Last night I tried to get into the classic version of WoW, but it had me sit in a queue, choose an account, then put me in a queue again. For a solid hour. So, that didn’t happen. There was a discussion that classic WoW was ‘hardcore’ but c’mon. Really? Now, I only played it for maybe a few days when it first came out but I promise you Lineage 2 was more hardcore. Here’s just a few examples I can think of from what I know about vanilla WoW.
1. Dying.
In Lineage 2 if you died you lost experience and could even de-level. You had a chance of dropping gear (more on how bad this was later). You’re only rez choice was ‘return to village’ which meant running all the way back to your current location. No item durability loss.
In WoW, you died and your equipment took some durability loss. Didn’t drop gear, didn’t lose exp, and could corpse run.
Lineage 2 wins at the worst dying.
2. Money.
I heard money was hard to get in WoW but I am not clear on exactly HOW hard.
I remember being level 20ish with 16k on me. A D grade weapon (levels 20 and up) cost around 400k.
I am not positive but I think L2 wins
3. Gear
In Lineage 2 you did not get gear from mob drops. You did not get gear from quests. You did not get gear from rare mobs. Raids didn’t exist yet. You either bought gear from stores, which had limited supplies past NG (no grade, level 1 and up) or have a dwarf craft it for you. Crafting was tedious and expensive. The only reliable gear was some nub-grade jewelry you could get in some starting areas off low level mobs. If you ever lost a weapon by a scam or dropping while dying, YOU WERE SCREWED. Your power came 99% from your weapons.
As I mentioned I did not play vanilla WoW but, I am pretty certain gear dropped from mobs once in a while, quests gave gear rewards, the raids gave gear. You could kill stuff by punching it or if you were a caster, still hit stuff with spells at least a little. I think. Update: I was able to play a bit of classic, I did get gear prior to level 5 from a quest.
L2 wins.
4. Scams
Lineage 2 had such excessive scamming that I wrote a guide detailing it out to help people avoid it. Low level items that looked the same as higher level or higher priced goods, shop scams, trade window scams, player name font scams, loot method scams, you name it. It was especially prevalent because of these flaws AND because the GMs did nothing about it.
Many scams simply cannot be done in WoW thanks to bind-on-pickup gear and other soulbound items. The trade window one still worked, and loot ninjas were a thing. But, the GMs would punish you if you did a scam which stopped a good majority of them and loot ninjas were labeled and punished by the community.
Lineage 2 scams were much, much worse.
5. Transferring items
Lineage 2 literally didn’t have a mail system of any kind for many, many years. If you wanted to trade something from one of your characters to another, you had to find a secluded area on the map and log one character out there. Then log in the character with the stuff and get to the same spot. Then, I kid you not, you had to DROP THE GEAR ON THE GROUND, quickly log out, log in the other character, and spam pick up and hope you got it. Seriously. I use to drop stuff in rivers to hide it to do this.
WoW had a mail system between characters right out of the gate so, do I even need to say it?
6. Travel
Lineage 2 had boat travel between the Talking Island starter area, Gludin and Giran, and instant Gatekeeper ports to areas and towns. In early expansions though no one could afford ports and had to run everywhere. We even ran under the ocean to get between towns because the boat was expensive and buggy. In the entire time I played, I never had a player mount. They had to be upgraded through experience and quests from a hatchling to a strider, required food and armor to survive, and could die forever, besides all of that. There was no porting ability like blink, dash, leap, etc. I remember wanting to cry during the 2nd class change quests when I had to go across the entire map over and over BY RUNNING. It was so bad in later expansions the quests gave you ‘dimension diamonds’ that let you trade for town specific portal scrolls but in very limited supply. However, regular quests were generally in a nearby zone and certainly not across the world.
WoW had mounts at level 40 that didn’t need food, didn’t die, and didn’t require exp. Flight points took time but as far as I know, they weren’t cost prohibitive to use. (Update since playing Classic. WoW mounts at 40 cost A LOT of gold. You probably won’t have enough at 40 on your first character. Flight points can be expensive, like half a gold to fly to where you need to be. Lots of basic quests send you across the ocean or entire continent.)
I think both games are about even here.
7. Crafting and enchanting systems
Put aside the fact that L2 required hundreds of materials to make an item, it had recipes that had 70% and 60% success rates and recipes you needed extra copies for. Not even kidding. If you wanted to craft a 60% item, which was often the only way you could because some items did not have a 100% recipe, you not only needed a copy of the recipe for yourself, and the crafter also needed a recipe, but you COULD FAIL. That meant you lost the recipe and ALL THE MATS, if you failed. And for the longest time you couldn’t tell if it worked or not, you would give all your materials to a crafter who could SUCCEED, but tell you it failed and keep your stuff. And you had no idea if it worked or not. And some recipes took ages to even get. I legit (almost) cried when I turned in the Tower of Insolence floor plans for all 13 floors and it gave me a handful of materials AND NOT THE RECIPE. You could do a quest for weeks and not even get what you wanted.
I don’t know how WoW’s crafting worked in vanilla but I am going to guess it’s 100% not like L2’s. (Update from classic, no, L2 was definitely worse)
8. Raids
Lineage 2 didn’t have raids at all that I can recall at all until the Cruma Tower Core in C1 or 2 and the Ant Queen. However, no one was a high enough level to try either of those until well into Chronicle 2 since they were level 50 something. They weren’t made for a US audience either because they required ridiculous number of players (like 50 to 100) we just didn’t have. They weren’t raids in the instanced sense either, they were all world bosses. If it was killed on your server, no one could do it until it respawned. We did have mini world bosses though. They often dropped nothing at all or useless stuff though. In C3 we did an actual legit world boss raid for the first time and it dropped no joke, 397 stems. Stems were a very base crafting material. It would be like getting 300 mage cloth from Ragnoros or something.
If I recall correctly, Classic WoW had some actual raids, like Onyxia and AQ? I believe raids were 40 people as well. They were only available to max level players though.
I think both games are probably on par for 2004 raiding though. Other than WoW not making you lose gear or exp during raid wipes though.
L2 wins at being hardcore.
If I think of more later I’ll add it.