Sod Review - Overall

Overall, the running theme of SoD seems to have been "let's throw random crap into the game and see what happens". Some of that random crap turned out to be nice, and some of that random crap turned out to be not nice. Mage healers and warlock/rogue tanks? World buff items? 10man leveling raids? Really neat ideas. Incursions and MC heat levels and borrowed power systems and untested overtuned raids? Nah, keep that crap in retail where it belongs.

The one important point I'm making here is: SoD deviated so far from vanilla that even calling it "classic" feels wrong. Leveling is super fast and done almost entirely through incursions and dailies, instead of questing and dungeons. Classes are fairly homogenized in that everyone has aoe, everyone has defensive/offensive cooldowns, everyone has movement abilities and self heals...Cataclysm class design. Gear is really streamlined too, which is both a positive and a negative really. Positive in that there's no more "instant d/e garbage loot", but negative in that everything is bland and samey. No longer is there hype over items like mageblade or onslaught girdle or Ironfoe or even Thunderfury, because items are all standardized and made to fit into the WOTLK style of itemization where newer raid = better gear, and outside of some niche exceptions, every new raid is almost an entire gear reset. Every new raid's gear is the same as the last raid, just with higher numbers on it.

SoD was originally marketed as "vanilla with changes" but what we ended up with was "Cataclysm in old azeroth". Is this BAD? Not really, no. It's just distinctly not vanilla at all anymore. I wanted some tweaks and light changes, not a complete removal of everything that made vanilla unique. I wanted classic plus, not cataclysm minus.

To make an oversimplified food analogy, I wanted vanilla ice cream with sprinkles, and what SoD gave us is chocolate ice cream with m&m's, fudge, peanuts, cherries, caramel sauce, whipped cream, jelly, a whole banana, and a tiny little swirl of vanilla. Is that bad? No, it's not bad. It's just not vanilla. It's not what I wanted, and not what the game was originally advertised to be.

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"but but but...SoD is just a testing ground for the REAL Classic+!", is what people are using to defend all these strange design choices. Let's ignore how that is admitting you're paying $15/month for a beta test; my real point is that all of the changes made in SoD were pretty definitive proof that the devs have no idea what made vanilla unique and special. If they wanted to do a "classic+" properly, they would have done it right to begin with instead of spending over a year """testing""" things that are obviously broken, bad ideas like Incursions. It doesn't take much foresight to see how some of these ideas are awful ones that shouldn't have ever been implemented in the first place.

Almost every distinctly "vanilla" thing about the game was stripped away and replaced with Cata / Retail game design. The slow and steady leveling, the dangerous open world, the feeling of being weak as a player and overcoming challenges against all odds, the socialization and group questing, the classes having distinct niches/strengths/weaknesses, early raid gear still being relevant in later raids....all of these things are gone. SoD barely even resembles vanilla anymore, outside of being set in the vanilla game world. It fell for the same pitfalls that retail did, in that everything unique and interesting was stripped away to make the game more streamlined and "balanced".

Nobody who knows and understands vanilla would ever implement an instanced questing area that obsoletes normal questing/dungeons. Or implement a binary pass/fail resistance check mechanic for an entire raid. Or implement a borrowed power system that inflates health/damage numbers to absurd levels. Or homogenize all the classes so that everyone is good at everything. Or make leveling so quick and easy that you can just breeze through it in a week with no challenge whatsoever. (I get that SoD is a temporary seasonal game mode, but still.) Or buff player power so much that 5mans are an absolute joke that can be aoe-facerolled in quest greens, or even ENTIRELY SOLOED by some classes.

For me, half the appeal of vanilla is that it has "roughness" to it. There's weird, janky design. It's broken and unbalanced but in a fun and interesting way. You're weak as a player and the world is dangerous, making it feel more satisfying when you overcome a challenge despite the janky undercooked class design. The devs were just kind of throwing crap at the wall and seeing what stuck, but without 20 years of game design to look back on and copypaste, so they were mostly just winging it, or getting inspiration from other games (Diablo, Everquest, etc). Vanilla is a mess, but a fun and interesting mess, hence why we're still playing it over 20 years later.

With SoD, the devs have shown that they would rather sand down all of the roughness of the game and give us a very streamlined and "balanced" game, just like retail, so I can only assume that any theoretical "classic+" from this dev team is going to be the same. I'm not asking for them to be perfect on the first try, but every single phase of SoD pushed it further and further and further away from vanilla. They had so many chances to course-correct, but instead just continuously made the game more and more like retail.

Again, this isn't necessarily a BAD thing, it's just not what I wanted and not what the game was originally marketed as. I've always said that the idea of "classic+" is sort of doomed to fail because everyone has their own idea of what "classic+" should be, and...yeah, I'm kind of making an example of myself with this write-up. My idea of "classic+" is apparently very different from Blizzard's idea of "classic+". I want vanilla with some light changes and tweaks to its pain points, whereas Blizzard seems to want retail with less content.

Given how SoD turned out, I currently have very very little faith that any "classic+" from blizzard will be the "vanilla with some tweaks and light changes" that I want.