Jump to content

Classic Wow


Skywalkre

Recommended Posts

I know from various posts over the years here I'm not the only one who played and loved vanilla WoW.

 

For those who don't follow gaming news all that much (and honestly, given the sad state of WoW these days I would understand completely if former players did everything they could to avoid news from Blizzard) Classic WoW is coming back! Blizzard has been working on it officially for about a year now and recently announced the servers will go live 27 Aug. If you have a sub active two weeks before that you can save name and classes before launch day hits.

 

The game will be a mishmash of vanilla WoW. While the classes and most game features will be launched at 1.12 levels not all content will be available at launch. Certain raids and instances will be released in stages (so, for example, only Ony and MC will be available at launch... not BWL, world dragons, Naxx, or even Dire Maul) and even drop tables from instances will be adjusted to match how they were and evolved over the course of classic.

 

Retail WoW is in a really sorry state right now. The WoW subreddit has effectively been dead for months and there are rumors subs for the official game may have dipped below 1 million (compare to the 10 million+ the game enjoyed back at its peak). It's quite possible Classic may surpass retail WoW in active players. I'm certainly hoping for this as retail WoW has embraced so many of the toxic aspects of modern gaming. Would be quite the statement if players all swarmed a 15-year-old version of the game, rough edges and all.

 

So... anyone else going back? I'll be there launch day. Going to roll Horde this time to see what the quests and story were like for them. Right now it also seems I'll probably be going PvP server for the first time. I can't wait.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Been there, done that. Staged release sounds just like the original. I doubt I'll bother, the original feel won't be there, I already know every zone, there won't be any more epic death runs across the wetlands and the like. To me it's Activision's last gasp to suck the corpse dry.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There have been quite a few private servers over the years. They've been plagued by the occasional legal interjection of Blizzard, inability to completely recreate the actual environment of vanilla WoW, and the tinkering of their creators. They've been popular enough for 'that crowd' but private servers have always been a niche thing.

 

Still, Classic WoW is showing signs that it could legit pass retail WoW in active players. Someone in the subreddit pointed out the Twitch numbers and I looked them up myself last night. WoW as a category was like the 4th or 5th most viewed game. When you went in to look closer the overwhelming majority of those watching were watching those playing the Classic Beta. :blink:

 

There's precedent for this being a success as well. I forget which one (EQ?) but another of the older MMOs launched a classic version of their game and it became so popular they continued to develop content for it. Given the state of retail WoW, as mentioned above with the plummeting sub figures, there's hope amongst some that the same could happen to classic WoW. Maybe Blizz will reimagine follow-on xpacs based more in line with the philosophy of vanilla over what actually was. Old school Blizz could pull this off. Can the current crop of devs there do it now? That does seem a tall order...

 

Regardless, I'm still excited. Over all the various times I played WoW I was mostly Alliance. I'm looking forward to going back and questing up and seeing the world the Horde had. If that's all I get to do for a few months I'll be happy. I'm also wanting to finish Naxx (something I just missed out on back in vanilla). If I'm able to do that it'll be icing on the cake.

 

Edit to add: I'm also curious about, on the raiding front, to discover what we got wrong back then. There's a lot of talk from folks who used these private servers that us hardcore raiders were off on quite a few things back in vanilla (such as druids not being viable MTs... on the contrary the private server crowd is stating that by AQ/Naxx timeframe a druid is the go-to for MTing... that's quite the claim). Maybe it's the History major in me but that aspect of "all these players just got it wrong?" really intrigues me.

Edited by Skywalkre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ferals were excellent in the hands of a player who did collect the necessary bear tanking equipment (including the two rings and the chest piece from BWL). The cat damage exceeded a lazy raid rogue's damage, their bear was unparalleled at Nefarian entrance and other multi-mob encounters because they were equally protected all-round. My bear had 75% absorption plus some dodge and kept the main tank warriors motivated by occasional embarrassment.

 

The ferals' strenght was known at the time, but there appear to have been but one or two such players per ordinary server among thousands of players per server.

They nerfed the bear too much in a patch in early 2017, after Burning Crusade came out. IIRC I had calculated a 20% loss of dps for ferals by that patch, and did quit.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I only knew of one at the time who was tanking in Naxx. I frequented the EJ forums religiously back then and don't recall a lot of talk about them.

 

It's understandable, though, as gearing a Bear took a lot of work. You needed very specific gear to actually drop (I was a Hunter in a guild that killed C'Thun and got 3/4 of the way through Naxx before falling apart before the xpac... we never once got the xbow out of BWL that was 2nd BiS for our class despite clearing BWL for months). You then needed to be in a guild willing to give it to you for tanking. You had to be in a guild that wasn't constantly in need of replacements (in any decent guild a Bear would likely have a full healing set long before they had half a tanking set given how set pieces were designed and how often they dropped... he can heal with a respec, a warrior can't).

 

In short, these private server folks seem to be forgetting the logistics of vanilla WoW. Apparently many of these private servers made 'adjustments' to leveling speed, drop rate, and other mechanics which made gearing up so much easier. Blizz has said they're trying to recreate the vanilla experience as closely as possible so these private server players may be in for a surprise.

 

What's interesting, still, is last night I was reading more into this and despite all this support for Bears apparently the 'top' guilds on these private servers still mostly run with Prot Wars. Very confusing. Makes picking what class to play a bit difficult.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I left the tier 1 and 2 druid sets to the other druids, so they got well-equipped real fast and I kept using my mix that included rank 13 pvp gear. My healing set was mostly blue stuff including cloth and IIRC I only used it in a total of two encounters in MC & BWL. They didn't require me to heal more than that as long as I gave the mana recovery skill to priests.

 

Having rank 13 pvp gear and being the most infamous PvPer and notorious duelant in front of Ironforge (people at the auction house got the duel results in local chat) AND Ogrimmar before entering MC surely helped convincing people of letting me into the new raid, and performance in raids established my joker role.

 

The prejudice against ferals was strong because they were crap until lvl 60 due to item issues (same with shadow priests - better than healbot for individual leveling, but worse in teams) kept them from growing to their best in raids unless they were already outstanding in some way (guild leader, raid organizer, real world friend of the sames, PvP rank 13 etc.).

 

It was even worse for shadow priests until that one encounter in Naxx where they were indispensable. I once encountered an all-shadow damage green stuff shadow priest who outright nuked experienced duelants of any class who had pvp gear. I tried to recruit him/her for Warsong (we had no priest or paladin), but learned that I came too late; he/she had re-roled into healbot. I considered to pay him/her gold for re-roling back, but never met the player later.

 

 

Early WoW was a game where to quote a presentation, "5% of your players can destroy the other 95%". A single one of my guys was a more reliable Arathi flag defender than six randoms. You needed to find and identify those 5% if you wanted to achieve much. The bear and cat were unremarkable in the hands of the 95%.

 

related

https://www.filehosting.org/file/details/806244/ENDGAME.pptx

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Classic launched yesterday. Queues in NA ranged from 14000-25000 players. Many who actually got in reported servers that simply couldn't handle the load. Needless to say Blizz wasn't prepared </rimshot>.

 

Will be really interesting to see how long this interest lasts. Leveling is a fairly arduous process in Classic with the fastest speed-levelers possibly reaching 60 in just under 100h. Your average player will probably be closer to 240. For folks who have never done that before and don't necessarily know if the end-game is worth that effort will they be willing to grind out that long?

Edited by Skywalkre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

From what I've read in other places thus far they have done a fine job replicating the at launch state of classic wow. Although, I have yet to read about loot lag. Since I can't replicate the group I played the original game with I don't think I'll bother with this since most of the fun was playing it with people I knew. This from an article discussing the new classic servers killed any desire I had for the game.

 

 

 

Here, you’ll have to earn your high-level gear by diving into raid dungeons with thirty-nine other people, slowly piecing together your best possible equipment over days or weeks...
Edited by Harold Jones
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The best gear being from raids and requiring 40 (well, not really... the initial raids are so easy you could probably do them with 25 or so) to do them is the same as it was back in vanilla. Back then, though, so few did it (there was a stat along the lines of less than 1% of the playerbase ever killed a single boss in Naxx).

 

I'm really curious how things will change now that it seems most folks coming back to play are intent on raiding. Back in vanilla if you did dungeons and BGs you could get decent gear compared to the average player. Now, it's likely tier 1 will be the baseline for most players. Will make things interesting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Speaking of those early raids they were both cleared by a guild that could only field 25 max level characters.

 

Raiding in WoW (til at least late AQ40/Naxx) is drastically easier compared to retail. Leveling is a lot harder.

 

So far it's been a terrific experience. There's actually a sense of community. Folks are helpful and cooperative. I've grouped more and talked to more players in less than a week of playing Classic than I did all my playing time in Wrath->Legion. :blink:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...