>>62159404So the thing with retail is they made the leveling experience completely braindead/pointless while making the top end actually hard, but it's all designed to have to be played with the damn add-ons which makes it a lot worse than it should be. WoW's best strength before was that it was simple to play at the top end but rewarded mechanical knowledge and even more so game knowledge. If you know things you can level quickly and make gold easily, while maintaining a good power curve through leveling which was a core part of the experience. Levelling like this teaches you the mechanics a long the way, prepping you for high end dungeons and eventually raiding when you got your pre-raid BiS. The raids before Ulduar and later ICC aren't really mechanically taxing, but you could do everything including ICC without add-ons. At this point they rush you to max level and then have you queue through raidfinding rather than forming proper guilds to do raiding, and if you decide you want to go into top tier raiding you HAVE to install the add-ons, and master all the mechanics which feels like a shitty action game. Vanilla wasn't perfect, stuff like debuff cap meant the only viable meta raiding builds for classes like Warlock involved spell crit shadowbolt for example, but you didn't need to be meta to run a 40 man and have enough to perform raids.
When FF14 went A Realm Reborn, this was the design YoshiP aped successfully, which is why FF14 gives you new skills to use every few levels to ease you into a class. No add-ons needed either to perform any of the raids. Vanilla was the best because you could play it casually and have a good time, or sweatlord it for optimal clear times
