Have We Lost Sight Of What Makes Classic... Classic? | Asmongold Reacts 

well when you come out with “classic”, and then continue to just re-release all of the expansions, isn’t “losing sight of what makes classic classic” just bound to happen?

The biggest problem with wow expansions was adding new rushed gated areas rather than expanding Azeroth itself. The core world felt neglected and unfinished in areas, story and quests just fizzled out and got overshadowed by the raid boss of the week. Then when they did go back to the main world they completely rebuilt it destroying all the connection you had to it. Then they abandoned it again.

Vanilla always had a Tolkien-like feel to me. I remember running around places like BRD just in awe of the environment. WoW has never recaptured that for me. But there’s just something about Vanilla. They really struck something, and I’m clearly not the only one feeling that.

I cannot wait for classic The War Within

16:40 - there are SO many of us who were avid WoW players at launch 18 years ago...who are now middle aged dudes with families...who still love the WORLD of warcraft and just want to experience it to destress from work. We're not interested in min/max'ing. Turning off Warmode has been an absolute blessing...I enjoy world pvp, but some days I just literally dont have the energy to deal with griefers.

Asmon is 100% right. I'll use myself as an example. Every few years, I think to myself to try to get back into world of warcraft. I really should be the target audience since it's my type of game... but so much about it really turns me off. Things like: -Addons -Parcing -Guilds and having to form a schedule around content. -Raid gatekeeping -Multiple raid difficulties. -Loot distribution (how do we not have tokens to buy the gear if the item refuses to drop or you are at the bottom of the friends list and are destined to get it last) -PvP is horrible if you don't have the gear and to get the gear you have to be severely punished for way too long. -Mythic plus and having to do it daily. -Insane amounts of buttons needed for rotation. -Servers (Some servers are dead and some are only faction focused, meaning I have to research before playing) It turns the game into a horrible second job and I have a wife I want to spend time with. Classic was easier, most of the time It just turned into raid logging once I achieved the latest content.

It's certainly not the parsing culture & requiring BIS to go a levelling dungeon. Feels to me the retail culture has permeated classic to its determent and I don't think there's any recovery from it.

This is the difference between old school MMO fans and modern MMO fans. Old school MMOs were simulated worlds, mostly unconcerned with convenience, and are more about creating virtual explorable sandbox worlds (with light, subtle funneling into key content locations) where players create their own emergent gameplay in a relaxed, fun, and fulfilling way. The content isn't hard, and it isn't any worse for it, It's just a fun game and a big world to play and be immersed in w/ other ppl, this is how MMOs were intended in this earlier era of MMOs. Modern MMOs are just the husks of old school MMOs, they wear the skin of old school MMOs, they superficially appear to still be MMOs, but their worlds are just glorified lobbies. You teleport to ultra-hard content spots (or fly over the entire world in a perfectly straight line at 400+% speed straight to the instance portal) with minimal social interaction and you go there to dick measure and be hyper competitive against other people, and to be ruthlessly and pointlessly tested on your skills (and on your ability to download a hundred addons) while repeating the same single piece of ultra-hard (for what reason?) content over and over, week after week. Then the patch comes out and all previous content is effectively wiped and irrelevant. Modern MMO fans are actually proud of their performance in this bullshit, all while they pay the company making it extra hundreds of dollars for gold and cosmetic items that every game ever made before the year 2010(ish) would let you earn yourself for free thru gameplay. These people are just like lab rats on treadmills with this modern, pointlessly hard and predatory content, and they defend it and think they're better for putting themselves thru this CBT. They're shit eaters and have the audacity to have an ego over how much modern shit they consume. The people saying "Classic is too easy" don't realize how that's actually a good thing. All they know is their ultra-hard, exploitative, CBT filled modern MMO, they think anything easy is bad. They're basically psyop'd by how bad modern games are, their frame of reference is solely this modern garbage.

Ahhh yes Asmons natural habitat. Wow videos

What made classic, classic was the community, and the Era. Back then, I never encountered group that would ask what my exp is or anything like that. Just simply, "hey, wanna group up to kill this elite?" Or "hey, let's do this dungeon". Everyone was very helpful and kind back then. Most people now are entitled, selfish pricks.

"dozens of people enjoyed the New World expansion" lmaoooooo

its like pirated version offers a better experience, warmane having 50/50 horde alliance, world PVP, and people everywhere, I mean literally better than the original

I just wanted to stay in tbc era or wotlk era guess i cant have that

Its called "the Road to retail". such a bait and switch. Classic ends once the lich king is dead

As a HVAC Certified Electrician I agree

I said it when it first start and I'll say it again. They are going through expansions quicker to catch people up to the newest expansion and combine "new" and "old" players.

Mfw the space between vanilla and cata is the same space as classic to now

i was so hype for cata back in the day. i remember binge watching totalbiscuit playing the beta

What's odd to me is why don't they do a Classic Era fresh server? There are a ton of players who would spend the next two years playing through all the phases yet again like we did 5 years ago.

Asmons thumbnails are always hilarious 😂 like the one on this video makes him look like he is contemplating some deep time lost ancient truth of the universe but its just about the state of 20+ year old video game 😂

"Season of discovery" is not the classic game people were begging for.

Issue to me is the fact with seasonal, and not permanent realms ect.. getting stuff thats isnt nessesery to play seems pointless.. collectives and stuff. Completly pointless to get when u know ur gna lose it in 1 year and start over.

These videos overlook my people: People who wanted to find a home in Classic to play a more relaxed game where parsing wasn't everything but it got taken over by people who make parsing everything and want to make it harder so they can...flex I guess? I USED to be a fairly hardcore raider. I cleared challenging content. I am confident in my abilities and could do that content again if I wanted to but man those days are behind me. I just want to engage with the game as a RPG again but there doesn't appear to be a version of the game that allows for that anymore.

Cata was my first WoW expansion and since i was a kid i had no money paying a sub so i played it on private server and was one of the best gaming experience i have ever had up until that point. Cata Classic will be a chance for me to reconnect and also play it for the first time properly, i'm overly excited tbh.

SOD is just becoming more and more like retail

They really should launch fresh servers. I missed the Classic launch and I would like to play through the experience.

I think 1 big Problem of WoW Classic like SoD is that raiding should be little bit harder. but we need to get away with all that farming for buffs, addons, rezzing and rebuffing, running back to the boss for 10min... so put 10h Work in something that not make fun for raiding 1h... make so sense.

It never should have gone past classic wrath

world of warcraft stole EVERYTHING from everquest

I’ve wanted tbc era since wrath launched. I hope the make one

I joined a gnomer run with 7 people from the same guild , lvl 50 players doing the lvl 40 raid, and they tried to do the last boss 4 times before giving up. The last boss was the only one I needed lol. Sometimes I forget just how average the average player can be

Well yeah of course it stopped at Wrath. After Wrath was completed, a lot of the original development team from the very beginning either retired or went to do other projects. They felt they finished their legecy with Wrath and passed on the torch.

they are training the soddies for retail wow for sure

I don't know how Asmon and his audience can put up with regurgitating the same WoW points month in and month out as if it's the first time they're being articulated.

I think people are misunderstanding the entire "hard" aspect when it comes to raiding. When ST came out people were in there 6-10hours doing that shit. I understand its fun to over come the challange. However, MOST people can't invest that kind of time in one sitting. That would be impossible for me to do right now, so that just locks me out of any groups. No shot i could say "i can come for 2-3 hours then ill leave". I woud never get an inv.

vanilla > wrath were the 'holy trinity' to me, for some reason or another. Magic in a bottle, at least for myself.

It's funny when WoW Andys want the "Hardcore MMO experience" of Wow Vanilla back. That shit was like Timmy's first MMO at the time. It was the casual-friendly alternative to hardcore MMOs.

You made a very good point. The majority of WoW players are not Hardcore Gamers. They are everyday people. So what Blizzard is doing is catering to the minority of their fan-base.

Blizzard should take a note out of jagex playbook with osrs. Pick a timeframe of wow classic and build around that. Stop at lich king and build around that

I thought we would just have some minor adjustments to the classes in SoD along with so much more in the world like unused zones and dungeons, bgs, etc. but instead SoD has actually turned into a giant clown fiesta and it grinds to a halt every phase. I think it was a worthwhile attempt.

Doesn't matter with the rabid farming/bots. I would resub in a heartbeat if I could farm herbs/ore. Reworking the talent trees was the last straw for me. It broke all my characters....especially my spirit priest.

I am still leveling in classic because I never got to hit 60 in vanilli. I just can't get into SOD.

They did add autoloot as an option in the settings which is what enabled rogues to bot BRD naked for 20g an hour or more, I got about 19g/h when I was farming it but i'm sure a bot could be more efficient than I was.

Era grew during Naxx in Wrath, not just because of Ulduar. People went from having a super rewarding Sunwell experience to experiencing the worst tier they have ever released in retail WoW history in Naxx25m. It wasn't just ulduar that killed it.

WoW and Marvel are very similar if you think about it. Warcraft up to Wotlk is basically the Endgame timeline and no one really cares about anything after

Cata was the first time i took a break from WoW. I am not touching that again.

To be fair Sargeras was a loose end that wasn't tied up by WC3, but I wish they just did the entirety of Legion right after WotLK

"There was more content in Legion Archaeology than in all of the Shadowlands professions" Even BFA had the Epic Tools.

It's quite uncanny how the progression of WoW's lifetime mirrors Runescape. I think Jagex did the right thing by adding old school runescape. In fact it struggled initially as well, it was through in game updates and expanding on the game to the monolith that it is now that made it THE mmo, completely overshadowing RS3. Blizzard should definitely make WoW Classic Plus (permanent additional content to era) but there are some guidelines though. They need to examine what the underlying issues were with future expansions- namely the constant stacking of vertical content making the core original game obsolete, leaving an artificial husk of an open world. Furthermore, having permanent changes to era will be met with some resistance by the playerbase. It happened with OSRS with a vocal group of ultra-conservative players who want 0 changes to the game. It will happen with WoW. Often times in OSRS some updates are changed, modified, or outright canceled if they warp the game too much in a way that stops the game from being "old school." This isn't a bad thing. The dev team is pretty competent at being able to distinguish what made old runescape great and new runescape bleed out the playerbase. I hope the Blizzard team can identify the same things and make a WoW Classic Plus that the players deserve.

Kinda ironic that a guy who makes guides for each class, before each classic addon release, is making a video about losing sight of classic

if they kept a realm for older expansions as they progressively go to the next one would be amazing, dont know why they do that to vanilla and dont for tbc and wotlk

My fam and I came back to Wow and were going to play Lich king, but once we realized it's going to be gone soon, we went to Hardcore Classic instead. I wish they kept TBC and Lich king servers around.

Many people don't think Wrath as Classic because it had group finder and heirlooms which kinda killed the open world levelling and socialising towards the end of the expansion. Also, some people disliked both tbc and wrath because it was close to impossible for lower level players to see max level players since almost all of them went to zones far away from the old world. So those people claim that only vanilla was classic because the world felt much more alive and full with all the zones being relatively close to each other being on one of the two continents. It caused some funny shenanigans like max level players flying to and fighting in gigantic battles at Hillsbrad Foothills, a low level zone. Experiences of players of different levels were greatly enmeshed which made the world more believable.

The old gods are mentioned in the warcraft 3 manual, 5 old gods funnily enough

Remember beeing Holydin and in Cata we suddenly had op AoE healing while prior to Cata Holydin was THE Single Target healer.

people dont want classic, people want what they _remember_ to be classic. which is why no changes died very fast. the classic in their heads never existed which is why we have gotten to this point. along with the fact that there is no one definition of "classic", you ask 100 people and you will get 100 definitions of what classic is. Read the comment section, and you will know I dont lie.

thats why legion popped, you could progress with Worldquests and dungeons and not have to raid

Thank God I was there when Classic launched... We will never get true vanilla experience again now that the game is full of retail minded players.

A bunch of people asked for Cata lmfao??

Wrath doesn't feel classic to be honest. Wrath introduced everything that Cataclysm would become known for, and I'm not talking about dungeon finder, I'm talkin about the insanely good loot that's easy to come by in dungeons which makes leveling obsolete in the sense of how easy it is, not to mention "heirlooms" which kill the need for regular gear and thus removes the need to run dungeons beyond a single run. The only reason dungeons have some re-playability in Wrath is because dungeon finder offers XP bonus + random gear for using it.

I refer to Classic as the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor before its drastic change with Cataclysm. But there are people who mean the time until Burning Crusade.

blizzard should just do what everquest is doing with progression servers

they should do what RS did. have a poll box in the game where players control what gets added and what doesnt.

If every expansion Blizard updated some or added new zones to the old world for leveling or end game content the game would feel so much more alive and larger by now. Instead they focus their development on Island zones which no one has reason to go to after that expansion is over, while the old world still uses 20 year old assets.

"Why Nobody's Excited For Cata Classic"? Because it's not Classic by any shape or form. Anything after Wrath is Retail. Period. Some might even say anything after Vanilla is but I'll say Vanilla/Tbc/Wrath is the "holy classic trio". By saying "classic cata" we might as well start saying "hey inc Classic Dragonflight 2030".

Season of discovery is exactly what's needed, the core of classic with no micro transactions but fresh updated content . They just need to take feedback and release new stuff

I think people want the romantic nostalgic version of what they think they remember classic being.

Novelty is a precious, fleeting experience that can NEVER be fully recreated once it has passed. While we may continue to enjoy things as they evolve, the initial experience of an enjoyable endavour tends to register as an unforgettable part of our memories and lives. Many people seem to chase that initial feeling, tilting at windmills, all whilst laying the blame on something/someone else as to why things are different. The sooner they accept this truth, the sooner they can start enjoying their experiences and have see things in a more positive light. To not come off sounding like a doomer, the positive thing about novelty is its a reminder that the present moment is a precious commodity, and that embracing new experiences with an open mind will make you have a good time engaging with what --first and foremost- is a hobby, and gaming in general.

What was the problem with Ulduar in Wotlk classic? I dont know i played the whole Wotlk classic and it was awesome.

Let's be honest here. The hardest part about SOD raids is getting in to them. The gatekeeping is way harder to beat than the bosses. Once you get past precis, 2 world buffs, consumes, parses, and not needing the same gear as the raid lead, you're good to go.

Cata was soo good I remember selling DS carry’s solo healing on my Druid

Classic ends with the end of Wrath. Cataclysm isn’t classic.

I love the intro cinematic for lich king. The voice over is like butter.

It's pretty wild to hear that continuous wipes on a boss fight is due to braindead players not learning to watch out for mechanics LOL. It really shows how dense parse players can be.

Chatter at 17:29 “He should just play other games then 🤷🏻‍♂️” in response to asmongold saying people with jobs and families don’t have time to “git gud” they just want to play a game is the exact same person who will eventually say “why is muh game dead no one plays anymore 🤤” just drooling brain rot. The fact that people actually think games should be gate kept by how much effort you NEED to put in in order to enjoy it just baffles me. Games should be fun. PERIOD.

You are so right. Majority of us just wants to play the game. Not have to look guides to know how to do a dungeon you almost have to do a summary to remember all the little things that can provoke a wipe and a disband. We want simplicity and intuitive game that can chill and have fun in full screen mode.

What makes classic classic is the same thing that makes the original darksouls people's favourite one of the series, its an easy game that seems hard until you know stuff, classic and ds, aren't a skill check they're a knowledge check and they make people able to feel like a badass just by knowing the right things, from what enchants and gear to get to how mechanics work and how your class is supposed to fight in pvp, (mage reset for example) both ds and classic heavily reward knowledge whereas retail REQUIRES knowledge but doesn't reward it because skill is also required like sekiro or ds3 and the fact is ds or classic style difficulty is a lot more accessible to the average person than ds3 or sekiro because a few videos and a Google search can put you ahead of 60 percent of people

I want to get right into Max level content and BiS gear for PvP. Right now trying SOD (36 lvl) but too much grinding still and your time is wasted on a Flight path or boat somewhere. No QoL which is why people don't play it. People want to play WoW but for 1 hour after work and they should be able to log in and start killing or Que a dungeon instantly. The problem with Classic is it doesn't fit into society and people lives anymore. Running to get Flight paths isn't fun anymore. Spending 30 mins trying to get somewhere is just waiting to play the game. It's a shame Retail isn't a good MMO because they got good QoL but it's a bad game. Classic is a good game but wasted your time due to lack of required QoL.

Sad that "no changes" became a meme and the underlying sentiment died. Back in 2003, the game had passionate devs and GMs which resulted in one of the best games of all time. We got a brief glimmer of that again with classic, but ultimately there was no passion or GMs to uphold the integrity of the game. It became a bot-fest and blatant issues like the tryhard meta, toxic PvP, and worldbuff griefing went unattended. "No changes" is less literal than it sounds, it's a warning against the very things that manifested in the level boost of TBC, the WoW token of WoTLK, and the poor balance of SoD. If you ask me, we never had "no changes" because the fundamental pieces of that philosophy, passionate devs and GMs, were never there.

Classic+? Give me death knight in Classic+!

"I played Cata all the way through and really enjoyed it but it's not classic wow". I couldn't agree more with this statement. I really liked Cata when it came out because it was a new fresh coat of paint on the world I loved but it DID change wow as a whole and definitely feels like a transitionary period for the game overall. It was the start of going away from the classic style and into the modern day style of wow. Things got simplified, and the boat started drifting towards the more casual style of play. Looking back, it was fun, but now I almost wished that it was a seasonal change as far as the world is concerned, maybe keeping some of the better parts of Cata based off overall player feedback and reverting places like Darkshore and Ashenvale back to what it was in Classic, for the most part.

I wish they'd release fresh classic servers. People still die all the time during Cata Timewalking

The War Within The War Without The War With Doug Who's Doug? A good guy? A bad guy? Idk, but we're with him.

The only reason I liked the tight knit communities of pre cross realm was because trolling in trade was much more cool that way. I liked being known by the whole server along with a few brothers in arms, wether we were hated or loved.

Something Guild Wars 1 did right is the start and finish of the game. You always knew what you were building towards the whole game and the endgame is very rewarding in that aspect. A great "I'm finally where I want to be" feeling.

Anything after Lich King doesn't deserve "classic" badge.

"You think you do, but you don't" was 99% correct.

1 Thing classic is good at , is leaving players with the room of "what if" there are a lot of unfinished questlines , the zones feel big , relaxing and meditative. Going down the path of expanding azeroth instead of going on different continents and planets its another "what if" that's inline with the classic theme , ppl who are saying "classic copium " or stuff like that , remember that most of the vanilla players didn't really enjoy going to another continents and planets this is why we got cataclysm but instead of gradually updating old azeroth they just destroyed and rebuilded it with a weird vision in mind :) so why not give it a try and start elaborate from what we were left off by the end of classic ? there are a lot of unfinished story lines in classic that just got dumped latter on or were moved in 3-rd row as side quests.

they should do the remixes for cata-legion expansions, i agree classic is vanilla through wotlk.

sod is great, im loving it so far

I think asmon is wrong about retail players. I am a no life, terminally online retail player. I have played wow for over 15 years, and I can honestly say, classic is not fun at all to me. My retail guild needed a boomy for SoD (my retail main,) so I decided to give it a chance because I figured the changes to the base classic would be enough to make it more fun for me, and there's a huge xp buff. Right away I noticed how annoying some of the base gameplay was with spell cast interruption when you're hit by enemies. A normal 2 second cast, can take up to 4 seconds to get off if you're being hit by an enemy. I figured I would get over it. There's also the core loop of killing 1 monster, being out of mana, drinking to regain mana, rinse, repeat. This was "ok" but not very interesting and I found myself just tabbing out of the game alot. Eventually though in SoD, I got glyphs that made this not much of an issue, so I was ok with that. I forced myself to play until about level 25, my GM had given me 10g early on and I was constantly buying the best gear I could find off the AH the entire time while leveling. At this point, I had been questing, still pulling 1 mob at a time pretty much the entire time, unless the mobs were very low level under me. I would have to do 1 of 2 things when pulling a mob. Either A. precast wrath, wrath, starsurge, starfire, wrath, surge, starfire (get spell interrupted for about 6 seconds,) surge, mobs dies. B. precast wrath, wrath, surge, entangling roots, starfire, surge, entangling roots, starfire. While I will say, at first it was fun figuring out how to do B so that I could take less dmg, have to heal less, which would help with mana, and would usually be faster due to the spell intrupt. It made the game so much more boring doing over and over 1 mob at a time. Now I'm completely willing to say this is maybe a balance druid issue, or caster issues specifically that I'm experiencing, but it has overall killed any ounce of interest I had in the game. Leveling to me is just so unfun and having to spend so much time in that mode of gameplay isn't interesting at all. On top of it being this tedious cycle of 1 mob, drink for mana/health, 1 mob, drink/eat. It feels to me like the main difficulty of the game is being able to do things you don't want to do for long enough to make it to 60. Which is just not the kind of difficulty I'm interested in. I don't think I'm alone in my belief and this is something ppl are missing about the retail players who don't enjoy or want to play classic. It's just riddled with small nuisances or annoyances that make the gameplay loop too boring for me to enjoy. I hope that classic players are willing to admit this. It always feels like they are often too afraid of admitting this fault due to fear that it will make their point of "classic wow is the best mmo ever" diminished.

From cata onwards I hope they will open new classic and tbc servers where you can experience those expansion from the start again. Just like 1-2 servers per expansion. I believe they would have an ok population since not everyone likes cata and the following expansions.

I never played any of the classic phases. But I would if they were all permanent era servers. Kinda like a trophy case for my characters. That sounds nice.

WoW Classic community way more toxic than Retail. It's like watching a bunch of Dads fight over a $2 steak.😊

While I couldn't care less for Classic Cataclym, Mist or Draenor, Classic Legion would be just what I needed. Bring us Legion +!

Spot on mate, when you spoke about the "electrician " I felt like you are talking about me.

Imagine Classic+ with High Elves on the alliance and like, goblins on the horde, expand Quel'thalas, add Undermine, grow the existing Vanilla world. I would be so on board.

Man, this brings me back to just how much fun I had playing early Cata; in retrospect the WoW expansions I enjoyed most were consistently those in which I had the best social circle.

@16:45 ironically the only HVAC certified technician I knew was an Uber sweatlord whale that played BDO and Lost Ark

The only argument I would make against the stance that wow dungeons/raids can't be hard basically comes down to a simple question. Why are souls games popular then? Yes yes, single player vs not being able to rely on 39 others. But hard 5 man dungeons or 10 man dungeons are fine to have. They fit a perfect middle between the "wow is my job" and "wow is my entertainment" people. Just give us heroic dungeons.