(05-20-2014, 02:40 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: People didn't pug vanilla raids because the gear requirement was too high. The barrier to entry was enormous. You had to be attuned, which was a time-consuming pain in the rear. You couldn't just pick up random people in blues to do MC. Itemization was terrible that early in the game and thus the DPS and healing checks were very, very tight. Without spending weeks farming the earlier bosses, you wouldn't have much chance against Rag. Additionally, you had to farm resist gear for several vanilla fights (further slowing things down) and many specs were just flat-out completely useless (fire mages, forcing mages to run frost, which just killed their DPS, and destro locks, though at the time destro couldn't touch SM/Ruin). This was before the days of easy respeccing and running dual specs.
Flash forward to when BWL, ZG and the AQ raids added far better itemized gear, with gobs of spell damage and spell healing, attack power, MP5, etc. Guess what? MC became utter faceroll. My guild, when working on C'thun, would throw together a random cross-guild pug and go plow through MC without breaking a sweat to farm mats for peoples' silly legendaries.
Vanilla raids were not mechanically more difficult. They were logistically more difficult. You needed more gear, more people, more consumables, more resistance bullshit. The mechanics themselves were vastly simpler.
FFXI is a good example of this as well, actually an even better one. Most bosses in pre-Abyssea FFXI had no mechanics at all. They were simple tank-and-spank bosses, or groups of Elite Mooks. Even one of the absolute most difficult fights from the Zilart expansion, Ark Angels, was mechanicless. You just had five enemies with incredibly powerful abilities to manage. But you had no mechanics. They just had to be tanked and killed in the most expedient order. It was only "hard" because the gear requirements were enormous, far more than the average level-cap player could manage.
When ToAU came out and PLDs could sub blue mage for Cocoon, Ark Angels' difficulty pretty much disappeared. The "difficulty" of the fight was a gear check--the tank damage was so absurdly high that the healers and damage-dealers had to have extremely high throughput to kill the enemies before the healers ran out of MP, whereupon the tank would die, then everyone else would die. A PLD/BLU using Cocoon could reduce the damage down so much that the fight became almost trivial in comparison, assuming your party was well-geared.
Older MMOs are not mechanically more difficult. They're only logistically more difficult. More people, more gear, more time spent (many of XI's bosses took well over an hour of continuous combat to kill simply because they had hilariously bloated HP pools). This doesn't mean all new MMOs have insanely complex boss mechanics. FFXIV and TERA did not; both games rely on punishing "oneshot" mechanics that must be actively avoided by all players in order to clear the encounter. But to say that old MMOs are more challenging and skill-based than modern MMOs is disingenuous at best.
They were harder, but that was Fake Difficulty. That was The Computer is a Cheating Bastard. It wasn't something you could overcome through practice; it was something you could only overcome through making your numbers higher... spending more time grinding.
That's true, but I wasn't counting attunement. Â I also don't think new fights are really more mechanically difficult. Â What's definitely changed is the onus of the fight now being on individual players being able to handle themselves rather than operating the raid like a giant 40 man machine.
Really, I'm not sure the game has gotten easier or harder, but that Blizzard changed the focus of the raid bosses to a form of difficulty that people find easier to master. Â On the one hand, take the Ragnaros fight. Â It was fairly typical for its time. Â The healers would OOM, that much was certain, and there was very little that could be done to stop that since so much damage was unavoidable save for a few cleaves. Â That meant everything hovered around two important concepts, gear, position, and rotation. Â I think it's fair to say that gearing isn't difficult. Â However, having your rotation interrupted and restarting it at the wrong time could cost you those all-important DPS stats. Â Really, almost every boss fight revolved around this.
What I think people are assuming when I talk about this is that I think we should go back to vanilla-style raiding, and I've already said that I don't. Â I'm well aware of why the raiding focus changed and most people, even ones who were around at the time, don't always remember why it changed.
The reason it changed was the other hand in vanilla raiding, that the most popular boss in a long time, the one we liked the best, was a Naxx boss called Heigan. Â Heigan wasn't really a gear check. Â It also wasn't really about position. Â It wasn't about rotation. Â No, the Heigan fight revolved around mastering the Heigan Dance, the first real boss-defining movement mechanic. Â It is impossible to explain, to people who weren't there, how popular and fun this boss was. Â Raiders were divided into two camps; those who could dance and those who couldn't. Â It was a sort of out-of-game skill that you had to apply, and at the time people LOVED it. Â Heigan wasn't the hardest boss in the game for most people, but he was certainly the most popular.
Nowadays, people wonder why the game got easier. Â It's that ever since Heigan, WoW has been focusing extensively on Heigan-style mechanics. Â Which, honestly, isn't a bad thing. Â Most people get the hang of the mechanics quickly and clear bosses faster, but nowadays the most boring bosses in WoW are spank-and-tank. Â That used to be the norm; mechanics were something you had to do that might interrupt your rotations too often or had to do with where you stood.
The Onyxia fight, for instance, is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Â Not for the individual player, but because of how much coordination had to be done between the raid itself. Â Many characters stood around and just milked the rotation until phases changed. Â Now, with so many things made reactive and so many mechanics based around dances and specialized mechanics, it's very rare you can just stand around and maximize your damage. Â Now the game is focused around mitigation. Â Again, not a bad thing, but a lot easier to do and PUG for most people since you aren't relying on forty people not screwing up on behalf of the group.
In that sense, you're probably right that the fights were more logistically difficult, but not solely for gear, but because, in a very EVE sort of way, older raids were based around people being number-factories for their strategist overlords. Â Now, it's much less difficult per se, but that's because if your average raid boss these days kills someone, it's because they stood in the fire.
It's one of the reasons I think it's hilarious to hear people in that Wildstar beta talking about how Wildstar will be a return to hard raids that WoW apparently left behind. Â It's not hilarious because of the sentiment; from what I've heard Wildstar might be the hardest PVE you can get in an MMO, including vanilla WoW. Â It's hilarious because, if you REALLY hated the way Blizzard went away from old vanilla bosses, you should hate every second of Wildstar. Â Wildstar is difficult in the complete opposite direction. Â It's almost entirely dependent on characters mitigating damage and avoiding crazy mechanics (some of them remind me of old spyrograph drawings). Â It's entirely dependent on fast-thinking and reaction; essentially it's all the old vestiges of vanilla WoW removed and slapped into a much faster and less forgiving game.
People tend to equate difficulty with quality, which isn't necessarily true. Â I don't want anyone to misconstrue my point, vanilla raids were a lot harder, but I kept playing through Mists because I thought the game was getting better. Â Easier, yeah, but then again if it wasn't easier, you wouldn't be able to PUG. Â And believe me, the hardest thing about 40 man vanilla raiding was keeping yourself from strangling the other members who screwed up. Â I've kept in touch with no one from my original raiding guild, but I've met a lot of people pugging raids in the new WoW. Â At least we can replace people who suck.
So WoW's really benefited from becoming easier; actually becoming a better game. Â I don't think it's as good as Wildstar, but I'd much rather play Mists of Pandaria than vanilla WoW at this point. Â Incidentally, I also don't think people give Blizz enough credit for making Mists harder than Wrath. Â It definitely is, without going back to the old raid difficulties in vanilla that these days seem aggravatingly quaint.
I mean, who wants another Baron Geddon fight exactly like that old one? Â Even if it was harder, we'd be bored.