I think Classic is more casual than retail in regards to endgame, as you don't need to progress through multiple raid difficulties or grind AP to meet a specific standard set by the game developers, as not every level of an artifact weapon or Heart of Azeroth is the same. Whereas in Classic the only thing you need to grind outside of raid is the gold in your pocket and the occasional reputation.

There are also far less carrots at the end of a stick in Classic that are locked behind RNG.

If you stick it out with a guild that doesn't give up, you'll be able to clear all the raid content on its hardest (and only) difficulty. It'll take longer, but you can do it.

However, the leveling process in retail is much more casual, but I think that's more of a necessity for the game's livelihood as 120 is a daunting number for new players.

Well you have to define what hardcore means. It is different type of difficulty then we see on retail in let's say mythic raiding.
Compared to the very first mmo's like EQ or RS, I'd say WOW is more of a casual game.
The levelling experience and even raiding is hard in the sense that you are limited in terms of resources and your capabilities.
Game mechanics are not difficult but rather limiting for the player and you have to manage your humble amount of resources in order to succeed. So preparation and planning play kinda big role.

Overall I would say that Classic is a casual game and personally I am glad for what it is. I wanna enjoy all the fruits it has and with the slow paced gameplay I can achieve that.

Well you have to define what hardcore means.

i realized someone was bound to ask this after posting the thread. to give you a straight answer i dont know. i guess hardcore would mean being a huge time sink taking a lot of dedication more over being a difficult game. but take the term "hardcore" it as you would see it

i guess hardcore would mean being a huge time sink taking a lot of dedication more over being a difficult game.

By that definition, the answer is both, but for very different reasons.

Well you have to define what hardcore means.

i realized someone was bound to ask this after posting the thread. to give you a straight answer i dont know. i guess hardcore would mean being a huge time sink taking a lot of dedication more over being a difficult game. but take the term "hardcore" it as you would see it

If you see hardcore as this, then sure it is hardcore.

I quess I looked at it from wrong angle. It think it is rather fitting to say that Classic can be hardcore and casual depending on what you wanna do.

For it’s time it was considered casual when compared to other MMOs like EQ.

I think by today’s standards the grinding involved would make it pretty hardcore compared to competing MMOs.

For me I often associate the word hardcore less with grinding and more with finality - more that ‘when you die, you die’. For example in EvE you lose a ship and it’s gone forever, or Runescape if you get PK’d and lose all loot, or Diablo 2 where if you die it’s game over no matter how high a level you are.

Vanilla was casual by the standards back then and while certain aspects of the game have gotten more player friendly, retail is way more hardcore at the top end than Classic is. And at the bottom end, both are relatively casual as these players arent really achieving much anyhow, just running around and enjoying the game.

Lets look at how "HARDCORE" each patch will be for the average raider - the hardcore raider.

Consider that during phase 1-2 a player can clear his raids in about 2-3 hours per week. This will be the reality of raiding for 2/6 phases. Many players will raid log and can play at the highest level of content while investing as little as 2 hours per week.

Phase 3 you add BWL and likely an additional raid night for awhile, but after some time most guilds (even casual guilds) will squish their raid back to one night. For a short time BWL provides a challenge for some guilds but through gearing and practice the fights become easy. BWL becomes manageable and they are able to do BWL and MC on one night. Even though Ony is on a 5 day timer, they will have accumulated so many kills that they will likely only be doing this once per week. Leaving players at about 3-4 hours on one night, once per week in phase 3.

ZG gets introduced as a catchup mechanic in phase 4 and is more of a dungeon by this point than a raid for guilds who have been gearing. Any adversity developing guilds were facing are slowly decreased by the gear that comes out of ZG.

Phase 5 releases AQ and on most servers the event ends incredibly fast. Potentially in a few short hours. Again, a new catchup mechanic in the form of AQ20 is added further adding crutches to all of the previous content and springboarding guilds towards AQ40. AQ40 starts to present the first major walls that guilds will face. Guilds are now typically running two raid nights and have increased from about 3-4 hours of raiding per week up to around 8 hours in the form of 2 nights of raiding. Though at this point, many guilds begin have no interest in MC anymore and even Ony is likely being ran with a combination of alts and pugs. They have trimmed most of their old raids out of the rotation. Many players have gotten what they needed out of ZG as well and this is now only done with alts. Serious raid teams are doing BWL and AQ40.

Phase 6 is Naxx. The server is old and the social heirarchy of the upper ranks have been well established. Guilds are no longer worried about recruitment or community, they are simply folding and merging with one another. The remaining vetrans are long in the tooth and short on patience. They want what they have worked so hard for and by separating the wheat from the chaff they are able to accomplish their goals with relative ease. This raid simply takes time, time that these players have demonstratively invested into this game, on this server, on this character.

"But thats just how private servers were". No. Consider having 1.12 talents. No progressive itemization means that raids are significantly easier. Raids being easier than private means they will be easier as content was tuned a bit on private and was still easy. Long phases and prolonged periods for players to gear means that when players reach these new benchmarks at each phase, they have had FAR longer to gear than most private server players have had. On private these phases are short AF. On retail vanilla guilds werent clearing so fast because they didnt have the same access to information and thus had less time to gear between content. Imagine how many thunderfuries we will see when MC and Ony are downed in the first 2-4 weeks and then continue to get farmed as the only content for 2 phases.

TLDR; Vanilla was casual. Private was casual and in many regards this is the most challenging variant of vanilla we will see. Classic is likely going to be the easiest variant of Vanilla we have ever seen.

Vanilla was casual by the standards of a time passed. Vanilla raiding difficulty is trivial by todays standards. The entire game could use a solid 10-30% increase in difficulty to be a bit more relevant by modern standards. Unpopular opinion, I know. Not how vanilla was I know. Private isnt Classic, I know. Classic is casual AF but I still love it.

For me I often associate the word hardcore less with grinding and more with finality - more that ‘when you die, you die’. For example in EvE you lose a ship and it’s gone forever, or Runescape if you get PK’d and lose all loot, or Diablo 2 where if you die it’s game over no matter how high a level you are.

This is the reason I believe most felt Vanilla was casual. Prior to WoW, MMO deaths were very punishing.

For me I often associate the word hardcore less with grinding and more with finality - more that ‘when you die, you die’. For example in EvE you lose a ship and it’s gone forever, or Runescape if you get PK’d and lose all loot, or Diablo 2 where if you die it’s game over no matter how high a level you are.

This is the reason I believe most felt Vanilla was casual. Prior to WoW, MMO deaths were very punishing.

this seems to be a very popular opinion. i wouldnt play wow if it had item or xp loss. i see it a form of perma death mechanics and i absolutely despise losing progress in any way

I think the main thing about Classic, is that it is a time-sink (but so was repeatable/world quests) and that its gear progression is much slower than the current loot pinata system, that envelops retail now.

The epic journey, and the logistics behind raiding is what makes it stand out, and sure if investing time into what you do is hardcore, then Classic will be hardcore aplenty.

I think the main thing about Classic, is that it is a time-sink (but so was repeatable/world quests)

there is a fine line between dailies/world quests and an ongoing grind. daily rewards are just time gates that you have little to no control over while a mob grind for example you invest what you want into it. maybe im getting a bit off-topic on your statement, im just putting it out there that dailies do nothing but make you wait while you have the rewards on your mind. some might argue its to keep you subbed to the game

It's casual then but hardcore by todays standards, I've played Lineage II for over a decade, many private servers and finally 5 years of my life into retail Lineage II, I'd call that a "hardcore" game with pw2 concept.
I remember spending like 8hs farming 2% of exp to lose 15% after being killed. Or upgrading weapons with a chance of breaking. Gathering crafting materials for over a week and when I finally "craft" the item it failed and lose all of the materials.

Highest character on retail was Lv110 with a subclass Lv109, that game ruined my life but I met really good friends who get me into WoW and enjoyed even more, I loved that WoW keeps your progress, you can watch your character "upgrade" and it doesn't matter how much time you spend, it can be 1-2hs a day, but eventually you'll reach your goals.

It's casual compared to Japanese MMO's but hardcore by todays standards, yep.

The entire game could use a solid 10-30% increase in difficulty to be a bit more relevant by modern standards.

I agree, and the best way to explain it is to align it with Blizzards goals for Classic. Recreate an authentic vanilla experience. Sure #nochanges fanatics will go mad, but this buff would help recreate the seeming difficulty of original vanilla. Better hardware, lower ping and generally better and older player base means the game can be buffed and still feel as hard as it was in vanilla. Esfand discussed this yesterday and I agree.

I guess by mmo standards you could call wow pretty casual, but just by general gaming standards I'd say pretty much all mmo's are hardcore. Try getting someone who has never played mmo's into classic wow, it's pretty daunting for most people. Just the time commitment/ work it requires makes it a lot more "hardcore" than the majority if games on the market.

It's only "hardcore" if you don't like earning everything.

No, not really. It's unforgiving compared to modern MMOs, for sure, but it's not as punishing as some older ones. I kind of like it as a medium-core MMO.

I'm talking mainly in terms of death penalty. Like, in Everquest when you die you lose experience and drop all of your items on your body (on the Rallos Zek server if you died in PVP, the player who killed you could loot an item off you). You then have to either run back naked to where you died, which might involve getting a Rogue friend to sneak in and drag your corpse somewhere safe, and/or get a Cleric to resurrect you (which is vastly preferable since their rezzes would restore some of the experience loss, up to 98% if you could get a high level rez!).

Or going back to like Nexus TK, when you died you'd lose a hefty chunk of experience and all of your Break On Death items, uh, break. And then they're just gone and you have to go buy them, farm them, or win them again.

All that said I think WoW hits a good sweet spot where you're not an unstoppable god blowing through the content, but also dying isn't such a gut-punch. Don't get me wrong, being legitimately afraid to die makes dungeon diving actually seem dangerous and adds to the immersion, but I also don't mind losing them for convenience's sake.

That said I'm not sure why WoW got the reputation of being the casual MMO, considering a much more casual MMO also had a big launch a few months prior: City of Heroes. I just played that on a private server for a bit and, XP debt aside, it feels much more approachable and casual to someone who's completely unfamiliar with MMOs or RPGs. I guess just because WoW ended up being that much more popular.

after playing a game like FFXI back in the day before wow, this game does feel more casual. I honestly feel classic wow is even a more casual friendly game than the current game. Retail is all about getting max level ASAP and grinding AP and spamming mythic + for titan forge gear the leveling and the casual content is very lackluster now, pretty much leaves most casual players to mount farm or transmog farm.

FFXI was ridiculous, there were quests but they werent really your main means of leveling. You basically solo grinded mobs to level 10 and then had to group with 5 others to efficiently level all the way to max. Classic leveling feels very steady and constantly rewarding, if you just play an hour a day you can get something back from the game.

There is no real heavy grind required for reaching endgame goals in wow and wow classic. So, I would consider wow classic as a casual MMO.
Getting PvP r13/14 is maybe a hardcore thing, but the game does not turn by that into a hardcore MMO for me.

"Hardcore" in the context of games usually means inconvenient or very time consuming. Older games used to be more hardcore because they lacked content, so the existing content had to be stretched. When platformers only had 10 stages to play through these stages had to be fricking hard, otherwise the game would be over 30 minutes in. If the same type of game has 150 stages they dont have to be difficult; it will take you long enough either way.
MMOs had the same problem. Before WoW endgame content didnt exist. People grinded the shit out of the games (including very annoying setbacks like the ones mentioned in this thread) and thats it. WoW didnt need to be as hardcore because it had stuff to do at max level. With endgame (or rather say additional) content continously expanding the still existing hardcorey aspects became unnecessary and got removed over time.