In current, you can get from Hated to Exalted with Brood of Nozdormu after about 4 full clears, probably 6 if you don’t include the tokens you can turn in for bonus rep.
So that begs the question: is the rep much lower in Classic? Since by the time you get the drops needed to buy your T2.5 set, you will probably be Exalted already from clearing the place anyway if the rep works the same, making the bonus reputation drops somewhat pointless.
So yeah, how does the rep gain work in Classic compared to current?
The expected pattern of clear was not killing 9/9 first week and evey following one, including the rep bomb from C’thun.
In Vanilla, one would progress slowly, getting maybe to Huhuran after a few weeks, being stuck there while all your melee and hunters farm for nature res, then being stuck on Emperors for many resets and possibly never killing C’Thun before TBC at all. Not to mention hardly anyone even attempted Visc or Ouro. Many serious, dedicated raiding guilds only ever killed 6 bosses in AQ40 and maybe 8-10 bosses in Naxx.
In light of that, the rep gain and tokens make much more sense than they do for guilds farming the entire place from the get go.
The fact that for the opening of AQ scepter quest requires you to kill Neff within 5 hours of killing Vael, shows how the expectation of progress and consideration of what was really hard back then were.
In Classic we cleared entire BWL with MC together in less than 5 hours within the first week of opening.
To be fair, even back then in 1.12 people still didn’t routinely clear MC/BWL/AQ40 as fast as we do now - because back then ppl didn’t know a lot of stuff that we know today.
That’s the big difference between playing a changing game and a static game that has been dissected for 15 years.
Hate to break it to you, but in 1.12 most actual raiding guilds were already past BWL content. They were sticking to AQ40 and Naxx, and most of that was spent in Naxx.
The rest were just trying to catch up, and with a much more limited trickle down effect (in other words, information wasn’t spreading as fast and wide as today), it meant they were basically progressing through experimentation a lot of the times, just to find out how a boss worked and what they thought they could do.
The real raiders back then had dissected quite a lot of the game already.
The real difference is that when MC had come out, and then BWL, they weren’t the nerfed versions which we’ve had all throughout Classic and the items had very different stats on them.
You only have to check the Naxx videos and their raid comps to realize they obviously haven’t.
By comparison, while TBC raid comps back then weren’t quite as pushed as today, the difference between now and then is much smaller. And even more so for WotLK.
I mean, it’s easier to try hard when the game doesn’t change significantly every other month and you know what to work towards months if not years in advance.
Yes, it is. So your comment about Naxx, well, in Naxx people had grown more organically as a guild, formed social bonds better, and servers were smaller as well so there was more value in sticking with the same people who keeps showing up for raids. Unlike today.
In other words, setup wasn’t as big of a priority as it is today. People weren’t trying to minmax to the 100th percentile as they do today.
It doesn’t mean the knowledge wasn’t there though. It just wasn’t as widespread as it is today.
That’s kinda hard to believe when the very same guilds started stacking their guilds much more methodically in TBC. It’s not like people suddenly turn into tryhards over a few months just because a new expansion comes. It’s simply that TBC’s knowledge was far more accurate than Vanilla’s.
Seriously, you only have to browse through the official Dungeon Companion by Bradygames, printed during 1.10, to realize how off players’ knowledge of Vanilla was back then compared to now.
It’s easy to believe. They had over 40 players raiding. That was trimmed down to 10-25 in TBC. So the priority to focus on setup rose up over night, compared to vanilla.
And one publication reflects the knowledge base of the hardcore raiders back then… how?
1.12 alwasy meant we were playing the nerfed, the “balanced” versions, you know? Up until Naxx. It was always known that there won’t be a real replica of Vanilla’s PvE content until we get Naxx.
Same with talents, itemization changes and such. It was all for the 1.12 content, meaning Naxx. Not MC, and not BWL.
You do realize most of the changes occurred well before 1.12 right? 1.12 isn’t some kind of “pre-expansion nerfing patch” that nerfed everything across the board like, say, 3.0.2 did for TBC. While the difference with, say, raiders doing MC in 1.3 is significant, the people who raided AQ40 back in 1.10 had access to pretty much the same gear we do (especially if you don’t count PvP honor items), with pretty much the same talent trees (Only shamans, mages and rogues had talent revamps in 1.11 or 1.12, and the trees they mainly use in PvE now were mostly left untouched).
Fury warriors, for example, had their 1.12 talents since patch 1.6 (when BWL came out). Heck, back then they were even stronger since weapon normalization hadn’t yet happened. The thing is, it took a long time for players back then to realize just how good fury warriors were, and by that time the expansion was already around the corner. At no point, back in Vanilla, you saw raids stacking as many fury warriors as we do now - not even in 1.12.
He is right though, I played pretty hardcore in vanilla (raiding about 14h a week of which 10h dedicated to wiping on new content and 4h to clear old raids) and we only ever had 2 fury warriors. Tops. Mostly we had just 1.