(05-20-2014, 01:26 PM)Naunet Wrote: Bottom line is: Gear walls with resistance checks and attunements do not count as boss difficulty. Mastering your rotation is something you still have to do and doesn't count as boss difficulty, though with the increased complexity of fight mechanics, I would argue it is harder now to maintain one's rotation than it was in vanilla WoW. Healing has come a long way from being primarily focused on managing mana (still something you had to do, until gear scaling advanced in each expansion - I think Blizz just had trouble figuring out how to properly scale their healer stats, but I definitely remember having to be worried about mana when raiding through the first tier of MoP) to being primarily focused on planning and pre-casting and setting up for damage one predicts to happen - basically a giant chess game.
I don't understand how you can possibly type with a straight face that boss mechanics now are not more difficult and complex than what they were in vanilla.
As for puging, it's infinitely easier to pug when you only need to gather 10 people (maximum 25) as opposed to 40. But that's just a numbers thing and has nothing to do with fight difficulty.
You obviously refuse to remove your nostalgia glasses, though, so more power to ya.
Woah, you didn't raid back then.
Mastering rotation back then was actually a VERY serious problem. Â Remember that old vanilla raid bosses were tuned to a nigh perfect rotation, especially the first time you cleared it. Â Synth brought it up, how much HP they had compared to the amount of mana healers and caster DPS had before they went OOM. Â Nowadays, a lot of changes have been made to DPS spells so that interrupting your rotation isn't so huge of a difference in the long run.
That didn't used to be the case.
Literally, clearing a boss sometimes was predicated on whether DPS could do things like affliction warlocks never repeating a dot or refreshing before it ran out. Â There were times that, if your best geared DPS had to stop for whatever reason more than a few times in a fight, you simply did not have enough DPS to clear the enrage mechanics or to DPS down a boss before the healers went out of mana.
That's not something that exists anymore in modern WoW, and was the source of all of the game's personal tactical difficulty at the time. Â There were times you had to decide whether you were going to obey a mechanic or just try to survive it in order to keep DPS on track. Â Nowadays, with mana able to be regenerated quite a bit faster and more reliably, that's not a problem. Â In fact, that was corrected by many abilites as early as BC, which showed you how necessary it was to the entertainment of the game.
But my God was it hard. Â It wasn't just healers or DPS worrying about their own mana, it was everyone having to worry about everyone else's mana. Â Constantly. Â If DPS blew their mana and didn't maximize their DPS for the amount they had, you failed the DPS check and you wiped. Â If healers ran out of mana, there was no recourse and you wiped. Â My Raid leader literally went back through combat logs looking for people who had casting downtime or looking for rotation gaps. Â It very often meant you had to maintain a completely perfect rotation and even if interrupted you had to know precisely where in the rotation to jump back in so that you don't waste damage vs resources. Â I remember having to manage mana on my hunter and being called out because I'd dropped serpent sting after having to move instead of jumping back in on arcane shot until it had fallen off. Â Mistakes like that in your rotation meant the difference between wiping and winning.
It's not as easy to tell people who weren't there how it worked, but imagine the most stringent raid leader you've ever met. Â Mine was worse and he was considered nice. Â He explained nicely at what point I should jump back into my rotation on any skill, what I needed to do even if it meant taking massive damage to maintain that DPS, and what circumstances it was considered acceptable for me to break my rotation.
Most raid leaders just kick you, pull in a backup, and never invited you again until you could prove you could do a skip on a dummy.
Believe me, those boss mechanics may look less complicated these days, but your skills are not what they were in vanilla. Â They're much easier to handle now. Â Hell, I still remember prot warriors having to stance dance and thus having full sets of skills and/or macros so that they could access the battle and fury stance abilities they needed to tank. Â But you couldn't do that when you had rage, because stance dancing wiped rage. Â If you did it at the wrong time, you might not have enough rage to continue.
And this was all during a time when any old DPS could accidentally do too much DPS in a burst, pull hate off the tank, be killed, and if they were good in the first place it might wipe the raid. Â Even healers could pull aggro off an otherwise decent tank. Â Threat wasn't normalized; at first that seemed like a bad idea but non-normalized threat these days would be ridiculous.
Imagine doing some of those "simple" raid mechanics when even minor lapses in your almost mind-numbing concentration were enough to fail the DPS check.
No, it's not nostalgia glasses. Â My friend, I wouldn't want to go back to those days. Â And trust me, neither would you. Â Some people say they miss it, I'm not one of them. Â The gameplay has gotten so much simpler and reactive; Hell, everyone in every spec has a couple of procs they can use and resources are fairly easy to come by. Â The new warrior specs have a priority list where they pool rage for Colossus Smash; that would never have happened if you had to change stances to hit different abilities that you couldn't access in other stances. Â Imagine keeping that up during a fight like Geddon.
I cannot possibly describe to someone who wasn't there how inviolate that rotation was and how, even with 40 people, you could maybe carry 5 who weren't perfect. Â Last time I did Garrosh, one other person and I handled his shaman adds to interrupt his healing (we ended up killing one with two on the floor and he summoned another). Â I was charging and intervening to interrupt the adds because the PUG DPS wasn't interrupting the MC mechanic.
Imagine not only having to get the interrupt right, but knowing that every time someone interrupted and broke their rotation, they risked blowing vital DPS you needed to clear the boss. Â So you had DPSers who were told not to even bother with mechanics; their DPS was too vital. Â You'd have one guy cross a room and nearly miss it to handle a mechanic so that a high-DPS mage didn't move. Â That was when there was anything you could even do about it.
It was crazy. Â That's why you heard about such violent guild blowups. Â It wasn't just the 40 people, it was that raid leaders had to squeeze so much DPS out of their members that everything that everyone did was under scrutiny. Â Those stories of people getting yelled at and losing their DKP for loot because they lapsed and missed a raid mechanic (even if the raid won) are very much true. Â Not in all cases, but really hardcore raid guilds were horrible to their members. Â I was lucky to escape a lot of it.
I don't look back on vanilla raiding very fondly. Â Having done both, vanilla was almost certainly more difficult. Â I have no idea what you think could be nostalgic about that.
