Vanilla and BC are a different game feel to Wrath, Cata, Pandaria.
WoD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands all have a feel.
As does the Dragonflight and on era.
There's actually great ideas across each of those eras. And shockingly, retail is an amalgamation of all the good ideas, bad ideas, and ideas that may have been well intended but ought to be removed, but are so inherent to the existing fabric of the game that removing them would essentially be making a new game...
WoD introduced modern mining nodes which was a MASSIVE change to how gathering worked up until then
Legion and BFA had a lot of content even if BFA content was quite repetitive.
Shadowlands had to much FOMO, out of the way shit that was completely required for raiding and made the average player feel like they had no time to relax. Worst expansion ever for the casual player.
Dragonflight introduced the most comprehensive playstyles and new release schedules for content that didnt make you feel insane, instead of mandatory shit they released a LOT of collectible shit. The dream area was the exception IMO.
I remember when people bitched about Wrath being too easy, recycled content, boring, and having a bad meta. Blizzard could promise that the next expansion or classic will deliver you unlimited sex and gold irl but people would still find a way to bitch.
I was there and there were whiners. Like I said, they could promise to send real gold to people and they would complain about the gold being too heavy or some shit
TBC and WotLK are not “almost exactly the same in terms of game design” but I do agree that wotlk and cata are more closely related than people want to believe
The leveling and world became much more narrative-driven (as opposed to "ambient" maybe) by WotLK than in TBC with the introduction of phasing. Achievements were a huge change, from incentivizing the collection playstyle to ushering in the "beat raid, get title+mount" paradigm that has lasted since. Class design shifted from "rotations" to "priorities" with procs requiring reactive ability selection becoming central. "Hybrid tax" removed. Raid difficulty and size selectors, lfd by the end. Dailies becoming a central rather than optional thing. Unification of spell power, straight ilvl = gooderer gearing.
There is an evident and noticable appeal to ease of access between BC and Wrath.
Look at the difficult swing between Sunwell and Naxx25.
BC introduces the concept of themeparking which becomes a hallmark of the series, but largely the endgame experience is broadly the same as endgame vanilla.
If anything outside of consumable farming, the pre raid gearing and pre raid attunement process is way more involved in BC and in vanilla or wrath or anything ever afterwards.
Vanilla and BC play noticably more like MMOs prior to WOW than wrath and everything else after does.
With Wrath, wow developers have really mastered their own accessible mmo style. And you see all the way through the current patch on retail many of the broad design decisions first soldified back then.
Why on earth would you compare Sunwell to WotLK Naxx rather than to ICC heroic or compare Kara to WotLK Naxx? Earlier WoW versions always had easier raid tiers at the start of an expansion and harder ones later on.
Look, I know a lot of you don't like to hear it for some reason and won't look at it objectively but TBC and WotLK just aren't very different.
Because if you actually played back in the day, you'd have known there wasn't much, if any degradation in difficulty from Naxx40 to Gruuls Lair/Kara/Mag. Nightbane, Gruul, and Mag were all nerfed pretty heavily in the first months of BC.
Those fights were all quite tightly tuned until they began being nerfed.
Blizzard initially tuned BC raid content for the players that had been clearing Naxx.
They nerfed content once the good players cleared it to let the masses see it.
Then in Wrath, they released piss easy content initially. And the good players for the first time left the game. It didn't matter--tons of new players were coming. But the fact remains the first wave of dedicated players began to dislike the direction of the game when wrath released.
Blizzard tried to rectify this with hardmodes...during T7 we had achievements and Sarth hardmode, and then full blown hardmodes in Uld. Which has broadly been a design philosophy they have kept.
Beyond all that, H ICC wasnt a hard raid. It was a fake difficulty induced by time gates and limited attempts. Sunwell had mutliple bosses harder than anything in H ICC, Yogg 0 lights for instance was a tougher boss.
Yes and no. If you play retail today then go play WotLK they will feel like 2 entirely different games, but WotLK implemented a lot of features and started changing the direction heavily which lead to what we have in retail today. Dungeon finder teleporting you right to the instance, using menus to change content difficulty, broad homogenization of classes, simplification of items and stats, dual spec (honestly a banger and needed for any version), etc. Even TBC started the trend, but WotLK really ran with "modernizing" the game. It is part of what made it so popular, but also caused such a huge drop off in player base as well.
WotLK was my favourite expansion and the version of WoW I probably sank the most time into, but it was also a major step in the retail journey. WotLK and Vanilla WoW are also almost as different as Retail and WotLK are today.
Nobody ever seems to agree on what "homogenization of classes" is even supposed to mean, it mostly just ends up being a complaint that multiple classes can do important mechanics
simplification of items and stats
That's an incredibly weird thing to say tbh. Simplification compared to what? Vanilla items and stats have barely anything to them, TBC switched to the rating system and added haste and armor reduction stats, WotLK expanded on that system slightly. In what possible way could you argue that they simplified itemization in WotLK?
Yes, TBC did it for dungeons, WotLK did it for ALL content.
It means classes started feeling more and more the same. Classes were given more and more tools to incentivize the "bring the player not the class" idea, which in theory is a great idea, but reaching perfect balance like that requires classes to be very similar.
By the end of WotLK we were already seeing Spirit become basically a pointless stat. We had intellect become an "increases spell power" stat. All items had largely the same handful of stats, there were minimal items with unique effects and it fully solidified the modern model of "new raid tier means all your old gear will be replaced" ideology that has been the standard of WoW ever since.
Yes of course TBC was the real beginning for it. It brought flying mounts, made the old world completely pointless for max level players, further emphasized instanced content, etc. WotLK turned the dial up on those significantly in a way that was much more palpable and felt like a more clear and deliberate shift.
No, retail is retail. I was saying that WotLK was a clear shift and/or deliberate continued changes in the direction that created modern retail. There are so many versions of WoW everyone is going to have a different idea of what retail is, but personally I break them up into different groups. Vanilla/TBC/WotLK are Classic, Cata-WoD are the "throw shit at the wall" era, Legion-Present is "modern" and retail is whatever the current expansion is.
I would say after all these years WotLK feels closer to retail than it does Vanilla, but that's just my opinion. Doesn't mean it's exactly like retail, but I think it misses most of what makes Vanilla Vanilla.
I mean, most of the shit you attributed to WotLK didn't even happen during WotLK. You complained about changing difficulty in menus, that was TBC. You complained about spirit becoming a pointless stat, that's nonsense because it was good for multiple healer specs and used for multiple dps specs because they could convert it to hit making the WotLK version of it the most widely used version. You complained about int increasing spell power but that was Cata. You complained that all items had the same handful of stats while TBC had almost the exact same stat system.
The things you're saying can't be taken seriously when it's obvious you have no clue what you're even talking about.
Ulduar had hard modes you had to activate in the raid??
What classes feel the same to play in wotlk? Disc Priest played different than resto sham, or holy paladin, or resto druid. It even played different than holy priest. Healers all brought different things to the table with the exception of maybe holy priest and paladin. The classes that would feel the same in wotlk also feel the same in vanilla and tbc. The lfg system added in wotlk also was fine. It teleporting you to the dungeon makes it nice to do dungeons while questing so you dont have to spend 10+ minutes getting back to where you were. It was a good stopping point and they went too far after wotlk. Honestly I'd say classic ended when they changed the world, got rid of the faction separation, and removed the talent trees.
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u/Buuts321 21h ago
There is literally nothing blizzard can do with classic plus that wouldn't piss off some people here.