There's a famous quest in The Barrens called Lost in Battle which has you searching for the wife of an orc called Mankrik, with no clue as to her location in the vast play area or hint that you were actually searching for a body generically labelled as "Beaten Corpse". Almost no-one could complete it without annoying everyone in the infamous Barrens chat channel by asking, and what should have been a poignant bit of storytelling fleshing out the hardscrabble life of the orc caravan became a running joke. That quest is back in WOW Classic(WoW Classic Gold) - unfixed, of course.
It's stunning how slow the game is compared to modern WOW, and how much more work it requires. It makes sense that the levelling is slower - back then, the level cap was 60; now it's 120 - but that's not all. Combat has a much more deliberate rhythm. I could swear the global cooldown on all skills is quicker now, but individual skill cooldowns are certainly longer and you can expect to spend a lot of time auto-attacking and waiting. Corpses need to be looted individually. Health and mana regenerate much more slowly, so you need to take regular breaks to eat and drink.
Playing a hunter, I encountered many systems that have since been stripped away. I needed to be mindful not to run out of arrows and I was required to switch between ranged and melee weapons depending on the distance to the target. I also had to micromanage my pet a lot more, both in combat and out of it. It needed to be fed to keep it happy, gaining loyalty and dealing maximum damage. I dismissed the plainstrider pet the demo provided me with and trained a big cat instead, but this pet was now several levels below me, which meant it needed to be trained in vital skills like Growl (a taunt) and was ineffective against the mobs I needed to fight for some time. All of this is completely foreign to contemporary Hunter gameplay, having been streamlined out of the game.
Is that a good thing? This question gets to the very heart of WOW Classic and its reason for being, and it's not so easy to resolve. World of Warcraft is certainly a lot easier to enjoy now than it was then, but while the questing is far more entertaining, it has become a near-frictionless vehicle for delivering storylines, progress and regional flavour at the expense of actual gameplay. Outside of dungeons in modern WOW, you almost never die, and you certainly never need to think about changing your skill rotation.
I was shocked, in the WOW Classic demo, to die frequently while attempting simple quests (and also shocked at the length of the hikes back to my corpse). A mob one or two levels above me might cause me trouble, a group of two definitely would, and a wandering patrol could easily wipe me out. I sometimes had to stop and think before wading in, checking enemy positioning and considering ways to pull stragglers away from the group or use utility skills like Scare Beast to buy me a little time. I had to mind my mana level and my pet's happiness before starting combat. Minor buffs from crafted armour patches or scrolls were, all of a sudden, quite valuable.
More WoW products in https://www.mmotank.com/Wow-classic-Gold.html
There's a famous quest in The Barrens called Lost in Battle which has you searching for the wife of an orc called Mankrik, with no clue as to her location in the vast play area or hint that you were actually searching for a body generically labelled as "Beaten Corpse". Almost no-one could complete it without annoying everyone in the infamous Barrens chat channel by asking, and what should have been a poignant bit of storytelling fleshing out the hardscrabble life of the orc caravan became a running joke. That quest is back in WOW Classic(WoW Classic Gold) - unfixed, of course.
It's stunning how slow the game is compared to modern WOW, and how much more work it requires. It makes sense that the levelling is slower - back then, the level cap was 60; now it's 120 - but that's not all. Combat has a much more deliberate rhythm. I could swear the global cooldown on all skills is quicker now, but individual skill cooldowns are certainly longer and you can expect to spend a lot of time auto-attacking and waiting. Corpses need to be looted individually. Health and mana regenerate much more slowly, so you need to take regular breaks to eat and drink.
Playing a hunter, I encountered many systems that have since been stripped away. I needed to be mindful not to run out of arrows and I was required to switch between ranged and melee weapons depending on the distance to the target. I also had to micromanage my pet a lot more, both in combat and out of it. It needed to be fed to keep it happy, gaining loyalty and dealing maximum damage. I dismissed the plainstrider pet the demo provided me with and trained a big cat instead, but this pet was now several levels below me, which meant it needed to be trained in vital skills like Growl (a taunt) and was ineffective against the mobs I needed to fight for some time. All of this is completely foreign to contemporary Hunter gameplay, having been streamlined out of the game.
Is that a good thing? This question gets to the very heart of WOW Classic and its reason for being, and it's not so easy to resolve. World of Warcraft is certainly a lot easier to enjoy now than it was then, but while the questing is far more entertaining, it has become a near-frictionless vehicle for delivering storylines, progress and regional flavour at the expense of actual gameplay. Outside of dungeons in modern WOW, you almost never die, and you certainly never need to think about changing your skill rotation.
I was shocked, in the WOW Classic demo, to die frequently while attempting simple quests (and also shocked at the length of the hikes back to my corpse). A mob one or two levels above me might cause me trouble, a group of two definitely would, and a wandering patrol could easily wipe me out. I sometimes had to stop and think before wading in, checking enemy positioning and considering ways to pull stragglers away from the group or use utility skills like Scare Beast to buy me a little time. I had to mind my mana level and my pet's happiness before starting combat. Minor buffs from crafted armour patches or scrolls were, all of a sudden, quite valuable.
More WoW products in https://www.mmotank.com/Wow-classic-Gold.html