Playing on a private server has been nice to refresh my memory on a lot of things. It totally wont kill my experience in Retail.
For example, the escort quest in Loch Modan, I now know to tell people to talk to the npc ONCE and then wait for everyone to do the same, and then whoever created the group starts the escort quest. Resulting in a successful escort mission and no frustration from a failed attempt + waiting around for another 15 mins to try again.
This and many other things have been nice to have a more pleasurable experience overall. :)
Playing on a private server has been nice to refresh my memory on a lot of things. It totally wont kill my experience in Retail.
For example, the escort quest in Loch Modan, I now know to tell people to talk to the npc ONCE and then wait for everyone to do the same, and then whoever created the group starts the escort quest. Resulting in a successful escort mission and no frustration from a failed attempt + waiting around for another 15 mins to try again.
This and many other things have been nice to have a more pleasurable experience overall. :)
Where would one join a private server?
Yes, I have played 3 private servers since the announcement of Classic. I have leveled a total of 5 characters to 60. 2 were horde and 3 were alliance. I have a fairly good idea of what I am doing. For all the inaccuracies that people like to highlight on private servers, they are very authentic. They arent perfect, but for the layman, you wont notice the subtle differences without them being presented to you. "Oh but the Devs extrapolated drop rate data on Iron Foe and it has a 2% drop rate instead of the 1% I think it was during retail vanilla!!!!" My expectations, my plans and preparation for Classic have changed dramatically since I played private. Say what you will about private but the meta has continued ever since most of us quit over a decade ago... Some of that meta will be very relevant when Classic releases. Understanding your questing route, your BiS list, what race/class/aesthetics youre taking, refreshing your memory with boss fights and attunements, your rotation... It will all impact your experience. For some people, I think playing pre Classic may hurt their hype and may make them lose motivation, but for the hardcores, I highly recommend it.
TLDR; i'd rather find out I hate my hair color/style after playing on a private server than having that realization 40 levels in on Classic with no chance of fixing it. i'd rather trial a few characters on an insta-60 pvp server to have a realistic understanding of a class/spec before I invest 6-14 days played into the character.
LOL. Only one bank char. That's cute.
I can relate with this haha. On my pserver currently I main a hunter. I have an alt just to stockpile all my thorium ammo/iron grenades. Finding ammo vendors sucks, after you have an established ammo/nade toon, any mailbox becomes your resupply. I keep this toon in a main town and he can also be used to grab meat or drinks and mail it to my hunt if needed. In total I have about 5 bank alts and am regularly purging their inventories on the AH because I simply do not have enough space.
Keeping my virginity so i could fully enjoy classic launch with wow effect.
I'm trying to figure out what race to pick while practicing my 1-20 on private servers. By combining these two I get a feel for the different male / female animations of each race, while learning the nuances of early rogue and optimizing my path.
I've been playing private servers since 2007. I too have stopped the classic server I was playing on. I don't to be burned out on classic leveling. It'll just be downer going from a private server straight to retail. But I still play a wrath server.
Can anyone PM me the name of a good Vanilla pserver? There's so many now, lol.
I did play on a classic server for a few months, a few years ago. But aside from that, no way. I want to have an authentic experience - including the feeling of discovering new things, being lost, etc. The only research I did was in order to pick faction/race/class, and I heavily factored in the nostalgia. That's what I want to cash in on.
Played on Northdale for a little bit just to get an idea what I was in for. Very prone to burnout hough, so trying to pace myself.
It's a marathon, not a sprint!
My buddies and I are very very casually playing through a PS. It's been a blast.
I feel like I would get burned out.
Nope, I don't wanna get burnt out.
I've never really speed-run a game before (unless you count laddering PoE) but I've been having a blast doing 1-30s on a private server.
I've thought about it hard, even gave one a quick try before Vanilla was even announced, but I want everything to be new again when the game is officially released. I feel like leveling through classic to practice leveling through classic would turn the official experience sour for me :P
Surprised to see many are already playing on private servers. Personally, I wanna wait until classic drops. That way the experience is as fresh as possible. The withdrawal is kicking in pretty hard though, so I wouldn't blame anyone for taking a sneak peak :mrgreen:
My thoughts exactly :mrgreen: .
Practicing what exactly? It seems like speed leveling has been done to death, so if you really want to optimise, just follow a guide. I reckon many of the people "practicing" here use it as a way to justify their vanilla-fix :wink:
Been casually playing some classes I haven't tried in Classic before on one. Paladin has been pretty fun!
Yes and no?
Yes, because I just bought a gaming laptop and want to get used to it. I never gamed on a laptop before.
No because I want to experience it "for the first time" after so many years.
I haven't played WoW for 4-5 years as well, so I recently started on retail with a brand new account, and I'm dicking around. It's so interesting to see what has changed. I picked shaman and uhh my spells don't cost mana? OK I guess.. And I can swap to any spec when I want, so there's no more dual spec? OK I guess.. Hmm and gear has +agi AND +int on it, and one stat gets grayed out depending on my spec..
I can see how the game has evolved in these little bits of pieces. And I have to admit that it's very easy to understand and very new player friendly (you no longer need a healer set for leveling I guess, for example), but at the same time quite shallow if you're a veteran.
It's all "new" to me in the sense that well.. it's new lol. Sort of rediscovering a long forgotten lego set. But at the same time I can see how everything is now streamlined and more "mobile-like" even though I'm level 12 now. I know world quests are something like diablo-like bounty systems, and I know about garrison followers (or was that a previous expansion?) and all the "other stuff" you can do. It feels daunting at the moment because there are so many new systems, but also feels irrelevant and ultimately pointless because "so what". So what I can send my followers to quests, dungeons etc., that's not the WoW I loved, that's not the WoW I know. It really feels like a mobile game with all these different "systems".
Going off topic here a bit, but yeah playing the retail wow after so many years is also reminding me what I loved about the vanilla WoW. So it's still a good filler content for me before Classic comes out. And this way I'm not spoling it for myself by playing on private servers, so yay. Win win.