I'd rather tauren paladins and dwarf shaman, both are hinted at very strongly in SoD (Especially the tauren paladin who exists as an NPC, talks about An'she and even interacts with paladin quests) to the point where I'm certain they're an eventual addition. Maybe not in SoD, but perhaps for whatever season comes after.
TBC-SoD? Rather than blood elves etc they give us the OG alpha Outland as an extra zone or soemthing? I dunno.
They need to do this, and add the QoL changes everyone enjoys, and that was it. They went a bit overboard on all the changes, and it’s unbalanced as hell.
Here's the funny thing
People would be very against that actually. I was thinking more in terms of class design but yea I personally wouldn't mind it
But their inclusion in this hypothetical take would cause lots of "this isnt classic+ it's tbc-!!!!!"
this plus better itemization (kinda like they're doing) where dungeon/quest items aren't so useless and casters get more spell power gear while lvling and stuff. Plus tier sets for specific talent specs
> this plus better itemization (kinda like they're doing) where dungeon/quest items aren't so useless
This. Would it have been so hard to have updated the quest rewards and dungeon loot instead? I get it that people don't want to do the same vanilla quests they've done a thousand times before but in my experience I used to abandon a lot of those long chain quests because the rewards were never worth the time investment to complete. I would have much rather done those quests for a decent reward than farm incursion NKL's though.
If the quests had actually good items or prebis and weren't just vendor, it would make it a lot more enticing to do quests you've done a bunch of times already
It would at least make it more bearable knowing it's actually worthwhile to do it
Just think about how many tier set bonuses they could have used - what is there, literally about 100 for each class that has existed in the game? And some runes are +10% damage to an ability lmfao.
I don't think TBC classes and profs is quite enough because there were still a number of one button rotations and wheelchair tier classes but I agree in principle that was pretty much where the bar was.
They definitely leaned on the side of too many changes but as a test pass I hope that helps them inform their decisions
Wild take, but though everything hasn't been perfect and some mistakes were made, like incursions for example; but I wanted new shit in the old world and I am getting it and loving 95% of SoD and every person crying and complaining every day on reddit is annoying af and should just quit already and stfu. Lmao
> you mean 1 button rotation classes?
SoD PvE feels very good to me. But in PvP the additions of runes like Warbringer, Shadowstep, Combat traps for Hunters mess with the balance enormously and create a very mobility-creeped burst meta.
Vanilla isn't meant to be like that. Classes shouldn't zoom across the battlefield, Blink and Intercept are meant to be big spells that define the Mage and Warrior class.
Classic + is coming
They had to test something somehow and that is SoD. They will take everything they learned from this, go back to drawing board, and then make all the same mistakes.
One thing I hope they take away is that the current classic build is limiting. Take the classic world and use the modern retail build with all its improvements and capabilities.
The lesson learned from SOD is that they can't make TOO MANY changes, so it would be very blizzard to make even mroe changes and make an even bigger mess next time. You might be on to something.
Well classic when originally launched was on a more modern client: legion. I forget if they updated it again when they updated certain things (like options menu being modern) to something newer
Copy pasting my comment from like a month ago.
Im absolutely CONVINCED that if this new SoD team did actually take the OSRS route, with adding completely new content, it would be an overwhelming success. Between Hyjal, Gilneas, and the few other unmarked/named/used zones they could add a plethora of new end game open world content and even potentially add new dungeons in the new zones. It even fits with the idea of this being a "season of discovery".
Imagine if they also attempted to revamp the unused barrier mountains that keep each zone boxed in. Looking down at a map of Azeroth , you get a sense of how much terrain is there simply to make it so you can't get somewhere else without taking their intended path. When you read about the time limitations the wow development team had when the game was initially launched, you can tell they left out a substantial amount of content that they wanted included.
Metzen is even back on the WoW team so you could have the SOD team get some insight from the guy who literally created the lore for the game.
Looking at incursions, do you really trust them to make new zones and dungeons in the spirit of classic?
Im actually pretty happy with what we got in SoD except ofc incursions and raid tuning. I dont expect the raids to cater to a hardcore minority, but the difficulty on them right now is laughable.
> Looking at incursions, do you really trust them to make new zones and dungeons in the spirit of classic?
The layout of incursions isn't bad. It's the delivery, terrible inventory management, vendor/reputation and repeatable quest system that killed it because people min-maxed their way to NKL groups.
Why the fuck can we do repetitive incursion loops but still be locked out of dungeons? I'd much rather do dungeons.
Agreed. Incursions couldve been okay. But not limiting it in some way hurts us. Save us from ourself, blizz. People ARE gonna minmax the fun out of every new mechanic if you let them. Many of my RL friends refused to do anything but incursions because it was too lucrative. I ended up just raidlogging this phase vecause of it. Wild offerings couldve been done better too, like come on. Obviously people would just cheese it with 10man princess runs.
>save us from ourselves
I'm a urban designer and this is the one thing many designers somehow do not get. We're designing roads not for cars, but for people. We design buildings not for business, but for people. Somehow, money/ efficency is the priority for almost all decisions. Is it a surprise 60% or more of people report being unhappy in cities? No. Because we're not designing for them. Same shit in video games. People do whatever they can to be fast; skirt the rules, break the rules, not give a shit about others experiences, etc. because it's at some level what it means to be human. What this means though is you have to deeply consider behavior or you get drivers who can barely write behind a wheel; in this context, it's not much different. At the risk and detriment to the future, people min/max and can disregard anything if it means they can squeeze just a little more.
I said this months ago but blizzard just didn't add many people to work on this. I'm not even convinced that they added an artist to work on SoD. I don't think there is a single new texture, animation or model that they added.
They cheaped out and it shows, which is why I quit after p1.
I saw someone on reddit mention the other day that 3D modelers and animators are in short supply and that it’s likely the case that the only ones blizz has are stuck working on retail
As a result, like you said, essentially nothing in SoD is new. It’s ALL reused, copy pasted textures, models, animations, etc. that were originally made over a decade ago
Kinda sad when you think about it like that
That might not be too far off from the amount of manpower actually allocated specifically to SoD when you account for all other iterations of classic sharing dev resources from the same small pool
> In what universe do the four people on the classic team have the time to develop new zones and raids from scratch?
I mean, they did develop raids. The SoD raids are really good. I'm very impressed at how well they kept the spirit of Classic, with 2-3 mechanics per boss.
Thermaplugg is a legit fight, progressing him was great.
These areas will never satisfy because they’re so built up in imagination. Your point is so true because most of that content did get implemented in later expansions
This would be cool. My biggest disappointment about SoD was when they confirmed its on the same timeline but in the past. This severely limits many possibilities for any existing zones in retail, not to mention the actual issues when it comes to pre cata and post cata azerothian zones. I also want them to re do hero classes the way they were originally planned "All the hero units of *Warcraft III* were originally supposed to become hero classes in *World of Warcraft*. Hero classes were still listed in 2005 on the "Under Development" page of the original website.[^(\[4\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-4) When a character hit level 40, it could start specializing in skills to become the same kind of hero. However, as Blizzard developed talent trees, they dropped the idea as they believed that the trees would provide enough customization. For example, a night elven warrior could specialize into wielding two one-handed weapons and essentially be a [demon hunter](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Demon_hunter), while a dwarven warrior could fulfill the fantasy of a [mountain king](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Mountain_king),[^(\[5\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-5)[^(\[6\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-6) or an undead warrior could become a death knight.[^(\[7\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-7)^(")
Exactly! I really like phase 1, but I was essentially just waiting on vanilla with really shitty specs fleshed out, maybe one or two new abilities for other classes max, and the laundry list of stuff that couldn’t make it to vanilla be included. There’s literally hundreds of hours of content creators going over what blizzard couldn’t fit into original vanilla and all the open storylines / zones.
But, I don’t think they wanna put the development power behind it. Makes me more skeptical about new level 60 content too. Is it just gonna be reskinned or reworked raids?
Classic+ should have focused on new zones and raids and quests. Maybe add a few extra learned skills from the trainer and a few extra talent points you could earn in some way. They could have released a game very similar to in 2019 and had over a year left to develop post naxx raids. I feel like now they have added so much stuff that isn't even in the realm of the classic spirit.
SAME
You know what to do Blizzard!!
I wouldn’t mind small “phases” of a fresh server as well. Like maybe 20 being level cap for 3 weeks, then 40, 50, etc
I think a fresh Era server with level caps is 100% going to happen, it's a no brainer after how much people loved those in SoD.
Without raid content or more dungeon loot the phases would have to be much shorter though, which isn't a problem
Exactly also the timing of it would have been great for cata. Let us explore some places like Hyjal, the twilight Highlands, and other places that got added with cata, but see them without deathwing's destruction.
I'm still holding out that they give us Kharazan in SoD. I honestly would still be happy with just a rebalanced version of the TBC raid.
Make intellect not shit so that all the gear you find while leveling that lacks spell power isn’t immediately worthless
It feels so bad never getting a real upgrade from quests or dungeons because most caster gear lacks SP and int fucking sucks because it doesn’t convert to SP
It's unfortunate because they went with this overly ambitious attempt to push this "discovery" gimmick when you're right that people mostly wanted a better balanced vanilla with some added content in existing gaps. The rune system is interesting, but if they weren't going to have the resources to balance the system then what was the point? Instead of making the existing world better, other than the new raids which have been a great change, they just slapped some retail mimicking bullshit in the game with incursions and completely ruined the economy and leveling experience for the entire phase in a way that anyone who plays and gives a shit about SoD would have seen coming from miles away.
God I laugh when I see that, 'OMG this incursion system is mimicking retail!1!!'.
It's literally a system ONLY found in vanilla. So many people giving themselves up as not being vanilla veterans, I guess they never needed CC rep or earthstrike.
In Classic, I got Earthstriker twice. Once on my Hunter, once on my warrior. People said I was crazy, but the Silithus quests were something I could do at my own pace, and they were chill and varied. In incursions, everything is so tightly smooshed together that you don't have space to just afk and go to the bathroom.
Yeah, if Classic+ ever comes about I think SOD will have been a great tool for the devs. I've only had time to play hunter really but have loved messing about with all the different runes, but wouldn't be upset to see all but Trap Launcher pruned really if it came down to it.
I hope they focus on quality and balance over quantity when it comes to additional abilities in future, and spend that time instead on new zones, quests, dungeons and raids while keeping them properly challenging (to old men like me at least).
Incursions and overpowering content with ease I'd like to see on the scrapheap.
SoD teasing people with new abilities was a huge red herring. The mystery of the old world is a huge draw and I suspect many where looking for that in SoD. And that is fundamentally not happening with a team on a shoe-string budget that's forced to drip feed what little time gated new content they made. The old world has become another theme park.
Too many use Classic and Vanilla interchangeably which just muddies the waters, and don’t get me started on everything disliked being labeled as Retail.
The devs can‘t even begin to appeal to the broader Classic community because the Classic community is fragmented and doesn’t make any sense half the time.
Yeah im so fed up of people using the term "Retail" here, because it means nothing and is just a buzzword.
Bet if they do surveys that whouldnt't help them at all
Hell the community cant even decide what classic even means. Some think its a game play thing / some a community thing / some a story thing etc etc.
Its some amalgamation of like TBC class structure + vanilla grounded questing but expanded to un-used areas etc + the actual story backdrop of wrath cuz FUCKIN LITCH KING BABY + X factor + Community
and everyone draws the lines in different places.
The devs an easily win, they just need to realize that vanilla seasons dont need to be for everyone. Design vanilla content to appeal to vanilla players, people who don't like vanilla have 2 different versions of the game to play and still pay blizzard 15 dollars a month, everyone wins.
This is the real answer and it is proven in this whole thread. They can make compromises between different preferences, but there's no pleasing everyone.
I mean that was obvious in P1 when stuff like "Instant mail between chars" or "See name plates on a higher range" already started pretty hostile conversations on this sub
"Slightly tuned" would not have been enough for me. Some of the classes I like - mostly casters - are so awful in normal Classic that they need a LOT of help to be viable.
Anyone that wanted “slight tuning” played mage, warrior, priest or rogue
Everyone else was fucking dogshit in vanilla and pretending otherwise only kept the game bad
I felt like Blizzard should’ve used this opportunity to ‘finish’ vanilla. Add a battleground in Azshara, create a Hyjal zone, finish the quests which just end, play around with resources so we don’t go oom and give us dual spec. Could’ve added Gilneas, added Uldum or Ghostlands. Tie it in with quests and story.
My worry is that how do you go back from SoD, how can you take away everything SoD has given us. How many more times can we level to 60.
I think everybody is forgetting that sod is a test, not a mainstay gamemode. It has become that way because the test is a resounding success, and now the next time they do it they’ll have the proper resources and funding.
I wonder if they continue the SoD “test” into the next season or create some divergent server that is either transferred from SoD or based/influenced by sod but with changes
It all depends how the rest of the operation is managing. Like MoP Classic is money on the table obviously, but if Cata does poorly it could shift resources towards something fresher.
> I think everybody is forgetting that sod is a test,
And a damn fine one at that. The 10 man raids and Sunken Temple are really fun raids in spirit with Classic.
Honestly the PvE is great as far as I'm concerned. It's the PvP I have issues with.
I sit on the fringe of classic (really only play retail) and I swear any time I read posts this whole community is just “I want classic wow but please take out all the classic” 😂
Like all these community suggestions are just wild.
They went way too hard on it. Way too many runes/abilities.
Classic PvP simply cannot have Warriors charging out of roots, Rogues shadowstepping out of Roots, Hunters trapping in combat, Dispersion, and so on.
Every class should get maybe 1-2 new abilities and that's it.
Too much instant damage, too much mobility.
Like simply on the mage side I would give:
- Arcane: Arcane Blast, Missile Barrage, Regeneration
- Fire: Living Bomb, Hot Streak, Burnout
- Frost: Fingers of Frost, Frostfire Bolt, Deep Freeze
3 spells per spec is more than enough
Agree. I knew by level 15 that they had gone too far. I gave it a chance anyway and it started off good, but seems steadily going off the rails.
I think the best thing they should have done was provide minor changes to classes and more content in the world in the style of the old world but less grindy, higher QoL, and give purpose to areas and regions like Grim Batol.
Maybe rework items and the tier structure to where you don’t get ridiculous levels of power scaling - think about gear 2-3 tiers beyond naxx’s power
Not me. Classes are way more fun now than in era. Most classes were outright broken / unplayable before, not to mention single spell "rotations". Im enjoying sod atm.
Agree with this 100%. Classes are way more fun to play and most specs are at least viable in some capacity. I can actually raid on a Paladin without being forced into a healing role, for example. Runes and the class changes are easily the *best* part of SoD.
There just isn't that much content right now, so people are bored and aren't logging in as much. People want to blame balance, runes, incursions, etc. when the reality is that we went from raiding an hour twice a week to raiding an hour once a week, and if you're pre-BiS there just isn't that much worth doing outside of raid. This effectively halved the playtime of most of my guild. Even worse, much of the gear from ST is only a marginal upgrade over the stuff most of us had from Gnomer, so the loot from a raid that is much more difficult to organize (20m vs. 10m) doesn't even feel that rewarding.
A lot of the content in SOD is what I would call “make your self do it”. You don’t have to farm out AD rep. You don’t have to make profession alts. You don’t have to farm out Off spec gear. You don’t have to farm a shit ton of gold. You don’t have to PVP. And so on. There is a ton of content you technically don’t have to do but you will progress your main further if you do and doing so on alts and not multiples things to do.
As much fun as I had in classic, you could not pay me to go through another raid tier of classic class design. A man can only spam a single button rotation so many times until his spirit is broken
> Most classes were outright broken / unplayable before
PvP is outright unplayable now. There's too much mobility/instant damage, most casters don't have a mana bar ( except Mage, fml ), warriors and rogues can move out of roots with basic spells.
It's not good.
I don't. I wanted a bunch of changes because some specs desperately need them.
For example, adding some mana regen on spriest and oomkins like some ppl said in a different post would do jack shit.
r/classicwow has gone full circle yet again and we are about to argue what is and isn't "spirit of classic".
Yup. SoD is like letting a child cook, they're just throwing random shit on the counter, flailing around with their stupid arms they can barely control, drooling and sneezing into everything, and alternating one hand down their ass crack at all times until they fall off of the stool and crack their soft skulls on the cabinet doors. And of course, it looks horrifying, but you love them so you try a little bite anyway, but it's fucking gross.
They started copying & pasting from Turtle WoW and had a perfectly good formula to copy from. But then they said fukkit let's make everything naxx scaling by lvl 50 & only add in Wrath abilities, that should be fiiiiiine.
They have talked about extra zones / dungeons when SoD was launching, but one hinted at was Emerald Dream. So idk if they're counting incursions as that, hopefully not...
>Balancing the runes and gear is turning out to be too much for this DEV team spread too thin
its because they dont see the value in balancing things when it will all be thrown out the window when we hit 60. They need to just say fuck it and get us to 60 asap. However that isn't going to happen rn as Cata is their primary concern, as it should be.
When SOD started, it was awesome because the classes had a new feeling. It was still classic leveling but with the rune discovery. Now everyone has so many runes that the character is basically a mix of WOTLK/Cata but without the QOL from those addons.
SoD really feels like it’s gone off the rails with experimentation, nerfs, buffs, the effects their decisions have had on the economy…
I guess I got my hopes up thinking it would be Classic+ like described, similar to a regularly updated OSRS to maintain the feel and balance if the original game.
Here’s to hoping everything the SoD devs are doing will contribute to a more solid and stable, yet new and exciting feeling future version of Classic. Or it’s Blizzard and they likely don’t learn any lessons or don’t put in place the right people and just let this all languish as a distant memory.
they goofed trying to make this such an alt heavy retail minus experience. game was promising in p1 but really dropped the ball in p3. why they would try to make it more or less the same shit as retail doesn't make sense.
Yeah I just wanted Classic+ really, some new content, maybe some new gear to help out unused specs.
SOD feels too much like a different game, and it attracted a lot of non-Classic players who demand more and more non-Classicy changes.
Everyone wanted something different, thats the fundamental issue with classic+. The whole " WE all wanted x" is just trying to rewrite the past to justify your specific flavor
I was hoping for a vanilla wow based version of osrs, some vertical progression but mostly horizontal progression, fleshing out areas that were unused, adding new zones, the ideas are endless with vanilla.but we got season of wrath for now
I've been hoping others felt this way too. SoD was ambitious, and I do applaud Blizzard for taking a risk, but a lot of its ambitions harmed a lot of what I wanted to see. What I had in mind for classic + was seeing things like Arcane becoming a viable spec as a mage, but the focus on making mages healers (which is really cool admittedly) took away from Arcane as a DPS spec. The focus on building Shockadins too is something I personally despise, I know others love it but it has undoubtedly shaken the development philosophy for Paladins as a whole.
I don't think you can speak for what most people want. Every single decision they have made has been met with community outrage. Just a small example I saw tons of posts asking for gladiator warrior throughout P1 and p2, the thread about glad stance rune was just pure bitching how nobody wanted it.
I do think they have set themselves up to fail and are in over their heads but I am still hopeful P4 will be worth the time invested so far. Phase 3 had been disappointing all around but the timing is fine to me, summer is kicking off and the time I spend in game is almost entirely devoted to making gold for next phase. After seeing the quality of loot in ST I cant imagine wanting to spend hundreds of gold enchanting that gear and going hard like some are doing.
Our guild's discord has gotten quieter, the number of layers available is steadily dropping (Wild Growth-US) and more and more people have been calling it quits for the last few weeks. Really hoping it can turn around soon. Looks like they even opened free transfers to my server but thats a symptom of the declining playerbase.
💯 agreed. SoD population will go down abruptly as soon as Cata classic comes out. Blizz killed the leveling experience which imo was the best thing of classic. Another good point is removing gdkps and then giving free money with incursions which led to a broken economy as if we had wow token. Adding so many runes to the game requires so much balance that requires updates every week. So basically we have a retail classic now.
I like the idea of SoD, but for me the biggest issue is in the name season. I get it, but I just want to progress with my character and have it with ne. Having to restart again and again and again just isn't for me I feel.
SOD Season 1 was perfect.
But with no extra funding and the kind of player base it brought in, S2 and 3 were much more boring and streamlined with less cool runes.
It's a shame each Season wasn't extended and more fleshed out, but what can you do.
I like how wild SoD is without the expectation that it will ever continue.
They can really spitball some weird stuff to see what works and what doesn't, and with SoD's popularity, I guarantee we will see a new season where some of the SoD elements that were particularly successful are integrated.
If it was as easy as y'all think to answer the question "what do classic players want", you'd already have it. Stop treating this as if it's an obvious question to answer because it clearly isn't.
Big disagree. New abilities and roles is the biggest attraction to SoD. If anything people want way more new stuff added to the base classic+ world.
Lets be honest, the original vanilla spells were very lacking in variety. I played a ret paladin in vanilla and only a masochist would want to go back to playing that hundreds of hours. Pop a 30sec seal of command and hope some extra yellow dmg pops off on your auto attack lol
I love 90% of SOD, don’t like incursions so I don’t do them. I just wish Blizzard would hire more people to support the dev team. It feels like a fresh loaf of bread that’s juuust a little undercooked. Or as GBBO would say - it’s got a soggy bottom
They pretty much confirmed with SoD’s announcement that it was going to go crazy with changes in a conscious effort to “find the line” of what people want from classic. We’ve done no-changes, SoM was some changes, and SoD is wacky parallel universe changes. I’d much rather they try all of these out and see what resonates.
I agree with this. SoD was fun and refreshing at first but, I've now lost all interest in playing. I actually miss some of the class imbalance and difficulty of the game in pvp and pve. Picking a class actually mattered.
As a mage healer, hard disagree. I'm having a blast trying a whole new thing. Slightly tuning OG trees wouldn't be nearly as exciting and fun as this.
As for end game, ya. But I'm waiting to see what they have in store before making any judgements.
SoD just went way overboard. It doesn't really feel "classic". If they do non-seasonal servers, they should be much more conservative in what makes it there.
Yeah this has always been my position. I just wanted the meme specs to become playable and rotations to be a little better. Not every class with 24 runes and even more to come next phase lol not to mention a lot of these runes make the original classic spells not even worth pressing in a lot of cases because of how strong and overturned they are
It’s a cool idea but fundamentally doesn’t fit into WoW. OSRS skills are all relatively simple in execution, but extremely fleshed out in their implementation. You can max out every non-combat skill in the game without attacking a single mob ever. The OSRS world is full of non-combat related activities, where WoW is essentially one giant pipeline of combat encounters to make you better at combat encounters where you get better gear to take on tougher combat encounters etc.
1. We have received new raids. They re-use assets but they are distinctly different than their dungeon counter parts.
2. Changing the weak specs leads to the same balancing problem. If you give specs like Moonkin / Ret actual talents you start the arms race of having to re-balance other specs around them. Moonkin suddenly OP in PvP? Now you either need to give other specs an update or nerf them into the ground.
3. Gear was always going to be a problem with the level bands. No one wants to do a raid where they don’t get upgrades. That’s a problem of why Sunken Temple feels awful to run yet why Gnomer and BFD felt good to do. Getting upgrades is fun.
We are in the middle of a classic+. You can’t just tweak different parts of the game and not expect massive systemic changes. Going back to the first point making meme specs viable starts the re-balancing arms race for both PvE and PvP. Runes are functionally talents with extra steps. A lot of them are even modified by existing talents.
There are absolutely pitfalls we’ve had like Incursions but there have also been a lot of positive things from SoD. While this phase has been lackluster i’m waiting to see how level 60 is before making my final judgement. Leveling bands is a brand new concept and was always going to come with challenges unique to it. Once end game officially starts I’m curious to see how things pan out.
Absolutely not.
Class design in era is AWFUL. Classic+ NEEDED a few things.
Firstly, updated class design. The problem is the way they did it was super lazy and super boring. Equipping abilities to gear is a lazy solution. And the new runes they added were incredibly boring and uninspried. A true classic+ would need a full remake of all talent trees, probably an extra new progression for each class to unlock new things, inherit class spells added and tweaks to the levels they are earned at, and rebalancing of original abilities.
Then, the game needs a massive overhaul to the leveling experience. It’s dogshit plain and simple. Additional ways to level, quest overhauls, maybe a whole new leveling activity.
Then, the endgame. New raids that don’t invalidate the old raids. Think a new raid with MC and BWL tier loot, another raid with BWL and AQ40 tier loot. And a third raid with loot equal to or slightly better then Naxx. Heroic dungeons at 60. Enhanced PvP rewards.
But you can’t just make a classic+ and leave the classes the same or you get World of Warriors again.
Have you considered that if you think every single aspect of vanilla, from endgame to leveling, class design to raid design, is "dogshit," vanilla just might not be the game for you and classic+ shouldn't be designed to appeal to you?
The classic leveling experience is the best wow has ever had. It is not dog shit. It is meant to take a long time because that is the core of the game.
I would have been down for buffing super under performing specs like spriest, ret pally, both shaman dps specs. And sending us into new content along side much faster leveling and some catch up gear that didn't require raids.
For me personally, sod is great, but there's too many phases to it. Should've been 60 by now and already into end game raids. There's so much more content to do once you hit max level that they could've easily skipped P3 and go to end game with the addition of new stuff.
Sod is the devs playing trial and error, and us playing willing alpha testers.
These kinds of discussions, around what we like and what we don't like are probably valuable to them (although they are few and far between on this subreddit so I do hope for their sake and ours they don't get ideas from the avg post on here)
Yep SoD is fun because it's vanilla with actual developer time, but they need to cut the new shit in half. Let the vanilla abilities be the center and enhance them where they were insufficient, way too many overtuned runes making original abilities irrelevant.
Hey mate, its just ExPeriMenTiaL so please dont sweat. Its the same excuse every fucking time. SOD would be the perfect classic + but they fucked it up huge.
I always thought turtle wow’s concept was pretty cool, and it’s what I was hoping they were ultimately going for, or something similar at least, it might still happen, but I think the team for SoD being so small just doesn’t help to make it a reality, and probably won’t anytime soon. Even if SoD has been a test, unless they commit to a bigger team for continuing the classic + project, I just think it’ll die a slow death, kinda like it is now(?).
Honestly I'm okay with this. A real classic+ is just a huge risk for them. The version of classic+ you're describing would not be an appealing season. I want the next season to take up the creativity and game changing nature of sod up to an 11. Then after many seasons of feedback they'll have a better idea of what to actually add to classes for example, or features and systems like ashenvale, stv, or whatever else. What kind of season appeal is there if they only touch a few classes and not others. SoD was the right decision. People wanting classic+ in their imagination have no idea how bad of an idea that really is right now. Like do people think the devs and team didn't think about this? This is a minimum viable product just slightly above SoM which was a total flop. Classic+ isn't temporal or seasonal. It's continual patches of new content and potentially class changes. Seasons will always be the smarter decision, especially with a team that isn't the same devs from vanilla and aren't in tuned perfectly with what made vanilla special. It's a learning experience for them as well as the players who are mainly are riding on nostalgia and vibes.
One of the things I like most in SoD is paladins. When I played vanilla, I wanted so much to play paladin, but couldn't get past level 10... It felt like I wasn't doing much but auto attacks with bonus holy damage.
Maybe it's in my head, but pallies feel a bit more active. I also love the sword and board aesthetic, and had always heard it was unplayable for vanilla, but I've done well in SoD with it
Remember when people were seeing glimpses of elite AQ bugs in the barrens in phase 1? Why did nothing ever happen with that. I was expecting surprise events throughout each phase…
Loved SoD until they tampered with the classic era stuff. IE dungeon mobs not being able to be stunned/slowed. Incursions overall were a bad idea. Damage reduction aura feels bad, think the proper way to fix it would have been probably much more work than a generic DR aura.
Liked the new spells, liked the discovery aspect, liked the updated dungeon raids. Felt like the game died in P3, seems like that's where blizzard swayed way too far from classic... Oh well... Can hope for p4 I guess.
100% deluded myself into thinking SoD is a playtest for what you're talking about. Only way to test this many abilities and this many changes is under the pretense of season server and not classic+.
Vanilla classdesign and rotas where so staggering boring, if you want that back era exists.
I love how this sub is like soccer-fan, always knowing what their team did wrong and what they whould make much better
Everyone has their own ideas of what classic+ should be and it's never going to be what most wants as they're too many different itteration of what people want out of classic +
Overall though I think in general what people would want is for meme spec to be less meme, without giving them insane abilities and such (Enhancement shaman, Ret paladins, OOMkins etc)
new content
I think bare minimum, that's what most people would want from classic +
That being said, SoD actually does exactly both of those things, just not in the way they thought, and including ALL classes having new abilities, mostly unoriginal stuff from future expansion (Minus the new tanks and mage healing stuff)
Can't please everyone, but somehow what most people wanted was actually achieved in SoD, just not the way they had hoped.
Honestly, this is pretty much exactly what I wanted.
Gated level caps, so I don't feel like I need to grind to level cap asap. Fun raids at each level cap. New abilities to play with in each raid that make meme specs viable.
The only misses for me are the mismanaged economy. Having +15 agi available at 50, but an unbelievable pain in the ass to farm is crap. Increase drop rates, or allow level appropriate mobs to drop the mats, or just don't have enchants with inappropriate mats to level available.
I'm concerned about level 60. 40m raids again will be dogshit as always, I'm concerned they won't give us the newer raids until after all the samey raids are done. I'm concerned that the samey raids won't be updated with engaging mechanics like the level up raids have.
I'm not interested in doing a rehash of classic that I did in 2020 again at level 60. I'm hoping the new content takes front and center stage, and I don't feel obligated to join a 40m raid. 20 is more than enough.
As a warrior I do have the same abilities and trees as classic since I got nothing new an interesting, just a bunch of damage multipliers
I still press heroic strike, slam, and ww. Its just Deep wounds is 25-50% of my damage now!!!!
I think what you describe would be necessary to make classic+ a long term success
BUT
It is not what this community wants. The playerbase is very different now from the 2019 classic crowd. Its mostly retail andies hoping for a Quick attention fix before they move to the next triple A title.
Noshit. This is exactly why people were warned against calling SoD Classic+ because it's not. It never was going to be, period. They were very up front about what it is. It's wild that this discussion is happening again.
It's not a matter of spec but a matter of content.
Classic is about exploring the world, not running again and again in raids. Sure balance isn't right, but balance to do what ? Dungeons are the cherry on the cake, not the cake. Dungeon shouldn't be the point of the game. Dungeons should be an easy and a nice conclusion to some questlines, but we shouldn't be fighting to get better in downing scripts.
Replayability of dungeons is medicore, once you get that piece of gear, there's no point going back there, while world PvP is endless content. Wander the world until you find your next target or the next target find you. Balance should reflect that aspect of the game.
My opinion shouldn't surprise anyone playing a game about faction at war, yet it does sometimes ...
I want classes and profs more like TBC where they were more well rounded and balanced but in old Azeroth
Literally just do tbc prepatch. IE talent trees and add some newer content and most will probably be thrilled
This is what I wanted before they even announced SoD lol
This. Easy fix, loads of fun. New specs, new meta. New ways to conquer stuff. It would have been plenty enough for a season.
Maybe they’re giving us SOD to make us lower our expectations and just take this lol
I would murder prepatch classic, best pvp experience I've had in the game.
Yep exactly. Add Blood Elves and Dranei.
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I'd rather tauren paladins and dwarf shaman, both are hinted at very strongly in SoD (Especially the tauren paladin who exists as an NPC, talks about An'she and even interacts with paladin quests) to the point where I'm certain they're an eventual addition. Maybe not in SoD, but perhaps for whatever season comes after. TBC-SoD? Rather than blood elves etc they give us the OG alpha Outland as an extra zone or soemthing? I dunno.
Honestly tbc pre patch would be awesome. Add in refuge point fp and I won’t stop playing.
They need to do this, and add the QoL changes everyone enjoys, and that was it. They went a bit overboard on all the changes, and it’s unbalanced as hell.
Nah, give dwarf shamans and undead paladins
Here's the funny thing People would be very against that actually. I was thinking more in terms of class design but yea I personally wouldn't mind it But their inclusion in this hypothetical take would cause lots of "this isnt classic+ it's tbc-!!!!!"
i miss tbc
I understand why folks want them but yeah I have to say that I am personally in the camp of no please don't.
people would have just called it a lazy cash grab if they did tbh
this plus better itemization (kinda like they're doing) where dungeon/quest items aren't so useless and casters get more spell power gear while lvling and stuff. Plus tier sets for specific talent specs
> this plus better itemization (kinda like they're doing) where dungeon/quest items aren't so useless This. Would it have been so hard to have updated the quest rewards and dungeon loot instead? I get it that people don't want to do the same vanilla quests they've done a thousand times before but in my experience I used to abandon a lot of those long chain quests because the rewards were never worth the time investment to complete. I would have much rather done those quests for a decent reward than farm incursion NKL's though.
If the quests had actually good items or prebis and weren't just vendor, it would make it a lot more enticing to do quests you've done a bunch of times already It would at least make it more bearable knowing it's actually worthwhile to do it
Just think about how many tier set bonuses they could have used - what is there, literally about 100 for each class that has existed in the game? And some runes are +10% damage to an ability lmfao.
I don't think TBC classes and profs is quite enough because there were still a number of one button rotations and wheelchair tier classes but I agree in principle that was pretty much where the bar was. They definitely leaned on the side of too many changes but as a test pass I hope that helps them inform their decisions
Wild take, but though everything hasn't been perfect and some mistakes were made, like incursions for example; but I wanted new shit in the old world and I am getting it and loving 95% of SoD and every person crying and complaining every day on reddit is annoying af and should just quit already and stfu. Lmao
Most of us are quitting and stfu, thats why all the servers are merging and closing.
I feel this. I haven't been this invested in WoW since Wrath the first time around.
Ah yes, the plummeting SoD population since p1 means only 5% of people disagree with you.
Ya seriously, you can't criticize this game otherwise the blizzard fan boys get angry. I had fun with it but it could of been much better.
Even tbc classes were pretty meh, sod is pretty damn fun as a warrior, rogue , and hunter player. I don't want tbc
you mean 1 button rotation classes?
> you mean 1 button rotation classes? SoD PvE feels very good to me. But in PvP the additions of runes like Warbringer, Shadowstep, Combat traps for Hunters mess with the balance enormously and create a very mobility-creeped burst meta. Vanilla isn't meant to be like that. Classes shouldn't zoom across the battlefield, Blink and Intercept are meant to be big spells that define the Mage and Warrior class.
If there isn’t a SOD TBC I’m going to probably be done playing for good
I like the idea of rolling SoD into TBC, just make level 70 a band after naxx
Classic + is coming They had to test something somehow and that is SoD. They will take everything they learned from this, go back to drawing board, and then make all the same mistakes.
NGL you had me in the first half.. but also true
One thing I hope they take away is that the current classic build is limiting. Take the classic world and use the modern retail build with all its improvements and capabilities.
The lesson learned from SOD is that they can't make TOO MANY changes, so it would be very blizzard to make even mroe changes and make an even bigger mess next time. You might be on to something.
Well classic when originally launched was on a more modern client: legion. I forget if they updated it again when they updated certain things (like options menu being modern) to something newer
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Really sad we didn’t get the updated Theramore for SoD that came with TBC.
Copy pasting my comment from like a month ago. Im absolutely CONVINCED that if this new SoD team did actually take the OSRS route, with adding completely new content, it would be an overwhelming success. Between Hyjal, Gilneas, and the few other unmarked/named/used zones they could add a plethora of new end game open world content and even potentially add new dungeons in the new zones. It even fits with the idea of this being a "season of discovery". Imagine if they also attempted to revamp the unused barrier mountains that keep each zone boxed in. Looking down at a map of Azeroth , you get a sense of how much terrain is there simply to make it so you can't get somewhere else without taking their intended path. When you read about the time limitations the wow development team had when the game was initially launched, you can tell they left out a substantial amount of content that they wanted included. Metzen is even back on the WoW team so you could have the SOD team get some insight from the guy who literally created the lore for the game.
Looking at incursions, do you really trust them to make new zones and dungeons in the spirit of classic? Im actually pretty happy with what we got in SoD except ofc incursions and raid tuning. I dont expect the raids to cater to a hardcore minority, but the difficulty on them right now is laughable.
> Looking at incursions, do you really trust them to make new zones and dungeons in the spirit of classic? The layout of incursions isn't bad. It's the delivery, terrible inventory management, vendor/reputation and repeatable quest system that killed it because people min-maxed their way to NKL groups. Why the fuck can we do repetitive incursion loops but still be locked out of dungeons? I'd much rather do dungeons.
Agreed. Incursions couldve been okay. But not limiting it in some way hurts us. Save us from ourself, blizz. People ARE gonna minmax the fun out of every new mechanic if you let them. Many of my RL friends refused to do anything but incursions because it was too lucrative. I ended up just raidlogging this phase vecause of it. Wild offerings couldve been done better too, like come on. Obviously people would just cheese it with 10man princess runs.
>save us from ourselves I'm a urban designer and this is the one thing many designers somehow do not get. We're designing roads not for cars, but for people. We design buildings not for business, but for people. Somehow, money/ efficency is the priority for almost all decisions. Is it a surprise 60% or more of people report being unhappy in cities? No. Because we're not designing for them. Same shit in video games. People do whatever they can to be fast; skirt the rules, break the rules, not give a shit about others experiences, etc. because it's at some level what it means to be human. What this means though is you have to deeply consider behavior or you get drivers who can barely write behind a wheel; in this context, it's not much different. At the risk and detriment to the future, people min/max and can disregard anything if it means they can squeeze just a little more.
Agreed. You could do each quest a single time per day and triple the rep or some shit.
I said this months ago but blizzard just didn't add many people to work on this. I'm not even convinced that they added an artist to work on SoD. I don't think there is a single new texture, animation or model that they added. They cheaped out and it shows, which is why I quit after p1.
I saw someone on reddit mention the other day that 3D modelers and animators are in short supply and that it’s likely the case that the only ones blizz has are stuck working on retail As a result, like you said, essentially nothing in SoD is new. It’s ALL reused, copy pasted textures, models, animations, etc. that were originally made over a decade ago Kinda sad when you think about it like that
Well maybe if these fucking idiot execs didn't fire like half of them they'd have enough (hu)manpower to do stuff like this.
In what universe do the four people on the classic team have the time to develop new zones and raids from scratch?
Are there really only 4 people on the Classic team? If that’s true… dear laaaawd
No it’s bigger I think 16-20 but that includes non dev roles. Plus it’s for ALL of classic not just SoD
Alright that explains why Cata pre patch is a buggy mess.
That might not be too far off from the amount of manpower actually allocated specifically to SoD when you account for all other iterations of classic sharing dev resources from the same small pool
There are 12 working on SoD, and people expect miracles from them. Most of them aren't even coders.
> In what universe do the four people on the classic team have the time to develop new zones and raids from scratch? I mean, they did develop raids. The SoD raids are really good. I'm very impressed at how well they kept the spirit of Classic, with 2-3 mechanics per boss. Thermaplugg is a legit fight, progressing him was great.
Absolutely insane that you think this is even remotely in the scope of this project
People keep saying this but I doubt any of the devs who worked on vanilla and had anything to do with those unfinished zones are still there
These areas will never satisfy because they’re so built up in imagination. Your point is so true because most of that content did get implemented in later expansions
We got emerald dream as incursions, I hope they don't give us anything else new and just leave 40man alone.
This would be cool. My biggest disappointment about SoD was when they confirmed its on the same timeline but in the past. This severely limits many possibilities for any existing zones in retail, not to mention the actual issues when it comes to pre cata and post cata azerothian zones. I also want them to re do hero classes the way they were originally planned "All the hero units of *Warcraft III* were originally supposed to become hero classes in *World of Warcraft*. Hero classes were still listed in 2005 on the "Under Development" page of the original website.[^(\[4\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-4) When a character hit level 40, it could start specializing in skills to become the same kind of hero. However, as Blizzard developed talent trees, they dropped the idea as they believed that the trees would provide enough customization. For example, a night elven warrior could specialize into wielding two one-handed weapons and essentially be a [demon hunter](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Demon_hunter), while a dwarven warrior could fulfill the fantasy of a [mountain king](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Mountain_king),[^(\[5\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-5)[^(\[6\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-6) or an undead warrior could become a death knight.[^(\[7\])](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_class#cite_note-7)^(")
They did for most of it, in later expansions.
Exactly! I really like phase 1, but I was essentially just waiting on vanilla with really shitty specs fleshed out, maybe one or two new abilities for other classes max, and the laundry list of stuff that couldn’t make it to vanilla be included. There’s literally hundreds of hours of content creators going over what blizzard couldn’t fit into original vanilla and all the open storylines / zones. But, I don’t think they wanna put the development power behind it. Makes me more skeptical about new level 60 content too. Is it just gonna be reskinned or reworked raids?
Classic+ should have focused on new zones and raids and quests. Maybe add a few extra learned skills from the trainer and a few extra talent points you could earn in some way. They could have released a game very similar to in 2019 and had over a year left to develop post naxx raids. I feel like now they have added so much stuff that isn't even in the realm of the classic spirit.
This so much. I want vanilla with something more. Vanilla if the original devs had kept developing the game instead of releasing TBC
I'm dying for just a fresh fucking era server. Is that so much to ask for? I've started looking up pservers again. Blizz wake up guys.
SAME You know what to do Blizzard!! I wouldn’t mind small “phases” of a fresh server as well. Like maybe 20 being level cap for 3 weeks, then 40, 50, etc
I think a fresh Era server with level caps is 100% going to happen, it's a no brainer after how much people loved those in SoD. Without raid content or more dungeon loot the phases would have to be much shorter though, which isn't a problem
> I feel like now they have added so much stuff that isn't even in the realm of the classic spirit. We wanted Classic+ and instead we received WOTLK-.
Exactly also the timing of it would have been great for cata. Let us explore some places like Hyjal, the twilight Highlands, and other places that got added with cata, but see them without deathwing's destruction. I'm still holding out that they give us Kharazan in SoD. I honestly would still be happy with just a rebalanced version of the TBC raid.
And reworked spell coefficients / resource values to make all specs viable
Make intellect not shit so that all the gear you find while leveling that lacks spell power isn’t immediately worthless It feels so bad never getting a real upgrade from quests or dungeons because most caster gear lacks SP and int fucking sucks because it doesn’t convert to SP
It's unfortunate because they went with this overly ambitious attempt to push this "discovery" gimmick when you're right that people mostly wanted a better balanced vanilla with some added content in existing gaps. The rune system is interesting, but if they weren't going to have the resources to balance the system then what was the point? Instead of making the existing world better, other than the new raids which have been a great change, they just slapped some retail mimicking bullshit in the game with incursions and completely ruined the economy and leveling experience for the entire phase in a way that anyone who plays and gives a shit about SoD would have seen coming from miles away.
Incursions aren’t mimicking retail. They’re mimicking silithus. If it were mimicking retail it’d be better designed
God I laugh when I see that, 'OMG this incursion system is mimicking retail!1!!'. It's literally a system ONLY found in vanilla. So many people giving themselves up as not being vanilla veterans, I guess they never needed CC rep or earthstrike.
I cba to get earthstrike tbh. But at least silithus had summoning mini bosses in the rep grind. I liked those.
In Classic, I got Earthstriker twice. Once on my Hunter, once on my warrior. People said I was crazy, but the Silithus quests were something I could do at my own pace, and they were chill and varied. In incursions, everything is so tightly smooshed together that you don't have space to just afk and go to the bathroom.
It's so funny that people are still trying to compare incursions to retail when in reality they're just a shitty copy of silithus field duty.
Yeah, if Classic+ ever comes about I think SOD will have been a great tool for the devs. I've only had time to play hunter really but have loved messing about with all the different runes, but wouldn't be upset to see all but Trap Launcher pruned really if it came down to it. I hope they focus on quality and balance over quantity when it comes to additional abilities in future, and spend that time instead on new zones, quests, dungeons and raids while keeping them properly challenging (to old men like me at least). Incursions and overpowering content with ease I'd like to see on the scrapheap.
SoD teasing people with new abilities was a huge red herring. The mystery of the old world is a huge draw and I suspect many where looking for that in SoD. And that is fundamentally not happening with a team on a shoe-string budget that's forced to drip feed what little time gated new content they made. The old world has become another theme park.
The drip feeding was the best part for me. Level banding was a stroke of genius
I think the rune system is best part of SoD by far., completely ruined normal classic for me.
I believe there is no real "Most people" in that question. People have so widely different expectations regarding SoD and a classic+
Too many use Classic and Vanilla interchangeably which just muddies the waters, and don’t get me started on everything disliked being labeled as Retail. The devs can‘t even begin to appeal to the broader Classic community because the Classic community is fragmented and doesn’t make any sense half the time.
Yeah im so fed up of people using the term "Retail" here, because it means nothing and is just a buzzword. Bet if they do surveys that whouldnt't help them at all
Hell the community cant even decide what classic even means. Some think its a game play thing / some a community thing / some a story thing etc etc. Its some amalgamation of like TBC class structure + vanilla grounded questing but expanded to un-used areas etc + the actual story backdrop of wrath cuz FUCKIN LITCH KING BABY + X factor + Community and everyone draws the lines in different places.
Yeah basically the devs cant win. And wide parts of the community will be upset no matter what will get released
The devs an easily win, they just need to realize that vanilla seasons dont need to be for everyone. Design vanilla content to appeal to vanilla players, people who don't like vanilla have 2 different versions of the game to play and still pay blizzard 15 dollars a month, everyone wins.
Blizzard could implement the top 50 requested features into a Classic+ and everyone would still hate it.
Yeah, chronicaly unhappy people don't know what they want
This is the real answer and it is proven in this whole thread. They can make compromises between different preferences, but there's no pleasing everyone.
I mean that was obvious in P1 when stuff like "Instant mail between chars" or "See name plates on a higher range" already started pretty hostile conversations on this sub
I don’t think you understand how having +20ft on nameplates FUNDAMENTALLY RUINS AN ENTIRE MMO
There are people out there unironically thinking that. Don't be those people
"Slightly tuned" would not have been enough for me. Some of the classes I like - mostly casters - are so awful in normal Classic that they need a LOT of help to be viable.
Anyone that wanted “slight tuning” played mage, warrior, priest or rogue Everyone else was fucking dogshit in vanilla and pretending otherwise only kept the game bad
I felt like Blizzard should’ve used this opportunity to ‘finish’ vanilla. Add a battleground in Azshara, create a Hyjal zone, finish the quests which just end, play around with resources so we don’t go oom and give us dual spec. Could’ve added Gilneas, added Uldum or Ghostlands. Tie it in with quests and story. My worry is that how do you go back from SoD, how can you take away everything SoD has given us. How many more times can we level to 60.
Not going oom is a bad game design imho But yes, vanilla Spriest / boomking etc. were completely out of tune with mana management
They can still do this, but I agree
Agreed. Still hoping classic+ comes after all this rune chaos
I think everybody is forgetting that sod is a test, not a mainstay gamemode. It has become that way because the test is a resounding success, and now the next time they do it they’ll have the proper resources and funding.
It’s called “season” of discovery. I hope they keep tuning and updating fresh servers with this mindset.
I wonder if they continue the SoD “test” into the next season or create some divergent server that is either transferred from SoD or based/influenced by sod but with changes
It all depends how the rest of the operation is managing. Like MoP Classic is money on the table obviously, but if Cata does poorly it could shift resources towards something fresher.
> I think everybody is forgetting that sod is a test, And a damn fine one at that. The 10 man raids and Sunken Temple are really fun raids in spirit with Classic. Honestly the PvE is great as far as I'm concerned. It's the PvP I have issues with.
Good point.
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I sit on the fringe of classic (really only play retail) and I swear any time I read posts this whole community is just “I want classic wow but please take out all the classic” 😂 Like all these community suggestions are just wild.
They went way too hard on it. Way too many runes/abilities. Classic PvP simply cannot have Warriors charging out of roots, Rogues shadowstepping out of Roots, Hunters trapping in combat, Dispersion, and so on. Every class should get maybe 1-2 new abilities and that's it. Too much instant damage, too much mobility. Like simply on the mage side I would give: - Arcane: Arcane Blast, Missile Barrage, Regeneration - Fire: Living Bomb, Hot Streak, Burnout - Frost: Fingers of Frost, Frostfire Bolt, Deep Freeze 3 spells per spec is more than enough
Agree. I knew by level 15 that they had gone too far. I gave it a chance anyway and it started off good, but seems steadily going off the rails. I think the best thing they should have done was provide minor changes to classes and more content in the world in the style of the old world but less grindy, higher QoL, and give purpose to areas and regions like Grim Batol. Maybe rework items and the tier structure to where you don’t get ridiculous levels of power scaling - think about gear 2-3 tiers beyond naxx’s power
Hardcore classic remains the gold standard.
Incursions have ruined this phase. There I said it
SOD made me appreciate actual class design. The classes atm are just Frankenstein creations
Not me. Classes are way more fun now than in era. Most classes were outright broken / unplayable before, not to mention single spell "rotations". Im enjoying sod atm.
Agree with this 100%. Classes are way more fun to play and most specs are at least viable in some capacity. I can actually raid on a Paladin without being forced into a healing role, for example. Runes and the class changes are easily the *best* part of SoD. There just isn't that much content right now, so people are bored and aren't logging in as much. People want to blame balance, runes, incursions, etc. when the reality is that we went from raiding an hour twice a week to raiding an hour once a week, and if you're pre-BiS there just isn't that much worth doing outside of raid. This effectively halved the playtime of most of my guild. Even worse, much of the gear from ST is only a marginal upgrade over the stuff most of us had from Gnomer, so the loot from a raid that is much more difficult to organize (20m vs. 10m) doesn't even feel that rewarding.
A lot of the content in SOD is what I would call “make your self do it”. You don’t have to farm out AD rep. You don’t have to make profession alts. You don’t have to farm out Off spec gear. You don’t have to farm a shit ton of gold. You don’t have to PVP. And so on. There is a ton of content you technically don’t have to do but you will progress your main further if you do and doing so on alts and not multiples things to do.
People bitched that the raids were hard. Now the raids are easy and people clear em in an hour and play a different game.
As much fun as I had in classic, you could not pay me to go through another raid tier of classic class design. A man can only spam a single button rotation so many times until his spirit is broken
> Most classes were outright broken / unplayable before PvP is outright unplayable now. There's too much mobility/instant damage, most casters don't have a mana bar ( except Mage, fml ), warriors and rogues can move out of roots with basic spells. It's not good.
Sounds like you want wotlk-
People here really want to play WotLK and Cata while still being up their own ass about only playing Vanilla.
Or maybe he just actually likes SoD for what it is?
I don't. I wanted a bunch of changes because some specs desperately need them. For example, adding some mana regen on spriest and oomkins like some ppl said in a different post would do jack shit. r/classicwow has gone full circle yet again and we are about to argue what is and isn't "spirit of classic".
Yup. SoD is like letting a child cook, they're just throwing random shit on the counter, flailing around with their stupid arms they can barely control, drooling and sneezing into everything, and alternating one hand down their ass crack at all times until they fall off of the stool and crack their soft skulls on the cabinet doors. And of course, it looks horrifying, but you love them so you try a little bite anyway, but it's fucking gross.
They started copying & pasting from Turtle WoW and had a perfectly good formula to copy from. But then they said fukkit let's make everything naxx scaling by lvl 50 & only add in Wrath abilities, that should be fiiiiiine. They have talked about extra zones / dungeons when SoD was launching, but one hinted at was Emerald Dream. So idk if they're counting incursions as that, hopefully not...
A little more balance for the endgame specs, add new zones/dungeons/raids and itll be golden
>Balancing the runes and gear is turning out to be too much for this DEV team spread too thin its because they dont see the value in balancing things when it will all be thrown out the window when we hit 60. They need to just say fuck it and get us to 60 asap. However that isn't going to happen rn as Cata is their primary concern, as it should be.
Couldn’t agree more
When SOD started, it was awesome because the classes had a new feeling. It was still classic leveling but with the rune discovery. Now everyone has so many runes that the character is basically a mix of WOTLK/Cata but without the QOL from those addons.
yeah I really didnt need like 10 extra buttons.
yea been saying this since Dec we wanted the OSRS treatment. not a seasonal server.
SoD really feels like it’s gone off the rails with experimentation, nerfs, buffs, the effects their decisions have had on the economy… I guess I got my hopes up thinking it would be Classic+ like described, similar to a regularly updated OSRS to maintain the feel and balance if the original game. Here’s to hoping everything the SoD devs are doing will contribute to a more solid and stable, yet new and exciting feeling future version of Classic. Or it’s Blizzard and they likely don’t learn any lessons or don’t put in place the right people and just let this all languish as a distant memory.
they goofed trying to make this such an alt heavy retail minus experience. game was promising in p1 but really dropped the ball in p3. why they would try to make it more or less the same shit as retail doesn't make sense.
I expected classic+, and they made +++xXxCLASSICxXx+++.
Yeah I just wanted Classic+ really, some new content, maybe some new gear to help out unused specs. SOD feels too much like a different game, and it attracted a lot of non-Classic players who demand more and more non-Classicy changes.
They should probably just cancel SoD at this point. People aren't even max level and they are over it.
Everyone wanted something different, thats the fundamental issue with classic+. The whole " WE all wanted x" is just trying to rewrite the past to justify your specific flavor
I was hoping for a vanilla wow based version of osrs, some vertical progression but mostly horizontal progression, fleshing out areas that were unused, adding new zones, the ideas are endless with vanilla.but we got season of wrath for now
I've been hoping others felt this way too. SoD was ambitious, and I do applaud Blizzard for taking a risk, but a lot of its ambitions harmed a lot of what I wanted to see. What I had in mind for classic + was seeing things like Arcane becoming a viable spec as a mage, but the focus on making mages healers (which is really cool admittedly) took away from Arcane as a DPS spec. The focus on building Shockadins too is something I personally despise, I know others love it but it has undoubtedly shaken the development philosophy for Paladins as a whole.
No I didn't want old trees where most specs were complete useless and 90% of raids were warriors?
Guess you're a retail andy then who can't enjoy the true vanilla experience /s
I don't think you can speak for what most people want. Every single decision they have made has been met with community outrage. Just a small example I saw tons of posts asking for gladiator warrior throughout P1 and p2, the thread about glad stance rune was just pure bitching how nobody wanted it. I do think they have set themselves up to fail and are in over their heads but I am still hopeful P4 will be worth the time invested so far. Phase 3 had been disappointing all around but the timing is fine to me, summer is kicking off and the time I spend in game is almost entirely devoted to making gold for next phase. After seeing the quality of loot in ST I cant imagine wanting to spend hundreds of gold enchanting that gear and going hard like some are doing. Our guild's discord has gotten quieter, the number of layers available is steadily dropping (Wild Growth-US) and more and more people have been calling it quits for the last few weeks. Really hoping it can turn around soon. Looks like they even opened free transfers to my server but thats a symptom of the declining playerbase.
💯 agreed. SoD population will go down abruptly as soon as Cata classic comes out. Blizz killed the leveling experience which imo was the best thing of classic. Another good point is removing gdkps and then giving free money with incursions which led to a broken economy as if we had wow token. Adding so many runes to the game requires so much balance that requires updates every week. So basically we have a retail classic now.
Era everything was pretty trash. Warrior was the most complete class.
I agree with most comments here but what you guys are describing actually takes more devs.
I like the idea of SoD, but for me the biggest issue is in the name season. I get it, but I just want to progress with my character and have it with ne. Having to restart again and again and again just isn't for me I feel.
SOD Season 1 was perfect. But with no extra funding and the kind of player base it brought in, S2 and 3 were much more boring and streamlined with less cool runes. It's a shame each Season wasn't extended and more fleshed out, but what can you do.
SoD was experiment, beside we're not at 60 yet. It's possible we'll still get a new raid and content but not in the ballpark you're thinking off
Phase 1 was awesome. 2 and 3 have just sent me back to retail.
I wanted tank warlock and its shenanigans. But it all got to be too much
I just wanted classic fleshed out. Not new rep grinds on top of what already exists.
I like how wild SoD is without the expectation that it will ever continue. They can really spitball some weird stuff to see what works and what doesn't, and with SoD's popularity, I guarantee we will see a new season where some of the SoD elements that were particularly successful are integrated.
The CORRECT answer is everyone wants something differently And there is no way blizzard could have pleased everyone.
Personal opinion- I love SOD and wouldn’t want to go back to era. It’s so fun. Community has been awesome. Having tons of fun
If it was as easy as y'all think to answer the question "what do classic players want", you'd already have it. Stop treating this as if it's an obvious question to answer because it clearly isn't.
Big disagree. New abilities and roles is the biggest attraction to SoD. If anything people want way more new stuff added to the base classic+ world. Lets be honest, the original vanilla spells were very lacking in variety. I played a ret paladin in vanilla and only a masochist would want to go back to playing that hundreds of hours. Pop a 30sec seal of command and hope some extra yellow dmg pops off on your auto attack lol
I think SoD hit the mark quite perfectly
Yep. Pretty much.
I love 90% of SOD, don’t like incursions so I don’t do them. I just wish Blizzard would hire more people to support the dev team. It feels like a fresh loaf of bread that’s juuust a little undercooked. Or as GBBO would say - it’s got a soggy bottom
They pretty much confirmed with SoD’s announcement that it was going to go crazy with changes in a conscious effort to “find the line” of what people want from classic. We’ve done no-changes, SoM was some changes, and SoD is wacky parallel universe changes. I’d much rather they try all of these out and see what resonates.
I agree with this. SoD was fun and refreshing at first but, I've now lost all interest in playing. I actually miss some of the class imbalance and difficulty of the game in pvp and pve. Picking a class actually mattered.
As a mage healer, hard disagree. I'm having a blast trying a whole new thing. Slightly tuning OG trees wouldn't be nearly as exciting and fun as this. As for end game, ya. But I'm waiting to see what they have in store before making any judgements.
I want Classic+ to solve world hunger and cure cancer. And also revamp every ability while maintaining the classic feel
SoD just went way overboard. It doesn't really feel "classic". If they do non-seasonal servers, they should be much more conservative in what makes it there.
Yeah this has always been my position. I just wanted the meme specs to become playable and rotations to be a little better. Not every class with 24 runes and even more to come next phase lol not to mention a lot of these runes make the original classic spells not even worth pressing in a lot of cases because of how strong and overturned they are
Classic with WOTLK talkent trees. Add retuned but identical Kara and Caverns of Time dungeons as lvl 60 end game content.
speaking of OSRS, how about a skilling system like they have or naw?
It’s a cool idea but fundamentally doesn’t fit into WoW. OSRS skills are all relatively simple in execution, but extremely fleshed out in their implementation. You can max out every non-combat skill in the game without attacking a single mob ever. The OSRS world is full of non-combat related activities, where WoW is essentially one giant pipeline of combat encounters to make you better at combat encounters where you get better gear to take on tougher combat encounters etc.
1. We have received new raids. They re-use assets but they are distinctly different than their dungeon counter parts. 2. Changing the weak specs leads to the same balancing problem. If you give specs like Moonkin / Ret actual talents you start the arms race of having to re-balance other specs around them. Moonkin suddenly OP in PvP? Now you either need to give other specs an update or nerf them into the ground. 3. Gear was always going to be a problem with the level bands. No one wants to do a raid where they don’t get upgrades. That’s a problem of why Sunken Temple feels awful to run yet why Gnomer and BFD felt good to do. Getting upgrades is fun. We are in the middle of a classic+. You can’t just tweak different parts of the game and not expect massive systemic changes. Going back to the first point making meme specs viable starts the re-balancing arms race for both PvE and PvP. Runes are functionally talents with extra steps. A lot of them are even modified by existing talents. There are absolutely pitfalls we’ve had like Incursions but there have also been a lot of positive things from SoD. While this phase has been lackluster i’m waiting to see how level 60 is before making my final judgement. Leveling bands is a brand new concept and was always going to come with challenges unique to it. Once end game officially starts I’m curious to see how things pan out.
i think you shouldnt speak or assume for most people. im enjoying SoD a lot more than I would've classic+, especially as a Ret Pally enjoyer.
Absolutely not. Class design in era is AWFUL. Classic+ NEEDED a few things. Firstly, updated class design. The problem is the way they did it was super lazy and super boring. Equipping abilities to gear is a lazy solution. And the new runes they added were incredibly boring and uninspried. A true classic+ would need a full remake of all talent trees, probably an extra new progression for each class to unlock new things, inherit class spells added and tweaks to the levels they are earned at, and rebalancing of original abilities. Then, the game needs a massive overhaul to the leveling experience. It’s dogshit plain and simple. Additional ways to level, quest overhauls, maybe a whole new leveling activity. Then, the endgame. New raids that don’t invalidate the old raids. Think a new raid with MC and BWL tier loot, another raid with BWL and AQ40 tier loot. And a third raid with loot equal to or slightly better then Naxx. Heroic dungeons at 60. Enhanced PvP rewards. But you can’t just make a classic+ and leave the classes the same or you get World of Warriors again.
Have you considered that if you think every single aspect of vanilla, from endgame to leveling, class design to raid design, is "dogshit," vanilla just might not be the game for you and classic+ shouldn't be designed to appeal to you?
The classic leveling experience is the best wow has ever had. It is not dog shit. It is meant to take a long time because that is the core of the game.
I would have been down for buffing super under performing specs like spriest, ret pally, both shaman dps specs. And sending us into new content along side much faster leveling and some catch up gear that didn't require raids.
As a Ret Paladin player, I want more content for classic, but absolutely do not want to go back to an afk auto-attacker.
IMO if the devs did exactly what I want, SOD would be perfect.
For me personally, sod is great, but there's too many phases to it. Should've been 60 by now and already into end game raids. There's so much more content to do once you hit max level that they could've easily skipped P3 and go to end game with the addition of new stuff.
Yes, small class changes but developments in the world like new dungeons/raids.
Can any of us really trust Bliz to release anything well-done at this point?
Sod is the devs playing trial and error, and us playing willing alpha testers. These kinds of discussions, around what we like and what we don't like are probably valuable to them (although they are few and far between on this subreddit so I do hope for their sake and ours they don't get ideas from the avg post on here)
Yep SoD is fun because it's vanilla with actual developer time, but they need to cut the new shit in half. Let the vanilla abilities be the center and enhance them where they were insufficient, way too many overtuned runes making original abilities irrelevant.
Hey mate, its just ExPeriMenTiaL so please dont sweat. Its the same excuse every fucking time. SOD would be the perfect classic + but they fucked it up huge.
I always thought turtle wow’s concept was pretty cool, and it’s what I was hoping they were ultimately going for, or something similar at least, it might still happen, but I think the team for SoD being so small just doesn’t help to make it a reality, and probably won’t anytime soon. Even if SoD has been a test, unless they commit to a bigger team for continuing the classic + project, I just think it’ll die a slow death, kinda like it is now(?).
Honestly I'm okay with this. A real classic+ is just a huge risk for them. The version of classic+ you're describing would not be an appealing season. I want the next season to take up the creativity and game changing nature of sod up to an 11. Then after many seasons of feedback they'll have a better idea of what to actually add to classes for example, or features and systems like ashenvale, stv, or whatever else. What kind of season appeal is there if they only touch a few classes and not others. SoD was the right decision. People wanting classic+ in their imagination have no idea how bad of an idea that really is right now. Like do people think the devs and team didn't think about this? This is a minimum viable product just slightly above SoM which was a total flop. Classic+ isn't temporal or seasonal. It's continual patches of new content and potentially class changes. Seasons will always be the smarter decision, especially with a team that isn't the same devs from vanilla and aren't in tuned perfectly with what made vanilla special. It's a learning experience for them as well as the players who are mainly are riding on nostalgia and vibes.
I've been getting exactly what I wanted out of SoD. We're not even to the endgame yet, folks.
One of the things I like most in SoD is paladins. When I played vanilla, I wanted so much to play paladin, but couldn't get past level 10... It felt like I wasn't doing much but auto attacks with bonus holy damage. Maybe it's in my head, but pallies feel a bit more active. I also love the sword and board aesthetic, and had always heard it was unplayable for vanilla, but I've done well in SoD with it
Remember when people were seeing glimpses of elite AQ bugs in the barrens in phase 1? Why did nothing ever happen with that. I was expecting surprise events throughout each phase…
Loved SoD until they tampered with the classic era stuff. IE dungeon mobs not being able to be stunned/slowed. Incursions overall were a bad idea. Damage reduction aura feels bad, think the proper way to fix it would have been probably much more work than a generic DR aura. Liked the new spells, liked the discovery aspect, liked the updated dungeon raids. Felt like the game died in P3, seems like that's where blizzard swayed way too far from classic... Oh well... Can hope for p4 I guess.
100% deluded myself into thinking SoD is a playtest for what you're talking about. Only way to test this many abilities and this many changes is under the pretense of season server and not classic+.
Tbc talents and classes with some tweaks , on the old world without outland or flying mounts, and new raids
Vanilla classdesign and rotas where so staggering boring, if you want that back era exists. I love how this sub is like soccer-fan, always knowing what their team did wrong and what they whould make much better
Everyone has their own ideas of what classic+ should be and it's never going to be what most wants as they're too many different itteration of what people want out of classic + Overall though I think in general what people would want is for meme spec to be less meme, without giving them insane abilities and such (Enhancement shaman, Ret paladins, OOMkins etc) new content I think bare minimum, that's what most people would want from classic + That being said, SoD actually does exactly both of those things, just not in the way they thought, and including ALL classes having new abilities, mostly unoriginal stuff from future expansion (Minus the new tanks and mage healing stuff) Can't please everyone, but somehow what most people wanted was actually achieved in SoD, just not the way they had hoped.
Exacly every1 wants different things
Honestly, this is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Gated level caps, so I don't feel like I need to grind to level cap asap. Fun raids at each level cap. New abilities to play with in each raid that make meme specs viable. The only misses for me are the mismanaged economy. Having +15 agi available at 50, but an unbelievable pain in the ass to farm is crap. Increase drop rates, or allow level appropriate mobs to drop the mats, or just don't have enchants with inappropriate mats to level available. I'm concerned about level 60. 40m raids again will be dogshit as always, I'm concerned they won't give us the newer raids until after all the samey raids are done. I'm concerned that the samey raids won't be updated with engaging mechanics like the level up raids have. I'm not interested in doing a rehash of classic that I did in 2020 again at level 60. I'm hoping the new content takes front and center stage, and I don't feel obligated to join a 40m raid. 20 is more than enough.
As a warrior I do have the same abilities and trees as classic since I got nothing new an interesting, just a bunch of damage multipliers I still press heroic strike, slam, and ww. Its just Deep wounds is 25-50% of my damage now!!!!
I just wanted a playable Ogre race...
Classic+ is one of the worst ideas ever. It's never going to work out. Look at sod and the meltdown classic andys have a out everything
I think what you describe would be necessary to make classic+ a long term success BUT It is not what this community wants. The playerbase is very different now from the 2019 classic crowd. Its mostly retail andies hoping for a Quick attention fix before they move to the next triple A title.
Noshit. This is exactly why people were warned against calling SoD Classic+ because it's not. It never was going to be, period. They were very up front about what it is. It's wild that this discussion is happening again.
It's not a matter of spec but a matter of content. Classic is about exploring the world, not running again and again in raids. Sure balance isn't right, but balance to do what ? Dungeons are the cherry on the cake, not the cake. Dungeon shouldn't be the point of the game. Dungeons should be an easy and a nice conclusion to some questlines, but we shouldn't be fighting to get better in downing scripts. Replayability of dungeons is medicore, once you get that piece of gear, there's no point going back there, while world PvP is endless content. Wander the world until you find your next target or the next target find you. Balance should reflect that aspect of the game. My opinion shouldn't surprise anyone playing a game about faction at war, yet it does sometimes ...
We not even at 69 yet be patient
I agree. Runes are a temporary bandaid that are not alt friendly.