"Play on Hardcore with your PvP flag up." I had said in an email that there was some change that would be important to enjoy playing Classic WoW. It might have been something about layers, but I'm not sure what I said this change was, or whether I was correct.
The idea is that even if there are things that are unpleasant about doing this, you would have enough influence to get those things fixed. Just like how after DDOS attacks wiped an OnlyFangs raid in Blackwing Lair, Blizzard announced they were changing their policy of never reviving dead characters on Hardcore.
But it really depends on your ability to identify the problem and guide people to a solution, if it isn't obvious. And it rather seems like to most people, solutions are not obvious.
On wowclassic.plus, an example: retribution paladins were identified in the community survey as the talent spec that needs a rework the most. (The language here is biased: implying that characters should, or can, be associated with a single talent tree. People select the ret tree because they think, "ret tree is the dps tree, and paladins can't dps in raids." Characters in retail WoW start out by selecting a single talent tree, I think, but in original WoW when PvP was more popular and there was no dual-spec, it was common to pick talents from a mix of trees. Like a lot of rogues in PvP had a spec that was something like 22/7/21, and the paladin video Zalgradis 3 featured a spec that was oriented towards fighting rogues, as he explained.)
I happened to select paladin as one of my main classes, which meant I took the paladin survey. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen these questions, as I didn't review the answers to the survey. One of the questions for paladin mains was about whether it was better for paladins to just focus on strength, instead of trying to get both strength and spellpower.
It is a distraction, but I searched for a screenshot of my paladin.
I chose the pretty face for my mage:
My paladin, not topping healing meters because I was a lvl 61 in a battleground with 70s (on the PTR) with a lot of dps gear (I show my talents as mostly retribution, but Repentance was very useful in PvP, so this was the spec I chose as the most effective in my situation), but I was still 4th out of 80 players:
On the PTR, first of a series of three, but the other two aren't as good:
So in this folder, with just 90 screenshots, I have both the paladin I fought in TBC's first zone, and the warlock in Warsong Gulch. It isn't really worth it, but here are all eight featuring the paladin:
The warlock. Player on the wall, center of screen in first screenshot? I apparently did not think the combat log for my own death was important. But I can say that I had about 10k health, my 1.5 sec heal restored about 1500 health, and the warlock's Shadow Bolt took 2.5 sec to cast. I was used to a game where 1.5 sec Flash Heal restored 900 health and a 2.5 sec damage spell did 500 damage.
When I had the same gear and level as everyone else, I wasn't terrible. Not the best (my unused cooldowns are definitely a point of criticism), but I was healing a lot and doing objectives; I probably linked this exact screenshot before in early 2013:
That's nearly the end. On an earlier PTR, with no premades (despite a player named Premademage?), so I'm on my mage that I leveled from 60 to 63 on that PTR, where all of 16 Alliance players were online on the entire server and Ironforge was being raided by at least nine lvl 70 Horde:
I somehow managed to get a kill on a PTR where warlocks had access to a spell (Seed of Corruption detonation) in their spellbooks that did high damage with no cooldown, not even a global cooldown:
A warlock killing everything with the same ability. Note the WorldDefense messages. I think I actually have never seen such a message from WoW streams or videos in the past seven years, since Classic launched, and I don't know if they just took it out (I don't think it's in retail anymore, maybe because of sharding) or if no one ever attacks towns or NPCs anymore:
The original screenshots have timestamps in the filename. These don't (and are resized from 1680x1050 yuv444 to 1280x800 yuv420, making red names hard to read), but the food and drinks on the right show that it was a different occasion than the first of these three. Obviously I died just after this screenshot. What was I thinking!
So yeah, WoW became a game with no world PvP, where people just spend all their time in instances.
Oh, well, my point, which wasn't well-conveyed here: I played my paladin on live realms in early 2007, around the same time as these screenshots from the PTRs. This was before a talent was added, due to hybrid problem, that converted attack power (which comes from strength) to spellpower: the solution that the paladin survey polled people about.
My paladin had a mix of gear. I wanted not only attack power (from strength), and spell power, but also healing and mana. But anyway: a spellpower to attack power conversion would make paladins overpowered before gear, but they would not scale well. The conversion didn't give sufficient healing, which needed to be about 1.8x the amount of spelldamage to match what was on gear, and even with that much most heals would be scaling poorly. Just with the level 60 balance: in the screenshot of my paladin, I have 540 attack power. With a buff like Blessing of Might, it might be 700. Spellpower conversion was 30% of attack power, which would have given 200 spellpower.
This is about 170 item points of extra stats. With the stamina costs in TBC onwards, this would be 2500 health or mana. My character had 5k health and 4.3k mana in this screenshot (at lvl 61). It's a big boost, and why? Because later on, when most power increases came from gear, the gear did not adequately scale all parts of a character.
Before that point, basically during the 1 to 60 leveling process, things were already as balanced as the developers had been able to make it.
So, the creators of the survey had been thinking about a bad solution. They did not correctly identify the problem, which was scaling. Their survey questions all suggested that the way to fix the game, if retribution paladins were doing low dps in raids, was to modify talent trees, which would buff ret paladins in ALL areas of the game, including the leveling process, before they encountered the scaling problems which made them perform poorly.
And people submitting their own suggestions about what should be done in Classic Plus did not identify this problem either.
Bringing this back to you: if you encountered problems as a result of doing something most people think should not be done (playing Hardcore WoW with PvP flag), I would like to think that you would understand what those problems were and how to fix them. But here we have a large project, with high visibility, and people were not suggesting solutions to the fundamental problems. And, of course, other streamers who played WoW were not able to suggest good solutions to many problems. Over the past week, I submitted dozens of suggestions for the wowclassic.plus site, because it seemed that no one else was going to make those suggestions, but I haven't submitted a detailed suggestion on the site about how to fix PvP. All of the suggestions that I made could be implemented, and I still might not think WoW was a game that's worth playing, if the PvP remains bad.
It's a very high-visibility problem. All of the screenshots from the PTRs that I included above are about PvP. But in the survey question about what to do with the honor system, the option of 'throw the whole system out' didn't even get the most votes. More people prefer a grindy system where the only point of the system is to reward player with gear once they put enough effort. No one is looking at the potential for the system to encourage people to fight difficult opponents — to influence players' actions, not just the stats on their characters.
That includes streamers, who have more incentive than most people to want the game to be fun, even if they also struggle to identify with the perspective of new players. Admittedly, six years ago they would have struggled against the "#NoChanges" purists; Classic Plus is all about what changes should be done.
Would you do better?
Started 02:51, saved as draft without publishing at 05:15, 24 Mar 2026.
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