>>735094957
Duh

>>735094957
And water is wet.

>>735094957
TBC had better quest design and less wasteful zone space, otherwise you are right.

>>735094957
tbc prebis grind is a higher peak than anything in classic but classic is overall a much better game

raiding sucks ass in both games

>>735094957
separate gear for pvp is such a retarded fucking idea i can't understand why wasn't there huge backlash against it. also all of the dungeons turning into boring hallways because braindead retards can't handle anything else

>>735095482
>tbc prebis grind is a higher peak than anything in classic
I can tell you have never played a healer. There is nothing peak about needing to grind exalted with sha'tar, cenarion AND keepers of time before even setting foot into kara once

>>735095594
yes there is if you do it on hc and by the time you are full hc bis you should quit the game anyways because raiding is pathetic

>>735095332
Flying only in blades edge makes tbc zones kino

>>735095745
Why the fuck would you grind raiding gear just to quit before doing the raid

>>735094957
true and tbc had nothing better

>>735095332
Vanilla:
kill 10 boars
TBC:
Kill 20 boars

>>735095594
>i can tell you have never played a healer
Yeah because hes not a tranny like you

>>735094957
And wrath & cata was better than everything before and after

>>735096046
>vanilla: kill boars until they drop a random item you have to compete with chinese bots for or buy off the auction house. reward: cloth strength chest. next step in chain: go to the other continent and take a 15 minute flight path and walk for 10 minutes across a field of nothing but random raptors to talk to a dickhead who sends you straight back

>>735094957
TBC is where the seeds of the game's downfall were sown. Endless cycling dungie & hero grindys, attunes, dailys, faction grindys, all sorts of time-wasting shit just to keep you Engaged™. TBC is where the new world obsoleted the old world, TBC is where the race to endgame took prominence, TBC is where they botched the fucking storyline carryovers from War3. It all started with TBC.
Classic, too, Classic's downfall was cemented with TBC; not just #nochanges, but the proof that blizzard couldn't iterate on the product and no longer knew why it was so good in the first place. Cataclysm Classic was an absurd proposition on the face of it, with the core idea of classic being to carry on with pre-cata instead of going onwards to post-cata. Yet Cata-classic was inevitable as soon as TBC classic came about.
All the 1337 raidfags got to own the game in tbc and fucking ion came out of all that and he's still running the game so in a very real sense TBC is where all the shitwow started to take over the game and it never ever stopped.

>>735096257
kino

>>735095551
Min/maxers got pissed off they had to get rank 12 to get bis PvE gear in vanilla.

God knows we have to cater to the top 3% of players who don't socialize and are only there to make gearscore number go up.

Want to make WoW great again? Delete Wowhead, remove gearscore, and make weird ass items drop from rare mobs that are hard to find. Also make dungeons you can get lost in, dungeons that use the Z axis for god's sake. Add locked doors, traps, keys that can be pickpocketed, make rogues useful again.

>>735096292
attunes were good though, ensured shitters had to do the bare minimum for engaging with a dungeon/raid before they could queue up.

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>>735095332
>less wasteful zone space
Sometimes it's nice to have an empty space that serves no purpose.
Why? Because why not?

>>735096292
>dailys
The blue exclamation mark heralded one of the worst decisions in video game history.

The "daily" or FOMO virtual chore is now in every fucking mobile game in existence turning the whole thing into a skinner box pellet dispenser for human rats.

I know adults that have three phones to get their Monopoly Go! daily rewards multiple times just for the fucking dopamine spike.

>>735096537
sometimes sure, but in vanilla it was because the areas were blatantly unfinished and they FELT like it. eg. the max level elite demon areas which exist for like 4 quests, all of azshara's outer ring, hinterlands, the red-dragon death corridor in wetlands, karazhan's whole zone, etc.

>>735094957
They're the same. What you really mean to say is
>1 through 40 leveling is better than everything else in the game possibly other than PVP in Blackrock
Stranglethorn and Desolace mark a great drop in quality the game never completely recovers from.
It doesn't help that Outland looks like ass, for the most part

>>735095332
>le TBC zones
yeah some of them are nice but
YOU NEVER FUCKING ENGAGE WITH THEM BECAUSE YOU FLY EVERYWHERE
fucking core memory of TBC is getting a quest to kill some chief guy at the back of a village. back in vanilla you'd start at the front of the village and fight a bunch of mobs just to get to the quest mob/item. remember fighting raptors to get the crossroads silver back? but now, in fucking outland, you just hop on your stupid griffon and fly over the whole map, skipping all the everything to harvest 1/1 killed.
fucking cardinal game design sin, the ultimate haram: player 'solves' the game's challenge by ceasing to play the game at all.

>>735095551
>>735096350
Grinding for weeks in pve and then being able to take that gear and actually fight people with it is cool and is how every other mmo in existence worked. Feels so unsatisfying to get a full tier set and then it turns out it sucks if you try to actually fight other players with it.

>>735097023
You can't get flying until 70 though, and unless you are using rested XP or being a retarded dungeon grinder you have to complete all but 1 zone to level up to 70.

>>735096817
>scary off-limits places you can't easily access
>nothing there but some scary mobs

It's not about being useful, it's about giving a sense of danger and mystery to the world.

>"Don't go near the tainted scar, or you'll get fucked up by demons"
>Is there anything to do there?
>"Maybe, no one wants to get fucked up and find out."

It's also why flying is terrible for an MMO.

>>735096990
Why do people hate desolace so much? It sucks at 35-39 because of the huge run, but if you do it at 40 it is one of the most atmospheric zones in the game

>>735094957
>spend vanilla exploring and setting up all kinds of expansion villains and unexplored regions
>fuck it up by ignoring it for an entire expansion
>then rush the fuck out of it
>then nuke the setting before exploring anything beyond the undead plotline
Actually criminal what happened to this franchise

I recently realized why the barrens were so magical.
All horde races ultimately ended up there after their starting zones. Forsaken only had a few quests in silverpoint so they went to the barrens too.
Alliance on the other hand had dedicated zones for each race.
I loved seeing everyone come together in crossroads.

>>735097296
Even alliance went to barrens sometimes for the ratchet quests. The true melting pot

>>735097296
*silverpine
obviously

>>735097276
big and mostly empty, questing is kinda shitty, befriending centaurs is hella gay kill em all
>>735097296
Crossroads is, in a very real sense, the place where Horde Players are made. The whole north barrens set, if done with a bit of forethought, is such a tight loop. Best questing in the whole earlygame imo, even better than Redridge.

>>735097296
there was also that teasing hint of what you were going to be doing later, if you were playing tauren. You come out in southern barrens with all the big scaries and do the scenic run up the gold road to get crossroads. Nothing else like that except for flight path glimpses and MAYBE the run down stranglethorn for alliance

>>735096350
>Also make dungeons you can get lost in, dungeons that use the Z axis for god's sake. Add locked doors, traps, keys that can be pickpocketed, make rogues useful again.
This change in design is ultimately what cemented the shift from "mmorpg" to just "mmo". Cool level design gone, non-combat abilities made worthless.

>>735097276
I didn't even know it was commonly disliked, though I can certainly understand it.
For one is that it's a completely empty zone, hence the name, which doesn't have to be a problem in itself, but they've specifically picked the worst looking textures and the most uninteresting themes for the area. A fucking goblin drag race? Right now, when my character is starting to feel strong? That'd be fine if you could finish the zone within a few minutes, but you have to circle back to the other side of the world because unfortunately you're too low level to finish your quest.
It was nice fucking up the gnome warlock I'd been priorly feuding with in Tarren Mill who'd been giving me a hard time though.
Speaking of which, how can you just finish Hillsbrad Foothills and Thousand Needles then go to Desolace and not have your reaction be "what the fuck is this shit"

The scariest thing as an alliance chud was seeing a Tauren Shaman for the first time.

>>735097537
>>735097641
desolace does look shit, but centaur quest was a unique idea and the first time the reputation system/reward choices is really introduced as a proper mechanic, the unique goblin caravan mechanic, quests out in the water needing actual waterbreathing for once, the (scrapped) warlock mount quest area, the spooky demon ruins, mara, the mysterious mega-snake skeletons in the canyon, kodo graveyard migration npcs, etc. It was the most unique zone and its a shame none of the experimental concepts made it into any other area

>>735097296
The barrens is the best MMO questing zone hands down. Just for the fact it funnels all the horde players there and then gives you a shit ton of quests that are best done as a group.

Everquest and Camelot had fucking shit zones outside of the noob towns. Just emptiness and the occasional giant mob that will kill you for lulz.

The Barrens has a ton of landmarks, very little wasted space. Three dungeons (before north and south barrens were separate zones). A boat to the other continent. A bank at Ratchet. Connections to six different zones. And it used to have the entrance to Warsong Gulch back when you had to queue at the battleground zone-in.

>>735097023
yep flying ruined the game
it was good in some parts of tbc/wotlk but overall a huge net negative

Feralas is underappreciated.
It’s my favorite Nelf themed zone.

>>735097247
As soon as flying is introduced you might as well call it, it's the end of the world being a threat and it's the end of people wanting to explore. As soon as anything gets too difficult they'll hop on their mount and fly off.
Harder to meet people in the open world, harder to make interactions. I will forever advocate against flying being introduced to an MMO.

>>735096257
home...

>>735098569
I often do the KALMIDOR MAN playthrough as Nelf, just only quest in Kalimdor. leveling just feel like you have more freedom there as Alliance.

Vanilla WoW was a cake and TBC was all frosting. Sure, everyone likes frosting but it gets old very quickly.

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>>735098569
All forests in wow are under-appreciated. In 2004 they actually looked like forests. Yeah it was visual tricks with 2D leaf canopies, but it worked.

Go back to any MMO prior to wow and go to their "forests", they're all triangle trees that extend into the sky, if you're lucky they might have a branch or two.

Even as a horde player I was stunned walking into Ashenvale for the first time, it actually looked a fantasy forest.

>try world of warcraft
>finish making my character
>wow cool fantasy world
>come out of intro cinematic
>a fat elf in a bikini is riding a motorcycle
>she shouts some incomprehensible gibberish and motors away
>get a quest and kill some mob
>a trail of bots is killing everything in sight
>altf4, uninstall

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>>735099401
>Food analogy
Stop. And TBC does NOT get older faster than vanilla. You couldn't pay me to do 40 mans or spend literally hours in alterac valley again

>>735099820
it takes 6+ days of /played to get to the point where that could possibly begin to matter

>>735099653
>ancient MMO called Shadowbane
>you click on the game world to move there
>no hotkeys, need to click all your abilitys on the bar
>limited info displayed to the player, need chat commands to see if mobs are tougher than you
>abilities all have the same icon, need to remember which is which
>mobs all look the same, need to remember the name of dangerous ones
>only 6 music tracks in the game, they're all ~1-2min loops
>75% of every class's abilitys are useless, you can't respec
>you need to reroll, relevel and regear your character several times to figure out a working build
>meanwhile everyone outside your guild will steal your mobs or farm you for fun
this is what World of Warcraft's competition was. this is why WoW won and everyone else fucking died. this is why there's a noticable pre-WoW and post-WoW era in the MMO boom.
all this context, just tears in the rain.

>>735095594
nigga i did kara on my resto shammy about an hour after hitting 70 in fresh shitty 70 gear from revered with all the reps, i know its post nerf but still it was certainly not worth it id rather have to do heroics but all the gear is basically the same

>>735094957
All the areas and dungeons in TBC are complete garbage no wonder it's dead already can't believe anyone pretends to like this slop.

>>735095551
stats
pve has useless stats for pvp and vice versa

nobody likes TBC really

>>735098569
Night Elf zones unfortunately suck ass because of the constant purple/green filters. It just doesn't look as magical as they'd have thought. Don't wanna be that faggot but a greyish Winterspring a la Northrend would have been a much better looking zone. Alternatively, look to W3 where they didn't get any filter at all and still looked wondrous

>>735100293
>gear from revered with all the reps
you mean the set gear that doesnt even exist until 2.3?

>>735098713
The value of EK Alliance leveling is mostly tied up in the Human Zones overarching and surprisingly dense questline, and if you either are not a fan of that kind of content or are sick of it their is nothing for you in EK.

>>735097247
yep, and instead of fleshing out what they had, they retarded off to diversity land.

>>735094957
nothing beats the first time in molten core but
i liked WOTLK so much bros
the feels

>>735101473
no dumbfuck like watchers cowl and the honor hold ring

>>735101837
ah, so you just sandbagged your raids

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>>735098038
Unbelievably based.

>>735095332

>less wasteful zone space

This was the problem that led to the expansions feeling like a 'theme park'. The original zones felt like they were designed to resemble what could have been real geographical (albeit fantastical) places.

>>735102130
no its just post nerf and a joke, also i said i was a healer and not retarded so its incredibly easy as we didn't wipe once

>>735094957
true, i hated bc...i loved wotlk tho, everything went downhill after that

>>735097569
the best example of that is being a tauren druid and flying back to thunderbluff from moonglade for your level 10 quest. you see all these ruins and monsters and the scale of the world is really hinted at for the first time. I kind of envy peoples whos first character was a tauren druid and who did that at level 10.

>>735096350
>Also make dungeons you can get lost in, dungeons that use the Z axis for god's sake
have fallen down from that jump in wailing caverns too many times

>>735094957
Classic raiding was baby mode. TBC was a test, a filter. Wrath raiding was for men.

>>735096350
Dungeons you can get lost in are fun the first time. Then when you're in there again and a retard misses the WC jump it's not fun, it's just a waste of 5 minutes of your time. It's better for a game to be designed around replayability than one single use dungeon. There'ss a reason SM dungeons were the most popular in Vanilla and why all the TBC dungeons were modeled after that design.

>>735103583
>It's better for a game to be designed around replayability than one single use dungeon
Strath, BRS, Mara, Dire Maul and BRD all had that BECAUSE they were large and complex

>>735095332
>TBC had better quest design
Shut up. Everything after Vanilla was just going from hub with 20 quests to the next hub with 20 quests. Meanwhile in Vanilla you're jumping from zone to zone, sometimes bringing along specific quests that are complete in other zones. Knowing where to go and what to do in Vanilla zones is an art form that it takes time to learn. TBC onwards is dogshit.

>>735094957
I honestly don't like the tbc map nor wotlk, base vanilla map is more fun to play.

>>735097163
tbc haters dont play the game