Discussion; How do you feel Classic will be different from Vanilla?

[TehVoyager]

Hey all.

I’m wondering what everyone is anticipating as differences for Classic from the Vanilla experience. not so much in terms of the physical game engine, spells, etc. more the differences regarding the everything else.

I’ll start, to provide examples:

1: Addons.
I'm Imagining that the addon experience will be a lot different. people were starting from scratch in vanilla. now, out of the box, we're going to have damage meters (Details is already ported from the sounds of things), Auction house (Auctioneer and Auctionator), Bar replacements, Swing Timers, all the way up to full UI replacements (Elv has a classic branch already.) I imagine this will make the AH game a lot harder to play. I also expect a lot of players to be bitching about damage and such. I know that back in the day damage meters existed, but being much more rudimentary, so I’m guessing that at the time meant people didn't focus on them quite as hard (in relation to judging others). Also, with Group finder addons being developed already, I’m imagining that groups could also be a lot easier to find.
Hell, even WeakAuras is Ported to Vanilla. that alone is going to make a lot of changes from the vanilla experience.
the biggest change I’m anticipating though is Deadly Boss Mods / Bigwigs. that's going to be a big change.

2: Knowledge.
With players starting with all the knowledge that top raiding guilds would jealously keep confidential in vanilla, I can foresee that causing a big change. for example: we all know how specific fights will play out.
Same with farming guides. everyone can go watch a YouTube video about how DM Tribute runs work, or Mara runs. And same again with class information. a great example of class information being significantly better now is how much information has been gained regarding Feral DPS Druids, as opposed to how it was back in vanilla.
Wowhead and YouTube will change the experience in pretty big ways.

3: Streamers.
Love em or Hate em, Streamer interaction is going to Significantly change any experiences on servers where they are going to be playing.


4: Hardware.
Since Vanilla, we've had a lot of computer hardware changes. larger resolutions, widescreen, better internet, Better processors and video cards are going to change things up from the vanilla experience in a big way. when wow launched, the great majority of players were still on Dialup, and Disconnections were common. screen size was at a huge premium, and in conjunction to CPU and GPU limitations you couldn’t / didn’t want to run a lot of addons. I’m imagining that raiding will be easier, based only on how much better internet connectivity is now.

On the other side of things, The server hardware is much different than it was back then. imagine an AQ event where the servers could handle the load, for example.


Anyways, Discuss! I'm interested to hear what others think is going to change Classic play.

[Kenneth]

I think you hit the main ones for sure. One that might be under knowledge still is the need for end game fast. Players in 2019 will be trying to breeze past the leveling to hit end game asap. Retail has bred us for this but it isn't a WoW specific issue. Gaming today is all about instant gratification, dopamine fixes, etc. So one big difference I think we will see is the slow paced, go on an adventure while your leveling, type gameplay dissapear

[TehVoyager]

Thats a good point. i wasn't around for vanilla, and the "go go endgame" mentality had allready started when i started, partway through TBC.

i do think that quest and Exp limitations will help with that though, going to have to do pretty much every quest in every zone in order to get the required exp, unless you are spamming dungeons with a pre-made group.

[Baldness]

I think you hit the main ones for sure. One that might be under knowledge still is the need for end game fast. Players in 2019 will be trying to breeze past the leveling to hit end game asap. Retail has bred us for this but it isn't a WoW specific issue. Gaming today is all about instant gratification, dopamine fixes, etc. So one big difference I think we will see is the slow paced, go on an adventure while your leveling, type gameplay dissapear

I don't know !

I think many people that played WOW way back when it was first launched will know that end game took some time to happen and unless you are in a raiding guild already being level 60 very early on will feel too lonely with little payoff.

Additionally, a lot of the target player base will be coming back to WOW and will not have the time to play that they did in the original.

So I think there will be plenty of slow levellers.

Blizzard will have to do some juggling to keep server populations right because numbers are critical when raids are 40 players..

Sure there will be plenty that race to level 60 though but the added factor will be people quitting Classic because Classic raiding will be tortuous for many who haven't experienced how it was and other factors that will pull them back to other versions of WOW.

There is going to be a lot of drama to deal with in Classic.