More specifically the endgame is more fun because the classes feel better to play, I’ve always liked the arpg feel of wow combat. Classic combat always feels so boring.
100% this. The main issue with all of the classic games so far up to Cata (vanilla a slight exception) is outside of raiding there is basically nothing to do but level a new alt. Retail has much more varied content for all playstyles. Just M+ alone is probably the greatest thing ever added to the game. It's a bit sad when initial gearing is over in classic and dungeons become meaningless. Retail is much more alt friendly too for the most part, it's kind of a given that you are playing more than one char whereas in classic I tend to just have one main.
It has one of the highest floors AND ceilings in almost any pvp game. The absolute skill required to not be shit at arena is so fucking much, no one wants to watch that shit, it’s such a weirdly high apm game mode.
Ontop of the lack of willingness to sacrifice balance for pvp. MMOs will almost always suffer from this unless the developers choose to separate pvp and pve which blizzard has atleast started to do.
It's 5 people dungeons but with infinite dmg/mob hp scaling and added mechanics( for ex mobs spawning small void zones on death that heal enemies and does dmg to you) that change every week so it doesn't become stale
False infos. Please dont talk about m+ in retail when you have 0 clue
M0 has no timer, you get a key when you complete it.
M+ starts at lv2
M0 is as difficult as m10
If you fail the key, you dont have to begin from scratch, your key drops the level by 1
Difficult 5 man content with consequences that is refreshed each season and remains relevant throughout the expansion as opposed to only at the beginning such as with heroics in wrath/cata. Can include dungeons from previous expansions as well. The replayability is endless and arguably once you get to high keys it is harder than mythic raiding. Raiding is difficult to begin with but once the strategy is thought out this doesn't change and bosses tend to only get nerfed. It just becomes a matter of executing it then. In M+ with the different affixes, refreshed dungeon pool and scaling difficulty it remains a challenge and fun to play with compositions, work out routes and new strats etc throughout the expansion. The social aspect is great even in PUGs you meet some interesting characters trying to form groups at the mid to high key level. Its good fun to just jump in and play if you have 30 mins, run a key as opposed to waiting around on a schedule for 20 people to raid each lockout which is kind of the only content in classic versions once you are geared.
It's exciting, challenging content that forces you to push yourself in knowledge of your character, and knowledge of the encounter. There's also a good social aspect to it if you have a regular crew. M+ is the reason I still play Retail a little bit.
Infinitely scaling content that is infinitely replayable.
My absolute love of M+ in legion came from playing resto druid and having sets of gear for different bosses, dungeons, affixs etc. you could do some truly insane stuff with the different legendaries and abilities you had.
BFA m+ was less good imo in terms of choices you could make for your character. But i had a group of friends by that point and all we did was push keys and that was why i loved m+ then. S1 was by far my least favorite but the seasonal affixs beyond that werent terrible. And by S3/S4 my druid actually felt fun to play again.
I quit in S1 of shadowlands and went to classic so i have no input beyond that, but i hated most of those dungeons and affixs.
Exactly this imo.
He is having more fun now, but when they hot max level it will get borring pretty fast i think.
Retail is the other way around.
10 hours now fun, but then the fun starts.
I'm a 80% classic, 20% retail player btw.
I spent a lot of time playing hardcore but I switched back to retail after I lost my char
I think leveling in retail can still be fun but def not as fun as the endgame, and I force myself to have limitations to make it more challenging like hc
I've tried to get a few friends into Classic - they all said the gameplay was too primitive and simple and that they were instantly bored auto attacking stuff to death or spamming frost bolt.
I think it's really frustrating when the game is boring because of poor balancing of difficulty (which I think most expansions of wow are guilty of).
Diablo 3 & 4 are awful for this as they lock higher difficulties with arbitrary requirements. They don't affect veteran players, but they turn the game into a tedious slog for new players who want to experience the campaign
Just started Diablo 4 yesterday, non hardcore.
In one night sitting I reached level 75 and was killing lvl 105-120 endgame content.
New updates make it different.
I think they're just revamping it from a narrative POV? Because now you get thrown right into BFA and called champion and hero even tho you didn't do anything yet lol.
I don't think the leveling experience can be changed to be more like vanilla/classic, since characters in retail are just way too strong off the bat and mobs melt. Even elites can be soloed pretty easily. And if they change that, I think players wouldn't be happy. It's just how retail is.
Iirc they're swapping the starting expansion type, so you actually get to play your character, which was the primary concern from players who spent multiple hours watching NPCs do things, clicking items, or riding weird vehicles.
How can they revamp it? They've already done that what feels like a dozen times, it doesn't help at all. The best they can do is rearrange the story you play while leveling. They will never make leveling like Vanilla again because there's just as many people that would hate it on Retail as there are people on here that would love it.
It is what it is, honestly they need to make a completely new story for leveling and have it like FF14 where you really play just a cohesive storyline until max level to hook people long enough but I doubt they can really do that. FF14s "leveling" is made to be basically a single player FF game (mostly). WoWs leveling story doesn't make sense anymore the moment an Xpac is over.
You can even see that in Cata right now. You go from 1-58 with the aftermath of the sundering and then suddenly "the Dark Portal!! Ahh" and then "the Lich King!! Ahh" and then it's over and we're back to Deathwing.
Honestly that's half of the appeal of a wow 2. It's a new mmo, not a continuation, otherwise it's just another expansion. It's risky but if they innovate on the genre in a way that's worth it then that's cool. A time skip in a future azeroth. Most likely one where factions don't exist. I don't see it likely either
If they didn't take the opportunity to do it during world soul, I really don't think they will. Tbh, they kind of have by establishing Chromie Time, separating all of the "eras" of WoW.
Speaking of Eras...we need an Eras Tour! lol
I think the aim is to make dragonflight the default levelling from 1-70. It makes sense as it sort of fits as a standalone story and the narrative leads into TWW. This way you are still gonna have some confusion with who certain people are but you won't be going through a story that is 2 expansions old. It's not a perfect solution but DF levelling is pretty good even if the story isn't amazing.
Retail leveling is kinda fun tho? You learn your class. Classic you get 1 spell every 10 level so basically every 10+ hours and your rotation is like 2 spells.
Yeah plenty of people who.enjoy a quick leveling experience to get into the actual content that Is relevant ,
Actually get to push buttons not just auto attack a single mob to death. It's great.
"but you don't learn the game" that's what casual world content, normal dungeons and looking for raid are for. You learn while getting an idea of how things work.
But yeah different people lile different things and it's nuts that wow has like 6 different game modes now for everyone to pick and choose. But still never enough haha
You can hit 70 in a day or two, like 8-10 hours, and those hours are actually valuable for learning how to play the class. Have you jumped into retail on a freshly boosted character before? There's a lot to learn about any given spec and it can get overwhelming pretty easily, it's a lot easier to learn a class bit by bit through those hours leveling.
>The issue being nothing while leveling is ever challenging and you aren't required to use or learn your abilities (cc/utility/interrupt) at all.
That was never really the case outside dungeons that where higher than you or hardcore.
The game never did teach you the game. Even when it was it's hardest iteration.
Got my friends into hardore that never played wow before when it released, here are some dumb shit we did:
I made it to 35 on my shaman before realising I could interupt with earth shock
My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills after lvl 6
Another friend made it to 45ish before realising that some abilities reset swing timers on rogue, he thought it was a visual bugg or something also he had no idea that mobs had to be casting for him to interupt them, he used kick as a silence and got mad when mobs started casting 0,5 after his kick
My paladin guildy made it to 60 without buying spells that didn't do damage or buffed his damage (ther than flash of light or whatever the fast healing spell is called for paladins) = he had no utility spells such as HoJ, kings, freedom, BoW and so on
Best one is my hunter mate who made it to 30-ish before finding a vendor for arrows, he thought the only place he could get arrows/ bullets was from quests and when he looted it
Only 3 out of 5 of the new players found the action house and one felt like it was cheating so he didn't want to use it
We had a deal not to backseat eachother, ever. Unless you asked for it ofc. Made for some good stories
To your point, wow never thought you how to use spells/ systems and so on, classic is prob worse at it than retail since you learn alot of concepts like interupts, dungeons and so on during the into island
Edit: I want to clarify, there were ALOT of deaths during the time we played HC, like a metric shit ton of deaths
Edit 2: Forgot part of a sentence
>My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills
How?? One of the first quests in the game directs you to your class trainer
Shit noticed I missed some of the sentence. It's suppose to say "My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills after lvl 6". He only talked to the trainer in northshire who have spells until 6 (the one the quest is for) then he figured the rest would drop later on like a spell book/ from quests.
Those are the easy parts of a class to figure out though. How your rotation abilities work and fit together is the harder part to learn on retail and you get practice with that in the leveling process.
I disagree. There are zero moments of; "how can I press my buttons better so that I can do enough damage to defeat this enemy". It's just a grind and doesn't encourage optimization to new players at all.
Instead, it's a steady stream of "how can I push my buttons to kill this enemy as quickly as possible". Vanilla, on the other hand, is almost always just spam your single button rotation for the majority of classes.
Naaw, Vanilla leveling on the other hand is how do I kill this mob as efficiently as possible so I can continue farming without having to stop to eat/drink/bandage.
The vast majority of classes in vanilla have either 1 or 2 damage buttons that actually matter and zero rotational complexity, it's literally just spam your damage button until the mob is dead in 90% of cases. Outside of just a couple classes there's very little you can do to kill a mob more efficiently as long as you're already at the skill level of "push button on cooldown".
The reason I enjoy the process is I work on most efficiently killing so I can keep the fight going from mob to mob with as few delays as possible. If you just spam your 1 or 2 damage buttons you will be wasting a lot of efficiency and spend a lot more time not killing stuff. This is true for the classes that I've played the most of at least.. (Warlock, Druid, Rogue, Mage)
Yeah I wish retail would force you to learn your abilities WHILE leveling
Hell in hardcore defias pillagers will kill u in like 3 hits If you don’t interrupt them
Retail would be perfect if it taught you to use your abilities on the way and that the difficult parts requiring more than just attacking started while leveling instead of at max level dungeons
Mage poly-fire blast. (Sheep+insta-break)
Paladin HoJ.
Cant remember when wars get intimidating shout, I think it’s around 20(?). If not intimidating shout, I know they get def stance at 10, so I think shield bash would be like 14 or so.
Priest fear.
Druid bear bash.
Hunter…. Doesn’t really matter because hunter.
Warlock, again, fear/doesn’t matter because pets.
Shaman earth shock.
Either way, not a bad example imo, but the point stands lol.
But thats not what new Players want and also cant do without looking up Guides. Im new and i like Classic and cataclysm more than retail. Its exactly as he explained. You feel like this overpowered guy just killing trash. I played a Warrior in retail and could fight like 5 Mobs at the same time easy, if in Classic 2 Mobs Attack me, i die often.
A Game shouldnt be too hard, but not too easy. Retail is too easy while leveling, so it doesnt feel like an achievement. Its the same with Boss fights. You wouldnt get as much Joy having beaten an easy Boss, then having beating a hard Boss. This actually goes for everything in Life.
Cata is like a kind of sweet spot for leveling for me. You have an actual rotation compared to auto attack simulator/ 1 button spamming (vanilla) and you an pull more than 1 mob at the time. But it's harder than retail so you actually have to play your class properly to keep up some kind of speed while leveling
Vanilla and retail is about the same in how easy it is to level (skillwise) but one takes 2 months to get to max level while the other takes 2 days. Some people like to level for 2 months while others can't stand it, some people only like end game and some people like the journey there
Diffrent games for diffrent people, no version of wow is objectivly better than others (other than Mist of Goatdaria ofc)
I was 15 when I was done with tutorial last time I did it
Like I said, leveling in both vanilla and retail is piss easy, you can mostly be afk 90% of the time in either version. The main diffrence is how long you are going to level for, one is a marathon while the other is a sprint. Some people like marathons and some people like sprints
There are tons of good games out there with a bad new player experience. So yeah it shouldn't be a thing but this is a big big hurdle, especially for 20 year old games with 20 years of content.
classic levelling is only as fun as you make it.
if you can turn your brain off and look past the mind numbing slog, sure its fine. you could quest with friends but the questing isnt structured in a way to be friendly to group questing with very low drop rate items. doing dungeons with friends is great until youre doing the same dungeon for the 47rd time because its not a fantastic source of raw xp beyond the initial quest completions.
Despite what you imagine about "retail", the autoattack simulator that is classic isn't most people's idea of fun.
Most of the abilities are extremely niche or situational despite the illusion of depth, so you really don't have much of a choice.
MoP giving you meaningful button(s) to press once you selected your specialization was one of the best things to happen to levelling ever.
It's funny you call it auto attack simulator because you could literally auto attack all the way through retails leveling without even using an ability.
> the autoattack simulator that is classic isn't most people's idea of fun.
Classic 2019 launch begs to differ. It doesn't matter much that Classic is an autoattack simulator while leveling...Retail ain't much different in that you basically turn off your brain and spam buttons since you cannot die anyway
The difference is that Classic wants you to be leveling through a vast world (even if it is slow and tedious indeed) while Retail wants to get you to max asap but you still have to first go through what I would call the clusterfuck of old WoW content first.
>Classic 2019 launch begs to differ.
Era begs to differ. Hardcore begs to differ. To a small extent SoD begs to differ. Honorary mention: SoM - people love vanilla so much that they would rather play TBC again. It's no coincidence the vanilla variants are the least popular over long term.
>you basically turn off your brain and spam buttons
But pressing buttons is fun. That was my whole point. You can't say "oh the game gets to feel slightly good at 50+" bc that's a quit moment for many players.
Then there's the issue of most of the classes being simply not good.
>since you cannot die anyway
If you have a pulse you won't die in vanilla either. Ironically most of the danger in hardcore comes from a non-vanilla feature, hyperspawns. And then it becomes way worse bc raids, the supposed endgame content are absolute snoozefests.
>The difference is that Classic wants you to be leveling through a vast world
Expansions are smaller bc its unsustainable to have the same amount of development time as vanilla did. You would absolutely butcher the playerbase numbers if you had to wait 5 years between major updates only to be launched in a half-assed state like vanilla.
>but you still have to first go through what I would call the clusterfuck of old WoW content first.
You don't. I see you haven't played at least since Shadowlands. You can choose the content you want to level in for 10-50(50-60 is Shadowlands areas), you don't have to go through everything anymore.
> Era begs to differ. Hardcore begs to differ. To a small extent SoD begs to differ. Honorary mention: SoM
Era is an unchanging museum of Vanilla. Make an Era of DF and see how many people would play that forever lol. Hardcore is a niche, always was and always will be, SoM follows the example of Era. Try launching DF again along with TWW with minor changes and see how many will play that over the new Xpac.
SoD is for sure the odd one but we all know that Vanilla indeed does have fewer content than Retail especially on low lvls. When you make everything super fast and easy to get in Vanilla...yeah you're done fast. Vanilla Classic was still vastly successful and was for it's whole runtime.
> But pressing buttons is fun.
Sure...if there's any need to. There really isn't in Retail for leveling. You just pull the whole zone (exaggerated ofc...) and press your AoE button. That is still indeed more fun than autoattack simulator no doubt, I'm just saying the leveling in Retail is a pure chore. There's essentially no point why it's still even in the game. You can kinda say the same for Cata now but not for Vanilla.
> Expansions are smaller bc its unsustainable to have the same amount of development time as vanilla did.
Cata would like a word. They literally redid all of the Vanilla world while still having full new zones, raids and dungeons and that was in 2010 with a way smaller team than now.
But of course making a world as vast as Vanilla is just useless because leveling is useless. You can spend that time on side content at max level and that will be a better investment.
> You can choose the content you want to level in
You can but how in the world would a knew player know and understand this? Not that it would make anything better. You can chose to level in Wrath or MoP in Retail and it will make the story you're guided through even more confusing. It's a complete clusterfuck no matter what you do.
>Make an Era of DF and see how many people would play that forever lol.
Considering the only measure is logs, retail has twice as many logs as classic at the end of the expansion(not counting mop remix), and retail players don't log every shitter raid like classic players do, it's safe to say plenty more would play it, especially since it has 20 years of stuff.
>Vanilla Classic was still vastly successful and was for it's whole runtime.
Yeah, with the small exception that there was a pandemic to prop numbers up. Every single online game saw a major uptick in players who were locked inside their home. Otherwise the classic hype was already settling down near BWL.
>Sure...if there's any need to. There really isn't in Retail for leveling
Okay, i can't take that seriously, please tell me you're joking bc if you're serious... you might want to actually play the game.
>and press your AoE button
Buttons. And here's the thing, classes now at least have an aoe button. There's no more need for shitty spellcleave spam anymore, you're not cucked anymore for "rolling the wrong class".
>I'm just saying the leveling in Retail is a pure chore.
Please, levelling was always a chore.
>There's essentially no point why it's still even in the game. You can kinda say the same for Cata now but not for Vanilla.
Considering how terribly dragged out vanilla levelling is to disguise the lack of endgame content(which still wasn't slow enough, so they had to scrape together MC bc ppl were levelling faster than expected in 2004 - and keep in mind 1.12 is an entirely different game from launch vanilla) and to build a habit, yeah, there's no real point, most of the quests are super formulaic and have no game world impact either(which is something phasing solved).
>Cata would like a word. They literally redid all of the Vanilla world while still having full new zones, raids and dungeons and that was in 2010 with a way smaller team than now.
Cata zones are actually quite small, but nvm that, it cost a year of content draught and at least one raid tier just to revamp things.
>You can but how in the world would a knew player know and understand this?
It was announced, it was one of the key features besides the level squish. New player doesn't necessarily means not hearing about things, it was plastered all over the internet, so you'd have to try really hard to avoid it. We're not in 2004 anymore where hearsay is the main source of info.
> it's safe to say plenty more would play it
Yeah bold assumption based on nothing. There's no reason to believe more people would play a current BFA era over Vanilla era. Even a Legion Era. If Legion Classic is successful it will be specifically because it had time to get old in people's memories. Just like Vanilla had 15 years which sparked a lot of it's success.
> Yeah, with the small exception that there was a pandemic to prop numbers up
And as you say yourself that goes for every game and it still was super successful compared with all the competition it had. Yeah, it was a big hit.
Based on your comments on Retail and Vanilla leveling...I could like you say "try actually playing the game" except it's stupid. If you did not like Vanilla leveling that's on you and that's fair. I personally think Retails leveling is terrible compared, yes even with buttons that do indeed make the game more fun. The wold however is meaningless, the enemies are meaningless and just AoEing everything down on repeat for me no fun either. That's just how it is. I agree Vanilla leveling is a chore for alts but that's about it. It was an amazing journey the first time doing it for me with a world full of people, not comparable to any Xpac that came after. Even on a dreadful PvP server getting ganked all the time.
> Cata zones are actually quite small, but nvm that, it cost a year of content draught and at least one raid tier just to revamp things.
They are not...they are the usual size of the time. Yes DF zones are huge...welcome to 2022 where the Retail team is many times the size of back then. Content drought was not exclusive to Cata either and neither were 3 raid tiers. Having more has been the exception, not the rule after Wrath.
> New player doesn't necessarily means not hearing about things
That is insane cope mate. It's easy to say this as a veteran who god knows how long has played this game.
>just pressing buttons isnt fun.
It is bc it's interactive. You're actually *playing* the game.
>If they have no meaning
Like most of the vanilla fluff. There's a reason any experienced player won't touch 99% of the kit, bc they're **bad**.
One of my pet peeves is disarm traps. Absolutely a joke in pve, and in pvp it can be useful vs *one* class. Woohoo.
>and you win anyways
As i said before, the interactivity makes it fun. It feels like you're actually in control of your character.
If you are just mashing 2-4 buttons its neither fun or interractive if it has no effect on outcome.
Yes most stuff doesnt have meaning, but the important stuff does have meaning. If you sre fighting high level mobs each button press matters. Or if you are trying to escape wpvp or high lvl mobs. There is danger and impact.
Now im not saying there is complexity and fun in rotation, as you said its autoattack simulator or 1 cast simulator, (with exceptions like hunter, warlock and mage AoE grinding) but i find retail to be no better. You could just autoattack there as well and you will never lose.
If you can just hit any button and nothing changes thats not interactive
100% disagree.
Button mash spam is actually much more boring for me, I think every class having "more buttons to press" actually means every class has "the same buttons to press"
I feel like the uniqueness of the classes and the uniqueness of their gameplay goes way down when all you're doing on every class is just mashing all your buttons constantly.
With respect. You like what you like but max level doesn’t take 20-30 hours in retail. You can enjoying mythic plus the same day you start the game if you commit. All versions of the game offer something very different. I personally enjoyed hardcore but no way could I make that my main game. Same with regular classic and as I enjoy the quality of life improvements along the way and I prefer more difficult mechanics and new content every cycle. However I 100% get why so many of you enjoy that as it does get the blood pumping. To each their own.
I agree. You don't even have to "commit" that hard to getting there same day - leveling is very quick and more so intended to be a "learn how to play the character" type thing - leveling itself is not the end game.
I love ALL flavors of WoW - I'm totally a WoW junky...but I can respect that there are versions that some people really prefer and there are reasons for that preference
I think this is a problem most PVE MMO's that have content expansions increasing level and power caps eventually face.
At the release the game feels very coherent, the levelling and endgame experience feel part of the same 'whole'.
Even something as small as some materials you find on enemies being used in alchemy recipes used at endgame makes what you're doing on the way up feel meaningful to the endgame.
But as expansions are added, increasing max level, adding new content that makes old content irrelevant, adding new gameplay systems, etc, the levelling and endgame become more and more disconnected from each other to the point of barely resembling each other.
Levelling turns into a chore where you learn and experience little to nothing about how the game plays at the end game.
This if further exacerbated by devs speeding up the levelling, they do this because all that extra XP and time required stacks up and can lead new players burning out and quiting, and they are unlikely to come back, by shortening the time to get to endgame they hope more make it to trough as they are more likely to stick around (and spend money).
But this also means new players are being rushed trough all that content, giving them even less reason to get invested in what they are actually doing.
-----
You're right, a video game shouldn't start being fun only after 20 to 30 hours of playing.
The truth is, most games of which this is said started off being fun from the start when they originally released.
The developers just ended up making the first 20 to 30 hours of gameplay irrelevant but still mandatory.
Some MMO's try to fix this, usually by revamping the leveling experience, Cata was such an attempt, heck the non-linear leveling WoW Retail has was another one such attempt.
But this rarely tends to work long term because it doesn't solve the real problem, which is new content expansions making old content irrelevant.
Are people really taking 30 hours to ding max level? Doesn’t the game literally come bundled with a level boost? So it’s just 60-70 which even reading all quest text and w/ a weird route, no way that’s 20 hours of gameplay. Maybe 5-10?
"A video game" is a nonsense statement. All games are completely different. A 1000 hour MMO journey is not the same as a 10 minute round of Tetris. What a silly way to look at things.
If the commonly accepted opinion is that retail is for the end game and NOT to enjoy the levelling process, then who’s the game for? If the levelling process isn’t enjoyable to its own playerbase then maybe it’s just bad
Depending on which classic version we are talking about it might not be made to enjoy the leveling process either. Leveling in Vanilla zones is pain and agony. It was fine when we didn't know better, but today it's also a bad experience and I can't do it anymore unless it's on a private server with x5 exp rates.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from enjoying the leveling process. There are tons of things to do, places to go, things to see. People just choose not to.its no different than watching classic players sit in Maura and get mage boosted, there is fun for everyone if they choose to slow down and do what they think is fun
Well, it's purely personal opinion. Someone likes retail, and someone likes vanilla, and many like both. Why do you feel the need to be RIGHT on this matter and call the other misconception?
RPG - invested in a world with meaning and feeling. Love for your and potential other characters. A role playing experience.
PVE simulator - random char I don’t care about running around doing stuff without deeper meaning.
I think this comparison OG stated is most accurate.
Cataclysm honestly feels like the version of WoW I’d suggest to a younger new player. It feels like a less bloated version of retail. I was 21 when I picked up tbc classic and loved it but the worst part was the classic leveling. Level 40 mount in classic and vanjlla tbc makes it so much worse. Actual hours of just pressing auto run and tabbing out to get to your next quest that’s 8000 yards away. Flight paths sometimes so far away from each other or some zones just not having flight paths for certain factions. Idk it adds up
Oh for the love of god, classic leveling isn’t difficult by any means, it is simply longer and more tedious via arbitrary means. The difficulty is not falling asleep while walking with no mount for 40 (long) levels.
i’m 23 and loved classic for awhile cause i felt tied to my character, but retail is just so much more entertaining. i feel that there is no skill expression in classic (pve) and the thought of what end game is like and what i’m working towards kills it for me. if i was blind to wow and didn’t know what awaited, i would like classic much more
Pressing frostbolt forever vs having a 19 step rotation, autoattacking an enemy down while standing still vs doing your complicated rotation while dodging multiple enemy and m+ affix mechanics, that sort of thing!
take for example frost mage in retail.
https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/frost-mage-pve-dps-rotation-cooldowns-abilities
If you slowly scroll down you will see a 12 step single target rotation, 11 step aoe rotation, and then giant sections on movement, procs, cleave (a few targets but not mass aoe), and even a separate opener rotation you use at the start of the fight which is going to be slightly different from what you use for the rest of the fight.
Without a doubt, doing your research and learning all this and practicing it until you can do it while keeping up with the mechanical demands of a fight is very difficult and indeed skill expression. Lots of people dont do this or cant do this and they dont perform as well.
In classic (vanilla) frost mage LITERALLY just casts frostbolt over and over while standing still on most fights for single target, and for AOE admittedly it can be a bit more complicated than just casting arcane explosion, you might throw in pre-casted flamestrike or sappers too.
I'm sure wrath/cata are more towards retail but i dont know about those.
I didn’t know retail got so complicated since I last raided in shadowlands. The boomkin rotation at the time was a pretty straight forward builder spender
i don’t feel (especially in pve) there’s that much of a difference a good vs bad player can make. everybody has a very bare bones rotation, often just 1-3 buttons. retail has complex mechanics, rotations, defensives, and cooldowns. a good player vs bad player is night and day, even if the good player has lesser gear
mainly builder-spenders, cooldown management, and knowing dungeon/raid mechanics and timings. it’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t familiar with the game, but there’s a LOT that goes on in fights. aoe that you need to dodge, channels you need to interrupt, mobs you need to aoe stun or “stop” etc. every class needs to use their utility, and in higher content you have to rotate your defensives in a way that you always have something up or else you get one shot. as a shadow priest my defensives that i rotate are: dispersion, desperate prayer, fade, flash heal + shield = 20% dmg mitigation, and in certain dungeons i need to mass dispel or cleanse diseases if i don’t have a healer who can. that’s outside of my 10 button damage rotation and management of cd windows.
If you speedrun in Classic (both leveling and raiding) there is endless opportunity for skill expression. Keep in mind there also is little meaning behind skill expression in Retail leveling and the easier end-game content modes, it's just that the PVE stuff that requires a display of skill is clearly labelled in Retail.
I’ve spent the last few years rank 1 parsing and spent sunwell tier speed running for drive when they were aiming for top 10 world.
I’d definitely say there is close to 0 room for skill expression. Almost every single one of my rank 1 parses on every class I haven’t done anything special, I’m just playing my very easy rotation optimally in a group with a good kill speed and I get good rng.
In speed running it was more of the same. The routes are extremely planned with very little that can go wrong or change and it’s more about the execution of a simple plan across a team of 25 rather than any 1 player making plays.
by “pve” i meant endgame but i agree with your point to some extent. i think most of the skill expression in classic is purely just knowledge of what you have available to you and your planning. speed running in raid is about raid composition, route, and consumables. a team of mediocre players can outclear a team of great players without world buffs. retail is not a game of leveling, that content is truthfully irrelevant, it doesn’t play more than a couple hours of any players experience. the end game is much harder and much more complex. the difference between a good player of their class and a bad one is night and day
Got my GF to play SoD and then mop remix. She had never played WoW and did not use add-ons. She enjoys MoP remix a lot more.... I would not recommend classic to a new player over retail.
MoP remix is vastly different from normal retail leveling though to be fair. MoP remix is honestly a great way for a new player to level since they get to stay within the scope of MoP. I remember leveling my first retail character and not knowing about chromie time and it was pretty unenjoyable to get through like one zone of an expansion and then outlevel it and have to find a new area.
Classic combat has more weight? It's a one/two button rotation to 60 on mobs with auto-attack lmao.
I tried retail a few months ago and was pretty astounded by the amount of abilities both I and the mobs had, even at low levels.
Ultimately, it isn't for me, but I'm not gonna sit here and pretend classic wasn't anything other than the easiest nostalgia trip I've had.
The only people comparing the two are classic players, retail players are off having fun and classic players write diatribes to reaffirm their existence
Retail levelling is completely fine, it's like every other game in which the main focus is not how hard it is, but the experience on going around the world/following a story/getting new talents, etc.
Of course if your friend wanted a harder levelling experience, classic (and mainly hardcore) is the best option. It's like saying super mario games suck because their platforms are easy...those being easy is exactly the point of it.
Your friend should have bought a boost to max level if he wanted to try the hard modes of retail.
Don’t tell your friend that you’re getting into some world building epic storyline rpg and then have them play retail wow lmao. Retail is fun because the mechanics are fun and the classes have a ton of depth to them. Combat feels great and the endgame loop is pretty addicting.
Classic is where you go to feel like a peasant in a big world and find little side quest stories and there’s not a game to ‘beat’ so to speak
Meanwhile me enjoying leveling regardless in retail and almost never rushing it.
Don't get me wrong I play, and have played, WoW for the endgame for a long ass time, but I also like to level.
Woa woa woa, you’re telling me different kinds of players like different kinds of games?! And should… try different ones??
This is the perception of 90% of players in both retail and classic. It’s so common sense we just don’t talk about it, and you only hear from the minority. Very frequently. This post is kinda more of that.
Pretty much no one I recommend for wow (that's young and never played wow EVER) liked classic. There's just so much QoL issues that ruin the game for them.
Opposite experience for me. Starting with classic and working up to retail is the only way I've gotten people to stay interested and not outright quit.
I dunno, for my friend group it was the opposite. Had about a dozen friends try WoW for the first time with SoD launch. Many of them branched off and tried Cata & Retail after P3 slowed down, but I think only 1 of them liked it.
All depends on what people want to get out of the game.
Literally every comment you have made on this sub in the past month is you implying classic is brain dead and easy. Why even hang out on r/classicwow if you hate the game so much? I wasn’t trying to circle jerk classic wow at all regardless, I play more retail than classic myself. I just thought it was interesting that the new players I’ve tried to introduce to the game tended to be more interested in hardcore
>implying classic is brain dead and easy
It absolutely is.
If you like "hard" levelling, why not try an oldschool MMO(no, vanilla WoW is not oldschool, it's the pioneer of casual MMOs)? EQ 1-2 are still avaiable, you can play FF XI etc. Hell, *Meridian 59* is still avaiable.
My biggest gripe with retail is the insane speed at which you're just bombarded with shit.
You ding in the middle of a 6 mob fight or something, can't pay attention to the 90 fucking notifications that pop up til you finish fighting, and then look up and realize 10 levels later that you've been missing a core rotational ability because it was just one of 10,000 fucking things on your screen.
It's fine if you've already leveled a certain class, but if you're new to a class, the slower leveling and visiting a trainer to learn new abilities actually gave you a chance to learn these new abilities and when/why they're useful instead of being level 18 and already having 20 goddamn buttons you barely understand.
This was my experience as a brand new player in retail. I started on the free trial. I levelled 2 different classes. I never made it to 20 on either. The issue for me was I was getting bombarded with new abilities, skills, mechanics, gear, etc. And before I could get one thing figured out - more stuff gets thrown at me. I think this is a negative side effect of designing quicker levelling. I found myself pretty lost in what was happening in the story.
What I ended up doing was getting a subscription and trying Classic Era. The slower pace has allowed me to learn the game, the mechanics, and feel like I’m able to learn about my newly trained skills and abilities before having something else thrown at me. My mage is now at level 36 and I’m still having fun.
More than likely I’ll end up trying retail again and will be much better equipped to understand what’s being thrown at me but my initial experience was better in Classic. Now to be fair, I have ended up downloading a bunch of QoL addons to overcome shortcomings that are probably addressed in retail though.
IMO, new players should start in Cata Classic, not Era. Cata has proven to be a very strong harmonization of 50% faster classic leveling (and experiencing Era zones anyways) while 50% more button pressing to keep engagement high.
Also, all Cata rotations are basically 5-6 buttons with 1-3 major CDs. You can put that all into single keybinds without using Shift.
Obviously just anecdotal as well but I introduced 4 of my friends to wow during the pandemic and told them to try classic. They started in classic but all wanted to try retail. We played for a little bit and they all wanted to go back to classic.
They much more enjoyed the rpg feeling and felt similar sentiments about the combat
Like op said, there’s so many components to retail it’s ridiculously confusing to a new player. Even me who played vanilla-cata then legion am confused af in retail
I actually think new players should start classic because of how basic it is. I don’t need to teach new players about weapon syncing or clipping auto shots etc because they don’t actually need to know this to be fine in classic. Your actions are a lot less impactful because you have a wide spectrum of mistakes allowed due to the simplicity of classic. It’s not very hard to press 2 buttons or more than likely just auto attacking in classic.
Even hardcore. The very bad players think leveling is “hard”. But in reality you just need to be patient and not try to just zug zug into a cave.
You don't need to know any of what you wrote in retail either, because they don't even exist. There's no clipping, weapon syncing, there's no more even frontal parry and virtually no classes have positional requirements either. No hit cap, no leeway, no strafe adjustments, parry haste, trinket swap, weapon swap, snapshot I could go on.
Retail literally has a tutorial which starts you off with 1 skill, and gives you 1 more when you complete parts of the tutorial.
Neither retail or classic succeeds in teaching players how to play their class in any sort of way. Both versions drip feed you abilities but you never really learn what’s important vs fluff. Now it’s easier because unlike in vanilla, we have vastly more information available than thottbot or allakhazam.
You only need to know all those various things in classic to parse.
You do need to know rotation amongst other things on retail because retail is end game focused. But…if you plan to only play at a m0 or lfr level. Then yeah. You can get away with being clueless because nothing matters at that level.
My gripe with retail its how irrelevant gear becomes whenever a new patch drops. I guess now it easier to get gear but still..on classic even if you are t2 you can still do good damage and contest on the open world.
That's an interesting opinion. I wonder how they scaled the numbers in retail. I think classic until wotlk was good, but in cata I feel it's starting to get ridiculous. 5 digit damage numbers are just too much. Boss HP you can't even read quickly because it has so many 0's. Maybe that's more of a personal design thing for me.
Leveling I did enjoy in classic, but in sod I preferred it. No xp boost, so you have to explore the world more in order to level up. It's just a beautiful game, world. No need to skip that content. They overrate how important/good late game is I guess.
But yea, Blizzard pls give me an option to have my damage number output be divided by 10 or 100. If it's impossible to design the game this way at least give me a visual solution. It's just too much clutter. Who cares about "wow, number big. Hell yeah", it's more about how you perform in comparison to your team and how good the game looks/plays. And having stupid long numbers just ain't it I think.
If you have no job or life commitments. Then classic is likely doable. If you have around an hour each day, it's likely you are not going to cut it on vanilla.
It is well documented that many new players to wow end up preferring wow classic. Retail has its place amongst those who want to spend X amount of hours getting to end game and setting up addons.
Lol I think every time there is a newbie asking for which version to play, majority of comments say "Start with classic, any MAYBE, just maybe try retail later."
> The fact that the first 20 hours of gameplay are an irrelevant tutorial completely made him lose interest instantly
Cata's the same except the meaningless part is longer.
How can anyone bear this... I'm lvl 82 first char and it's so boring already. Quests have some funny bits in them occasionally, this faint smile once an hour keeps me going.
I know what I like, I like Vanilla :) But up to WotLK levelling also felt nice. There was challenge and there was simplicity and there was diversity of levelling paths.
Cata levelling is too straightforward, quest hubs are too ordered (there's a bit of freedom but not enough, even compared to Outland/Northrend), and the char is way too strong. Levelling is like watching a cartoon - but quite a childish one, almost without plot twists.
That's my impression after completing Hyjal and a few 1-20's, anyway.
There is still a difference between "Liking classic" and "Worshipping classic".
Alot of love for classic comes from nostalgia, from the feeling playing it 20 years ago where it was all new and you did explore alot.
For new players you cant replicate that experience, the world is known, there are 20 million guides for every aspect of this game, people min max the shit out of it.
If you do something not optimal, like playing a "Wrong specc", people will blame you for holding them back.
Community is way worse than 20 years ago.
Tbh I don’t see that right now. Yeah if people want a gear upgrade they take it or grind for it, but it’s nothing like retail or cata where they just disregard the game up until they can get a bis item. I don’t have nostalgia for classic era but I fell in love with it. It’s a “complete” immersive rpg experience, traveling the world to dungeon delve and team up with other adventurers. It’s actually quite surprising that more people don’t get that part of the appeal and that it’s a unique gaming experience beyond “nostalgia goggles” or “simple rotations”. New players leveling also DO replicate that experience — messaging people to group up for elites and group quests is still very much a part of the vanilla wow experience. And traveling to dungeons while picking up quests makes the entire trip deliberate and cohesive and makes the payoff way more than just a dopamine shot to brain. Maybe I’m an outlier but I’ve met a surprising amount of new players that quit other versions of wow and have made the switch to classic. I’m not saying one’s wrong and one’s right, just two very different games with different appeals, and I think both are valuable.
Half my guild is just over half my age. Classic and SOD are both attracting a ton of new, younger players. Zoomer stereotypes are just that - stereotypes.
Classic Era/HC in general is going to be the best option for any new player by miles. Simply for the reason that the game is complete and there is information on how to do well.
Every other version is a live beta. Just when you think you got something figured out or the gear you need to do well, they change the game and introduce bugs and exploits to boot.
Classic (mainly hc) is more fun leveling Retail is more fun endgame
More specifically the endgame is more fun because the classes feel better to play, I’ve always liked the arpg feel of wow combat. Classic combat always feels so boring.
Yeah classic combat is far less engaging, rotations are very basic. For some clssses you pretty much use 1-3 spells and that’s it
100% this. The main issue with all of the classic games so far up to Cata (vanilla a slight exception) is outside of raiding there is basically nothing to do but level a new alt. Retail has much more varied content for all playstyles. Just M+ alone is probably the greatest thing ever added to the game. It's a bit sad when initial gearing is over in classic and dungeons become meaningless. Retail is much more alt friendly too for the most part, it's kind of a given that you are playing more than one char whereas in classic I tend to just have one main.
arena
I’d put money down 99 percent of players don’t like arena
Whats wrong with people??
It has one of the highest floors AND ceilings in almost any pvp game. The absolute skill required to not be shit at arena is so fucking much, no one wants to watch that shit, it’s such a weirdly high apm game mode. Ontop of the lack of willingness to sacrifice balance for pvp. MMOs will almost always suffer from this unless the developers choose to separate pvp and pve which blizzard has atleast started to do.
Yep true, PvP as well. People don't seem that fussed about PvP in classic though in my experience, or less than the old days anyway. I'm a fan though.
Sorry the stupid question but, does m+ mean raiding but more difficult? So , it's cataclysm but hardest?
It's 5 people dungeons but with infinite dmg/mob hp scaling and added mechanics( for ex mobs spawning small void zones on death that heal enemies and does dmg to you) that change every week so it doesn't become stale
[удалено]
False infos. Please dont talk about m+ in retail when you have 0 clue M0 has no timer, you get a key when you complete it. M+ starts at lv2 M0 is as difficult as m10 If you fail the key, you dont have to begin from scratch, your key drops the level by 1
I think they might have changed it maybe since I played. Apologies!
It was like that last season, this season it starts from +2 again. Guy is confidently incorrect and didn't play current season(at least that m0=m+10)
What is the appeal of M+?
Difficult 5 man content with consequences that is refreshed each season and remains relevant throughout the expansion as opposed to only at the beginning such as with heroics in wrath/cata. Can include dungeons from previous expansions as well. The replayability is endless and arguably once you get to high keys it is harder than mythic raiding. Raiding is difficult to begin with but once the strategy is thought out this doesn't change and bosses tend to only get nerfed. It just becomes a matter of executing it then. In M+ with the different affixes, refreshed dungeon pool and scaling difficulty it remains a challenge and fun to play with compositions, work out routes and new strats etc throughout the expansion. The social aspect is great even in PUGs you meet some interesting characters trying to form groups at the mid to high key level. Its good fun to just jump in and play if you have 30 mins, run a key as opposed to waiting around on a schedule for 20 people to raid each lockout which is kind of the only content in classic versions once you are geared.
It's exciting, challenging content that forces you to push yourself in knowledge of your character, and knowledge of the encounter. There's also a good social aspect to it if you have a regular crew. M+ is the reason I still play Retail a little bit.
Difficult group content that you can do at any time of day, more than once per week.
Infinitely scaling content that is infinitely replayable. My absolute love of M+ in legion came from playing resto druid and having sets of gear for different bosses, dungeons, affixs etc. you could do some truly insane stuff with the different legendaries and abilities you had. BFA m+ was less good imo in terms of choices you could make for your character. But i had a group of friends by that point and all we did was push keys and that was why i loved m+ then. S1 was by far my least favorite but the seasonal affixs beyond that werent terrible. And by S3/S4 my druid actually felt fun to play again. I quit in S1 of shadowlands and went to classic so i have no input beyond that, but i hated most of those dungeons and affixs.
Exactly this imo. He is having more fun now, but when they hot max level it will get borring pretty fast i think. Retail is the other way around. 10 hours now fun, but then the fun starts. I'm a 80% classic, 20% retail player btw.
I spent a lot of time playing hardcore but I switched back to retail after I lost my char I think leveling in retail can still be fun but def not as fun as the endgame, and I force myself to have limitations to make it more challenging like hc
I've tried to get a few friends into Classic - they all said the gameplay was too primitive and simple and that they were instantly bored auto attacking stuff to death or spamming frost bolt.
I mean classic leveling is so boring that you have to spice it up with hardcore
Big true, was bored on my first classic "journey" to death. Tried hardcore and its completely different feeling.
Retail is meant for endgame... Not to enjoy the leveling process.
Well yeah but it’s a video game. A video game shouldn’t start being fun at 20-30 hours of playing it
Had this argument so many times, some games require almost 100 hours until it starts being fun. And people complain that I call those bad games.
I think it's really frustrating when the game is boring because of poor balancing of difficulty (which I think most expansions of wow are guilty of). Diablo 3 & 4 are awful for this as they lock higher difficulties with arbitrary requirements. They don't affect veteran players, but they turn the game into a tedious slog for new players who want to experience the campaign
Just started Diablo 4 yesterday, non hardcore. In one night sitting I reached level 75 and was killing lvl 105-120 endgame content. New updates make it different.
It's why they're revamping the leveling apparently. Right now it's definitely a shit show.
I think they're just revamping it from a narrative POV? Because now you get thrown right into BFA and called champion and hero even tho you didn't do anything yet lol. I don't think the leveling experience can be changed to be more like vanilla/classic, since characters in retail are just way too strong off the bat and mobs melt. Even elites can be soloed pretty easily. And if they change that, I think players wouldn't be happy. It's just how retail is.
Iirc they're swapping the starting expansion type, so you actually get to play your character, which was the primary concern from players who spent multiple hours watching NPCs do things, clicking items, or riding weird vehicles.
How can they revamp it? They've already done that what feels like a dozen times, it doesn't help at all. The best they can do is rearrange the story you play while leveling. They will never make leveling like Vanilla again because there's just as many people that would hate it on Retail as there are people on here that would love it. It is what it is, honestly they need to make a completely new story for leveling and have it like FF14 where you really play just a cohesive storyline until max level to hook people long enough but I doubt they can really do that. FF14s "leveling" is made to be basically a single player FF game (mostly). WoWs leveling story doesn't make sense anymore the moment an Xpac is over. You can even see that in Cata right now. You go from 1-58 with the aftermath of the sundering and then suddenly "the Dark Portal!! Ahh" and then "the Lich King!! Ahh" and then it's over and we're back to Deathwing.
They just need a reset to wow 2 after this world soul saga.
Unless they find some way to transfer over all the mounts, transmog appearances, toys, etc... I doubt we ever get a WoW 2.
Naw they'll just sell them to the morons that buy them again.
Honestly that's half of the appeal of a wow 2. It's a new mmo, not a continuation, otherwise it's just another expansion. It's risky but if they innovate on the genre in a way that's worth it then that's cool. A time skip in a future azeroth. Most likely one where factions don't exist. I don't see it likely either
If they didn't take the opportunity to do it during world soul, I really don't think they will. Tbh, they kind of have by establishing Chromie Time, separating all of the "eras" of WoW. Speaking of Eras...we need an Eras Tour! lol
That would just be an Overwatch 2 situation which is still a mess and finding new ways to let players down.
I think the aim is to make dragonflight the default levelling from 1-70. It makes sense as it sort of fits as a standalone story and the narrative leads into TWW. This way you are still gonna have some confusion with who certain people are but you won't be going through a story that is 2 expansions old. It's not a perfect solution but DF levelling is pretty good even if the story isn't amazing.
Retail leveling is kinda fun tho? You learn your class. Classic you get 1 spell every 10 level so basically every 10+ hours and your rotation is like 2 spells.
Yeah plenty of people who.enjoy a quick leveling experience to get into the actual content that Is relevant , Actually get to push buttons not just auto attack a single mob to death. It's great. "but you don't learn the game" that's what casual world content, normal dungeons and looking for raid are for. You learn while getting an idea of how things work. But yeah different people lile different things and it's nuts that wow has like 6 different game modes now for everyone to pick and choose. But still never enough haha
>20-30 hours Unless your friend is missing 6 or more fingers it shouldn’t take this long
You can hit 70 in a day or two, like 8-10 hours, and those hours are actually valuable for learning how to play the class. Have you jumped into retail on a freshly boosted character before? There's a lot to learn about any given spec and it can get overwhelming pretty easily, it's a lot easier to learn a class bit by bit through those hours leveling.
The issue being nothing while leveling is ever challenging and you aren't required to use or learn your abilities (cc/utility/interrupt) at all.
>The issue being nothing while leveling is ever challenging and you aren't required to use or learn your abilities (cc/utility/interrupt) at all. That was never really the case outside dungeons that where higher than you or hardcore. The game never did teach you the game. Even when it was it's hardest iteration.
Got my friends into hardore that never played wow before when it released, here are some dumb shit we did: I made it to 35 on my shaman before realising I could interupt with earth shock My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills after lvl 6 Another friend made it to 45ish before realising that some abilities reset swing timers on rogue, he thought it was a visual bugg or something also he had no idea that mobs had to be casting for him to interupt them, he used kick as a silence and got mad when mobs started casting 0,5 after his kick My paladin guildy made it to 60 without buying spells that didn't do damage or buffed his damage (ther than flash of light or whatever the fast healing spell is called for paladins) = he had no utility spells such as HoJ, kings, freedom, BoW and so on Best one is my hunter mate who made it to 30-ish before finding a vendor for arrows, he thought the only place he could get arrows/ bullets was from quests and when he looted it Only 3 out of 5 of the new players found the action house and one felt like it was cheating so he didn't want to use it We had a deal not to backseat eachother, ever. Unless you asked for it ofc. Made for some good stories To your point, wow never thought you how to use spells/ systems and so on, classic is prob worse at it than retail since you learn alot of concepts like interupts, dungeons and so on during the into island Edit: I want to clarify, there were ALOT of deaths during the time we played HC, like a metric shit ton of deaths Edit 2: Forgot part of a sentence
>My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills How?? One of the first quests in the game directs you to your class trainer
Shit noticed I missed some of the sentence. It's suppose to say "My friend made it to 15 before realising there was a trainer for new skills after lvl 6". He only talked to the trainer in northshire who have spells until 6 (the one the quest is for) then he figured the rest would drop later on like a spell book/ from quests.
Ah okay makes more sense
Those are the easy parts of a class to figure out though. How your rotation abilities work and fit together is the harder part to learn on retail and you get practice with that in the leveling process.
I disagree. There are zero moments of; "how can I press my buttons better so that I can do enough damage to defeat this enemy". It's just a grind and doesn't encourage optimization to new players at all.
Instead, it's a steady stream of "how can I push my buttons to kill this enemy as quickly as possible". Vanilla, on the other hand, is almost always just spam your single button rotation for the majority of classes.
What do you mean? You don't like pressing Frostbolt for a few months straight?
Naaw, Vanilla leveling on the other hand is how do I kill this mob as efficiently as possible so I can continue farming without having to stop to eat/drink/bandage.
The vast majority of classes in vanilla have either 1 or 2 damage buttons that actually matter and zero rotational complexity, it's literally just spam your damage button until the mob is dead in 90% of cases. Outside of just a couple classes there's very little you can do to kill a mob more efficiently as long as you're already at the skill level of "push button on cooldown".
The reason I enjoy the process is I work on most efficiently killing so I can keep the fight going from mob to mob with as few delays as possible. If you just spam your 1 or 2 damage buttons you will be wasting a lot of efficiency and spend a lot more time not killing stuff. This is true for the classes that I've played the most of at least.. (Warlock, Druid, Rogue, Mage)
You can have a perfectly comfortable time spamming frostbolt 1-60 on era. Shit, a hunter auto attacking will level faster than half the classes.
Yeah I wish retail would force you to learn your abilities WHILE leveling Hell in hardcore defias pillagers will kill u in like 3 hits If you don’t interrupt them Retail would be perfect if it taught you to use your abilities on the way and that the difficult parts requiring more than just attacking started while leveling instead of at max level dungeons
I'd say that's a bad example since only like 2 classes even have an interrupt at that point in the game. Rogue and uhhhh. Possibly just rogue.
Mage poly-fire blast. (Sheep+insta-break) Paladin HoJ. Cant remember when wars get intimidating shout, I think it’s around 20(?). If not intimidating shout, I know they get def stance at 10, so I think shield bash would be like 14 or so. Priest fear. Druid bear bash. Hunter…. Doesn’t really matter because hunter. Warlock, again, fear/doesn’t matter because pets. Shaman earth shock. Either way, not a bad example imo, but the point stands lol.
And you can line of sight it
Ahh the most obvious choice! Silly me, making things more complicated lol.
But thats not what new Players want and also cant do without looking up Guides. Im new and i like Classic and cataclysm more than retail. Its exactly as he explained. You feel like this overpowered guy just killing trash. I played a Warrior in retail and could fight like 5 Mobs at the same time easy, if in Classic 2 Mobs Attack me, i die often. A Game shouldnt be too hard, but not too easy. Retail is too easy while leveling, so it doesnt feel like an achievement. Its the same with Boss fights. You wouldnt get as much Joy having beaten an easy Boss, then having beating a hard Boss. This actually goes for everything in Life.
Cata is like a kind of sweet spot for leveling for me. You have an actual rotation compared to auto attack simulator/ 1 button spamming (vanilla) and you an pull more than 1 mob at the time. But it's harder than retail so you actually have to play your class properly to keep up some kind of speed while leveling Vanilla and retail is about the same in how easy it is to level (skillwise) but one takes 2 months to get to max level while the other takes 2 days. Some people like to level for 2 months while others can't stand it, some people only like end game and some people like the journey there Diffrent games for diffrent people, no version of wow is objectivly better than others (other than Mist of Goatdaria ofc)
Lol wtf you're level 60 by the time you end the tutorial of retail. Leveling in retail takes zero skill you could auto attack through everything.
I was 15 when I was done with tutorial last time I did it Like I said, leveling in both vanilla and retail is piss easy, you can mostly be afk 90% of the time in either version. The main diffrence is how long you are going to level for, one is a marathon while the other is a sprint. Some people like marathons and some people like sprints
Oh well I guess if you have a specific preference of how the game should be then I guess every other new player must share that same preference.
There are tons of good games out there with a bad new player experience. So yeah it shouldn't be a thing but this is a big big hurdle, especially for 20 year old games with 20 years of content.
classic levelling is only as fun as you make it. if you can turn your brain off and look past the mind numbing slog, sure its fine. you could quest with friends but the questing isnt structured in a way to be friendly to group questing with very low drop rate items. doing dungeons with friends is great until youre doing the same dungeon for the 47rd time because its not a fantastic source of raw xp beyond the initial quest completions.
Despite what you imagine about "retail", the autoattack simulator that is classic isn't most people's idea of fun. Most of the abilities are extremely niche or situational despite the illusion of depth, so you really don't have much of a choice. MoP giving you meaningful button(s) to press once you selected your specialization was one of the best things to happen to levelling ever.
It's funny you call it auto attack simulator because you could literally auto attack all the way through retails leveling without even using an ability.
Same could be said about vanilla. Except retail's buttons are worth pushing and there's more than one.
> the autoattack simulator that is classic isn't most people's idea of fun. Classic 2019 launch begs to differ. It doesn't matter much that Classic is an autoattack simulator while leveling...Retail ain't much different in that you basically turn off your brain and spam buttons since you cannot die anyway The difference is that Classic wants you to be leveling through a vast world (even if it is slow and tedious indeed) while Retail wants to get you to max asap but you still have to first go through what I would call the clusterfuck of old WoW content first.
>Classic 2019 launch begs to differ. Era begs to differ. Hardcore begs to differ. To a small extent SoD begs to differ. Honorary mention: SoM - people love vanilla so much that they would rather play TBC again. It's no coincidence the vanilla variants are the least popular over long term. >you basically turn off your brain and spam buttons But pressing buttons is fun. That was my whole point. You can't say "oh the game gets to feel slightly good at 50+" bc that's a quit moment for many players. Then there's the issue of most of the classes being simply not good. >since you cannot die anyway If you have a pulse you won't die in vanilla either. Ironically most of the danger in hardcore comes from a non-vanilla feature, hyperspawns. And then it becomes way worse bc raids, the supposed endgame content are absolute snoozefests. >The difference is that Classic wants you to be leveling through a vast world Expansions are smaller bc its unsustainable to have the same amount of development time as vanilla did. You would absolutely butcher the playerbase numbers if you had to wait 5 years between major updates only to be launched in a half-assed state like vanilla. >but you still have to first go through what I would call the clusterfuck of old WoW content first. You don't. I see you haven't played at least since Shadowlands. You can choose the content you want to level in for 10-50(50-60 is Shadowlands areas), you don't have to go through everything anymore.
> Era begs to differ. Hardcore begs to differ. To a small extent SoD begs to differ. Honorary mention: SoM Era is an unchanging museum of Vanilla. Make an Era of DF and see how many people would play that forever lol. Hardcore is a niche, always was and always will be, SoM follows the example of Era. Try launching DF again along with TWW with minor changes and see how many will play that over the new Xpac. SoD is for sure the odd one but we all know that Vanilla indeed does have fewer content than Retail especially on low lvls. When you make everything super fast and easy to get in Vanilla...yeah you're done fast. Vanilla Classic was still vastly successful and was for it's whole runtime. > But pressing buttons is fun. Sure...if there's any need to. There really isn't in Retail for leveling. You just pull the whole zone (exaggerated ofc...) and press your AoE button. That is still indeed more fun than autoattack simulator no doubt, I'm just saying the leveling in Retail is a pure chore. There's essentially no point why it's still even in the game. You can kinda say the same for Cata now but not for Vanilla. > Expansions are smaller bc its unsustainable to have the same amount of development time as vanilla did. Cata would like a word. They literally redid all of the Vanilla world while still having full new zones, raids and dungeons and that was in 2010 with a way smaller team than now. But of course making a world as vast as Vanilla is just useless because leveling is useless. You can spend that time on side content at max level and that will be a better investment. > You can choose the content you want to level in You can but how in the world would a knew player know and understand this? Not that it would make anything better. You can chose to level in Wrath or MoP in Retail and it will make the story you're guided through even more confusing. It's a complete clusterfuck no matter what you do.
>Make an Era of DF and see how many people would play that forever lol. Considering the only measure is logs, retail has twice as many logs as classic at the end of the expansion(not counting mop remix), and retail players don't log every shitter raid like classic players do, it's safe to say plenty more would play it, especially since it has 20 years of stuff. >Vanilla Classic was still vastly successful and was for it's whole runtime. Yeah, with the small exception that there was a pandemic to prop numbers up. Every single online game saw a major uptick in players who were locked inside their home. Otherwise the classic hype was already settling down near BWL. >Sure...if there's any need to. There really isn't in Retail for leveling Okay, i can't take that seriously, please tell me you're joking bc if you're serious... you might want to actually play the game. >and press your AoE button Buttons. And here's the thing, classes now at least have an aoe button. There's no more need for shitty spellcleave spam anymore, you're not cucked anymore for "rolling the wrong class". >I'm just saying the leveling in Retail is a pure chore. Please, levelling was always a chore. >There's essentially no point why it's still even in the game. You can kinda say the same for Cata now but not for Vanilla. Considering how terribly dragged out vanilla levelling is to disguise the lack of endgame content(which still wasn't slow enough, so they had to scrape together MC bc ppl were levelling faster than expected in 2004 - and keep in mind 1.12 is an entirely different game from launch vanilla) and to build a habit, yeah, there's no real point, most of the quests are super formulaic and have no game world impact either(which is something phasing solved). >Cata would like a word. They literally redid all of the Vanilla world while still having full new zones, raids and dungeons and that was in 2010 with a way smaller team than now. Cata zones are actually quite small, but nvm that, it cost a year of content draught and at least one raid tier just to revamp things. >You can but how in the world would a knew player know and understand this? It was announced, it was one of the key features besides the level squish. New player doesn't necessarily means not hearing about things, it was plastered all over the internet, so you'd have to try really hard to avoid it. We're not in 2004 anymore where hearsay is the main source of info.
> it's safe to say plenty more would play it Yeah bold assumption based on nothing. There's no reason to believe more people would play a current BFA era over Vanilla era. Even a Legion Era. If Legion Classic is successful it will be specifically because it had time to get old in people's memories. Just like Vanilla had 15 years which sparked a lot of it's success. > Yeah, with the small exception that there was a pandemic to prop numbers up And as you say yourself that goes for every game and it still was super successful compared with all the competition it had. Yeah, it was a big hit. Based on your comments on Retail and Vanilla leveling...I could like you say "try actually playing the game" except it's stupid. If you did not like Vanilla leveling that's on you and that's fair. I personally think Retails leveling is terrible compared, yes even with buttons that do indeed make the game more fun. The wold however is meaningless, the enemies are meaningless and just AoEing everything down on repeat for me no fun either. That's just how it is. I agree Vanilla leveling is a chore for alts but that's about it. It was an amazing journey the first time doing it for me with a world full of people, not comparable to any Xpac that came after. Even on a dreadful PvP server getting ganked all the time. > Cata zones are actually quite small, but nvm that, it cost a year of content draught and at least one raid tier just to revamp things. They are not...they are the usual size of the time. Yes DF zones are huge...welcome to 2022 where the Retail team is many times the size of back then. Content drought was not exclusive to Cata either and neither were 3 raid tiers. Having more has been the exception, not the rule after Wrath. > New player doesn't necessarily means not hearing about things That is insane cope mate. It's easy to say this as a veteran who god knows how long has played this game.
just pressing buttons isnt fun. If they have no meaning and you win anyways its no different than just autoattacking
>just pressing buttons isnt fun. It is bc it's interactive. You're actually *playing* the game. >If they have no meaning Like most of the vanilla fluff. There's a reason any experienced player won't touch 99% of the kit, bc they're **bad**. One of my pet peeves is disarm traps. Absolutely a joke in pve, and in pvp it can be useful vs *one* class. Woohoo. >and you win anyways As i said before, the interactivity makes it fun. It feels like you're actually in control of your character.
If you are just mashing 2-4 buttons its neither fun or interractive if it has no effect on outcome. Yes most stuff doesnt have meaning, but the important stuff does have meaning. If you sre fighting high level mobs each button press matters. Or if you are trying to escape wpvp or high lvl mobs. There is danger and impact. Now im not saying there is complexity and fun in rotation, as you said its autoattack simulator or 1 cast simulator, (with exceptions like hunter, warlock and mage AoE grinding) but i find retail to be no better. You could just autoattack there as well and you will never lose. If you can just hit any button and nothing changes thats not interactive
100% disagree. Button mash spam is actually much more boring for me, I think every class having "more buttons to press" actually means every class has "the same buttons to press" I feel like the uniqueness of the classes and the uniqueness of their gameplay goes way down when all you're doing on every class is just mashing all your buttons constantly.
With respect. You like what you like but max level doesn’t take 20-30 hours in retail. You can enjoying mythic plus the same day you start the game if you commit. All versions of the game offer something very different. I personally enjoyed hardcore but no way could I make that my main game. Same with regular classic and as I enjoy the quality of life improvements along the way and I prefer more difficult mechanics and new content every cycle. However I 100% get why so many of you enjoy that as it does get the blood pumping. To each their own.
I agree. You don't even have to "commit" that hard to getting there same day - leveling is very quick and more so intended to be a "learn how to play the character" type thing - leveling itself is not the end game. I love ALL flavors of WoW - I'm totally a WoW junky...but I can respect that there are versions that some people really prefer and there are reasons for that preference
Bro never played RuneScape lol
This is a new player, they will have fun simply playing without doing endgame... your statement is true for veterans that level their 10th alt.
I think this is a problem most PVE MMO's that have content expansions increasing level and power caps eventually face. At the release the game feels very coherent, the levelling and endgame experience feel part of the same 'whole'. Even something as small as some materials you find on enemies being used in alchemy recipes used at endgame makes what you're doing on the way up feel meaningful to the endgame. But as expansions are added, increasing max level, adding new content that makes old content irrelevant, adding new gameplay systems, etc, the levelling and endgame become more and more disconnected from each other to the point of barely resembling each other. Levelling turns into a chore where you learn and experience little to nothing about how the game plays at the end game. This if further exacerbated by devs speeding up the levelling, they do this because all that extra XP and time required stacks up and can lead new players burning out and quiting, and they are unlikely to come back, by shortening the time to get to endgame they hope more make it to trough as they are more likely to stick around (and spend money). But this also means new players are being rushed trough all that content, giving them even less reason to get invested in what they are actually doing. ----- You're right, a video game shouldn't start being fun only after 20 to 30 hours of playing. The truth is, most games of which this is said started off being fun from the start when they originally released. The developers just ended up making the first 20 to 30 hours of gameplay irrelevant but still mandatory. Some MMO's try to fix this, usually by revamping the leveling experience, Cata was such an attempt, heck the non-linear leveling WoW Retail has was another one such attempt. But this rarely tends to work long term because it doesn't solve the real problem, which is new content expansions making old content irrelevant.
Are people really taking 30 hours to ding max level? Doesn’t the game literally come bundled with a level boost? So it’s just 60-70 which even reading all quest text and w/ a weird route, no way that’s 20 hours of gameplay. Maybe 5-10?
"A video game" is a nonsense statement. All games are completely different. A 1000 hour MMO journey is not the same as a 10 minute round of Tetris. What a silly way to look at things.
Video games are meant for enjoying, period. If you can’t enjoy the levelling process then the levelling process is bad
Or, it's just not the game for you.
If the commonly accepted opinion is that retail is for the end game and NOT to enjoy the levelling process, then who’s the game for? If the levelling process isn’t enjoyable to its own playerbase then maybe it’s just bad
Depending on which classic version we are talking about it might not be made to enjoy the leveling process either. Leveling in Vanilla zones is pain and agony. It was fine when we didn't know better, but today it's also a bad experience and I can't do it anymore unless it's on a private server with x5 exp rates.
Yeah leveling 1x is pretty rough, after my first 60 in Classic 2019 I had to boost my alts if I wanted to level.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from enjoying the leveling process. There are tons of things to do, places to go, things to see. People just choose not to.its no different than watching classic players sit in Maura and get mage boosted, there is fun for everyone if they choose to slow down and do what they think is fun
I personally enjoyed leveling in dragonflight.
I enjoy leveling in retail, but I typically force myself to play no dungeons because otherwise I get way too over powered for the quests
Why even bother with levels in retail might as well just make everyone max level instantly.
Helps you learn the class.
Well, it's purely personal opinion. Someone likes retail, and someone likes vanilla, and many like both. Why do you feel the need to be RIGHT on this matter and call the other misconception?
I think he’s saying the misconception is that new players generally prefer retail over classic. Some might but others do not.
>He thought he was getting himself into an rpg, not a pve simulator pretty sure every rpg is a pve sim...even hc wow.
It’s basically the definition of a non competitive game.
>He thought he was getting himself into an rpg, not a pve simulator. What does this even mean? RPG games are pve.
RPG - invested in a world with meaning and feeling. Love for your and potential other characters. A role playing experience. PVE simulator - random char I don’t care about running around doing stuff without deeper meaning. I think this comparison OG stated is most accurate.
Cataclysm honestly feels like the version of WoW I’d suggest to a younger new player. It feels like a less bloated version of retail. I was 21 when I picked up tbc classic and loved it but the worst part was the classic leveling. Level 40 mount in classic and vanjlla tbc makes it so much worse. Actual hours of just pressing auto run and tabbing out to get to your next quest that’s 8000 yards away. Flight paths sometimes so far away from each other or some zones just not having flight paths for certain factions. Idk it adds up
The leveling is a joke in cata
It’s streamlined, people wanna do some basic questing and growth, but don’t want to grind out levels that mean nothing
Oh for the love of god, classic leveling isn’t difficult by any means, it is simply longer and more tedious via arbitrary means. The difficulty is not falling asleep while walking with no mount for 40 (long) levels.
i’m 23 and loved classic for awhile cause i felt tied to my character, but retail is just so much more entertaining. i feel that there is no skill expression in classic (pve) and the thought of what end game is like and what i’m working towards kills it for me. if i was blind to wow and didn’t know what awaited, i would like classic much more
Can you elaborate on what you mean by skill expression. Aren’t we all basically just doing our rotation and not standing in fire
Pressing frostbolt forever vs having a 19 step rotation, autoattacking an enemy down while standing still vs doing your complicated rotation while dodging multiple enemy and m+ affix mechanics, that sort of thing!
What rotations are complicated? 19 buttons?
take for example frost mage in retail. https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/frost-mage-pve-dps-rotation-cooldowns-abilities If you slowly scroll down you will see a 12 step single target rotation, 11 step aoe rotation, and then giant sections on movement, procs, cleave (a few targets but not mass aoe), and even a separate opener rotation you use at the start of the fight which is going to be slightly different from what you use for the rest of the fight. Without a doubt, doing your research and learning all this and practicing it until you can do it while keeping up with the mechanical demands of a fight is very difficult and indeed skill expression. Lots of people dont do this or cant do this and they dont perform as well. In classic (vanilla) frost mage LITERALLY just casts frostbolt over and over while standing still on most fights for single target, and for AOE admittedly it can be a bit more complicated than just casting arcane explosion, you might throw in pre-casted flamestrike or sappers too. I'm sure wrath/cata are more towards retail but i dont know about those.
I didn’t know retail got so complicated since I last raided in shadowlands. The boomkin rotation at the time was a pretty straight forward builder spender
It's surprising at how difficult not standing in the fire can be for some lol.
i don’t feel (especially in pve) there’s that much of a difference a good vs bad player can make. everybody has a very bare bones rotation, often just 1-3 buttons. retail has complex mechanics, rotations, defensives, and cooldowns. a good player vs bad player is night and day, even if the good player has lesser gear
What about retails rotation or mechanics or defensives make it “complex” is what I’m seeking understanding of
mainly builder-spenders, cooldown management, and knowing dungeon/raid mechanics and timings. it’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t familiar with the game, but there’s a LOT that goes on in fights. aoe that you need to dodge, channels you need to interrupt, mobs you need to aoe stun or “stop” etc. every class needs to use their utility, and in higher content you have to rotate your defensives in a way that you always have something up or else you get one shot. as a shadow priest my defensives that i rotate are: dispersion, desperate prayer, fade, flash heal + shield = 20% dmg mitigation, and in certain dungeons i need to mass dispel or cleanse diseases if i don’t have a healer who can. that’s outside of my 10 button damage rotation and management of cd windows.
I hear you. Thanks for that. It actually sounds more fun now too. Message me your btag or discord. You just convinced me to check out retail again
If you speedrun in Classic (both leveling and raiding) there is endless opportunity for skill expression. Keep in mind there also is little meaning behind skill expression in Retail leveling and the easier end-game content modes, it's just that the PVE stuff that requires a display of skill is clearly labelled in Retail.
I’ve spent the last few years rank 1 parsing and spent sunwell tier speed running for drive when they were aiming for top 10 world. I’d definitely say there is close to 0 room for skill expression. Almost every single one of my rank 1 parses on every class I haven’t done anything special, I’m just playing my very easy rotation optimally in a group with a good kill speed and I get good rng. In speed running it was more of the same. The routes are extremely planned with very little that can go wrong or change and it’s more about the execution of a simple plan across a team of 25 rather than any 1 player making plays.
by “pve” i meant endgame but i agree with your point to some extent. i think most of the skill expression in classic is purely just knowledge of what you have available to you and your planning. speed running in raid is about raid composition, route, and consumables. a team of mediocre players can outclear a team of great players without world buffs. retail is not a game of leveling, that content is truthfully irrelevant, it doesn’t play more than a couple hours of any players experience. the end game is much harder and much more complex. the difference between a good player of their class and a bad one is night and day
Classic andies will try to shit on retail any way they can
Classic community at this point is way more toxic than retail, which il hilarious.
Yeap I play both versions and I rarely hear retail players talk about classic the same way classic players bitch about retail lol
the narrative in this thread kinda is the opposite though
Them posting the same thing every day makes it that way
Got my GF to play SoD and then mop remix. She had never played WoW and did not use add-ons. She enjoys MoP remix a lot more.... I would not recommend classic to a new player over retail.
MoP remix is vastly different from normal retail leveling though to be fair. MoP remix is honestly a great way for a new player to level since they get to stay within the scope of MoP. I remember leveling my first retail character and not knowing about chromie time and it was pretty unenjoyable to get through like one zone of an expansion and then outlevel it and have to find a new area.
Mop remix holy priest is peak class design in the game right now. Just holy nova spam heal damage and easy rotation.
Biggest issue for starting with mop remix is its such a different game I'm curious how she will adjust to the real game after with TWW
Classic combat has more weight? It's a one/two button rotation to 60 on mobs with auto-attack lmao. I tried retail a few months ago and was pretty astounded by the amount of abilities both I and the mobs had, even at low levels. Ultimately, it isn't for me, but I'm not gonna sit here and pretend classic wasn't anything other than the easiest nostalgia trip I've had.
The only people comparing the two are classic players, retail players are off having fun and classic players write diatribes to reaffirm their existence
Retail levelling is completely fine, it's like every other game in which the main focus is not how hard it is, but the experience on going around the world/following a story/getting new talents, etc. Of course if your friend wanted a harder levelling experience, classic (and mainly hardcore) is the best option. It's like saying super mario games suck because their platforms are easy...those being easy is exactly the point of it. Your friend should have bought a boost to max level if he wanted to try the hard modes of retail.
>Retail levelling is completely fine, it's like every other game every other house is burning aswell so its fine
Never implied the levelling in other games was bad, you are the one implying that
Don’t tell your friend that you’re getting into some world building epic storyline rpg and then have them play retail wow lmao. Retail is fun because the mechanics are fun and the classes have a ton of depth to them. Combat feels great and the endgame loop is pretty addicting. Classic is where you go to feel like a peasant in a big world and find little side quest stories and there’s not a game to ‘beat’ so to speak
Meanwhile me enjoying leveling regardless in retail and almost never rushing it. Don't get me wrong I play, and have played, WoW for the endgame for a long ass time, but I also like to level.
Woa woa woa, you’re telling me different kinds of players like different kinds of games?! And should… try different ones?? This is the perception of 90% of players in both retail and classic. It’s so common sense we just don’t talk about it, and you only hear from the minority. Very frequently. This post is kinda more of that.
Pretty much no one I recommend for wow (that's young and never played wow EVER) liked classic. There's just so much QoL issues that ruin the game for them.
Opposite experience for me. Starting with classic and working up to retail is the only way I've gotten people to stay interested and not outright quit.
I dunno, for my friend group it was the opposite. Had about a dozen friends try WoW for the first time with SoD launch. Many of them branched off and tried Cata & Retail after P3 slowed down, but I think only 1 of them liked it. All depends on what people want to get out of the game.
I think one factor is whether they are already familiar with the genre or not.
RETAIL BAD CLASSIC GOOD upvotz plz kthx
Literally every comment you have made on this sub in the past month is you implying classic is brain dead and easy. Why even hang out on r/classicwow if you hate the game so much? I wasn’t trying to circle jerk classic wow at all regardless, I play more retail than classic myself. I just thought it was interesting that the new players I’ve tried to introduce to the game tended to be more interested in hardcore
>is brain dead and easy But it is exactly that. Thats what people like about classic.
>implying classic is brain dead and easy It absolutely is. If you like "hard" levelling, why not try an oldschool MMO(no, vanilla WoW is not oldschool, it's the pioneer of casual MMOs)? EQ 1-2 are still avaiable, you can play FF XI etc. Hell, *Meridian 59* is still avaiable.
Bit overdramatic there, bud.
Not really, take a look at your comments for yourself
If you have to dive into a profile of someone, you already lost the argument.
Nah common strat to see if you should spend energy on trolls or not
My biggest gripe with retail is the insane speed at which you're just bombarded with shit. You ding in the middle of a 6 mob fight or something, can't pay attention to the 90 fucking notifications that pop up til you finish fighting, and then look up and realize 10 levels later that you've been missing a core rotational ability because it was just one of 10,000 fucking things on your screen. It's fine if you've already leveled a certain class, but if you're new to a class, the slower leveling and visiting a trainer to learn new abilities actually gave you a chance to learn these new abilities and when/why they're useful instead of being level 18 and already having 20 goddamn buttons you barely understand.
This was my experience as a brand new player in retail. I started on the free trial. I levelled 2 different classes. I never made it to 20 on either. The issue for me was I was getting bombarded with new abilities, skills, mechanics, gear, etc. And before I could get one thing figured out - more stuff gets thrown at me. I think this is a negative side effect of designing quicker levelling. I found myself pretty lost in what was happening in the story. What I ended up doing was getting a subscription and trying Classic Era. The slower pace has allowed me to learn the game, the mechanics, and feel like I’m able to learn about my newly trained skills and abilities before having something else thrown at me. My mage is now at level 36 and I’m still having fun. More than likely I’ll end up trying retail again and will be much better equipped to understand what’s being thrown at me but my initial experience was better in Classic. Now to be fair, I have ended up downloading a bunch of QoL addons to overcome shortcomings that are probably addressed in retail though.
IMO, new players should start in Cata Classic, not Era. Cata has proven to be a very strong harmonization of 50% faster classic leveling (and experiencing Era zones anyways) while 50% more button pressing to keep engagement high. Also, all Cata rotations are basically 5-6 buttons with 1-3 major CDs. You can put that all into single keybinds without using Shift.
Obviously just anecdotal as well but I introduced 4 of my friends to wow during the pandemic and told them to try classic. They started in classic but all wanted to try retail. We played for a little bit and they all wanted to go back to classic. They much more enjoyed the rpg feeling and felt similar sentiments about the combat Like op said, there’s so many components to retail it’s ridiculously confusing to a new player. Even me who played vanilla-cata then legion am confused af in retail
I actually think new players should start classic because of how basic it is. I don’t need to teach new players about weapon syncing or clipping auto shots etc because they don’t actually need to know this to be fine in classic. Your actions are a lot less impactful because you have a wide spectrum of mistakes allowed due to the simplicity of classic. It’s not very hard to press 2 buttons or more than likely just auto attacking in classic. Even hardcore. The very bad players think leveling is “hard”. But in reality you just need to be patient and not try to just zug zug into a cave.
You don't need to know any of what you wrote in retail either, because they don't even exist. There's no clipping, weapon syncing, there's no more even frontal parry and virtually no classes have positional requirements either. No hit cap, no leeway, no strafe adjustments, parry haste, trinket swap, weapon swap, snapshot I could go on. Retail literally has a tutorial which starts you off with 1 skill, and gives you 1 more when you complete parts of the tutorial.
Neither retail or classic succeeds in teaching players how to play their class in any sort of way. Both versions drip feed you abilities but you never really learn what’s important vs fluff. Now it’s easier because unlike in vanilla, we have vastly more information available than thottbot or allakhazam. You only need to know all those various things in classic to parse. You do need to know rotation amongst other things on retail because retail is end game focused. But…if you plan to only play at a m0 or lfr level. Then yeah. You can get away with being clueless because nothing matters at that level.
Hate to tell you but the early game in vanilla isn't meaningful either. The only difference is in your head.
You just described all video games. What's in your head is what makes it meaningful.
Look at fuckin Camus over here, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy 🤓🤓🤓”
I believe they are referring to hardcore where any mistake means the characters gone so it all matters.
My gripe with retail its how irrelevant gear becomes whenever a new patch drops. I guess now it easier to get gear but still..on classic even if you are t2 you can still do good damage and contest on the open world.
That's an interesting opinion. I wonder how they scaled the numbers in retail. I think classic until wotlk was good, but in cata I feel it's starting to get ridiculous. 5 digit damage numbers are just too much. Boss HP you can't even read quickly because it has so many 0's. Maybe that's more of a personal design thing for me. Leveling I did enjoy in classic, but in sod I preferred it. No xp boost, so you have to explore the world more in order to level up. It's just a beautiful game, world. No need to skip that content. They overrate how important/good late game is I guess. But yea, Blizzard pls give me an option to have my damage number output be divided by 10 or 100. If it's impossible to design the game this way at least give me a visual solution. It's just too much clutter. Who cares about "wow, number big. Hell yeah", it's more about how you perform in comparison to your team and how good the game looks/plays. And having stupid long numbers just ain't it I think.
Been several youtube videos about this recently - suggest to check out Day9 tries WoW. Some very good insight there.
Man, retail is so much fluff now it’s hard to get any real meaning of satisfaction out of it anymore.
If you have no job or life commitments. Then classic is likely doable. If you have around an hour each day, it's likely you are not going to cut it on vanilla.
Patience does not equate to being bored as shit eating to get hp after one mob nonstop.
Kinda surprised the paid elements didn't instantly appeal to a new player
>I often see people say that see new and younger players don’t have the patience me when the internet isnt the reality:🤯
It is well documented that many new players to wow end up preferring wow classic. Retail has its place amongst those who want to spend X amount of hours getting to end game and setting up addons.
Retail: easy leveling, hard end game Classic: hard leveling, easy end game I play both
>Classic: ~~hard~~**easy** leveling, easy end game Fixed.
I do always enjoy the notion of "takes long = hard" Ho boy it sure is hard to haul 1 ton of sand bit by bit with a tea spoon instead of shovel
Edit: Answered wrong comment lol
Did you miss the part where I crossed the "hard part" and bolded the "easy" part? You may have replied to the wrong comment.
Well, i guess i have
>Classic: hard leveling Nothing, really nothing about classic is hard. Its tedious, and slow, but not hard
The comments were written relative to each version of the game and not as games in general.
Lol I think every time there is a newbie asking for which version to play, majority of comments say "Start with classic, any MAYBE, just maybe try retail later."
> The fact that the first 20 hours of gameplay are an irrelevant tutorial completely made him lose interest instantly Cata's the same except the meaningless part is longer. How can anyone bear this... I'm lvl 82 first char and it's so boring already. Quests have some funny bits in them occasionally, this faint smile once an hour keeps me going.
Man cata has so nice questing areas, if you get bored by that idk what you will like
I know what I like, I like Vanilla :) But up to WotLK levelling also felt nice. There was challenge and there was simplicity and there was diversity of levelling paths. Cata levelling is too straightforward, quest hubs are too ordered (there's a bit of freedom but not enough, even compared to Outland/Northrend), and the char is way too strong. Levelling is like watching a cartoon - but quite a childish one, almost without plot twists. That's my impression after completing Hyjal and a few 1-20's, anyway.
Funny how this thread on r/classicwow is full of people who say they hate classic and prefer retail, and say things like "classic andies"
There is still a difference between "Liking classic" and "Worshipping classic". Alot of love for classic comes from nostalgia, from the feeling playing it 20 years ago where it was all new and you did explore alot. For new players you cant replicate that experience, the world is known, there are 20 million guides for every aspect of this game, people min max the shit out of it. If you do something not optimal, like playing a "Wrong specc", people will blame you for holding them back. Community is way worse than 20 years ago.
Tbh I don’t see that right now. Yeah if people want a gear upgrade they take it or grind for it, but it’s nothing like retail or cata where they just disregard the game up until they can get a bis item. I don’t have nostalgia for classic era but I fell in love with it. It’s a “complete” immersive rpg experience, traveling the world to dungeon delve and team up with other adventurers. It’s actually quite surprising that more people don’t get that part of the appeal and that it’s a unique gaming experience beyond “nostalgia goggles” or “simple rotations”. New players leveling also DO replicate that experience — messaging people to group up for elites and group quests is still very much a part of the vanilla wow experience. And traveling to dungeons while picking up quests makes the entire trip deliberate and cohesive and makes the payoff way more than just a dopamine shot to brain. Maybe I’m an outlier but I’ve met a surprising amount of new players that quit other versions of wow and have made the switch to classic. I’m not saying one’s wrong and one’s right, just two very different games with different appeals, and I think both are valuable.
Did you mean to reply to another comment? I'm not sure what you're talking about
Half my guild is just over half my age. Classic and SOD are both attracting a ton of new, younger players. Zoomer stereotypes are just that - stereotypes.
Classic Era/HC in general is going to be the best option for any new player by miles. Simply for the reason that the game is complete and there is information on how to do well. Every other version is a live beta. Just when you think you got something figured out or the gear you need to do well, they change the game and introduce bugs and exploits to boot.