[LHK]

Personally if there were a "Classic Vanilla Only" server, I'd play that for the rest of my life lol. I really enjoy the balance of that era - weapons aren't so strong that melee DPS outperforms nukers to the point of them being worthless, mobs aren't so strong that Charming is almost a must for efficiently grinding through mobs, and end-game gear isn't so strong that twinking with it trivializes the whole game. It's frustrating when I came back to blue in Velious (and now, Green in Velious) and every group had so much damage and HP that as a cleric or wizard I felt basically useless. There was no tension in groups, just CH and everything is fine. Just auto-attack and everything melts. No decision making or crazy moments, just mindless grinding. I've so many memories from crazy groups almost wiping but scraping by in classic green, and i'll probably never forget them.

The gear progression in Classic is great, you work your way up from trashy cloth to platemail, and having + stats is a luxury because it's not really super needed in classic. The content is beatable by working together with other people, which is the point of an MMO. Giving a lowbie a SSOY isn't remotely close to giving a lowbie a T-Staff, for example.

Planar gear being gated by being 46+ as well as no-drop is great too because it mitigates the problem of twinking while still giving higher end players something to strive for - especially with something like Sky in Classic, god that's painful but gearing everyone up with the absolute best Planar gear they can get, it's possible.

There are problems in Classic for sure - The endgame can be really bottlenecky, only having SolB and Lower Guk to hunt in kinda sucks, but if it were only Classic forever maybe people would explore grouping in Kedge more often as a third option. Only having Naggy/Vox to target for a long time sucks, too, but that makes that gear all the more prestigious and desirable (Planes fix that issue nicely, though)

Classic to me is the most fun, and I think a lot of people feel that way - If green is any indication, player numbers were absurdly good in Classic, dropped off a good bit with Kunark, and have really fallen off with Velious. Both of those expansions add a lot of content for the higher end player, but that gear always funnels down to the alts and lowbies and causes a major problem - the "new" expansions are focused for higher level players but the gear funnels down to the lower end / casual playerbase and ruins the original / vanilla game and people quit, and most people who play aren't interested in raiding or doing endgame stuff so Velious doesn't offer them much anyway.

Personally my partner and I are discussing what we're goin to do in Green 2.0 as opposed to playing anymore. We're over green, and don't want to go back to blue. Classic was special, and we're just waiting for that. I'd love to hear some word on what's going to happen / when / if, so I can take full advantage of that special 12-ish months of time.