Blizzard Only Gets One Shot at Classic Plus

10 points of success for Classic Plus. What are the main things that Blizzard really needs to hit on with a Classic Plus in order for it to be considered successful? I also have things that I think they need to avoid, things they need to be careful of if they don't want Classic Plus to be a failure. So, we got the positive, we have the negative. I want to talk about that today. So, first things first, the number one thing that I think is important and it it is an overarching, it's the umbrella, okay? You have to maintain the design principles of vanilla. Wow. It is hands down the most important thing. Everything needs to feel vanilla. If you want to make classic plus, it's important that the game feels vanilla. The sort of from from the raid design to the class design to the to the level design, top to bottom, the interactions, the social experiences. They need to feel like this is something that would have continued on from vanilla, from patch 1.12. This doesn't mean to not change things. This doesn't mean to not update things. This doesn't mean to not add to the game. What it means is that it needs to kind of feel like, hey, we're not going to patch 1.12. We're going to patch 1.13, 1.14. continue it on kind of where it was in that era of like the end of vanilla after Knacks and like the beginning of Burning Crusade and the game to continue developing as it were before that beautiful beautiful dark portal opened up. That is step one. Number two, and we've talked about this plenty. We talked about this in other videos. Building out the existing world of Azeroth. There is so much that hasn't been uncovered. We travel through the Eastern Kingdoms. We travel through Calumor and there's so much of the map that just hasn't even opened up. It's super super important to build on what's already there as opposed to building out new places. Like we don't need to go out to Outland or or anything like that. I think it starts with building out the existing world. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't eventually add more things. And one thing that I brought up is I don't think it's crazy to go to to go to Northrren even. I think there's a world where you can kind of go to Northrand and there's something there because Northrand exists. It exists in the world. It's not in the map whenever you press M in vanilla. It's not in the map, but it's there and it exists. You have all this kind of stuff that you can work with and you can play with. And I think that's that's cool and they should really focus on that. Flying ruined. Wow. Outland was built with flying in mind. It wouldn't work inherently in whatever a classic plus would be to go to Outland. Flying mounts are like when they were released, they were cool, but then over time people realized that flying mounts did kind of ruin a lot of stuff. They ruined a lot of the social interactions. They got rid of choke points because you now had an additional plane that you could travel on. Speaking of choke points, like I talked about like building out the existing world of Azeroth. If they do this, there's going to be more places to go. That's why I think it's very important to open up more like seapports. One of which was, you know, when we went to Tenaris and we went to Gadget, you went all the way to the edge and and we said Telbeam is in this area. I think there should be a boat there. There's a port there with no boat. I think they should add a boat there. That's my second point. Building out the existing World of Azeroth. Point number three, a lot of the intrigue of World of Warcraft from the beginning. You are in Azeroth. You are in this wide open world where you don't know anything. Now, in the world of data mining and which is very annoying, by the way, I kind of wish there wasn't so much data mining stuff going on, but you know, here we are. It's hard to recreate that. The internet today, the social media, every like the news travels like lightning fast, but I do think that the mystery of the game is key. So much so that I don't even want them to do a beta or the current rumor is that a beta is coming in October. That's the rumor that people have been sharing around. I hope it's not November launch. That's the big one. it wouldn't be the end of the world. It's just you kind of kill Burning Crusade and there's so many other games coming, but that's coming from me as somebody who plays a lot of games and does a lot of things. That's my own personal thing. Now, let me explain a little bit. Whenever I talk about the mystery is key, uh the mystery is the key because like if the game comes out and you have all the data miners going in and hacker man's just and they're just pulling everything and oh, this item drops off this guy, this rune is here, whatever. Like in Sod, actually, to be fair, in Sod they locked it up, right? people couldn't data mine stuff which which is kind of like leading to where I'm going with this. I think if everything just gets data mined and thrown on freaking thoughtbot then yeah is that how SAN hacks? Okay, I'm not a hacker. However, I am learning how to program thanks to boot.dev. This video is brought to you by boot.dev. You guys are used to leveling in game. Now it's time to level in real life. If you ever wanted to learn how to code but didn't know how, boot.dev is a fun and engaging way to get started. They have courses covering things like Python, Go, Linux, databases, backend development, and so much more. So, instead of watching hours of videos, you're actually writing code, and you're solving problems as you go. The whole thing is set up like an RPG. You earn XP, you complete quests, you unlock new content, and you work your way through different courses. But, you're used to leveling up an XP bar in game. Now, you can fill your XP bar and gain new skills in real life. The nice thing is you can actually start from the beginning with Python or something and work your way into more advanced topics. So you don't need to already know how to code. So if learning to code is something you've been wanting to do, whether you want to understand more about games or you just want to pick up a new skill, make sure to check out boot.dev. You can go to boot.dev/sfand or just use the code sand to get 25% off your first payment. Huge shout out to boot.dev for sponsoring us today. Let's get back to it. I think if you have data miners come in and pull everything and share everything, then that's kind of bad. I don't even want a beta. I want I want us to start leveling at level one. Whenever this game comes out, okay, whenever retail minus, classic minus, WoW 2, classic 2, classic plus, whatever it is comes out, I want it to start at level one and I want the whole world to get to experience it together. If uh everything gets data mined and everything gets found out right away, I think you kind of lose some of the mystery. I don't think a beta is the end of the world. Don't get me wrong. I'm just like an extremist in that regard. Uh, but I think it's cool to put things into the game, but not explain them. Don't explain everything that you put into the game. There's things like this in vanilla WoW where like an item would be put in and people be like, I don't know what this thing is. Like I want to kill a boss and an item drops off that boss that's meant for something maybe in a later patch or at at some other point in time where that item means nothing until and I don't even know. I want I don't even want to know that it means something. I maybe I can infer that it means something, but I don't even want to know for sure. Like I might see something it has like some flavor text and I'm like I'm gonna put this in my bank and just see what happens. And then later on down the road like I get another binding or another another stone of majesty. I don't know. I'm just saying random words but like some kind of item and then it's like wait you combine these two and then and then it turns into something that is a quest item that turns into a quest that now you go and you you do something right. I want the breadcrumbs to uncorrupt the Ashbrer. Right now they paid homage to this in season of discovery with the old ashbringer.com the rumors of how to uncorrupt the Ashbrer and Outland and all this stuff which was cool. Right. Like I said, even though like people think I'm a Season of Discovery hater, that's because I kind of am, but I'm not completely a hater. I just didn't like a lot of the systems in Season of Discovery, the way they put things on top of things. So, I don't think everything was bad. Mystery is important. Don't explain everything. Point number three. Point number four, for what I think Classic needs to do, what I think Blizzard needs to do for Classic Plus to be a success, I think it's very important to maintain the friction of the game. Friction and inconvenience are two separate things. eventually like with too much friction. Yeah. Like you that can lead to inconvenience. But I think you can I think if you don't have enough friction then nothing really sticks. It's just like science. Okay. It's just like science in real life. Everything has friction to some degree. Like you you know you put something on a on a on a surface and it stays there and doesn't roll off immediately. It's because there's friction there keeping it in place. Well, the friction enables investment in whatever it is that you're doing. So, if I spent 10 minutes making something happen, I spent 10 minutes getting a group together for a dungeon versus I spent an hour getting a group together for a dungeon versus I pressed a button and I immediately got into a dungeon. All these things have varying levels of friction because of how how difficult it was uh to to be able to get a group together and be able to go do the content that I want to do. Now, at a certain point, that friction becomes inconvenience, right? If it takes me an hour plus to get a dungeon group together, that kind of sucks. That's inconvenient. But the longer it takes me to actually get something going and the the amount of effort that I have to put in to get something going makes it mean more. So if I can and this is a big problem that you have in retail. Not to say that it's not a problem at all in classic. There's this weird kind of culture thing that's happened in burning in anniversary. I don't know what it is. Anniversary is like kind of weird. I feel like the average skill level of player went down significantly in anniversary for some reason. I don't know why. It feels actually very authentic to original Burning Crusade in that regard. But regardless, in retail, if you if you can join a group and your group sucks, you can immediately just leave and queue again. Now, now there's like you have like your lever queue or whatever, right? But people are so much more apt to be like, "Well, I'm just going to leave. I'm not going to deal with this crap. Okay, I'm not going to deal with this crap. I'm out of here. I'll go do something else until my my debuff runs out and then I'm going to queue again." Because, hey, instant gratification. When you have that instant gratification and you don't have that friction, it's very easy to get into stuff. That's why things like group finder, I think, are not good. The LFG tool in classic Burning Crusade Anniversary is is amazing. I would love to see that in Classic Plus. A built-in UI thing in order to message people and you actively have to talk to people to get into a group. Wonderful, right? But the Q system, I think, is bad. And you just show up and and you're in a random group because no friction. And this is not something I even think they're going to do, by the way, just to clarify. Uh, I'm just kind of bringing up points and talking about things as examples for why friction is good. It is way less likely if I spent 30 minutes to put a group together that I'm going to leave if somebody in the group is bad. I'm going to talk to this guy and be like, "Hey, you're doing this thing wrong so that we can like kind of locked in and get things figured out. Make sure to do this whenever we do this." Oh, okay. Thanks. I didn't even know that. Yeah, man. No problem. these kind of interactions, one, they're good for the social kind of culture of the game. Uh, and sure, that doesn't always happen. I I get some people just like get flamed or whatever, and that's that's unfortunate, but I think it's less likely for that to happen whenever people know that they're like, "Hey, I don't want to have to go find another guy to replace this guy with. I don't want to have to leave this group and get a whole another group together. I don't want to spend the time doing that. I look, I'm a I'm a grown man. I got a wife. I got kids. I got another wife. You know, she's got kids with another husband. I don't know, right? Their life is busy and people do not have the time to just keep, hey, I spent 30 minutes. I don't have another 30 minutes to do this. I'm just going to get through this group, okay? I'm going to figure this out. And I think that little bit of friction is very important. Point number five that I have here is adding new dungeons and raids. This is kind of a layup. Everybody expects this. Everybody knows that this is the case, but I don't think you add new dungeons and raids that replace the old content. I think a problem that Blizzard has had in the development of Retail WoW over the course of years cross expansion or even within the expansion is making content that replaces old content. I don't think that this is good. While that does happen naturally sometimes, I think that you should do your best to try and avoid this. I think that there should be some more dungeons throughout leveling. I think more midlevel content should be added in classic plus. You saw this in Season of Discovery and it's something that Season of Discovery did well. They added mid-level raids even. I think if they have mid-level raids in classic plus, it should be very similar to how like a UBRS is at max level where it's a 10-man dungeon essentially, not not necessarily a 10-man raid. And it doesn't necessarily need to be as difficult as running a raid, but it's like you're doing a 10-man dungeon. It's kind of like UBRS. I think that would be cool to have some stuff like that. I also think it's important if you're going to add stuff like this. Whenever you add in new items, new gear, new stuff like this, it's not stuff that's going to outright replace the other stuff and it's just going to be so much more powerful. Like this other thing with with sod, it's like the gear is insane. It's supplementary. It's complimentary. It's supplementary. It's additive. It's not something that is replacing anything that's already there. And the same thing goes for raids. Now, I have a take about raids. Some people might disagree with me, especially because I'm very old school and a lot of people know me as like a traditionalist. I run a trad guild. Okay. In WoW Crusade is a trad guild. All right. We run a traditional guild. We got our raid groups. We have the the loot council. We you know what I mean? It's I run with the same group for the most part every week. I'm very traditional. That's how I play WoW. That's how I enjoy WoW. You know, I like to do it like they you know, they don't they don't make them like they used to, and I believe that. So, I play that way. I think that in the classic WoW community, there is something that has happened over the course of years since the year 2019 where you've had classic release, you've had uh season of mastery, season of discovery, classic era, classic anniversary, hardcore, all these different versions of classic woow that have then been released. And uh just, you know, hey, we gota we got to milk them, okay? Hey, I'm not complaining, you know, do your thing. But I think something that has happened is what I call molten core fatigue. I think molten core fatigue is a real thing. And I think that if we are playing a classic plus and we get to level 60 and the first raid is molten core again as it was, even if they change some mechanics, even if they tweak it a little bit and do this and that, I think that's not good. I think it is important for the success of classic to have a different like entry level raid. I don't know what, but I don't think that molten core should be the first raid. I think it has to be different. People are not going to be excited to hit level 60 and then raid molten core first. Now, what I do think could be cool and and this is I talked about not replacing the old content. I do think having Molten Core be a raid in classic is good. You know, maybe you update some mechanics, maybe you change some bosses, maybe maybe you do some different things, but I think I think you should still have Molten Core as a raid as a 40man raid even. So, you have new raids kind of slotted in a problem in Vanilla WoW. And uh I have another video from 7 years ago if you want to go back and watch. We were talking about old videos about the power creep in vanilla. Wow. What the problems are and I talk about like itemization points and what you know people talk about gear score and like gear score doesn't really matter. Gear score is a is a fake stat. By the way, if anybody's like talking about gear score, there's like a very very nuanced sort of scenario in which gear score is like even worth talking about. It's kind of like a noob check. Okay, gear score is not important. Especially in vanilla, especially in Burning Crusade before the gear starts getting too optimized. I think that it's very important to have a horizontal progression and to not have this insane power creep that you have from vanilla to burning crusade to AQ to Knax cuz it doesn't go like this. That's what happens. You have you have MC, you have BWL. This one's okay. Then you have AQ40 and then you have Knack which is like boom. And the reason for this is not just because there's more itemization points, more stats on the gear, but the gear gets more and more optimized because they made things. They're like, "Oh, well, this is how people are playing the game. We need to use these stats." The tier three set is like the most hyper optimized piece of gear that you could have for whatever spec it is for whatever class you have. For example, holy paladin tier 3 is insane. Oh my gosh, it's it's the god set in vanilla, but it's so much better than everything else because more points and better designed. So, this actually led to a problem. Let me tell you guys a story. I don't know if this is a public story or not, but I'm going to go ahead and share it because I think it's interesting and I don't think it hurts anybody to share this. Back in 2007, you guys know like Jeff Kaplan and the old devs, right? The Allen Adamhams, the Jeff Kaplan's, the Kevin Jordans, Rob Partardeau, all these guys in Burning Crusade. Jeff Kaplan, friend of the show, Jeff Kaplan. I I think Jeff's great. He's like one of my favorite people in the world to talk to. Jeff was one of the leads on Burning Crusade. They had like a three-man team that were like the directors for Burning Crusade and Jeff was one of them. And Karazan comes out. The Knack Gear is so good that it's so hyper optimized that whenever Burning Crusade comes out, it's still more optimized, but it's a little bit it's like tuned back. So, what you ended up doing is you had level 70s in Burning Crusade that were wearing Knack gear and still like the Knack Raiders from back then. They kept all their Knack gear because the gear was so good. It was just better than things that were dropping in Karazhan. It was just better than things that were dropping in dungeons. Now it has changed a little bit and they've kind of tuned some things out a little bit and they made like Karazhan gear better. But the reason why they made them better is because people realize this back in the day. Okay, there's a guy there was a guild leader. He sent an email to Jeff Kaplan. It's crazy how much times have changed. He sends an email to Jeff Kaplan and he explains to him and he's like, "Hey, I lead a guild or I lead I lead this raid team. We cleared Knacks. We did all this stuff. We have all this Knack gear and there's a big problem in the game right now that we can't replace any of our gear because the Knack gear was just way too good. It was it was insanely too good. What are we doing? Jeff gets this email. I guess they take it to the team, whatever. And then they end up buffing the gear. They end up reitizing some of the Kerazan gear after launch because they're like, "Yeah, okay. He's he's right. Like if you have Knack gear, you can't go back and really change the NX gear now, but let's change some of this stuff up and make things work a little bit better." And what it led to is that led to a snowball effect of what we eventually got in Wrath of the Lich King. That was that gear score becoming a thing and all the gear becoming hyper optimized. And over time, just more and more everything became item level gear score and and it just got really really tightened down. Somebody said it in chat already. So the guy who sent that email was Ian Hazus before he worked at Blizzard. Yeah. Ian actually said this and he was like, "Hey, like what what what's the deal here? What's going on?" and it it got changed. Now, eventually it kind of led to something that was bad, but it was because the problem it already started in vanilla, and I think Blizzard needs to fix this. I think the gear in the next patch is so strong that it kind of it kind of screws up everything down the road. I think it needs a reitemization. I think vanilla WoW as a whole needs a top tobottom reitemization, especially if you are I say vanilla wow, I'm talking about classic plus. It needs a reemization of everything. Especially if you are adding new abilities or or you're updating the classes, you're making things stronger or whatever. I think you need to reitemize a lot of stuff because how is this going to interact with the raids? How is this going to interact with the world? I think everything needs to be looked at. All that kind of leads to my next point. I think they need to be very very smart about raid size. So this is point number six for me. They need to be smart about the size of the raids. I personally don't like flex rating. Flex rating seems very not classic to me. And whenever whenever I talk about, you know, point number one, the umbrella, maintaining the design principles of vanilla wow, this is probably like a little bit unpopular opinion with the Sod crew cuz a lot of people like the flex rating because they're, oh, somebody could make it, whatever. I think 40man raids are so epic and so grand and there there's so much to a 40man raid. I'm doing 25 mans now in Burning Crusade. And doing the 25 mans has made me realize how much I miss 40 mans. What if you can't get 40 people? Like, this is all part of the game, right? It's just part of the game. That's part of the friction. Whenever you design a raid around 40 people being there, something that people have learned ever since is, yeah, the raid is designed around a 40 person cap, but man, you can carry some people in a 40-man raid. It allows you to be able to group with some people that aren't like cutthroat breakneck. I mean, that's that's the thing is like, yeah, like you run a 40 40man raid and like you're basically having 25 to 30 people carry the other 10 to 15. So, I think 40man raids are good, but that doesn't mean that every raid should be a 40-man raid. And I talk a lot about the horizontal progression instead of having this insane power creep, right? So, they need to be smart about raid size. You have ZG as a 20man. You have AQ20 as a 20man. You have UBRS as like a 10-man dungeon raid hybrid type thing. I think there should be three raid sizes. There should be 40man raids. Absolutely. And it should be the juicer. This is like the big content. This is this is like your your flagship. This is leading the charge. This is this is big time. That's your 40man. You should have 20 man raids and you should have 10 man. And they should be exclusive to whatever raid it is that they are a part of. It is special whenever you have certain things that are able to run a certain way. Now, when we talk about horizontal progression, that doesn't mean that all the best gear is always in the 40man. That doesn't mean if you can't run a 40man raid, you can't be effective. Now, I think one of the main design principles of Vanilla WoW is that you have to play the whole game. So, if you want to be 100% the best player, you have to do everything. Hey, let's say I don't do 40man raids. I do I do the 20 mans, you know, I don't PVP. I'll do 10 mans, whatever. I think you should be able to get to like 90% of your player power. Like you should be able to get there and there should be like a diminishing return on that. I'm a big big believer in this. Having 20 25 man avoids class stacking. So does better design. Better design also avoids class stacking. I think having some Yes, exactly. Holy diver. Having some of your best pieces in 10man, having some of your best pieces in 20man, having some of your best pieces in 40man. I think it's all good. And I think that is special. and you have that horizontal progression. That's how you get people to play the whole game. Hey, let's say I'm fully decked out. Let's let's learn from ZGurub a little bit. ZG had I'm telling you, the the the way they created ZG when we're talking about itemization, when we're talking about the way that they had the bosses, the the rewards from doing the dungeon, masterful. And I don't know if it was all on purpose. I don't know how they did it, but the best patch in my opinion, I think the best patch in Vanilla WoW is that 1.7 1.6 patch range, right? Uh whenever they put ZG in the game, when they put ZG in the game, the itemization is beautiful. There's interesting items in ZG. There's uh there's there's rep gear that you can get from ZG that you can fit into your other sets that you can get like uh set bonuses from that are really valuable. Like man, there's a like for a Paladin, the Paladin ZG necklace, I think it is, increases your hammer of justice time by.5 seconds. A lot of like vanilla woow like private server old school people like enthusiasts will probably agree with me. The dueling is amazing. The PvP is amazing. The dueling is amazing. The rating is amazing. Like that is almost always the turning point in like the death of a private server from back then was around this time. There was a number of reasons for it, but but that ZG patch is so big. It's so good because the itemization is good, the content is good, all that stuff. Now, something else with ZG, you have people who are in AQ40 gear. You have people in Knack gear that will go back and they will run ZG as a catch-up raid with other players. Maybe it's your friend on an alt and he has a new character. And there's a bunch of gear in ZG that is like very specific and niche to help get you caught up and help you run the other raids. Same thing with AQ20. Like there's like an axe that increases your attack power against dragons. Weird axe. You almost never use it. But let's say you just have like no gear. I'm a two-handed fury warrior orc on Horde side. Well, I can take this axe and I can I can get a little bit of a DPS boost with this thing in in a BWL. Let's say I'm an alt. Let's say I'm a new player coming into the game. At the time, the game was still growing a lot. Now, why is a Knack player, why is an AQ40 player even running these dungeons? Maybe they're in a pug. Maybe they're carrying. Maybe they're playing with a friend. But also, what are the rewards for them? Tiger mount, raptor mount, the enchants, the enchants are so good. Oh my gosh, dude. I'm telling you, ZG is like, when you really think about like all the little things they did with ZG, masterclass. Masterclass in raid design. Masterclass in in it is the epitome of vanilla WoW is that patch. It's so good. So, so good. Oh, hit so hard. AQ20 has the books. Yeah, I mean, it's there there's a lot of stuff like that. So reeling it back in. Point number six was what? Being smart about raid size and having all these different things that you can have 10 mans, 20 mans, 40 mans, and having different ways that people can play the game. You're expecting a lot from Blizzard too optimistic. If you don't say it, then they won't hear it. That's the way that I feel. You got to say it. You got to deliver the message the right way. Hopefully they listen. So yeah, that is why I think it's important to have 40 mans, important to have 20 mans, important to have 10 mans, and then you have some of your best gear that you can get in in each one and with a more horizontal progression across the different raid tiers. Is it a bit late to talk about this stuff? No. Here's why. Three things. One, we don't know where Classic Plus is in the development. I don't even know the source on it. I I swear to God, they have not told us a date. All the juicy information is saved for Blizzcon. Okay, that's just how it is, right? If they did tell us the date, I would say I know the date. I'm not saying anything. But all the juicy information is saved for Blizzcon. And there's obviously a lot of things that I can't talk about, right? But just know I'm the people's paladin, okay? And I will always carry the torch. Okay? Uh I will look I will carry the light. Don't worry, okay? I'll leave it at that. So the other part of this is so we don't know exactly when it's coming out. We don't know if any of the rumors are true. We don't know how far in development they are. Any of that stuff. Now the big difference between whatever is coming and classic 2019 is that classic was classic. Vanilla was vanilla. Burning crusade is Burning Crusade. Some things can change, but Blizzard is really timid about getting in there and getting their hands dirty. We've seen it time and time again. Like I basically had to beg them to give Alliance seal of blood and hordes seal of vengeance years ago and they did it which is great because there would have been like a mass exodus from Alliance Paladins re-rolling Horde in Burning Crusade. We've gotten some things changed for the better in versions of the game which is great but they're very very timid. They don't like doing stuff. They don't like trying new things in that version of the game. The good thing about whatever is coming is hey if you are doing classic plus the whole thing is to change and to update and to add that's the whole point it will be ideally something that is living and breathing and let's say something comes out let's say they announce something and it is bad hey this is a new thing fix it and I think that is very important is that they are very quick to change things add things hey this thing sucks remove it. Somebody figured out a new farm and and the economy is going crazy. Nerf it immediately. This is what made private service so good. Getting rid of bots, being on the ball with with tracking everything, like actually following the trends and shutting stuff down whenever it was bad. Not, oh well, that's how it was. We probably don't want to touch this. It's like, no, no, if this is bad, fix it. That's kind of its own point in and of itself. I'm going to move on. That kind of is like point seven is is being agile. being agile, being very mobile with like how quickly you want to move with updates and trying new things and being like, "Hey, this is bad. We're going to dip. We're going to do that. We're going to do this." Treating it, they have to treat it like it's a living, breathing world. That's what an MMO is. It is a living, breathing world. It is constantly changing. It is constantly growing. You have to make sure that you are treating it with the care that it needs. Every MMO needs that level of care. So, that's point number seven. Point number eight for the success of Classic Plus, I think it's important for them to update the classes. I do think it's important to make some changes, update some classes and give it a little spit shine. Okay? Not a whole sort of wax buffer, you know, tri coat, what, but just give them a little bit of spit shine, I think, is important. I think it's important if you are updating the classes to do a few things. One, updating the classes does not mean to homogenize the classes. Not everybody needs a kick. Not everybody needs a steroid, a damage buff. Not everybody needs a wall. Not everybody needs every ability in the game a different version of it. This is something that happens over time. And like while that that works for retail, that's not classic woow. I think you need to protect the class identity of classic woow. If you play a class a certain way, it needs to continue to be played that way. Or at least that should be an option. If I want to be a reckoning paladin in PvP, like a a holy reckoning, if I want to be rat reckoning, if I want to, you know, do whatever it is that I do, I should still be able to do that. Frost mage should still be a thing. Fire mage should still be a thing. All these things should still be a thing. Two-handed fury, whatever. You need to maintain the current play styles of those classes. But with that being said, and I I did talk about this a little bit yesterday, you need to take the underserved, kind of underdeveloped ways of playing the classes. And I think you need to kind of bring them up to par or up to a par. Like a prop paladin, you should you should do some things for prop paladin to kind of fix those problems. Like let's say a paladin you have a shocketin, right? You want to be a spell power shockin. Let's kind of buff this up a little bit, right? Let's let's give them some tools in the talent tree. And by the way, I'm I've already done them. Like I have my paladin talent tree done. and I've had it done for a long time of like what I would do on Classic Plus, but I don't have it like it's not presentable on stream, if that makes sense. Like it's not it's not pretty. I'm I'm working on off stream trying to make it pretty and we're going to make a video where I'm going to finally show off my Paladin talents and what I would what I would do in Classic Plus. Okay, these ideas are going to be shown there where it's like, hey, like let's let's take shocket in let's make it a thing. Let's give you some tools to if you want to be a shock in be a shocket in right uh so you should help kind of the underserved underdeveloped play styles. Then the third part, right, and we're again, this is all in the scope of protecting class identity. The way WoW is right now, people go and they find different builds and they, oh, like I'm an elemental mage where I'm part fire and part frost. And if I want to do some stuff like that, hey, that's cool. Leave some breadcrumbs, leave some trails for people to do experimental builds and find out new ways to play the game. So, let's say you you do something that kind of help promote like an elemental mage. I think they should do some stuff to make like an elemental mage like a thing, but then that part three is like they should there should be new avenues for stuff like this. For example, I would like to see them bring back the trispec, maybe even paying homage to to some of the old specs. So before the 1.9 patch, Paladins had a big rework. Every class had a rework. Rogues and mages had the least amount of rework, but like some of the early ones, which was like warrior and and warlock, druid, a lot of these classes had had big big reworks. It's very important that you have this kind of like new ways for people to discover how to play the game. Paladin's had a build called the tri-spec. I talked about Zgratus PvP video. Go look at the ZGratus PvP video and you'll see it. He has holy shield. He has seal of command which you can't do anymore in 1.9 and in classic W. You can't do this. But this is fun. It's not a good spec. It is not a good build to be able to get consecrate, holy shield, seal of command. It's not good for like performance in a raid. It's not good for tanking. It's not good for DPS in the traditional sense, but it was a very fun way for a solo player to roam around in the world to do world PvP, to do solo content, trying to kill things, stuff like that. And it's because the original talent trees were very topheavy for healing and holy, and you had like some sort of like tent pull thing early in each tree for all of them. Very cool. I would like to see the tri-spec come back as an option. I'm talking from like the scope of paladins, but also I think they should make enhanced shaman tanking a thing. give them some tools. So, hey, if I want to tank as an enhanced shaman, look, maybe I'm not like a main tank for a raid, but I can tank the things that like a like, for example, how a prop paladin works in vanilla right now. I'll say a very good prop paladin who knows what they're doing and knows all the little tricks and stuff. There's better prop paladins than me, but I've tanked almost everything in vanilla as a prop paladin. I think a shaman should kind of be in that same boat where they can off tank some stuff in raids. Maybe they can tank a couple bosses. If you're doing a fiveman dungeon, a shaman would be a great choice for a tank. I think that is good. Now, the reason why I think this is for a couple reasons. One, I think it's because of the fantasy of the classes, but then two, it's also from a logistic standpoint. You have a big problem where there is too many tanks for raids and there's not enough tanks for dungeons. This is something that happens pretty often where everybody wants me to run dungeons, but I just don't have I don't have a raid spot. And I think that when you have uh certain tank specs that are like, "Yeah, this is a dungeon tank, but not a raid tank." I think that actually works out pretty well. That's my thought on updating the classes, not homogenizing them. Don't make every class the same, and protect that class identity. Point number nine for what I think is important for Classic Plus, and I teased this a little bit. I talked about it a little bit earlier. You need to focus on all aspects of the game. PvP, end game, leveling, dungeons, all all these things, all aspects of the game, crafting, economy, auction house, all these things should be a focus of the game. I don't think that you should be listening exclusively to the hardcore minmaxing 100 parsing community, but I don't think they should be completely ignored either. I don't think you should be completely ignoring anybody. I think you need to put an emphasis on all aspects of the game to some degree. Don't ignore PvP. Don't ignore leveling. Don't ignore crafting. I've always said this about classic World of Warcraft. If you want to be the best, if you want your character to be as powerful, as strong, as as good as it could possibly be, it's very important to do everything. You see this in vanilla. the highest performing if you want to be like a hundred you know 100 parsing you know minmax to the nth degree you're getting grand marshall you're getting that grand marshal gear you're rating you're pushing all the stuff in rating you're getting all the rating gear you're getting all your enchants you're you know you're crafting your crafted only items right you're getting your lion heart executioner right if you're a PVPer you're getting your storm herald right in burning crusade it's important to enable the player everything that they do is important right everything they do can be important and people can play however they It's no secret. I've been I've always been very vocal about this. I'm an endgame type of player. I like doing arenas in Burning Crusade. I like raiding. I like guild leading. I like raid leading. I I love the social aspect. I love the environment around vanilla WoW. I love I love being able to lead a guild and doing the managerial stuff and trying to enable a group of people to have a good time and have fun. That's that that is where I get my enjoyment in WoW from two places. one leading a group of people and and making sure that other people are having fun as a guild leader. That is what is important to me. The other part of the enjoyment is like the competitive nature of like I'm doing arenas. We're doing arenas. We're pushing for gladiator. We're trying to be the best that we can be. That's the thing to kind of tie it all back in. It's very important to focus on all aspects of the game. Make crafting important. Make PvP important. Make end game important. Make leveling important. Right? I'm not saying that for me, you know, even though I believe it. I believe that's good game design. what I like about the game is is not everything. You know, I don't like everything about the game. I think that's normal. I think most people are like that, but I think it's important that everything is important. This is point number 10 of things that I think are important for Blizzard to do for the success of Classic Plus. And this is a hard one. This is something that a lot of people have complained about over the years. They need to shut down the botting. They have to pay attention to the economy. They need to figure out a way to bring down the hammer and be vigilant stopping the just the rampant botting going around, people selling gold, all this like it is insane. They have to find a solution for this, man. And that is something everybody is on board for. That is something everybody wants. I don't know how hard it is. I don't they just they have to come up with a solution because it is so it is so damaging to the game, the economy, and the culture and everything. It's so bad. It's so bad, man. And like look, sometimes I understand, you know, you got to make money. You're a company. They got to find a way to invest something. If they have to hire people to do it and that is just their job, do that. Because I'm telling you, the community sentiment and having people supporting your game, your brand, there's so much value in that. Like, you want people to be like, "Yes, like we love Blizzard. We love WoW. We love classic. It's so valuable. You turn your player base not into customers. Turn them into evangelists, okay? You want them screaming from the top of the mountain like, "Yes, this is the best game in the world." And this goes for every game. And this is one of those things that is intangible. It is intangible. So, yeah, it's going to look like you're spending more money. You're losing money on having systems or people in place to be able to ban these people or get get rid of the bots and get rid of this, right? It's not going to look good if you're looking at the books. I understand. But every good or bad feeling about the game that people have helps to build a positive or negative sentiment publicly about your game. So if you have a large positive public sentiment about your game, people are going to tell their friends. They're going to tell their family. They're going to tell people, "Dude, come play WoW. WoW is so good." This and that. Like that's what you want. That's what you had in 2004, in 2005, in 2006, 7, 8, 9, until eventually it started to flatline in Wrath of the Lich King, and they didn't have that big growth, and then slowly it kind of went down over time. Now, yeah, times are different. Yeah, things are things are not exactly the same as they were, but man, just hire some damn people. Find a way to shut down the freaking bots. It's so bad. Pay attention to the economy. I think it's crazy in Burning Crusade that they haven't done the uh void crystal split. They add it for enchanters. I think in Zollemon they should have added that by phase 2 because they should have realized, oh my gosh, void crystals don't cost anything. There's way too many void crystals and there's no large prismatic shards. That doesn't make sense. But it's because people are raiding and they're not they're not disenchanting blues for prismatics. The way that the recipes and stuff work, you need a lot of prismatics. You don't need that many void crystals. So you have an overabundance of this. Make changes to balance the economy. being mobile, being agile, being vigilant in the development of the game and and treating it like this living, breathing world. Hey, we're going to do this thing where you can split the void crystals into two large prismatics immediately. Big economy fix. Get rid of the freaking bots. Pay attention to the economy and make sure that you are keeping everything in line. It's super important. Now, to be fair, they did add haze spots into vendors for Marksville. That's true. That actually is that a plus for Blizzard. That is something that they did plus. So, that is good. these are the 10 points that I think are incredibly important to the success of Classic WoW. And I think if Blizzard focuses on these things, then it it's going to be very positive for the game. Uh whether it's from a community sentiment or just, hey, these things are good for the game and it's just going to work. Obviously, there's a lot more to it than that, but I think these 10 points are are particularly important for them to pay attention to. With all these points, it comes back to point number one, which is what maintaining the design principles of vanilla wow is super important. That's the umbrella. Everything should be under that. That should be the key. The key is not to modernize vanilla. The key is not to to take vanilla WoW and turn it into, you know, let's recreate it today into a modern 2026 version. That's not what they should be doing at all. What they should be doing is they should take patch 1.12 vanilla. Hey, let's continue Vanilla WoW with the same sort of design principles that the game had in its first couple of years after it launched. Continue the game with that in mind. Hey, like let's continue this game to develop it as it were back then. And I think that's how you make a classic plus land. I think if they don't hit on this with Classic Plus, I think Blizzard is in a bad spot if they they come out with Classic Plus, Classic 2, WoW 2, Retail Minus, Classic Minus, whatever it is that they're actually coming out with, right? whatever that the final product is that they're kind of showing eventually. It's super important to hit on it because this is like the primary thing, the the big mystery that I talked about earlier, this is the the primary mystery that Blizzard has. So, we'll see. I hope that whatever we get to see at BlizzCon, I hope that it's good. I hope that it's that it's a that it's a success. I hope that a lot of these things that I mentioned are things that Blizzard decides to run by and to to kind of live by in the development of this game. So, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Uh, make sure to leave a comment, subscribe, let me know what you think. Again, I'll be live uh all weekend at Blizzcon. You can see me live everywhere. I might even be live right now. So, you can go to my Twitch. Everything is SPF TV. Join the Discord. Come be a part of the community. Thank you guys for watching and we'll see you guys next time.