Long story short, should keep classic balance as-is.
(I suppose I'll be the first in with the unpopular opinion.)The purists want vanilla, I say give them vanilla.....and everything that (didn't) come with it. The second you start giving them QoL improvements and class tweaks then its just pre-Cata "Old World" with a level 60 cap. They want "hard", tedious and time consuming? Give it to them as it was; there shouldn't be any more time or money wasted on this than there already will be.I would also like to edit my comment to include my POV about the nostalgic "Community" of vanilla wow set in the era of 2004-2006/7. The "Community" was (and for the most part still is) mostly composed of the 18-24 year old bracket. The generation that grew up on console games and no online multiplayer experiences. However, 13 years have passed and who knows how many more until this is officially launched. Your "Community" as you remember has grown up. There will be an entirely new generation of players who grew up playing a plethora of different styles of games and many more online games than you did. This means psychologically and socially speaking, that you can NEVER go back to be 100% how it was "back in the day". I am not the same 17 year old kid I was back in 2004 and I doubt many of you are either. Vanilla WoW was the first successful MMO of its kind, thus it was new to literally everyone who played it during its heyday. You will never be able to experience the things people who were there experienced when they speak of "Community" if you hadn't been there during that particular time, nor will you ever have the "Community" you remember ever again. Its gone, I am sorry. Not that anything is wrong with that, but I cannot go back and watch the moon landing on TV and feel/think/experience/talk about the same things the people of 1969 did and if you mention the moon landing to someone born post-1969 today you'll most likely get a response of "Yea, and, what about it?" But hey, I can still watch it on Television and y'all can still grind your booties off in whatever vanilla reboot they decide to do.All of that aside, the ONLY thing I miss are the weird long-as-hell quest chains that explained some elaborate backstories and whatnot of factions that aren't in the game anymore. I do not miss flying from continent to continent to turn them in however; but I lowkey miss the Shen'dralar and DireMaul story. Still dont think its worth the work for the servers though.PS- "Community" is in quotes because I find it to lack modern-play meaning, not to be snarky.
I only tested Classic on a private server for 40/50 hours (Too much lag on it, couldn't really enjoy it), but what I read everywhere is that the balance was terrible. You want to play Tank? War or Nothing. You want to play war DPS ? too bad for you. Same with other spec, not viable in end-game PVE or PVP.Doesn't it bothered player back then? Liking a spec, but not being able to bring it on a difficult raid?Like I said, I didn't play on the Start of WoW, but it's hard to see an unbalanced game now. I will play Classic whatever they do with it, only to see the Old dungeon/raid/quest etc
What is the question that is even being discussed? Of course class balance should be as it was when vanilla WoW was current. Why on earth would you try to invent a brand new different version of WoW and call it a "classic" experience?
Classic WoW, ideally, would serve as a democratically validated (or invalidated) enterprise enabling a situation where Blizzard would then be in a position to mutate current WoW into whatever form they wish to match and compete in the current market, pointing naysayers to Classic if they don't like the changes in current.Much like the PVP server toggle shining a light on how many/few people *really* want world PVP, I honestly think Classic WoW and the actual, quantifiable, long term interest it may or may not generate is indeed being watched for exactly this reason. There's a school of thought where BFA is heating up the faction divide in order to cool it in a mechanical sense once and for all, whether that means faction defections or bnet friends grouped in PVE regardless of faction. Between these speculations and Ion's words about changing the world permanently through storytelling, Classic serves as a convenient disclaimer for "don't like it? Classic is over there!" WoW classic needs to exist as a bare bones, notably outdated vision as a point of foundation and reference as to how far the game has come to revolutionize the genre. In this, it is vital that Classic remain as pure as possible.
Why are people so uppity about people wanting to enjoy the game too? As a druid player since I began in Wrath, I've always liked Feral (And bear) and I would like to continue to enjoy my favorite class in the new (old) Azeroth. Yeah we get it, back then if you were a druid all you did was heal. Now Blizzard has their heads on their shoulders and can make informed decisions as to what makes a spec viable.Blizzard made tens of thousands of players happy by making their favorite spec actually do damage where they can compete with other players. VANILLA IS DOOMED! Boohoo, if you don't like feral enough to cry about it non stop on the forums until some CM is forced to read it, DON'T PLAY ITI promise you, making all specs/classes viable is not going to ruin the experience, all of you idiot elitists are going to ruin the experience, true vanilla or slightly modified.
People who claim to want classic but with class balance changes have a big case of "You think you do, but you don't" fever.
Classic will not be able to support itself for long without un*!@#ing the classes. The community will be split between NA/EU, PVP, PVE, RP, Horde and Alliance, they need the fix to retain enough players to keep the realms healthy.
Not entirely sure if this is a blue post on WoW forums or if the feedback is being voiced on wowhead but I thought I'd put my two cents in.So Firstly, I just wanna say I love vanilla for what it was at the time but in my honest opinion I think it could use a couple tweaks now that we had time to digest what vanilla was trying to be. I think the content should be untouched but subjects like UI QoL's and Class balancing should be considered.There's only 3 UI changes I'd like to see. I'd like to see Focus targeting (It didn't exist in vanilla), buff/debuff timers, and enemy cast bars; I know most people at max level in vanilla had addons for all these functions so why not just bake it into the interface? I also think they should probably be togglable since there's people out there that probably want the 100% Vanilla experience, kinda similar to how in legion you can toggle old models vs. new models.For class balancing I'd like to see the final patch of Vanilla (1.12.1 I think?) and after a few months after people have had time to fully experience and understand their spec there should be some sort of statistics on blizzards side to see what's under-performing and whats over-performing. I would only like to see number tweaks though, for example; Disc: Power Infusion CD reduced from 3 mins to 2 mins or Feral Rip damage increased by 5%. In my opinion adding new spells would be the death of "Classic WoW" but I think small tweaks to specs that are "unplayable" should have small changes to their numbers since no one likes being forced to play something because it's meta.
It's very simple: WoW are not going to maintain two competing modern "EQ model" MMOs with current amenities. Classic is a snapshot of a time when our options were limited and our palette was "whooooa... those are other people!" Sound outdated? It is, but there are people that want that back. Are you one of them? If so, play classic. Do you demand modern standards of pretty much anything? Don't play classic. That's current WoW, it's modern. Play that.You think you want it. Do you? It'll be there. If not, play current.Or play neither. It's possible you've grown apart from the genre, and that's ok!
As horrible as the balance was if they tweak it they will inevitably tweak other things.
Classic WoW being a merge between Vanilla and some QoL aspects will only leave a sweet but sauer taste to it. Let's just go for it. It's not a thinking I do but I don't case, it's not being elitist. I want the gameplay as it is now, and I want Vanilla's, separately. It's not because we don't have the same QoL on Classic that it will disappear on the Now-WoW. Let's just go for it
Classic WoW could potentially function with just above "personal NWN server" level numbers with modern outside-game connectivity and forums. They don't need to cater to people who want vanilla 2.0 to have the game work. From my observation, true vanilla enthusiasts aren't the "no one in town, game is dead" types, they are the "hey that's soandso, I remember him" types. That's their jam.
A simple change to the available debuff slots on raid bosses would make a lot of the unviable specs playable, not all, bit some.