Welcome to yet another Sunday Brain Dump!
Topic 1: Haven’t done much
I have to admit to not having done much in the last week. After many years of not watching hockey regularly, I’ve returned to it, and it’s the playoffs now. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, have played 7 games and have now won 4 (they won Game 7 against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Tampa) and are now moving on to the next round. So I haven’t done a whole lot in WoW. But I also don’t have a lot to do in WoW. Farming remains the constant chore, but it does sometimes feel like a chore. Maybe I’ll take month off or something. I feel like I need to find a goal in the game.
Topic 2: Classic Plus?
There’s a lot of talk about a Classic Plus mode — hints from Blizz, a possible announcement at BlizzCon, stuff like that. And there’s the final shutdown of Turtle WoW coming this month. I can understand, Blizzard/Microslop need to protect their trademarks and copyrighted material. But my understanding is that Turtle WoW was developing new CLASSIC content? Wow. That’s wild. And it’s SO COOL. Different zones, mobs, quests, loot? Incredible.
So is that what Blizzard’s potential Classic Plus mode will include?
I played a tiny bit of Season of Discovery and I … didn’t like it. Was it kind of neat to see new talents/spells/abilities on different classes and specs? Sure. But they were all a bit weird to me. A mage, healing? Very weird. And having some key abilities available at like, early levels? My nephew was a rogue who had shadowstep extremely early on. I don’t know if that’s the way to go, at least for me and my interest. Part of what I always enjoyed about levelling was the gaining power aspect. Getting talents at 10 and then building on that every single level, even if you didn’t get anything at the trainer, that was awesome. So it’s weird to me to see stuff showing up at the start.
But the idea of exploring new zones at like, 50-60? New quests? New gear? Maybe alternative dungeons or small raids? I’m not saying I would do a ton of that group content, but I’m saying it would interest me.
Topic 3: What happens after Naxxramas?
The question occurs to me that if Classic Plus exists, is Naxxramas still the endgame in Classic? I mean, you typically go Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxxramas, right? With things like ZG and AQ20 thrown in there for people who are maybe trying to gear up to get into something like Molten Core.
But what happens after Naxx? In a Classic Plus, that is? Do you get a Tier 4 that isn’t from Burning Crusade? Or a Tier 5? What about a Tier 6? Because the thing about Classic is that it does have a termination point. After Naxxramas, that was it. You headed to Outlands. Naxx released June 19, 2006 and patch 2.0.1 launched on December 5, 2006, followed quickly by Burning Crusade’s release on January 9, 2007.
So what do you do after Naxx? IS there something after Naxx in a Classic Plus world? I don’t play a ton of Classic these days, but I know that people were definitely raiding Naxx successfully, way more than originally. I’m sure that it having existed for 15+ years before people got into it in Classic servers really helped, as most of the challenges are solved. People know how to do 4 Horsemen. People know how to do Instructor Razuvious. There’s no mystery left. And raids and stuff have gotten harder since Naxx. Kael’thas and Vashj were hard compared to what we saw in Naxx (well, the Wrath version of Naxx at 80, anyway).
Another question: if there is something post-Naxx in a Classic Plus world, does that mean one has to go through MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx to get the gear required to go through whatever comes next? Or will they introduce a catch-up mechanic?
There’s an interesting site, The Classic Project, at wowclassic.plus. These people are not affiliated with Blizzard, but are taking surveys to see how people feel about various bits of change in a potential Classic Plus world. It’s kind of neat, just need to sign in with a Discord account and take the surveys if you like.
In one of the surveys about the world, it asks about attunements.
Should attunements be streamlined/made easier?
- No, and if you touch the Onyxia attunement questline, I’ll lock you away with Marshal Windsor
- Sure, cut out the aggressive travel sections, but keep the spirit of attunements intact
- Yes, I’m tired of going to BRD or grinding righteous orbs just to enter a raid – cut it down and allow players to walk in easily.
I definitely voted no, because I will lock someone away with Marshal Windsor if I need to! I believe that attunements do a lot for bonding and team building.
Seriously, go do these surveys. I’m doing one right now and one of the questions is:
Should Damage/Heal over Time spells be able to crit baseline for all classes? The options are No, DoTs and HoTs shouldn’t crit, Yes, change it to allow them to crit, or Only if they make it a new talent that you can spec into.
And I instinctively went for the talent and then stopped, remembering one of the Blizz folks at a BlizzCon years and years ago saying that if you didn’t take a specific talent in one of the DPS warrior trees, you weren’t being creative or imaginative, you were just being a bad (whatever spec) DPS warrior. So while I don’t particularly like the idea of HoTs and DoTs critting for anyone, I don’t like the idea that you have to talent for it. If there’s an action someone can take in order to get their spells critting, and they don’t take it, that seems like a bad (class name here), right?
Basically, this survey is making me think a lot about what I want to see in a Classic Plus world.
What about you? Any interest in such a thing? What would it look like to you?
When I started playing WoW in 2009, I didn’t even know the Marshal Windsor questline existed. Well, I began playing on the Horde side, but beyond that it had been removed when Wrath dropped, so I was completely unaware that anything as epic as that had existed at one point. So, when Classic released in 2019, boy was I surprised to discover the entire Windsor questline.
Sure, I got a bit tired of seeing Windsor walking through Stormwind on a regular basis, but when Wrath Classic released and that entire questline vanished I really missed it. I blame the desire to bring Varian back, straight out of the comics and books, and into the game once more. It also makes me wonder why Blizz thought it was akin to playing 4-dimensional chess when they had Onyxia split Varian into two people, when it was a LOT easier to simply kill him off and make Anduin your puppet. I mean, he’s a freaking kid, and Lady Prestor is the one effectively in charge in SW.
If anything, Classic Plus needs to incorporate more mid-level questing areas and instances. TBC filled in a few gaps here and there with extra questing in Dustwallow Marsh, but there’s no reason why any new areas have to be max level only. Providing a breadth of activity for players of all levels is something that Blizzard’s dev team has consistently been avoiding, because once they committed to tacking on expacs as things to do after the previous max level it’s hard to get off of that train. One thing that can be done at max level is to create optional Heroic instances, kind of like the Tier 0.5 set quests, but for the entire spectrum of 5-10 person instances.
Another idea that had fallen by the wayside in instance development was the massive dungeon that feels like a real place: the Blackrock Depths or Stratholme or Maraudon type of instances. Instance development went hard into bite-sized chunks and/or wings that could be completed in 1/2 hour or less, but what makes Vanilla Classic so epic at times are dungeon forays into a real living/undead city (BRD or Strat or even the Razorfen instances), where you can get lost in for an entire evening. Trying to speedrun those instances would be a challenge, but that’s not the design emphasis: it’s the world first, game second emphasis that got lost along the way.
As for hockey, I’m happy that Florida isn’t lurking around again. Well, I’m still pissed off that back in the 90s the NHL gave the Ohio franchise to Columbus instead of Cincinnati. We here in Cincy had been supporting two AAA hockey franchises quite well at the time, and instead of rewarding the fan base here with an NHL version of the Cyclones we were passed over entirely to give the franchise to a city that is all Ohio State football all the time.
But if a Canadian team finally wins the Stanley Cup after all this time, I’ll be happy.
Wow, Redbeard, I spent WEEKS of my life attuning people to both MC and Onyxia. Marshal Reginald Windsor and I have a very contentious relationship. I was even attuning people back before Squire Rowe existed and you just sort of had to wait at the Gates of Stormwind for Windsor to show the fuck up. hahahaha!
I suspect they had to do something about the leadership of Stormwind because, you know, we kill Ony in Vanilla/Classic. So you have to progress the story in that Lady Katrana Prestor is no longer there, because we killed her. I think it would have been interesting for her to play the long game, but I guess they had no idea how long WoW would last, so they built it into Vanilla.
Totally agree, re: not just max-level stuff. The idea of having someplace else to go in the 40s, for example, is lovely. I remember Feralas not having a ton of quests and then there was the Hinterlands, also not filled with quests. Another area to explore and quest in would be great there, for example. That awkward time when you’ve done the quests out of Gadget but can’t quite do all the quests in ZF, you know?
re: Heroics… I have always hated heroic anything. I ALREADY KILLED THESE PEOPLE, QUIT MAKING ME DO IT AGAIN. hahahaha! But I understand what you mean. I would NOT be opposed to the sort of Ulduar-type hard modes, where you did something specific to activate them, sort of like the Strat UD 45m Baron run. That was my FAVOURITE part of the T0.5 quest chain. I know every pull still to this day. I would be okay with “here is an optional thing you can do that is more difficult than you’ll think it is and also it will haunt you if you never get it done”. hahaha. Man, we attempted that so many times and succeeded three times — except we didn’t get credit for it once because EITHER my cat, Whisper, or our friend Tia’s imp, Volloz, got the killing blow on the Baron. That was patched shortly after I spent four hours waiting for a GM in the middle of the night to award us credit. Which they did not do.
All on board for long runs, or at least I would have been years ago. I’d get home from a sociology evening class on Tuesdays around 10pm (?) and we’d instantly go do a 2-3 hour Scholomance run. It’s not that Scholo was that hard, it’s that we didn’t really know wtf we were doing back then. Ahhhhh, simpler times.
Yeah, eff Florida!!! And so sorry they gave a team to Columbus. I bet you folks would have had a better name than the Blue Jackets too.
Down one game to Buffalo, but it’s just one game. Hopefully we can recover on Friday!