Is Classic undertuned or were privates overtuned?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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As soon as I reached 11lvl, I wanted to do RFC. However, having played on private servers for as long as I can remember (12 out of my 15 years of WoW), I knew that I needed around 14lvl in order to properly clear the dungeon. I was seeing people in the general chat saying stuff like “LF tank RFC, you can be a warr with 2H” and thinking “that must be an overgeared or overleveled healer”. So I waited until 14 and started looking for a group only then, collecting dungeon quests and gearing up in the mean time.

When I finally reached 14 and found a group, I saw we had a 13lvl warrior tank and instantly expressed my doubt. The healer just brushed me off with “it’s ok, don’t worry”. Upon inspecting the tank, I saw that he actually already had gear from RFC and I thought “okay, what the F is going on here?”. Inside the dungeon, it took me just seconds to find out.

The tank was regularly making 4-pulls and was only able to keep threat on one target at a time, seeing as Sunder Armor does 60 threat (for some reason) and he didn’t have most of his basic spells. Both the healer and I were pulling aggro and getting hit for…

Yeah, the elites in RFC melee clothies for 20-25. This is around half the damage of your average 15lvl mob in Silverpine. When I asked in General, people just said “I don’t see a problem”, “you were playing on private servers, you idiot” or “these are the correct values, private servers were wrong”.

I’m pretty damn sure that a 15lvl elite should not hit for less than a 15lvl non-elite, but I guess I’m a private server idiot who knows nothing.

I asked around and it turns out ALL the dungeons are like that. WC is a cakewalk that can be completed at 17-18, including the final boss. SFK is also boringly easy. Warriors at 29lvl are already walking around with Corpsemaker in case the boss that drops the axe and his two adds should obliterate a 29lvl tank. SM is so easy that people form AoE grinding groups to get from 30 to 40 in one day. And Ragnaros is now down after 5 days, in case it took that same guild 9 days on Northdale.

So, Blizzard: is Classic dungeon and raid content grossly undertuned or have ALL private servers around the world been specifically overtuning every instance for 15 years without touching the mobs outside instances?

If you decided to undertune Classic so as to not scare off casual players, then congratulations - you played yourself. The quicker the content is cleared, the sooner the hype will die. At this pace, you should release P3 after 2 months max. Otherwise, I can give you a very recent example with a WotLK private server which lost 95% of its population in two months for the exact same reason.

If you’re reading this and you’re a player who’s about to say “lol vanilla was never hard” - spare me. I’ve played on vanilla private servers for at least 4 years, the last 1 year being right before Classic. Either give me a blue post with information or don’t bother replying at all.

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I don’t recall original vanilla values but, maybe in private servers they may have overtuned a little bit exactly because of this issue ?

Yet again it may be an undertune by blizz, my char is only lvl 18 but I realized in pservers some mobs outside dungeons were hitting harder than the same mob in official classic aswell.

There is also the possibility that the official 1.12 patch toned down the mobs damage and since most people were 60 already they didnt noticed it back then

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I believe Blizzard has the right values, private servers are known for overtuning to compensate for the increased skill of the players and the modern equipment (nobody plays on a literal potato anymore). The real classic was easier than it is on the private servers, and there has been really extensive research on if the classic values are right; so far it seems like they are exactly the same.

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I would say it seems ok to me. I was tanking DM twice first on 18 lvl and then on 20. In first case i died on van’clief and then he killed two other group members before the rest finished him of (he was almost down when i died)
The other time when i was 20 noone died but he still gave me hard time.
That seems right to me. Definitely not BfA easy…

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Private servers use their own custom code as Blizzard never released their source code to the public (obviously as wow is still a game that is sold at retail).

Private servers had to take all the data and information on the install CDs (stuff like models, textures, text etc) and then code in all the games logic from scratch to make it function. So things like “how does this spell work?” “How much damage does it do?” “How do resistances work?” Anything like that had to be made from scratch as private servers never had access to that code. Only the information stored on the install CDs which needs logic coded into it to function.

This is why now with Classic people are starting to notice the little details private servers got wrong. It’s because all they had to go off of was research on the internet, memory and old YouTube videos. Still an amazing feat that private servers got so close but Blizzard is using the actual source code so it’s more accurate.

What blizzard had to do, was take that old source code and make it function on the current engine of the game. So you’re essentially taking 15 year old code and moving it to an engine/client that cant read that old code. So it’s more of a merging process for blizzard. Private servers are of no help as the source code they use is entirely different and they use the 1.12 client anyway.

They’re using the new client for multiple reasons. Its up to date and modern and it has much better security and is overall much safer for consumers. Exploits and hacks that worked back then also wont work on the new client. It also allows a more seamless partnership with the retail version. Let’s say retail wanted to use the new layering system. Well, because classic is on a more modern client, it’s much easier for blizzard to move layering over to the current version of the game. Overall it’s a smart decision.

Private server values are inaccurate.

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Private servers were OVERTUNED. They had the wrong stats. For example boss resistances and parry rates. Were way off. They were close though, but a private server was actually slower to level, and easier to raid funnily enough.

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People dont quite get how buggy pservers were/are. Some bosses that were free kills in the live version like the 9th boss in icc which you heal, had for example cut their enrage timer by 2 - 3 minutes short. Lich king always enrgaing when someone goes down. Marrowgar triple stacking flames one shotting people. And so on. Don’t think it was any different for vanilla ones.

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pservers were “re”-tuned, not overtuned.

When your client is using the 1.12 version of the game, changing the difficulty of the raids doesn’t mean you’re overtuning them

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They weren’t even changed on purpose. The bugs made em by default much harder.

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Actually, if you think the server/client had any info your wrong. Lets take Boss parry rates for example. I think Private servers were 6/7 % It was a guess, where in reality. Classic, Blizzard was 12 % or something like that. Resistances were a guess, each boss actually changed reistances slightly, Private servers were locked.

Leveling was harder on a private server, XP was slower. They had to guess, if you think pservers have an exact copy of 1.12 blizzard has, your very wrong. There were many diff private server authors, and they were all off.

It was all Overtuned to make it harder.

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It’s probably a bit of both. Private servers didn’t have all the values so they rather guessed towards more difficulty than less, or at least that is what some ps dev said. Classic on the other hand is offering launch content but using the end-state patch. So Classic is objectively easier than Vanilla was a few days after launch.

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Not really bugs. But in most cases the devs on pservers had to guess a lot’s of values.
They had 15 years to make their server fairly bugless. Thats enough time, but they could never get the correct values.

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Some aspects are definitely different. Blizzard said themselves they don’t have the source or information available to them to exactly recreate vanilla but they were as close to it as they could get which, I believe, was based off private server figures and, mainly, watching old vanilla videos of damage numbers, buffs, equipment and enemies and checking old patch notes. It’s most definitely not 1:1.

I would say in some areas it is undertuned or just broken. Stockades for one is broken. The aggro radius on enemies is completely off. I had it where I could hug enemies my level in their and they wouldn’t react, I’d literally have to be 2 feet next to them for them to notice me. Then there’s the mobs inside cell areas. They don’t aggro at all unless you step into that room physically or antagonise them. One enemy in one room will aggro on you as you walk past and no other adds will come(He’s an optional boss that drops only greens). It’s totally broken. Not sure if it’s deliberate so as not to make mistakes as punishing but it’s different to vanilla. You couldn’t run past a room and not aggro if you were within aggro radius of them walking past the room.

It also feels as if some areas at a bit undertuned such as not taking as much damage, mobs not being as threatening or some odd mob behaviour such as the case in Stockade. Are they bugs? Possibly? Either way there’s some odd behaviour regardless. I can 2h tank in a dungeon at level 33 regardless of dungeon. You could never do that in vanilla.

Chain pulling? You could do it in vanilla and in TBC but you had to manage it and you certainly couldn’t tank 10 elites of or around your level. Now it seems it’s viable enough. Back then, from what I recall, you had to have decent gear while levelling to tank and if you could do that kind of stuff your healer was feeling the burn. I can chain pull around five separate mobs now with an under levelled healer and they’ll still be in the safe zone for mana. Not kidding, and they’ll be using their highest rank spells.

I think it is undertuned to a degree but I also think some of the “behaviours” are unintended and require a patch.

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That is true for some servers, yes, specifically wrath/tbc, but several well known vanilla private servers were not buggy at all. One can even argue that couple of them were more polished than official vanilla back in the days just because they had years and years to fix those bugs. Hell, even LoS works better on some private servers than now in Classic. And I keep seeing boars stuck in the trees in classic now, what?

The issue was that pserver devs didn’t know exact values and had to come up with something. I don’t think they overtuned on purpose, they just tried to recreate vanilla stats but were off sometimes.

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You guys are talking as if private server devs have never played retail and just had to make up numbers. You realize how funny this sounds, right?

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I don’t want to be that jerk, but these two sentences you constructed totally contradict each other.

However, having played on private servers for as long as I can remember (12 out of my 15 years of WoW)

I’ve played on vanilla private servers for at least 4 years, the last 1 year being right before Classic.

The people who said classic was hard, were just remembering the wrong aspects or used the wrong things as argument. Because the dungeons and raids were never believed to be hard and the ones that were impossible hard (like C’thuun) were actually impossible.

But I think you may be right about the tuning of private servers, since those serverowners/programmers basically only had an empty world and models they needed to fill and give stats/spells/mechanics themselves.

What I think people forgot about “difficulty” in wow, is that most of those people were between 12 and 18 years old (not calculating in exceptions). The game genre at the time was relatively new and there was only sparse amount of data available.

I don’t understand why you people let your game get ruined because some dedicated guild cleared everything in 5 days, so what.

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It would be a pleasure seeing FaiLizzard to tune up dungeons relative to the avarage skill of players.

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Even if you had played classic, without all the data… they had to make assumptions.

They attempted to make it as close to classic as possible.

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Private servers overtune dungeons and raids to help maintain a hardcore playerbase. Blizzard has checked these values based on old Classic videos of the content and recreated the numbers as they were.

Welcome to the authentic classic experience.

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I don’t see how I’m contradicting myself when I say that I’ve played private servers for 12 out of 15 years, 4 of which have been on vanilla.