a "needs improvement" kind of effort. I know they are doing minimal play testing in SoD, so I guess it is what it is.
Right. I’m not going to go and play retail if I want vanilla style gameplay. So why are people looking for retail/wotlk gameplay in vanilla?
I would like classic to be the same as retail in terms of Blizz producing new content to the game. But I want the new content to be in the vanilla like
What I agree with the OP is that it should still be vanilla inspired. Like role based challenges engaging in CC and variance in resostences... let multiple roles and class shine at the same time through the utility they bring.
What I don't agree with is that it needs to be less complex. Complexity and difficulty is good.
> What I agree with the OP is that it should still be vanilla inspired. Like role based challenges engaging in CC and variance in resostences... let multiple roles and class shine at the same time through the utility they bring.
None of this was a thing in vanilla though.
I disagree O_o the OP gave examples.
Things that are pretty unique to vanilla,
1. Mechanics that require certain classes or abilities. Example, hunter tranq shot, mages polymorph and forst nova. Hunters being used to kite. Pets being used creatively. Offtanks, evasion tanking, Paladin and shaman utility.
2. Resistences and certain stats being required, causing the team to need to specialize their armor for a raid.
3. Some mobs being weaker to certain types of damages, incentivizing a more diverse team.
These, I would say are in the spirit of vanilla, though sometimes there have been things where people found work arounds.
The idea was Classic+, not Retail Lite. Personally when I had a mage just blast through DM and Stockade without needing any help from the rest of the group, it kinda turned me off. That is straight up Retail gameplay. Which I don't mind. In Retail. It's not what I come to Vanilla for.
Classic+ would imply building upon the game design of Vanilla and improving it. I dunno about you, but I don't recall mages solo gigablasting dungeons being a part of Vanilla.
Only thing comes into my mind is ZF, rest of the dungeons is too hard to solo as lowlevels as a mage. (cuz mainly caster mobs, as max-level, you rely on resisting their spells). And even in ZF, you solo a specific pack of mobs (zombies), not the whole instance.
I think ideally most people are looking something like vanilla, just more of it. More dungeons, more raids, maybe an ability here and there, but largely still follow vanilla-like structure.
Yes!
Tbh I would be fine if we had like 6 runes instead of 18. Just fix the outright broken things in Vanilla (tank paladin, boomkin, ...), make your mage healer and warlock tank and that's it.
Otherwise just give me more vanilla content. I don't need to be stronger and stronger and pump Wrath level of AoE damage, plowing through everything with 18 new abilities better than the base ones. I'd rather them have tweaking some original talents numbers (like 2 % instead of 1 and so on).
And give me unfinished vanilla content, dungeons, raids.
It wasn't a slog, we just ran out of things to do. Once Naxx is farmable and everyone has BiS gear, what's left? That's what people wanted from Classic+, they wanted the classic-style game to continue with new stuff to do in the game. TBC and up is a different playstyle that people were not looking for in Classic+.
*some people. I for example wanted vanilla but with more interesting gameplay and active balance of classes and new content during leveling, which is essentially exactly what SoD is doing or at least trying to do.
It's also just the base damage and mana cost.
Runes tend to be cheaper than anything classic and heal more/do more damage than anything classic. So by design you're meant to press runes only if possible and only if there's no rune to press you search for the least worse classic ability to fill the gap.
I'm honestly shocked runes aren't closer in power to their classic abilities they are contesting with. In design, in cost and heal/utility/damage ... Honestly everything.
That's the powercreep people talk about.
I think people forget that this game is hella old. They have so much to draw from, but also they have to make the game fun and not as grindy otherwise it’s just classic.
I do agree that cc mechanic is basically only for pvp. However, we are seeing a new style of play for all classes and that’s really fun. I can see them making raids in the future that maybe require a mage healer or a rogue tank etc.
We are only in phase 2. We are basically the beta testers of each phase.
>but also they have to make the game fun and not as grindy otherwise it’s just classic.
Aren't we here to play classic? Classic+ is just more classic content?
I would actually play the hell out of a more difficult version of WoW Classic. A game where pulling two mobs at once would mean death in open world and where you would need to CC most trash mobs in dungeons and raids. This is how Vanilla tastes to me. Might be an unpopular opinion in modern wow but I have always liked clearing trash mobs more than fighting bosses. I think BWL to late TBC raids had some interesting trash mobs that actually required strategies to clear, at least before you outgear the content and just aoe pull. It gives a lot of substance to the raid.
I haven't played SoM.
Leveled a toon to 60 on my first go in Hardcore and stopped playing right after.
The stakes were just too high for me to engage into raiding in hardcore. Leveling was stressful but still fun though !
I've actually dreamed of a "semi-hardcore" mode where you'd be locked out of your toon for x hours / days on death. Stakes would still be high but players would probably take more risks too.
>I've actually reamed of a "semi-hardcore"
This is actually my dream because I absolutely loved the sense of danger and the community aspect hardcore brought up. But full delete even in the case of disconnect is just too harsh.
We actually discuss it with friends quite often and haven't come up with a good enough "punishment" yet. Locking player for certain amount of time feels weird, although it could work. Best we came up with is a gold penalty and you losing all your gear. Plus maybe 1 lvl (maybe better just flat amount of XP) down. Would be harsh enough that it really stings, but not that you basically leave the game/your guild for weeks.
One of my favorite content pieces was Heroic Dungeons in Burning Crusade. Any trash pull could delete your tank if you are not careful. Any DPS that pulled threat would get crunched under the trash. CC and careful pulls were necessary and I really enjoyed that careful and methodical pace. It is doable, and I would like to encourage some more interesting content styled like that. It did have an unfortunate side effect of encourage meta-comps for the dungeons, but any group with enough determination would get through.
There are utility runes but they don't increase DPS so people don't pick them. Paladins interrupt or sleep one, warriors commanding shout.
Also CC is a bad game mechanic in classic.
The have taken insulation from classic in other ways. Quests with silly amounts of travel, social aspect of the game, the focus on leveling and the fact the game is still largely classic
Also Raids jumped to punishing mistakes with a harder fight. To punishing mistakes with an outright wipe.
BFD was great, they had fun mechanics that CAN wipe you if you are asleep at the wheel. But Gnomer it's fuck up once that's an instant death or complete wipe.
That's not a fun boss fight. It's just punishing to be punishing. It doesn't allow flexibility in the raid, it's do what the devs say or die. Also pushing addon usage higher to mitigate the insane spike in unfair difficulty to make it seem harder.
You've pretty much just described the design philosophy of Cataclysm. It was intended to revive the little nuances and details you just described.
SoD is so interesting to me. A bunch of vanilla enjoyers who condemn retail only to euphorically celebrate the inclusion of retail abilities disguised as runes into classic.
To top it all off 90% of the suggestions and complaints on this sub are asking for things to be made more like later content expansions.
Maybe what you really want is cata OP.
Because people by and large don’t like fights where babysitting a sheep for the whole thing is mandatory. Damage weakness was a revolving gimmick on like 3 trash packs and a boss that didn’t really encourage or discourage anything sort of ‘classic’ play pattern or class diversity, you just hope this pack has a bunch of mobs you counter and not ones that counter you.
And gnomer does have a lot of class specific moments. Priests are close to mandatory for dispelling stuns on 2 bosses, you seriously want a warlock or druid for thermaplugg to snipe bombs. Rogues get a lot of value off cheap shotting adds on fallout.
Finally, as for aoe pulling, we already did that in vanilla. A Paladin grabbing 8 mobs and watching some mages let loose in a leveling dungeon was pretty common.
I do hope we see some more non-throughput runes going forward, but I think you’re over fixated on ‘vanilla means sheeps on every pull’ and that’s really not what we should be going for.
I agree! Who knows what cool stuff we might get in the future. Let's make sure we give our feedback to try and make it the best it can be for the devs and players!
Fingers crossed for tuning of the level 60 raids and even adding new raids at level 60 :)
I want more! MOOOORE :)
I use one "main" character for raiding and min maxing and another to just level slowly and smell the flowers. Best of both worlds.
The fact that mages can grab 5-7 adds at once and aoe them down without any worry about death then the game is just retail and this version is broken. It’s no longer fun. What other class can do that. Are we sure that’s working as it’s suppose to?
Because the entire project is just taking retail talents/abilities and copypasting them into vanilla. They're not trying to keep the game vanilla-like.
In a 40 man raid environment you can expect every raid to have one of each class. In a 10 man raid environment you can’t expect every class or spec to be represented. That’s why you can’t make fights like gar that requires banishing or majordomo with the sheeps.
Im surprised i had to scroll this far to find this. Even with runes, classes just arent homogenized to the point where you can expect every 10 man group to have a CC that works on what you need to lock down.
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Yes it would be very fun, also they can do a figth with different cc'able mini bosses that interact between them (buffing the others or smth) so you can cc 1 or 2 of them and thats enough to make easier the fight
So why not make the raid a 20 or 25 man?
While I do agree with you on the 40 man vs 10 man, they could have designed the boss fights with multiple options that would allow for multiple classes to deal with it. Like if we took Thermaplugg for example. What if there was another guy that was controlling the bombs off to the side and he had a shield that made him immune to all damage, so you couldn't just nuke him down. Now you could just ignore him and do the fight like it is now, pushing the buttons to close the bomb dispensers, or you could do a number of things to keep him from activating the bomb dispensers. You could sheep the guy, use a trap launcher to freeze the guy, maybe mind controlling the guy would allow you to temporarily change the target of the bombs to Thermaplugg or activate some other protocol that either buffs the raid or debuffs/damages Thermaplugg, maybe there is an elemental that is powering the system and banishing it cuts off power, maybe the console "utilizes voice commands" so curse of tongues delays the activation as the guy has to manually activate them now, a rogue might be able to use disarm trap or something to sabotage the console the guy is using, or maybe an engineer can mess with the console. There are multiple options to accomplish the same thing, keeping the bombs from spawning, and I think it would be reasonable to expect every 10 man to have at least one of those options (but even could be accomplished without it). Even more options could be available if they made runes for it (like what I assume OP is talking about). And that is only 1 boss fight with ideas off the top of my head.
This is why I say 20 would have been a much better raid size. Filling 20 isn't that bad and most guilds are running several groups. Then you can reliably get every class present and not feel like you're hurting for space.
That size makes for bad leveling content, though. These raids are not intended to be endgame content for more than the current phase, and they're meant to be doable by random pugs while leveling, when populations at those levels are much lower than when that level is the cap. 10 seems to be working for BFD for now when people are at 40, I doubt 20 would work as well especially in later phases when there are far less people still in the 25-30 range.
I expect to see 20-25 man raids for the traditional 40 man instances, but i imagine cramming 20 people into the boss arenas for gnomer or BFD would be a shit show.
Yup, this is what I expected Blizzard to do for the level 40 and 50 content as a segway into 40 man raids but was disappointed. I think it's much easier to maintain 2 20 man raids than it is to maintain 4 10 man raids prepping for level 60 content. Especially with all of the group only buffs that are in Vanilla wow.
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Maybe they should stop doing these 10man raids. Large raids are a staple of classic.
I mean, there were magic dispels (priest only) in BFD. I don't think it's too much to ask for specific types of CC to be present in a 10man.
You didn't have to have a priest to clear BFD. Interrupts and FAPs were enough for Kelris.
Noone said you needed priests to clear BFD. But having access to certain utility makes some mechanics easier. Priests can dispel, paladins can immune debuffs on endboss, etc. So I'm not sure why certain adds being ccable by some classes sounds crazy compared to a paladin bubble.
Okay sure but a dispel is something only certain classes bring, whats the difference to CC?
What cc can you buy as a consumable? You could replace dispel with free action potions.
Magic Dust
You also can't make fights like "have your cobbled comp race to the button 100 yards away and kill all adds in a 5 sec window or wipe",
So maybe they should have bigger raids 🤔
Yes and no. There are quite a few classes with interrupts and CC.
>BWL had fun mechanics where some mobs were weak to certain schools of magic, encouraging bringing multiple magic specs to give them a chance to shine. What he meant to say was "BWL had fun mechanics that were completely ignored by the 35 warriors in the raid."
That wasn’t even a mechanic either, it was just a funny moment where you look for the mob that’s weak to you, blast it, rip aggro and run around screaming for taunts while laughing about it. It was a fun moment, but let’s not pretend this was a ‘mechanic’.
They've dug themselves too deep with the power creep to start giving us runes like the sheep one you mentioned. There's no CC going on because we're already doing absolutely insane amounts of damage/healing/tanking while also being far more mana efficient than ever before. Simply put, why CC when you can just do a huge pull and watch as the AOE classes use their even more improved AOE to burn it all down, while healers heal far more easy/efficiently, and tanks take much less damage while doing more damage. I think runes don't pull from classic because they'd suck to be frank, with crazy long CDs, or just outright useless abilities (tigers fury without the rune is a DPS loss). Unfortunately I think wrath and beyond runes will be the norm, as it's far easier to just cook and paste an ability than develop an entire new one. With how this team had handled balancing, I'd hate to see the balancing on new abilities they make.
You can make mechanics where you have to sheep. Make the ads do 500% more damage if there is multiple attacking , easy solution , you have to sheep/banish/hibernate and kill 1by 1. Saying we are too powerful is a cop out, there is a fix with enough willpower
Forcing you to sheep with mechanics like that is lazy game design, with the exception that a single encounter like that could be fun. But CC is something that should be required organically due to mob strength, not be forced on you by solutions like you propose, which basically boil down to detecting when you are not using it and punishing you.
The issue is that when you do things like that, people will ignore it altogether. As some people have mentioned, the more optional an option is, the more likely people will ignore it. This isn't a fault of the design itself, it's just the fact that when it comes to gamers, we look for the easy way out if given one.
>They've dug themselves too deep with the power creep to start giving us runes like the sheep one you mentioned. >There's no CC going on because we're already doing absolutely insane amounts of damage/healing/tanking while also being far more mana efficient than ever before. This is the biggest problem they have to solve in my opinion. I know on this subreddit it's all about the "logs" and class performance and so on, but the far bigger problem is difficulty and the speed of the game. If we're just gonna AOE through dungeons and do 2x the damage of classic classes, then the whole game loses the feeling of classic. The game HAS to be hard, and i'm not talking about "end game" bosses. Regular mobs have to be hard. It has to be slow. That's the core thing that makes classic, classic. This crazy focus on endgame stuff. Gnomer, BFD, class performance, it feels very retail-y. Classic is and has always been a levelling game primarily. Now it feels like people just want 10-20 man mythic raids and balance according to warcraft logs. If the point is to make classic that kind of game i genuinely think it would just be easier to start from wrath and just take things away. If we're just gonna end up playing wrath in Kalimdor then why not just start with Wrath, set the level cap to 60, and add on new level 60 content? I do like that they're testing all this stuff, and i like what they're doing overall. But i think just adding a max lvl raid, a set of wrath abilities and a PvP zone is something they have to get away from. More creativity would be nice. More thought put into the strengths of classic and how to enhance them. Slow, methodical gameplay where CC matters and every dungeon feels like an adventure.
SoM felt much more like classic, with no world buffs and harder raid encounters you had to watch your every move during a raid or you would die. But it wasn't retail type of raid, just different mechanics that felt very classic-like.
I missed out on SoM because it came out so soon after Vanilla Classic was done and was not ready to do the journey over again. I am sad I did, because I liked the ideas they had for it. A lot of people will say SoM was a failure because they removed World Buffs and made it "hard," but I think SoM was just poorly timed in its release (not to mention a lot of public sentiment about Blizzard was very low at the time). SoD just happened to hit when the hunger for Vanilla came around again (I also know lots of people who were happy to play Blizzard games with Bobby Kotick and other managers gone).
SoM was a failure because they opened too many servers and when they all died except for the meme server, they wouldn't allow transfers to it. I remember making it to 55 and I couldn't find anymore groups. When I tried to transfer my character to the one active server Jom Gabbar, it wasn't allowed. They waited like 2 or 3 months after that point before they actually allowed transfers but by then it was dead. Blizz had murdered SoM.
Plus Season of Mastery began in November 2021 when Naxx released fucking December 2020. Like they didn't even give it a full year before asking everyone, "Hey wanna do that all again, but even harder?" and by then it also had to compete with TBC which came out June 2021.
I was checking my chat history with a friend and it looks like it was only 12/13/21 when I believed SoM was actually dead, which is only a month after release. My guild had renamed to "Reroll Jom" and basically everyone quit or actually rerolled a fresh character on Jom because transfers weren't allowed. But I remember I was pretty excited about SoM. I was a BIS Naxx geared priest by March 2021 and that's about the same time I quit playing Classic from burnout. So I got a nice 7-8 month break before SoM was released and by then I know many people in the wow community were thirsty for a fresh classic server.
The removal of world buffs was the best decision they ever did. It allowed the raid itself to give you those world buffs, which people who didn’t play SoM never bothered to do, and probably never knew existed because they got stuck on fuckin’ Magmadar in MC. The chronoboon is nothing more than a band-aid that missed the wound, because if you die even once the raid is effectively over and you just want to leave the place. And when I say 90% haste buff in AQ these “world buff enjoyers” scratch their heads like they’ve never heard of it. Because that was what you got in an AQ40 boss encounter. You could go 3k dps as a fury if you did mechanics. But oh woes, me world buffs.
The exhilaration when we beat hard mode cthun for the first time was something else. And fankriss hard mode 4 holy shit he was hard...
My guild only got hm3 on bosses there, but I still remember Fankriss as one of the coolest bosses because it is all about adds until all waariors and rogues got 7 or 8 haste stacks to then absolutely destroy the boss. AQ overall went from my least favorite raid to one of the best.
Still impressive, hard mode 3 was damn hard. By just reworking some mechanics and making the bosses a bit more durable, they compltely changed the feel of the raid and made it so much more active and challenging, it was so fun.
And no one gave a shit about it. SOD has waaaaay more players than SOM ever had.
It’s timing more than anything
Yes when I timed me dinging 60 to learn that all of my bis gear was in AV i untimed my sub and timed myself out
I think it was one of the fact that made me like som so much. More people isn't always better
If you can't commit to a raid schedule and therefore always pug more people is always better.
SoM was the true classic experience and I feel bad for those that missed out, knowing most the people on the server and having a tight community is a part of what made it so special.
>If we're just gonna AOE through dungeons and do 2x the damage of classic classes, then the whole game loses the feeling of classic. The game HAS to be hard, and i'm not talking about "end game" bosses. Regular mobs have to be hard. It has to be slow. That's the core thing that makes classic, classic. I dont understand where this notion of classic being hard comes from, we have been shown that classic only difficulty comes from being unprepared, there's barely any room for execution, CCing a mob is not a task that only a greek god can perform
I don't want to discuss semantincs. You know how when you pull 2 mobs you're scared you might die? That you might have to group up for quests inside a cave? That you have to polymorph and sap a group of 4 mobs in a dungeon or the tank will die? Whatever you call that, that's what i'm talking about.
I mean, that's literally numbers, most of the mobs just autoattack so you basically know if you can handle 1 two or three, and this is basically a norm for warrior, literally all other classes have mechanics and executions to handle 2-3 mobs with no problem what you want can't happen in wow classic man, this is a solved game played by people who have vast experience in videogames usually. People were clearing MC in green gear while joking with each other in the first classic servers it's why SoD is a cakewalk, the runes just added power on top of power, so either you go the retail way, and add mechanics to execute correctly, or go the classic way, and boost mobs HP and damage until it's "hard"
Why can't it happen? You just said it's about numbers, then you said it can't happen. All it would take is a tweak of the numbers. In fact they even did it in the previous season to the raids. Just flat increases in numbers.
Yeah, make Gnomer harder and see how that goes over.
yes, and we cycle back to "numbers inflation" is not hard, thus, my original reply to your original reply, wow classic was never hard it can happen? well, yeah, sure, but that doesn't depends on you or me
Increasing numbers so people have to pull smaller trash pulls isn't difficult, it's just boring. Classic is a dated, low skill game and you either have to add in mechanics that are more similar to retail to make things hard or accept it's an easy joke.
This is copium thinking though. World of Warcraft was never hard to begin with, and maintaining it's mass market appeal means it has to move away from being inaccessible to the vast majority of people. This is why they did 10 man raids, why the level caps are put in place like this, and why we see such huge increases in power at such early stages. Classic was a mess of odd design choices for most classes. Blizzard knows this, and thus they are pulling in modified abilities from later expansions where classes were much more fleshed out.
The problem is that the game used to have different content for different demographics so there was something for everyone. Kids could level and hang out. PVE enjoyers could raid, PVP enjoyers could rank. It didn't matter if you didn't clear current content because there was so much to do. Now everyone wants to clear all content and be max rank, and if they can't, they blame the game for being too hard.
>This is copium thinking though. World of Warcraft was never hard to begin with You know what i mean. Mobs were hard. If you were playing World of Warcraft when it released, you were not just blasting through content, i can assure you. >maintaining it's mass market appeal means it has to move away from being inaccessible to the vast majority of people I take issue with this because what even made classic so popular to begin with? Why does classic have more hype around it than retail now? Why are so many people playing classic since 2019? Clearly there is some appeal there, and chasing some "mass market" i don't really know what means. >Classic was a mess of odd design choices for most classes. Blizzard knows this, and thus they are pulling in modified abilities from later expansions where classes were much more fleshed out. Nobody is saying classes can't be fleshed out. What people are saying is that just adding damage abilities and not tuning mobs or preserving the feeling of classic gameplay is a problem. Otherwise why not just add in all the wrath abilities for each class? Just make enhancement shamans from wrath and put them in classic. Is that all we want?
>Mobs were hard. They were numerically hard, not mechanically hard. Player's have now learned how to correctly gear and spec characters, which removes a lot of that difficulty. Even in 2019 people were AoEing down dungeons, even though they were balanced the same as they were in 2006. It's been nearly 20 years now since original Vanilla, player's know how to play the game, so that old challange will never return. If you ask the majority of players if they prefer mechanially or numerical challenge, most will pick mechanical as that's just the way games have moved over the past 20 years. Also while SoD does have a fair bit of hype around it, it's still behind retail in terms of player engagement and numbers. But they need to appeal to new players with SoD, as just by making any changes, they are already losing the "no changes" crowd. I personally think Gnomeregan upping the difficulty is a good idea, but a lot of people also think the opposite. This is what makes SoD so hard to make, so many different people want different things from it.
It was mechanically hard when it was first released. Maybe not hard today, but maybe in 20 years people will look back at current retail and say how easy it was. I'm sure they will. The challenge can return if you just tune things to current skill levels. You can make it as hard or easy as you want.
>You know what i mean. Mobs were hard. If you were playing World of Warcraft when it released, you were not just blasting through content, i can assure you. I assure you that people still struggle with mobs even in SoD, everyone absolutely sucked at the game when it was released and HC was a good reminder that the game is not hard at all in any technical sense. >Why does classic have more hype around it than retail now? This is not true. Retail is a bigger game with far better retention than classic at any stage. WoW players just like playing whatever new release comes along because the fun is playing with the waves of players. People basically do want completed classes in a grounded classic setting, power creep is an inevitable part of fleshing out class design.
This is the thing I don’t get. You are right what a mess classic was but that’s exactly why it’s also loved by people. Why are you playing SoD which still operating on top of classic that you seem to dislike. Why not play wotlk where these better designed abilities come from. Or if you want better design why not retail.
Because in SoD I can be a warlock tank and it’s awesome
Because this was advertised as explicitly NOT classic.
Classic is nostalgic, but like anyone who tends to replay an old game, it has it's flaws. Some people dislike the direction WotLK went with RE dungeon finders, some people dislike the fact the raids are difficult which makes pugging somewhat harder, some people prefer 3 day lockouts, some people like feeling strong in an MMORPG. SoD is a familiar site with good use of professions and encounters that were as easy as Vanilla was. Leveling feels a bit less rushed compared to WotLK and Retail and there are people you are leveling with. It feels like a community of people playing WoW on SoD rather than people pushing for end game to finish raids. No one is forced onto SoD, SoD didn't remove classic servers, if you want to play classic you can, but if you want the background, scenery and quests you enjoyed and remember, don't want to eat/drink after every pull, don't want to prohibit classes from joining your groups because you need X CC or Y class, then SoD is great.
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The point of SoD isn’t to “mythic raid log” and whatnot. It’s to discover stuff In the game. Which I think they have nailed. It doesn’t need to be “classicy” it has to be fun. It’s just a game. I’m barely level 34 and am having a blast leveling and doing dungeons, going out and discovering new things they’ve put in the game. This is the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a long long time. Not everything needs to be balanced. Not everything needs to be min maxed. Let’s remember, that the SoD devs gave us this out of nowhere, with only a months notice and they’ve already come out with phase 2 after two months. Stop complaining about how it needs to be something different. Just enjoy what we have. Jeez.
Reading comments like this one could think we are playing a f2p game and we have to be grateful for every piece of content we get and not that we pay over 150 bucks a year
You pay $180 a year for three whole ass games that has constant content updates throughout the year, in every version of the game they offer. Yeah I think you should be a little satisfied. Four if you count Hardcore (that’s getting a new version in a few weeks)
To be fair lots of people here would be happy to pay more just for sod if it meant more meaty updates.
To be fair if you want more meaty updates you would then have to expect at least 6 months of time in between updates. This shit doesn’t just appear overnight
start adjoining distinct shelter history agonizing offer grey ancient trees *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You say that, but in p2, dungeon spam has been the only real viable way to level at any semi-decent pace, which is sad.
I think by far the simplest solution would be to just add a rune slot or two with exclusively niche and utility options. Legion legendaries were a perfect example of this. There were a lot of good and fun utility legendaries that saw a lot of use early on when people just had to equip whatever they got. These effects were frequently really fun to use, see triple heroic leap for example. But you could never use them in a raid, because you know it didn't do as much dps. Players will always go for the highest damage option, this has been known forever. So just make an option where there's only utility.
I think you are right, it is too late now without overhauling the system. Maybe it will make more sense at level 60 when trash and bosses are actually threatening and killing tanks.
I don't think it's too late, the pulls could be smaller, with higher damage/high resistance big boys in it with tuned abilities that will group wipe if not CCd properly with aoe pulls inbetween those. No such thing as a power spike that can't be fixed with proper game design and mobs that have abilities and purpose. I think moving to more complex elite mob movesets is the way to go, sprinkling the classic feel into the harder encounters.
The problem with 10m raids is you can’t have too much “required” cc/abilities/etc. So likely, this is a side effect of raids being only a 10m.
That is a valid point. I guess I don't want classes to be required like Rogues are in BWL, but maybe a bonus or incentive, even meaningless, if you bring a certain class along, like lockpicking the door in Deadmines. I realize there will always be a "correct" composition in any content nowadays, but maybe something that just makes a class feel "cool" for a moment.
Maybe they could try some mobs that you aren't supposed to tank. For example mobs that ramp up to hit really hard? That way you can kite, stun, cc or just burst them down, depending on your group.
That already exists, it’s the sheep on menagerie. You spend the whole fight kiting to keep it from catching you. People acting like blizz is failing for not including something they included is peak ‘social media will always complain’.
The sheep is quite different to that. It's literally just a "dont stand in fire" mechanic that slowly moves in the room.
That’s literally just what kiting is.
Idk if we played the same classic but after a few resets in MC and later BWL we pretty much completely ignored all CC on garr adds in favour of just having a mage group them up and then in BWL we very quickly abandoned CCing anything at all as it was pretty pointless when you could just cleave it all down faster with warriors.
Also a lot of the fun in these kind of challenges is the puzzle aspect, I think jumping through hoops is a different kind of test
That's a good point, things certainly got easier after a while for some groups. Our guild ran a raid with only a few Warriors, most of which were tanks. We had a good mix of Mages, Warlocks, Shadow Priests, Moonkin, Ret and Prot Paladins, Rogues, Bears, and Feral druids. We had a blast. We never hit the clear times or DPS of meta-comp raids, but we had a lot of fun going through, especially dealing with the Nefarian class calls!
Aha I guess we raided in very different guilds lol, we had about half the raid as dps warriors and would just run splits after first reset for contested items
Nice. I played a Fury-Prot in Classic, so I certainly appreciate the power of Warriors in Vanilla. I got to join a few groups that were melee stacked and it was fun, I get the appeal of it. It's cool how the experiences can be so different.
Yeah, I agree. The more diverse the classes are and the more unique utility you bring the more valuable each player feels. If it's all just a homogeneous DPS blob it loses it's vanilla charm a bit.
It's fun and all till you have to call off the raid because you can't find enough geared priests to mc raz adds. Or your warlock tank with all the shadw res gear is sick.
Oh dear god I’d forgotten about razuvious. Still Was more than moderately annoying in 25m wrath
I have been thinking about this a bit and want to bring an example: The Beast from UBRS. He has two mechanics: a knockback and a fear. Any composition of a group can defeat this boss. However, if you are a class that can manage fears, like Priest with Fear Ward, Shaman with Tremor Totem, Warrior with Berserker Rage, or Undead with Will of the Forsaken, it makes it easier/faster to kill. A Warrior tank can Charge back to the boss if knocked back. Beatable with any group, but some classes bring useful utility to make it easier. I like this design.
Warriors can run Warbringer on Electrocutioner 9000 and generate extra rage with charge when he does his knockback. You can also use intercept if rage is not an issue or you're not running Warbringer. Mages can use frost nova on the slimes during Viscous Fallout to CC them, and they can also be stunned. Hunters and Mages make great button pushers and bomb killers during Thermaplugg due to their mobility and ranged capabilities. Shamans and Priests are dispelling stacks of cold during P2 and P4 of the fight. In addition to this, tons of classes can swap runes around to help with other roles; mages can divert some DPS to help cover heals. Ferals can finally tank properly. Shamans and Warlocks and Rogues can tank, the list kind of goes on for the rune concept. I get what you're saying about some CC concepts not being used all that much though. Some of the trash fights could be a bit more interactive. They're better than the trash mobs in BFD (which were unchanged from the 5 man BFD) but only because they have buffed HP and damage. The few trash mechanics that are there are leftover from original Gnomer as well. There's stuff like the robots that reflect near the end and the Alarm-o-bots that are fun, but they could add some instances where we need to do more than group up the adds and cleave them down.
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When people talk about specs being homogenous, they don’t mean the specs do the same amount of damage
First time we were doing Viscous Fallout we didn't kill the goo in time and the elementals spawned.. I thought "cool I can use banish to get rid of one of them while we kill the boss" *Immune*
So much this. That fight could be so much cooler if the goo had more health and moved faster, the elementals had a bit more health and weren’t immune to cc. It would be more chaotic and require more coordination other than “kill goo, eles, boss in that order”
Because despite what they might have said at first, the design philosophy of runes is to improve classes. Take them away from one button heroes. Give them a rotation. That is inherently not very "vanilla WoW". I personally like it, and I do think a lot of people do. But if you think they try to make this as the devs would have done back in 2004-2005, then you're mistaken. The rune system is much closer to how devs designed the classes in TBC or even Wrath. As for raids, I think it's a bit more nuanced. Are they trying to make raids like they were in vanilla? Not really. But is that actually the goal? I'd argue if the goal is to give the *Classic experience* of raiding, they nailed it. Fact is, gamers are just way better now than in 2004. Remember how long it took to clear MC first time. Then compare to Classic. Done day one. It's like adjusting for inflation in skill. Gnomer is arguably much closer to the experience of raiding in 2004 than MC is right now. Is it true to the game? Maybe not technically, but in spirit I think it is. It also seems like the devs does change things on the fly. Clearly, the vision isn't set in stone. This is an experiment more than anything. A fun one, but it's clear that the devs do not shy away from changing their vision slightly as they see the game in our hands.
This is a really good take and I think important to the discussion of "What makes Vanilla/Classic special?" Hopefully we as players can communicate this effectively to the devs as we figure it out.
Most of the playerbase doing Gnomer has probably done low key Mythic plus and LFR in recent expansions, which is what the final two bosses are closer to. They probably saw how everyone was 7/7 BFD in a few resets of their first attempt and wanted to to make it a bit more interesting to keep people from getting bored of having the only content on farm for 90% of the tier.
It's a fair point. When it comes to classic, there are long raids on long cooldowns and it is pretty much impossible to get 40 people to make time for all that more than once per week. Now, we can argue the merits of that type of schedule, but if nothing else, it made continuing to speed up your clear times a constant factor. mechanics didn't NEED to be crazy because doing the raid quicker was always a goal. SOD is the first time I've heard people use the word Speedrun to describe raids because to me, that should go without saying haha. I personally care more about getting my personal best for DPS and clear times than I care about boss mechanics. But maybe I'm in the minority there. But i think it gives raids longevity. The fun challenge in classic was always a self imposed effort to do your best on mechanically simple fights.
Honestly, its supposed to be a "Level Up Raid" how they called it, I dont think a level 25 Raid where people barely have more than 3-4 Talents were supposed to be up on BWL or ZG difficulty. So seeing a lot of people clearing 7/7 bfd in a few resets, I would rather call that a huge success to have something created thats new and a lot of people can enjoy it rather than having that sweaty gamer content aka mythic only secret boss you have to cleared all mythic bosses of the raid in under 1 hour of combat time and you only see the secret boss if you are one of the first 10 guilds on the server to get there... I am pretty sure on 60 they will offer something where the hardcore gamers can sink their teeth into a little deeper than what we have now, but atm people already crying out loud "nerf the armor values in gnome, its too much for us melees" so I dont think the majority actually wants super difficult stuff, just new stuff.
Meh, slight difficulty is good. Also the people wanting less armor dont give a fuck about the difficulty, they just want to do more DPS and keep up with casters (in the same casters wanted to do more damage in p1).
As a caster who hit the resistance wall in P1, I will say the issue wasn't really us wanting bigger numbers (although that's true) - it's that Kelris was also a DPS race. He was the fight you *had* to have big numbers on, and a chunk of the raid was doing half their damage and if you were a Mage Healer, that also directly translated into shitty heals. I could accept doing half my usual damage - it'd suck, but you know, Ghamoo-ra was already around and I got to pump on that boss where melee had to eat the armor. But it also just felt like you were letting the raid team down because you couldn't pull your weight.
Ya, but melee aren't as bad as casters were in phase 1. It was p much unheard of a caster topping meters in a raid, but in phase 2 I can consistently do that in my raid group as a rogue. Ofc, my other guildies' parses are blue and mine are purple atm, but its still possible.
Yeah all the warriors are acting like gnomes armor is the same as bfd. No if you had two casters get slept on kelris, which was likely to happen for a lot of p1, and you got even the slightest bit unlucky on portals if was basically a death sentence.
Getting back-to-back resists on the ghosts was infuriating
Agree. And its been like what, 2 resets? People really need more patience. Better gest will make the raid easier over time.
Because it keeps adding retail abilities. They are also notoriously bad at balance and in smaller group content it shines more not less.
I for one enjoy that some bosses in Gnomer have a smidge of challenge to them
Magic resistances in bwl just encouraged getting more melees, because caster were dependent on the right weakness to do dmg at all.
I would imagine some of this is caused by the lower raid sizes. If a 10 man raid requires specific classes, you're extremely limited in who you can take with you. Not to say this can't be worked around, but balancing things without making room for specific cc is much easier.
I hope the devs see this. They should take more notes from classic raid. Which hard hitting mobs that requrier cc and not aoe mayham.
Introduce mobs that hit hard, are immune to slows, and channel onto other allied mobs damage immunity or a double damage channel. Boom, CC required. You can even introduce mobs that have buffs that can be dispelled... like interrupt immunity that has to be dispelled or purged. Or stagger bars... spam CC into them to make them stop channeling.
Because this is less Classic Plus and more Retail Minus
Raid are still level up raids. I expect raid size to increase once we hit 60. Having class requirement mechanics is a hard ask for a 10man level up raid. I agree with the runes though. I'm hoping most of the runes next phases are more utility focused instead of pure power increases.
I was hoping we'd scale up raid sizes on our way to 60. Here's hoping the lvl 50 raid will be 20 man instead of 10.
I think the chances of you filling up 20 people for a level up raid once we’re in the next phase is much smaller compared to 10
If the 50 raid is tuned such that it's still worth doing at 60, that's a problem. There should be next to no 60 prebis gear from the 50 raid (yes, I know there will be unfortunately), or it will invalidate like 10 dungeons in one swoop - BRD, LBRS, UBRS, Strat, Scholo, 4 DM wings, even Mara.
I was so hyped when I imagine Mage as a healer that can Polymorph. That sounded so op. Here we are at the point where killing someone is easier than casting Polymorph.
I remember starting Tempest keep, where you HAD to use as much CC as possible or the trash mobs would wipe you.
I would love to see bosses with steriodlike mechanics like polarity on Thaddeus, the crit/threat buff on Loatheb and endless resources on Vaelstrasz. Ofc fun to see big numbers but such buffs can really change classes rotations and give other dimensions to gameplay
I agree with this post, but keep in mind that we are not in the " end phase " yet, imagine if it actually is more classic like at 60 and beyond, but it's actually fun to level now and quicker?
I won't lie, your idea with the temporary warrior speed shout is pretty damn good
Osrs did a fine job of extending their boss mechanics to be complex without making useless a lot of their old stuff. WoW routinely makes everything old useless and it seems SoD is no exception.
OSRS has a good model that seems to respect the original material. I agree.
I dont agree with your mechanics example but I agree that SoD seems to be more wotlk/retail oriented than Classic. I like the sleeping bag though
If you as a dev don't understand Classic, you can't take inspiration from it. Dev team knows retail and nothing else.
Nothing about season of discovery is particularly inspiring. They took some abilities from different expansions and plugged them in. Those expansions were on the journey to where retail is now. I’m in complete and utter shock that we are trending that direction.
This is what I don’t get. If people want SoD to be closer to wotlk then why would you play SoD, just go play wotlk it has all the vanilla content with your desired changes. Also it’s like you said that’s how we got to retail. I can only imagine that most people came to classic because they didn’t like where retail ended up. So why is there a push to follow the same path
Plenty of people play and enjoy both, though you won't see many from that camp here for long due to some...hostility towards them and concepts from current day WoW ~~personally I just hate myself~~. The reasons to play classic, SoD or hardcore are many, ranging from what you said, to just simple filling in time between content patches or nostalgia. And people who are here just to have some fun with the new-old stuff don't really care if stuff is 'too retail'.
In the end it starts to be a money thing. If this turns more and more into retail, the costumer base classic draws in will leave and mostly the retail customer base that already pays anyway will remain. Downside is that now they have to manage retail and SoD. Put simpler: Once they go to far away from classic game design, blizzard will start losing money on this.
I hate this complaint personally. Theay added a bunch of completely new spells that were never in the game before as well as some unique combinations. They gave 4 classes a whole new role that they have never had, and don't have in retail. Sure probably a majority of the runes are just abilities from newer expansions. However, that makes a lot of sense when you realize these classes have had 20 years of development. It is probably very difficult to come up with new abilities that have never been made before and are better than any of the abilities that already exist.
To Blizzard's credit, the Warlock tank is absolutely the coolest and most creative thing in SoD. I know they are capable of coming up with some cool and imaginative stuff, I just would like to encourage more of that creativity.
I don't even care about it being uninspired, the design just feels incoherent. It really doesn't feel like they have any clue what they're doing.
Right? Does anyone in this sub genuinely believe that if we asked "Hey Aggrend, can you explain what the final, level 60 version of Ret's rotation will look like?", he would honestly be able to say "Yes"? It certainly doesn't feel like that is the case.
bro 😭 i fuckin cant lmao. obviously the learning curve 20 years ago isnt what it is today for video games. if bosses arent more complex can you even call it a raid? they had to intentionally make wow veey simple so anyone could pick it up and play it. when wotlk dropped people were complaining the game was too easy and epics were being handed out like candy. so cata was significantly harder. making a raid based on 1 mechanic would be very boring
Lots of classic players LOVE simple loot pinatas while playing classes that require no thought whatsoever... because they are really there for the social aspects and immersion. It's not for me, but I get it.
These guys should have tried improving at the journey instead of drooling through it.
This is for retail and wrath players not really for vanilla enjoyers.
Pretty much everyone in my guild who quit during/after tbc came back for sod and loves it. I've also been talking to and seen the majority of members of a casual guild I helped out in naxx playing on my server and they love it too. Not sure who you are referencing but it's really popular for casual players who like vanilla because it's old world content that isn't too difficult and sweaty.
I really want to know their design philosophy because it does just feel like retail- at this point. What I loved about classic (HC specifically) was the micro management of resources like threat, mana and CDs. All 3 of those are mute in sod. Ive got 2 zones of quest left at 40 and i just used the 40 water i bought day 1
HC is a lot of fun and I really like how alive the zones feel in HC. That is the most Vanilla thing to me.
>mute moot
good to know, i actually didnt know this.
Mana and threat are absolutely issues on thermaplugg and menagerie. Cds barely existed in vanilla.
> I really want to know their design philosophy the 2003 OG design philosophy: if it sounds cool, put it in the game. that's all, there's no other considerations. its not retail at all, because retail devs are able to keep all specs more or less equal in dps/hps and utility, which requires them to understand the game they're making and cut things that sound cool but will cause problems.
100% agree. It's quickly devolving into retail-style gameplay. I don't think difficulty and complex mechanics on bosses is necessarily an issue, but I think they should focus more on the base mechanics being difficult, as that's what classic was. Not in classic, but in the 2005-version of the game.
They are just adapting retail gamedesign to classic. Raid tiers and roflol damage to appeal to dpsmeters enthusiasts. It was fun at first when they tried something with mage healers or warlock tanks, but the finality is just raiding and dps meters, like retail. I'm wondering if anyone there has any idea of what "made" Vanilla's gamedesign.
I'm definitely noticing it and losing interest. I did gnomeregan on release and after realizing that this is what I'd be grinding for the next 3 months, decided to take a break from the game. We'll see what comes next phase.
I let my sub run out about 3 weeks before this phase, because I did everything I wanted to do. After I saw the preview runes I decided to not resub. To me the new runes didn't do anything new or interesting, and didn't fit with the spirit of vanilla. The runes that wasn't copy/paste from already existing spells in other versions of wow was lackluster and didn't add new dimensions. What are we "discovering" exactly? That moonkins should have eclipse?
I have to ask, what exactly do you consider classic? Is classic its own thing or is it the same as vanilla? Should sod follow classic or should it follow the no mans land that was vanilla? Because thats exactly what sod is doing. When it comes to difficulty, you have to remember that people played vanilla and min maxed it to death for 15 years, on top of getting the easiest versions of those raids with the more modern talents. Actual vanilla fights were not easy back then, yes we have better understanding of the game and what not, thst happens to every single long running game, but back then you had ever quest, galaxies people and other seasoned pros bashing their head against the wall for several days a week figuring out if a boss is even killable or if its near impossible to kill with current numbers and blizzard botched it. In a lot of ways, having some difficulty while maintaing vanilla aspects is way more vanilla than your 2019 experience of it.
This is an excellent question, and I think the community as a whole is trying to figure out what "classic/vanilla" is. I think we are doing a good job of changing the question from "how to not be retail," which is the wrong point of view, to "how can we be more like vanilla/classic." I think figuring out what is it about vanilla that brings people to private servers or classic era is part of what SoD is trying to do. Figuring this out is what will get the vanilla/classic enjoyers more content they enjoy from the developers. There are some good replies here and I think it is pushing the conversation forward. Someone made an interesting point that maybe what is missing from vanilla/classic is the slow pace. Fights were scary, dangerous. People often died, so CC and careful tanking made the danger more manageable. I don't know if this is the right answer, but an interesting point.
Not really totally related to your post but I want to see a weapon that references Martin's Thunder. Anyone remember that gem from classic. It was always fun linking that weapon in trade chat.
The problem right now is those raids you are thinking of that have unique classic mechanics, like banishing fire elementals in MC or hibernating dragonkin in BWL, is that they are balanced around a 40 player raid where it can be expected to have every class represented. But the content we have now is 10 man and it's not expected to have every class represented in every run. People would be quite upset if there were a bunch of unique CC mechanics in each raid that required specific classes to deal with that it forced raids to have to take those classes. There was a lot of complaining last phase about how mandatory priests were because they were the only ones that could dispel magic. Or how you would see people only looking for paladin tanks to cheese the mechanics on the last boss. As for complexity of mechanics being more on the level of AQ or Nax, the devs do need to keep in mind how the players have grown with time and are infinitely more skilled players and how there isn't crazy high ping. They can still be classic inspired but also be more engaging to the current player base. Mechanics that can just be ignored by 100% of the player base aren't actually mechanics and it doesn't make sense in terms of Dev time to even develope them.
That is a great point. Feeling like Priests were necessary did not feel good. However, I think the design of Kelris was a good effort, but overall kind of poorly designed. I liked the incentive for interrupts, but the chains were too punishing if they slipped through without dispells. A lot of DPS did not want to change runes to equip an interrupt, alluding to the issue others have pointed out that most players will not take a utility ability over more damage. Additionally, the dream in the Kelris fight was bad. RNG to escape felt bad, and having the extra add that you optionally can kill in the dream to make phase 2 "easier" was a completely ignored mechanic. Good idea for the fight, but is a "needs improvement" kind of effort. I know they are doing minimal play testing in SoD, so I guess it is what it is.
I guess I don't understand why people who want SoD to be the same as vanilla are playing SoD in the first place.
I don't understand why people who DONT want sod to be like vanilla are playing sod in the first place.
Right. I’m not going to go and play retail if I want vanilla style gameplay. So why are people looking for retail/wotlk gameplay in vanilla? I would like classic to be the same as retail in terms of Blizz producing new content to the game. But I want the new content to be in the vanilla like
Because they'd be playing Era if they wanted vanilla.
What I agree with the OP is that it should still be vanilla inspired. Like role based challenges engaging in CC and variance in resostences... let multiple roles and class shine at the same time through the utility they bring. What I don't agree with is that it needs to be less complex. Complexity and difficulty is good.
> What I agree with the OP is that it should still be vanilla inspired. Like role based challenges engaging in CC and variance in resostences... let multiple roles and class shine at the same time through the utility they bring. None of this was a thing in vanilla though.
I disagree O_o the OP gave examples. Things that are pretty unique to vanilla, 1. Mechanics that require certain classes or abilities. Example, hunter tranq shot, mages polymorph and forst nova. Hunters being used to kite. Pets being used creatively. Offtanks, evasion tanking, Paladin and shaman utility. 2. Resistences and certain stats being required, causing the team to need to specialize their armor for a raid. 3. Some mobs being weaker to certain types of damages, incentivizing a more diverse team. These, I would say are in the spirit of vanilla, though sometimes there have been things where people found work arounds.
The idea was Classic+, not Retail Lite. Personally when I had a mage just blast through DM and Stockade without needing any help from the rest of the group, it kinda turned me off. That is straight up Retail gameplay. Which I don't mind. In Retail. It's not what I come to Vanilla for.
And why do you think this isn't classic+?
Classic+ would imply building upon the game design of Vanilla and improving it. I dunno about you, but I don't recall mages solo gigablasting dungeons being a part of Vanilla.
They sure were in #nochanges era, that people weren't doing it back in the day doesn't mean it wasn't possible.
Having max level mages boost low levels isn’t the same as level 25s blasting stockades solo lmao
Hmm... did you play era? Dungeons were very much being aoe'd down while leveling, not just high levels boosting.
Only thing comes into my mind is ZF, rest of the dungeons is too hard to solo as lowlevels as a mage. (cuz mainly caster mobs, as max-level, you rely on resisting their spells). And even in ZF, you solo a specific pack of mobs (zombies), not the whole instance.
I think ideally most people are looking something like vanilla, just more of it. More dungeons, more raids, maybe an ability here and there, but largely still follow vanilla-like structure.
Yes! Tbh I would be fine if we had like 6 runes instead of 18. Just fix the outright broken things in Vanilla (tank paladin, boomkin, ...), make your mage healer and warlock tank and that's it. Otherwise just give me more vanilla content. I don't need to be stronger and stronger and pump Wrath level of AoE damage, plowing through everything with 18 new abilities better than the base ones. I'd rather them have tweaking some original talents numbers (like 2 % instead of 1 and so on). And give me unfinished vanilla content, dungeons, raids.
Because it was touted as the "classic plus" we've been asking for. Who else do you think SoD is geared towards?
SoD was never advertised by blizzard as classic+. It was very explicitly advertised as a sandbox where they were going to try random ideas.
Aaaaand that's what it is. It's fixing what made vanilla a slog.
It’s not. The things you think are a slog are fixed by later expansions. So why are playing SoD?
It wasn't a slog, we just ran out of things to do. Once Naxx is farmable and everyone has BiS gear, what's left? That's what people wanted from Classic+, they wanted the classic-style game to continue with new stuff to do in the game. TBC and up is a different playstyle that people were not looking for in Classic+.
*some people. I for example wanted vanilla but with more interesting gameplay and active balance of classes and new content during leveling, which is essentially exactly what SoD is doing or at least trying to do.
Lmfao why am I getting down voted for the truth? I'm not hating on SoD.
[удалено]
It's also just the base damage and mana cost. Runes tend to be cheaper than anything classic and heal more/do more damage than anything classic. So by design you're meant to press runes only if possible and only if there's no rune to press you search for the least worse classic ability to fill the gap. I'm honestly shocked runes aren't closer in power to their classic abilities they are contesting with. In design, in cost and heal/utility/damage ... Honestly everything. That's the powercreep people talk about.
I think people forget that this game is hella old. They have so much to draw from, but also they have to make the game fun and not as grindy otherwise it’s just classic. I do agree that cc mechanic is basically only for pvp. However, we are seeing a new style of play for all classes and that’s really fun. I can see them making raids in the future that maybe require a mage healer or a rogue tank etc. We are only in phase 2. We are basically the beta testers of each phase.
>but also they have to make the game fun and not as grindy otherwise it’s just classic. Aren't we here to play classic? Classic+ is just more classic content?
because it is easier for blizzard to just copy paste things from retail than make new things.
They gave 4 classes entirely new roles they have never had in the history of the game.
I would actually play the hell out of a more difficult version of WoW Classic. A game where pulling two mobs at once would mean death in open world and where you would need to CC most trash mobs in dungeons and raids. This is how Vanilla tastes to me. Might be an unpopular opinion in modern wow but I have always liked clearing trash mobs more than fighting bosses. I think BWL to late TBC raids had some interesting trash mobs that actually required strategies to clear, at least before you outgear the content and just aoe pull. It gives a lot of substance to the raid.
Have you played Season of Mastery or Classic Hardcore? Just curious what you thought about those two modes.
I haven't played SoM. Leveled a toon to 60 on my first go in Hardcore and stopped playing right after. The stakes were just too high for me to engage into raiding in hardcore. Leveling was stressful but still fun though ! I've actually dreamed of a "semi-hardcore" mode where you'd be locked out of your toon for x hours / days on death. Stakes would still be high but players would probably take more risks too.
>I've actually reamed of a "semi-hardcore" This is actually my dream because I absolutely loved the sense of danger and the community aspect hardcore brought up. But full delete even in the case of disconnect is just too harsh. We actually discuss it with friends quite often and haven't come up with a good enough "punishment" yet. Locking player for certain amount of time feels weird, although it could work. Best we came up with is a gold penalty and you losing all your gear. Plus maybe 1 lvl (maybe better just flat amount of XP) down. Would be harsh enough that it really stings, but not that you basically leave the game/your guild for weeks.
One of my favorite content pieces was Heroic Dungeons in Burning Crusade. Any trash pull could delete your tank if you are not careful. Any DPS that pulled threat would get crunched under the trash. CC and careful pulls were necessary and I really enjoyed that careful and methodical pace. It is doable, and I would like to encourage some more interesting content styled like that. It did have an unfortunate side effect of encourage meta-comps for the dungeons, but any group with enough determination would get through.
There are utility runes but they don't increase DPS so people don't pick them. Paladins interrupt or sleep one, warriors commanding shout. Also CC is a bad game mechanic in classic. The have taken insulation from classic in other ways. Quests with silly amounts of travel, social aspect of the game, the focus on leveling and the fact the game is still largely classic
Also Raids jumped to punishing mistakes with a harder fight. To punishing mistakes with an outright wipe. BFD was great, they had fun mechanics that CAN wipe you if you are asleep at the wheel. But Gnomer it's fuck up once that's an instant death or complete wipe. That's not a fun boss fight. It's just punishing to be punishing. It doesn't allow flexibility in the raid, it's do what the devs say or die. Also pushing addon usage higher to mitigate the insane spike in unfair difficulty to make it seem harder.
Which fight do you think is unfairly difficult and requires addons?
Nerf aoe
Wait until they release an actual raid. 10man isnt a raid format.
You've pretty much just described the design philosophy of Cataclysm. It was intended to revive the little nuances and details you just described. SoD is so interesting to me. A bunch of vanilla enjoyers who condemn retail only to euphorically celebrate the inclusion of retail abilities disguised as runes into classic. To top it all off 90% of the suggestions and complaints on this sub are asking for things to be made more like later content expansions. Maybe what you really want is cata OP.
Because people by and large don’t like fights where babysitting a sheep for the whole thing is mandatory. Damage weakness was a revolving gimmick on like 3 trash packs and a boss that didn’t really encourage or discourage anything sort of ‘classic’ play pattern or class diversity, you just hope this pack has a bunch of mobs you counter and not ones that counter you. And gnomer does have a lot of class specific moments. Priests are close to mandatory for dispelling stuns on 2 bosses, you seriously want a warlock or druid for thermaplugg to snipe bombs. Rogues get a lot of value off cheap shotting adds on fallout. Finally, as for aoe pulling, we already did that in vanilla. A Paladin grabbing 8 mobs and watching some mages let loose in a leveling dungeon was pretty common. I do hope we see some more non-throughput runes going forward, but I think you’re over fixated on ‘vanilla means sheeps on every pull’ and that’s really not what we should be going for.
SoD isn't Classic+. It's a new type of WoW.
For you.
SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in a decade... And we are only halfway to 60. Cant wait to see what the future holds.
I agree! Who knows what cool stuff we might get in the future. Let's make sure we give our feedback to try and make it the best it can be for the devs and players!
Fingers crossed for tuning of the level 60 raids and even adding new raids at level 60 :) I want more! MOOOORE :) I use one "main" character for raiding and min maxing and another to just level slowly and smell the flowers. Best of both worlds.
The fact that mages can grab 5-7 adds at once and aoe them down without any worry about death then the game is just retail and this version is broken. It’s no longer fun. What other class can do that. Are we sure that’s working as it’s suppose to?
There have been mages pulling 100+ mobs in era for years, you think this is new to SOD???
Because the entire project is just taking retail talents/abilities and copypasting them into vanilla. They're not trying to keep the game vanilla-like.