Aug 26, a classic mmorpg releases. How will

[Charistoph]

2 hours ago, biostem said:

I played WoW a little when it first came out.  Perhaps I'm still bitter about it, but it annoys me that because of WoW, we didn't get another full-fledged Warcraft RTS.  It also irked me that you practically had to use add-ons to efficiently navigate to quests and such, (or maybe CoH's clear marking of quest locations just spoiled me).  I also didn't like how many of my friends who play WoW almost view it as work... 

I remember that Warcraft 3 was supposed to have a stronger RPG flavor than it released with.  You literally only controlled your hero.  You didn't control the base or what it did or anything.  You ran your hero around to fight or collect troops to fight with, and that's it.  In a way, it is a cross between some of the WoW content where you're escorted by NPCs (an interesting take on escort missions) and what Starcraft 2 does in some areas.

[Boon]

Im not even excited 😞 and I use to love MC 40-man raids till 4am with work at 7am with a guild that used some bastardization of a DKP system that ensured I never got any loot.

 

 

[THEDarkTyger]

On 8/3/2019 at 1:51 PM, DR_Mechano said:

the whole 'Classic was difficult lol' thing

Funny thing is, it WASN'T difficult. Just time consuming.

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, THEDarkTyger said:

Funny thing is, it WASN'T difficult. Just time consuming.

Time consuming, and not even remotely friendly to solo leveling past about level 20. 😢

[THEDarkTyger]

28 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

Time consuming, and not even remotely friendly to solo leveling past about level 20. 😢

God has that changed now. Too far the other way.

[Primantis]

On 8/3/2019 at 12:59 PM, Charistoph said:

Yeah, one of the best examples of Vanilla WoW's problems were the so-called "hybrids".    Druids and Paladins were supposed to be able to Tank, even Shamans could a little, theoretically.  However, they often lacked the tools the Warriors had to be effective at it, especially as the content you were facing was more difficult than your equipment or level could address.  They were often left to healing, especially when their damage couldn't keep up any more than their tanking could.  Even the raiding gear pushed them in to those pigeon holes as well.

 

 

 

Yea, Hybrids and itemization are going to be a rude awakening to a lot of people.  QoL updates such as Spell Damage scaling with Intellect, Healing/Spell Damage being under the same banner, spell damage schools all being combined into one etc.. Just didn't exist yet in Vanilla.

 

In Cata, you had something like +100 spell power on your gear. Back in Vanilla it was either +50 Healing. Or maybe +66 Nature Damage. It was very specific. Tier 1-3 gear was also proprietary with no options. You had 1 set of Tier Gear and it was balanced for the "Raid Spec" of that class in most cases. IE Priests got Holy Gear, not Shadow Gear. There were no other options.

 

If you wanted to go against the grain and main a non-raid spec you your only hopes were "pity" slots in the raid and scavenging hodgepodge non-set pieces of gear. A feral druid had to wait until some Non-Tier piece of Rogue gear dropped. There was very little raid gear specifically made for Feral Druids in Vanilla.

 

There was a reason that "Clothadins" existed xD

 

 

Honestly I wish they either rolled up a Wrath server or a TBC. Although Blizzard has mentioned that those are possible if Vanilla is successful. I'll probably still level a toon in Vanilla just to revisit old memories, but I don't plan on raiding. Ain't got no time for that!

 

Edited August 5, 2019 by Primantis

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, THEDarkTyger said:

God has that changed now. Too far the other way.

Dunno what Legion or Battle did, but at least up through Warlords, I rather liked it, myself.

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, Primantis said:

a Wrath server

... that would get me back.  Especially if Inscription worked the old way - that was how I financed myself, and my then-g/f, on Horde-side: I had Herbalism and Inscription both, on my Forsaken Death Knight.  I'd spend a couple hours just Herbing, then park myself somewhere quiet with a pile of supplies, scribe a couple dozen Glyphs, and head for the AH.

 

Come morning, I'd be several hundred gold richer .... even underselling everyone else by a good 10%.  No exhorbitantly-priced stuff either; since most Glyphs were Raid level content, paying 50g or 100g was "loose change" level for most of my customers.

...

Then they changed how Glyphs work, and the bottom got kicked right out of the market.  ESPECIALLY when they became "once-and-done" memorization things.  It was at the point where it made no sense to mill herbs into pigments anymore ... the herbs were worth more than the pigments, the inks, or even the finished glyphs.  By a factor of five to ten!!

THAT really cheesed me off.  Eventually, halfway through Warlords, I just dropped Inscription (which I'd had maxxed out for, like, ALWAYS and forever) and picked up Skinning instead.  😢 

[Primantis]

Yea, I really really enjoyed Wrath. It was probably my favorite 'era' overall.

 

 

 

 

 

[Charistoph]

3 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Time consuming, and not even remotely friendly to solo leveling past about level 20. 😢

I found it so, relatively speaking, and I was running a Dwarf Warrior in Protection Spec because I was running as the tank for my room-mate and his brothers.  We four-manned Gnomregon and Dead Mines rather handily.  We started breaking up after Gnome-town, though.  My leveling between dungeons was slower (surprise surprise), and I was an altoholic.  Of course, I'm comparing to Dark Age of Camelot, FFXI, and Vanguard, too.

 

You want to talk about not being solo-friendly?  Look at FFXI, where only a couple classes could get to level 10 without a group (at least, if your luck with RNG is incredibly poor like mine is).  Vanguard was almost as brutal, but once you hit your teens, you either needed to group, seek content you were over-leveled on, or be really lucky/good.  Pantheon is looking to be similarly rough if what the devs have been saying is in the finalized version.

[Tanker_Toy]

It's interesting, people are all worked up about this version of the game coming out. I left CoH for awhile to play WoW, joining a raiding guild, and eventually becoming it's leader. I transferred eventually and ended up on a large population server that had some of the top guilds in the game on it, one of which I eventually joined. During BC we competed heavily and got a few server firsts. To me, Burning Crusade was the pinnacle of the game. I just like how the expansion felt, and everything about it. I left during Wrath which was just, well, boring to me.  I've come back a few times but signed off for what I think the last time was this last spring when the Homecoming servers popped up here.

 

While a classic version of WoW might have it's appeal, I think people are going to quickly see the crappy stuff about it. Like killing spread out mobs in Silithus for weeks on end to complete a set that, while not as good as top level, was still pretty good? Yeah, not a fan of revisiting that. Foul mouthed Bnet kiddies. Time sinks that include horridly slow travel at first. Raids that were fun at the time but upon the revisiting of them, proved to be boring - Molten Core is the perfect example, which was rereleased at a high level during Warlords. Turns out that place was fun to do once, but it sated my nostalgia after that. And worst of all, having to literally live my life online for months on end if I want to be competitive in it.

 

I've read somewhere that the developers were going to fix a few things that needed to be fixed for it, but I have little faith in it.

[Sidious]

It wont. I quit WoW cold turkey in 2009 and apart from popping in every 5 years to see if my account has been hacked again, I'm happier for it.

[DR_Mechano]

19 hours ago, THEDarkTyger said:

Funny thing is, it WASN'T difficult. Just time consuming.

That was exactly my argument. Classic WoW isn't difficult, it's just time consuming and designed to waste your time in as many ways as possible because that is what the EQ style of MMO DID back then. Like I said, a lot of people are looking at this via Streamer nostalgia. These same streamers are also going to be the ones who have subs randomly running up to them and dumping gear on them just so they can get a "Oh thanks xxxhordesucksxxx for the gold and gear" 5 second thanks whilst the streamer then just carries on and forgets about that person in about 5 minutes. Unless they literally insist that the subs give them nothing, no leveling help, no help in dungeons, that the streamer has to find all their dungeon team mates on their own, then they're never going to have the same experience as joe public.

 

Maybe I'm just bitter because myself and a team of others use to be a 'Pokemon competitive breeding team' for several pokemon streamers during the X and Y days. A group of 5 of us would put in huge work actually getting a specific Pokemon with the right nature, EVs and IVs for competitive pokemon streamers since they didn't 'have the time' to do it themselves (i.e. Each one of us would focus on one specific pokemon and we had to have it ready for their next stream, which sometimes meant taking literally 4-5 hours out of our lives to get it set up several times a week in addition to working a full time job).  We maybe got a shoutout at the beginning of a stream and that was it. They would then use all our hard work and be the ones getting all the twitch and patreon donations whilst we got nothing because we were doing it 'for the love of the game'. After about two weeks of this I gave up and some other poor schlub jumped at the chance to take my place in a mostly thankless task.

[jubakumbi]

9 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

Maybe I'm just bitter because myself and a team of others use to be a 'Pokemon competitive breeding team' for several pokemon streamers during the X and Y days. A group of 5 of us would put in huge work actually getting a specific Pokemon with the right nature, EVs and IVs for competitive pokemon streamers since they didn't 'have the time' to do it themselves (i.e. Each one of us would focus on one specific pokemon and we had to have it ready for their next stream, which sometimes meant taking literally 4-5 hours out of our lives to get it set up several times a week in addition to working a full time job).  We maybe got a shoutout at the beginning of a stream and that was it. They would then use all our hard work and be the ones getting all the twitch and patreon donations whilst we got nothing because we were doing it 'for the love of the game'. After about two weeks of this I gave up and some other poor schlub jumped at the chance to take my place in a mostly thankless task.

Meanwhile, I look at people watching these streams and think 'why?'...

I don't watch sports either.

Watching someone else have fun is just not my idea of fun...

 

For some truly competiive things, I get reviewing strategies, etc., but the entire 'ecosystem' around watching other people play video games baffles me ...

Lots of people have lots of reasons they love it, I am glad it brings them joy, it is just really odd to me.

[Locruid]

I started playing WoW on the day it released and played faithfully every damn day up until June.  And for my loyalty I watched a game go from it's glory to a shell of what it was.  The devs no longer listen nor care about the player base.  The day I found out COH was being run again was the day I canceled my WoW Sub for the first time and been here ever since.

 

My only gripe is I WANT to donate money but the dang "window" of opportunity"  comes up and gets closed before I can blink lol

[Rathulfr]

I will be playing WoW Classic because my son wants me to play with him.  I figure if I can put up with CoH being gone for almost 7 years, I can put up with a month or so of WoW Classic until his nostalgia goggles wear off.

 

[DR_Mechano]

4 hours ago, jubakumbi said:

Meanwhile, I look at people watching these streams and think 'why?'...

I don't watch sports either.

Watching someone else have fun is just not my idea of fun...

 

For some truly competiive things, I get reviewing strategies, etc., but the entire 'ecosystem' around watching other people play video games baffles me ...

Lots of people have lots of reasons they love it, I am glad it brings them joy, it is just really odd to me.

I don't watch twitch streams because...well..I like having the ability to pause and walk away without missing anything.  When I was doing the whole pokemon theme it was 'hinted' at that we would be compensated for our efforts. Unfortunately said compensation turned out to be the equivalent of 'paying you in exposure' and the idea what that if we did streams that our shoutouts would help us build a community base. Naturally learning this was what caused me to ditch the whole thing because 1) I wasn't a streamer, I didn't and still don't have time for that, not to mention the personality or looks to really pull people in. 2) I knew that people would probably check out your channel once and go back to watching the streamer they actually enjoyed. You either have to be VERY good at games or VERY bad at games to pull an audience. Which is why one of my original ideas if I ever got the time to stream was going to be a "Myself + Friend fail at X" stream. Since neither of us knew anything about League of Legends or DotA in general we'd stream us being awful at it. 

[PaxArcana]

19 hours ago, Charistoph said:

I found it so, relatively speaking, and I was running a Dwarf Warrior in Protection Spec because I was running as the tank for my room-mate and his brothers.  We four-manned Gnomregon and Dead Mines rather handily. 

... yeah, um, "a party of four" != "solo".  Solo means, "never have to team up at all".

Also, was this before or after TBC?

Because, let me tell you, in Loch Modan, as a level 21 or 22 Dwarf Hunter ... I was sent out to hunt ... um, cyclopes or ogres, I forget which.  But they were big.  And all of them were elites.  Now, I could do one, solo.  If I was careful to make it JUST the one.  But it was a long, hard fight ... followed by having to sit down and eat/drink (and feed my brown bear, Muffin).  After every single fight.  And the quest wanted me to cap a good forty to sixty of the blasted things!!

That's not playing.  That's grinding, and to me, that is completely and entirely unfun.  Catastrophically so, even.

I don't mind if leveling itself is slower - just make sure I can actually be doing things, measurably, the whole time.  "Not solo friendly" doesn't only mean thats oloing isn't possible, it can also mean just that soloing isn't fun.

[Charistoph]

1 minute ago, PaxArcana said:

... yeah, um, "a party of four" != "solo".  Solo means, "never have to team up at all".

Also, was this before or after TBC?

Because, let me tell you, in Loch Modan, as a level 21 or 22 Dwarf Hunter ... I was sent out to hunt ... um, cyclopes or ogres, I forget which.  But they were big.  And all of them were elites.  Now, I could do one, solo.  If I was careful to make it JUST the one.  But it was a long, hard fight ... followed by having to sit down and eat/drink (and feed my brown bear, Muffin).  After every single fight.  And the quest wanted me to cap a good forty to sixty of the blasted things!!

That's not playing.  That's grinding, and to me, that is completely and entirely unfun.  Catastrophically so, even.

I don't mind if leveling itself is slower - just make sure I can actually be doing things, measurably, the whole time.  "Not solo friendly" doesn't only mean thats oloing isn't possible, it can also mean just that soloing isn't fun.

When we weren't in a dungeon, we were solo, and Draenei weren't an option at the time.

 

Yeah, certain areas were not expected to be soloed when you got the quests to go there.  I got around some of that by region hopping to keep leveling in quests easy.  If certain parts of Lock Modan were hard, I'd be heading to either the Wetlands or head down south to Westfall and Red Ridge.  I always had something to do, some of it was definitely either dropped or delayed, though.

 

And compared to any other MMORPG out there at the time, besides maybe CoH, WoW was very soloable.  You just had to be relatively smart and not continue to try and bang your heads against certain walls alone.

[THEDarkTyger]

2 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Because, let me tell you, in Loch Modan, as a level 21 or 22 Dwarf Hunter ... I was sent out to hunt ... um, cyclopes or ogres, I forget which.  But they were big.  And all of them were elites.  Now, I could do one, solo.  If I was careful to make it JUST the one.  But it was a long, hard fight ... followed by having to sit down and eat/drink (and feed my brown bear, Muffin).  After every single fight.  And the quest wanted me to cap a good forty to sixty of the blasted things!!

Elite quests were clearly marked as such and always purely optional.

[Charistoph]

1 hour ago, THEDarkTyger said:

Elite quests were clearly marked as such and always purely optional.

Not always.  I remember finding out the hard way which ones were Elite, Dungeons, and other aspects.  Those aspects were added after launch.  I can't remember how long, though.

[Primantis]

2 hours ago, Charistoph said:

Not always.  I remember finding out the hard way which ones were Elite, Dungeons, and other aspects.  Those aspects were added after launch.  I can't remember how long, though.

 

 

Word is we're getting the final Classic patch 1.12. So some of the classic QoL additions will be there.

 

Now this is not the pre-TBC patch. Shammies won't have dual wield or Earth Shield, etc.

 

And yes, you could skip every dungeon and every elite quest and still hit level cap within a reasonable amount of time. It might have involved a bit more grinding, but it was still very realistically achievable. The secret was doing content for every zone, not just your race's zones. Hit a wall in Loch Modan? Go visit the Human zones, it's just a tram-ride away. Once those are finished there's a few Night Elf zones as well. Even if the content was "Green", you zoomed right through it and it was very much worth doing.

 

Horde were stuck in the barrens for a long time, or you could venture out to the Forsaken's zones for a nice change of pace.

 

You were not shoehorned into one story line and exploring paid off via streams of new content to conquer. Everything was just far away enough to make it feel like a journey but not so far away to make it feel really tedious.. Granted the game I played before hand was FFXI, where it could take upwards of an hour for a boat ride between hubs if your timing was bad. So my perspective on "Time Sink" was a bit skewed.

[TheOtherTed]

The only reason I'd play classic WoW would be roll a shaman, take a hit of something trippy, and groove with the invisible spirits that are, like, all around us, man.

Even then, I'd probably have flashbacks to leveling lockpicking in Azshara.

[Thramack]

I am not sure the people excited for Vanilla WoW are remembering Vanilla WoW correctly. I played CoH because I liked it. I played WoW because my SO and a many of my friends played and they needed a tank. 

 

I did have some good times in WoW, mostly RP, and am still friends with some of the people I met there, however these are things I remember most about it.
Ridiculously long, boring raids, that required hours of trash clearing to get to a Boss.

Bosses with nightmarish drop rates.

Other players ninja looting off role gear.

Horrible PuGs.
Vent shouting arguments.
And really it just not being the most pleasant experience as a whole. 
I did play for years though, and their art books are excellent...…..

I'm back home though, Don't plan on going anywhere.
 

[Primantis]

2 hours ago, Thramack said:

 

 

 

Very nice!

 

That reminds me.. On launch day my brother picked up a standard edition of WoW from Wal-Mart. Came home, installed it.. and low-and-behold the CD Key was buggered and it registered as a Collectors Edition! So he got the little in game perks for that while only buying a standard edition. XD