Season of Mastery “2” | How Can It Do BETTER?

these Namaste released a few months after TBC classic had dropped as an alternative for players who didn't wish to go down the path of expansions once again these servers aim to answer many common points of feedback for classic and to offer a somewhat different experience the second time around and though these servers have recently closed as per their planned 12-month for life cycle classic as a game has been seeing a huge uptick in players both on the error servers as well as those taking on the hardcore challenge now more so than ever it feels like we're hitting a real second reignited interest to head back to calendar on Eastern kingdoms and get stuck in some good old-fashioned grinding the day I want to talk about why classic has seen this rise in interest now the positives and negatives to take away from seasonal wow so far and the possibilities for what the future of seasonal servers May hold so then classic wow once again for the uh third time now well it will be for some of us I think the first big reason that classic has seen a rise in players is just that seasonal Mastery has gone it wasn't exactly huge when compared to raf's player base but it's just no longer a choice that is offered that will leave many many players with an active sub who want to continue playing vanilla so where do they go classic era second is how dramatically the game has changed during the first two expansions being the burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and it will continue to do so for me vanilla gets him more popular now when there is no fresh realm and people are actively taking on a Community Driven challenge where they have to delete their character if they die says a huge amount to me vanilla was the only version of wow where the world was the size of a world and that matters a lot more than you may think because expansions have always been comparatively small in size and have at maximum increase the level count by 10. vanilla's two entire continents with 60 levels to get through expansion started to treat leveling as a series of convenient hubs with optimized gear and weapons your specialization vanilla has you go halfway across the world for a weapon that you might be using for the next 15 levels because it's just that much better than anything else and expansions assumed that we are level cap and that there's people who need to catch up during TBC Elite questing was removed from vanilla as well as XP required to hit level cap lowered in Raph it was lowered even more and then we had heirlooms and the lfd well in original rap we had lfd anyway in classic there is nothing to assume you start at level 1 just as everyone else does the game isn't afraid of you taking months to hit level cap because there is just that much to do and see in the world before you hit Level 60 and back in the day it was not uncommon at all to see players with weeks and weeks of play time for their first to level 60. that meant something in short expansions have started to push you more and more towards playing the end game as the main content classic does not to do that and I think that makes it really stand out third reason for classics growth is when MMOs are popular they get more popular because they are more popular there has to be some kind of word or phrase for this I'm going to call it popularity weaving if you see people on Twitch recommendations on YouTube other people in their Guild and so on all on Hardcore and then you think to yourself wait aren't they just ghost towns I thought no one played there then you go log into a starter Zone on a hardcore server it's gonna be a big surprise it's not even just the hardcore starter zones either try Orgrimmar or Stormwind on the big clusters like white main or firemore you see a lot of people in the game you get neuron activation game looks alive and you think I'll try the game again then often something which I'll mention several times during the video is the Hardcore challenge I've done a video on getting started on it already if you wanted some information in short though it's trying to get to level 60 without dying and for a challenge designed around questing it's surprisingly fun just as with the previous reasoning leveling zones are full of people non-stop but perhaps biggest of all it makes you play well in a different way where you're suddenly a lot more Clueless us about the game than you thought you were everyone thinks they have classic gameplay solved until a Defiance Pillager does half your health in one Fireball or that one son of aragol and Silver Pine Forest catches you out hardcore puts a level of challenge back into the game tests even the most experienced players knowledge and creates an environment where you are even more invested into your character's growth than normal and the final reason is to Classic becoming more popular now is it's just different from Rage logging many versions of wow get into a Raider log state after some time and if ratings what you like to do that's fine but feeling as though you have something to work towards is fun and very much What MMOs are all about so classic error is there for that demand at the moment all these joined together have led to a situation where Once Dead servers are now seeing an organic Resurgence leveling zones are once again busy auction houses packed with items and end game content restarting and you would certainly hope that blizzard has seen this growth over the past few months and have been cooking something up for classic fans be it through through seasonal servers or just a plain fresh you know Holly Longdale who joined blizzard to work on classic back in 2020 she used to be on EverQuest where they had time lock progression servers these are would you believe it near enough one-year duration servers that work off different rule sets such as randomized loot from similar level enemies or holding player votes to decide when the next major content drop happens EverQuest started the time lock progression servers in 2015 mind you and they're still going to this day and I think seasonal Mastery for a first attempt did do a lot of things well nerfing the boosting meta by making mobs in dungeons go CC immune after a while more content available from launch such as the tier 0.5 quest lines and Diamond easier to farm reagents and eventually extra crafting procs similar to how Alchemy worked in TBC lowering the cost of mounts to fit a faster leveling speed removal of the debuff limit and so on there were negatives too though for sure its launch date came a little too early for many who were already enjoying TBC and didn't quite want to go back to vanilla yet the PVP ranking system was sped up through doubling RP games instead of halving Decay or any other system meaning players were still forced into an unhealthy grind on top of that the PVP gear existing from the outset meant that hitting even Rank 10 would unlock gear that surpassed the majority of items found in raiding content which made 40-man raiding not feel as impactful about raiding though I have this idea there are two main groups of people who want to raid in World of Warcraft there are those who want progression and those who want to collect a loot classic all the way up to ulduar has been a great game for loot collectors and a poor one for progression enjoyers The Divide in difficulty between hard mode and normal has put up a barrier of above average performance needed to access the best to loot rather the grand Crusader should be a step down comparatively but expect ICC to be a step up once again and then Kata will come along and completely blow everything out of the water retail on the other hand is a great game for progression and not such a great one for loot collectors Mythic raids around a whole other level to anything you've seen in classic loots is personal and at times it can feel much more down to RNG and without ever dividing a raid's difficulty I don't think you can have it be somewhat challenging whilst people did say time and again how easy classic raiding was maybe it was never about being hard but just providing a place for you to press your buttons and collect some satisfying purple upgrades also believe me you don't want hard 40 Man raids remember WildStar they did this it's hard enough getting 20 people for Mythic getting 40 above average players is just not realistic for the majority can you imagine the guild poaching and having everyone to learn that one mechanic that can wipe the raid yeah no thanks I guess what I'm saying is that currently we're seeing a lot of people coming back to vanilla purely for the purpose of leveling content I don't think any other version of wow could pull this off and the raids are far more for loot collectors than providing a big challenge the whilst blizzard definitely took on board a very common bit of feedback the raids were too easy in vanilla perhaps going down the road of trying to make classic into a game more focused on the end game was just not an idea which really made sense if you remember seasonal Mastery at the start had a bonus 40 XP from all activities and even more XP from Elite quests later this was buffed to 100 which given the fact this server was designed to last for 12 months is perfectly reasonable however at the outset blizzard did not confirm you will be able to transfer characters on seasonal servers to the live classic Realms they will be going to Classic era which at the time was not much of a selling point it was kind of like having your character thrown into the void I think if people knew they could have moved to TBC or Raph at the end of the server's life cycle it would have encouraged a lot more people to try it out on top of that you could justify not increasing leveling experience or allowing players to choose whether or not they want the bonus experience just as how joyous Journey has worked in classic the next big point for me has to be classes if it's not a vanilla no change is fresh surely something has to give here we try and season a Mastery we buffed around trades we did no world Buffs and we got the warrior Mata back once again this is of course a point where everyone's gonna have a different opinion using talents from other expansions doesn't seem like much of a runner to me they are trees built off being level 70 or 80 or what have you on top of us not having core expansion abilities that these talents are used on like mutilite or Arcane blast or incinerate and so on I'm not sure minor changes would cut it either you could give a paladin taunting Crusader strike they're still going to go home in 30 seconds flat either way you could give Moon King's infinite mana and they won't be top 10 on DPS and that's without even going into itemization or the complete near lack of gear tailored towards specific specs at the moment the distance between the top performers and the bottom is just way too large with or without World Buffs I mean what I like to see is each spec be somewhat viable in the role they were designed for with the intentions they were designed around if that makes sense enhancement challenge use two handers what if that was actually somewhat viable Resto droids are designed around healing over time but in classic it's only really healing touch or regrowth can you make hops work in classic individual spectator may go a long way to help this but they're mostly your 40-man raid once tear from bosses that drop a couple of pieces in seasonal Mastery they did start making bosses drop more loot after some time had gone by maybe this is just a simple solution to the potential issue adding tear would have another big bonus in that it creates new Chase items and a less wasted Loot on a faster content Cadence even if you brought a shadow priest to a raid were they ever going to get the first mission there or the first Talisman of ephemeral power probably not unless they're the GM it would have gone to a mage or something if tier drops for a priest it's gonna go to a priest another thing to consider is World Buffs and do we bring them back I think the chronoboon was a really good solution to being forced into raid logging and if we assume it's supposed to be easy raid content which is blasted through World boss kind of fit into that power fantasy of having two dozen Buffs running at the same time and just blowing stuff maybe even allow chronoboom with suspended World boss to be sold on the auction house you probably want to put some kind of level restriction on them though or you can just have 12 accounts and farm Boons by summoning level ones around the world wait I'm just going to be giving them ideas here aren't I either way if there is class rebalancing it definitely has to be done very carefully if you can just run into mobs and AOE them downria for the Lich King style that's not going to be any good and in raids I think the low end DPS need to be brought up and the top end down I don't think Warriors can stay where they are at the moment because if everything was at that power level the end game would just get deleted way too fast overall in seasonal Mastery 2 or whatever it's called should it happen I think one of the biggest things to realize is that classic is a game that has a lot of replayability before level cap and fast tracking people into end game is not necessarily a good thing despite having an increased content Cadence I hope some class changes to adjust the meta and make more play Styles feel useful I don't think raid content needs to try and be hard let people chase their gear and blast and if there's gonna be World Buffs make them not terrible to get ranking and ranking reward availability both need a rethink there were a lot of positives and learning points from the first season which can be carried forwards you need to tell people you can transfer your characters to live classic Realms right from the beginning if there's going to be bonus XP make it a choice the player can make individually and hardcore modus had a huge amount of influence on Classic's population and is worth consideration too leveling a somewhat changed class on Hardcore and working towards those modified talents or abilities will be super hype it would be like playing the game back in the day and hitting level 40 for the first time once again on the other hand hardcore has shown success even without any changes so there's that too whatever happens seasonal is seasonal that's the main reason that I don't mind them trying to do different things you aren't ever gonna please everyone so pick a direction and stick to it rather than trying to compromise and make a game for everyone which at the end of the day doesn't really suit anyone any thoughts from the first season Mastery and what things are the top of your priority list if they do a second season drop them down below and as always thank you all so much for watching and listening in and I'll see you on the next one very soon foreign foreign

Channel: WillE

Views: 99,836

Keywords: classic wow, classic hardcore, hardcore wow, hc wow, hardcore clips, hardcore death, hardcore wow guide, wille, paladin, warrior, warlock, mage, priest, rogue, druid, hunter, shaman, toc, icc, dragonflight, wow, warcraft, mmorpg, mmo, best mmo, free mmo 2023, best mmorpg, best free mmorpg, best mmo 2023, mmo 2023, eso, gw2, ff14, osrs, ashes of creation, riot mmo, role playing game, rpg, dungeons and dragons, tabletop, gaming, pc, console, ps5

Id: ywMxTRPSrpQ

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023