Hello Guys,Since i couldn't decide which Discussion part(Topic) should i choose,i came to Wow General Discussion,Okay enough of introduction and let's get started:So This is as old as Jesus's flip flops,but why do people misd old Expansions like Orginal Wow which they call "Vanilla Wow" ,The burning crusade,And Wrath,some people say They messed up Wow in Cataclysm because they brought up some new things with Which i am not familliar,Well i started playing Wow in 2014 and m first expansion was Wrath on Deathwing server here,come on guys i'm 16 i am not old like you and hardcore like you,so can someone please clarify to me what was so special about old expansions before Cata or Mop or Wod or Legion Will or they allredy fcked up the game so casual newbies like me can have fun with the game but Hardcore ones may consider new wow expansions easier then getting Aids with the cheap Columbian Whores(No offense to Columbians i am just joking) i Do know something6 about the game,but i don't know everything,So thank you for your patience and i hope you can explain to me how the old days looked like in old expansions,Thanks for reading ,sorry if i offended you somehow and stay Cool,See ya in the comments.
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Da Old Dayz
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I myself have played retail back in 2007,8 with **** loads of my friends down the pc club.Honestly,I can only recall the few things and do not remember TBC as much,but it certainly was a place to be.By the time WOTLK came,it filled what TBC was missing.Somewhat ''completed'' the classes and honestly I'd say that 3.3.5 is the best expansion pvp wise.I played some Cata and logged MOP once.Cata was somewhat unbalanced.
Anyhow,the wow story itself is a very interesting one and that's pretty much the only thing one looks forward to.Expansions on the other hand,they always do have some high expectation to bring the things to way they were,but as far as I am into it,they never did.
3.3.5 is obviously the most favorized by everyone,as you can see by the population of WOTLK private servers.
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Banned
Vanilla was the beginning of the game. It was where you actually needed to put a lot of work, albeit mindless farming of dungeons and UBRS, so you could get gear to start raiding. If you were really good on vanilla, you could easily stand out from the rest, make money, join a top guild, top the meters etc. Bragging a bit, but when I played my warlock on a vanilla server I used to top meters and outperform people who were 1-2 tiers higher than me. Of course, this was mainly because warlocks were unbalanced when it came to PvE DPS and unhindered by resistances (looking at mages), but who cares? PvP was faceroll with basically all classes being able to 2-shot people - a warr could as easily as charge > MS > WW and kill you, rogues were killing ppl in their openers, mages were able to shatter you with just a Frost Nova > Frostbolt + Fireblast, hunters could trap you indefinitely and could also top meters as easily as just autoattacking and putting an arcane shot here and there, enh shamans could oneshot ppl with a WF proc, ele shamans could blow your *** out - stuff like that. The game was very clumsy, very undeveloped, required a lot of mindless farming, but it was fun.
TBC was when real development came in, arenas were introduced, resilience was introduced, so players could no longer get 2-shotted (now 3-shotted instead), HC dungeons were added, which were actually really hard and required people to think, mark, CC and interrupt. Jewelcrafting was added. Profession specializations were improved. Raid fights were also diversified a lot. TBC marked such a massive improvement over vanilla that it easily became the favorite expansion for a lot of people.
WotLK is when things started to water down, but the improvements it brought remedied that. Heroics were hard at first, raids were also hard at first, but only at first. ToC was absolute trash in terms of design and fights, then came RDF which allowed players to sit idle in Dalaran and wait in queue, people started getting overgeared for dungeons and simply steamrolling through them, then FoS and PoS were introduced which turned the game into a grind-fest of FoS/PoS farming and RDF farming. Profession specializations barely mattered anymore. Reputation gains were done passively through tabards. Nothing you were doing mattered much anymore and at the end of the expansion the game felt dull and senseless, which is when most people started to leave.
Cataclysm was an expansion which a lot of people initially frowned upon, but it turned out somewhat OK at the start. Massive changes, new stats being introduced and old ones being removed, hybrid specs being removed from the game because of the way how you pick your specialization, profession specializations were gone by then, a lot of individual class buffs were melted down together so that "you wouldn't feel forced to bring a shaman into every raid for Bloodlust". So although Heroics and BWD were really fun at the start, the game became more and more watered down with the more content that was released. End Time dungeons were supposed to be fun, but nobody really cared. Firelands were a breath of fresh air, offering some really unique boss fights and Ragnaros so the oldies could be satisfied. But that was not enough. And then also came RRF - the random raid finder.
From that point on the game pretty much died. Cataclysm was the last expansion which really excited players. MoP was ridiculous, both lore-wise and gameplay-wise. WoD couldn't fix that and instead only further ****ed up with the lore of the game, while also introducing FarmVille to WoW - garrisons. Legion is the expansion which a lot of people are seeing as Blizzard's last hope of redeeming WoW, but with how much the game has changed since then I can't see that happening.
So, in conclusion - vanilla was hard and fun, but it was underdeveloped. TBC was also hard, fun, brought a lot of improvement, but it was still a bit clumsy. WotLK is the most favored expansion because it hits the spot, but it was also when the game started getting dull at one point. From that point on, it has been "more of the same" for the rest of the expansions, which brought Blizzard from 12 million at WotLK to 5.5 million today. Nowadays WoW is by far not the leading MMO it once used to be, with LoL being first, followed by CS, then followed by Dungeon Fighters - an asian MMO, and WoW being 4th.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/2...rs-by-quarter/Edited: March 5, 2016
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None of which are MMOs, and Dungeon Fighters is technically the most popular MMO only because of China.
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Posts above cleared up alot except the raid difficulty you had in Vanilla with 40man raids for example 40man naxxramas where you HAD to have 8 tanks with hit cap (equal to finding a bis tank on these WOTLK servers) for"The 4 hoursemen", wich was like wtf? Guilds had to "steal" tanks from other guilds to be able to clear it, even sunwell in TBC was hard as balls and people who used to play back then and cleared all content still concider it was the hardest raids ever implented in WoW (some exceptions to firelands / ragnaros).
When Ulduar came out it was also one of those frikken hard as hell raids to compleate, specially with a raid who all has naxxramas gear. Wich made WOTLK challenging, ICC was one of those raids aswell when it came out, first it was TOO hard so they had to implent the 30% more dmg buff so people could clear it, but like "taralej" said, ToC felt like Blizz didnt even care, I mean Gear that shares the looks cause their to lazy to create new looks.
Personally, I think the "looks" of the gear in this game matters alot, and I was kinda dissapointed when I saw how nice and colorfull they made TBC gear but when WOTLK came out almost everything went gray-ish and spikey. We all want our toons to look good and with alot of complaints comming in about this they implented transmorgh in cata (kinda since cata gear was fugly too)
I tried retail with Cataclysm and MoP and imo I think they just destroyed the way you could spend talents on what not to differ out from the rest, or even the way every class just went super easy, so easy so it went to the point where it was not even fun to play anymore, sure the raids were nice and some challenging but that didnt matter when your class was boring as hell to play.
WOTLK still has that hard feeling to master a class compleately, and it takes time, Im thinking about enh shamies, demo warlocks, frost dk's, combat rogues, feral druids etc, all of them takes quite alot of raids to master compleately and once you do, the dps difference is fikken huge, wich made people contineu to play cause they saw they just got better and better, wich is what I think makes this game fun, the constant improvement of your skills.
Wich is also, why I think the new expansion "legion" will take everyone (kinda) back to TBC once again. And hopefully WoW will have a new great expansion, wich we all have missed for quite a while now.Edited: March 5, 2016
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Banned
MMO means massive multiplayer online. Both the LoL MOBA and the CS FPS are classed as MMOs. What you're talking about is MMORPGs, like WoW, Guild Wars, Lineage and TES: Online. And yes, I agree about Dungeon Fighter - it's pretty evident from just the looks of the game.
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People don't like changes.
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That's... actually an incredibly correct reply. Most people are driven away by changes overall.
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olny if those changes dont have a sense (i.e. bility prunning)
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Banned
Ability pruning was utterly stupid. How can they claim that to "ease up" the classes and reduce the decision-making process is something good, seriously. Yeah, let's just remove half of the spells in the game because they force people to actually think. Let's also delete half the talents and make the basic ones passive for the spec because people are too lazy to read.
This brings me to another point - a huge reason for people leaving retail is the consistent dumbing down of the game in favor of the casual players. My brother bought a Blizz acc some months ago, I tried WoD alongside with him, and after a week I was just "wow, this game is ****ing horrible". Ever since then when he offers me to play on his acc I'm like "nah bro, you play that ****, I'm gonna stick to private servers". ****ing ******s working at Blizzard...
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Its hard to explain, Op. To explain the ENTIRE story, you'd have to also hear and understand the evolution of video game culture over the last decade.
In short - all of wow can be divided into 2 seperate games - Pre-cata wow and post-cata wow . Call the wowA and wowB.
From the most fundamental aspects of game design, the two are polar opposites. However, reason behind this is very simple... the players from each generation are polar opposites.
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Really MMO's are an online game which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously in the same instance (or world).
Since LoL and CS have multiple instances holding all players and not one big one.
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LoL has its own launcher and different zone servers, just like WoW has zone servers and realms. I can't say about CS:GO, haven't played CS since the old 1.6 days in game clubs.
Also, what trucqulent said is true. Cata was the point where the two player groups, which have always existed, separated from each other - the wowA group being dissatisfied with the decisions Blizzard was making towards the game's development, "dumbing down" and appealing to casuals, while the wowB group being totally "okay" with gameplay being more accessible to normal players, them being such.
All in all, the days of real hardcore WoW raiding were over somewhere around mid-Cata, between Firelands and Dragon Soul. To me, personally, Firelands was the last good raid that Blizzard made.Edited: March 10, 2016
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Banned
The only reason people still go about vanilla and tbc (the jokes that they both were) is nostalgia.
In fact it's gotten so bad that there are people who feel nostalgic for old content when more than two thirds of them have never even played it.
My first character was back in vanilla,an orc hunter,T2 just came out and naxx40 was nowhere mentioned yet.
I stuck with retail right up to Ulduar when i quit.
Vanilla and TBC were not the hardcore days,raids were not mechanically more complex than they are now,the reason why it might seem so was exactly the same reason why raids nowadays seem to be too easy. Addons.
You cannot develop a hard raid in this day and age when every single thing can and is tracked by addons.
The old saying ''Don't stand in fire'' comes from vanilla when addons could not properly,if at all track boss aoe or certain spell trigers,you did not have DMB to warn you,so you had to pay attention by your self.
Go and watch any old raid that was there before t4/5ish,if back then we had the tools we have now,AQ40 would have been on farm status for 50% of WoW guilds within days,same for naxx40.
Anyone who says that back then raids were harder and pvp was more fun ,has never played neither of the expansions,or is so full of nostalgia that he is about to blow unicorn dust out of his rear end. What we have now is a direct result of actions taken by players them selves,DBM was not made by blizzard,nor was gladius,power auras,atlas loot,or any other tool that can track and display signs/warning/information about every single thing in the game.
The reason why horde got paladins and alliance got shamans? players complained,same for homogenization of every other class and spec. If enough of us complain,Blizzard will obey.
TL/DR: It's not the raids that ever got any easier,it's the tools made by players that got more and more advanced to a point where providing any challenge within the game became near impossible.
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He is exactly right, if you took addons away from most people and asked them to clear a raid in Cata they would need about 40 men to clear it. We as players are responsible for most of what Blizzard has decided to change and we are responsible for making it really easy to play the game with addons.
Now Blizzards decision to add kung fu pandas to the game to me was a ridiculous decision but from what i have read it was them trying to corner the eastern market and add a Asian flare to the game. But the "dumbing down" of the game is a result of us the players complaining, those players that raided in Vanilla might not be the ones who complained the majority of their player base did.
The one thing Blizzard is responsible for is the lack of imagination in the looks of the gear, it is very evident in Wrath that they seemed to loose interest in making a wide variety of looks which is why as someone said earlier transmog fixed this problem
If you really want to truly learn your class and play like the raiders did back in the day then turn off all your addons and you really will see how much you need to still think to play this game. Most of us would come out of it much better players.
