STV was literal Vietnam for me yesterday. Don't go there

 

This is a really good point- some of the Zones I have went to are very questable, everybody is trying to push 40k+ per hour XP at SM, I did it for a while, got the entire scarlet mail set, but it's fucking mind numbing.

 

I'm still mucking around at Lvl 11. Part of it is that last few days have been really busy what with Ganesh Chaturthi festival and all. Part of it is me really, really, taking my sweet ass time to do quests lol.

 

Level 14 and all remaining quests in silverpin forest(?) are either too high level or elite... why am I playing this game again? How could anyone ever think this is good desgine? How could I think this was good back in the day.

 

I haven’t even played classic yet but everything I’ve heard and watched on twitch is making me not want to play it. I’ll still probably level in the hope they release bc but I have strong doubts.

 

hit level 60 today. feels good

 

So I rolled a toon the other day and already love it. Retail never grabbed me like this. That said, I’m doing a progression schedule with a group of 5 so that while we do most leveling solo, once a week we can get on and run dungeons together.

 

Fuck Gnomer is cancer. Cleared all 7 quests in 2 runs... would have done it in 1 had the entire group just dipped RIGHT BEFORE THERMAPLUG FFS I MEAN COME ON!

 

It sucks because when you take too long the mobs start to re spawn.

That dungeon is way too long considering the GY is so far away. If you have the workshop key you can take a right turn before entering the instance ( Where the vendor is and punchcard A) and use the key there to skip the first half. Very useful if you are just doing a quest run for the last boss and the box things. No keychain bag added yet though ( I think they are adding it phase 2) so you need to waste an bag slot on the key.

Uldaman is also a long dungeon but at least the GY isn't too far away.

Dinged level 48 on my warrior last night, really feeling the lack of rep though since most of my XP came from dungeon running. I don't even have revered with Stormwind. It really is the fastest way to level (especially on servers with a faction imbalance). Some quests are just not doable because of the Horde.

 

Got my Seal of Wrynn yesterday and dinged 25. Crisscrossing Stormwind for 20 minutes was pretty fun. Felt very much like a quest you wouldn’t get anymore in modern WoW.

 

Yes there is.

Time to reroll another three characters on that realm now?

 

Got some secondhand hype from a co-worker who's been talking about classic for like 4-5 months; convinced me to sign up and roll a character despite never having played WoW. It's pretty fun, though I'm not sure PVP is really my style. I just don't really find getting instantly killed by someone 20+ levels higher than I am while I'm trying to kill some random harpies for a quest to be like... motivating? Challenging? the way some people do.

I really enjoy the instanced dungeons and running them with people I know and can voice chat with; that shit's pretty fun.

 

Dungeons and raids are just so laughably easy it's just not the version I am nostalgic about. :/ Guild already clearing MC everything first try (except ragnaros because not enough water) with a bunch of people in the raid who are not 60 yet. Overall attitude is very sad about it. I noticed it was way easier than I remember but just put it down to having gotten better, this is just low lvl stuff etc. but now having read up a bit and actually watching what my already 60 buddies are doing, has me very disheartened.

Not 100% sure but I think, this is it for me now.

 

If you're playing classic on the notion that it was going to be hard, that was a notion that should have been killed months/years ago. People have warned against that mindset for forever now. However, I'm playing the game because it's fun, and fun is not something that is tied to difficulty.

 

Nono, PVP is fun when you are the one slaughtering horde 20 levels below you.

Or more seriously, PVP isn't really fun unless you are in a group at lower levels, or at 60 and prepared for it. There's a bit of a learning curve.

 

It's odd, because I'd say the levelling and the 'World' experience is way harder, but the raids are obviously very simple. The complete reverse of live.

 

Here's a bunch of overly-long rambling thoughts of a person that never played WoW before. Checked /played when I hit 50 and it was 4d8h, at which point I realized that I've wasted more than enough time already.

As a person that never played wow before, playing Classic truly feels like playing an MMO of old. There's benefits to it, like no cash shops and other monetization nonsense that I usually despise, but the game is just tedious overall. There's only one 'modern' MMO I've played - ESO - and just about everything is far, far worse in classic. For all the jeering at "you think you do, but you don't" I can't help but think the guy was right.

Perhaps it was the fact that I chose to play a rogue, but the leveling experience just wasn't good. Combat is excruciatingly slow, often requiring you to have 10s (bandage) to 25s (food) downtime between every second or third mob, and you'll take 20, 30sec to actually kill the one you're fighting. There's little to no tactics anywhere - write macro to automatically cast Riposte when it's available, then spam SS and Eviscerate when it's fully charged; replace eviscerate with SnD in dungeons. Only spells worth interrupting are healing ones. As a rogue, no matter how well I play it is almost impossible to kill more than two, sometimes three mobs at once because killing anything takes forever and your only source of healing in combat can be used every two minutes (you can't bandage in 2v1).

There's been plenty of noise about how 'difficult' combat is. I did not find that to be the case, or rather the cause of it is not any inherent difficulty but rather the fact that you only have so many resources (HP, MP) that don't regenerate it in combat and potions have a 2 min cooldown. The vast majority of the game is pulling mobs one by one so that you don't have downtime after every single fight.

I ran a number of dungeons - RFC, WC, RFK, RFD, Uld, ZF. Every single one of them was simplistic to the point that a brain-dead person might complete it if he had any idea about his class (and I mean don't use AoE/multitarget to pull additional mobs and do some basic target prioritization, not some esotheric knowledge about a given dungeon). The fights themselves come down not to tactics, but to the levels of characters - it's a sure bet that a 50lv dps will do a lot more dmg than a 48lv, for example, no matter the rotation. I don't know how it is at 'endgame' (MC? Onyxia?), but I watched several vids of 'iconic' bosses being cleared and it all seemed similarly uninspired. I am led to believe that there is a *vast* difference between endgame dungs/raids in classic and retail, but classic itself is just bland and boring in that regard.

In short, PvE combat just plainly sucks. There's a lot of downtime, levels are everything, and IMO there's little difference in player skill when it comes to actually fighting. Maybe it's different when you play a class that isn't complete trash pre-60 like Rogue (I think I'd have had a lot more fun playing a mage, or maybe even a priest), but I can't think of a single instance from my 1-50 run where I thought 'that was pretty cool' after a hard-won fight. There is a vast, vast gap between ESO and Classic in that regard, both in overland and instanced content.

I did not particularly enjoy how grindy running the actual dungeons was, too. There's barely any challenge in running the content, but gearing is... slow, to put it mildly. There's about a dozen items you can wear, and with how few drops a 2-hour long run gives (because every single elite mob is a health sponge and AoE is the exception, not the rule), it'll take a long, long time to gear up - especially since the loot is split five ways. There's the added fact that in some inconceivable way I was usually one of the best players in any group I ran despite having never played WoW in my life, which added to the frustration when we wiped yet again because the huntard used multishot to pull half the room and his pet pulled the other half.

I don't have enough knowledge of PvP to really comment on, but... fuck but Rogue was an unlucky choice. I find that killing somebody without them actually fighting back is rather boring, which is what a Rogue excells at. If I want to brawl, I lose - it is pretty much impossible to even get a hit in if Sprint is on cooldown. In the end I never really bothered due to my class choice. I think other classes have it better, but I really can't say. It does seem better than PvE, at least, though perhaps there might be a few too many hard counters between classes.

I was always wondering whether the 'One Tamriel' update that made everything scale to your level in ESO was a good design choice. It allows you to go anywhere, at any time, and be at least somewhat challenged - but I always felt that you don't really see your character grow in strength. After playing Classic, the answer to that question is obvious - yes, it was a great choice. Want to check out Gnomeregan? You have to be in a narrow level range: too low and you're not doing anything, too high and you're facerolling (and getting no xp). In ESO, you can quest literally anywhere in the whole world and do any dungeon or raid in the game; if Classic, if you're level 50 the only 'valid' quests are for 44-52 lvl range. Don't like a zone? Enjoy grinding mobs for the next eight hours. Or maybe do a dungeon - likely a total of two to choose from at any given level.

Quests themselves are both uninteresting and grindy. It is an MMO, so one shouldn't expect the story to be the main focus, but everything feels samey. At level 15 you're killing centaurs in the Barrens to bring 10 $quest_item (note: there's probably four different quests regarding the exact same mobs, but you didn't know that so enjoy running around and grinding in the same place for over an hour). At level 25, you're killing centaurs in Thousand Needles to bring 10 $quest_item. And at level 33 you're killing centaurs in Desolace -- over a hundred of them -- to gain reputation with another faction of centaurs, which will later require you to loot another 10 $quest_item from the other centaurs. Then at lv38 you need to kill centaur spectres, which are the same but slightly transparent. As best I can tell, there hasn't been any difference between the 15lv centaurs and 38lv centaurs. They might have some new abilities - maybe a short stun, or maybe they'll root you into place for a few seconds, but it's not like you can do anything about any of it because most casts are instant (ie uninterruptable) so you just wait a moment and proceed to spam Sinister Strike until they're dead.

Want to do a quest in a group? There's about 50% chance you're out of luck, because most quest drops are not shared. Kill quests are fine, but if you need to bring twenty Troll Dingalings and want to group up with another person you'll have to kill over twice as many mobs because loot isn't shared. If you still want to go ahead you might get unlucky and end up with one person having 8 Dingalings while the other finished already, because it's not an even split and quest items rarely drop from each mob. I suspect that at least 2/3 of xp comes from grinding mobs to get whatever quest items you need than from the exp you get for turning in a quest. Coupled with the fact that there are many quests that require you to hunt the exact same mobs, it must be maddening to play without a guide telling you where to go at what level and what quests to do in what order because you'll be constantly looping back to grind the same mobs you already killed before, but now to collect 15 Troll Pubes instead of Troll Dingalings (oh, and Troll Pubes have a 15% chance to drop - have fun).

Elite quests are probably the best part of the game (well, most of them). The mobs you'll be facing are real tough, quest items are almost always shared amongst party (though not always) and PvE combat only ever approached fun when it was in a small group, fighting against groups of different elite mobs near your level. The matter of prioritizing enemies with different skills, CC and the like made combat feel vaguely interesting. Sadly, those quest areas are few and far between (I only recall Hinterlands and Arathi Highlands; Tarren Mill might've had the dwarves but they didn't really have any skills between them). The added layer of world PVP with different groups killing each other to have the mobs for themselves was interesting, too.

I will note that despite there not being much of a story and the constant grind I did enjoy not being the savior of the world, the chosen one or whatever role you're usually placed in for the 'cool factor'. It was refreshing to be treated as a shit-eating, replaceable grunt that was more a wandering mercenary that helped the Horde's war machine here and there rather than being pivotal to whatever was happening in the world.

***

The best part of World of Warcraft is undoubtedly the map. It is much more whimsical than Tamriel in ESO, and while Tamriel might be much more realistic (or perhaps believable) I think that Azeroth came out on top. Most zones are visually and geographically distinct and going from Barrens to Ashenvale feels like being in a whole different world. Despite the game being old as balls many zones still look decent - Feralas and Searing Gorge were some of my favorites.

The second element which Classic does better than ESO is classes, IMO. Despite combat being shit, each and every class seems very distinct and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Playing as a rogue and a druid is a very different experience, while in ESO there isn't that much of a difference between a magblade and a magsorc. It leads to balancing problems, as well as the ever-present 'rock, paper, scissors' between classes, but it's interesting nonetheless.


In the end, though, the map and class distinctiveness were the only elements that I found superior to ESO in any way (and mayyybe world PVP - I can't say either way). PvE feels incredibly dated, boring and slow, 90% of the game consists of an uninteresting grind and the quests are almost universally uninspired. Despite having fun for the few days I spent playing, in my opinion WoW Classic belongs firmly in the past.

Oh, and rogues fucking suck.

 

I didn’t end up picking up classic because I was convinced that I would pretty much have the same experience you just had. And I would have played rogue as well because I play rogue on retail, where you can argue it is probably the best class from a design perspective and, despite complaints of pruning from previous expansions, has a cocktail of the strongest crowd control options and defensives on a relatively short cooldown.

I was kind of hyped to give classic a go before reality set in. On average I think over the life of my rogue it’s moved faster in stealth (with sprint) than out of stealth (if you don’t count times I’m mounted). Shadowstep doesn’t exist nor does cloak of shadows. Grappling hook will be available ten years down the line on legion classic servers. The primary, genre defining gameplay of a rogue on retail - where every ability costs energy and precise calculations along branching decision trees of built in rng, combo points and energy acquisition - is absolutely shit on by the combo points being target specific.

There are more mechanics in not just some but any random trash pack in a bfa dungeon than there is in the entirety of molten core.

People play MMOs for many reasons, but I’ve always played for the high end pve content. I play dps characters with high responsibility in content and flexibility in options. I’m not trying to wipe cuz some giga random mob in a dungeon made artificially difficult via numerical tuning resisted a sap. That’s aids.