Blizzard adressed some of this in their addon interview. Blood queen Lana’thel was mentioned. Today an addon would do the job with the bite mechanics for you, back then that addon didn’t exist. It was coordinated manually. It’s a bit more complex than just easier mechanics.
Yes, I remember my bite trees. ^^
Just confirms it - the existance of addons made devs make the game harder.
Well,and honestly, the bites were her only mechanic. Today she would have at least 3 mechanics more that all can overlap in a very unfortunate way…
Its a simple matter, no matter what anyone’s opinion of the tank nerf was; everyone saw lfg become a ghost town for tanks as many ‘tanks’ just couldn’t find any joy in playing them anymore so many quit; the fact season was made more difficult didn’t help either though it does call in to question why these heavy handed and impactful decisions keep being made
We now stare down the abyss of tank shortage 2.0 with removing the ability to use many of said add ons; even the most seasoned player will for whatever function or functionality its used for will question if they even desire to bother or play anymore
Well, the same article said that with the removal of combat addons, they will likely have to tone down on the mechanics, or amount of them. It’s obviously not going back to classic levels, but they did say that they had to ramp up the mechanics to try combat the addons that made their mechanics too simple.
I don’t remember much, but I am sure some of the old guides are still out there. Sometimes there are more hidden mechanics that you don’t actually do much with, but just have to understand to not make it harder on yourself. One of them being ramp ups(soft enrages, I believe we called them?), but there is also these mixes of abilities that you should know about to not mess it all up. WotLK also had the achievesystem which added difficulty to encounters that way, if you had an interest in it.
It’s also a balance of availability. My partner and I talked about this yesterday, as we level on classic(don’t raid or do dungeons there). On classic we run around with the same piece of gear for 25 levels sometimes, and the stat distrubution is crap. We just got cloth gloves with agility and spirit as a quest reward(we play feral druid and ele shaman atm - horribly designed btw). These are the things that makes you run a rotation to kill quest mobs, while on retail you would 1-2 shot any quest mob, because the power availability is so much higher. For leveling purposes we both wish there was a bit of a middle ground between classic and retail. We would both rather play retail for leveling, if retail had leveling. It’s a question of definition, but speeding through what retail leveling is today isn’t giving us any entertainment. Retail only pulls off endgame for us.
Yes. Barrier to entry should be low. Or lower. We can debate that.
But not at the expense of high end content. Any game needs “levels” or progression to survive. And that implies, by definition, that not everyone will manage to do everything.
So there is a fine line between asking to lower the barrier of entry, and entitlement.
For example:
- Removing the personal lockout in Mythic Raids is removing a barrier of entry.
- Asking for nerfs to Mythic Raid bosses because you want to pug the raid and get Myth Track gear is entitlement.
All this REALLY sounds like a nerfed out version of Retail. All this “fresh start” talk really sounds like seasons to me…
But as you mentioned, the moment difficulty goes up by just a bit people quit. Cause lets be honest, the cata difficulty between T10 and T11 is peanuts compared to a Mythic raid boss in Retail.
The thing is that this data is squewed. The release schedule of classic era servers matches the content droughts in Retail.
I will be honest myself, I have a couple of classic toons laying arround. But I have them because I got bored of Retail after some months of nothing at all, and if I was forced to do a brand new alt to get entertainment, might as well do it in classic era servers.
But the moment a new season in Retail started, I had no remorse to abandon that toon and get back to retail.
SoD however, is the “branch” of classic intended to give ever-green content with the “classic” feel to it. Which is, on paper, what classic players really want. And that population is literally irrelevant compared to the Retail one.
I am so not updated. I have seen this phrase a few times… What is track gear? Or, Myth track gear? (I get Myth is mythic… but what’s with that added track?)
Im sorry. You are posting with a level 80 toon. Dont you play retail? You havent played like… at all? Not even the campaign?
Gear in Retail comes in “tiers”. You got Veteran gear. Hero gear, ect…
Each “tier” has levels you can upgrade it. From 1/8 to 8/8. With currency you get from playing the game. Anywhere. It can be Delves, WQ, dungeons, raids, whatever.
Myth track gear is the maximum “tier” you can get. Its 1/8 and it drops from Mythic Raids and Vault if you do +10 or above dungeons. And if you upgrade that to 8/8, you get the highest ilvl possible this season.
I play in periods. I mostly quest. Did a few delves, got super bored fast. Busy on classic the last month. Done the campaign up until the goblin patch. Got the campaign quest to kill Gallywix iirc. Left that hanging, and not done anything after that… It’s not that the game is bad, it’s just that I am completely drained from all the issues and requirements I have been facing over time IRL. I just don’t have the mental capacity to follow the speed of all these patches. I am home today, with a sick child that is currently sleeping, and then you guys kept me busy instead of the game. I do find the forums entertaining too though, in periods.
Ah, that is all I needed to know. The upgrade system has been around for a while. I really don’t care for it. I liked titanforging Legion style a lot better, but I know I am a minority there. I can’t stand repeating things too much, so the upgrade system is just killing my interest in gear. So yeah, I have no idea what itemlevel is currently the highest, or what the names of each upgrade are. I know the system exist though.
False. Back then you absolutely had the WA to do that for you.
And then, it was only really an issue for RTWF guilds. For everyone else, the fight itself was actually a DPS check more than anything else. That is what the bite mechanic was.
Because of that, with more gear, you could bite anyone you wanted and still kill the boss. Because if you killed it before the whole raid had the debuff there was no need to coordinate anything.
Well… with all due respect.
Do you see me in the Classic Era forums giving my opinion on Classic ? No you dont.
All I ask in return is for Classic era players to stop coming here to the general (aka: RETAIL) forum to give their opinion on Retail. You have to know what you are talking about to give an informed opinion.
And someone that leveled to 80 and left. Is not someone that is informed enough on the problems, and potential solutions Retail might have.
Especially not when Ion already said that all this addon business will not count for Classic servers. NONE of that will change. All this addon business applies ONLY to Retail.
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Might be, but since Ion said we manually had to list those bites ourselves back then, I blindly believed him, because it adds to my memory of the fight. My guild had a lot of server first kills in WotLK, but sadly we had a very competative fellow progression guild who managed to get the server first kills that mattered(the end bosses). We got the server first Sartharion 3 drakes iirc, but since the other guild killed the normal mode first, they got the title. We were also 600 in the world when we killed the second last hardmode boss in Trial of the Crusader, but after multiple 3% wipes on the last boss our guild just died. Still annoys me to this day. I still can’t remember much of the process there, because I kinda stopped caring. It’s a while since 2008/2009. I just remember a few things, mostly negative sadly(like the 3% wipes, and me dying during immortal on Sindragosa(?) because I thought I was in an ice cube(in reality someone turned to ice in front of my camera, so my camera zoomed it in so it looked like I was cubed. Never felt more stupid ever, but I was super nervous because we were so close to getting it. Meh, fun times. I do love raiding, but yeah, I just can’t atm. No mental capacity at all.
As said, I don’t really share the sentiment that any content is perfect. In the end, the main prio is that the game is fun. If more guilds can clear the mythic raid, I think more players are gonna play the game longer, but at the same time, if it’s too easy, people will pug it or buy boosts, which would be very bad. So it needs to be hard enough to not be able to be pugged, which is usually achieved by requiring verbal coordination, having dps-check-fights, and making every player important. At this point we are back at the topic of restricting addons.
You are putting me in a crowd I don’t belong in. I only level for myself and with my partner in classic. Otherwise I play retail. I don’t play a lot, so both games get very little time from me. My addon talk is about retail, I just explained why I am not updated on gear on retail. I also explained that I don’t remember much of the classic raid mechanics, but I did pay attention to the examples given by Ion in the article, and brought those up in relation to what I quoted.
Like I said. You can do it manually because it’s a DPS race. Server first guilds usually would pass that DPS check with out any issues. Therefore, they did not need it as much.
And the “who” got the bite was kind of disingenuous. Bite the F warriors first. 
And really quickly that changed to: Bite the DPS first. And finally, with the 30% buff it was: Bite anyone, dosent matter.
I mean… look at what the gameplay used to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtI9qB0V120
(A) he is a clicker. and (B) look at the DBM. Because the important part of that mechanic is WHEN you bite. Not neceserely WHO you bite. Most of the wipes on that boss were people forgetting to bite. Or people not doing enough DPS to take advantage of the 100% buff and kill the boss on time.
And that UI look really similar to the retail ones today. So not much has changed in that regard. But the addon did exist. It reminded you when to bite someone, and it pointed it out for you. Cause you know… reminders…
But still. A trip to the past is fine.
But I dislike people commenting on Retail about “accessibility” or “gating difficulties” when they simply haven’t played retail beyond the campaign quest-line.
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Believe me it’s not. The retail UI upgraded a lot in recent years(possibly the main changes in BFA?).
While I don’t play TWW at any level, I did still raid heroic in early SL, while my partner raided as a resto druid(my raid MS) + did some mythic+ well into Dragonflight. It doesn’t seem to have changed much in what you need to have access to as a raider since then. I am also not making any claims, just giving a few pointers from my own impression from recent years. See my first post in this thread.
I absolutely love raiding, but as said a few times now, I see my limitations atm. maybe I’ll be back in the future, but right now my brain is about to fry, so it’s not an option.
Err… it was vital to know who to bite - someone who hadn’t already been bitten. Which was why bite order mattered, so ppl didn’t panic about finding their bite target during the last few seconds.
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It’d be funny, if the first thing they do after restricting addons is bringing the blood queen mechanic back 
This is also a healer topic. I wonder how many healers writing here