World of Warcraft: Retail, Classic and Private

[J1M]

Ah ****. I wanted to do a play from the beginning up to the newest expansion kinda thing.

If you want to play WarCraft for the story, you need to start with WarCraft III and its expansion. That is still the primary influence 23 years later.

[Finarfin]

Ah ****. I wanted to do a play from the beginning up to the newest expansion kinda thing.

If you want to play WarCraft for the story, you need to start with WarCraft III and its expansion. That is still the primary influence 23 years later.

I already did, I was just wanting to refresh my memory regarding the WOW storylines.

[J1M]

Ah ****. I wanted to do a play from the beginning up to the newest expansion kinda thing.

If you want to play WarCraft for the story, you need to start with WarCraft III and its expansion. That is still the primary influence 23 years later.

I already did, I was just wanting to refresh my memory regarding the WOW storylines.

For vanilla, I'd say the alliance is more definitive. You'd want to cover the Defias Brotherhood and the missing king questlines. TBC can probably be skipped but Wrath would be more consequential and start in the Fjord.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It wasn't a problem. The bosses do the same moves every pull. All I had to do was learn slightly faster than the slowest person using mods. Something really important like a phase change would have voice chat chatter about it anyway.

To finish my thought above: They should continue to allow DBM in raid finder difficulty to give it a negative stigma and smooth the transition.

The way you shrug it off make it seems you really didn't interact with the mechanics from recent raid releases. If your raiding experience is from MoP, the game has been live for twice as long, and its raiding philosophy and encounters has changed quite a lot, for better or worse.

Except for lower difficulties, people are rarely going blind; in fact I'd wager most already know the mechanics before setting foot in an encounter. In that case, boss encounter addons aren't used to tell you what the abilities do, they're mainly used for pacing and attribution. Same for WeakAuras.

Things like Volcanic Heart from Mythic Echo of Neltharion are hardly doable without any kind of addons. There was 5 bombs with a large explosion radius on 5 random players, where you have to move to a nook and cranny different from the other 4 players in less than 7 seconds, where the disposition of the room changes for each set, to not clip them (otherwise it's a wipe). If you play a class with no mobility (I do, I play Priest) between the decision making, the time to travel and possibility of being in the same spot than another player and having to correct, without addons, it's over.

I do think there's an issue with the arms race between addons and encounters today, and some fights were clearly trivialized by them. On the other hand, it's disingenuous to pretend they're not currently needed at all and you just have to "git gud" when I assume you've barely grazed any kind of relevant content for a while. Yeah, I took the bait.

Fair point, I didn't raid Dragonflight or War Within, and Mythic raiding was never of much interest to me (run splits or wait until they put in nerfs? bleh). The reason I'm still dismissive of the claims that DBM is mandatory is because they sound exactly the same as the (false) claims of those addons being mandatory that I heard for years and years prior. I'm sure they are helpful and that many people genuinely believe that they need them.

Another big issue with WoW isn't just the non obvious boss mechanics and resolutions, but also the moment to moment incoming damage profile in which the game is not conveying to you information you need in the next 2 seconds.

WoW combat since Legion plays out very differently. Not just for boss fights but also for M+ trash packs, which is where most of the frustration comes from. WoW over the past decade has struggled with spikey damage. Every time the devs vow to make the game not spikey, it inevitably becomes spikey again within a year. This is due to foundational game design flaws, mainly that there are several different conditionals that determine incoming damage and the game is tuned around that all of them are being fulfilled successfully.

In ye old days, only the tank was getting hit, which was boring for the rest of the party. Nowadays the whole party is taking damage. There are lots of unavoidable AoEs, one shot mechanics that target DPS like tornadoes that spawn during combat or unkillable fixating adds, and untauntable mobs that target DPS, etc. So the rest of the players are constantly being hurt. Those players have defensive CDs, so the incoming damage is tuned with the presumption that they have their defensives up. So if you walk into a room and don't have your defensive up right away, you get hit very hard. But you can't just pop defensives all of the time or else you will run out when you need one. DBM tells you on trash fights right away if you need to pop a defensive.

And then you have the interrupt/stun mechanic. Mobs are always trying to get off a devastating attack, which when combined with damage being tuned for defensives means that if someone misses an interrupt and doesn't have their defensive up, they die. Also, mobs often have several castbar abilities/spell but not all of them are devestating, so you might see a castbar to kick what turned out to have been a weak attack, and then the target immedietely begins casting his devestating attack and whoops your pummel is on cooldown. This is why you need DBM so you wait for the audible ping telling you this is the one you need to kick within 1.5 seconds.

Also, less obviously to non-healer players, a lot of mobs get juiced up by a buff that makes them super dangerous which has to be purged by the healer, so if the healer misses that (or is new and doesn't understand how Retail WoW's damage model works) then people die. This is why an overgeared tank can still go from full HP to dead in less than 2 seconds into a trash pull. (this is also yet another failing of the default UI due to how hard it is to notice these buffs).

And then it got worse because we have another variable being added with Augmentation Evokers who can grant shields to the party. Augmentation Evokers were a godsend when they were introduced in 10.1 giving parties a comfortable buffer. Everyone wanted an aug. So damage has to be tuned under the assumption that players actually have a lot more than just their default max HP. (The game being designed under the presumption you have certain classes is a general issue though, like certain boss AoEs being impossible to escape in time without Demonic Gateway, or adds that need to be repositioned within 1.5 seconds by Death Grip or everyone dies, etc).

To reduce spikeyness in WoW, you would have to narrow the huge variance in damage, which means removing these conditional variables so that you don't have to presume that all of them are being fulfilled.

• 1. better design the visual language of the game so that it's clear when you walk into a room which mob is s souped up on a buff or has a devastating attack,
• 2. remove interruptible/stunnable hard hitting attacks, design combat under the presumption that the enemy will always hit the players.
• 3. remove most short cooldown defensive abilities and items, so damage is tuned under the assumption that players will take damage naked at 100% (instead of assuming they have a 20% damage reduction defensive up so you need to do 125% damage to them to make it 100% as you originally intended).
• 4. remove buffs on enemy mobs that have to be purged, so tune damage under the presumption that healers won't purge the buffs every time. Alternatively, move debuffing over into a support role so that healers are not overburdened, and maybe make the damage debuffs an automatic thing that happens in the support role's rotation. Maybe expand the party size from 5 to 6 to accommodate a support slot. If the baseline is that every group will have 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 support, and 3 DPS, then Blizzard can know for sure how much damage that support will be stopping and design accordingly. Etc. It'd be simpler to just remove purging, though.

[J1M]

From what I recall Sapphiron was a good fight for raid damage. Not flashy, but kept the healers busy.

I'm not going to talk about current WoW, just say that I don't think it is required to have every player hitting every GCD in order to make a good game, and when other considerations, like managing mana, were present the game was more popular.

[Kolgrim]

You kinda had to be there for WoW's story.

Sad that this applies to the entirety of WoW at this point. At it's peak the game was something special but I can't fathom why new players would ever stick around nowadays.

[Shillitron]

The way you shrug it off make it seems you really didn't interact with the mechanics from recent raid releases. If your raiding experience is from MoP, the game has been live for twice as long, and its raiding philosophy and encounters has changed quite a lot, for better or worse.

Except for lower difficulties, people are rarely going blind; in fact I'd wager most already know the mechanics before setting foot in an encounter. In that case, boss encounter addons aren't used to tell you what the abilities do, they're mainly used for pacing and attribution. Same for WeakAuras.

Things like Volcanic Heart from Mythic Echo of Neltharion are hardly doable without any kind of addons. There was 5 bombs with a large explosion radius on 5 random players, where you have to move to a nook and cranny different from the other 4 players in less than 7 seconds, where the disposition of the room changes for each set, to not clip them (otherwise it's a wipe). If you play a class with no mobility (I do, I play Priest) between the decision making, the time to travel and possibility of being in the same spot than another player and having to correct, without addons, it's over.

I do think there's an issue with the arms race between addons and encounters today, and some fights were clearly trivialized by them. On the other hand, it's disingenuous to pretend they're not currently needed at all and you just have to "git gud" when I assume you've barely grazed any kind of relevant content for a while. Yeah, I took the bait.

Fair point, I didn't raid Dragonflight or War Within, and Mythic raiding was never of much interest to me (run splits or wait until they put in nerfs? bleh). The reason I'm still dismissive of the claims that DBM is mandatory is because they sound exactly the same as the (false) claims of those addons being mandatory that I heard for years and years prior. I'm sure they are helpful and that many people genuinely believe that they need them.

Another big issue with WoW isn't just the non obvious boss mechanics and resolutions, but also the moment to moment incoming damage profile in which the game is not conveying to you information you need in the next 2 seconds.

WoW combat since Legion plays out very differently. Not just for boss fights but also for M+ trash packs, which is where most of the frustration comes from. WoW over the past decade has struggled with spikey damage. Every time the devs vow to make the game not spikey, it inevitably becomes spikey again within a year. This is due to foundational game design flaws, mainly that there are several different conditionals that determine incoming damage and the game is tuned around that all of them are being fulfilled successfully.

In ye old days, only the tank was getting hit, which was boring for the rest of the party. Nowadays the whole party is taking damage. There are lots of unavoidable AoEs, one shot mechanics that target DPS like tornadoes that spawn during combat or unkillable fixating adds, and untauntable mobs that target DPS, etc. So the rest of the players are constantly being hurt. Those players have defensive CDs, so the incoming damage is tuned with the presumption that they have their defensives up. So if you walk into a room and don't have your defensive up right away, you get hit very hard. But you can't just pop defensives all of the time or else you will run out when you need one. DBM tells you on trash fights right away if you need to pop a defensive.

And then you have the interrupt/stun mechanic. Mobs are always trying to get off a devastating attack, which when combined with damage being tuned for defensives means that if someone misses an interrupt and doesn't have their defensive up, they die. Also, mobs often have several castbar abilities/spell but not all of them are devestating, so you might see a castbar to kick what turned out to have been a weak attack, and then the target immedietely begins casting his devestating attack and whoops your pummel is on cooldown. This is why you need DBM so you wait for the audible ping telling you this is the one you need to kick within 1.5 seconds.

Also, less obviously to non-healer players, a lot of mobs get juiced up by a buff that makes them super dangerous which has to be purged by the healer, so if the healer misses that (or is new and doesn't understand how Retail WoW's damage model works) then people die. This is why an overgeared tank can still go from full HP to dead in less than 2 seconds into a trash pull. (this is also yet another failing of the default UI due to how hard it is to notice these buffs).

And then it got worse because we have another variable being added with Augmentation Evokers who can grant shields to the party. Augmentation Evokers were a godsend when they were introduced in 10.1 giving parties a comfortable buffer. Everyone wanted an aug. So damage has to be tuned under the assumption that players actually have a lot more than just their default max HP. (The game being designed under the presumption you have certain classes is a general issue though, like certain boss AoEs being impossible to escape in time without Demonic Gateway, or adds that need to be repositioned within 1.5 seconds by Death Grip or everyone dies, etc).

To reduce spikeyness in WoW, you would have to narrow the huge variance in damage, which means removing these conditional variables so that you don't have to presume that all of them are being fulfilled.

• 1. better design the visual language of the game so that it's clear when you walk into a room which mob is s souped up on a buff or has a devastating attack,
• 2. remove interruptible/stunnable hard hitting attacks, design combat under the presumption that the enemy will always hit the players.
• 3. remove most short cooldown defensive abilities and items, so damage is tuned under the assumption that players will take damage naked at 100% (instead of assuming they have a 20% damage reduction defensive up so you need to do 125% damage to them to make it 100% as you originally intended).
• 4. remove buffs on enemy mobs that have to be purged, so tune damage under the presumption that healers won't purge the buffs every time. Alternatively, move debuffing over into a support role so that healers are not overburdened, and maybe make the damage debuffs an automatic thing that happens in the support role's rotation. Maybe expand the party size from 5 to 6 to accommodate a support slot. If the baseline is that every group will have 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 support, and 3 DPS, then Blizzard can know for sure how much damage that support will be stopping and design accordingly. Etc. It'd be simpler to just remove purging, though.

The reason fights need spikey damage is because players have too many tools. Every class has a billion mitigation abilities. The only way to create lethality / punishment / difficulty in this game is to spike your tank with a gorillion damage - or make "if you touch a fart cloud for a second half the raid dies" .


They would need the game to go back to Vanilla in terms of class identity for raids to not be like this.


I recently tried out a monk in a MOP private server.. before level 20 I had 6 movement abilities that let me run faster than a 60% mount and I could just infinitely rotate them because their CD's are so short. Lol k.

[Manny V]

just dont play retail, simple as boyz

[Finarfin]

just dont play retail, simple as boyz

No thank you.

[Shillitron]

@Kalarion by "recently" i mean 1.5 years ago.

[LemonDemonGirl]

just dont play retail, simple as boyz

Shadowlands sucked, no.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I won't be home in time for the Legion remix launch so it'd be nice if someone could grab screenshots. MoP remix was absolutely packed at launch.

Some screenshots from the Mists of Pandaria remix that began last month. Tried narrowing down the pictures, but I'd thought I'd show off some of the aesthetics to people who might not have played the expansion.


Starting area on launch day May 16th.

[Finarfin]

WAIT! they are doing a legion remix? TODAY?!

[Val the Moofia Boss]

WAIT! they are doing a legion remix? TODAY?!

Yup. Servers go up 3 PM PST. Finished farming my transmog last night. Spent 4 days running Torghast to finally get the golden sword drop.

[Finarfin]

Ah wait, it is not live today in EU. Gotta wait for tomorrow.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Legion remix questline has some interesting tidbits.

► Show Spoiler

You, the current champion from the current present day TWW WoW after having befriended Eternus in the Dragonflight patch questline and after having gone back with him to MoP remix, travel back in time to the start of Legion, swapping places with your past Legion self there (who is now presumably running around in present TWW).




You work with an Infinite drakonoid smith to take a crumbly sword and enchant it to make it look like your Legion artifact weapon, and then he opens a portal through time to replace your real old Legion artifact weapon.






Eternus muses that it might not have been the artifacts which saved Azeroth from the Sword of Sargeras' corruption that was threatening to kill her. Eternus also notes that the Bronze Dragonflight time police have curiously once again not shown up to stop us.

It's nice to hear a new subdued arrange of the climatic music from the final fight of Dawn of the Infinite as the Infinite Bazaar theme.

[Finarfin]

Started playing Legion Remix. Seems fun so far, just a bit laggy. Think that will go away over the day though.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

As a level 25 arms warrior I gave the Heroic World Tier difficulty a spin today. Finished my play session at level 30. Haven't died yet. I had one momentary scare when I ran into a pack of murlocks but immediately heroic leaped away and outran them and lived. There was a group of players who were fighting a Doomguard so I joined in, but they died to the Doomguard and it then went after me so I ran and lived. Those were my only two close calls. I have no issues with soloing normal overworld mobs. This is not hard at all, just don't be stupid like mass pulling and you're good. Though I guess with the Doomguard incident you might need a party to survive elites. I spam Ignore Pain whenever possible to give myself the absorb shield, and I rarely open my boxes of gear so I am not really keeping up.

[mercerxiv]

Definitely don't play retail. It's pozzed to the extreme, and so is modern Blizzard. They don't deserve anyone's subscription money, or worse idiots swiping for wow tokens.

I'd say the 2 expansions worth playing would be The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King. After that IMO the game really just ends. It more or less wraps up the story arc started in WC3, and from there forward it's a long slide downwards. Of note may be Mista of Pandaria for PvP, and Legion of you really want to get some class boner and play with a some weapons with big names. Story wise everything after WotLK was utter garbage not deserving anyone's attention. I believe BfA or Shadow lands was the beginning of it getting pretty overtly pozzed, with Dragonflight adding clearly scales, and main quest line so insufferable due to "modern audiences" writing that you will wish death on everyone involved in the story.

[mercerxiv]

As a level 25 arms warrior I gave the Heroic World Tier difficulty a spin today. Finished my play session at level 30. Haven't died yet. I had one momentary scare when I ran into a pack of murlocks but immediately heroic leaped away and outran them and lived. There was a group of players who were fighting a Doomguard so I joined in, but they died to the Doomguard and it then went after me so I ran and lived. Those were my only two close calls. I have no issues with soloing normal overworld mobs. This is not hard at all, just don't be stupid like mass pulling and you're good. Though I guess with the Doomguard incident you might need a party to survive elites. I spam Ignore Pain whenever possible to give myself the absorb shield, and I rarely open my boxes of gear so I am not really keeping up.

I've played on fan server with my brother on their own "hardcore", iirc we got to level 46 or so before issues with scheduling started. It's some what fun, but tbh I did miss going to dungeons without having second thoughts. Especially considering it was a WotLK server, so we still had old ****** up vanilla dungeons that would murder you, not the OSHA compliant versions retail now has.

[madbringer]

Definitely don't play retail. It's pozzed to the extreme, and so is modern Blizzard. They don't deserve anyone's subscription money, or worse idiots swiping for wow tokens.

I'd say the 2 expansions worth playing would be The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King. After that IMO the game really just ends. It more or less wraps up the story arc started in WC3, and from there forward it's a long slide downwards. Of note may be Mista of Pandaria for PvP, and Legion of you really want to get some class boner and play with a some weapons with big names. Story wise everything after WotLK was utter garbage not deserving anyone's attention. I believe BfA or Shadow lands was the beginning of it getting pretty overtly pozzed, with Dragonflight adding clearly scales, and main quest line so insufferable due to "modern audiences" writing that you will wish death on everyone involved in the story.

There used to be a very good Cataclysm server, MoltenWoW (I believe it rebranded as Warmane), where I had a lot of fun on. Always easy to find a group for RDF or a raid. As far as story goes I think paying attention to WoW lore after WoTLK is silly, it doesn't matter, it's just a parasocial friendship simulator and a collecting game at that point.

[buttfucker 3000]

As a level 25 arms warrior I gave the Heroic World Tier difficulty a spin today. Finished my play session at level 30. Haven't died yet. I had one momentary scare when I ran into a pack of murlocks but immediately heroic leaped away and outran them and lived. There was a group of players who were fighting a Doomguard so I joined in, but they died to the Doomguard and it then went after me so I ran and lived. Those were my only two close calls. I have no issues with soloing normal overworld mobs. This is not hard at all, just don't be stupid like mass pulling and you're good. Though I guess with the Doomguard incident you might need a party to survive elites. I spam Ignore Pain whenever possible to give myself the absorb shield, and I rarely open my boxes of gear so I am not really keeping up.

I leveled up in Heroic mode on my Windwalker Monk, and if I pulled more than two mobs at once, I had to pop all my cooldowns or I’d get absolutely shredded. Sometimes, elites would even straight-up one-shot me.

I actually had to CC and kite mobs just like in Classic.

Now that I’m level 80 with 600 ilvl, I can handle larger pulls, but I still need to be cautious.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Currently there is a minor fiasco going on with Legion remix. On Heroic World Tier difficulty at higher levels and when pushing higher M+ keys, the sheer incoming damage is very dangerous to DPS players and healers. However, the incoming damage inflation significantly outpaces the enemy's HP inflation, so you don't really need to play DPS. So the current meta is for everyone to be a tank spec. You can comfortably survive and still kill mobs in a timely manner. Tanks have enough self recovery that they don't need a healer either. Currently the highest M+ key runs are 5 tanks. This is having some downstream issues for people queuing into heroic dungeons, as you now have people joining in, switching to tank, and then sprinting through the dungeon mass pulling and starting boss fights before people can enter the room in time. People getting kicked from dungeons for not being a tank. Blizzard has announced that they will be buffing DPS and healers, but this doesn't sound like it will solve fundamental issues here.

[HyalineAmaranth]

Currently there is a minor fiasco going on with Legion remix. On Heroic World Tier difficulty at higher levels and when pushing higher M+ keys, the sheer incoming damage is very dangerous to DPS players and healers. However, the incoming damage inflation significantly outpaces the enemy's HP inflation, so you don't really need to play DPS. So the current meta is for everyone to be a tank spec. You can comfortably survive and still kill mobs in a timely manner. Tanks have enough self recovery that they don't need a healer either. Currently the highest M+ key runs are 5 tanks. This is having some downstream issues for people queuing into heroic dungeons, as you now have people joining in, switching to tank, and then sprinting through the dungeon mass pulling and starting boss fights before people can enter the room in time. People getting kicked from dungeons for not being a tank. Blizzard has announced that they will be buffing DPS and healers, but this doesn't sound like it will solve fundamental issues here.

Who cares, it's week 1 of a 3 months "fun" event with infinite scaling. You'll be able to solo everything in a few weeks at most, and there's plenty of people that aren't sweats and running non-meta; the content is trivial anyway. Honestly, it's mostly an issue of people being so entitled and whiny nowadays that they need to have access to everything on day 1 without any kind of difficulty to supposedly "have their time respected."

[Faceless_Sentinel]

Do you know good private server for Lich King? I think you call them blizlike or something. Witch one of them best you can recommend?

[Finarfin]

Amani Trolls get new models since we are visiting a new Zul'aman zone.

[rusty_shackleford]

Amani Trolls get new models since we are visiting a new Zul'aman zone.

lemon demon soyjak.jpeg

[Finarfin]

@LemonDemonGirl Check that video out.

[Manny V]

Do you know good private server for Lich King? I think you call them blizlike or something. Witch one of them best you can recommend?

Warmane's 'Lordaeron' one is the one i've been hopping on to every now and again. Keeps things mostly 'Blizzlike', but it has its fair share of bugs, as well as the occasional griefer. There might be better ones but i'm content with stickin with it to scratch my WoW itch

[LemonDemonGirl]

Amani Trolls get new models since we are visiting a new Zul'aman zone.

What the ****, they literally reskinned a female Orc.