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Naunet · **05-20-2014, 08:23 PM**

You realize none of the Baron Geddon mechanics (to use your example) are actually difficult? A pulsing AoE (mitigated with fire resist). A DoT that drained mana that needed to be dispeled (unless the target resisted it because of fire resist gear). An "if you get targeted by this, run away from everyone" ability. And a dps check in the last 2% of HP.

Oh no. So "crazy".

Mechanics-wise, I could do that fight in my sleep. There are fights in XIV, which has the easiest raid content I've ever encountered, that are harder than that (and a lot of the rest of vanilla WoW). And definitelyÂ 90% of WoW that came after was more difficult.

Making spell choices based on rank isn't hard. A good player knows "how much" their heals hit for and doesn't even have to think about which to cast, because they see how large the chunk of health is that's missing from their target and they just how much they need to heal. It's all just muscle memory. Balancing damage stats isn't hard, only a matter of maybe some rudimentary math and an understanding of how your class's spells work. Stance dancing isn't hard (hello macros); I did it all the time PvPing on prot; it's no different than knowing when to hit any other spell.

Things like players' attitudes towards racials isn't attributable to difficulty; that's just min-maxers being min-maxers and WoW being obscenely unbalanced at the time.

The onlyÂ thing in your walls of text that is an applicable challenge is managing threat and mana, but both of those become exponentially easier with gear and neither of them were as balls-to-the-wall hard as you are pretending they were.

Ignacius · **05-20-2014, 09:55 PM**

(05-20-2014, 08:23 PM)Naunet Wrote: You realize none of the Baron Geddon mechanics (to use your example) are actually difficult? A pulsing AoE (mitigated with fire resist). A DoT that drained mana that needed to be dispeled (unless the target resisted it because of fire resist gear). An "if you get targeted by this, run away from everyone" ability. And a dps check in the last 2% of HP.

Oh no. So "crazy".

Mechanics-wise, I could do that fight in my sleep. There are fights in XIV, which has the easiest raid content I've ever encountered, that are harder than that (and a lot of the rest of vanilla WoW). And definitelyÂ 90% of WoW that came after was more difficult.

Making spell choices based on rank isn't hard. A good player knows "how much" their heals hit for and doesn't even have to think about which to cast, because they see how large the chunk of health is that's missing from their target and they just how much they need to heal. It's all just muscle memory. Balancing damage stats isn't hard, only a matter of maybe some rudimentary math and an understanding of how your class's spells work. Stance dancing isn't hard (hello macros); I did it all the time PvPing on prot; it's no different than knowing when to hit any other spell.

Things like players' attitudes towards racials isn't attributable to difficulty; that's just min-maxers being min-maxers and WoW being obscenely unbalanced at the time.

The onlyÂ thing in your walls of text that is an applicable challenge is managing threat and mana, but both of those become exponentially easier with gear and neither of them were as balls-to-the-wall hard as you are pretending they were.

Okay, I'll TL;DR it for you. Â Your idea that boss mechanics make a game hard is wrong. Â The game has been made substantially easier for you to deal with in your moveset, in your priority system (rather than rotation), and in boss mechanics. Â The idea that boss mechanics = difficulty is only applicable if you ignore the actual game you're playing, I.E. the mechanics of your class and character. Â They're exponentially easier now, so those oh so primitive mechanics were nightmarishly difficult.

Geddon's mechanics specifically? Â Yes, today, easy. Â You've got ways to mitigate the damage and to fix your mistakes. Â But back then? Â There's a reason vanilla has that reputation for difficult boss fights. Â People who weren't very good overcame it with gear, but it was possible (and proven) that some guilds were better than others.

But back then, casting the wrong level of spell too often was enough to make your guild wipe. Â You didn't need better gear to win, you needed perfection. Â Better gear reduced the necessary perfection you needed. Â But it never made it easy. Â Nobody facerolled Molten Core. Â And remember, that was the first and by far not the hardest real raid dungeon in vanilla.

I'm trying to explain, for someone who never dealt with it, what it was like. Â It's easy to scoff at what you read on WoWwiki now; it sounds easy. Â I was there. Â Trust me, it wasn't. Â I killed Garrosh and Ragnaros in their respective times. Â I'm very personally aware of what was harder and why. Â You can turn your nose up at those elements that seem like afterthoughts now, but those things like spell choices, stance dancing (and that wasn't hard because of the button presses, I'll have you know), and rotation maintenance weren't things you ignored on your way to boss mechanics.

They were prominent, they multiplied the difficulty of everything you'd ever do, and they weren't just present in one tough boss. Â They were present in every single fight, boss or trash, you ever did in a raid.

They weren't things you ignored so that you could wait for the boss's cast bar to charge an AOE. Â They were things where you wondered how much AOE you might have to eat to maximize your efficiency.

Parth Makeo · **05-22-2014, 11:44 PM**

not going to fight this any longer but i'll try my best to word it out.

Mechanic wise:
Vanilla's mechanics all were nothing and were considered nothing even by the time's standards. Hell, Naxx 40 was challenging because some of the fights required tanks to stack on one another to midigate cleave damage. There was nothing really else for the off tanks to do other than reduce the damage the main tank was taking.

BC and beyond there was more awareness and the sense that if one or three people died, the boss was considered unkillable for the most part. Yes a Rogue could tank Illidan back then and 5 people could kill Gruul but that was all because of the itemization before Wrath (where certain items were bis even after it's not current content). Then you got mechanics that relied on doing more than just not stand here or wait to hit that. I can tell you right now the only challenging bosses in Vanilla for the times were Ragnaros, Chromagus, Vale (only because of the short time to kill him), Nefarian, C'thun and half of Naxx.

In BC we had a ton of fights that were just as hard or harder. Kaelthas however suffered from Vanilla syndrome because he has 6 phases.

Gameplay wise:
Oh boy. I hope you still don't have those glasses on. Because regardless what you think and what others want to believe... 40 people make the difficulty on more than just unable to control them. It was required that half or more of the raid had the gear for resistances, and tanks are never excluded. It was considered bullshit when you get paladin gear as horde or shaman gear as alliance and wasted those precious runs to get jack shit. Size does not always equal difficult. You want difficult? Have you tried doing hyjal back in BC (And that was a shit place for trash....nightmares of waiting...) and fought against Archiemonde? Well his fight was mainly a no one die fight. If even one person out of the 25 died...that was considered a wipe. No shit. Ragnaros? eh 20 people could die and you could potentially still kill him if you are at the right percent.Â

Back when I was raiding vanilla, I remember having 10 dead people minimum during our prog kills ad at least four dying to Baron or the molten giant (can't remember him off the top of my head) but that was because some healers had to make a choice or were not in range or "Shit I didn't notice" because there were too many people usually to keep track. with the 10 and 25 mans it was a little easier to keep track but that just meant that the less there are, the more you CAN'T die. Suffice to say some people can carry things and with Death Knights, they can prove to nearly solo stuff without any aid.

But gameplay wise, Vanilla was still not that great for raiding and most of the time you spent your dps just auto attacking and occasionally moving to get out of bad.
Now it's more than just move out of bad. you had to pay attention to what happens. And yeah you can toss in the whole ranked talent argument and such but really...who cares? Removing the need to purchase certain ranks was a godsent on my wallet and alts.Â

Honestly, I have raided back then. The problem with raiding in general was the gating of gear and the idea that you needed at the least 30 pals to help make a raid that were not already there. Yes it was fun enough but when I remember vanilla raiding....I remember the times i sat and did nothing but sunder armor and taunt or as a dps just sit still and do nothing but attack and hit certain abilities without any care.Â

Now? I am running around. I am dpsing certain mobs. I am getting in puddles to prevent the death of my teammates. I am pushing bombs into a corner. I am CCing mobs and silencing MCs. I am kiting bosses with fixate on me. I am destroying weapons on a belt. I am doing so many things just as DPs alone.

Vanilla? I was not attacking the mob when melee shield was up...and getting out of bad or getting away from bad. Some fights were just boring and others were interesting at least (Mainly AQ bosses) but the issue lies with how each individual boss was either mass dispel spree or just watch for bad/get out of bad.Â

Tank or DPS or healer...Vanilla raiding was fun when you didn't read into the mechanics. Hence why the rose tinted glasses. I took them off well after BC.

Raiding now may be considered "EAsier" but that is only due to blizzard's intent to let people at least SEE the content instead of restricting it to a 1% minority. Sure not many killed heroic garrosh still but it was way more than Kelthzad 60.

synaesthetic · **05-23-2014, 01:20 AM**

We appear to be working off a different definition of "difficult."

Ya'll seem to be defining "difficult" as "unlikely" or "statistically improbable rates of success."

Let's talk about rolling dice.

Is it "hard" to get ten sixes in a row? By your definition of hard = unlikely, then yes, it's hard to get ten sixes in a row.

Does getting ten sixes in a row require learned skills that can be improved with practice and training? No. It's unlikely, but it's not challenging. Rolling dice is not difficult.

Most raid bosses in vanilla WoW were not challenging. They were "difficult" because success was unlikely due to gear checks, poor itemization, poorly-designed logistical systems (forcing mages to spec Frost, Intellect not directly increasing spell damage). These were not things you could affect through practice and perseverance. They were things you could affect by grinding gear, using consumables and simply waiting for Blizzard to tune the fights downward.

The same excuses were used to whiteknight TERA's multiple layers of RNG involved in endgame gearing. They weren't good excuses then, either. None of the fights in vanilla!MC were hard. They were statistically improbable, largely due to itemization issues. Once the itemization issues were solved (gear added later, from Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, both Ahn'Qiraj dungeons), MC became faceroll.

Vanilla WoW didn't actually get even slightly challenging until Blackwing Lair, and even there most of the "difficulty" was statistical improbability. Vael, the Guild Breaker, was about resist-gear grinding and luck.

Again, we're defining "difficulty" as actual challenge. Something that tests your skills, not the gear you've ground out.

Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, a boss is not truly difficult and challenging if getting better gear makes it considerably easier.

allgivenover · **05-23-2014, 02:20 AM**

(05-23-2014, 01:20 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, a boss is not truly difficult and challenging if getting better gear makes it considerably easier.

Then as far as you're concerned there is no "truly difficult" content in any game anywhere that has a gear system that isn't purely vanity.

Even Monster Hunter - a /very/ skill based game - you can equip armor sets that increase your defense and apply skill bonuses (something like giving you a faster roll or more defense against paralyze, etc) that makes certain fights considerably easier to deal with, is not truly difficult. And that assessment is flat out wrong.

I help people with turn 5 now and then. At this point a good number of endgame people are over-geared for it, yet they still manage to wipe on the mechanics. So yes, having the echo buff and newer gear makes it considerably easier to deal with, but it's still something that's difficult to pull off and challenging - until you've got enough practice with the mechanics. I think people will still manage to wipe in difficult content like turn 5 and (lol) turn 7, 8, and 9, even months from now when they're full i110 and having a much easier time with it thanks to the gear.

synaesthetic · **05-23-2014, 02:44 AM**

Well, to be honest I think that the whole idea of increasing your stats actually does nullify difficulty. It's why I think PvP in MMOs is completely stupid unless all stats are normalized.

But you're taking my words a bit stronger than I intended. Smile

Â Key words here were "considerably easier."

Twintania and Titan EX are good examples of where the mechanics can still kill you even if you massively overgear it. No matter how hard you overgear Titan, getting hit by Landslide will still knock you off the edge.

Leviathan EX is an example of an encounter where overgearing it can actually make the fight harderÂ (or even potentially unwinnable, if your DPS is so high that the converter doesn't have time to charge up).

What I meant is if overgearing the encounter takes it from "difficult" to "faceroll," then the fight was never very difficult to begin with. Success was just unlikely. You just didn't have the gear to leave the realm of "statistically improbable." A good example of what I'm talking about is Patchwerk from Naxx40--it was a straight-up gear check. Just barely passing it required the best available gear at the time, but once you passed Patchy and got geared up from later parts of Naxx, he became very easy, because Patchy had almost no mechanics. It was just a DPS race.

Pre-Rising/F2P Auricadis and Nightmare Auricadis from TERA are also good examples of this. The boss's mechanics are relatively easy to deal with. Almost everything he does is easy to avoid. The fight is very, very forgiving in every aspect until Phase 3, where you have just over two minutes to kill him before you unavoidably die. If you don't meet the gear check, it's impossible. If you just barely meet it, it's unlikely but doable. If you overgear it, it's laughable. When my sorc had maxed out weapons and armor two tiers higher, I and a few friends cleared the fight with 3 people instead of 5--I was the only damage-dealer, with one tank and one healer--and it was stillÂ easy.

tl;dr: if the mechanics are not challenging, the fight is not challenging.

Edit: Actually I think that on a player with Convalescence up it might be possible to eat a Landslide and not be knocked off if a scholar crits Adloquium for 2k-ish (which would give them a 4k shield). I know that Manawall prevents the knockback effect, but I'm not sure exactly how that works. I've never been hit by Landslide and taken 0 damage except under the effects of Manawall. Anyway, it's a corner case and not something that you can achieve on demand, so it doesn't really invalidate the argument.

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