Future MMO Prospects

[Naunet]

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.

[Parth Makeo]

Honestly, point taken, except the intensely more difficult boss fights.  Bosses now are definitely easier than in vanilla, though if you played a spellcaster that might be a different story personally.  I know affliction warlocks topped DPS charts while barely looking at the boss sometimes; you just had to run the rotation.  I was a CC/kiting hunter back in the day, and even I felt bad for the melee back then.  Overall, the game's easier all over.  I'd say you had to have a bit more skill, in general, to play in vanilla.

Vanilla bosses were just as easy man. The thing was that since you had 40 people to take it was more of an annoyance to manage so many which masks the simplicity of said fights.

Onxyia?

Phase 1: Tank takes ony to back wall and everyone on either side. MT must have Fear Ward from Undead/Dwarf Priest

Phase 2: Ony goes in air, whelps come on. AOE whelps and move from her breath path. Range on Ony and melee focus on adds. Range helps melee if too many adds.

Phase 3: Ony lands. Reduce Aggro if you can at all. MT takes only to back wall and rotation of Fear Ward on MT+Healers. 

GG

 

Iron Juggernaut in SoO Heroic.

rotates through 2 phases.

Mobile Mode:

Tank faces IJ away from raid. Raid spreads and so do melee but be close to boss. Move out of red death circle fast, avoid drill digs and avoid the saw ricochet. Tanks (Or any DPS with reduced damage CDs) take the three (or five on 25 man) bombs that spawn before they explode and do raid wide damage. Healers worry about dot cast on tanks and others.

 

Siege mode: At 100 energy IJ plants itself in place. Starts doing raid wide damage overtime and spews tar. Clump up in the position made earlier after tar is gone and heal everyone up to full before shockwave. Get blasted back and stay relatively close for bombs. If you have the lazer RUN IT AWAY FROM THE PUDDLES AND BOMBS! Keep moving out of puddles and staying close. Tanks worry only about taking bomb damage.

 

When it's close to depleting, adjust yourself to face the opposite direction and do Mobile mode all over again.

---

The fights are simple most of the time but some are RNG dependent and mechanic heavy. Worst one i fought was Heroic Dark Shamans (Which required you to split your raid and position in a certain way while also surviving the abilities as the fight goes on.

 

The only raid that can be considered the easiest was Dragonsoul (I cleared heroic without an issue and was able to carry two DPS under performing....).

---

Most of the fights in Vanilla are not really tech heavy because of the time. Since Wrath we've been getting fights like Lich King, Heroic Garrosh and even Heroic Nefarian (Which required you to control the rate at which Ony died before the aoe killed you). The size of said raids made them difficult after all.

 

The only thing i can agree is the fights have been more simplified in terms of strats but as I said before, the raid size shrank to about 25 (20 for heroic in WOD) because trying to command 39 people was aggravating enough. Especially when fifteen of the freaking morons were a close group in the guild . 

 

And to make a note, my first character was on Daggerspine alliance called Lamaria. He also had the Master Sargent title...but shortly into BC i lost my account to hackers hard so I had to start fresh on horde with the Account I have to this day

I use to tank Majordomo back in Vanilla and even I saw the fight was just a waiting game. If blue light, no magic, if white light no melee. Kill healer then a dps in rotation. Ignore Majordomo. GG.

[Ignacius]

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.  I played WoW from launch to about three months ago pretty much every day.  I remember the raids.  Old raids were more difficult than new ones, it's just that simple.  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.  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.  Ragnaros was the best example of this.  You could survive two, maybe three lava waves before you were just flat out of mana and wiped.  That was mitigated as early as BC and stopped being a problem in Wrath.  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.  I remember having a paladin in our group that threw blessings in rotation and that was all he did.  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.  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.  It was harder, but I wouldn't say it was necessarily better.  Wildstar, for instance, is harder than WoW in a way that's more entertaining.  Vanilla WoW was harder than modern WoW in a way that I don't entirely miss.  A few things that really sucked were that you had to grind consumables for elixirs and gear even when you had your set.  My raiding guild in vanilla was a 3-4 day a week job just to have enough stuff to raid two of those nights.  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?  I wouldn't necessarily think so.  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.  But was it harder?  Definitely.  I can speak from experience.

[Naunet]

Your delusion is incredibly powerful, but if it makes you happy... >_>

[Ignacius]

Your delusion is incredibly powerful, but if it makes you happy... >_>

Hey, I never heard of pugging MC back in the day.

[Parth Makeo]

Your delusion is incredibly powerful, but if it makes you happy... >_>

Hey, I never heard of pugging MC back in the day.

*Raises Hand*

Usually had to pug for 1-5 people if we were missing them for guild. I may not of killed Rag but we did get up to him. We at least managed to grab people to let them see the content.

 

Oh and I use to go to pug AQ20 and ZG 20 as well as was a pug for AQ 40 first two bosses (Not including the bug family).

 

Really though, the game has gotten at least somewhat more complicated. True some bosses are still super straightforward but first boss of Heart of Fear.

http://wowpedia.org/Imperial_Vizier_Zor%27lok

I remember wiping more times on him than I did on Lucifron. and for a scale...

http://wowpedia.org/Lucifron

 

And the reason why I died more to Viz over Luci? Luci had 40 people and all the fight was is a Dispel convention and add killing due to Mc but you could LOS the MC. Viz you had to avoid ring of shockwaves, deal with a stun channel that can kill non tanks if tanks don't get in it, had to run silencing smoke that harmed you, deal with an AOE pulse by standing in bubbles and MC mechanics...then when he clears the room of the gas you dealt with all three at once in a timed order. 

Heroic Mode he left projections behind so you had to kill the projection as well or force a raid wipe if no one could tank him.

 

Yes those are first bosses of their respective releases. Heart of fear was the first raid of the two with tier gear.

[Zhavi]

Hum, while I have no personal experience in vanilla, I felt it prudent to drop in and just repeat something I've seen Vixin of Life in Group 5 say fairly frequently (and she's bounced around guilds in top 50 world for a good long while) -- she always comments and says that current boss fights are much more difficult (at least on release and heroic) then the old vanilla fights were, and even BC.

 

Probably it depends on each individual's definition of what makes something difficult, and whether or not you count only normal, or only heroic, or the overall, or just the race to world first.

 

I've always been a middle of the pack raider, I was content to remain where I was at rather than try to guild hop up to the really good guilds (our best was like in the 1000s or 2000s). So for me, the difficulty was primarily those old timers in the guild who emmm, could not move. Or change targets fast enough. Or hit the right cooldowns. And, of course, the unending parade of tanks . . . but for the top guilds, there are still really, really difficult encounters. That one heal-boss in the Cata Rag raid, for instance, had numerous top guilds stuck for weeks. Healers were stacked to hell -- Vixin put up a blog about what it felt like to be held back by her class for the first time in memory (http://lifeingroup5.com/?p=2445 it's a good read), though she was eventually rotated in and was part of the first kill. But you know. Stuff. I certainly never saw fights at that level of difficulty. I wanted to, but we were slow, and nerfs.

 

*coughcough* to demonstrate the perspective of a top raider in wow.... yeah I'm copying from her blog:

 

It’s with no small amount of reluctance that I admit to all of you, that some of my darkest, hardest weeks have been spent in this tier. I struggled, so much, on HM Baleroc, knowing that if I had been a holy paladin, the fight would have been that much easier. (Bear in mind, this is pre-nerf; the fight is fundamentally different today). Night after night of attempt, of me not measuring up, of trying to find the absolute perfect rotation to keep my soaker targets alive (bless them, they even took survival talents to try and help me out), of having a healing lead constantly leaning on me to step up my game, of feeling absolutely and completely broken down, of trying to squeeze every bit out of a mana pool that seemed to evaporate in the blink of an eye, took its toll on me both mentally and physically. And I tell you, I have never, in all of my raiding days, been so thankful for our first kill.

 

just sayin'.

[Ignacius]

Your delusion is incredibly powerful, but if it makes you happy... >_>

Hey, I never heard of pugging MC back in the day.

*Raises Hand*

Usually had to pug for 1-5 people if we were missing them for guild. I may not of killed Rag but we did get up to him. We at least managed to grab people to let them see the content.

 

Oh and I use to go to pug AQ20 and ZG 20 as well as was a pug for AQ 40 first two bosses (Not including the bug family).

 

Really though, the game has gotten at least somewhat more complicated. True some bosses are still super straightforward but first boss of Heart of Fear.

http://wowpedia.org/Imperial_Vizier_Zor%27lok

I remember wiping more times on him than I did on Lucifron. and for a scale...

http://wowpedia.org/Lucifron

 

And the reason why I died more to Viz over Luci? Luci had 40 people and all the fight was is a Dispel convention and add killing due to Mc but you could LOS the MC. Viz you had to avoid ring of shockwaves, deal with a stun channel that can kill non tanks if tanks don't get in it, had to run silencing smoke that harmed you, deal with an AOE pulse by standing in bubbles and MC mechanics...then when he clears the room of the gas you dealt with all three at once in a timed order. 

Heroic Mode he left projections behind so you had to kill the projection as well or force a raid wipe if no one could tank him.

 

Yes those are first bosses of their respective releases. Heart of fear was the first raid of the two with tier gear.

 

Did you really die that often on Vizier?  I don't recall that being very difficult.  It sounds complicated to say, but it wasn't really that hard to get the movement pattern down.  I remember people not getting the Geddon fight.

 

It might be you're right, and just the easier modes of the dungeon before heroic get people better prepared.  There were no heroic modes of vanilla raids, so they were infinitely harder.  Your first experience with Rag was walking into the room.  Who knows, I know how hard it was playing MC when it was released and I remember doing Heart of Fear once it was out, and MC was definitely a lot more frustrating and difficult for us.  Then again, the first time I did heroic HoF, I'd done it normal, so maybe I was prepared?

 

It's all I can think of to explain it outside of the mechanics of an actual raid being a LOT different than today.  It's complicated to explain, say, the Shamans in SoO, but actually doing the fight's pretty easy.  It's easy to explain Geddon, but it was a lot harder to actually pull off.  The Garrosh fight, even on heroic, wasn't nearly as bad as C'thun was, for instance, even though they aren't necessarily more or less complicated than the other.  However, that might be because the raid mechanics at the time made healing and mitigation for that fight was a LOT harder to deal with than it is now.  There's more add management, I'll give it that, but it's still easier.

 

But honestly, I don't recall either of those bosses you mentioned being exceptionally difficult.  I think we downed Lucifron first day.  I wasn't sure how widespread that was.  I remember Baron Geddon being a brick wall for us, though, in a way no boss post-Wrath ever was.

 

It's hard to describe to someone that wasn't there.  At face value, Ragnaros wasn't even the most complicated fight in Molten Core.  It was definitely the hardest, because if ANYONE in your raid dicked their DPS rotation, you didn't have enough to kill Ragnaros.  Overhealing by the healers meant the difference between surviving two or three waves, whereas now you've got people racing for heals per second.

 

I'll give you that point, though.  Fights are more complicated to explain and, honestly, more complicated to attempt.  You don't really have to overcome raw numbers as much as learn the fight and you have a lot of opportunity to run an easier version before they toss in a few harder abilities.  But if you can't follow directions but you've got a mind like a calculator, modern WoW might well be harder for you.  Most people don't have that particular problem, though, and I rarely hear people who honestly raided both say that vanilla was an easier time for raiding.  The raw numbers and limits you had made it a lot more difficult to actually play those raids.

 

It may be that having a DF, normal, and heroic mode of MC back in the day would have made it just as easy, though.  I can't say.  All I know is I raided both, and I know which was harder.  After a few runs in modern dungeons, I know where to stand and move to avoid damage and don't have problems finding targets I need to kill and avoiding ones I avoid.  It sounds complicated, but most of those fights aren't actually that hard to do.  Imagine not being able to clear Heart of Fear for months because there simply wasn't a margin for error in your DPS until you geared up.  I can't say any modern raid has been impassible for that long.  You just eventually learn the mechanics.

[synaesthetic]

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.

[Ignacius]

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.  I also don't think new fights are really more mechanically difficult.  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.  On the one hand, take the Ragnaros fight.  It was fairly typical for its time.  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.  That meant everything hovered around two important concepts, gear, position, and rotation.  I think it's fair to say that gearing isn't difficult.  However, having your rotation interrupted and restarting it at the wrong time could cost you those all-important DPS stats.  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.  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.  Heigan wasn't really a gear check.  It also wasn't really about position.  It wasn't about rotation.  No, the Heigan fight revolved around mastering the Heigan Dance, the first real boss-defining movement mechanic.  It is impossible to explain, to people who weren't there, how popular and fun this boss was.  Raiders were divided into two camps; those who could dance and those who couldn't.  It was a sort of out-of-game skill that you had to apply, and at the time people LOVED it.  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.  It's that ever since Heigan, WoW has been focusing extensively on Heigan-style mechanics.  Which, honestly, isn't a bad thing.  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.  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.  Not for the individual player, but because of how much coordination had to be done between the raid itself.  Many characters stood around and just milked the rotation until phases changed.  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.  Now the game is focused around mitigation.  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.  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.  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.  It's hilarious because, if you REALLY hated the way Blizzard went away from old vanilla bosses, you should hate every second of Wildstar.  Wildstar is difficult in the complete opposite direction.  It's almost entirely dependent on characters mitigating damage and avoiding crazy mechanics (some of them remind me of old spyrograph drawings).  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.  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.  Easier, yeah, but then again if it wasn't easier, you wouldn't be able to PUG.  And believe me, the hardest thing about 40 man vanilla raiding was keeping yourself from strangling the other members who screwed up.  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.  At least we can replace people who suck.

 

So WoW's really benefited from becoming easier; actually becoming a better game.  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.  Incidentally, I also don't think people give Blizz enough credit for making Mists harder than Wrath.  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?  Even if it was harder, we'd be bored.

[Naunet]

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.

[Ignacius]

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.  Remember that old vanilla raid bosses were tuned to a nigh perfect rotation, especially the first time you cleared it.  Synth brought it up, how much HP they had compared to the amount of mana healers and caster DPS had before they went OOM.  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.  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.  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.  Nowadays, with mana able to be regenerated quite a bit faster and more reliably, that's not a problem.  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.  It wasn't just healers or DPS worrying about their own mana, it was everyone having to worry about everyone else's mana.  Constantly.  If DPS blew their mana and didn't maximize their DPS for the amount they had, you failed the DPS check and you wiped.  If healers ran out of mana, there was no recourse and you wiped.  My Raid leader literally went back through combat logs looking for people who had casting downtime or looking for rotation gaps.  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.  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.  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.  Mine was worse and he was considered nice.  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.  They're much easier to handle now.  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.  But you couldn't do that when you had rage, because stance dancing wiped rage.  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.  Even healers could pull aggro off an otherwise decent tank.  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.  My friend, I wouldn't want to go back to those days.  And trust me, neither would you.  Some people say they miss it, I'm not one of them.  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.  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.  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.  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).  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.  So you had DPSers who were told not to even bother with mechanics; their DPS was too vital.  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.  That was when there was anything you could even do about it.

 

It was crazy.  That's why you heard about such violent guild blowups.  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.  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.  Not in all cases, but really hardcore raid guilds were horrible to their members.  I was lucky to escape a lot of it.

 

I don't look back on vanilla raiding very fondly.  Having done both, vanilla was almost certainly more difficult.  I have no idea what you think could be nostalgic about that.

[Naunet]

[edit] You keep changing your definition of "hard" to make you right in your mind. First it was just difficult content. Then it was that you had to spend a lot of time preparing because of gear-resist checks and flasks (as though later expacs didn't have consumables...). Then it was OMG DPS and but the raid leader has to manage 40 people!!!!! None of those speak to the actual mechanics of the fight. So. Nevermind. I'm tired of egos. ;

[Ignacius]

[edit] You keep changing your definition of "hard" to make you right in your mind. First it was just difficult content. Then it was that you had to spend a lot of time preparing because of gear-resist checks and flasks (as though later expacs didn't have consumables...). Then it was OMG DPS and but the raid leader has to manage 40 people!!!!! None of those speak to the actual mechanics of the fight. So. Nevermind. I'm tired of egos. ;

 

I think you've misconstrued my posts.  I wasn't too specific about rotations at first because I didn't want to assume you weren't aware.  I brought up farming for mats (not specifically gearing, that wasn't me) in a sentence talking about why I disliked it.  I brought up the rotations when you discounted it because I had wrongly presumed you were aware of how they worked in vanilla.

 

Which does explain why you were confused by my posts.  I just took that we'd rehashed the skill changes so often that it was common knowledge.  I thought that was the general argument for why things got easier in Wrath.  It really was what I thought you meant by the "Did you seriously just pull the "wrath baby" card?" comment.  That's usually what I hear about Wrath, that in that expansion skillsets were streamlined and pared down to a very easy rotation paired with an extremely strong ability to AOE.

 

You might not then remember that, during BC, the comment was that it was less difficult because of the nature of the boss fights.  Fights like Kael'thas in the EOTS were less dependent on rotation and more on mechanics, which some players felt made the experience easier.

 

Wrath's major criticism, especially at the time, was that alterations made to specs and class mechanics made the game extremely easy.  The counter argument to that was that the boss mechanics were supposedly harder to compensate.

 

I assumed we had taken that argument as read.  I apologize if that wasn't the case.  I only figured that you didn't take the rotation into account after you said so.

[Naunet]

From my first post on this subject, I have been discussing the difficulty of raid boss mechanics. That is my criterion for difficulty, especially when they are mechanics that are not easily overgeared. Reacting to and planning ahead against a myriad of boss/environment abilities provides challenge. Button mashing does not.

 

Perhaps that is why I have always played tanks and healers in MMOs and hate playing DPS.

 

But really, you can't say things like "but your skills are not what they were in vanilla" and expect people to not feel as though you are insulting them. Tone down the completely irrelevant and misplaced superiority.

[synaesthetic]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

 

However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty.

 

Emphasis mine.

 

The "difficulty" that existed in early 2000s era MMOs was not challenging. It was not something you could get better at with practice. It was a logistical hurdle. That's not what I define as difficult. Beating a DPS check is no more "difficult" than getting +12 and masterwork and perfect stats on all your gear in TERA. Neither of these things require skill or practice, they simply require grinding. That's not true difficulty.

 

True difficulty is going up against a chess master. Yes, you're going to get curbstomped and hard. But if you train, play and practice for years, you have the ability to actually get better than that chess master and beat her. Logistical problems don't get better unless they get solved. Practice doesn't fix it, and thus these things are not true difficulty. Having to maintain a roster of 40 raiders isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to grind for resist gear isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to spend weeks ignoring the fifth boss in a raid so you can gear up from the first four that you've got on farm and can kill with half your raid asleep isn't hard, it's fucking annoying.

 

Annoying and hard are not synonymous!

[Twinflame]

 

/wave

 

/em goes back to work

[Ignacius]

From my first post on this subject, I have been discussing the difficulty of raid boss mechanics. That is my criterion for difficulty, especially when they are mechanics that are not easily overgeared. Reacting to and planning ahead against a myriad of boss/environment abilities provides challenge. Button mashing does not.

 

Perhaps that is why I have always played tanks and healers in MMOs and hate playing DPS.

 

But really, you can't say things like "but your skills are not what they were in vanilla" and expect people to not feel as though you are insulting them. Tone down the completely irrelevant and misplaced superiority.

 

Oookay, I said it's usually harder for people who started after Wrath of the Lich King.  I don't think that's really saying you don't have skill.  In fact, I wasn't even talking about raids in that case.  I was talking about dungeons, specifically challenge dungeons as compared to vanilla dungeons.  You have to do a challenge dungeon to even get near that level of difficulty in an instance.  I don't think it's crazy to say that even MoP instances aren't anywhere near that level of difficulty until you get to challenge mode.

 

The skills that you use in modern instances aren't anywhere near what you needed to run Zul'Furrak at level in vanilla.  If that's a superior attitude, it wasn't meant to be insulting.  Every single bit of trash had to be individually pulled and killed in a marked order after you use multiple CC to reduce the incoming damage.  not getting enough DPS from someone could run you into the same problem.  I remember having to stop to wait for the healer to drink after every pull or every other pull.  That's how fast you could kill mana just healing the tank.  Tanking meant single-targeting each target to throw a sunder or using a paladin or druid (which wasn't common, they were less resilient and didn't hold threat as well).

 

Honestly... I did enjoy the instances in vanilla more than the raids, but I still don't think I'd want to go back to them.  Whereas I was really disappointed by Wrath dungeons, they are at least more fun and challenging than the two previous expansions.  I kind of feel bad for people who didn't get to experience the original vanilla instances (not raids).

 

Not putting one together, though.  Having dungeon finder is so amazing if you've ever had to use the LFG channel for your server.

 

Honestly, though, that's what I've dealt with.  Most of the people who've run those old vanilla instances were better prepared for challenge dungeons.  The skills that you need to run both are more similar than the general LFD dungeons in even MoP.  Challenge mode dungeons are much easier to play for people who ran the original Blackrock Depths in vanilla.  That's just how I've seen it, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

 

On raid boss mechanics though, if you're judging solely on that, it depends, but that would definitely color it your way.  I'd understand that.  It's a LOT easier using a modern skillset to kill an old raid boss than it would be to use an old skillset to kill a modern raid boss.  Most of the difficulty in vanilla was tied directly to the game, so it came with you from boss to boss.  Post-Heigan, that's not so much the case.

 

And that's a good thing.  Imagine them releasing a vanilla WoW now.  Back then, it was the fast, reactive, action-packed competitor to Everquest and FFXI.  Vanilla WoW would fall flat on its face if it were released today.  It would be completely boring and frustrating.  More difficult, maybe, but people would rightly complain about it, and for precisely the reasons you brought up.  It's more fun to fight a complex boss with a flexible set of skills than to fight a simpler one with a more inflexible one, no matter how difficult it is.

 

In the end, that's what's important.  WoW has been getting better, and has been regaining its difficulty since Wrath.  It's also fighting an uphill battle considering how long some of us have been playing it.  Luckily, Blizzard didn't give into their veteran fan base asking to go back to vanilla WoW.  That would have been a horrible idea.  It was harder for ALL the wrong reasons.  I'm not even adding in pre-raid gear and consumable grinding because that was flat out horrible.

 

So WoW getting more difficult (as they have been) is good because they've been doing it not by going back to vanilla's oldschool approach, but stepping up the difficulty of what they've developed.

 

There is every chance that, with the increased boss complexity, the number squish, redesigns of skills to take some of the wind out, a focus on making quick decisions between AOE and straight damage, and more that WoD will exceed vanilla in difficulty and be more entertaining.  That seems to be what Blizz is aiming at.  Hell, I wouldn't really say you're wrong with MoP's raiding; I thought it was easier than vanilla straight up, but it's hard to say that's as universal a truth as Wrath raiding was.  Take it for what it's worth as an opinion from someone who did both.

 

I'm kind of hoping that the basic instances are longer, slower, and harder, though.  If there is one thing I really miss from vanilla, it's those instances.  That might not be a commonly held opinion across the player base, but there has been no dungeon more fun, more interesting, more exciting, and more brutal than when you hit level 50 and walked into Blackrock Depths.  My favorite memories of the original 1-60 crawl were in that dungeon.  Since BC's release, though, Blizz has gone out of their way to make the dungeons short and has even chopped up the big ones into smaller parts.  They've also taken out and eased up many of the mechanics.  Also, the new skillsets and heirloom gear makes instances a complete breeze.

 

Despite how much I hated putting together a /LFG party, my favorite part of vanilla WoW was grinding instances.  It's where the game has really, irrevocably, unquestionably gotten soft.  I think it's suffered for it.

 

Raiding, though, if you felt insulted, don't.  I've done both.  I think vanilla was still harder than MoP.  A lot of the people that I've stopped and had to explain basic raid mechanics to, people that need the most help, started after Wrath.  I know it's probably because they didn't learn the basic skills in instances because they aren't required to clear them anymore.  I'll have to go out on a limb and say I just don't run into people who can explain the original rotation of their class from vanilla who fail in modern raids.

 

As a disclaimer, though, I'll say that's not universal.  Nothing stops people from Wrath from becoming just as good at raiding as old vanilla raiders and I've also played with plenty of those.  It's just a generalization taken from the fact that I don't think leveling via instances and the new blazingly fast quest leveling is generating high-quality raiders who are already familiar with the basics of what they may be asked to do during a raid, and especially would have had to have known just to step into a raid in vanilla.

 

Also as a disclaimer, keep in mind that I wouldn't recommend going back.  Most people who started playing after Wrath get told they're missing something.  I wouldn't say that what they missed was necessarily good or fun.  The things that made vanilla hard weren't just gear and grinding, but the other stuff wasn't that much fun.  All I regret newbies today missing is what it was like bonding with people you met on your server in a searingly hot instance dungeon that could sometimes take six hours to clear.  As nice as Dungeon Finder has made finding a party and as easy as it is to get a party with cross-realm instancing capability, I think the game lost something when that instancing was gone.  That's something I wish we could have back, so that everyone who came in after Wrath could have known what it was like to full clear BRD and ZF in vanilla.  That's what I wish Blizz would put into WoD.  It'd make better raiders out of people than anything you put back into the new game from vanilla raiding.

 

And sometimes I miss needing to prepare with ammo.  Gear grinding sucked, but managing arrows was something you had to keep in mind that wasn't a chore.

 

Also, I have to point out that a vanilla rotation wasn't "button mashing", as defined by hitting everything as fast as you could.  There were a lot less procs, those procs weren't always something you wanted to hit, and hitting any key out of sequence was a loss of DPS even if it just spent mana you might eventually have needed at the end.  It's what most people could point to as what made anything after BC easier than vanilla WoW.

 

Then again, I've also pointed out to those people (it's weird to be argued with on this side for a change) that you could say that sort of system is fundamentally flawed.  My usual argument is, "Yeah, so it was harder.  It was harder because the system wasn't very responsive or reactive, and it punished creativity.  We didn't know it at the time because all games had that kind of system and WoW's was just the best we had.  It's like when people say NES games were better because they were harder, forgetting that sometimes those games were harder because you had one attack that didn't hit what was coming after you.  Yeah, it's hard, but that's because the control system is a hurdle to jump over, not an aspect of gameplay."

[Ignacius]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

 

However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty.

 

Emphasis mine.

 

The "difficulty" that existed in early 2000s era MMOs was not challenging. It was not something you could get better at with practice. It was a logistical hurdle. That's not what I define as difficult. Beating a DPS check is no more "difficult" than getting +12 and masterwork and perfect stats on all your gear in TERA. Neither of these things require skill or practice, they simply require grinding. That's not true difficulty.

 

True difficulty is going up against a chess master. Yes, you're going to get curbstomped and hard. But if you train, play and practice for years, you have the ability to actually get better than that chess master and beat her. Logistical problems don't get better unless they get solved. Practice doesn't fix it, and thus these things are not true difficulty. Having to maintain a roster of 40 raiders isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to grind for resist gear isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to spend weeks ignoring the fifth boss in a raid so you can gear up from the first four that you've got on farm and can kill with half your raid asleep isn't hard, it's fucking annoying.

 

Annoying and hard are not synonymous!

 

No, they're not.  But remember, it wasn't just logistical.  You may have had enough DPS to beat the raid boss, if one or two people in your group just didn't break their rotations and come back in differently than they did.

 

It was that squeeze that was most annoying.  People scouring your combat log and calling out the few drops of DPS we were missing, starting huge fights with people for things like that.  So you might easily have had the DPS and still couldn't do it because people failed.

 

On that note, why are people bringing up the gear grind so often?  I try to avoid it; I don't consider it part of raiding.  I definitely didn't think MC was hard because beforehand I needed to get a set of fire res gear.  Mostly I don't think that because getting the fire res gear wasn't even that hard.

[Ignacius]

 

/wave

 

/em goes back to work

ROFL

 

Outside of him never having played DPS by the sound of it, yes, this kind of crazy shit happened.  This is the kind of stuff I bring up when people want to go back to vanilla raiding.  I have a few places I'd disagree, namely about how the lack of mechanics made it easy (he was pretty up front about being in a relatively casual raid), but don't let anyone tell you vanilla raiding was better.  A few tidbits he missed!

 

Entire classes had limits.  As he mentioned, you didn't need any prot or ret paladins in a raid.  Only holy had its benefits.  It's benefits were blessings, which lasted 30 seconds.  So you never needed more than one or two paladins.  So have four friends with paladins?  Useless.  Level a warlock or a mage, we needed them.

 

He missed the fact that gearing up was bad, but the actual GEAR was a nightmare for a few classes.  Hunters especially not only needed to watch their mana, but needed INTELLECT on their gear!  That's right, hunters needed to balance their agility with intellect because abilities either used one or the other.  And this led to several stupid hunters figuring everything should be theirs, including two-handed strength weapons to use as stat sticks because, "What if I need to raptor strike or wing clip?"  That's where "huntard" came from.

 

In that bit, he says you only needed two spells if you were a healer.  And he was technically right.  However, you needed ALL of your healing spells.  That meant you might have all your levels of Flash Heal and Holy Light on two bars so that you could heal using JUST ENOUGH mana, because you needed to conserve it.  You could get in serious shit for overhealing, and that could happen solely by using the spell a level higher than you needed it.

 

Yes, warriors needed certain skills.  A few of which weren't in their stance.  That meant a protection warrior didn't usually use shield bash (because they needed the rage for sunder) but they often had to switch to battle stance to use Mocking Blow, an ability that taunted in melee range when your taunt was on cooldown.  This was necessary because, sometimes, if your DPS was high, you couldn't start until there were five sunders on the target.  He didn't mention how little threat even prot warriors generated.  Healers and DPS pulled hate all the time, so you had to watch your threat meter religiously and know precisely where to restart your rotation.  For some classes, like Affliction Warlocks (and they were ALL affliction), that meant that you might suddenly overtake the tank on threat and couldn't dump threat fast enough because your dots were still doing incredible damage.

 

You might get passed over in a raid based on RACE!  Racial traits essentially made and broke classes.  Hell, priests even had a spell they got BASED ON THEIR RACE!  So humans had a heal for themselves only and had a spirit buff.  Guess who got invited along to raids most often.  Not Night Elves, which had a damage spell and an avoidance spell.  Those were wastes of mana!  Reroll a human so that you have an instant for yourself that gets you back on the other characters quickest.  And you can't race change, so reroll from 1.

 

It is impossible to stress how seriously some people took raiding guilds.  This guy was obviously in one that wasn't too serious (they got to play around).  There were some hardcore guilds that seriously broke down combat logs after the fact and reported back to you how you could have increased your DPS.  And guess what?  If you performed everything perfectly, turns out you would have had enough DPS and healing efficiency to kill the boss.  Screw whether it was humanely possible, it worked on paper, and it was your fault.  And if you were the consistent "problem", you were ejected from the raid.

 

He wasn't joking about being ejected not just for being the wrong spec, but also wrong class, wrong race, having the wrong gear, not being able to demonstrate a certain level of damage on a dummy, being blacklisted in the local community after being ejected from your last raiding guild, for not showing up to a raid even in an actual emergency, or for being friends with someone that was ejected from a raid, regardless of whether or not you disagreed.  And yes, of all of those, I have seen examples personally.

 

Of course, if you're friends with the GM, you aren't ever ejected, no matter what.  Your numbers have an excuse.  But other peoples' numbers?  Ironclad proof of failure.  "You should have been on the fucking boss, man.  My girlfriend was getting whelps."

 

The mechanics they did have were utterly crazy.  Take Baron Geddon.  He starts pulsing, and in 10 seconds he does 30,000 damage, 500 the first second, 500 the second second, 1000 the third, etc.  The tank had 9-10k health if he was really well geared.  Imagine this back in the time before internet connections were so quick and reliable.  This also meant that the game chugged if you weren't using a high quality machine back in the day.  The problem was that the melee had no mitigation.  These days, almost everyone has a sort of self-heal, ways of getting out of damage.  That leaves survival in your hands.  In vanilla, you needed the healers to refill you, and their mana was mana you needed to survive.

 

So it really sucked that another mechanic did damage AND stole mana, and was unavoidable.  Unless you had a shitload of fire resistance gear.  So you had a whole set of gear specifically tailored to combat fire damage just so that your mana wasn't completely burned.  How many mechanics in new WoW require you to have a gear set, then once you have it it's not even a big deal?

 

Oh, but the most fun was living bomb, the first time I remember being sentenced to death.  You ran away from everyone else, because when it exploded, unless you'd packed a ton of gear and had the stamina, it killed you.  It did a healthy chunk of damage to you, but it also flung you into the air and the falling damage generally finished you off.  Which, by definition, you probably did too far away to be healed in midair.

 

Nowadays?  None of these mechanics would be a problem.  People have mitigation for them, people have mana to heal you, people can prepare.  It's difficulty that can be overcome.  With the movesets you had?  You just hoped it hit your priest so they could cast levitate, and thus they all carried soft feathers.  Your survival was almost completely out of your hands.  And, of course, if you're airborne and away from the group, you're probably not doing damage.  It especially sucks if you have a bunch of melee, who suffer the most from the spells.

 

And I haven't even talked about repairing and what a pain in the ass that was.  And did he go over the debuff limit?  Yeah, you could be ejected from the raid, or told not to do things in the raid, because you could only use a certain few debuffs before they started erasing the first ones put on.

 

Difficult?  Yes, very.  Harder than MoP, I certainly think so.  More fun than MoP?  There are a few things I miss, but don't believe the hype when someone uses the word "better".  Harder isn't better, because it wasn't hard for the right reasons.

 

Goddamnit, and I didn't tell you guys about Divine Intervention, the paladin spell that costs a reagent, kills yourself, and gives someone invincibility (usually a healer).  But your paladin is a healer, obviously!  So it is a healer's job to carry reagents and predict a wipe beforehand, then die by putting it on another healer who, in MC, HAD TO BE IN THE PARTY WITH THEM!  Why would you need that when Warlocks had Soulstone?  Because Soulstone had a half-hour cooldown.  And if neither of those worked, there was a stink because the whole raid had to release and run back to the raid.  Yes, that was an admonish-able offense in vanilla.

 

Man, vanilla raiding...

[Naunet]

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 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.

[Ignacius]

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 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.

Okay, I'll TL;DR it for you.  Your idea that boss mechanics make a game hard is wrong.  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.  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.  They're exponentially easier now, so those oh so primitive mechanics were nightmarishly difficult.

 

Geddon's mechanics specifically?  Yes, today, easy.  You've got ways to mitigate the damage and to fix your mistakes.  But back then?  There's a reason vanilla has that reputation for difficult boss fights.  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.  You didn't need better gear to win, you needed perfection.  Better gear reduced the necessary perfection you needed.  But it never made it easy.  Nobody facerolled Molten Core.  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.  It's easy to scoff at what you read on WoWwiki now; it sounds easy.  I was there.  Trust me, it wasn't.  I killed Garrosh and Ragnaros in their respective times.  I'm very personally aware of what was harder and why.  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.  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.  They were things where you wondered how much AOE you might have to eat to maximize your efficiency.

[Parth Makeo]

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. 

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

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]

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]

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.