Classic WoW Dungeon Features That Were Scrapped in TBC
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- čas přidán 15. 07. 2020
- Hello guys, in today's video, we will be looking at a number of different dungeon features from Vanilla or Classic World of Warcraft that were scrapped in The Burning Crusade or at the very least changed very significantly.
Blizzard learned a lot from the first few years of WoW, and in TBC, it became very clear that the design philosophies of the development team had changed in many ways from Vanilla - not least in the area of dungeons.
The implementation of heroic mode left a clear mark on the Burning Crusade 5-man instances. It was probably the biggest factor in transforming the original dungeon design landscape, but not the only one.
I thought it would be fun to look at some of the Classic WoW dungeon features that did not make it to the first expansion, and try to understand why. I am mildly sad about part of the changes, but some of that is probably nostalgia as well. In the end, I can understand and in some cases also appreciate the shifts in design philosophy even though they manifested themselves in some ways in the game I dislike. Today, we will be looking at both pros and cons of the highlighted changes.
I hope you will enjoy the video! - Hry
After finally finishing Deadmines as a noob, then exiting the mineshaft overlooking Dagger Hills...BIG SMILES. (sigh) Many thanks for this beautiful video, Moe!
I like that part of the Deadmines as well :-) Thank you mate for the nice comment - I'm happy you enjoyed the vid, and it's my pleasure.
What a great first dungeon for most people, seriously.
I got kicked ....
From the group....
On the way to the instance portal...
For needing on a few drops....
Love your videos bro, just wish you published more often, love your accent 😂 hope you’re keeping safe 🧡
Thanks again man for all the positivity! I'm happy to see your nice comments, and happy you enjoy the videos. Stay safe in the UK :)
I'm really happy to see more small youtubers uploading TBC content, I feel like this guy has the potential to become pretty big considering the effort he puts into making the videos!
Thank you mate! I'm happy to be able to provide some entertainment :)
This is a very well thought out video. Thanks for uploading.
Thanks a lot - my pleasure! Hope you enjoyed it :-)
As always, really enjoyed the Video:) keep up the interesting, informative and unique content :)
Thank you very much - that's a great compliment :) I'm glad you enjoy the content, and I'm glad I'm able to provide some entertainment through the videos.
Get to da chopper!
Nicely informative, instant follow!
Thanks a lot! Glad you liked the video :-)
I did love the 5 mob groups that required CC and some thought that came with Heroics in TBC
Heroics brought a lot of good stuff to the game as well I think.
In "Vanilla WoW" dungeons really felt epoch, they were large and complex, took sometimes hours to completely clear, and some of them had a chance to drop actually useful items (pre-raid best in slot) I personally loved it this way. From TBC onward the game was made more and more "accessible" everything was streamlined to take less time, dungeon finder, smaller instances, instance hubs... Look, I understand not everyone has hours to devote to a game on a regular basis... but this was the beginning of the end... it really was. Wow was redesigned for more and more convenience... more and more accessibility... Look where that ended...
You know why so many people miss "Classic/Vanilla WoW" because UBRS felt epoch, so did Mauradon... and many other instances. Raids felt like your little band of hero's coming together to storm Hellfire Citadel, the feeling was so much more dramatic, so much more epic, even if the reality was that what we were doing then is more or less the same as what were doing now IT FELT DIFFERENT... Modern dungeons/raids feel like trick or treating...
I want dungeons to be massively inconvenient and time consuming, things that I only have time for on the weekends. And I want them to feel Epic again. I want Wow to feel like WOW again... This whole movement towards convenience and accessibility is exactly what is killing the game, it doesn't feel Epic anymore. Preach said it so many times... When I was walking around Ogrimar and I saw someone in full Tier 2 it like WOW, look at that shit, I want to have that set, and it inspired people to get better so they could be that guy... Now with raid finder there is no incentive to get better, noting to strive for and as a result wow feels hollow and empty.
Put it back the way it was... there is a reason "Classic WoW" is so popular even 15 years later... the game was better, yes it had HUGE problems, class balance for example... but it was better....
Vanilla / Classic WoW has so much flavor to it - it's pretty amazing. I think it was very experimental in a lot of ways, but it succeeded beyond expectations probably because of that as well. There were no exact formulas in the beginning for how to make dungeons for example which is pretty clear from John Staats' book, The WoW Diary. I think that's one reason why the Vanilla dungeons are so diverse and feel very unique. Like I say in the end of the video, I think dungeons were made more of a science in TBC, and maybe there wasn't as much room for creativity.
Great stuff as always
Thanks man - thanks for the support, and I'm honored you enjoy the videos I make.
They also did away with sprawling instances that are treated as different instances by players.
Like LBRS / UBRS, Stratholme live / dead, and the various runs of BRD.
You could argue Blackrock Spire is a dungeon hub for example, but it's not the same feeling in my opinion.
"No ultra rare drops from bosses in TBC, such as Ironfoe"
DUDE, tell that to The Sun Eater from Mechanar. Is been 13 years and i still don't have it!!!
Damn, sorry man, hehe, keep grinding!
I actually didn't realize there were differences in the drop rates of heroic epics (I thought they were the same judging from current private server databases), but according to old Thottbot pages the drop% of The Sun Eater seems to be only around 10% (on retail Wowhead it says 8%).
I never saw it either... when playing on my tank >.>
There is always kings defender from the easiest raid boss in wow history
@@superxgaga1 Yeah i got it back then, in like our 2nd kara run... but Even after that, i kept trying to get Sun Eater, because it has an unique model, and is also an easter egg. Even after TBC, i keep going back to farm it for xmog, and i still don't have it.
I don't think there's another item that has eluded me for so long! The other weapon it too me YEARS to get, was the Barons Runeblade... even after farming 9 baron mounts (before mounts were account wide) i still didnt had it... i only got it as recently as LEGION! That is crazy! Man, i even got the headmaster charge back in vanilla, and that was pretty rare!
jose juan andrade oh yea my TBC loot RNG was rogue sword, no nether sprite sword, no tide giant dude sword, no ZA sword, I went from blue sword to supremus in black temple, had to go with the inferior combat dagger build for almost a whole year.
TBH Blackrock Depths alone has more bosses than many of these hubs. You can easily count BRD or Mara or ST or Strat as proto versions of instance hubs too. Just the SM model being the one to be chosen in the end.
There are some common features, but I still think long, continous instances like BRD have a different feel than instance hubs.
@@moegdalswowvideos6800 Yep, they definitely have a different *feel*. Even if mechanically they are not thaaaat different. I honestly prefer the BRD model over the instance hub model just because of that feel - but BRD also feels daunting to most people, so I get why Blizz went in that direction.
@@erejnion You have a point about BRD maybe being a bit too daunting because of the scale. That's a valid consideration.
Karazhan has a "back" entrance tho :D
Yep, I just tried entering through it today on a test server. It's pretty cool :D (I knew about it before from Vanilla, but didn't think about mentioning it)
If I remember correctly, much of Karazhan’s design was done in vanilla, which might explain its more vanilla design.
@@ImagineHeroism Yep, that's right (John Staats talks about it in his WoW Diary book). I'm almost 100% sure that the secondary entrance can be seen in Classic, so it was already there for the WoW team to use when TBC was developed.
Those instance specific BoEs were brought back in wtlk though.
That's great to hear. I didn't know that.
Moegdal, don't forget about The Sun Eater and Quagmirran's eye. farmed those for months..!
Hehe, when you look on current private server TBC databases (I've mostly used Twinstar), the drop rate of an item like The Sun Eater is listed at 25% - the same chance as the other three epic drops from Pathaleon the Calculator. On archive.org, I looked at some old Thottbot pages of The Sun Eater where the drop rates seem to be between 8% to 13%. I actually didn't realize some heroic epics were more rare than others. I like that. But if you farmed for months you must have been particularly unlucky :-)
Didn't Stern Vaults & Heallfire Citadel have mobs out infront of it kind of pathing around.
You could avoid most of them, but am I crazy in thinking there were patting Fel Orcs up on the Hellfire Citadel?
There are some Fel Orcs close to the Hellfire Citadel dungeon entrances (you can see a few of them in some of the clips in the video), but I'm pretty sure that's the only true instance hub with pre-instance mobs in TBC.
I don't mind the super low drop rates on the dungeon epics (besides SGC) as the items themselves are all very unique
There's a buff to their drop rate in phase 5 though, so we'll probably see more princess dagger farming
I also think rare epic dungeon drops are very cool, but like with the Gladiator Chain they can create problems in my opinion. It will be interesting to see if the increased drop rates will create new farming routines.
auchindoun will be grinded/leveled in very heavily like it or not. lower city rep is important for several classes for pre-raid BIS, and spamming those dungeons at 70 is probably the last thing you want to be doing in terms of progressing your character
Even with my very limited personal experience with TBC pre-raid planning and pre-bis grinding, I also get that impression. It's not the most thrilling thought to me.
I'm looking forward to tryi g pve content in BC. Back in 2006 I only did minimal dungeon content and did not do any raids, only thing i focused on was pvp.
I'm excited for Classic TBC as well (if we get it - hopefully we will :D) I don't have much experience with neither PvE or PvP in TBC actually.
The benefits of dungeon leveling are great. Safe leveling, hardly any chance of getting ganked.
Consistent mob spawns, you know where they're all going to be with no overcrowded areas.
Any unfinished quests give bonus gold upon reaching level 70. You get to run around the world at 70 doing all the quests and making bank for epic flying in the unlikely event you can't afford it already.
It's definitely not all bad, but I think one of the main reasons why people have a problem with it is that it's not how the game was supposed to be played (at least not in the eyes of me and probably a lot of other people too). It's great for min-maxing I guess, and if that's how you like to play that's totally fair.
I think they also did instance hubs and removed the elite enemies before the dungeon because people got burned out on all the traveling and fighting through elites outside the dungeon in vanilla.
I think you are right. It's a fair change, and it probably helped the game overall. Still, some of the pre-instance areas from Vanilla are very cool, but you can't have everything.
ok ahnold
3:16 I was gonna say ZA but that was JUST a raid with no dungeon.
564 runs for my SGC never forget
Ouch - you must have been very unlucky there. Hopefully you got lucky somewhere else :D
TBC was great but I still hope they might go the Classic + route.
Nope.
There are many reazons why Classic + is a terrible idea, but it dosent matter, as Blizzard won't sink lots of development resources to create new content for an old version of the game that is considered "niche". They already pretty much confirmed TBC classic.
Why would they do that when they can double dip on code already made
jose juan andrade they only did a survey nothing is confirmed.
I'd much rather know the content in TBC than hope that Blizzard actually puts forth effort to make new content for classic+. Blizzard is motivated by nothing but money, and they'd allocate the absolute minimum amount of resources required to "create content," and truthfully I can almost guarantee that Classic+ would just be retail 2.0
@@gozcubukcu1 That's the opposite, they bothered doing a survey because it will obviously come, that's the point of the survey, planning on how they do it.
Dungeons weren't collected into hubs; they were SPLIT into hubs. They took all the huge dungeons that spanned multiple levels that would require multiple trips and just split them up. So instead of having Strat with a live side and a dead side, or BRS with a lower and upper section, you have Hellfire with 3 separate entrances. Thus the multiple entrances do still exist. Ramparts is the primary entrance and Blood Furnace is the "back door". But Hellfire is really just one dungeon.
By your way of looking at it, secondary entrances do still exist in the Burning Crusade 5-mans, but not in the same way as in Vanilla where they lead to the same instanced area, and that's the special Vanilla type of secondary entrance I'm talking about in the video. I can understand your view on instance hubs, but I don't share it. I don't get the same exact feeling of continuity in instance hubs like the Hellfire Citadel as in dungeons like Blackrock Spire (UBRS and LBRS) even though the themes of the Ramparts, the Blood Furnace, and the Shattered Halls are similar in a lot of ways. That's one reason why I don't feel like they're a single dungeon, but I can see why you do. Whether you view them as a single dungeon or not, there are still much fewer uniquely themed Burning Crusade 5-mans compared to Vanilla, and that's one of the points in the video.
The German accent is strong in this one, even though he is Danish
He sounds like Arnie.
Schwarzenegger.
pod i hit a naked 60 sitting for 2922, level 39 wf shammy, hahaha pod is king
Holy moly - PoD is king! :D
i cant wait to wade in tbh XD
they did not abandon 2 entrances 100% ok for dungeons, but kara still has 2 entrances
The Kara building was also designed in vanilla, so they were expanding on what was already there in BC.
There's no raid instance behind the crypt gate in TBC, so that was never a second entrance into Kara. There's another portal but I don't think it's accessible until you're like halfway through the raid already. You could however access the raid via squeezing through a crack behind the tower and running up from behind similar to how you can zone into ZG the back way in Classic. Though I'm sure neither of these are intentional.
@@Midinette-bu2xq there is a tower that skips the first 4 bosses that requires a key or a death run to spawn behind.
You're right about the secondary entrance in Karazhan. On wowwiki it says you can unlock one of the doors there from the inside once you've done the Opera event, so I guess you have to complete that first before you can use the side entrance. I had never entered through it before until I just tried it on a test server, and it's pretty cool!
@@moegdalswowvideos6800 Yeah the back entrance to Karazhan needs to be first 'unlocked' from the inside (by simply walking to the door from that side), it's basically just a shortcut if you don't clear whole raid in one go so you don't have to run through all the (now empty) hallways in the first areas again when you continue.
GET TO THE CHOPPER!
If blizzard releases pre-nerf attunements(revered HC keys) questing rep will be superior to the speed of dungeon grinding.
You might be right. I've also seen the suggestion that you do dungeons first and quests afterwards once you reach honored with a given faction since quests don't stop giving reputation.