This video actually was meant to come out a week ago, but I kinda fell behind with it. Now that Phase 4 is out, I certainly am going to check it out, but this video is more to answer the question why I personally stopped playing SoD so much during P2 and P3. Also, hopefully it answers the question as to why I haven't been making SoD content so much recently; I've seen many comments asking as to why. Anyway, enjoy everybody! Also, a big thanks to the Channel Members for making the content possible. You guys are awesome. tinyurl.com/5n738rsb
SOD felt more and more like a watered down version of retail.. it actually made me go back to retail after years. Didn't help that I had to waste so much time to get all the spells I wanted to test. More running less fighting. Was not Classic was not Retail.
I think i can answer it because every problem came out after phase 2. Which was "jesus we waited this many months for this?" So much hype behind season of discovery. Was for the cut content that was never released. The ashenvale commander open world pvp event was a good example. Removed mount colorstions good example, the point of it was to explore EVERYTHING with a new outlook at what endgame was gonna be and what leveling was gonna be with every original idea "CLASSIC PLUS" cuz we were promised even northrend to be open. And like all these cool new zones that were cut from the original classic before it became "new expansion new island". And updates were literally just entire new zones that felt like they added something to the game not just another grind for you to waste 1000 hours in. But now each new thing they add just seems to be retail daily quest grind garbage for each 10-15 levels they let us unlock after playing at level 25 for 3 months. And each phase felt more like a slog of "they updated this dungeon into a raid. And added this single world event". I hope. They actually hold up to even 5% of the hype they did before it came out for the level 60 phase. But if its just "we are gonne timegate and gatekeep each raid behind 3 months of waiting. Im done".
Місяць тому
its fkn boring asf that's why you dont make content, classic in a nutshell, played out, old been there and done that, dont worry phase 5 will be a game changer,
Nixxiom please if you and a bunch of other youtubers and streamers are not happy with what SoD is make videos and tweets telling Blizzard what alot of the Vanilla players want with a true classic plus it has to be very detailed on what you want these are not the devs we had 20 years ago that had a clear vision of what they wanted and yall cant say basically we want classic but with more classic.....thats not going to get anything across to them break it down and tell them what you loved about classic and be super clear with it and what you disliked about classic or any expansions that followed vanilla.
They completely ruin the game, funny how they feel the need to be try harding and parsing on such easy content, next time try a cutting edge pve game if you wanna poop sock, classic aint it.
@@joelhodoborgassadly, I cleared heroic amirdrassil and was 4/9 mythic and I didn’t come back to retail and didn’t clear the previous raids before amirdrassil and I couldn’t ever get into a raid in SoD. Every guild I joined either had no room in raid roster or I couldnt make the raid times
@@joelhodoborgasand honestly blizzard could have kept the gate keeping from happening if they actually made the lockouts loot lockouts by the boss instead of weekly lockouts. They killed it themselves no matter how much you’d like to blame the try hards
Min maxing has damaged the health of the game so much that the only fun thing about wow is roleplaying with friends or solo challenges, because having to have an exhausting list of requirements for other sweaty players to let you raid is what is killing the game.
It completely killed MOP remix for me, slamming through every bit of content in minutes is no fun. I want to feel some element of challenge and that I might die when I play the game. I run around in the open world without the cloak on just to feel that
Yep, find a group of 2 likeminded players, then just run dungeons as 3 players :P cozy chill run, but still a challenge if they're scaled for 5 but you're only 3 going in.
So your complaint is that you didn't like the people you were looking for to get wrangled by? Make your own raid group, keep the sweaty players out and your problem is solved. But no, you just want lame excuses as to why you couldn't progress a 20 year old game properly.
@@mikfhan This doesn't work. Whenever someone says stuff like this they don't understand normal human behavior. People aren't going to go out of their way to fight against game design and try to find the very small amount of people willing to engage in the game in their own niche way. They are just going to quit the game and find a different game that is catered to what they want and how they want to play.
1. I lost my steam because we were trashing gear way to fast. 2. Most spells were just reused stuff from retail 3. The world content was just meaningless after each phase It was just like playing retail with a classic skin.
Current developers of the game are missing some of the aspects that made WoW so good back in the day... current day WoW is all about max level raids and handing put replacement gear constantly.. not the adventure getting there with a good story where you arent the main being on the planet just a random adventurer learning and living the story...
Not entirely their fault either ! People want to rush the game and then complain there's nothing to do as well so it's a mixture of player/developer issues lol
Yeah, I don't think there wasn't too much inherently wrong with the game but it was the community. Once again the community meta'd the fun out of the game and decided what was optimal and what was good and if you didn't agree then you didn't get to play with anyone. I couldn't find groups to collect my runes because just... no one even wanted to help either.
Honestly I don't agree, if you want to say the community killed sod then how hasn't it killed every other iteration of wow? It's not like suddenly a new group of players started playing sod that has never touched classic or retail, meta try hards are in every version of the game. They want to play with people who also want to try hard, It makes logical sense. Find like-minded people that don't mind wiping or clearing the content slower and make a group or join a guild that does so. It's not like try hards in the community are going to one day be like you know what you guys are right this isn't how I enjoy playing the game. Nope they'd just stop playing so either way if your not meta gaming those grouping with those who are will always be out of reach, because they'd simply just leave the game. The game died because of decisions made by developers. Not enough content, content being too easy. Everyone complained that ST was too hard, they nerfed it and then everybody had full BIS in about 3-4 weeks and no longer had any reason to play. The pvp event was recycled, class balance was terrible and not properly addressed, everybody hated the incursions. Ultimately, the game just quickly ran out of things to do. People have been complaining about the meta tryhards in the community for years, prior to sod. Go ahead and continue your complaints of that if you wish but to pretend this somehow killed this version of the game and not others is disingenuous and takes blame away from the true issue, poor design and decisions by the developers.
What you mean you don't have the the .0001% world drop level 24 blue BiS helm for a warrior that costs 2000 gold on the Auction House? NO INVITE. Genuine brainrot in this game's community. You'd be surprised how many people get salty when you tell their raid lead to touch grass. Please do it more often if only to see the reactions.
@@therider990 Gear is not as important as you think. FF14 doesn't have complex gearing systems. You do dungeons, get currency, trade for the gearset for your role, get into the raid, get an item, trade that for the raid gear. There's only 2 sets really. The difference is they make up for it by having neat bosses with interesting yet simple mechanics. And doesn't make you waste 3 hours getting ready for said raid. And if you wipe, you're set right back in front of the boss ready to go again. Even Guild Wars 2, the gear stops gaining stats at level 80 and it only changes around based on the suffix of the gear. The only exception being the "ascended gear" that doesn't add much in terms of stats but is super grindy to get. If all you want to do is set yourself up for masochism and chasing numbers, go play one of the 50 million diablo clones so you can run the same dungeon 50 times for your 1 perfect drop that gives you a +2 to your strength after 20 hours of farming.
@@xyndros if all addons were removed the excuse for the community being toxic wouldn't fly. The addons allow the community to be toxic the way they are. The devs are 100% to blame for the state of the game because they build the rules.
@@paintingsbypanco but the comm is toxic, even in era. Much more than in retail. (Yes!) and isnt it the community who invents addons anyway? :p But nvm, im just chilling in classic for the leveling, nothing else Not with this wannabe elitism there :x
Complaining that people are rushing through the content and asking what’s the fastest way to do stuff yet the video sponsor is Zygor, the guide to do just that, was hilarious. Anyone else catch the irony of that? Lol.
You clearly didn't get what Nixxiom is talking about. Zygor is an addon that helps you in leveling by questing. You know, what the game was designed for? Whereas dungeon spamming and level boosts completely circumvent the entire World? of Warcraft?
SoD was a good idea but in practice its a mess I remember i tried to hop back in at phase 3 with my friend, and I didnt want to do nightmare incursions and my friend did, so my friend did incursions for 13 hours one night and he was lvl 50 with 500g and I was still lvl 23 rubbing coppers, realizing incursions were the best I tried to do them and they were the worst kind of gameplay i've ever seen in an mmo So I never got to play with my friend because I didnt want to play incursions Runes were supposed to be discovered and fun to get, now if i dont look it up on wowhead and find it I cant play the game Cant get into raids because everyone is sweating super hard in the easiest version of wow I think whoever came up with the idea of incursions shouldnt work on video games
Incursions were running in a hamster wheel and paying a monthly sub too do it. The most braindead content, but the addicts lapped it up because it mean they could level to 50 in less then 10 hours.
I stopped playing during phase 3. Everyone was leveling up through incursions and that was way too boring for me. The group I played with wanted to hit max level fast and I just wanted to explore and take my time. The thing about WoW is that they create and bring in systems then after a while they leave them out to dry. Happens in almost every expansion and we saw that in SOD. After phase 1, it was hard to find a group for BFD and the Ashenvale event was pointless. I really enjoyed phase 1. Probably the best time I have had playing WoW since TBC classic.
yep i love most open world exploring and grouping and ofc some dungeons but not chaining, sometimes i feel there need som resctrictions like not more then 4 Dungeons or something like this por Xp restruction from Dungeons. Ofc player will whine but probably get fine with it, and if it absolutly not work chanhge it back
Scaled content does not belong in Classic WoW. Just because content is fully progressed and outdated, doesn’t mean there aren’t alts and new players joining late that want to play the content at level.
I had fun in Phase 1, but felt like i was going through the motions, towards the end. Once I hit lv 25, I couldn't get into any groups for raids, because the player base is toxic af, and unless you beat the raid already, you couldn't get into the raid, so I just gave up, and started playing FF14. Best decision I ever made btw
People are so toxic I cant believe it. Either people are helpful or super toxic. If you dont perform people will drop you from group or trash you in chat. It completely ruined the game for me. I just quit the game. I think im done with WoW for good. Everything comes to an end.
I quit because after clearing literally every raid from ICC to Amirdrassil with even a couple of CE achievements over the years, and farming pre-bis, I had a helluva a time getting invited to raids. I was barely able to get into a couple of BFD runs (where we 1 shot every boss). After that I didn't even try to find a Gnomer group. It's too much work to prove yourself for raids basically equivalent to LFR difficulty. It's been said before, but it's like trying to get a job that won't hire you without at least 2 years experience, but the only way to get the xp is if you were hired. I have 15 years xp, that's the sad part.
@@Mduffy-yo6rb So destroy yet another form of manifest game play to cater to the people who invest less, play less, and are faster to move on. Brilliant!!! You should be working at Blizzard. Min/maxing happens in every game. Guides, records, 100% completion, etc... are all organic player motivations that drive people to engage with the game. Every time people try and mess with these things in order to make the game 'healthy' by their standards the game gets worst.
that is so true xDD he promotes tryhard playstyle and crys about it, a real hypocrite. professional cryer. i mean if you like it play it, if you dont just dont, why talk bad about it?
My problem with SoD is. Past Phase 1 the whole "Discovery" part of this season was gone. There were no new runes to collect no new quests to explore. And more and more it started becoming more.... Retailified. Like the folks at Blizzard they just can't help it but to put people on a conveyor belt to raid. Vanilla WoW. Hardcore WoW what I like about this game. It's the leveling it always has been. Doing raids at the end is just something fun to do after. I love the WORLD of Warcraft.
Exactly. What is this obsession with raiding? It's so divorced from what the casual player wants. Back in the day Vanilla WoW was like Elden Ring but even bigger. Every inch of the world felt brimming with high quality and challenging content. (granted we sucked back then, but the point still stands).
@@ZachStachelski13 I mean the part that captured people most is the one thing we can't get back. Which is the discovery. When people ask for Classic+ we want it exactly how Turtle WoW is doing it. New Quests, New Zones to explore. Slight class balance tweaks (that aren't changing every month for "balance sake" ) And dungeons and raids that are interspliced with current existing dungeons and raids so you can pick and choose where you go and what you want to do. You never raise the bar to make past things irrelevant but you fill in the gaps so you can do the same type of gear progression in different ways.
They started well with giving each class a few new spells (fresh coat of paint). If they would've kept focusing on the early game I think it would've been better. But we don't even know what's possible. Could they create a new class if they wanted to? Could they create a new zone? A new dungeon with old assets? New PVP modes?
@@ZachStachelski13 I don't want them touching classes really since they don't seem to understand how to let a thing cook? ya know? Like Blizzard devs make the worst chefs cuz they'd be adding all this extra stuff to a dish ever five minutes without tasting it, and then dish it out. Just to bring it back in again and do even more things to the dish. Like bro I just wanted a ham sandwich why is there pesto, a lamb chop bone, and lobster in here? Why is everything covered in a blend of liquid smoke and vinegar. They don't know how to let things rest, and they don't know how to keep things simple. I also think it's high time we acknowledge WoW Classic Era. Is NOT the definitive Vanilla experience they promised. It's not the earliest build of WoW possible that Private Servers could never emulate (that's a lie used to discredit the quality of things like Nostraliaus) No. It's pretty obvious WoW classic at most has been a pre-patch TBC build clumsily backlogged to just have classic content. All they had to do was shut off access to the dungeons and raids in the area.
@@NotTheWheel I never cared about "no changes" to me it was always classic_ or bust. If I don't get more, new, WoW content in the classic WoW shell I won't be satisified. They could just import retail classes into classic and I'd be happy. I never forgave blizzard for making Death Knight a hero class. So you never got to level one in the best content of the game. (the early levels)
I quit mainly due to two reasons: 1) 10-Man content was nuked, and while I understand it's not 'Classic', it certainly suited my friend group and I 2) Content took way too long to come out, you bang out max level from P2-P3 in about 2 days, and then you gotta wait months for new-ish content. P1 Was PEAK though. My god, that was so fun.
I very much agree on 10 mans. I had a close knit group of friends that raided each week, but when ST came out none of us were itching to start a guild to get 10 more people because it's essentially a part time job to do that.
I feel the same about xp boosts, i just dont like rushing that much. I want to complete the entire zone. I really hope there will be a fresh server soon without bullshit
I stopped at phase 3 with the incursions. Like you said, my server as well had nothing but SM grinders. The world was empty and felt pointless playing because I am against speed leveling. Then phase 3 everyone was in incursions 24/7, so again I was in a giant empty world. Couldn't find people to do epic quests, or do the dungeons I did need for certain quests. Then raiding was a big no after phase 1 because every single guild/pug wanted the sweatiest min max no lifers, and I'm old and just want to chill out and see how the raid works with regular people. Oh well.
Also, i leveled and spent mt gold on a mount just for blizzard to lower its price and give xp buff. Felt like a slal in the face and a disrespect of my time so i just left
Same, I think the problem is people complain about the cycle of mid maxing and then proceed to do that exact thing they complain about. So far I've only encountered helpful people leveling, grouping to get quests done and everything, level 32 right now as a melee Hunter, it's been a blast.
@@joshuasmith4643 yeah I think if you don’t min max and play the game like it’s meant to be played you will enjoy it. Min maxers ruin every online video game.
@@khronick3596 right, it's okay to min max yourself and enjoy it if you enjoy that, but don't force or expect others to play your way if they don't want to.
100% Incursions were the final nail in the coffin. They added the Quest experience buff to try to get people to quest again, but it was still faster to spam the incursions until max. I spent the whole time leveling by myself, essentially.
Still playing SoD and very much enjoying it. I don't compare myself to other people, how they play, what they do. I enjoy questing and playing a lot of alts so I do that and enjoy it a lot. I have a main that is raiding and I did all the content since p1. Got a casual small guild that I enjoy being a part of, no min maxing, banter, having fun, joking around with them. So it was and is very fun. Phase 4 was also very fun so far. Shout out from Crusader Strike EU
RE: growing out of zones too quickly - this doesn't apply to the Warrior - where if you're leveling mostly solo, you want to mostly be questing 3-5 or even 6-8 levels above your average mobs, or else it's incredibly demanding and painful. I ended up totally finishing a lot of the quest chains in zones during Phase 3 just because questing in anything around my actual level was like pulling teeth.
Players have forgotten about the adventure portion of playing an MMORPG; or any RPG for that matter. Social media and some content creators have contributed a great deal to that honestly. To be fair I myself made some spec guides for DF, but I still love exploring when I'm questing in new zones, and taking my time leveling in order to experience the whole story. I also play a lot of alts for variety, even though I do try to push my mains io every season in M+...I dunno man. I find myself to be somewhere in-between hardcore and casual, but everything these days is just "gogogo"; get to max level, endlessly grind and geat fully geared in the first 2 weeks, and what's the best meta class/spec to play so I can only play that every season. People have forgotten to just have fun sometimes ya'know? It's sad 😞
For me it took just ending up with a group I know outside the game that we all work in the same job field. We're super casual during work busy season and lean a little more hardcore when it's our slow season. Our big thing is we're playing for relaxation and laughing/venting about the unique things that happen in our job field.
It's vague statements like this that the SoD devolopers mistakenly clung on to. You say "exploration", but NOBODY enjoys combing through a map as massive as world of warcraft as if they were testing for collision bugs...that's just insane. And yet that's how they designed runes in SoD. That's garbage exploration IMO. 99% of people just looked up where runes are, because finding them on your own isn't even reasonable.
@@ZachStachelski13 That's only because the majority of players have already explored these areas since forever ago. Exploration is always more enjoyable when everything is new and shiny.
@ZachStachelski13 Disagree here. I believe the cause of the frustration in SOD, is the fact that you're not actually exploring, so much as you are looking for something specific. It's about the destination rather than the journey. Aimless exploration is much more relaxed.
Bro is complaining about people going too fast and missing the adventure, while promoting a guide Addon to help you through the adventure quicker and more efficient??
At the end of Phase 1 my friend and I were denied entry into a BFD before successfully creating our own group. In order to create an environment that was less toxic and more inclusive, my friend and I just started our own guild at the beginning of phase 2. We have since merged with two other guilds who took a similar approach- we want to play well but we welcome casuals who move at their own pace. Most often these players just need a group to encourage them and a heads up of content and goals- and they will be perfectly capable of clearing anything in game. We are all just trying to enjoy ourselves. The population during the end of Phase 3 made me nervous but since the content drop of phase 4 the community is reinvigorated. I also blame Cata, and the weather getting nicer, for the temporary population drop. I hope blizzard keeps us engaged through the life of the server. This has been my most enjoyable WoW experience yet.
To me the hole experience of SoD felt like Blizzard trying to show Retail mind set down my throat. I hate that they added the new OP talents in the first place. I wated More content, Not rehash from later expansions. How about discover a way across the big wall to Gilneas.. Open new and unexplored Zones. A few new Dungeons that where in Par with Classic. Atrue Classic Plus would never add all this OP stuff and ruin the core Idea. But then again.. We have seen changes now so i guess the Dream of Classic is all a memory now /
I just started SOD for the first time around 2 weeks ago, currently level 33. It's a different experience. I'm leveling a paladin at the moment and I'm enjoying it so far. I think the runes are implemented awkwardly. There are not very many hints, no quests for them? Some of them are essential and I find myself going out of my way to get them. I just end up opening wowhead to get the answer, along with how to min max everything haha. The only part i really hate is the waylaid supplies. I find this really changes how i level. I end up hording everything in case a crate drops that i can use, and the rep is an essential part of the game. I don't understand why the azeroth commerce authority is in the game. Regardless im having fun and there are enough people on my realm that i can do elite quests and dungeons with. Can't wait to try endgame!
i repicked it after phase long break since phase 2 and legit same experience its just so fun with the new abilities and im still finding some groups for dungeons. also the drama part in the video it's basic wow guild drama happens on retail on classic so its nothing new to me especially some of those leveling guilds are weird
Personally, I quit right around phase 2, as I felt like the worst aspect of the endgame was amplified to the extreme, where you could barely get groups for normal Gnomeregan unless you were some TOP TIER RAIDER who had a 99 PARSE and Best in Slot gear and all this other junk. It became more of a chore than an actual fun journey in a fantasy world I enjoy, and that's what made me stop.
Strange how people could enjoy min/maxing and just rush through the game. When I played I spent about half the game wandering around and discovering things. It was pretty amazing in 2004/5 to be in a MMO when I was used to single player games. Azeroth seemed like there was always something new to discover. It seemed unlimited.
@@shabaranks9710very strange to rush through a classic-WoE adjacent version.. endgame sucks in classic WoW, the 1-60 experience is the main gameplay sequence
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u I mean some people just like raiding and getting their bis others like the leveling experience plus sod adds more to the end game now so idk if it's necessarily strange
@@shabaranks9710 i dont think it's wrong, because everybody plays differently, but i do think it's strange. the design philosophy of vanilla WoW is far more weighted towards the world and leveling vs the endgame lvl 60 experience. it's not an opinion, it's just where most of the effort was put in to whenever development was occurring, especially when compared to modern/retail WoW i dont think playing like that is an issue either, i think the issue comes in whenever the community takes on too many of those behaviors as a whole, and the community consequently decays because once min/max culture is embedded, it RARELY IF EVER leaves or decreases.. at least, in my 25+ years of gaming ive never seen that happen this isnt a 1:1 comparison, but imagine playing a TTRPG like D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, etc... and the DM and players are all bought-in for a Role play heavy, non-powergaming campaign... everyone except one guy who makes an uber min/max character that breaks the game or diminishes every other player's character... sure, it's cool and all, but you should be playing in a game being ran specifically for power gamers. imagine somebody playing a min/max Twilight Cleric in D&D with a group of people who picked everything purely for aesthetic or RP... the design philosophy of the DM does not mesh with this type of powergaming. it's not bad that the player likes to play like this, but they are playing a game that's not designed for them i would say in this case, that's classic & classic adjacent versions of WoW vs Retail WoW
First off, Phase 1 rocked. But this is why I stopped: 1. Power creep from gear and runes made characters WAY more powerful 2. Raids had to be scaled to compensate more powerful characters 3. Devs scaled around World First raiders instead of casual groups and PUGs 4. Difficult raids forced players to be more selective so they could clear raids in a timely manner 5. Casuals left because they can't get into raids 6. Only min/maxers (sweatlords) remain and thus the player base became toxic The game had min/maxers in classic re-release and before, but in classic it wasn't as sweaty since a group could actually have like 30% AFK players and still clear raids. I think Blizz missed the mark with the difficulty curve and forgot that the hardest part of the raid should be getting a group of real humans to give up a few hours every week to play a video game together, instead of trying to make super challenging content.
The reason I stopped is the elitist attitude and devoting time to playing a class can get punished by a nerf. I want to play a game where I know what my class does and where it shines.
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u Just jump in the game on Wild Growth server and check it out if you are that interested. I am not particularly interested in putting in the effort to send you a screenshot.
funny enough, alexensual of all people was right when he said, all blizzard will do, is put features from later expansions and a more difficult ragnaros in the game.
1. Everything is too easy! There's nothing challenging in the content you can do everything with pug. If you are not forced to do quests, dungeons and raid with your guild members the game become single player for most people. 2. Leveling and gearing is too fast! In P3 most warriors/paladins had lvl 50 with BiS sword on the second day after the release 3. Too many spells! I tought that there will be 4-5 "new" spells for each class to balance them better than it was in vanilla but everyone has like 20+ new spells 4. Community is bad as always in the past 15 years...
SO, seriously dude, you are talking all about how you do not like exp boosts and things that push you to max level without having the time to enjoy it, *while* you have the Zygor app open in your UI on screen. I know they're helping pay the billsand all, but this comes across as a tad hypocritical I think. Anyway, cheers and carry on I guess, but maybe stop using addons to speed the levelling process and see how that feels.
I went super hard in phase one and got 4 characters exalted in Warsong and just burnt out 2 weeks before phase 2 drop. Then there is the people who report BG chat when they're losing in WSG and you get your account suspended just for encouraging your team to play the game they joined.
All we wanted was a new questing area, 1 or 2 new dungeons, and maybe a new raid tier. That's it. No one asked for this. That's why it's not as popular as Blizzard would like. Because, NO ONE WANTED IT!
I stopped at about level 15 in P1 because I realized one day after I logged out for the day that I was really bored and then I just havent convinced myself that its worth trying again….or at least not worth paying the sub fee to try again….Turtle WoW looks neat though. Might see if I can get that running on my Steam Deck
Finally letting nostalgia go? Come, join us in the present with lots of improvememts (retail). Let go of nostalgia, 2004 was 20 years ago. You will NEVER get "that" feeling again. Let goooo
Improvements? I'm sorry but retail devolved so hard that it's unbearable. The most fun I had on retail in 8 years was the first month of remix and anything after first month sucks due to glaringly obvious issues. I do not play seasonal games, I don't care. I want something meaningful, retail is bloated and meaningless. I started with cata, never played classic era, can't be nostalgic on something I never played and you know what? It's superior. So much more fun.
I am still dabbling in SoD but very slowly chipping away. The drop off with my friends seemed to be the increased difficulty for endgame in phase 2. It lead to our raid nights taking much much longer just to put a group together. When the risk of failure goes up, the gatekeeping does as well because no one wants to waste their time. My honest thoughts are that they should have allowed for raids to allow more people to join in pick up groups. Have bosses drop tokens/currency for all players and only drop the same amount of loot. Guild runs get better loot distribution by running in a smaller group that the content is tuned for, and pugs have effective reduced difficulty by having 50-100% more players. I havent gone back an run any of the raids as level up raids after phase 2 because all my homies left during phase 3
From a non boomer perspective i always hear the same complain about people being tryhard and not playin the game like it was 2006 and i think is stupid, maybe sod has his problems but that argument about the players could be used in every iteration of wow, it doesnt matter if the content is good or bad it seems like every "OG classic andy" wants to play in his own early 2000 echo-chamber where everyone is clueless about the game
I think WoW works best when content is NOT gated behind phases. The game isn't supposed to be a sprint, its a marathon. So when devs hard stop players behind artificial time gates, it gives them no choice but to either quit, raid log, and/or push parses. They promote this min max culture because there's literally nothing else to do. Everyone is always in their full bis ready for the next sprint (phase). I think the smarter plan would've just to have sod released all of its content mc to naxx and the content they could develop are the raids post-naxx (scarlet crusade raid) and improving the leveling experience with new or more flushed out questing zones to DISCOVER. Sure, people will still minimax and absolutely sweat to naxx within a month, but the barrier to entry becomes much higher while also giving the other 98% of the playerbase always something to progress towards.
@@fanaticist What I'm saying is being a random level 14 helping a farmer kill wild boars outside his farm while there are a select few raiders out there fighting Kel'thuzad himself is what creates the scale and epicness of WoW. When you allow everyone to catch up to the same playing field through time gates/phases removes all of that and it all just becomes a min-max sprint to the finish.
The bot farming and gold buying ruining the economy and making everything so expensive ruined it for me i dont enjoy constantly farming to be able buy consumables and enchants enjoyable if you dont buy gold
I can only agree with what many have already pointed out: - the painful min-maxing - the predictable class-balance issues and "flavor of the month" classes, just like in retail - horrible botting issues - tying BIS gear to PvP events...even on pvp servers - badly thought out events But what was most prominent for me and the reason I quit was: I never, never, EVER wanted a Classic+ with class-balance changes. I simply wanted MORE content for the carefully crafted, if flawed though, but predictable class environment of Classic. I played Rogue and was stunned at some of the lackluster class changes. I would have been happier, had they just given us new dungeons, quests, raids and gear. That would have made me stick to it.
We are having big fun in this P4. Dungeon farm while playing with the boys , BG for ranks , some group farm in MC waiting for our raid tonight. In guess the most important thing is to have a guild with enough committed players. We have one roster , 5 people online during the day and 10-15 each evening. We can fill our roster for raids. Sometimes I had to jump into PU nightmare and yeah , I can imagine the game would be terrible if not in my guild ...
When Phase 2 dropped, the majority of my friends spammed dungeons to 40. They were so exhausted and bored by the end and did not enjoy the time spent playing. Meanwhile they cried that the rest of us were taking too long to get to lvl cap because we were actually playing the game and experiencing the world and community. I got to experience 1k Needles from the Horde's perspective for the first time and it was really neat; tedious, but neat. This culture of zug zug to the end is what kills the game imo.
My interest was very short lived. It lasted about a week or so. I realised that this wasn't what I was looking for. What I wanted was an SoD that is about content and additions to the old zones, world, etc. An approach where things that were left unfinished are actually finished, but this content should not replace the old like tBC did in many ways. Maybe things are pulled in from later expansions but retuned and redone around Classic's philosophies. Examples of this include Karazhan crypts of course, but also Mt. Hyjal as a zone, Uldum, Grim Batol, Isle of Dr Lapidis, the 2nd dungeon in SW, Emerald Dream, unfinished class quests like the Druid cat form one, finishing Azshara, Desolace, adding quests findable when dead, populating unfinished islands (there are quite a few), Timbermaw Hold, more reputation rewards for Ravenholdt, Gilneas is a big one of course, Quel'Thalas, Outland? - Not tuned like the tBC one since we don't want levelling to 70. And so on, you get the idea. But what did I get? Runes - quests that can only reasonably be solved by having everybody together rummaging the entire continent and all the rest of us go on WoWHead. That's pretty bad on its own, but then when you actually get them, they cause insane power creep and their designs do not fit Classic at all. I quit only just after level 25, and I don't regret it. It's absolute trash, and it's disappointing to see that Blizzard STILL does not understand vanilla WoW. How many times must it be reiterated and restated to them before they get it?
On another note, I stopped play Mist event as a rogue. I was the mob killer that I wanted to be. With all the gems, meta, tinker, cog, on my gear. I was still a weak rogue that still had only a few hits and then I was waiting to attack again.
As a new player that started in season 2, BFD not being scaled was no issue for me. Sure it was probably easier, but that didnt really matter. There was no exp buff at the beginning beyond level 25, and BFD was still pretty relevant and fun for me. The gear mattered for leveling, and the xp was great. There was a mace i think in BFD for pally that made shockadin work a lot better if you didnt have gnomer gear. Once they introduced the exp buffs beyond level 25 thats when it became truly started to become more irrelevant in my opinion. The world still felt pretty active until incursions were released in p3 on my server. Blizzard killed the level experience in so many ways.
Phase 1 was amazing. New things, exploration, and content to play with friends. Phase 2 sucked. Gnomer was terrible. Why did they think that those boses were fun? Was really hopeful that P3 would fix some things/learn lessons. Phase 3 was a car crash. Don't go level out in the world, just go grind the emerald dream loop until your eyeballs fall out. Raid cap pushed higher was an idiot move Phase 4 I'm not even interested anymore.
I stopped playing phase 1 😂I was looking for a guild and pugging in the meantime, by the end of it I wasn’t enjoying the community metas and even forming my own groups was annoying because there were always ppl aggressively insisting we do things one specific way and killing the vibe of each raid to where I didn’t look forward to playing. I’ve been thinking about trying it again, but I would really need a casual guild to play with consistently
I was trying a different build for a shaman that wasn't "meta" during phase two and it seemed to work as I was killing stuff really fast and doing a bunch of aoe. Someone in my group saw my build and demanded I change my build or I will be kicked, then told me that this game isn't meant for theory crafting. I was dumbfounded and proved that build worked, but still got kicked because it wasn't "meta"
For me personally, I got super hyped pre SoD also as I got more into the slower style gameplay of classic over retail where you just enjoy the journey instead of rushing to the max level. I played for a few months then went on a long travel with my partner which caused me to not play and engage with the guild I was in. After two weeks of not being able to do much, I was just randomly booted from the guild and I never really felt like going back. After my travel I felt like I was way behind and considering the 'Seasonal' feeling I thought why bother. Now when I wouldn't have gone on this travel, I would probably still have burned out from SoD. I noticed that I did the raid every week for at least a month maybe two, but after that when I only needed one more item, I didn't feel like doing it, neither on my alts... The guild I was in started casually with intend to raid at 60, but it became extremely try hard relatively quickly, with a very small portion of people who seemed to have no life outside of SoD (I don't mean that offensively) and when they'd notice you didn't feel the same, it would become meh. I play wow to have fun, and I want to join raids, prepare for them, etc. but wow is not and will never be a job for me, and if that's what it takes, I guess I'll be a casual forever and just hop on and off whenever a new patch hits.
Too many gatekeepers in Phase 2 who would reject you from doing a Gnomer run because of your class or your raid logs did not show a parse. The same happened in phase 3 with Sunken Temple.. Gatekeepers. Couldnt get a run with my guild even though I was on everyday due to "Raid Loggers" I logged into SOD phase 4 yesterday ..totally confused by the levelling. Professions now based on reputation..just seems too hard and I will stick to Cata.
This is why I say hardcore classic WoW was in fact the best they could really do to center the game back to socialization. Because you had to trust your teammates in a dungeon. You had to create bonds with people and know who is loyal and who is really going to watch your back out for you and not leave you in the dust. You would recognize who is always ready to run from a bad pull and who would stick to take you out of a jam then you measured it all out strategically. It was about diplomacy and socialization. Just do hardcore classic again but limit the level caps.
SoD was my first experience with WoW. I was having so much fun and got to join raids and figure things out. But then Phase 2 dropped in and people already data mined everything, they were optimizing and being told that if you were not caught up in certain amount of time you were missing out... I wanted to level up by exploring the world but people showed me how that's just wasting time. I was even hoping dungeons would get a sort of limited times you could run them like in Hardcore to prevent the dungeon farming, but I kept being told that that would be stupid and annoying. SoD turned into a spread sheet that had no mystery to it, everyone knew how it worked before the new patches dropped and leveling just turned into Dungeon spamming not for gear but for levels until maxed out. It turned me off from continuing the game.
Man, I'm playing Warhammer and D&D next to WoW as well so I completely understand where you're coming from 😂 I loved P1 and P2 as well but got burnt out for P3 along with most of my guild, although we're back for P4 and having a blast so far. I think the constant SM farm in p2 and the incursion spam in p3 did kill the enjoyment of the game for a lot of people. Classic isn't really made to tryhard it that much, the content is way too easy for that. It's your personal story and exploration which counts imo. I think the whole phase system is a double edged sword. In a way it gave ppl with less time a chance to catch up to smaller level caps but it also opened the floodgates for the speedlevel crowd from retail to nestle in. I almost feel like it would've been better if we just leveled up to 60 in one go and had the raids come out phased again like they originally did, but with a lot more content than just the raid.
Personally it went like this for me: Phase 1: Fun Phase 2: it was ok for the most part. Phase 3: i quit playing it as soon as i hit 50. Phase 4: I came back to it. Its fine for the most part plus I now have some goals to work towards other than raid logging (it will eventually happen though). Not sure if ill stick around later but for the time being im having a little fun experimenting with my shaman.
You know what's also awful? How quick the leveling is with that Discoverer's Delight buff. You lvl zoom through the gorgeous, detail rich areas of Vanilla as if the game is trying to throw you into the endgame asap, which in the end just feels like Retail. We're not here on SoD to play Retail.
Sounds like WoW, at-least the classic and SOD realms, is finally having its runescape moment where a lot of the playerbase wont even recognize your existence unless you're doing the ultimate 3-4 tick fletching, fishing and cooking or doing the fastest way to get whatever. WoW to me has easily become and pretty much always been a game that I like to play at a very casual pace and just sort of relax while playing a game. my "minmax" comes in the form of my ability rotation and paying attention to my cooldowns/buffs/debuffs
Yea just being good at your class and playing the mechanics of the Bosses, i think thats a healthy and fun way to play. But everything else is just stressful torture for me
Yea just being good at your class and playing the mechanics of the Bosses, i think thats a healthy and fun way to play. But everything else is just stressful torture for me
It’s not just SoD, it’s classic, TBC classic, Wrath and so on. The min-maxing is what officially just killed this game for me. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck in picking a server, I wasn’t having fun playing in an empty open world when the dungeon spammers started. Leveling alts became boring to me, no one to explore the world with like back when I was 10 in 2005 playing vanilla. WoW will always be my favorite game, but the community that took it over ruined it for me. The min-maxers, the meta-gamers, and the “get to max asap” players. First phase was a blast with people everywhere exploring having fun was awesome and I got to experience it all but phase 2 it all just died for the same scarlet monastery spammers, the world felt gone when it started. I hope to experience it alive once more before I officially call it quits on WoW
Nixiom, first time commenter here. Been following you years. I haven’t played classic for a few years but I like to pop in to see how it’s going. I had to stop because of outside life stuff, so I can relate. The speed the majority of the player base cosume the content, off the charts. This game is not for people that may not get to play that much.
I ran BFD on multiple alts every week and loved every moment, I then ran Gnomer and ST on my main and couldn't wait for each raid to end. I don't understand why they decided that fun was bad in P2 and P3.
I wanted to quest and take some time to enjoy the zones too. Turned exp boost off finding myself disappointed that most people rushed to get BiS and content cleared. P2 was cut super short to keep sweaty players happy, which meant I didn't see much of the new content. P3 I played a lot and it felt crap. Incursions, Mara spamming, ST got boring etc.
I think they could try making it so quest exp remains the same always. a lv12 westfall quest always giving the 1200 its worth. No more grey quest where the exp gain decays by 99% if you out level it 10+ levels. This would be adjusted so its not worth doing quest that are like 30 levels lower than your level but if your 10-15 levels overleveled its still kind of worth doing. Keep in mind if mobs are grey, a quest that says kill 10 monsters would be missing out on the 10x mob kill exp.
I don't mind the XP boost. I think people really take SOD too seriously. It feels like it is designed for casual play, giving some new flavor to the nostalgia. I'm still stuck with my Tauren in Mulgore, I'm just playing at night for a bit, taking in the vibe with a starry sky.
Ya phase one was lots of fun. Phase 2 turned into getting one shot by players with end game gear... should have rolled on a PvE server. Also, like you mentioned, the community seem really toxic/elitist. I'm an arena player and classic community was way more toxic than Retail. I mean, wasn't SOD supposed to be really casual?
Season of Discovery has roughly 10k more players than Classic Era. Its is definitely not dead. It was understandable for less people to be on from the P3 ending due to that being the longest phase due to Classic Cata. Going to be honest but a drastic majority of Classic players only care about end game. There is a player base that likes to level up but that is drastically smaller to the raiders in Classic Era.
I think you hit the big reason I don't like joining an mmo that my friends play a ton of. They just want to have me sprint to the end and its zero fun. I've had more fun going from 1-15 on a human rogue just questing in Elwynn forest than I ever did getting speed ran to the end,
Phase 1: Amazing! 🤘- Phase 2: Pretty ok, kinda 👌- Phase 3: Dead, not even raidlogging 💀.. P3 killed the hype/fun to the point I lost all interest of playing it. Doesn't matter what P4 added. Being a seasonal server, all your gear/rep grinds/gold is gone soon anyway. Unsubbed 2 days ago.
the reason min max culture is growing so big in Wow is because we've done it all so many times, people seem to think if they make classic fresh servers its going to be like what it was in OG vanilla or Classic 2019 but it won't ever be like that agin.
I wasn’t looking for a scavenger hunt or retail light. It got so you couldn’t play the game you just had to raid grind and rune race. I went from leveling six alts in phase 2 to not leveling anyone since.
Its impossible to find the balance between fun and respecting your time, or finding other people who will value your time. BFD can be cleared in under an hour easily without stress or drama, but when people want to fuck around and make a 45-55 minute clear take over 2.5 hours because they wanna bring their unskilled/completely unoptimized spouse or dad or whatever, its hard to stay motivated.
The warlock dagger farm.... enough said. Classic WoW gearing was about going in quest chains and taking down iconic bosses in dungeons and raids for beloved weapons. How about Warlock, tanks specifically the new play style, you just farm rng portals.... super memorable.
I thought it was obvious at this point. SoD has just been a retail-mindset project agenda. Even the devs more or less admitted SoD was just a testing ground for Pandaria remix. Them adding incursions, sneaking in Retail UI/Guild changes etc. They want us to like retail again. Classic may be more popular than Retail and would not be surprised if the player numbers would be more for Classic in a near future but they still are making much more money on Retail and its moneytizations. I'm far more biased with Classic so don't get me wrong there but if you read between the lines and start thinking insted of "zomg X-phase hype!" you might notice these things too.
The thing that killed the game mode for me was the min-maxing. I don't like to make an entire interview just to do a dungeon or quick raid. If im going to do an interview for something, it will be for a real job, not a freaking videogame
This video actually was meant to come out a week ago, but I kinda fell behind with it. Now that Phase 4 is out, I certainly am going to check it out, but this video is more to answer the question why I personally stopped playing SoD so much during P2 and P3. Also, hopefully it answers the question as to why I haven't been making SoD content so much recently; I've seen many comments asking as to why. Anyway, enjoy everybody!
Also, a big thanks to the Channel Members for making the content possible. You guys are awesome.
tinyurl.com/5n738rsb
SOD felt more and more like a watered down version of retail.. it actually made me go back to retail after years. Didn't help that I had to waste so much time to get all the spells I wanted to test. More running less fighting. Was not Classic was not Retail.
I think i can answer it because every problem came out after phase 2. Which was "jesus we waited this many months for this?"
So much hype behind season of discovery. Was for the cut content that was never released. The ashenvale commander open world pvp event was a good example. Removed mount colorstions good example, the point of it was to explore EVERYTHING with a new outlook at what endgame was gonna be and what leveling was gonna be with every original idea "CLASSIC PLUS"
cuz we were promised even northrend to be open. And like all these cool new zones that were cut from the original classic before it became "new expansion new island". And updates were literally just entire new zones that felt like they added something to the game not just another grind for you to waste 1000 hours in. But now each new thing they add just seems to be retail daily quest grind garbage for each 10-15 levels they let us unlock after playing at level 25 for 3 months. And each phase felt more like a slog of "they updated this dungeon into a raid. And added this single world event". I hope. They actually hold up to even 5% of the hype they did before it came out for the level 60 phase. But if its just "we are gonne timegate and gatekeep each raid behind 3 months of waiting. Im done".
its fkn boring asf that's why you dont make content, classic in a nutshell, played out, old been there and done that, dont worry phase 5 will be a game changer,
I probably wouldve just not uploaded it lol little too late for this kind of video
Nixxiom please if you and a bunch of other youtubers and streamers are not happy with what SoD is make videos and tweets telling Blizzard what alot of the Vanilla players want with a true classic plus it has to be very detailed on what you want these are not the devs we had 20 years ago that had a clear vision of what they wanted and yall cant say basically we want classic but with more classic.....thats not going to get anything across to them break it down and tell them what you loved about classic and be super clear with it and what you disliked about classic or any expansions that followed vanilla.
People took it WAY too seriously. The tryhards ruined what was a really fun time
People gatekeeping classic cause they cant make it on retail is real.
They completely ruin the game, funny how they feel the need to be try harding and parsing on such easy content, next time try a cutting edge pve game if you wanna poop sock, classic aint it.
@@joelhodoborgassadly, I cleared heroic amirdrassil and was 4/9 mythic and I didn’t come back to retail and didn’t clear the previous raids before amirdrassil and I couldn’t ever get into a raid in SoD. Every guild I joined either had no room in raid roster or I couldnt make the raid times
@@joelhodoborgasand honestly blizzard could have kept the gate keeping from happening if they actually made the lockouts loot lockouts by the boss instead of weekly lockouts. They killed it themselves no matter how much you’d like to blame the try hards
Retail does the same. I can't stand people who played 15 years of wow and expect new players to do the same. What happened to having fun?
Min maxing has damaged the health of the game so much that the only fun thing about wow is roleplaying with friends or solo challenges, because having to have an exhausting list of requirements for other sweaty players to let you raid is what is killing the game.
It completely killed MOP remix for me, slamming through every bit of content in minutes is no fun. I want to feel some element of challenge and that I might die when I play the game. I run around in the open world without the cloak on just to feel that
Yep, find a group of 2 likeminded players, then just run dungeons as 3 players :P cozy chill run, but still a challenge if they're scaled for 5 but you're only 3 going in.
@@maximus6253
To be fair, mop remix was just for leveling alts, getting mog, toys, mounts.
It wasn't meant to be a difficult thing.
So your complaint is that you didn't like the people you were looking for to get wrangled by? Make your own raid group, keep the sweaty players out and your problem is solved. But no, you just want lame excuses as to why you couldn't progress a 20 year old game properly.
@@mikfhan This doesn't work. Whenever someone says stuff like this they don't understand normal human behavior. People aren't going to go out of their way to fight against game design and try to find the very small amount of people willing to engage in the game in their own niche way. They are just going to quit the game and find a different game that is catered to what they want and how they want to play.
1. I lost my steam because we were trashing gear way to fast.
2. Most spells were just reused stuff from retail
3. The world content was just meaningless after each phase
It was just like playing retail with a classic skin.
Exactly. It misses the point of classic: the world. It incentivizes end game content and skipping past the zones/quests/story like Nixxiom said.
Current developers of the game are missing some of the aspects that made WoW so good back in the day... current day WoW is all about max level raids and handing put replacement gear constantly.. not the adventure getting there with a good story where you arent the main being on the planet just a random adventurer learning and living the story...
Not entirely their fault either ! People want to rush the game and then complain there's nothing to do as well so it's a mixture of player/developer issues lol
It was not like retail at all what are you even talking about 😂
@@valdenn3073there barley is any Story in classic untill the endgame. Some länger Story quests here and the but most if it is just random stuff
Phase 2 onward everyone got super tryhardy (worse than even classic era) and it felt impossible to get into any groups for anything...
This! Couldnt even get Mara in season 3 to get my pally runes done! I may jump back to Classic Era.
The community killed wow. Everyone got very elitist despite not having 99% parses and even ever seeing orange.
Yeah, I don't think there wasn't too much inherently wrong with the game but it was the community. Once again the community meta'd the fun out of the game and decided what was optimal and what was good and if you didn't agree then you didn't get to play with anyone. I couldn't find groups to collect my runes because just... no one even wanted to help either.
Omg you don't parse 99?
One week later: SOD Dies
Honestly I don't agree, if you want to say the community killed sod then how hasn't it killed every other iteration of wow? It's not like suddenly a new group of players started playing sod that has never touched classic or retail, meta try hards are in every version of the game. They want to play with people who also want to try hard, It makes logical sense. Find like-minded people that don't mind wiping or clearing the content slower and make a group or join a guild that does so. It's not like try hards in the community are going to one day be like you know what you guys are right this isn't how I enjoy playing the game. Nope they'd just stop playing so either way if your not meta gaming those grouping with those who are will always be out of reach, because they'd simply just leave the game.
The game died because of decisions made by developers. Not enough content, content being too easy. Everyone complained that ST was too hard, they nerfed it and then everybody had full BIS in about 3-4 weeks and no longer had any reason to play. The pvp event was recycled, class balance was terrible and not properly addressed, everybody hated the incursions. Ultimately, the game just quickly ran out of things to do.
People have been complaining about the meta tryhards in the community for years, prior to sod. Go ahead and continue your complaints of that if you wish but to pretend this somehow killed this version of the game and not others is disingenuous and takes blame away from the true issue, poor design and decisions by the developers.
That’s what did it for me, the constant gear checks to raid.
Nothing like raiding feeling like a part time job
it’s because the raid lockout system is awful literally ruined the game
What you mean you don't have the the .0001% world drop level 24 blue BiS helm for a warrior that costs 2000 gold on the Auction House? NO INVITE.
Genuine brainrot in this game's community. You'd be surprised how many people get salty when you tell their raid lead to touch grass. Please do it more often if only to see the reactions.
So you want to raid while having trash gear that takes no effort to get?
@@therider990 Gear is not as important as you think. FF14 doesn't have complex gearing systems. You do dungeons, get currency, trade for the gearset for your role, get into the raid, get an item, trade that for the raid gear.
There's only 2 sets really.
The difference is they make up for it by having neat bosses with interesting yet simple mechanics. And doesn't make you waste 3 hours getting ready for said raid. And if you wipe, you're set right back in front of the boss ready to go again.
Even Guild Wars 2, the gear stops gaining stats at level 80 and it only changes around based on the suffix of the gear. The only exception being the "ascended gear" that doesn't add much in terms of stats but is super grindy to get.
If all you want to do is set yourself up for masochism and chasing numbers, go play one of the 50 million diablo clones so you can run the same dungeon 50 times for your 1 perfect drop that gives you a +2 to your strength after 20 hours of farming.
I stopped playing SOD when phase 3 dropped. It completely ruined the game mode.
the community ruined it. Its always the community
@@xyndros No, this time it was incursions. Adding incursions was an absolute fuck up. Reason the wife and I stopped playing.
@@xyndros if all addons were removed the excuse for the community being toxic wouldn't fly. The addons allow the community to be toxic the way they are. The devs are 100% to blame for the state of the game because they build the rules.
@@paintingsbypanco but the comm is toxic, even in era. Much more than in retail. (Yes!)
and isnt it the community who invents addons anyway? :p
But nvm, im just chilling in classic for the leveling, nothing else
Not with this wannabe elitism there :x
@@paintingsbypanco For real this game would 1000x better without addons and only basic macros.
Complaining that people are rushing through the content and asking what’s the fastest way to do stuff yet the video sponsor is Zygor, the guide to do just that, was hilarious. Anyone else catch the irony of that? Lol.
I was about to comment exactly that. Pretty shameless, tbh.
I'm sure Nixxiom can get a much better sponsor... Zygor is just dreadful.
He's literally part of the problem but doesn't care because it's $$$
its even more ironic that its a garbage addon too lol
Hahaha i cant believe anybody using that Trash Addon. What a shame
You clearly didn't get what Nixxiom is talking about. Zygor is an addon that helps you in leveling by questing. You know, what the game was designed for? Whereas dungeon spamming and level boosts completely circumvent the entire World? of Warcraft?
SoD was a good idea but in practice its a mess
I remember i tried to hop back in at phase 3 with my friend, and I didnt want to do nightmare incursions and my friend did, so my friend did incursions for 13 hours one night and he was lvl 50 with 500g and I was still lvl 23 rubbing coppers, realizing incursions were the best I tried to do them and they were the worst kind of gameplay i've ever seen in an mmo
So I never got to play with my friend because I didnt want to play incursions
Runes were supposed to be discovered and fun to get, now if i dont look it up on wowhead and find it I cant play the game
Cant get into raids because everyone is sweating super hard in the easiest version of wow
I think whoever came up with the idea of incursions shouldnt work on video games
Incursions were running in a hamster wheel and paying a monthly sub too do it. The most braindead content, but the addicts lapped it up because it mean they could level to 50 in less then 10 hours.
I actually was really enjoying SoD until I got to incursions. Ended up quitting right after doing one. Made me realize how boring it really was.
I stopped playing during phase 3. Everyone was leveling up through incursions and that was way too boring for me. The group I played with wanted to hit max level fast and I just wanted to explore and take my time. The thing about WoW is that they create and bring in systems then after a while they leave them out to dry. Happens in almost every expansion and we saw that in SOD. After phase 1, it was hard to find a group for BFD and the Ashenvale event was pointless. I really enjoyed phase 1. Probably the best time I have had playing WoW since TBC classic.
Yep incursions killed it for me and the inflation on auction house was a joke
yep i love most open world exploring and grouping and ofc some dungeons but not chaining, sometimes i feel there need som resctrictions like not more then 4 Dungeons or something like this por Xp restruction from Dungeons. Ofc player will whine but probably get fine with it, and if it absolutly not work chanhge it back
Scaled content does not belong in Classic WoW. Just because content is fully progressed and outdated, doesn’t mean there aren’t alts and new players joining late that want to play the content at level.
So in short, you stopped playing for the same reason people stopped when Classic first dropped. The community is ass and way too try hard.
I had fun in Phase 1, but felt like i was going through the motions, towards the end. Once I hit lv 25, I couldn't get into any groups for raids, because the player base is toxic af, and unless you beat the raid already, you couldn't get into the raid, so I just gave up, and started playing FF14. Best decision I ever made btw
People are so toxic I cant believe it. Either people are helpful or super toxic. If you dont perform people will drop you from group or trash you in chat. It completely ruined the game for me. I just quit the game. I think im done with WoW for good. Everything comes to an end.
Blizzard seems to think the classic community wants to rush quickly to the end game. But we love levelling
If you love that isn't Classic still available?
@@thaive3734 loving the classic STYLE doesn't mean you don't want new content with the same pacing.
@@thaive3734 Yes bro. We've already leveled through all that content dozens of times. We want WoW 2 please.
@@ZachStachelski13 do you think if they make WoW 2 it'll be like classic? Lol
@@thaive3734 probably not. But a less bloated version of retail would at least be playable.
I quit because after clearing literally every raid from ICC to Amirdrassil with even a couple of CE achievements over the years, and farming pre-bis, I had a helluva a time getting invited to raids. I was barely able to get into a couple of BFD runs (where we 1 shot every boss). After that I didn't even try to find a Gnomer group. It's too much work to prove yourself for raids basically equivalent to LFR difficulty. It's been said before, but it's like trying to get a job that won't hire you without at least 2 years experience, but the only way to get the xp is if you were hired. I have 15 years xp, that's the sad part.
"Grrrr, min-maxers ruined SoD!
...
So, anyway guys, here's Zigor, this addon that tells you the best leveling routes and other guides!"
I know right? He's part of the problem lol
That’s not the problem. It’s simple, block APIs to combat logs and stop letting Warcraft logs record everything.
@@Mduffy-yo6rb So destroy yet another form of manifest game play to cater to the people who invest less, play less, and are faster to move on. Brilliant!!! You should be working at Blizzard.
Min/maxing happens in every game. Guides, records, 100% completion, etc... are all organic player motivations that drive people to engage with the game. Every time people try and mess with these things in order to make the game 'healthy' by their standards the game gets worst.
that is so true xDD he promotes tryhard playstyle and crys about it, a real hypocrite. professional cryer. i mean if you like it play it, if you dont just dont, why talk bad about it?
@@jimmyhopkins4095because he’s a giant overweight sook
Would love to be playing sod rn but theres like no time to do so when everything is so expensive and i need to work as much as much as possible.
And then you work as much as possible only to find that it really didn’t help all that much
My problem with SoD is.
Past Phase 1 the whole "Discovery" part of this season was gone. There were no new runes to collect no new quests to explore.
And more and more it started becoming more.... Retailified. Like the folks at Blizzard they just can't help it but to put people on a conveyor belt to raid.
Vanilla WoW. Hardcore WoW what I like about this game. It's the leveling it always has been. Doing raids at the end is just something fun to do after. I love the WORLD of Warcraft.
Exactly. What is this obsession with raiding? It's so divorced from what the casual player wants. Back in the day Vanilla WoW was like Elden Ring but even bigger. Every inch of the world felt brimming with high quality and challenging content. (granted we sucked back then, but the point still stands).
@@ZachStachelski13 I mean the part that captured people most is the one thing we can't get back. Which is the discovery.
When people ask for Classic+ we want it exactly how Turtle WoW is doing it. New Quests, New Zones to explore. Slight class balance tweaks (that aren't changing every month for "balance sake" ) And dungeons and raids that are interspliced with current existing dungeons and raids so you can pick and choose where you go and what you want to do. You never raise the bar to make past things irrelevant but you fill in the gaps so you can do the same type of gear progression in different ways.
They started well with giving each class a few new spells (fresh coat of paint). If they would've kept focusing on the early game I think it would've been better.
But we don't even know what's possible. Could they create a new class if they wanted to? Could they create a new zone? A new dungeon with old assets? New PVP modes?
@@ZachStachelski13 I don't want them touching classes really since they don't seem to understand how to let a thing cook? ya know?
Like Blizzard devs make the worst chefs cuz they'd be adding all this extra stuff to a dish ever five minutes without tasting it, and then dish it out. Just to bring it back in again and do even more things to the dish.
Like bro I just wanted a ham sandwich why is there pesto, a lamb chop bone, and lobster in here? Why is everything covered in a blend of liquid smoke and vinegar.
They don't know how to let things rest, and they don't know how to keep things simple.
I also think it's high time we acknowledge WoW Classic Era.
Is NOT the definitive Vanilla experience they promised. It's not the earliest build of WoW possible that Private Servers could never emulate (that's a lie used to discredit the quality of things like Nostraliaus)
No. It's pretty obvious WoW classic at most has been a pre-patch TBC build clumsily backlogged to just have classic content. All they had to do was shut off access to the dungeons and raids in the area.
@@NotTheWheel I never cared about "no changes" to me it was always classic_ or bust. If I don't get more, new, WoW content in the classic WoW shell I won't be satisified.
They could just import retail classes into classic and I'd be happy. I never forgave blizzard for making Death Knight a hero class. So you never got to level one in the best content of the game. (the early levels)
I quit mainly due to two reasons:
1) 10-Man content was nuked, and while I understand it's not 'Classic', it certainly suited my friend group and I
2) Content took way too long to come out, you bang out max level from P2-P3 in about 2 days, and then you gotta wait months for new-ish content.
P1 Was PEAK though. My god, that was so fun.
100% agree!
I very much agree on 10 mans. I had a close knit group of friends that raided each week, but when ST came out none of us were itching to start a guild to get 10 more people because it's essentially a part time job to do that.
I feel the same about xp boosts, i just dont like rushing that much. I want to complete the entire zone. I really hope there will be a fresh server soon without bullshit
Especially in a game that's legendary about being a long journey through an epic large world.
I stopped at phase 3 with the incursions. Like you said, my server as well had nothing but SM grinders. The world was empty and felt pointless playing because I am against speed leveling. Then phase 3 everyone was in incursions 24/7, so again I was in a giant empty world. Couldn't find people to do epic quests, or do the dungeons I did need for certain quests. Then raiding was a big no after phase 1 because every single guild/pug wanted the sweatiest min max no lifers, and I'm old and just want to chill out and see how the raid works with regular people. Oh well.
MARRIAGE?! Congratulations on settling your Hearthstone to a home my dude! I’m stoked for you!
Nixxiom is checking out Turtle WoW
nope
Also, i leveled and spent mt gold on a mount just for blizzard to lower its price and give xp buff. Felt like a slal in the face and a disrespect of my time so i just left
I quit during phase 1 and just returned for phase 4. I am hyped af for the game again and am having a blast.
Same, I think the problem is people complain about the cycle of mid maxing and then proceed to do that exact thing they complain about. So far I've only encountered helpful people leveling, grouping to get quests done and everything, level 32 right now as a melee Hunter, it's been a blast.
@@joshuasmith4643 yeah I think if you don’t min max and play the game like it’s meant to be played you will enjoy it. Min maxers ruin every online video game.
@@khronick3596 right, it's okay to min max yourself and enjoy it if you enjoy that, but don't force or expect others to play your way if they don't want to.
100% Incursions were the final nail in the coffin. They added the Quest experience buff to try to get people to quest again, but it was still faster to spam the incursions until max. I spent the whole time leveling by myself, essentially.
Still playing SoD and very much enjoying it. I don't compare myself to other people, how they play, what they do. I enjoy questing and playing a lot of alts so I do that and enjoy it a lot. I have a main that is raiding and I did all the content since p1. Got a casual small guild that I enjoy being a part of, no min maxing, banter, having fun, joking around with them. So it was and is very fun. Phase 4 was also very fun so far. Shout out from Crusader Strike EU
RE: growing out of zones too quickly - this doesn't apply to the Warrior - where if you're leveling mostly solo, you want to mostly be questing 3-5 or even 6-8 levels above your average mobs, or else it's incredibly demanding and painful. I ended up totally finishing a lot of the quest chains in zones during Phase 3 just because questing in anything around my actual level was like pulling teeth.
Players have forgotten about the adventure portion of playing an MMORPG; or any RPG for that matter. Social media and some content creators have contributed a great deal to that honestly. To be fair I myself made some spec guides for DF, but I still love exploring when I'm questing in new zones, and taking my time leveling in order to experience the whole story. I also play a lot of alts for variety, even though I do try to push my mains io every season in M+...I dunno man.
I find myself to be somewhere in-between hardcore and casual, but everything these days is just "gogogo"; get to max level, endlessly grind and geat fully geared in the first 2 weeks, and what's the best meta class/spec to play so I can only play that every season. People have forgotten to just have fun sometimes ya'know? It's sad 😞
For me it took just ending up with a group I know outside the game that we all work in the same job field. We're super casual during work busy season and lean a little more hardcore when it's our slow season. Our big thing is we're playing for relaxation and laughing/venting about the unique things that happen in our job field.
It's vague statements like this that the SoD devolopers mistakenly clung on to. You say "exploration", but NOBODY enjoys combing through a map as massive as world of warcraft as if they were testing for collision bugs...that's just insane. And yet that's how they designed runes in SoD.
That's garbage exploration IMO. 99% of people just looked up where runes are, because finding them on your own isn't even reasonable.
@@ZachStachelski13 That's only because the majority of players have already explored these areas since forever ago. Exploration is always more enjoyable when everything is new and shiny.
@@Thematicz I think that kind of exploration only works in dungeons. You can't check behind every tree in azeroth without losing your mind.
@ZachStachelski13 Disagree here. I believe the cause of the frustration in SOD, is the fact that you're not actually exploring, so much as you are looking for something specific. It's about the destination rather than the journey. Aimless exploration is much more relaxed.
Phase 4 is pretty good so far! :)
Bro is complaining about people going too fast and missing the adventure, while promoting a guide Addon to help you through the adventure quicker and more efficient??
At the end of Phase 1 my friend and I were denied entry into a BFD before successfully creating our own group. In order to create an environment that was less toxic and more inclusive, my friend and I just started our own guild at the beginning of phase 2. We have since merged with two other guilds who took a similar approach- we want to play well but we welcome casuals who move at their own pace. Most often these players just need a group to encourage them and a heads up of content and goals- and they will be perfectly capable of clearing anything in game. We are all just trying to enjoy ourselves. The population during the end of Phase 3 made me nervous but since the content drop of phase 4 the community is reinvigorated. I also blame Cata, and the weather getting nicer, for the temporary population drop. I hope blizzard keeps us engaged through the life of the server. This has been my most enjoyable WoW experience yet.
Deviate Delight…Classic Era.
It’s calling you
It's really not.
Is it a fresh server?
Heard there is a strong amount of drama there too
@@Tarrimaster No. its the same as whitemane, going on since 2019, people are delusional.
@@JW-jd6sn then don’t join troll
To me the hole experience of SoD felt like Blizzard trying to show Retail mind set down my throat. I hate that they added the new OP talents in the first place. I wated More content, Not rehash from later expansions. How about discover a way across the big wall to Gilneas.. Open new and unexplored Zones. A few new Dungeons that where in Par with Classic. Atrue Classic Plus would never add all this OP stuff and ruin the core Idea. But then again.. We have seen changes now so i guess the Dream of Classic is all a memory now /
I just started SOD for the first time around 2 weeks ago, currently level 33. It's a different experience. I'm leveling a paladin at the moment and I'm enjoying it so far. I think the runes are implemented awkwardly. There are not very many hints, no quests for them? Some of them are essential and I find myself going out of my way to get them. I just end up opening wowhead to get the answer, along with how to min max everything haha. The only part i really hate is the waylaid supplies. I find this really changes how i level. I end up hording everything in case a crate drops that i can use, and the rep is an essential part of the game. I don't understand why the azeroth commerce authority is in the game. Regardless im having fun and there are enough people on my realm that i can do elite quests and dungeons with. Can't wait to try endgame!
i repicked it after phase long break since phase 2 and legit same experience its just so fun with the new abilities and im still finding some groups for dungeons. also the drama part in the video it's basic wow guild drama happens on retail on classic so its nothing new to me especially some of those leveling guilds are weird
Personally, I quit right around phase 2, as I felt like the worst aspect of the endgame was amplified to the extreme, where you could barely get groups for normal Gnomeregan unless you were some TOP TIER RAIDER who had a 99 PARSE and Best in Slot gear and all this other junk.
It became more of a chore than an actual fun journey in a fantasy world I enjoy, and that's what made me stop.
Strange how people could enjoy min/maxing and just rush through the game. When I played I spent about half the game wandering around and discovering things. It was pretty amazing in 2004/5 to be in a MMO when I was used to single player games. Azeroth seemed like there was always something new to discover. It seemed unlimited.
Why is it strange though
@@shabaranks9710very strange to rush through a classic-WoE adjacent version.. endgame sucks in classic WoW, the 1-60 experience is the main gameplay sequence
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u I mean some people just like raiding and getting their bis others like the leveling experience plus sod adds more to the end game now so idk if it's necessarily strange
@@shabaranks9710 i dont think it's wrong, because everybody plays differently, but i do think it's strange.
the design philosophy of vanilla WoW is far more weighted towards the world and leveling vs the endgame lvl 60 experience. it's not an opinion, it's just where most of the effort was put in to whenever development was occurring, especially when compared to modern/retail WoW
i dont think playing like that is an issue either, i think the issue comes in whenever the community takes on too many of those behaviors as a whole, and the community consequently decays because once min/max culture is embedded, it RARELY IF EVER leaves or decreases.. at least, in my 25+ years of gaming ive never seen that happen
this isnt a 1:1 comparison, but imagine playing a TTRPG like D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, etc... and the DM and players are all bought-in for a Role play heavy, non-powergaming campaign... everyone except one guy who makes an uber min/max character that breaks the game or diminishes every other player's character... sure, it's cool and all, but you should be playing in a game being ran specifically for power gamers. imagine somebody playing a min/max Twilight Cleric in D&D with a group of people who picked everything purely for aesthetic or RP... the design philosophy of the DM does not mesh with this type of powergaming.
it's not bad that the player likes to play like this, but they are playing a game that's not designed for them
i would say in this case, that's classic & classic adjacent versions of WoW vs Retail WoW
Bro you're literally promoting Zygor or whatever and simultaneously crying how min maxing ruins the game. You gotta be trolling?
@eyemazed This. Zygor is about a half-step from just having an auto-play "feature" like some mobile time-waster.
Still a better sponsor than Raid Shadow Legends :D
Everybody has to pay some bills so yeah I don’t mind
damn didnt know zygor gave you an EXP boost
First off, Phase 1 rocked. But this is why I stopped:
1. Power creep from gear and runes made characters WAY more powerful
2. Raids had to be scaled to compensate more powerful characters
3. Devs scaled around World First raiders instead of casual groups and PUGs
4. Difficult raids forced players to be more selective so they could clear raids in a timely manner
5. Casuals left because they can't get into raids
6. Only min/maxers (sweatlords) remain and thus the player base became toxic
The game had min/maxers in classic re-release and before, but in classic it wasn't as sweaty since a group could actually have like 30% AFK players and still clear raids. I think Blizz missed the mark with the difficulty curve and forgot that the hardest part of the raid should be getting a group of real humans to give up a few hours every week to play a video game together, instead of trying to make super challenging content.
The reason I stopped is the elitist attitude and devoting time to playing a class can get punished by a nerf. I want to play a game where I know what my class does and where it shines.
Sod is... a disappointment
Ok Doomer. We are loving P4
@@eaglefreedom5361 all 10 of you?
Season of Discovery doesn't really seem dead on Wild Growth server. Similar feeling to P1 in terms of population out in the open world.
Similar to phase 1?? Bruh u gotta send me the screenshots, because I don't believe that lol
cope?
im still over here actually hoping for a response lol..
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u Just jump in the game on Wild Growth server and check it out if you are that interested. I am not particularly interested in putting in the effort to send you a screenshot.
I play on wild growth and it's true. However i gotta admit i did get burned out from all the min maxing
funny enough, alexensual of all people was right when he said, all blizzard will do, is put features from later expansions and a more difficult ragnaros in the game.
1. Everything is too easy! There's nothing challenging in the content you can do everything with pug. If you are not forced to do quests, dungeons and raid with your guild members the game become single player for most people.
2. Leveling and gearing is too fast! In P3 most warriors/paladins had lvl 50 with BiS sword on the second day after the release
3. Too many spells! I tought that there will be 4-5 "new" spells for each class to balance them better than it was in vanilla but everyone has like 20+ new spells
4. Community is bad as always in the past 15 years...
SO, seriously dude, you are talking all about how you do not like exp boosts and things that push you to max level without having the time to enjoy it, *while* you have the Zygor app open in your UI on screen. I know they're helping pay the billsand all, but this comes across as a tad hypocritical I think. Anyway, cheers and carry on I guess, but maybe stop using addons to speed the levelling process and see how that feels.
I was coming to make a similar comment lol.
He's part of the problem, but lacks the discipline to not use it, or cares more about the $$$ or both
I went super hard in phase one and got 4 characters exalted in Warsong and just burnt out 2 weeks before phase 2 drop. Then there is the people who report BG chat when they're losing in WSG and you get your account suspended just for encouraging your team to play the game they joined.
Bro complaining about leveling min maxing and how people want to get to max level as fast as possible while putting an ad for zygor at the beginning 💀
CONGRATULATIONS on the engagement!!! Hope you and your bride or groom have a beautiful wedding and honeymoon, my guy.
As soon as the raid turned into a 20 man, that is when I was done.
And there are still NPCs that defend the atrocious change to 20man..
10 man was such a W.
Yeah, raids should have stayed 40 man.
All we wanted was a new questing area, 1 or 2 new dungeons, and maybe a new raid tier. That's it. No one asked for this. That's why it's not as popular as Blizzard would like. Because, NO ONE WANTED IT!
I stopped at about level 15 in P1 because I realized one day after I logged out for the day that I was really bored and then I just havent convinced myself that its worth trying again….or at least not worth paying the sub fee to try again….Turtle WoW looks neat though. Might see if I can get that running on my Steam Deck
Era is love. Era is life.
💯😎
I stopped during nightmare incursions and all my momentum was lost.
Derailed me completely, zero chance I could come back for phase 4
Finally letting nostalgia go? Come, join us in the present with lots of improvememts (retail). Let go of nostalgia, 2004 was 20 years ago. You will NEVER get "that" feeling again. Let goooo
ewww adhd version of wow
Improvements? I'm sorry but retail devolved so hard that it's unbearable. The most fun I had on retail in 8 years was the first month of remix and anything after first month sucks due to glaringly obvious issues. I do not play seasonal games, I don't care. I want something meaningful, retail is bloated and meaningless. I started with cata, never played classic era, can't be nostalgic on something I never played and you know what? It's superior. So much more fun.
SoD is much closer to Retail than it is Classic Era. That’s where many of its issues come from.
Everything about retail is better, its the only thing keeping WOW alive sonce no one wants to play classic or SoD@xXdnerstxleXx
@@valdenn3073 Exactly
I've been having fun in SoD, came back to classic after 3 years and just enjoying the leveling as a melee hunter and it's been awesome.
I am still dabbling in SoD but very slowly chipping away. The drop off with my friends seemed to be the increased difficulty for endgame in phase 2. It lead to our raid nights taking much much longer just to put a group together. When the risk of failure goes up, the gatekeeping does as well because no one wants to waste their time. My honest thoughts are that they should have allowed for raids to allow more people to join in pick up groups. Have bosses drop tokens/currency for all players and only drop the same amount of loot. Guild runs get better loot distribution by running in a smaller group that the content is tuned for, and pugs have effective reduced difficulty by having 50-100% more players. I havent gone back an run any of the raids as level up raids after phase 2 because all my homies left during phase 3
From a non boomer perspective i always hear the same complain about people being tryhard and not playin the game like it was 2006 and i think is stupid, maybe sod has his problems but that argument about the players could be used in every iteration of wow, it doesnt matter if the content is good or bad it seems like every "OG classic andy" wants to play in his own early 2000 echo-chamber where everyone is clueless about the game
I think WoW works best when content is NOT gated behind phases. The game isn't supposed to be a sprint, its a marathon. So when devs hard stop players behind artificial time gates, it gives them no choice but to either quit, raid log, and/or push parses. They promote this min max culture because there's literally nothing else to do. Everyone is always in their full bis ready for the next sprint (phase). I think the smarter plan would've just to have sod released all of its content mc to naxx and the content they could develop are the raids post-naxx (scarlet crusade raid) and improving the leveling experience with new or more flushed out questing zones to DISCOVER. Sure, people will still minimax and absolutely sweat to naxx within a month, but the barrier to entry becomes much higher while also giving the other 98% of the playerbase always something to progress towards.
be happy there are caps that allow you to catch up. they'd be way further ahead otherwise
@@fanaticist What I'm saying is being a random level 14 helping a farmer kill wild boars outside his farm while there are a select few raiders out there fighting Kel'thuzad himself is what creates the scale and epicness of WoW. When you allow everyone to catch up to the same playing field through time gates/phases removes all of that and it all just becomes a min-max sprint to the finish.
What I got tired of was never getting the BIS gear I needed and being rejected for many raids because of it felt more like a chore than a game
The bot farming and gold buying ruining the economy and making everything so expensive ruined it for me i dont enjoy constantly farming to be able buy consumables and enchants enjoyable if you dont buy gold
I can only agree with what many have already pointed out:
- the painful min-maxing
- the predictable class-balance issues and "flavor of the month" classes, just like in retail
- horrible botting issues
- tying BIS gear to PvP events...even on pvp servers
- badly thought out events
But what was most prominent for me and the reason I quit was: I never, never, EVER wanted a Classic+ with class-balance changes. I simply wanted MORE content for the carefully crafted, if flawed though, but predictable class environment of Classic. I played Rogue and was stunned at some of the lackluster class changes. I would have been happier, had they just given us new dungeons, quests, raids and gear. That would have made me stick to it.
We are having big fun in this P4.
Dungeon farm while playing with the boys , BG for ranks , some group farm in MC waiting for our raid tonight.
In guess the most important thing is to have a guild with enough committed players. We have one roster , 5 people online during the day and 10-15 each evening. We can fill our roster for raids.
Sometimes I had to jump into PU nightmare and yeah , I can imagine the game would be terrible if not in my guild ...
When Phase 2 dropped, the majority of my friends spammed dungeons to 40. They were so exhausted and bored by the end and did not enjoy the time spent playing. Meanwhile they cried that the rest of us were taking too long to get to lvl cap because we were actually playing the game and experiencing the world and community. I got to experience 1k Needles from the Horde's perspective for the first time and it was really neat; tedious, but neat.
This culture of zug zug to the end is what kills the game imo.
I just got sick of having to pass a job interview to play a re-release of a re-release of a 20 year old game
My interest was very short lived. It lasted about a week or so.
I realised that this wasn't what I was looking for. What I wanted was an SoD that is about content and additions to the old zones, world, etc. An approach where things that were left unfinished are actually finished, but this content should not replace the old like tBC did in many ways. Maybe things are pulled in from later expansions but retuned and redone around Classic's philosophies.
Examples of this include Karazhan crypts of course, but also Mt. Hyjal as a zone, Uldum, Grim Batol, Isle of Dr Lapidis, the 2nd dungeon in SW, Emerald Dream, unfinished class quests like the Druid cat form one, finishing Azshara, Desolace, adding quests findable when dead, populating unfinished islands (there are quite a few), Timbermaw Hold, more reputation rewards for Ravenholdt, Gilneas is a big one of course, Quel'Thalas, Outland? - Not tuned like the tBC one since we don't want levelling to 70. And so on, you get the idea.
But what did I get? Runes - quests that can only reasonably be solved by having everybody together rummaging the entire continent and all the rest of us go on WoWHead. That's pretty bad on its own, but then when you actually get them, they cause insane power creep and their designs do not fit Classic at all.
I quit only just after level 25, and I don't regret it. It's absolute trash, and it's disappointing to see that Blizzard STILL does not understand vanilla WoW. How many times must it be reiterated and restated to them before they get it?
On another note, I stopped play Mist event as a rogue. I was the mob killer that I wanted to be. With all the gems, meta, tinker, cog, on my gear. I was still a weak rogue that still had only a few hits and then I was waiting to attack again.
As a new player that started in season 2, BFD not being scaled was no issue for me. Sure it was probably easier, but that didnt really matter. There was no exp buff at the beginning beyond level 25, and BFD was still pretty relevant and fun for me. The gear mattered for leveling, and the xp was great. There was a mace i think in BFD for pally that made shockadin work a lot better if you didnt have gnomer gear. Once they introduced the exp buffs beyond level 25 thats when it became truly started to become more irrelevant in my opinion. The world still felt pretty active until incursions were released in p3 on my server. Blizzard killed the level experience in so many ways.
Phase 1 was amazing. New things, exploration, and content to play with friends.
Phase 2 sucked. Gnomer was terrible. Why did they think that those boses were fun? Was really hopeful that P3 would fix some things/learn lessons.
Phase 3 was a car crash. Don't go level out in the world, just go grind the emerald dream loop until your eyeballs fall out. Raid cap pushed higher was an idiot move
Phase 4 I'm not even interested anymore.
I stopped playing phase 1 😂I was looking for a guild and pugging in the meantime, by the end of it I wasn’t enjoying the community metas and even forming my own groups was annoying because there were always ppl aggressively insisting we do things one specific way and killing the vibe of each raid to where I didn’t look forward to playing.
I’ve been thinking about trying it again, but I would really need a casual guild to play with consistently
Phases were coming out to slow, no certainty in what will be with the server at the end, not actually classic +
I was trying a different build for a shaman that wasn't "meta" during phase two and it seemed to work as I was killing stuff really fast and doing a bunch of aoe. Someone in my group saw my build and demanded I change my build or I will be kicked, then told me that this game isn't meant for theory crafting. I was dumbfounded and proved that build worked, but still got kicked because it wasn't "meta"
Theory crafting doesn't work, yet meta exists because of theory crafting the fuck?
For me personally, I got super hyped pre SoD also as I got more into the slower style gameplay of classic over retail where you just enjoy the journey instead of rushing to the max level. I played for a few months then went on a long travel with my partner which caused me to not play and engage with the guild I was in. After two weeks of not being able to do much, I was just randomly booted from the guild and I never really felt like going back. After my travel I felt like I was way behind and considering the 'Seasonal' feeling I thought why bother. Now when I wouldn't have gone on this travel, I would probably still have burned out from SoD. I noticed that I did the raid every week for at least a month maybe two, but after that when I only needed one more item, I didn't feel like doing it, neither on my alts...
The guild I was in started casually with intend to raid at 60, but it became extremely try hard relatively quickly, with a very small portion of people who seemed to have no life outside of SoD (I don't mean that offensively) and when they'd notice you didn't feel the same, it would become meh. I play wow to have fun, and I want to join raids, prepare for them, etc. but wow is not and will never be a job for me, and if that's what it takes, I guess I'll be a casual forever and just hop on and off whenever a new patch hits.
Too many gatekeepers in Phase 2 who would reject you from doing a Gnomer run because of your class or your raid logs did not show a parse.
The same happened in phase 3 with Sunken Temple.. Gatekeepers. Couldnt get a run with my guild even though I was on everyday due to "Raid Loggers"
I logged into SOD phase 4 yesterday ..totally confused by the levelling. Professions now based on reputation..just seems too hard and I will stick to Cata.
This is why I say hardcore classic WoW was in fact the best they could really do to center the game back to socialization. Because you had to trust your teammates in a dungeon. You had to create bonds with people and know who is loyal and who is really going to watch your back out for you and not leave you in the dust. You would recognize who is always ready to run from a bad pull and who would stick to take you out of a jam then you measured it all out strategically. It was about diplomacy and socialization.
Just do hardcore classic again but limit the level caps.
SoD was my first experience with WoW.
I was having so much fun and got to join raids and figure things out. But then Phase 2 dropped in and people already data mined everything, they were optimizing and being told that if you were not caught up in certain amount of time you were missing out... I wanted to level up by exploring the world but people showed me how that's just wasting time.
I was even hoping dungeons would get a sort of limited times you could run them like in Hardcore to prevent the dungeon farming, but I kept being told that that would be stupid and annoying.
SoD turned into a spread sheet that had no mystery to it, everyone knew how it worked before the new patches dropped and leveling just turned into Dungeon spamming not for gear but for levels until maxed out. It turned me off from continuing the game.
Man, I'm playing Warhammer and D&D next to WoW as well so I completely understand where you're coming from 😂
I loved P1 and P2 as well but got burnt out for P3 along with most of my guild, although we're back for P4 and having a blast so far. I think the constant SM farm in p2 and the incursion spam in p3 did kill the enjoyment of the game for a lot of people. Classic isn't really made to tryhard it that much, the content is way too easy for that. It's your personal story and exploration which counts imo.
I think the whole phase system is a double edged sword. In a way it gave ppl with less time a chance to catch up to smaller level caps but it also opened the floodgates for the speedlevel crowd from retail to nestle in. I almost feel like it would've been better if we just leveled up to 60 in one go and had the raids come out phased again like they originally did, but with a lot more content than just the raid.
Personally it went like this for me:
Phase 1: Fun
Phase 2: it was ok for the most part.
Phase 3: i quit playing it as soon as i hit 50.
Phase 4: I came back to it. Its fine for the most part plus I now have some goals to work towards other than raid logging (it will eventually happen though). Not sure if ill stick around later but for the time being im having a little fun experimenting with my shaman.
You know what's also awful? How quick the leveling is with that Discoverer's Delight buff. You lvl zoom through the gorgeous, detail rich areas of Vanilla as if the game is trying to throw you into the endgame asap, which in the end just feels like Retail. We're not here on SoD to play Retail.
The min max rush to cap was mostly because of FOMO. The way this “season” worked really ate at the soul of a classic experience in my opinion.
Sounds like WoW, at-least the classic and SOD realms, is finally having its runescape moment where a lot of the playerbase wont even recognize your existence unless you're doing the ultimate 3-4 tick fletching, fishing and cooking or doing the fastest way to get whatever. WoW to me has easily become and pretty much always been a game that I like to play at a very casual pace and just sort of relax while playing a game. my "minmax" comes in the form of my ability rotation and paying attention to my cooldowns/buffs/debuffs
Yea just being good at your class and playing the mechanics of the Bosses, i think thats a healthy and fun way to play. But everything else is just stressful torture for me
Yea just being good at your class and playing the mechanics of the Bosses, i think thats a healthy and fun way to play. But everything else is just stressful torture for me
It’s not just SoD, it’s classic, TBC classic, Wrath and so on. The min-maxing is what officially just killed this game for me. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck in picking a server, I wasn’t having fun playing in an empty open world when the dungeon spammers started. Leveling alts became boring to me, no one to explore the world with like back when I was 10 in 2005 playing vanilla. WoW will always be my favorite game, but the community that took it over ruined it for me. The min-maxers, the meta-gamers, and the “get to max asap” players. First phase was a blast with people everywhere exploring having fun was awesome and I got to experience it all but phase 2 it all just died for the same scarlet monastery spammers, the world felt gone when it started. I hope to experience it alive once more before I officially call it quits on WoW
Nixiom, first time commenter here. Been following you years. I haven’t played classic for a few years but I like to pop in to see how it’s going. I had to stop because of outside life stuff, so I can relate. The speed the majority of the player base cosume the content, off the charts. This game is not for people that may not get to play that much.
I ran BFD on multiple alts every week and loved every moment, I then ran Gnomer and ST on my main and couldn't wait for each raid to end. I don't understand why they decided that fun was bad in P2 and P3.
I wanted to quest and take some time to enjoy the zones too. Turned exp boost off finding myself disappointed that most people rushed to get BiS and content cleared. P2 was cut super short to keep sweaty players happy, which meant I didn't see much of the new content. P3 I played a lot and it felt crap. Incursions, Mara spamming, ST got boring etc.
I think they could try making it so quest exp remains the same always. a lv12 westfall quest always giving the 1200 its worth. No more grey quest where the exp gain decays by 99% if you out level it 10+ levels.
This would be adjusted so its not worth doing quest that are like 30 levels lower than your level but if your 10-15 levels overleveled its still kind of worth doing.
Keep in mind if mobs are grey, a quest that says kill 10 monsters would be missing out on the 10x mob kill exp.
That Turtle WoW glance at the camera 😂
I don't mind the XP boost. I think people really take SOD too seriously. It feels like it is designed for casual play, giving some new flavor to the nostalgia.
I'm still stuck with my Tauren in Mulgore, I'm just playing at night for a bit, taking in the vibe with a starry sky.
Ya phase one was lots of fun. Phase 2 turned into getting one shot by players with end game gear... should have rolled on a PvE server. Also, like you mentioned, the community seem really toxic/elitist. I'm an arena player and classic community was way more toxic than Retail. I mean, wasn't SOD supposed to be really casual?
Season of Discovery has roughly 10k more players than Classic Era. Its is definitely not dead. It was understandable for less people to be on from the P3 ending due to that being the longest phase due to Classic Cata. Going to be honest but a drastic majority of Classic players only care about end game. There is a player base that likes to level up but that is drastically smaller to the raiders in Classic Era.
I think you hit the big reason I don't like joining an mmo that my friends play a ton of. They just want to have me sprint to the end and its zero fun. I've had more fun going from 1-15 on a human rogue just questing in Elwynn forest than I ever did getting speed ran to the end,
Phase 1: Amazing! 🤘- Phase 2: Pretty ok, kinda 👌- Phase 3: Dead, not even raidlogging 💀..
P3 killed the hype/fun to the point I lost all interest of playing it. Doesn't matter what P4 added.
Being a seasonal server, all your gear/rep grinds/gold is gone soon anyway. Unsubbed 2 days ago.
the reason min max culture is growing so big in Wow is because we've done it all so many times, people seem to think if they make classic fresh servers its going to be like what it was in OG vanilla or Classic 2019 but it won't ever be like that agin.
I think people thought it was going to be a brand new experience with old throwbacks. But it's just retail for Classic Andy's
Dude everything you stated on points of the reason why you stopped playing is exactly the reason why I stopped
I wasn’t looking for a scavenger hunt or retail light. It got so you couldn’t play the game you just had to raid grind and rune race. I went from leveling six alts in phase 2 to not leveling anyone since.
Its impossible to find the balance between fun and respecting your time, or finding other people who will value your time. BFD can be cleared in under an hour easily without stress or drama, but when people want to fuck around and make a 45-55 minute clear take over 2.5 hours because they wanna bring their unskilled/completely unoptimized spouse or dad or whatever, its hard to stay motivated.
The warlock dagger farm.... enough said.
Classic WoW gearing was about going in quest chains and taking down iconic bosses in dungeons and raids for beloved weapons. How about Warlock, tanks specifically the new play style, you just farm rng portals.... super memorable.
I thought it was obvious at this point. SoD has just been a retail-mindset project agenda. Even the devs more or less admitted SoD was just a testing ground for Pandaria remix.
Them adding incursions, sneaking in Retail UI/Guild changes etc. They want us to like retail again. Classic may be more popular than Retail and would not be surprised if the player numbers would be more for Classic in a near future but they still are making much more money on Retail and its moneytizations.
I'm far more biased with Classic so don't get me wrong there but if you read between the lines and start thinking insted of "zomg X-phase hype!" you might notice these things too.
The thing that killed the game mode for me was the min-maxing. I don't like to make an entire interview just to do a dungeon or quick raid. If im going to do an interview for something, it will be for a real job, not a freaking videogame