I just got so tired of the meta and logs chasing. I thought it would be a casual wow experience much like the classic launch was. But i was way wrong.. it became retail 2.0.
When people start to treat game as a job, they seek to attain the biggest numbers, and invite only those with biggest numbers. I mean, noone could blame them, it is their time and if they want to save 30min on raid because of blasting through, they are very free to do so- and since it is the most effective way, everyone sadly does it, ruining it for casuals. There are no more raid nights, only raid 1-2hours in the night.. noone wants to spend more time than neccesary in the game, which defeats the whole purpose of the game... to enjoy the time in it. :(
It depends on your perspective. I found a guild that is casual and no one cares really about the logs, buffs and consumes. People just play for fun. So I disagree, it's not retail 2.0, it is classic +. Try to approach it with different perspective instead of chasing logs. If some people care about it, doesn't mean everyone does.
My guild is pretty chill. We log every now and again. We just cleared H2 MC. No log checks, just grabbing a good group of friends from previous wow servers and a few new people to our guild. Wild Growth server fwiw
@@QurikOfficial same I'm a refugee from lava lash on wild growth and literally took 20 minutes to find a guild run to join and then pump enough to get invited to the guild group. This game isn't hard, which is fine classic wow was never meant to be hard.
I think what ruins SOD is that everyone just wants to run the easiest content that'll get them the most return for the time they put into the game. Which I understand, but it completely ruins the experience when it takes hours to find groups for quests/dungeon. When all of the new content is discovered and done to death within a few days, there is absolutely nothing keeping me invested.
This has been an issue with the playerbase for the past 15 years or more. Players will optimize the fun out of the game and then blame Blizzard for not adding more content/nerfing said optimizations (looking at you MoP Remix players)/burning themselves out. It's a vicious cycle.
What ruins SOD for me is the lack of focus on the world. Raids are not the world, retail lore isnt the world, taking away questing zones isn’t the world. I expected new quests and finishing major and minor unfinished questlines. Instead we got more raid content. 😢
Played it with no information except the stuff from Blizzard announcing it, started in season 3, got all the way to lvl 50, did my princess runs, did my incursions, did my Gnomer and BLack Fathom Deeps, didn’t get to do a Sunken Temple because my guild fell apart. Was in the best gear I could have been in pre running ST, and stopped playing. Couldn’t find anyone to do anything with and would spend hours trying to get groups together for anything. My whole time leveling up everyone just wanted me to do stuff I didn’t want to do and no one would do anything besides incursions, couldn’t make any money, had to grind hard to scrape enough money for my mount took like 2 weeks prob. Didn’t like the incursions at all and that’s all people would do. Didn’t like how there were no cool abilities for my classes, and the whole time just wished I was playing regular classic or wrath before the token was added. Only tried it out because they took the wrath servers which is what I like and at the time all Vanilla servers were more or less dead. Won’t be returning.
Didn’t feel anything like “discovering” for me who didn’t look anything up at all. Everyone knew everything about everything and just wanted to tell you how to play the game or where to get your “runes” Any area that wasn’t an incursion besides Scarlet monastery was effectively dead with no players. Was playing on a high pop is easy server btw so yes there were people online.
@@TrickyThe0ne honestly that was my experience up until the last 3 weeks of phase 3. Fun but then I think I got burnt out and I can't get back into phase 4 unfortunately
In general conclusion I think I can say that SoD has/had too much change on the character-side but not enough change on the environment-side. Though I don't deny that character changes are necessary, it was already a warning sign to me that we were in mere P1 and we had 12 runes per class already, which is a lot. As many people probably agree, with so many runes and character-related changes it is by far not the classic feeling anymore. However, we hardly had any anticipated change on the environment, such as quests, quest chains, instances and outdoor zones. Which is a shame. Strange as it may sound but do you know what was my most memorable thing in whole SoD? Getting the Rainbow Generator and the Sleeping Bag. These little quest chains have their own little lore, we investigate, discover a mysterious new faction, travel around the world and get creative rewards. Even before SoD BRD had been my favourite instance, and finding out that there is a new secret area and event with it's own mysterious lore (which seems to continue what we had back in P2 with the Sleeping Bag chain) and eventually exiting a secret door in the middle of Shadowforge City made me really hyped and also a bit sad, that I can't do it again. It might sound childish but that's what I anticipated in a season of discovery, not several new runes and even more complex skill rotations with each phase.
Those are great thoughts, thank you for sharing! The Sleeping Bag/Rainbow were the kinds of questlines we desperately needed more of, not the ones always linked to Runes or ones that sent you back into the new raid.
Only endless romantics and naive dreamers though classic + wouldn't be retail lite. Retail is the result of current Blizzard dev culture and there was no reason for the classic+ project being any different. People who worked on the vanilla wow are long gone. I recommend listening to the podcast Countdown to Classic where the host made many interviews with former vanilla wow devs and how the Blizzard culture changed since they left. TL;DR WoW vanilla was a product of passionate independent dev studio and current Microsoft Blizzard doesn't have the talent or liberty to recreate it.
Default UI is acceptable for me only for classic. Plus I have such muscle memory for all the keybinds in the same spaces across all characters; and the look of the UI gives the more "nostalgic" feel that I love about vanilla. For retail though, complete overhaul of UI is very nice for mythic raiding and keys.
I don't get people's issue with the default UI. Those decorative elements only increase immersion. And when you're not a sweaty endgame minmaxer there's no need to optimize it for gameplay
@@PihtorichI like the decorations, I dislike the placement of the frames. I center everything and have all of my frames within view without needing to glance up. The wow UI was designed for computers with much lower resolution screens which were smaller and condensed and the UI elements got pushed very far away as monitors improved. It’s more about optimizing for comfort
@@tainicon4639 that explains it but then it sounds like monitors didn't improve but got worse. You're literally fixing an issue caused by a monitor lol. Good thing I still use a 1250x1024
You forgot to mention that incursions on launch provided a significant influx of gold. By using the no-kill leveling strategy, some players managed to grind around 500 gold within the first 10 hours before it was patched. Ironically, Aggrend then tweeted about how the 'data' indicated players were enjoying incursions, only to face a wave of backlash. The incursions alone highlighted the dev team's incompetence, making the general community distateful towards SoD as consumable prices soared beyond those of WotLK equivalents throughout the entire phase. Aggrend and his team were too prideful to listen to the widespread demand for a PTR and only released one after the disaster of Phase 3. Even then, the PTR changes were underwhelming, leading most people I know, including myself, to drop the season entirely.
Incursion gold inflation, banning GDKP but not bots or gold sellers had me done. Couldn't afford the sweat, didn't have the time to grind for gold or make gold raiding gdkps with alts. Felt like I needed to buy gold to compete with guildies or be useless.
The "Kaldorei Supremacist" night elf was kind of neat idea.If you play WC3 campaigns right before jumping into Classic WoW, you might get some whiplash from how nelves got turned from isolationist warrior people into somewhat generic tree huggers.
@@Jediwarlock well, its not really changing the lore. Just adding some stuff that makes the game feel like its not disconnected from everything else. Although I wish it was a "what-if" rather than "hey this happened, but we never told you before!"
Hi Jedi! I think the biggest issue with SoD was its focus on runes and other changes to classes. But what about new quests and NPCs? What about new locations like changes to the world map? What about new mobs and factions and items and roleplay opportunities? Sure, it makes sense that SoD would go in the most important direction first -- your abilities are how you interact with the world -- but I think sprinting in that direction to the exclusion of almost everything else has been wasted potential. I also made the mistake of playing SoD on a PVP server so I could play with some friends. What an awful mistake, and it's my fault for not learning my lesson from Classic. I'm never rolling on a PVP server again in my life. If I had played on a PVE server like I should have, then I probably would have stuck with it much longer.
You make a lot of great points! I am much too uncoordinated to survive on a PvP server and getting ganked just stresses me out, PvE is what I need to unwind and have a good gaming experience. :)
the eranikus quest should be getting followed up on next phase if you can read between the lines of what the devs were saying in their more recent interviews. i think some of the stuff from the shifting sands questline might be used
i think the biggest problem with SOD was that it was treated as a fun little extra game mode, not unlike hardcore, when it shouldve been treated like a full on expansion to actually meet player expectations. i think they shouldve kept this in development longer, at least a couple more years to actually flesh out these ideas. instead of turning dungeons into raids, adding entirely new ones, instead of making zones into pvp arenas, adding more pvp areas, etc. they struck gold with the initial implementation of the ruin system, but not much else.
How tf do so many of you guys have this expectation for SEASON of discovery to be a complete expansion? What do you think the term SEASON means? At no point were you told that this was an expansion. From announcement it has been known that SoD is a test season for a possible fully developed Classic+
I tried SoD at the beginning of phase 2 and quickly lost interest when I saw all the people rushing to the endgoal. I liked the idea of new quests, new things, revisited class and quest ideas that came up later? But at some points it seemed half-hearted. To the server issue: maybe it would need its own client, and they should think about implementing it. But I remember reading a comment that certain things programmed in the Vanilla era are so deeply embedded in the code that they're hard to change (like the 16 slot starter bag for instance). They got around that later, after Classic's release..
Great points and very true! I imagine it was a massive undertaking to even add the Rune UI in for SoD :o ... this is also 100% why they tried to "sneak in" the new Guild UI just because it was probably messing with some behind-the-scenes stuff to keep the Classic UI in there.
I'm seriously impressed with your videos, especially classic content, and the lore of the world. Your voice is nice, its relaxed but engaging material, and in-game footage you use makes it seem original. Gives the feeling of an adventurer uncovering and exploring the world.
I think this is some really good analysis of SoD thus far! Great video. Something I will throw in as a comment about Phase 3 is something that doesn't come up often regarding incursions. Grinding prebis is usually very fun for most people, but the need for it was near completely negated by the insane gear given out by the Emerald Wardens. Our guild healer said Sunken Temple wasn't even worth it for her because most gear there would be a side-grade because the set bonuses were so powerful. I think the gear was able to be gotten from Honored, which was at most a few hours of incursion work to get. This killed P3 faster than even the length of the phase could have, because the Wild Offerings were not enough to entice players into dungeons repeatedly unless they were targeting one of the pieces on the vendor. Maraudon, one of the game's best dungeons, very rarely saw anything outside of Princess runs because people just wanted only her loot and offerings. Incursions ruined the economy and the gearing in that phase. Something that became painfully clear in P3 and P4 is that the SoD dev team is pretty small, and I think they said as much in a recent interview. They don't have the resources to do what most people might envision as a Classic+, and had to delay P4 just to make sure they could get it right. Classic+ requires new art and level design for zones, dungeons, and raids. With TWW upcoming and significant layoffs earlier this year, it could also be possible SoD was scaled back from its initial pitch.
Thank you for those details! You make some great points that I had not thought of. :) Classic+ definitely would require a larger team and more resources... lots more! O_O
i quit when they decided to keep 20m raids after showing us 10m raids for 2 phases it killed my guild and gutted any interest of returning even in future phases regfuardless of what comes.. i realllly wanted to see the kara crypts but now i really doubt that is ever happening and if it did happen im still not returning just to level to catch up and run dungeons for months to get geared enough to find a guild that needs a lock tank. SOD had such great potential but rip < in my case anyways im glad to any and all who are able to still enjoy it, i wish i could too>
I stopped playing SoD after I got to 50 . Without putting in a lot of effort and time, I could not find a group for a full Mara run. Yeah I didn’t need to do all the quests, but I still wanted to. Everyone was just doing Princess runs. No one was really doing RFD or Uldaman either. I didn’t need to do any of those dungeons, because of the incursion gear. I realized I was in the minority and I’m not going to waste my time to struggle to play the game I like. I’m also not going to waste my time playing a game the way I do not like it.
Also I forgot to mention, I love playing alts and having them in a bunch of different level brackets. With the XP boosts added after phase 1, it just killed the lower level world faster and faster. Roaming around Westfall by yourself doesn’t feel near as good.
I think what they’ve done with SoD has brought a new depth of view for what direction WoW can go. This ensures that there is a possibility that they can make a **OSRS** for WoW.
I was hopeful considering the Classic team isn't the Retail team (and had to have Some idea that the vision was going to be different) but alas it seems like we got Retail- after all.
I haven't played SoD, but I've been interested in the additions like runes and lore bits, however minor. When they showed the Karazhan Crypts were being turned into an instance I got super hyped, but the execution of Demonfall Canyon made me realize it'll likely just be the crypts with NPCs and some doodads. The luster has definitely worn off now that the playbook is basically empty. Short of a radical lore update/brand new instance or raid, I'm not sure what else they could do.
Agreed, I gave BFD a pass because it was the first "new" instance, but with each phase it becomes more apparent that they aren't doing really new terrain or assets in most cases, just painting over the already existing locations.
The idea with Runes I think was really great, if I were to release a Classic+ I would grab a handful of abilities from each class & make them into rune like quests. Despite their implimentation I think the Nightmare Incursions were a great idea, if the quests were one time only I think they'd have been excellent as that's a great way to work in the Emerald Dream imo. I haven't really engaged in the PvP events so I have no take on those.
Great video, you put it perfectly I think! In particular the xp boosts and the incursions are a huge turn off for me. I thought this would be about the levelling experience as they advertised, and instead they rush people to the end game and cram people in small locations. Still is a lot of fun, but whatever Classic+ is if they end up doing it, I hope they'll respect the levelling a bit more.
Commenting as someone who has played Discovery *and* Turtle WoW I prefer the latter. SoD is defined by a lot of surface-level event/mechanical changes which often don’t combine well with the Classic experience. A lot of runes try to round off the hard edges of certain classes. Notable for me is the warrior. My go-to with levelling is a Tauren Warrior because I like the challenge but many of the runes really seem designed to make levelling the warrior way easier which I feel goes against the design that worked in classic of different classes having different strengths/weaknesses when levelling. Same for giving heals to mages and the exp buffs in general. It feels like contrary to the name SoD isn’t particularly interested in the world itself and wants to funnel players into relatively narrow sections of new content. Meanwhile Turty fills out the maps with new quests and zones to make levelling more Freeform as you have way more viable options and you get to choose where you go. Different levelling challenges allow you to tailor the difficulty and add replay ability to the levelling experience. They also committed to a direction for the lore, allowing them to add new stories without being constrained by BC, or Wrath’s plotlines. Overall SoD to me reeks of cheapness, a compromised understanding of the appeal of classic WoW, and low commitment to the content. The seasonal progression, retrofitted raids, and locational events are all cool ideas but they feel extremely surface-level compared to the effort an indie team like Turty have put in. Ideally I would like to see the best of both approaches together however I’m not confident Blizzard are even capable of committing to a proper classic+ model because I would be surprised if given the years of scandals they have retained or attracted any talented devs who also understand the appeal of classic. Maybe Metzen.
@@Jediwarlock (^_^)b And I dig the vintage lore. That’s the Warcraft with which I fell in love all the way back in WC2. It feels good to speculate on what should have been, if bittersweet.
recently cancelled my wow subscription only played because of SOD, but now that i reached endgame i understand that in the end what they added and what they changed was dissapointing
Funny enough I was just discussing "the old days" (tm) with a friend and mentioned discovery sounding conceptually interesting as opposed to just playing Classic up to Wrath again. I haven't watched your video but was happy to see you posted it 6 hours ago. Consider this your algorithmic engagement and I hope this blows up for you.
when most people discuss the "old days", you are not remembering how it was in reality, but how you remember it and how you feel about it. which is why the classic servers have had such negative discourse from a lot of people. like a grandpa reminiscing about his childhood, ignoring or forgetting all the bad things and only remembering the positive.
@@Shiirow That was largely the conclusion that we had too. WoW was pretty much the only time the two of us remembering engaging with the game systems of an MMO actually being fun, in our experience in all other cases it was the people we were with and the circumstances of our lives. We can't really remember a single MMO where actually engaging with the game absent those things was fun. FWIW I am "THAT GUY" who is literally (and happily) married to someone I met on World of Warcraft, so this game is very meaningful to me despite the fact that I haven't played seriously since....a time I'd rather not admit. He's mostly interested in a chill game to play. It sounds like in some ways season of discovery might be the game for him (the leveling experience) in others not so much (the endgame). We are also unsure as to whether we actually would find them fun NOW at nearly 40, or if they were just fun because we hadn't had them at the time.
Despite liking phase 1 in sod, it was the staggard level release that caused me to fall off. Because so many people would stop playing the guild I was in fell apart twice. If they had just added the runes and quests but went all the way to max level, I do not think so many guilds would of collapsed. And those that made it to end game would have stuck around longer. Or at least that is what I think.
I feel like filling in quests for the "problem levels" and fleshing out unfinished zones and areas would have been perfect. Maybe add some mana-regen options for the non-meta specs so they can at least play the game, but otherwise things are fine as-is
@@Jediwarlock It's so fun questing in the open world and discovering a new quest hub that you KNOW wasn't there in vanila, but it just feels like it was. They do an amazing job at classic+, so I hope Blizz pays attention.
Yea i agree. Ive been playing private servers and retail since 05, and the vision just isnt in the right place. To some extent its rather simple, there is only one option at the peak of the phase. Recreating dungeons into raids is a good idea however outright replacing the normal version left a sour taste for me. The few quests they put in are a highlight, there is so much to add to fill in the gaps just for building up how wrath happened. Or lore, finding new stuff around the world like a message in a bottle from pandaria, maybe even a quest... Vanilla had so much more planned but had to abandon in favor of paid expansion models.
Genuinely the most accurate review of SoD from an active players pov. Sod had plenty of Ls but imo it’s the best thing blizzard has put out in years. Also hot take but GDKP removal was a mistake.
P1 of SOD was amazing, but during P2 it became clear that the classes were going to be mega OP and it became 'classic+retail'. Classic was good because it was hard. Then they added those shitty 'PVP' events that didn't really have anything to do with PVP so I decided to quit until they make Classic+. If they don't mess it up, I'll play it forever.
I would love for SoD to get its own server to enable more wide-spread changes and new areas, but if Sod gets its own server without them bringing Wrath back, I swear to God!
I am so mad they didn't keep around TBC and Wrath Era! But once again, those are their own versions of clients and I doubt they wanted to manage that many of them :(
for me and my friend the level 25 lock lasted too long. I understand the reason for it was to level multiple characters to 25 and gather all your runes but with the casual classic fans there wasn't enough. pvp was fun but not enough to keep people playing. my entire guild quit and I was the only one to return for the next patch and with no friends I didn't want to play. I need new friends to play wow with.
SoD was always a chance for blizzard to test the waters for a Classic + and SoD has done a good job with that was also pissed off A LOT of players who have left calling SoD not classic+ but more modern/retail -. Classic and to a good extent BC don't really have a combat rotation system but a combat management system. When playing SoD at higher levels it feels more like WotLK or Cata. For many players this had been a strong departure from when they believe classic should be. The insane leveling speed is another thing that feels extremely anti classic for many. The changes to gameplay has boosted everyone damage to crazy levels, thus making leveling in the open world far easier then in unchanged classic. To a large chunk of the classic community leveling is just as important or even more so then max level. As for season 3 lasting so long that was because blizzard didn't want things to overlap. You had TWW Beta started, classic cata pre-patch, classic cata launch, MoP remix, and Plunder storm. Blizzard has so many version of wow running they don't want to release any version without giving another time to breath. I believe there will be a classic + at some point I just don't know if they can do it in a way to make the majority of classic players happy.
Loving the runes, while playing in classic 60 wow. I don't think I'd enjoy stock classic as much, with no flexibility in most class specs or dual spec.
@Jediwarlock totally! I'm playing new classes I never thought I'd enjoy, or be able to get a rhythm in. Solo hunter with lone wolf, mixed with beast mastery dual spec has been so much fun!
Before I watch this video, I do want to say one thing about player reception and expectations of SoD; it can't and won't make everyone happy. I guarantee people got themselves overhyped with expectations and were let down when there weren't any new classes or specs, only different ways to play the current ones. And as someone who didn't really get into SoD and watched how people complained about everything (despite it being a seasonal/experimental thing at no extra charge, mind), I think players did let their expectations cloud their judgement. Note that I don't really have much experience with SoD and am only speaking as a long time Classic/Retail player. After watching it, a few things; people seem to forget the title of this experience. *Season* of Discovery. It's not a permanent fixture. The argument of making an entirely new client for a version of WoW that will last, at most, 2 years seems like a waste of development time. I understand peoples wanting to find NEW things, but at that Blizzcon, they DID say there weren't going to be any new, groundbreaking lore reveals or anything like that, just small twists here and there. To add entirely new (as in, not reusing certain areas/dungeons) zones and quests would mean going against that statement; people do seem to forget things said or twist them out of context out here on the internet. On the topic of adding content, there's only so much you can do within the realm of 'Classic' without that loud minority of players shouting 'they're just making it retail', just like another comment on this video said (and that was just over the *runes*). You can only tweak world PVP so much before the retail accusations start, and at its core, its basically just killing other players, making it more intricate would just make it a MOBA IMO. Again, twists, not entire overhauls. The one thing I do know is that the playerbase seems to want to optimize their play as much as possible, and this goes for Classic, SoD, Cata, and Retail. Hell, people were saying within the first week or so that MoP Remix didn't have enough time to earn all the collectable stuff, despite it being 3 months long and people having already optimized leveling and bronze currency collection. People burned themselves out because they HAD to earn all that stuff, and that mindset is there in SoD too. Not saying it's 100% of the playerbase, but a good majority.
Player reception and expectations are high because people want a classic+ and since we don't get much information about how blizzard is thinking if this could have been the classic+ if no one said their disagreeances. The reception and expectations are players really really not wanting classic+ to be messed up with, players do not trust blizzard to make a good classic+ and so the reception is loud and clear. I mean just look at era. They can't help themselves but to touch it and change things from the original game. The new guild tab is horrible and the mouse click functions like retail still since around wrath. They added polearms for druids and a new world buff for alliance (those last 2 were removed with enough outcry but the other changes remain).
Blizz would NEVER be wasting money if it were developing a new engine for the game, we need player and guild housing. It is time to lay the old man to rest so we can have the rest of the things that have become basic QOL for the genre. How the fuck are we JUST NOW GETTING WARBANDS AND EVEN THEN ITS NOT FOR OLD CONTENT CAUSE OLD CONTENT IS CODED LIKE SHIT ON AN OLD DEFUNCT VERSION OF THEIR ANCIENT ENGINE. LMAO
This is a good comment. I expected the "dark" side referenced in this video to be more player driven and, in a sense, it is. Managing expectations is tough for a company to do, and as players, we really let our imaginations run wild with possibilities and let ourselves down when reality can't meet those expectations.
I really enjoy sod phase 4. I dont see many logs frogs anymore. The server is not as populated which makes me recognize many player's on my server and i found a guild to raid with because people recognized me too and asked me to join. Its not for everyone amd maybe got lucky with that. but i enjoy this phase very much😊
I am having the best time playing Ascension with Adventure Mode and Resolute Mode right now. Unfortunately, the world is dead, but at least this combination provides for a fun solo experience, unlike the "normal" classic.
I know Warmane was one of the more popular ones (WotLK and MoP options I think), but I haven't checked in a while so I'm not sure what's still around :)
I was enjoying SoD until I did a DM group and got yelled at by the healer for not following the meta build at level 17. After that I gave up on it completely. I’ve just been playing regular classic on whitemane there are tons of people running around because of the community driven fresh
lot of the issues with me and SoD come to community mismanagement, both self-induced and on blizzard devs themselves. 1 - Bots and gold buying. Don't think this needs to be explained - Blizzard sucks at managing it, and the community sucks at abusing that fact. 2 - Pug culture. Think I can speak for most people that - finding groups is just a terrible experience. Unless you're in a guild's raiding team you're kind of screwed for end-game content. 3 - Toxicity. People fucking suck, man, what can I say? I'll throw this out there. Every 1 in 5 dungeon runs with randos, just casual levelling dungeon runs, have had at least one sour moment that ruined the whole thing. For the points above, I mostly entirely blame the community for digging this grave. 4 - Game design. These are just the issues I've had with the game's core design on a fundamental level. - Incursions. Horrible idea to solve... what, gold income? Levelling speed? All of that as a re-skin of the cenarion repeatable quest grind. - Retail-isms. New toys, new mounts, even transmog, all over the place! What frustrates me the most is not knowing where all these characters will get thrown after SoD if anywhere. IMO, they don't belong in Era, or at least not with all the custom stuff. - Tuning. Due to the nature of adding abilities, having to tune things constantly just gets tiring. One day you're powerful, next day you're pathetic. Which also counts as a retail-ism, tbh. - Raid difficulties. Already didn't like it in SoM when AQ40 came out with 4 difficulty tiers and not really any custom boss fights. OH and the 11th MC boss is... a major letdown for me, honestly. - This goes half and half with community and Blizzard - but the removal of 40 man raiding. I like the idea of having a raid require up to 40 people, that just feels epic. In *practice* though it is insanely difficult to manage because of the way people are with wildly different schedules, so I don't blame the community for wanting smaller raid sizes, but I am a little disappointed that this is just better for the game. SoD did a couple of good things though. - Revamping old dungeons into raids, and creating a whole new dungeon. Yknow, kind of the common point for a lot of people with the idea of Classic+. - Trying new specs for some classes, and making underperforming specs viable. Key point is trying - IDK how well its all turned out now. - The way you acquired runes, at least in phase 1, felt good for the most part. I did almost every class's runes and I liked them all initially. Though for me, in the future, I want runes just turned into regular quests, I don't actually want the abilities. - Ashenvale PvP was fun. I liked it. Chaotic and large scale PvP is my jam. *I acknowledge the fact that PvP did not always occur, but when it did it was fun.*
A mass of class specific quests isn't my cup of Classic Plus. For me, SoD should have been about the world and new adventures for ALL players regardless of class or skill. Your main class quests, are different than my own meaning we both have a very different experience of SoD.
in recent years we have had 2019 classic, season of mastery, the classic servers and now season of discovery. for me, im getting burnt out of looking at the exact same scenery over and over again. i have played sod since day 1 and i do like that it is at least somewhat different, however the 5-6 days that you arent raiding you really are just doing the exact same thing that we've done for the past 5 years. i think my biggest issue with sod is that while there are some changes in some aspects of the game, overall its still the same zones, same quests, same everything besides some tweaks here and there. maybe i've played this version of wow too much and its me. besides the first week or 2 of phase 3 before the nerfs, none of the raids have been particularly hard. could also be that im in an amazing guild who progresses quickly. i want to stay the full duration of this seasonal server but it really is hard to continue looking at the same scenery every day of the week.
I disagree with your conclusion. New areas are difficult to create but not impossible. Plenty of private servers created new areas on vanilla or wotlk version. Sometimes they worldwide desactivate the fatigue to add new islands, sometimes they create a new maze underground or above the sky, sometimes they create a stair game on an unused zone of the game. But if a single person working for free for a private server can do that, what about Blizzard? They can do anything. They could finish abandonned projects. They could desactivate fatigue on only a portion of the map. They can raise islands from the seas. They can even copy/paste already made islands (Gillijim and Lapidis). They can add build something from the first iteration of the Emerald Nightmare, Outland or Nazjatar. For an unknown reason, they didn't used that potential. And I personnally find it sad. I knew a game master on a private servers that added those things, they weren't 100% perfect (f.i., from the outside the island looked unfinished AND to add a new island you had to manually install a mod, if you fell from a maze in some places your only option was to take the resurection sickness) but he was alone! They were even whole teams of devs on some private servers to add temporary events. I do not understand why they didn't explored their possibilities.
Oh, they definitely "could have," I'll try and explain a bit more. :) The way the game is set up right now (as I understand it), the devs can't add new zones or seriously update existing ones (via terraforming terrain, etc.) because SoD uses the same game client as regular Classic Era. Any changes to the game map on this client would mean any new SoD zones would also appear in Classic Era which is of course a problem. The solution would be to give SoD its own client so the devs could actually try these more ambitious possibilities, but I think from a corporate/financial standpoint Blizzard didn't let SoD expand to this level of investment/commitment. So while the devs would very well have wanted to try these things, the company didn't allow them to (as of yet).
Quickly wanna say, love content and showcasing all the small things and details that makes classic “classic”, before what actually wanna say. Have you tried classic+ private servers or considered. The likes of turtle wow or the soon to release Project Epoch (some point in 2025 hopefully). Would personally love to see you dive into or/and look through Project Epochs custom content and hear your thoughts.
@@Shiirowby this comment alone I can tells u haven’t looked through Project Epochs new content. 2 new dungeons, 3 raids, new quest lines in zones that rly lacked, like they have added a whole new area in Arathi highlands, so alliance players has a reason to go quest there. I get that it’s not like SoD in terms of class revamping, but that’s not what they’re aiming for which I like. Make every spec playable and feel unique, but without adding tons of new stuff. Turtle wow it’s yeah pretty bland.
Thank you for the kind words! :) I have considered TWoW but haven't had the time yet... I do enjoy seeing the trailers and game updates to see what private devs have been trying out tho!
incursions killed the fun for me, togheter with the fact that i worked my ass off for hard to get runes, that later blizzard decided to make it easier to get, after i had spent 200 gold and 20 hours farming portals. sunken temple was overtuned, but alot of bosses and difficulty was just right. then they nerfed everything and made everything so easy to clear you could do it will your eyes closed.
The only missing thing with classic is the gameplay on certain class. It is particularly visible in HL when nobody can do any damage for exemple beside rogues/war/mages/warlock. My beloved class , hunter , is boring , half of your time is spent waiting for cds. That was my hope for SOD. I suppose the problem now is that when a little tweak was needed , they put too many gameplay stuff into it. And with that the necessity to change everything at each phase. Adding an internal cooldowns here , changing a proc. Smaller increments but definitive ones would have been great.
Personally right now my biggest pet peeve is the rune swapping when respeccing and playing pet build as a hunter, lone wolf build for AoE, and swapping about 6 runes over every time, It's too much that said I wish we got more WoW Alpha talents (way more specialised) in something like classic+ less of this temporary nily willy power more permanent feeling impactful choices you made while selecting your spec/talents, perhaps even just an extended talent tree for classic or a 4th Tree for every class with "generic" talents that dont follow an order can pick any
SoD really just needed to add more stuff for the average player to do. Some caves or simple dungeons with new elite enemies and loot. Some new chests to find hidden in the environment. A few funny bits of dialogue here and there. But most importantly, new quests to fill in the gaps in the levelling experience. I don't think they would even necessarily need to change the geography, just add new instance portals or re-purpose existing caves. Instead they made 'difficult' challenge zones that predictably turned the community into elitist douchebags who won't allow most specs to do the raids. They really need to get over the mentality of 'catering to the high-end players only' that almost killed retail multiple times. I played a warlock and legit got rejected from groups because my character was human and not a minutely more optimal gnome.
So true! I love your thoughts. I was quite disappointed to find out that the cave used in the promotional trailer was actually just the Gold Coast Quarry (I thought there was a new cave in the Westfall hills, but nope) :/
We are in a minimum viable product. Couldn't even get its own client or budget. Look at soms failure. They execs are being so cautious but finally allowing art budget? Phase 1 was promising but we're just hindered at the core from tech side and also lore
I genuinely think community based voting system for vanilla plus would be the best thing Blizzard could implement, but you would have to test the water with incredibly niche/minor things first as a means of gaging what the player base wants. We are talking polearms for druids/paladins, fixing certain bugs, etc. The majority of the playerbase are idiots who would happily vote for retail changes if they could. Also there will need to be gate keeping. Warrior players can only vote for warrior changes etc.
Polling for class changes is a disastrous idea, if it dictates the decision. If you just want to see sentiments sure. Gee I wonder will this class vote to buff their own class or nerf it. Will they want this new strong ability or no? Only reason voting works in osrs is because it is a classless mmorpg where anyone can acquire any skill. Even then the polling for pve vs pvp community changes have hot debate and petty spiteful behavior, such as voting against pvp changes. For example, the more hardcore pvp community may want arena just as an option but casual pvpers and pve players may think it's bad for the game or hate the competitive pvp esports type of thing and vote against it. You really can't just replicate it, if done it needs a ton of wise caveats. Like if your class needs a buff but you can only decide between buffing a burst ability or consistent dps. Or a mobility or defensive ability. Maybe better off voting on the nerfs than the buffs. What it could work is the content that is the most general. New features or zones that'll affect everyone
@@ez6791 that’s I said you’d have to get gatekeep it and start the polling with bare minimum changes. If people start voting against them, then don’t poll bigger changes in the future. If they do, test the water with something slightly more impactful.
If the community polling is only allowed to go one way, then why poll at all? Idk if you've visited the wow forums ever, but wow players are not the smartest bunch
I dunno, p3 was pretty fun: st was great even prenerf, runes added a lot, flavorful items in stv and tier sets. Was fun except incursions but If properly tuned xph/gph wise they would be great too
with GDKP being against the rules... Also, i think "iron man style" would be good (no trade) in a specific server... yeah, ill sacrifice flask if that means people get to PLAY THE GAME instead of BUYING everything
Some people do I thek sod is Just a better version of classic. Especially when we talk about classes.They just feel so much better to play.Some people want just classic fresh. But there's also a lot of people that could care less they want something new.
Well. I like it. I wanted a casual experience and that’s how I play it. It turns out when you do that and shun the efficiency gamers, you can enjoy it.
Was kind of excited in phase 1 - phase 2 just went to total shit the moment everyone was just doing logs and meta garbage. Totally took away from any fun of trying out alternative builds and stuff which entirely took away from the point of it for me. Bailed after running gnomer a couple of times, was just too toxic and crap.
im sure creating a REAL classic plus would be too time consuming to put Blizz devs on. im sure they would have to mess with a lot of source code. and i dont think Classic or SoD or HC pull in enough money to warrant moving those devs...
i would bet nobody would becrying in sod if the added 10 to 15 new dugneons and more raids + zones to explore new tiers fuck if the would add loads of new content that would fit in vanila and not make it insanly hard at start to not give evrybody reson to gatekeep 75% of players out of content becus its too hard
It's true! They are now trying "new" dungeons (instanced areas that already exist) but I think there isn't enough truly original content to make it a super big hit right now...
@@Jediwarlock there are loads of areas they can add in to the game on the basic map you can see them all they just need some work and and they will be good to goo there is 5 raid tiers worth of posible content for the game thats double size of clasic
As a lore and map nerd as well I got excited for the same things as you did... I guess I understand why we didn't get that stuff, but what we did get is so boring? At this point I'm thinking if I ever really wanna see Classic+ I should just go try Turtle WoW.
My issue is that nothing was "new" everything except a couple things were in retail at some point, i played a rogue for season 1 and 2 (didnt play 3 and definitely not playing 4), like cool look, i call mutilate, omg guys its envenom. the things i was most excited about was the rune where when someone in your party critted you got a combo point against them. thats was cool design, but they ruined the tier by making it 20 man raids, i raided with 7 others friends, so we only had to pug 2, and we ended up picking up a regular, so realistically only 1, now you are telling me i need to get 11 more? just out of no where, no reason for it, just to do so? me and all my friends quit within a day or 2 in season 3. we raided when we were all available, with 20 people now, you need to set up more time and pick one, and most of them mythic raided castle nathria, and setting a schedule like that wasnt something they were interested in, neither was i. I enjoyed pushing logs as a rogue, i got really good parses. especially for my gear score. but it doesnt matter because at the end of season 2, i wasnt even fully geared, only missing 2 lockouts total in that season. to me, sod is meant to be a more retail version of classic, i like that, but they removed all the good parts about retail and said deal with it. no new actual content, just recycled shit. (added after watching full video) tldr: sod failed at everything it tried to be because of cutting corners and removing/adding the good/bad parts of other content they have in other versions. They tried to be a modern classic, failed. They tried to add replay ability, failed. They tried to add "new" abilities to WoW, and some how fucking failed. I love wow, i loved season 1 and 2 of sod, i loved shadowlands and df, even after taking a break. But WoW is slowly becoming a full blown mobile game, and SoD's failures and repeats of mistakes, proves that.
(I wrote this first comment im replying to before i watched the video) im now on the season 2 section with the blood moon event, this thing absolutely blows, its a really fucking cool concept, i like the idea a lot. but because it was open world, often I would get phased away from my group, or the server would lag so much that i would backstab someone and 4 seconds later i get a pop up saying i cant because im not behind them. then i made a mage alt, and in 2 runs of the event got enough tokens to get everything, and within 4 more able to get the mount. all this because mass regen and arcane explosion compounded 5 times makes you practically invincible unless you are stunned. and they constantly nerfed mage healer because they were broken, why not let them for a season? its seasonal content for christ sake
(now just finished phase 3) nightmare incursions also ruined the last amount of hope i had for the game mode. the xp wasnt an issue, that was perfectly fine. but when you tell me, i get 20 gold from one quest, at lvl 40 im gonna spam that till i cant anymore. i had multiple characters with logs full of every single one of these quests with the items in my bag to share them. i made so much money in the time i played, then i looked at the bis list, i need a darkmoon card, ok cool i will go buy one, well botters farmed the incursions, no surprise, and the card i needed was like 4k on my server. what am i to do about that?
(just finished the video) sod is just a failure, the devs never listened to feed back till it was way to late, instead of being a spin on classic with retail addons it just was a modern classic, removing the ease of access from retail, and keeping the ever long walks of doing something again for the 3rd time in the past few years. it doesnt work. same thing happened to remix in retail, they removed the fun of grind for power, the ability to "SOLO RAIDS" like why would i go solo a raid when i can join a group of people where 1 guy does 10m dps and i just afk and maybe b rez someone. I didnt even know season 4 came out for a couple days, thats how little ive heard about it. And again, there is nothing new, its just add system that failed before, add ability that was removed before, make raid harder to tune for increase player power, repeat. Its not actual game design, wow is just a gacha game if you arent a botter a flooding the economy
WOW, thank you for all those details, I really appreciate it! The promise was there... it definitely didn't reach the expectations it set for itself in a lot of areas.
Going from 10m with friends to 20m in phase 3 killed my guild. Had to merge guilds, and neither survived. I'm still playing in phase 4, found a new home and having a lot more fun than phase 2-3. I hope people give it another chance or blizz take these learnings into Classic + Why play sod over Era? Era has so much class limitation. Want to tank? can ONLY play a warrior. your class can heal? well its GOING to heal in raids. Sod's changes fix that, but the best part is its not all tied to runes, you can put the abilities in the game without this hotswapping rune system and it would work well.
Plus .. dose not mean mage healers , rog & warclock tanks , just Small brains .. trying to retail vanilla.. sad when this was the blizzcon announcement .. to the classic community.. and they shit on "CLASSIC" ... we dont get a blizzcon this year ... feels bad
I understand people being disillusioned about season of discovery but I'm still glad they released it. I'm sure there's a decent amount of people out there that like the vanilla gameplay with some extra spice to it and really even if it ultimately gets boring it's always worth playing a new game for the initial rush of people playing and discovering things on their own. As I told a friend, the last good moment to play an MMO was the original launch for Classic, the next best moment is whenever a new game or expansion releases. You don't know when it's the next big MMO experience you're going to get for a while, and really the only way to figure out is to try it out yourself even if it only lasts for a few months.
Incursions killed the game. I haven't tried Turtle Wow yet but the fact that they're even ATTEMPTING to make WoW with the Unreal Engine speaks volumes about the efforts of actual Blizz/Microsoft employees.
The issue there is they kinda have no choice. They built their servers on the vanilla architecture. Not Wrath, Vanilla. They wanted as authentic an experience as possible and they got it, bugs, headaches and all. And unless they want to update the client themselves so it can run cleanly on hardware 20 years advanced from what it was designed to run on they were forced to port it to a different engine. On the bright side it will mean far easier development for them because even creating new models in the vanilla engine is pain and it’s amazing what a small team did within those constraints.
Jedi joined the "content crew" and became a content Andy. Dude who cares if there is dev made content or not. It's all about player made content in this beautiful playground devs made.
That's fair, I know TWoW and others are really popping off lately! I always like seeing the game updates and the like from private servers doing their thing :)
all they had to add is more dungeons raids and quests with along with the runes nothing else it would be soo good and finish unfinished zones and add them to the game thats it karazan finish all islands on the map new isntences just keep clasic gameplay somewhat + far more content the scarlet citadel is bullshit they added that soo you would understand that you would spend 12 levels in sm the amout of new legitimete content added not copied is one and that is dfc wich i bet most people wanted anyway if they thought of it
Biggest issue with wow classic overall is the community. People say they love classic but can't stop being competitive like its retail.
Yeah, I definitely would stay away from the more hardcore scene, it took me a while to settle on a nice casual guild :)
I just got so tired of the meta and logs chasing. I thought it would be a casual wow experience much like the classic launch was. But i was way wrong.. it became retail 2.0.
it is unless you surround yourself with these people. can easily clear everything in classic without having to care about parsing or downloading dbm.
When people start to treat game as a job, they seek to attain the biggest numbers, and invite only those with biggest numbers. I mean, noone could blame them, it is their time and if they want to save 30min on raid because of blasting through, they are very free to do so- and since it is the most effective way, everyone sadly does it, ruining it for casuals. There are no more raid nights, only raid 1-2hours in the night.. noone wants to spend more time than neccesary in the game, which defeats the whole purpose of the game... to enjoy the time in it. :(
It depends on your perspective. I found a guild that is casual and no one cares really about the logs, buffs and consumes. People just play for fun. So I disagree, it's not retail 2.0, it is classic +. Try to approach it with different perspective instead of chasing logs. If some people care about it, doesn't mean everyone does.
My guild is pretty chill. We log every now and again. We just cleared H2 MC. No log checks, just grabbing a good group of friends from previous wow servers and a few new people to our guild. Wild Growth server fwiw
@@QurikOfficial same I'm a refugee from lava lash on wild growth and literally took 20 minutes to find a guild run to join and then pump enough to get invited to the guild group. This game isn't hard, which is fine classic wow was never meant to be hard.
I think what ruins SOD is that everyone just wants to run the easiest content that'll get them the most return for the time they put into the game. Which I understand, but it completely ruins the experience when it takes hours to find groups for quests/dungeon. When all of the new content is discovered and done to death within a few days, there is absolutely nothing keeping me invested.
This has been an issue with the playerbase for the past 15 years or more. Players will optimize the fun out of the game and then blame Blizzard for not adding more content/nerfing said optimizations (looking at you MoP Remix players)/burning themselves out.
It's a vicious cycle.
No life 30+ year olds will always fail themselves
True!
They minmaxed the fun out of the game
>I think
>everyone just wants
Stop thinking and stop assuming.
What ruins SOD for me is the lack of focus on the world. Raids are not the world, retail lore isnt the world, taking away questing zones isn’t the world. I expected new quests and finishing major and minor unfinished questlines. Instead we got more raid content. 😢
I agree with that!
Played it with no information except the stuff from Blizzard announcing it, started in season 3, got all the way to lvl 50, did my princess runs, did my incursions, did my Gnomer and BLack Fathom Deeps, didn’t get to do a Sunken Temple because my guild fell apart. Was in the best gear I could have been in pre running ST, and stopped playing. Couldn’t find anyone to do anything with and would spend hours trying to get groups together for anything. My whole time leveling up everyone just wanted me to do stuff I didn’t want to do and no one would do anything besides incursions, couldn’t make any money, had to grind hard to scrape enough money for my mount took like 2 weeks prob. Didn’t like the incursions at all and that’s all people would do. Didn’t like how there were no cool abilities for my classes, and the whole time just wished I was playing regular classic or wrath before the token was added. Only tried it out because they took the wrath servers which is what I like and at the time all Vanilla servers were more or less dead. Won’t be returning.
Didn’t feel anything like “discovering” for me who didn’t look anything up at all. Everyone knew everything about everything and just wanted to tell you how to play the game or where to get your “runes” Any area that wasn’t an incursion besides Scarlet monastery was effectively dead with no players. Was playing on a high pop is easy server btw so yes there were people online.
Adding anything like a daily grinding spot willnruin the frelnoc classic. Incursions seem like a huge mistake
@@TrickyThe0ne everything was ok until the whole "two weeks to get my mount" dude...
@@hohihahe I definitely was having fun for a good amount of time tbh.
@@TrickyThe0ne honestly that was my experience up until the last 3 weeks of phase 3. Fun but then I think I got burnt out and I can't get back into phase 4 unfortunately
In general conclusion I think I can say that SoD has/had too much change on the character-side but not enough change on the environment-side. Though I don't deny that character changes are necessary, it was already a warning sign to me that we were in mere P1 and we had 12 runes per class already, which is a lot. As many people probably agree, with so many runes and character-related changes it is by far not the classic feeling anymore. However, we hardly had any anticipated change on the environment, such as quests, quest chains, instances and outdoor zones. Which is a shame.
Strange as it may sound but do you know what was my most memorable thing in whole SoD? Getting the Rainbow Generator and the Sleeping Bag. These little quest chains have their own little lore, we investigate, discover a mysterious new faction, travel around the world and get creative rewards. Even before SoD BRD had been my favourite instance, and finding out that there is a new secret area and event with it's own mysterious lore (which seems to continue what we had back in P2 with the Sleeping Bag chain) and eventually exiting a secret door in the middle of Shadowforge City made me really hyped and also a bit sad, that I can't do it again.
It might sound childish but that's what I anticipated in a season of discovery, not several new runes and even more complex skill rotations with each phase.
Those are great thoughts, thank you for sharing! The Sleeping Bag/Rainbow were the kinds of questlines we desperately needed more of, not the ones always linked to Runes or ones that sent you back into the new raid.
Only endless romantics and naive dreamers though classic + wouldn't be retail lite.
Retail is the result of current Blizzard dev culture and there was no reason for the classic+ project being any different.
People who worked on the vanilla wow are long gone.
I recommend listening to the podcast Countdown to Classic where the host made many interviews with former vanilla wow devs and how the Blizzard culture changed since they left.
TL;DR WoW vanilla was a product of passionate independent dev studio and current Microsoft Blizzard doesn't have the talent or liberty to recreate it.
I prefer to call them what they truly are, delusional.
I appreciate the thoughts... I'll have to check out that Countdown! :D
I respect your commitment to the default UI
Default UI is acceptable for me only for classic. Plus I have such muscle memory for all the keybinds in the same spaces across all characters; and the look of the UI gives the more "nostalgic" feel that I love about vanilla. For retail though, complete overhaul of UI is very nice for mythic raiding and keys.
like classic needs modern UI lol its piss easy, I just remove the gryphons on the side with leatrix plus tho, then you've got a nice clean classic UI
I don't get people's issue with the default UI. Those decorative elements only increase immersion. And when you're not a sweaty endgame minmaxer there's no need to optimize it for gameplay
@@PihtorichI like the decorations, I dislike the placement of the frames. I center everything and have all of my frames within view without needing to glance up.
The wow UI was designed for computers with much lower resolution screens which were smaller and condensed and the UI elements got pushed very far away as monitors improved. It’s more about optimizing for comfort
@@tainicon4639 that explains it but then it sounds like monitors didn't improve but got worse. You're literally fixing an issue caused by a monitor lol. Good thing I still use a 1250x1024
You forgot to mention that incursions on launch provided a significant influx of gold. By using the no-kill leveling strategy, some players managed to grind around 500 gold within the first 10 hours before it was patched. Ironically, Aggrend then tweeted about how the 'data' indicated players were enjoying incursions, only to face a wave of backlash. The incursions alone highlighted the dev team's incompetence, making the general community distateful towards SoD as consumable prices soared beyond those of WotLK equivalents throughout the entire phase. Aggrend and his team were too prideful to listen to the widespread demand for a PTR and only released one after the disaster of Phase 3. Even then, the PTR changes were underwhelming, leading most people I know, including myself, to drop the season entirely.
That is a great point! Phase 3 definitely messed up a lot and the game really felt the consequences of it :(
Incursion gold inflation, banning GDKP but not bots or gold sellers had me done. Couldn't afford the sweat, didn't have the time to grind for gold or make gold raiding gdkps with alts. Felt like I needed to buy gold to compete with guildies or be useless.
Once they introduced bits of retail lore into SoD it killed it for me. That and how little new other lore there was
The "Kaldorei Supremacist" night elf was kind of neat idea.If you play WC3 campaigns right before jumping into Classic WoW, you might get some whiplash from how nelves got turned from isolationist warrior people into somewhat generic tree huggers.
I agree, feeling pretty unsure about the "Shadowy Figure" stuff they're throwing in...
@@Jediwarlock well, its not really changing the lore. Just adding some stuff that makes the game feel like its not disconnected from everything else. Although I wish it was a "what-if" rather than "hey this happened, but we never told you before!"
@@user-fv7jd4xj5n I hoped it would be disconnected from everything else
Hi Jedi!
I think the biggest issue with SoD was its focus on runes and other changes to classes. But what about new quests and NPCs? What about new locations like changes to the world map? What about new mobs and factions and items and roleplay opportunities? Sure, it makes sense that SoD would go in the most important direction first -- your abilities are how you interact with the world -- but I think sprinting in that direction to the exclusion of almost everything else has been wasted potential.
I also made the mistake of playing SoD on a PVP server so I could play with some friends. What an awful mistake, and it's my fault for not learning my lesson from Classic. I'm never rolling on a PVP server again in my life. If I had played on a PVE server like I should have, then I probably would have stuck with it much longer.
You make a lot of great points! I am much too uncoordinated to survive on a PvP server and getting ganked just stresses me out, PvE is what I need to unwind and have a good gaming experience. :)
the eranikus quest should be getting followed up on next phase if you can read between the lines of what the devs were saying in their more recent interviews. i think some of the stuff from the shifting sands questline might be used
Ooh, interesting! I may have to check it out :)
i think the biggest problem with SOD was that it was treated as a fun little extra game mode, not unlike hardcore, when it shouldve been treated like a full on expansion to actually meet player expectations. i think they shouldve kept this in development longer, at least a couple more years to actually flesh out these ideas. instead of turning dungeons into raids, adding entirely new ones, instead of making zones into pvp arenas, adding more pvp areas, etc. they struck gold with the initial implementation of the ruin system, but not much else.
I agree! I think a teaser trailer at BlizzCon with more details the following year would have been a bolder, but more worthwhile, timeline.
How tf do so many of you guys have this expectation for SEASON of discovery to be a complete expansion? What do you think the term SEASON means? At no point were you told that this was an expansion. From announcement it has been known that SoD is a test season for a possible fully developed Classic+
A larger project was obviously way too ambitious for what risk they were willing to take
I tried SoD at the beginning of phase 2 and quickly lost interest when I saw all the people rushing to the endgoal. I liked the idea of new quests, new things, revisited class and quest ideas that came up later? But at some points it seemed half-hearted.
To the server issue: maybe it would need its own client, and they should think about implementing it. But I remember reading a comment that certain things programmed in the Vanilla era are so deeply embedded in the code that they're hard to change (like the 16 slot starter bag for instance). They got around that later, after Classic's release..
It really ahould have focused on quests.
Great points and very true! I imagine it was a massive undertaking to even add the Rune UI in for SoD :o ... this is also 100% why they tried to "sneak in" the new Guild UI just because it was probably messing with some behind-the-scenes stuff to keep the Classic UI in there.
"Waiting for classic +" gang gere 😢
Try the Turtle WoW. After 5 yrs - still no regrets
Same same
A good permanent Classic+ would be great
That's what I'm hoping for :)
If Blizzard is working on a real classic+, it needs to be it's own client!
100%!!
If you weren't around for Warcraft 2 and legitimately enjoy the lore, I don't think classic plus will be for the "new" wow players
SOD is in a good place right now in phase 4. Come back and give it another try if you played before and left.
Yeah! I play it off and on right now, it's in a good spot :)
I'm seriously impressed with your videos, especially classic content, and the lore of the world. Your voice is nice, its relaxed but engaging material, and in-game footage you use makes it seem original. Gives the feeling of an adventurer uncovering and exploring the world.
Thank you so much! I'm glad you are enjoying my vids :)
Season of Discovery 2: the Season has been Discovered
Hmmm, yes, the Discovery here is made of Discovery XD
Great video. As someone who has not touched SoD, this was super interesting for me 👍
I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)
Yeah experience buffs are definitely not it. They completely break the levelling flow and structure.
Totally D:
I think this is some really good analysis of SoD thus far! Great video. Something I will throw in as a comment about Phase 3 is something that doesn't come up often regarding incursions. Grinding prebis is usually very fun for most people, but the need for it was near completely negated by the insane gear given out by the Emerald Wardens. Our guild healer said Sunken Temple wasn't even worth it for her because most gear there would be a side-grade because the set bonuses were so powerful. I think the gear was able to be gotten from Honored, which was at most a few hours of incursion work to get.
This killed P3 faster than even the length of the phase could have, because the Wild Offerings were not enough to entice players into dungeons repeatedly unless they were targeting one of the pieces on the vendor. Maraudon, one of the game's best dungeons, very rarely saw anything outside of Princess runs because people just wanted only her loot and offerings. Incursions ruined the economy and the gearing in that phase.
Something that became painfully clear in P3 and P4 is that the SoD dev team is pretty small, and I think they said as much in a recent interview. They don't have the resources to do what most people might envision as a Classic+, and had to delay P4 just to make sure they could get it right. Classic+ requires new art and level design for zones, dungeons, and raids. With TWW upcoming and significant layoffs earlier this year, it could also be possible SoD was scaled back from its initial pitch.
Thank you for those details! You make some great points that I had not thought of. :) Classic+ definitely would require a larger team and more resources... lots more! O_O
i quit when they decided to keep 20m raids after showing us 10m raids for 2 phases it killed my guild and gutted any interest of returning even in future phases regfuardless of what comes.. i realllly wanted to see the kara crypts but now i really doubt that is ever happening and if it did happen im still not returning just to level to catch up and run dungeons for months to get geared enough to find a guild that needs a lock tank. SOD had such great potential but rip < in my case anyways im glad to any and all who are able to still enjoy it, i wish i could too>
I really hope the Crypts end up being awesome :)
Rebecca is so wise
Yeah! Great way of summing up a lot of the issues with modern WoW culture (retail and Classic)
That Creator have the Balls and Honest. So glad to hear that i am not the only one, who recognized this.
Thanks!
Your comment section is insanely positive, interactive, and insightful. Great job cultivating your community.
Thank you! :)
I stopped playing SoD after I got to 50 . Without putting in a lot of effort and time, I could not find a group for a full Mara run. Yeah I didn’t need to do all the quests, but I still wanted to. Everyone was just doing Princess runs. No one was really doing RFD or Uldaman either. I didn’t need to do any of those dungeons, because of the incursion gear.
I realized I was in the minority and I’m not going to waste my time to struggle to play the game I like. I’m also not going to waste my time playing a game the way I do not like it.
Also I forgot to mention, I love playing alts and having them in a bunch of different level brackets. With the XP boosts added after phase 1, it just killed the lower level world faster and faster. Roaming around Westfall by yourself doesn’t feel near as good.
Thanks for your detailed Feedback. I feel the same
Thanks for the thoughts! You definitely don't want to play a game when it feels like a chore or isn't fun anymore... taking breaks is good! :)
I think what they’ve done with SoD has brought a new depth of view for what direction WoW can go. This ensures that there is a possibility that they can make a **OSRS** for WoW.
Agreed!
If you genuinely trusted current Blizzard to provide a true-to-vanilla "classic plus" experience then frankly you deserved what you got.
I was hopeful considering the Classic team isn't the Retail team (and had to have Some idea that the vision was going to be different) but alas it seems like we got Retail- after all.
One thing you can possibly be hopeful for is a Hyjal zone, since iirc that was pretty finished in the classic client. Correct me if I’m wrong though
You are correct! That is like the one big chunk of land that could feasibly used as a new zone. :)
I haven't played SoD, but I've been interested in the additions like runes and lore bits, however minor. When they showed the Karazhan Crypts were being turned into an instance I got super hyped, but the execution of Demonfall Canyon made me realize it'll likely just be the crypts with NPCs and some doodads. The luster has definitely worn off now that the playbook is basically empty. Short of a radical lore update/brand new instance or raid, I'm not sure what else they could do.
Agreed, I gave BFD a pass because it was the first "new" instance, but with each phase it becomes more apparent that they aren't doing really new terrain or assets in most cases, just painting over the already existing locations.
The idea with Runes I think was really great, if I were to release a Classic+ I would grab a handful of abilities from each class & make them into rune like quests.
Despite their implimentation I think the Nightmare Incursions were a great idea, if the quests were one time only I think they'd have been excellent as that's a great way to work in the Emerald Dream imo.
I haven't really engaged in the PvP events so I have no take on those.
Thanks for your thoughts! :)
SOD is such an excellent acronym for this game / mode
lol
Great video, you put it perfectly I think! In particular the xp boosts and the incursions are a huge turn off for me. I thought this would be about the levelling experience as they advertised, and instead they rush people to the end game and cram people in small locations. Still is a lot of fun, but whatever Classic+ is if they end up doing it, I hope they'll respect the levelling a bit more.
Thank you! :)
This is why I play private servers.
I grew up on private servers and they rock... definitely the move now if you're not someone who enjoys SoD!
Wildgrowth represent!
wg fam
YES! :D
Commenting as someone who has played Discovery *and* Turtle WoW I prefer the latter. SoD is defined by a lot of surface-level event/mechanical changes which often don’t combine well with the Classic experience. A lot of runes try to round off the hard edges of certain classes. Notable for me is the warrior. My go-to with levelling is a Tauren Warrior because I like the challenge but many of the runes really seem designed to make levelling the warrior way easier which I feel goes against the design that worked in classic of different classes having different strengths/weaknesses when levelling. Same for giving heals to mages and the exp buffs in general. It feels like contrary to the name SoD isn’t particularly interested in the world itself and wants to funnel players into relatively narrow sections of new content.
Meanwhile Turty fills out the maps with new quests and zones to make levelling more Freeform as you have way more viable options and you get to choose where you go. Different levelling challenges allow you to tailor the difficulty and add replay ability to the levelling experience. They also committed to a direction for the lore, allowing them to add new stories without being constrained by BC, or Wrath’s plotlines.
Overall SoD to me reeks of cheapness, a compromised understanding of the appeal of classic WoW, and low commitment to the content. The seasonal progression, retrofitted raids, and locational events are all cool ideas but they feel extremely surface-level compared to the effort an indie team like Turty have put in. Ideally I would like to see the best of both approaches together however I’m not confident Blizzard are even capable of committing to a proper classic+ model because I would be surprised if given the years of scandals they have retained or attracted any talented devs who also understand the appeal of classic. Maybe Metzen.
@@Bushflare issue with turtle WoW is that it’s still very pants on head retarded with its lore.
I really appreciate the thoughts, thank you for all the details! :D
@@Jediwarlock
(^_^)b And I dig the vintage lore. That’s the Warcraft with which I fell in love all the way back in WC2. It feels good to speculate on what should have been, if bittersweet.
I can join in on the Turtle WoW devs doing all the wonderful lore, zone, quest, item adding! Truly amazing!
recently cancelled my wow subscription
only played because of SOD, but now that i reached endgame i understand that in the end what they added and what they changed was dissapointing
Yeah, it's not as much as I was first hoping that's for sure :/ ...
Funny enough I was just discussing "the old days" (tm) with a friend and mentioned discovery sounding conceptually interesting as opposed to just playing Classic up to Wrath again. I haven't watched your video but was happy to see you posted it 6 hours ago. Consider this your algorithmic engagement and I hope this blows up for you.
when most people discuss the "old days", you are not remembering how it was in reality, but how you remember it and how you feel about it. which is why the classic servers have had such negative discourse from a lot of people. like a grandpa reminiscing about his childhood, ignoring or forgetting all the bad things and only remembering the positive.
Thanks so much! I'm hope you enjoyed it :)
@@Shiirow That was largely the conclusion that we had too. WoW was pretty much the only time the two of us remembering engaging with the game systems of an MMO actually being fun, in our experience in all other cases it was the people we were with and the circumstances of our lives. We can't really remember a single MMO where actually engaging with the game absent those things was fun. FWIW I am "THAT GUY" who is literally (and happily) married to someone I met on World of Warcraft, so this game is very meaningful to me despite the fact that I haven't played seriously since....a time I'd rather not admit.
He's mostly interested in a chill game to play. It sounds like in some ways season of discovery might be the game for him (the leveling experience) in others not so much (the endgame). We are also unsure as to whether we actually would find them fun NOW at nearly 40, or if they were just fun because we hadn't had them at the time.
Despite liking phase 1 in sod, it was the staggard level release that caused me to fall off. Because so many people would stop playing the guild I was in fell apart twice. If they had just added the runes and quests but went all the way to max level, I do not think so many guilds would of collapsed.
And those that made it to end game would have stuck around longer.
Or at least that is what I think.
That's a fair opinion! I know a lot of guilds felt hampered by the level caps taking so long.
I feel like filling in quests for the "problem levels" and fleshing out unfinished zones and areas would have been perfect. Maybe add some mana-regen options for the non-meta specs so they can at least play the game, but otherwise things are fine as-is
I like those ideas :)
The dragging on of phase 3 bored me so much that i quit but i kind of want to try again after this
It's definitely been a bit of a positive bump here in P4 :)
SoD is not all bad but the dev team is. Glad to see SoD talked about.
Thanks for watching!
Meanwhile, Turtle WoW feels like home.
I'm glad you're enjoying that! :) I've heard a lot of good things about TWoW!
@@Jediwarlock It's so fun questing in the open world and discovering a new quest hub that you KNOW wasn't there in vanila, but it just feels like it was. They do an amazing job at classic+, so I hope Blizz pays attention.
Yea i agree. Ive been playing private servers and retail since 05, and the vision just isnt in the right place.
To some extent its rather simple, there is only one option at the peak of the phase. Recreating dungeons into raids is a good idea however outright replacing the normal version left a sour taste for me.
The few quests they put in are a highlight, there is so much to add to fill in the gaps just for building up how wrath happened. Or lore, finding new stuff around the world like a message in a bottle from pandaria, maybe even a quest...
Vanilla had so much more planned but had to abandon in favor of paid expansion models.
Good thoughts! I was really wishing for more open-world quests too...
Genuinely the most accurate review of SoD from an active players pov. Sod had plenty of Ls but imo it’s the best thing blizzard has put out in years.
Also hot take but GDKP removal was a mistake.
Removing the GDKPs definitely drove a portion of the playerbase away instead of dealing with the base issue of gold farming/botting :(
the first blizzcon after 4 years on my birthday and i couldn't even go
Cool?
Oh no! D:
P1 of SOD was amazing, but during P2 it became clear that the classes were going to be mega OP and it became 'classic+retail'. Classic was good because it was hard. Then they added those shitty 'PVP' events that didn't really have anything to do with PVP so I decided to quit until they make Classic+. If they don't mess it up, I'll play it forever.
Totally agree!
I would love for SoD to get its own server to enable more wide-spread changes and new areas, but if Sod gets its own server without them bringing Wrath back, I swear to God!
I am so mad they didn't keep around TBC and Wrath Era! But once again, those are their own versions of clients and I doubt they wanted to manage that many of them :(
for me and my friend the level 25 lock lasted too long. I understand the reason for it was to level multiple characters to 25 and gather all your runes but with the casual classic fans there wasn't enough. pvp was fun but not enough to keep people playing. my entire guild quit and I was the only one to return for the next patch and with no friends I didn't want to play.
I need new friends to play wow with.
Ah, I hope you find some!! My original guild died off too :(
SoD was always a chance for blizzard to test the waters for a Classic + and SoD has done a good job with that was also pissed off A LOT of players who have left calling SoD not classic+ but more modern/retail -. Classic and to a good extent BC don't really have a combat rotation system but a combat management system. When playing SoD at higher levels it feels more like WotLK or Cata. For many players this had been a strong departure from when they believe classic should be. The insane leveling speed is another thing that feels extremely anti classic for many. The changes to gameplay has boosted everyone damage to crazy levels, thus making leveling in the open world far easier then in unchanged classic. To a large chunk of the classic community leveling is just as important or even more so then max level. As for season 3 lasting so long that was because blizzard didn't want things to overlap. You had TWW Beta started, classic cata pre-patch, classic cata launch, MoP remix, and Plunder storm. Blizzard has so many version of wow running they don't want to release any version without giving another time to breath. I believe there will be a classic + at some point I just don't know if they can do it in a way to make the majority of classic players happy.
i refuse to try WW out of principle for that reason
We'll have to see what happens! Hopefully they'll keep the good ideas and scrap the bad in favor of other things :)
Loving the runes, while playing in classic 60 wow. I don't think I'd enjoy stock classic as much, with no flexibility in most class specs or dual spec.
That's a good point! I think experimenting with the new specs is one reason people really enjoy SoD :)
@Jediwarlock totally! I'm playing new classes I never thought I'd enjoy, or be able to get a rhythm in.
Solo hunter with lone wolf, mixed with beast mastery dual spec has been so much fun!
Before I watch this video, I do want to say one thing about player reception and expectations of SoD; it can't and won't make everyone happy. I guarantee people got themselves overhyped with expectations and were let down when there weren't any new classes or specs, only different ways to play the current ones. And as someone who didn't really get into SoD and watched how people complained about everything (despite it being a seasonal/experimental thing at no extra charge, mind), I think players did let their expectations cloud their judgement.
Note that I don't really have much experience with SoD and am only speaking as a long time Classic/Retail player.
After watching it, a few things; people seem to forget the title of this experience. *Season* of Discovery. It's not a permanent fixture. The argument of making an entirely new client for a version of WoW that will last, at most, 2 years seems like a waste of development time. I understand peoples wanting to find NEW things, but at that Blizzcon, they DID say there weren't going to be any new, groundbreaking lore reveals or anything like that, just small twists here and there. To add entirely new (as in, not reusing certain areas/dungeons) zones and quests would mean going against that statement; people do seem to forget things said or twist them out of context out here on the internet.
On the topic of adding content, there's only so much you can do within the realm of 'Classic' without that loud minority of players shouting 'they're just making it retail', just like another comment on this video said (and that was just over the *runes*). You can only tweak world PVP so much before the retail accusations start, and at its core, its basically just killing other players, making it more intricate would just make it a MOBA IMO. Again, twists, not entire overhauls.
The one thing I do know is that the playerbase seems to want to optimize their play as much as possible, and this goes for Classic, SoD, Cata, and Retail. Hell, people were saying within the first week or so that MoP Remix didn't have enough time to earn all the collectable stuff, despite it being 3 months long and people having already optimized leveling and bronze currency collection. People burned themselves out because they HAD to earn all that stuff, and that mindset is there in SoD too. Not saying it's 100% of the playerbase, but a good majority.
Player reception and expectations are high because people want a classic+ and since we don't get much information about how blizzard is thinking if this could have been the classic+ if no one said their disagreeances. The reception and expectations are players really really not wanting classic+ to be messed up with, players do not trust blizzard to make a good classic+ and so the reception is loud and clear.
I mean just look at era. They can't help themselves but to touch it and change things from the original game. The new guild tab is horrible and the mouse click functions like retail still since around wrath. They added polearms for druids and a new world buff for alliance (those last 2 were removed with enough outcry but the other changes remain).
This is not just "a thing". Season of discovery has been overall a disappointment. You can like it like I do, but also be critical of it.
Blizz would NEVER be wasting money if it were developing a new engine for the game, we need player and guild housing. It is time to lay the old man to rest so we can have the rest of the things that have become basic QOL for the genre. How the fuck are we JUST NOW GETTING WARBANDS AND EVEN THEN ITS NOT FOR OLD CONTENT CAUSE OLD CONTENT IS CODED LIKE SHIT ON AN OLD DEFUNCT VERSION OF THEIR ANCIENT ENGINE. LMAO
This is a good comment. I expected the "dark" side referenced in this video to be more player driven and, in a sense, it is. Managing expectations is tough for a company to do, and as players, we really let our imaginations run wild with possibilities and let ourselves down when reality can't meet those expectations.
Good comment
Super vidéo !
Thank you! :)
I really enjoy sod phase 4. I dont see many logs frogs anymore. The server is not as populated which makes me recognize many player's on my server and i found a guild to raid with because people recognized me too and asked me to join. Its not for everyone amd maybe got lucky with that. but i enjoy this phase very much😊
It's been a nice phase! :)
Also 40g a day for blackrock dailies is pretty lit, it pays for my consumes for sure
Haha yeah!
I am having the best time playing Ascension with Adventure Mode and Resolute Mode right now. Unfortunately, the world is dead, but at least this combination provides for a fun solo experience, unlike the "normal" classic.
I'm glad you're enjoying that! :)
What are the best WOTLK private servers? I’ve been playing on Turtle WoW, but my nostalgia is more for WOTLK
I know Warmane was one of the more popular ones (WotLK and MoP options I think), but I haven't checked in a while so I'm not sure what's still around :)
I was enjoying SoD until I did a DM group and got yelled at by the healer for not following the meta build at level 17. After that I gave up on it completely. I’ve just been playing regular classic on whitemane there are tons of people running around because of the community driven fresh
Oh no! I'm glad you are enjoying Era, though! Getting into a toxic group is no fun :(
lot of the issues with me and SoD come to community mismanagement, both self-induced and on blizzard devs themselves.
1 - Bots and gold buying. Don't think this needs to be explained - Blizzard sucks at managing it, and the community sucks at abusing that fact.
2 - Pug culture. Think I can speak for most people that - finding groups is just a terrible experience. Unless you're in a guild's raiding team you're kind of screwed for end-game content.
3 - Toxicity. People fucking suck, man, what can I say? I'll throw this out there. Every 1 in 5 dungeon runs with randos, just casual levelling dungeon runs, have had at least one sour moment that ruined the whole thing. For the points above, I mostly entirely blame the community for digging this grave.
4 - Game design. These are just the issues I've had with the game's core design on a fundamental level.
- Incursions. Horrible idea to solve... what, gold income? Levelling speed? All of that as a re-skin of the cenarion repeatable quest grind.
- Retail-isms. New toys, new mounts, even transmog, all over the place! What frustrates me the most is not knowing where all these characters will get thrown after SoD if anywhere. IMO, they don't belong in Era, or at least not with all the custom stuff.
- Tuning. Due to the nature of adding abilities, having to tune things constantly just gets tiring. One day you're powerful, next day you're pathetic. Which also counts as a retail-ism, tbh.
- Raid difficulties. Already didn't like it in SoM when AQ40 came out with 4 difficulty tiers and not really any custom boss fights. OH and the 11th MC boss is... a major letdown for me, honestly.
- This goes half and half with community and Blizzard - but the removal of 40 man raiding. I like the idea of having a raid require up to 40 people, that just feels epic. In *practice* though it is insanely difficult to manage because of the way people are with wildly different schedules, so I don't blame the community for wanting smaller raid sizes, but I am a little disappointed that this is just better for the game.
SoD did a couple of good things though.
- Revamping old dungeons into raids, and creating a whole new dungeon. Yknow, kind of the common point for a lot of people with the idea of Classic+.
- Trying new specs for some classes, and making underperforming specs viable. Key point is trying - IDK how well its all turned out now.
- The way you acquired runes, at least in phase 1, felt good for the most part. I did almost every class's runes and I liked them all initially. Though for me, in the future, I want runes just turned into regular quests, I don't actually want the abilities.
- Ashenvale PvP was fun. I liked it. Chaotic and large scale PvP is my jam. *I acknowledge the fact that PvP did not always occur, but when it did it was fun.*
Thank You for all those details! I appreciate it and agree with a lot of what you're saying. :)
A mass of class specific quests isn't my cup of Classic Plus. For me, SoD should have been about the world and new adventures for ALL players regardless of class or skill. Your main class quests, are different than my own meaning we both have a very different experience of SoD.
So true!
OMG I'm famous. This is Dwayne btw. Nice vid :)
Dwaynnnnnne this is Boomchickën :D
Heyyyy! :D
Hi! :D
Wrath of the lich king broadcast
in recent years we have had 2019 classic, season of mastery, the classic servers and now season of discovery. for me, im getting burnt out of looking at the exact same scenery over and over again. i have played sod since day 1 and i do like that it is at least somewhat different, however the 5-6 days that you arent raiding you really are just doing the exact same thing that we've done for the past 5 years. i think my biggest issue with sod is that while there are some changes in some aspects of the game, overall its still the same zones, same quests, same everything besides some tweaks here and there. maybe i've played this version of wow too much and its me. besides the first week or 2 of phase 3 before the nerfs, none of the raids have been particularly hard. could also be that im in an amazing guild who progresses quickly. i want to stay the full duration of this seasonal server but it really is hard to continue looking at the same scenery every day of the week.
That's fair! If you're looking for a lot of new stuff that really moves the old world forward, SoD hasn't done a lot of that yet...
25th comment! Let's Go! ;) Jedi Friday
WOOOO! Thanks man! :)
I disagree with your conclusion. New areas are difficult to create but not impossible. Plenty of private servers created new areas on vanilla or wotlk version. Sometimes they worldwide desactivate the fatigue to add new islands, sometimes they create a new maze underground or above the sky, sometimes they create a stair game on an unused zone of the game. But if a single person working for free for a private server can do that, what about Blizzard? They can do anything. They could finish abandonned projects. They could desactivate fatigue on only a portion of the map. They can raise islands from the seas. They can even copy/paste already made islands (Gillijim and Lapidis). They can add build something from the first iteration of the Emerald Nightmare, Outland or Nazjatar.
For an unknown reason, they didn't used that potential. And I personnally find it sad. I knew a game master on a private servers that added those things, they weren't 100% perfect (f.i., from the outside the island looked unfinished AND to add a new island you had to manually install a mod, if you fell from a maze in some places your only option was to take the resurection sickness) but he was alone! They were even whole teams of devs on some private servers to add temporary events.
I do not understand why they didn't explored their possibilities.
Oh, they definitely "could have," I'll try and explain a bit more. :) The way the game is set up right now (as I understand it), the devs can't add new zones or seriously update existing ones (via terraforming terrain, etc.) because SoD uses the same game client as regular Classic Era.
Any changes to the game map on this client would mean any new SoD zones would also appear in Classic Era which is of course a problem.
The solution would be to give SoD its own client so the devs could actually try these more ambitious possibilities, but I think from a corporate/financial standpoint Blizzard didn't let SoD expand to this level of investment/commitment. So while the devs would very well have wanted to try these things, the company didn't allow them to (as of yet).
Quickly wanna say, love content and showcasing all the small things and details that makes classic “classic”, before what actually wanna say.
Have you tried classic+ private servers or considered. The likes of turtle wow or the soon to release Project Epoch (some point in 2025 hopefully). Would personally love to see you dive into or/and look through Project Epochs custom content and hear your thoughts.
Epoch and Turtle are just discount SaD, nothing new or + about them.
@@Shiirowby this comment alone I can tells u haven’t looked through Project Epochs new content. 2 new dungeons, 3 raids, new quest lines in zones that rly lacked, like they have added a whole new area in Arathi highlands, so alliance players has a reason to go quest there.
I get that it’s not like SoD in terms of class revamping, but that’s not what they’re aiming for which I like. Make every spec playable and feel unique, but without adding tons of new stuff.
Turtle wow it’s yeah pretty bland.
Thank you for the kind words! :) I have considered TWoW but haven't had the time yet... I do enjoy seeing the trailers and game updates to see what private devs have been trying out tho!
rune system gigabad
video good
It was exciting at the beginning but has since dropped off quite a bit for me :/
Phase 4 has been a lot of fun tbh
Yeah! :)
incursions killed the fun for me, togheter with the fact that i worked my ass off for hard to get runes, that later blizzard decided to make it easier to get, after i had spent 200 gold and 20 hours farming portals.
sunken temple was overtuned, but alot of bosses and difficulty was just right. then they nerfed everything and made everything so easy to clear you could do it will your eyes closed.
Those are good points!
The only missing thing with classic is the gameplay on certain class. It is particularly visible in HL when nobody can do any damage for exemple beside rogues/war/mages/warlock.
My beloved class , hunter , is boring , half of your time is spent waiting for cds.
That was my hope for SOD.
I suppose the problem now is that when a little tweak was needed , they put too many gameplay stuff into it. And with that the necessity to change everything at each phase. Adding an internal cooldowns here , changing a proc.
Smaller increments but definitive ones would have been great.
You make some good points!!
Personally right now my biggest pet peeve is the rune swapping when respeccing and playing pet build as a hunter, lone wolf build for AoE, and swapping about 6 runes over every time, It's too much
that said I wish we got more WoW Alpha talents (way more specialised) in something like classic+ less of this temporary nily willy power more permanent feeling impactful choices you made while selecting your spec/talents, perhaps even just an extended talent tree for classic or a 4th Tree for every class with "generic" talents that dont follow an order can pick any
Good points!! I think for cases like yours they need to add something like the Gear Set system so you can swap multiple Runes at the same time.
SoD really just needed to add more stuff for the average player to do. Some caves or simple dungeons with new elite enemies and loot. Some new chests to find hidden in the environment. A few funny bits of dialogue here and there. But most importantly, new quests to fill in the gaps in the levelling experience. I don't think they would even necessarily need to change the geography, just add new instance portals or re-purpose existing caves.
Instead they made 'difficult' challenge zones that predictably turned the community into elitist douchebags who won't allow most specs to do the raids.
They really need to get over the mentality of 'catering to the high-end players only' that almost killed retail multiple times. I played a warlock and legit got rejected from groups because my character was human and not a minutely more optimal gnome.
So true! I love your thoughts. I was quite disappointed to find out that the cave used in the promotional trailer was actually just the Gold Coast Quarry (I thought there was a new cave in the Westfall hills, but nope) :/
We are in a minimum viable product. Couldn't even get its own client or budget. Look at soms failure. They execs are being so cautious but finally allowing art budget? Phase 1 was promising but we're just hindered at the core from tech side and also lore
I agree!
Great video
Thank you! :)
I genuinely think community based voting system for vanilla plus would be the best thing Blizzard could implement, but you would have to test the water with incredibly niche/minor things first as a means of gaging what the player base wants. We are talking polearms for druids/paladins, fixing certain bugs, etc. The majority of the playerbase are idiots who would happily vote for retail changes if they could.
Also there will need to be gate keeping. Warrior players can only vote for warrior changes etc.
Polling for class changes is a disastrous idea, if it dictates the decision. If you just want to see sentiments sure. Gee I wonder will this class vote to buff their own class or nerf it. Will they want this new strong ability or no? Only reason voting works in osrs is because it is a classless mmorpg where anyone can acquire any skill. Even then the polling for pve vs pvp community changes have hot debate and petty spiteful behavior, such as voting against pvp changes. For example, the more hardcore pvp community may want arena just as an option but casual pvpers and pve players may think it's bad for the game or hate the competitive pvp esports type of thing and vote against it. You really can't just replicate it, if done it needs a ton of wise caveats. Like if your class needs a buff but you can only decide between buffing a burst ability or consistent dps. Or a mobility or defensive ability. Maybe better off voting on the nerfs than the buffs. What it could work is the content that is the most general. New features or zones that'll affect everyone
@@ez6791 that’s I said you’d have to get gatekeep it and start the polling with bare minimum changes. If people start voting against them, then don’t poll bigger changes in the future. If they do, test the water with something slightly more impactful.
If the community polling is only allowed to go one way, then why poll at all? Idk if you've visited the wow forums ever, but wow players are not the smartest bunch
Surveys and gauging the community with minor changes would be a good step I think :)
I dunno, p3 was pretty fun: st was great even prenerf, runes added a lot, flavorful items in stv and tier sets. Was fun except incursions but If properly tuned xph/gph wise they would be great too
I thought it was pretty good too and I enjoyed ST :) I just wanted to include the general vibe of most of the community during the time as well.
We just want fresh era servers
with GDKP being against the rules...
Also, i think "iron man style" would be good (no trade) in a specific server... yeah, ill sacrifice flask if that means people get to PLAY THE GAME instead of BUYING everything
@@Mexican00b yea this please, fresh vanilla, ban all the bots, outlaw GDKPs and classic will infintely better
Some people do I thek sod is Just a better version of classic.
Especially when we talk about classes.They just feel so much better to play.Some people want just classic fresh.
But there's also a lot of people that could care less they want something new.
Something something Deviate Delight
I think those would be a really good addition for some people :)
Well. I like it. I wanted a casual experience and that’s how I play it. It turns out when you do that and shun the efficiency gamers, you can enjoy it.
It's true! I'm glad I found a nice casual guild to hang with :)
Was kind of excited in phase 1 - phase 2 just went to total shit the moment everyone was just doing logs and meta garbage. Totally took away from any fun of trying out alternative builds and stuff which entirely took away from the point of it for me. Bailed after running gnomer a couple of times, was just too toxic and crap.
Meta definitely became toxic in P2 O_O ... I was able to find a casual-friendly circle which I am thankful for :)
im sure creating a REAL classic plus would be too time consuming to put Blizz devs on. im sure they would have to mess with a lot of source code. and i dont think Classic or SoD or HC pull in enough money to warrant moving those devs...
There are lots of challenges, for sure! :o
i would bet nobody would becrying in sod if the added 10 to 15 new dugneons and more raids + zones to explore new tiers fuck if the would add loads of new content that would fit in vanila and not make it insanly hard at start to not give evrybody reson to gatekeep 75% of players out of content becus its too hard
It's true! They are now trying "new" dungeons (instanced areas that already exist) but I think there isn't enough truly original content to make it a super big hit right now...
@@Jediwarlock there are loads of areas they can add in to the game on the basic map you can see them all they just need some work and and they will be good to goo there is 5 raid tiers worth of posible content for the game thats double size of clasic
Haven't tried SoD yet, now I'm definitely not going to lmao. Sounds like turbo timegated fomo.
prepare u ass for pvp rep farm as fk, rng loot, raid logs, worlds buff shit, and ofc, no alt friendly
As a lore and map nerd as well I got excited for the same things as you did... I guess I understand why we didn't get that stuff, but what we did get is so boring? At this point I'm thinking if I ever really wanna see Classic+ I should just go try Turtle WoW.
I've heard good things about TWoW! :)
My issue is that nothing was "new" everything except a couple things were in retail at some point, i played a rogue for season 1 and 2 (didnt play 3 and definitely not playing 4), like cool look, i call mutilate, omg guys its envenom. the things i was most excited about was the rune where when someone in your party critted you got a combo point against them. thats was cool design, but they ruined the tier by making it 20 man raids, i raided with 7 others friends, so we only had to pug 2, and we ended up picking up a regular, so realistically only 1, now you are telling me i need to get 11 more? just out of no where, no reason for it, just to do so? me and all my friends quit within a day or 2 in season 3. we raided when we were all available, with 20 people now, you need to set up more time and pick one, and most of them mythic raided castle nathria, and setting a schedule like that wasnt something they were interested in, neither was i. I enjoyed pushing logs as a rogue, i got really good parses. especially for my gear score. but it doesnt matter because at the end of season 2, i wasnt even fully geared, only missing 2 lockouts total in that season. to me, sod is meant to be a more retail version of classic, i like that, but they removed all the good parts about retail and said deal with it. no new actual content, just recycled shit.
(added after watching full video)
tldr: sod failed at everything it tried to be because of cutting corners and removing/adding the good/bad parts of other content they have in other versions. They tried to be a modern classic, failed. They tried to add replay ability, failed. They tried to add "new" abilities to WoW, and some how fucking failed.
I love wow, i loved season 1 and 2 of sod, i loved shadowlands and df, even after taking a break. But WoW is slowly becoming a full blown mobile game, and SoD's failures and repeats of mistakes, proves that.
(I wrote this first comment im replying to before i watched the video)
im now on the season 2 section with the blood moon event, this thing absolutely blows, its a really fucking cool concept, i like the idea a lot. but because it was open world, often I would get phased away from my group, or the server would lag so much that i would backstab someone and 4 seconds later i get a pop up saying i cant because im not behind them. then i made a mage alt, and in 2 runs of the event got enough tokens to get everything, and within 4 more able to get the mount. all this because mass regen and arcane explosion compounded 5 times makes you practically invincible unless you are stunned. and they constantly nerfed mage healer because they were broken, why not let them for a season? its seasonal content for christ sake
(now just finished phase 3)
nightmare incursions also ruined the last amount of hope i had for the game mode. the xp wasnt an issue, that was perfectly fine. but when you tell me, i get 20 gold from one quest, at lvl 40 im gonna spam that till i cant anymore. i had multiple characters with logs full of every single one of these quests with the items in my bag to share them. i made so much money in the time i played, then i looked at the bis list, i need a darkmoon card, ok cool i will go buy one, well botters farmed the incursions, no surprise, and the card i needed was like 4k on my server. what am i to do about that?
(just finished the video)
sod is just a failure, the devs never listened to feed back till it was way to late, instead of being a spin on classic with retail addons it just was a modern classic, removing the ease of access from retail, and keeping the ever long walks of doing something again for the 3rd time in the past few years. it doesnt work. same thing happened to remix in retail, they removed the fun of grind for power, the ability to "SOLO RAIDS" like why would i go solo a raid when i can join a group of people where 1 guy does 10m dps and i just afk and maybe b rez someone. I didnt even know season 4 came out for a couple days, thats how little ive heard about it. And again, there is nothing new, its just add system that failed before, add ability that was removed before, make raid harder to tune for increase player power, repeat.
Its not actual game design, wow is just a gacha game if you arent a botter a flooding the economy
WOW, thank you for all those details, I really appreciate it! The promise was there... it definitely didn't reach the expectations it set for itself in a lot of areas.
I dropped out when they shut the server I was playing on
Oh no! I didn't know they shut down some of the SoD servers... having to move/consolidate is always frustrating :(
they were stupid to do vanilla first, they should have done this first and more people would have played.
The other way is way cheaper.
It's possible!
Going from 10m with friends to 20m in phase 3 killed my guild. Had to merge guilds, and neither survived. I'm still playing in phase 4, found a new home and having a lot more fun than phase 2-3. I hope people give it another chance or blizz take these learnings into Classic +
Why play sod over Era? Era has so much class limitation. Want to tank? can ONLY play a warrior. your class can heal? well its GOING to heal in raids. Sod's changes fix that, but the best part is its not all tied to runes, you can put the abilities in the game without this hotswapping rune system and it would work well.
Same thing happened to me!! New guild is solid and the new spec options I know a lot of people enjoy :)
Here before the McBaldie
Haha, nice!
For a Season of Discovery there was nothing to Discover
only thing most people discovers in SaD was they tolerance threshold of patience exhaustion.
Discovered I was wasting my time.
Yeah :( Apart from the Runes and their quests the "discoveries" didn't live up to the hype for a lot of people.
Plus .. dose not mean mage healers , rog & warclock tanks , just Small brains .. trying to retail vanilla.. sad when this was the blizzcon announcement .. to the classic community.. and they shit on "CLASSIC" ... we dont get a blizzcon this year ... feels bad
Feels bad too :(
I understand people being disillusioned about season of discovery but I'm still glad they released it. I'm sure there's a decent amount of people out there that like the vanilla gameplay with some extra spice to it and really even if it ultimately gets boring it's always worth playing a new game for the initial rush of people playing and discovering things on their own.
As I told a friend, the last good moment to play an MMO was the original launch for Classic, the next best moment is whenever a new game or expansion releases. You don't know when it's the next big MMO experience you're going to get for a while, and really the only way to figure out is to try it out yourself even if it only lasts for a few months.
I like those thoughts. :) I'm glad they did too, even if it wasn't 100% good I still like the attempt made by the team.
Try Turtle WoW, you’re welcome
I've been wanting to! :D
A bunch of retail lovers and retail developers ruined a potentially awesome Classic remake.
It's true... lots of missed opportunities for more "Classic" memories and experiences!
Incursions killed the game.
I haven't tried Turtle Wow yet but the fact that they're even ATTEMPTING to make WoW with the Unreal Engine speaks volumes about the efforts of actual Blizz/Microsoft employees.
The issue there is they kinda have no choice. They built their servers on the vanilla architecture. Not Wrath, Vanilla. They wanted as authentic an experience as possible and they got it, bugs, headaches and all. And unless they want to update the client themselves so it can run cleanly on hardware 20 years advanced from what it was designed to run on they were forced to port it to a different engine.
On the bright side it will mean far easier development for them because even creating new models in the vanilla engine is pain and it’s amazing what a small team did within those constraints.
there's no way they will manage to bring it to UE though. It would take literal years and most people would already forget or lose interest.
also it's not like UE automatically means a better game lol.
@@Alechs777
It's not really optional for them so they either make it work or Turtle WoW... won't.
same terrible gameplay, shinier graphics... yeah sounds like a recipe for success, the delusional classic andys will love it. just like they love SaD.
Jedi joined the "content crew" and became a content Andy. Dude who cares if there is dev made content or not. It's all about player made content in this beautiful playground devs made.
That's fair, I know TWoW and others are really popping off lately! I always like seeing the game updates and the like from private servers doing their thing :)
all they had to add is more dungeons raids and quests with along with the runes nothing else it would be soo good and finish unfinished zones and add them to the game thats it karazan finish all islands on the map new isntences just keep clasic gameplay somewhat + far more content the scarlet citadel is bullshit they added that soo you would understand that you would spend 12 levels in sm the amout of new legitimete content added not copied is one and that is dfc wich i bet most people wanted anyway if they thought of it
You make some good points!! They still have a lot of opportunities they haven't looked at yet...
Phase 1 was amazing. Phase 2 and beyond was horrible
It definitely has dropped off a bit from the initial hype :'(
10:15 reverse gear engaged LoL
Can't spell WASD without S lol