My 1 minute experience of retail 9 years after vanilla

[VideoGameKarp]

-Log in
-Create character, wow new models look great!
-Enter world, ah the cinematics, they were always nice
-First seconds on new character
-I am standing next to a LEVEL 1 hunter that has a fkn motorbike mount, pet (wtf) and is wearing level 60 gear.
-I walk 10 steps and the new models now run like complete retards.
-What fkn game am i playing?
-Google vanilla private servers

[Drain]

You should have gotten to 10. You would have had a stroke when you saw what happened to the talent tree system.

Assuming you haven't already quit in disgust, you then hit 15 and see the next horrible, and somehow, it's even worse than heirlooms or what they did to the talent tree system. Yes, the dungeon finder, the worst thing to happen to WoW.

[gotmilk0112]

You should have gotten to 10. You would have had a stroke when you saw what happened to the talent tree system.

People whine about it constantly, but I honestly liked the idea Blizzard had behind the new talent trees. They're absolutely right: A lot of the talents were boring +crit or +% damage or +whatever talents that you just put 1/3/5 points into without thinking, and there was always a cookie cutter "best" spec that you had to use or you were gimping yourself.

With the new talent system however, they just take all of those filler talents and make them passives, leaving only the important choices. And for most classes, the choices are actually kinda equal to each other. It has you switching talents between fights to maximize your effectiveness, which is also pretty interesting.

Yeah, I have a nostalgia boner for the old talents, but the new talents are not literally hitler like everyone makes them out to be.

[Nostral]

There are many things that have ruined retail replaybility:
1. The game is too easy. You 1-2 shot mobs in common gear.
2. You get too much experience. By the time you complete single quest line all other quests in the zone will be grey.
3. Dungeon finder and garrisons resulting in empty world. Even with cross realms you will rarely stumble upon another player while questing. Empty capital cities on high population realms is a common picture.

[gotmilk0112]

1. The game is too easy. You 1-2 shot mobs in common gear.

Hear, hear.

This is pretty much why I quit retail; it's way too easy. Kinda...too streamlined, if that makes sense. There's no challenge to anything except Heroic and higher raid content. Everything outside of raiding feels dumbed down and easy as shit.

2. You get too much experience. By the time you complete single quest line all other quests in the zone will be grey.

I actually don't mind the leveling being faster. Leveling is kinda boring and repetitive when you've been playing WoW for 8 years.

[Drain]

Shrinking the trees just makes them even more boring and "cookie cutter". Since Cata, you are literally the same as everyone else, even more so with MoP where the trees got even smaller(damn near removed at this point). Before Cata, people actually had diverse builds. Worse yet is that they forced you to max a tree in Cata, even if you didn't want to, with too few points to do anything else with. If hybrid and mixed builds weren't already dead and buried thanks to the stupid dual spec system in Wrath, that would have been their end. Basically, more points and choices=good. Less points and choices=bad. And do not tell us we have to max a tree if we don't want to.

BC really was the best era for talent trees. It could have been Wrath, but that was stopped by the dual spec system. Dual spec means everyone can basically do everything for free, no penalty to changing builds. This "everything should be able to do everything" logic later became Blizzard's main design philosophy, which is the exact opposite of why classes and talent trees exist in the first place. The whole point of classes and talent trees is so that everyone CAN'T do everything. You have to make choices, taking what you want to do, and sacrificing other things you won't be able to do in the process. This simple game design philosophy no longer exists at Blizzard.

[VideoGameKarp]

I just hated the fact that brand new low level characters looked like high levels and you could not tell who was high level, let alone well geared by looking at them.

Takes a lot away from the feel of the game for me.

[nosuser123]

I agree with pretty much everything said here.

The only thing I wouldn't mind to have ported to the vanilla private server is getting experience from gathering/mining/fishing etc. This is one feature that I really like (even though I love fishing as it is).

[Askental]

-Log in
-Create character, wow new models look great!
-Enter world, ah the cinematics, they were always nice
-First seconds on new character
-I am standing next to a LEVEL 1 hunter that has a fkn motorbike mount, pet (wtf) and is wearing level 60 gear.
-I walk 10 steps and the new models now run like complete retards.
-What fkn game am i playing?
-Google vanilla private servers

Sometimes I feel like checking the last expansions, and then I read stuff like this and it scares me too much to go have a look myself

[BoxerBriefly]

-Log in
-Create character, wow new models look great!
-Enter world, ah the cinematics, they were always nice
-First seconds on new character
-I am standing next to a LEVEL 1 hunter that has a fkn motorbike mount, pet (wtf) and is wearing level 60 gear.
-I walk 10 steps and the new models now run like complete retards.
-What fkn game am i playing?
-Google vanilla private servers

Yep, that certainly sounds like retail. I cringe just thinking about it.