(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.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.
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 definitely 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 only 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.
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.