What Players Want From Classic+
And really, the question shouldn't even be whether we will see more horizontal progression, but how we will see it. WoW Classic content creator, WillE, recently made a video where he went into great detail about how this might be an "impossible problem."
Vertical & Horizontal progression explained
Vertical Progression
Vertical progression is something World of Warcraft players are used to. In vertical progression, new content means new raids, which means the old content becomes obsolete. We see this more in modern World of Warcraft with each patch and season, as PvP resets, and players will often replace a lot of their gear from the previous patch through entry-level content like the campaign, delves, and lower-level Mythic + keys. The positive to this is that players can come back whenever they want without having to grind old content and feel as though they are behind.
Undermine MythicManaforge Omega Normal
Item Level678684 - 691
The negative, however, is that all old content becomes irrelevant. Players do not need to do the old content outside of collection content or Achievements. A player just joining the game will not be able to experience the older content authentically. The current raid in The War Within is Manaforge Omega; the previous raids, Liberation of the Undermine and Nerub-ar Palace, offer no vertical progression. As Azeroth continues to grow, it only creates more space in the world, as players do not need to go back.
Horitzontal Progression
In Classic WoW, players have many reasons to go back into previous zones and raids. Some examples are until Naxxramas, a Warrior's Best-in-Slot belt and ring come from Molten Core. Warrior and Paladin tanks best weapon is the Legendary Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker for the entire game. Players who seek out the rewards from Imperial Qiraji Armaments in Ahn'Qiraj will need Elementium Ore, which drops in the previous raid, Blackwing Lair. Even when just hitting max level, a Warrior will want to go into the mid-level 40s dungeon,Maraudon, for Blackstone Ring a pre-raid best-in-slot in slot ring option. These are examples of horizontal gearing progression.
Even in the expansion to follow, The Burning Crusade, players still have reasons to go back into older raids for reasons outside of best-in-slot gear (such as Dragonspine Trophy), for attunements to the following phases' raid. To enter Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, players will need items from bosses in Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair, which are the raids from the previous tier. A very popular belief is that for Classic+ to succeed, the game needs to focus more on Horizontal Progression rather than Vertical, so how can Blizzard go about doing that?
Instanced Content
We did mention earlier that items such as Quick Strike Ring and Onslaught Girdle do remain Best-in-Slot for Warriors until Naxxramas. It should be noted that players should think more long-term when thinking about how to make older raids important. Eventually, as phases and new raids continue to develop, those items will become less and less coveted. How does the game still keep Molten Core important to new players?
One idea is that, as players continue to progress into their professions (which is its own topic altogether) that maybe incorporating new crafting materials that can only come from older raids can keep these raids active. Imagine something like "core forged" materials, or maybe even an updated version of Dark Iron Ore called something like "Refined Dark Iron Ore," is added into Molten Core later on in Classic+'s life, and this material is needed to craft a very powerful weapon or armor piece that can be Best-in-Slot for several phases.
New raids could have an attunement process that involves going back into raids like Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, similar to The Burning Crusade's attunement process. A quest that requires a "Fragment of Ragnaros" and/or "Scale of Nefarian" that needs to be crafted to create an amulet that grants entrance into a new raid. Along with that idea, there could also be quest chains for great rewards that involve going back into these older raids. In Season of Discovery, Tank Warriors could earn a Best-in-Slot Shield Suzerain, Defender of the Dragonflights, and one of the final parts of this quest chain involved carving a piece of Nefarian off during his encounter in the raid. Imagine having this quest, but much later on. Because these events involve the last boss, it allows players to still do the raids, but gives longtime players a reason to want to come back.
One final idea is also releasing raids that may not have a higher item level than the previous, but offer more options at the same level. Imagine a raid releasing alongside AQ40 that offers the same item level gear, but just different gear along with it. This would give players more options for gear and also slow down the raid cadence and power creep. On the topic of power creep, it should be considered that future raids that follow Naxxramas may not want to increase item level as much as their predecessors, as we don't want to create such a gap in the game so early.
Professions
Professions are a key part of any MMORPG, and in Classic WoW, that's also the case. However, there's definitely room for more use of this type of content. There are cases where professions greatly assist the player, especially with armor professions like Tailoring, Leatherworking, and Blacksmithing. When looking at Pre-Raid Best-in-Slot gearing, this is where it really comes into play. However, a lot of those items get replaced early on in Molten Core, and from there on out, players tend to forget about them. However, some items, like Lionheart Helm, remain the best option throughout the game.
When the Ahn'qiraj Raids were released, a new ore to mine, Large Obsidian Chunk, also came with it. This ore required a mining level of 305, meaning players needed an enchant on a pair of gloves to give them +5 Mining skill, as all professions maxed out at 300. We could use this concept again, but even further. Imagine in a new raid or zone, maybe an outdoor dungeon-style area similar to Jintha'Alor in The Hinterlands, where there are nodes that can only be mined with a profession skill of 325, but the only way to obtain that skill was through obtaining a pickaxe with +20 mining, along with the +5 enchant. The journey of acquiring and creating this pickaxe could be through old raid content, new zone challenges, and tedious gathering material grinds. The reward for obtaining this pickaxe could be to mine nodes that allowed the creation of new strong Blacksmithing/Engineering items.
The process behind creating these items wouldn't just be locked behind tedious material gathering (not to say that it shouldn't be a part of the journey), but there chould also be some sort of challenge for the player to obtain, maybe a key item to craft that. This is where we break into our next, and probably more controversial topic.
Solo Content
The 'MMO' part of MMORPG might make it seem like adding more solo content is counterintuitive to the game's culture; however, we've seen great successes when adding more individual content into the game. Modern WoW has had multiple systems like this. In Mists of Pandaria, players had the Brawlers Guild. In Legion, players were given the Mage Tower, where each class had a unique, challenging boss to defeat. And most recently, The War Within gave players arguably the most popular solo content yet: Delves! A system like Delves could be very popular in the Classic setting.
If you noticed, Torghast, the solo content from the Shadowlands expansion, was not mentioned above. The reason for this was the overwhelming negative feedback from players regarding this content. If you're asking why this got such pushback from the community, it was because, unlike other solo content mentioned before, this was mandatory for players to progress their character. Torghast was how players advanced and crafted their required legendary armor piece in Shadowlands, which is why this system was given the infamous "Choregast" nickname. As even Blizzard has admitted, solo content can go wrong in an MMO, and it seems like they learned from their mistakes, as Delves were introduced two expansions later.
Part of the tedious process of crafting your legendary in Shadowlands
When thinking about Classic, the most recent solo content we saw added was the Khonsu Challenge in Season of Discovery. Originally, this was intended for Warriors to obtain a rune for their personal player progression, but it would later be opened up to all players, and players would soon discover a hidden story and quest chain involved with this solo challenge. Should players defeat Khonsu 17 times at his hardest difficulty, they could unlock a hidden quest to obtain very cool toys like Linkue Combatant Icon, giving the player a temporary Mortal Kombat themed outfit!
Adding solo content like this should be highly considered when thinking about the longevity of this potential game mode. And when discussing rewards, something we'll go into more detail later on in this article, it seems as though making the rewards a bonus, like Delves and Khonsu, and not a requirement, like Torghast, is the right move.
Challenges and Achievements
Challenges and Classic might not seem to go hand in hand, at least not in traditional ways. With the content being over twenty years old, and the Anniversary servers being Blizzard's fifth version of original WoW released, players (for the most part) know how to clear this content, they know their best gear options, and they know the most optimal way to do it. We could make a whole separate article on raid challenges, and if Classic+ should alter the original raids in any way similar to how Season of Discovery did, but regardless of all that, genuine challenge should be welcomed in this game.
Whether it's a new raid, solo content, or new profession advancement, there should be a depth of challenge to these journeys that makes getting the reward so much more... rewarding! In Season of Discovery, more often than not, players were given faster systems to unlock features of the game, due to the game being seasonal and temporary. Challenges that the game introduced were often nerfed quickly due to this reason, like Molten Core's Heat 3 mechanic and bosses like Fankriss and C'Thun in AQ40. Should this also be the case in Classic+? Should we turn away challenging content in a game that seems to be a forever, non-seasonal game mode? Going back to that hypothetical +20 pickaxe journey mentioned earlier, should this be an easy quest for all players to achieve? Should new solo and group content be clearable the first day without any trial and error?
In Classic, challenges are often player-created, with the main ones being speed running, raid execution, and parsing. All of these are tracked through third-party websites, such as Warcraftlogs, where players can see their ranks on an individual and group scale. However, in Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard would add their own in-game version of challenges, with the Achievement system. Allowing players to keep track of what achievements they've completed, versus what was also out there to offer. It does indeed seem like a no-brainer to just copy and paste this system into Classic+, as it is another form of horizontal progression to very easily add into the game. It begs the question once again: what type of rewards would be appropriate for these challenges in Classic+?
Rewards
In Season of Discovery, all of the original Vanilla raids had multiple levels of difficulty added. In Molten Core, 3 "Heat Level" difficulties required players to sacrifice their gear for Fire Resistance gear, and also increased the boss's health and damage with each level. Blackwing Lair added five different mechanics similar to modern WoW's Mythic + "affixes", where most of them didn't actually affect the boss's mechanics, but added environmental changes to the raid to watch out for. This would be the standard for AQ40 and Naxxramas. However, the rewards for completing this challenge at max difficulty were more loot per boss, with some modes also giving players cool cosmetic looks for their gear as well.
Three Chests with a total of twelve bonus loot items in SoD's Blackwing Lair
When looking at Classic+ versus Season of Discovery, offering more loot probably is something that should be avoided, as speeding up player progression would not flow well with the game. But keeping the cosmetic awards is definitely something to consider. Cosmetics that give your weapon a unique glow, or maybe even a new design, encourage players to do these challenges, without massively affecting the game's pacing. We're going to avoid, for now, the idea of transmog in the game, as that itself is a very controversial topic, but we could see cosmetic items similar to what was available in Season of Discovery.
SoD's AQ40 and AQ20 not only did just that, but also offered unique mounts that would drop for completing the raid at its hardest difficulty within a certain number of player deaths. However, the challenge would have to be greatly increased, as these challenges were nerfed, making them much more accessible to all players.
Let's go back to professions for a bit. Imagine an alchemist gets an extraneous quest chain that not only unlocks new potions and elixirs to craft, but also a cosmetic "alchemist belt" that has bottles, potions, etc, on it to attach to their character, showing off the player's achievement for doing so, and letting others know this player is a very accomplished alchemist! The quest chain and encounters could also not even reward new potions or elixirs, but simply cosmetic items.
It must be stressed that this shouldn't be awarded simply for maxing out Alchemy, or a random item drop from a boss or enemy mob, but there should be an extraneous (but fun) journey the player has to go through to obtain this cosmetic. This warbound cosmetic item from The War Within or the Robe from Shadowlands are good examples.
However, difficult challenges could still reward stronger gear. On Anniversary server, the majority of Best-in-Slot gear is obtained either through raids or PVP. Opening up the variety of options to get gear is not a bad thing. As mentioned earlier, allowing professions to craft significantly more "best" gear options only strengthens the game.
Maybe some challenging solo content does allow for strong gear. For example, maybe completing a Classic version of a Delve at its greatest difficulty could reward players with strong bracers, a cloak, or a ring option. Maybe new 5-player dungeons could also award gear like this. However, the key to all this is that it's genuinely challenging, but not required.
What are your thoughts about horizontal and vertical progression in Classic? How do you think this should be handled in a hypothetical Classic+? Let us know in the comments!
