(05-19-2014, 01:24 PM)Naunet Wrote: No, bosses weren't more difficult. Mechanics in boss fights from vanilla WoW were objectively less complex. Most of the sense of difficulty came from the game (and the genre) being relatively young and "Ooooh must organize 40 people!" The original incarnation of Naxxramas came close (though that was in large part due to its high gear requirement compared to what the majority of players were in), but if you look at the layers of mechanics in the majority of fights across end game content in vanilla WoW, you will see that Blizzard has, over the years, stepped it up quite a bit.
I suggest you read this article. I apologize for trying to shatter your rose tinted glasses but really, don't let nostalgia color history so much.
Actually, I've read that article, and I really don't have to again. Â I played WoW from launch to about three months ago pretty much every day. Â I remember the raids. Â Old raids were more difficult than new ones, it's just that simple. Â New mechanics are easily made to get around, and there are two major reasons why.
First of all, new players don't have to worry about mana so much. Â It might seem weird to remember a time when mana and resources were such a big deal, but there were fights that you didn't lose because of a stacking debuff, but because your healers would run out of mana eventually. Â Ragnaros was the best example of this. Â You could survive two, maybe three lava waves before you were just flat out of mana and wiped. Â That was mitigated as early as BC and stopped being a problem in Wrath. Â Nowadays, if you're OOM, you're doing something wrong as a healer, not coming up against a soft enrage.
The second thing that makes it easier is that it's more of a game focused on the trinity now instead of support. Â I remember having a paladin in our group that threw blessings in rotation and that was all he did. Â I remember having to have a CC kite you had to race in DPS because if he got back with his mob before the second mob died, you wiped. Â Things like that were unforgiving and far more difficult than the dual boss mechanics they've had since.
I think you're misconstruing my point. Â It was harder, but I wouldn't say it was necessarily better. Â Wildstar, for instance, is harder than WoW in a way that's more entertaining. Â Vanilla WoW was harder than modern WoW in a way that I don't entirely miss. Â A few things that really sucked were that you had to grind consumables for elixirs and gear even when you had your set. Â My raiding guild in vanilla was a 3-4 day a week job just to have enough stuff to raid two of those nights. Â On my hunter, I needed to walk into a raid with all my bags filled full of ammo and I'd need to make a trip out and back to get more.
So was it better back in the day? Â I wouldn't necessarily think so. Â At least raiding now is something you can do in a pug that focuses almost exclusively on the event itself, not on preparation and bouncing your head off a wall for a month straight. Â But was it harder? Â Definitely. Â I can speak from experience.