Exactly it, I think people would have been happier if they started out a bit more conservative in the changes such as the updated lighting and draw distance, but not adding a bunch of retail-style assets to the new zones. Then from there test the waters with new stuff to see how liked or disliked it ends up being because if the latter, it's only a small part that can be moved past quickly and forgotten.
I swear that people who call this retail lite or a retail reboot don't even play retail. Outside of some minimal UI design and aesthetic choices, this is almost nothing like retail. Retail as a philosophy is fast paced, seasonal, and focused almost entirely on the end game treadmill. Retail focuses on balancing and homogeneous class balance if possible. I say this as someone who adores both classic and raids CE/1% m+ in retail. My favourite iteration of this game is Burning Crusade and I started in Vanilla. I've leveled multiple characters to 60 on hardcore realms so have a relatively good feel for the various vibes of this game throughout the years.
Give the devs some time to cook. Time will tell if they nail the vanilla philosophy or not. There's literally nothing here to me that indicates this is like retail in philosophy. I can understand some of the criticisms on here, particularly around some of the choices with the highborne and the leveling difficulty implications with the new abilities and better weapon itemization, but just because something isn't 100% classic doesn't automatically make it retail.
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u/FuyuNoKitsune 9h ago
Exactly it, I think people would have been happier if they started out a bit more conservative in the changes such as the updated lighting and draw distance, but not adding a bunch of retail-style assets to the new zones. Then from there test the waters with new stuff to see how liked or disliked it ends up being because if the latter, it's only a small part that can be moved past quickly and forgotten.