In my humble opinion this is not a bad thing. I also play retail and go there if I want challenging gameplay that I have not seen before. Classic raids are cleared fast but can still provide some small challenge for people that have never done these before, like Sunwell prenerf and Uld HM’s. No matter what people claim these were not easy. Other raids were faceroll, I agree, but why is this bad?
A big part of the appeal in classic is to replay a period in wow and to breathe in the atmosphere as if it were current. People all over the old zones, using old class playstyles. I feel that people these days measure a game in difficulty only, while this is just one factor.
I said this in another post/thread but I think blizz will have no choice to reset everything in a year or 3. By then people will start to miss Classic progression and people will once again flock to a server that will go from vanilla to wrath in 3 years time. Else classic players will just return to private servers. Anyone believing a static era server in the last phase is enough for those players is dead wrong
Yeah this I agree with, but what I meant, is that mainly you needed x likeminded people to play with you at the exact time. So for ULD25, you needed 24 people to play with at that time (for HMs atleast), because pugging was not really a thing back then.
Actually there were. And i’m not talking about dps / hps checks. I’m talking purely mechanics. TBC raiding was piss easy, same as WOTLK raiding. It’s just that some bosses were tuned abit too high (some being even impossible at time, hello Hodir and Mu’ru prenerf). Mechanics wise? Compare ULD25, ICC25 to fights like Blackhand mythic, Archimonde mythic, or if we take a step higher, KJ mythic and Uu’nat mythic. Raiders today, would stomp bosses like Mimiron HM with their eyes closed probably if we compare mechanics, and that’s what I meant.
This pretty much:
And while we’re at it, ICC wont be any different when it launches. I’m expecting guilds to clear LK10/25 HC in a matter of hours.
Because Mythic difficulty didn’t even exist back then. That’s not exactly a fair comparison, now, is it? If you compare modern Heroic difficulty to old Heroic difficulty, you’ll find that old Heroic raids were actually mechanically more difficult than modern ones. Modern Heroic raids are, mechanics wise, more akin to WoTLK 25 Normal (with the exception of Naxx).
Yes, true, but a big part of the appeal of WoW itself is to explore and learn. It rises out of two core design pillars, which I’ll just touch on real briefly yet again (idk if I have to you, but I pull these up so often it’s hilarious. Btw they are on the back of the vanilla box)
A sense of world
A sense of community
Great combat
Constant stream of content
This issue related both to 1) and 4) there. Basically the idea is that as you grow you see more stuff, and Blizzard will keep adding stuff so you can keep doing this. The first time you encounter this as a player is when you transition from the first zone to the second - a moment of WoW I will NEVER forget. The first time I zoomed the map out all the way back then… it blew my friggin’ mind.
So… when you hit the replay button you don’t hit those kinds of moments. You’re just doing things you’ve already done, and thus this leaves you with great combat and community. Classic does do those things well but the failure of the other two are heavily impacting these as well.
The correct approach with WoW was always to understand why Classic worked and replicate it with new content. Always. Even the lead designer of vanilla, Mark Kern, said so on stream just before he delivered the stacks of paper to Mike. He said Classic+ was the way to go - release vanilla and then develop it into its own thing separate from retail instead of retracing the same steps that leads back where you started.
And they didn’t listen. So here we are.
The longer Classic runs the bigger this problem will be and, as we both clearly agree, Cataclysm is going to be a major moment in the history of Classic one way or another.
Oh really? After playing the game since 2006, you actually thought I didn’t know that?
Were you sober when you wrote this? Like srsly, you couldn’t have been more wrong. Even modern NORMAL raids have more mechanics than heroic old raids did. Hell, even trash nowadays has more mechanics, than bosses in vanilla, tbc and wotlk raids had. Please stop writing such nonsense.
You’ll have to excuse me, I got confused when you were comparing the raid difficulties of the two expansions and proceeded to compare a Heroic Difficulty to Mythic. I was under the impression you were trying to make a sensible comparison.
Nonsense? I’m the one between the two of us who’s wrong? I don’t know which has the higher number of mechanics, for all I know modern raids could actually have more. But the number of mechanics doesn’t mean anything if half of said mechanics are either trivial or non-consequential and can be ignored or mostly ignored. Modern raids being more mechanically difficult might have been true for Vanilla, TBC and Naxx, but Ulduar onwards? Absolutely not. And if you think modern Normals are more difficult than old Heroics, then you’re absolutely delusional.
Current Mythic is old Heroic. Old Normal is now Heroic. Current normal is the result of Flex being ditched while still keeping the level of difficulty.
This title was removed when Ulduar came out, so players where unable to outgear it. They changed the mechanics of such achievements later to an itemlevel restriction, but for this, you no longer can get it. They also removed the reward for “Glory of the Raider” with the same patch and intention.
While technically true, it’s obvious that old heroics weren’t supposed to be as difficult as modern Mythics. After all, it was Blizz’s first venture into adding more difficulties to raids. There’s also the question if WoTLK classes could even handle modern mythics, given they tended to have far less mobility and didn’t have BS utility like casting while moving etc. That said, I think old Heroics sit somewhere between modern Heroics and Mythics.
No it wasnt. It was removed with the cata pre patch. Only the mounts got removed from the glory achivs. Undying runs were a thing until the pre patch of cata.
Not just technically. Flex was removed and turned into current normal. Normal and Heroic were in response renamed with Normal being renamed heroic and heroic being renamed mythic.
Yes and no. They upped the difficulty with each xpac and have stated as to why. The playerbase got better and better over the years and it had to be met with a response. The response being raids being made harder in general. This wasnt a thing with just Mythic. Arthas at the time was nicknamed the hardest boss in history. He was then replaced by Ragnaros. This continued throughout the expansions even after it was renamed to mythic but it had nothing to do with the creation of mythic by itself.
Can be argued. Yes and no. We had patches in the past where we had more utility. Burst of Speed for instance, even if that came after wotlk, would be game breaking.
Without that you could scrap a lot of ranges nowadays. Also its more about to be able to move while still not failing at your dps/healing rather than being allowed to stand still and hardcast too often.
What’s this “Flex” you keep mentioning? Never heard of that.
I’d like to make it known that I firmly disagree with the often repeated idea that “players are better these days” or that “people were bad back then”. While people being bad might’ve been true for Vanilla and TBC, 4 years of play was plenty of time for people to get really good at the game by the time WoTLK came around, let alone 5 or 6 years of play as was the case with ICC for many players (especially those doing Heroic).
Players didn’t magically get better, younger people don’t have some genetical advantage that would give them an advantage over older players. The reason behind people performing better as WoW grew older was that following tutorials slowly became the norm, rather than an exception as was the case when the game was younger. These days, players not following the min/maxed meta are met with strange looks, being told they “have the wrong talents/gear” and are getting kicked out of raids, while people know exactly how to execute a boss fight before ever actually seeing the encounter themselves. Following a tutorial to the t, or “letting a 3rd party websites play the game for them” as I like to refer to it, does not a good player make. Such player may perform well, but getting a high number on Warcraft logs doesn’t automatically indicate a good player.
That’s because encounters are built around players having such utilities at their disposal. But there’s no reason a difficult encounter couldn’t be designed around such abilities being absent.
A system implemented in 5.4.0. Turned into current normal with 6.0.2. The difficulty level of it is what normal is today.
Sorry but just comparing myself from back then with current there is an astronomical difference. And it isnt just me. That you also adapt to your surroundings is also a thing.
I am not speaking about younger people in particular. Im speaking about all generations.
We already had guides on mass even back in the days.
This was also already the case back then. Especially during wotlk.
I am not speaking about logs. 99% of the community cant read logs properly to begin with.
Yes. But it also makes encounters ala “tank and spank” more easily to happen. Deciding when you can hardcast without getting instagibbed by the boss or causing a potential wipe can be regarded a mechanic in itself given we still have hard casters.
What I said does apply to all generations, although I took a slightly different angle with that particular sentence.
Did we have guides? Yes. Did we have guides “on mass”? No. Not even close. You can’t spend 5 minutes on Youtube looking at WoW-related videos these days without being absolutely bombarded with guides left, right and center. A written guide back then was something you’d find on an obscure forum, written by a player you had no way of knowing if they were actually good or not. These days, you have entire sites dedicated to guides as well as class-dedicated discords. Simming wasn’t a thing back then, either. Not large-scale, publicly available simming, anyway, yet these days people will sim every piece of gear that finds its way into their inventory. It’s just not comparable.
Not at all. While you didn’t have to go far to find someone who followed a guide, following guides was nowhere near as common even in 2012 when I had my “WoW peak” as it is today, let alone in WoTLK.
I just felt like pointing it out since I find it absolutely ridiculous people will follow a guide without as much as thinking about it for 5 seconds and then care super hard about getting high numbers on logs as if it showed great skill or something. I’m sure I’ll rustle quite a few feathers by saying this, but if someone follows a guide and then gets a nice, big number on logs, then they probably played little part in that success.
i personal hate the go go go mentality and bis mentality these day’s in wow retail and classic! who care’s if you can clear a dungeon/raid faster then me i don’t, i just would love to see Bliss to stop rewarding behavior like that ! its a game start whit that.
