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  1. #1
    Deleted

    How hard was Naxxramas?

    I'm going through old videos from Lore from Tankspot, since I've seen that 7 hour Q&A marathon of his and I stumbled upon a video where he talks about how he came to WoW and how he did molten core pugs and how Naxxramas wasn't really the hardest raid. And since players always praise Vanilla for how hard it was (I don't actually want this to turn into a "Vanilla was better" thread) I was just wondering how hard was Naxxramas really, compared to newer raids. BC raids? WotlK normal/heroic raids? Cataclysm normal/heroic raids?

  2. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by Nindoriel View Post
    I'm going through old videos from Lore from Tankspot, since I've seen that 7 hour Q&A marathon of his and I stumbled upon a video where he talks about how he came to WoW and how he did molten core pugs and how Naxxramas wasn't really the hardest raid. And since players always praise Vanilla for how hard it was (I don't actually want this to turn into a "Vanilla was better" thread) I was just wondering how hard was Naxxramas really, compared to newer raids. BC raids? WotlK normal/heroic raids? Cataclysm normal/heroic raids?
    I didn't raid at the time, but I know a few that did, and I saw the guild recruitment messages and such. Naxxramas' "difficulty" stemmed from a few things.

    1. Most specs were worthless. There was one tank (warriors) one real healer (priests) one mana bot (druids) and one buff bot (paladins.) The pure DPS were pretty equitable, but that was just because they were all equally pigeonholed into one "right" way.

    2. Related to above, Four Horsemen required either 4 or 8 tanks, I can't remember which. Since no other fight required that many, guilds started having to snipe each other for geared warriors, or run old raids ad infinatum to gear new tanks just for one fight.

    3. Resist gear for Sapphiron was ludicrously difficult to craft/obtain.

    4. Coordinating 40 people for some of the mechanics was an exercise in futility.

    3DS Friend Code: 0146-9205-4817. Could show as either Chris or Chrysia.

  3. #3
    I did raid in Vanilla and managed to get to Sapphiron in Naxx 40.

    It was hard back in the day in the sense that it required more players of your raid to actually know what you were doing. If you look at mc, you could have 50% of your raid essentially be auto attacking and you could still clear the place. As you moved up through vanilla raids it required more and more players to do individual jobs. Such as in BWL on chromaggus your entire raid had to know when to attack. Move on to AQ20/40 and your raid had to be doing good dps and not stand in shit. Move to naxx40 and your entire raid had some sort of specialized jobs on some of the final wing fights. Thaddius required 40 people to watch a debuff to not kill everyone, 4H required your entire raid to coordinate multiple bosses at once. Sapphiron required a lot of coordination to be able to survive the mechanics and KT tested a bit of every aspect of the game from add control to heal and dps maximization and positioning.

    By today's raids would hey be hard? Probably not. But back when raiding was new and everyone was not playing at the same level was it hard? Yes.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    add to that all the farming that was required. Multiple flasks, not only 1. lots of pots. Tanks needing to have 2 set bonus for 4 h so they would not miss taunts. Kinda painfull, yes. Difficult on a pure boss fight? not as today. But just guess by all the 25-man are dying threads to imagine what a 40 man raid was like

  5. #5
    40 man to manage, much better quality bosses with actual abilities and strategies, needing resistance gear for Sapphiron, needing to gear up 4 tanks VERY GOOD to down the 4 horsemen, the painfull attunement to get in.

    I can imagine doing Heigan with 40 man should be pretty fun, Back then he also had the ability to teleport players to the middle of the gauntlet that leads to his room

  6. #6
    Frost and nature resistance gear and the stupid attunement were the hardest part.

  7. #7
    Scarab Lord Arkenaw's Avatar
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    In retrospect, I found vanilla raiding to be disgusting. Resistance gearing and terrible, TERRRRRRIBLE class mechanics were the worst not to mention dealing with 40 people.


  8. #8
    It is very difficult to gauge the difficulty of a raid where you had no viable tools to compare the players. The combat log was UDP based, meaning many messages were lost.
    The best comparison tool simply communicated via a hidden chat channel with the other players, but it still was not very reliant.
    Additionally many bossmods like CT Raid were not very stable. So many encounters where timing was important, that would be ridiculous with the tools at hand right now, required the player to watch closely for the timing.

    So you cannot actually say "it was hard", because you simply could have 20 players that performed far sub par. But since you had no comparison - except you knew someone from another guild on your server -, and different addons and tools than today. it is difficult to say.

    There were a few unforgiving fights, like Heigan (including trash, you had to repeat it everytime you wiped!) and Thaddius (one failure would very likely wipe the raid). Speaking about trash: Trash was a real pain in the ass, and not in the slighest comparable to the 25 version. And, something people tend to forget, some patrols had a 30m respawn, also artificially increasing the felt difficulty of a raid.

    Additionally, you had to be prepared for Loatheb with shadow protection potions, and of course frost resistance for Sapphiron. You had wipes on Razuvious - even then not a very hard fight - because the holy priest's mind control was resisted four times in a row. Those are all things that would be unimaginable right now.

    So I say raids were different then, and you can hardly compare them. The greatest change for BC, that hardly anyone thinks of, was the introduction of a reliable combat log, which allowed comparing players to each other, and to implement reliable boss mods which - on the other hand - lead to more complicated encounters.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by McNeil View Post
    much better quality bosses with actual abilities and strategies
    this part is BS,ofc the bosses were hard,but the abilities were way more simple than the one from the raids after that

  10. #10
    stack resists, hope people don't go afk or disconnect.

    it wasn't difficult, just needed to do what I said above, not to mention the skill of players was a lot smaller then compared to now.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Zazey View Post
    I did raid in Vanilla and managed to get to Sapphiron in Naxx 40.

    It was hard back in the day in the sense that it required more players of your raid to actually know what you were doing. If you look at mc, you could have 50% of your raid essentially be auto attacking and you could still clear the place. As you moved up through vanilla raids it required more and more players to do individual jobs. Such as in BWL on chromaggus your entire raid had to know when to attack. Move on to AQ20/40 and your raid had to be doing good dps and not stand in shit. Move to naxx40 and your entire raid had some sort of specialized jobs on some of the final wing fights. Thaddius required 40 people to watch a debuff to not kill everyone, 4H required your entire raid to coordinate multiple bosses at once. Sapphiron required a lot of coordination to be able to survive the mechanics and KT tested a bit of every aspect of the game from add control to heal and dps maximization and positioning.

    By today's raids would hey be hard? Probably not. But back when raiding was new and everyone was not playing at the same level was it hard? Yes.
    What this guy said... This thread is pointless, its like saying "was péle better then messí?"... Theyre both quite awesome for their time.

  12. #12
    Things certainly were a lot harder in the sense that there was way more bullshit piled on top of the players, in terms of obtuse class mechanics, laggy servers, randomness like resists/misses on crucial abilities, having to deal with more people, worse understanding of what was going on due to worse combat logs and a less mature community, crazy pre-raid preperation farming requirements, tons more trash everywhere that respawned more frequently, and loads of other shit.

    If we ignored all of that and assumed that the game worked back then as well as it does now (at least in terms of fixing the bullshit, without touching class balance too much; which was a mess too but that's another long topic) the counters themselves were fairly simplistic. The only thing that was really more difficult in any unambiguous sense was dealing with 40 people at once instead of just 10/25.

    Personally I loved that chaotic environment, but most of the changes have been for the better. I still think 40 mans were more fun than these tiny 10 mans or even 25 mans, but the organizational demands on running 40 man would make 40 mans almost impossible to sustain, at least if they were in direct competition with (ie. had the same loot as) 10 mans.
    "Quack, quack, Mr. Bond."

  13. #13
    Do you have links to these videos?

  14. #14
    Deleted
    Raiding was literally crap. Moronic trash respawn timers, low amount of loot from bosses, bad addons and pre-raid grinding... Lots and lots of grinding. The bosses themselves were meh mechanics wise. Looking back, i cant believe the sub-numbers that WoW got with such design.

    I swear, if vanilla was released right now with updated graphics, it would be the laughing stock of the decade.
    Last edited by mmoc37bd04931c; 2012-10-22 at 12:05 AM.

  15. #15
    The Patient Wiredmana's Avatar
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    It was toxic. Many people had difficulty even at level seventy, and that's not even from the attuments. Addons were required not to tell you when you could press the next ability, but to press a stop casting macro so you could press the next ability. Things were just chaotic. It took a Mage about three minutes to make a stack and a half of food. Hunters needed mana pots.

    Naxx was a huge step up from the other tiers. Before it didn't matter if fifteen people were auto attacking. As long as they were there and doing something. There were no active rotations. The patch with Naxx changed most of that and suggested rotations rolled forward. If someone zoned out they caused the entire forty man raid to wipe. It was a sickening leap forward, but some of us did it. Not many at all , but some experienced Naxx while it was relevant and it was glorious.

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Chrysia View Post
    I didn't raid at the time, but I know a few that did, and I saw the guild recruitment messages and such. Naxxramas' "difficulty" stemmed from a few things.

    1. Most specs were worthless. There was one tank (warriors) one real healer (priests) one mana bot (druids) and one buff bot (paladins.) The pure DPS were pretty equitable, but that was just because they were all equally pigeonholed into one "right" way.

    2. Related to above, Four Horsemen required either 4 or 8 tanks, I can't remember which. Since no other fight required that many, guilds started having to snipe each other for geared warriors, or run old raids ad infinatum to gear new tanks just for one fight.

    3. Resist gear for Sapphiron was ludicrously difficult to craft/obtain.

    4. Coordinating 40 people for some of the mechanics was an exercise in futility.
    You needed 8 tanks, yeah.

    Also, best DPS back then were fire mages to stack the ignite.

  17. #17
    the fights themselves were not particularly hard.
    but a lot of fights were really gear dependent and others were really dependent on silly resist gimmicks.
    getting 40 people with a pulse and a stable internet connection to sit down and listen to you was probably the hardest part.
    " I need a sec, my wrists hurt from spamming slam so hard. Playing cleave vs cleave is tough stuff guys"

  18. #18
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by neuropsycho View Post
    Do you have links to these videos?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cznStl1Xs0M&feature=plcp

    Was the one I was referring to
    He talks about how he got into MMOs.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...l1Xs0M#t=1439s

    Is when he starts talking about WoW.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Wiredmana View Post
    It was toxic. Many people had difficulty even at level seventy, and that's not even from the attuments. Addons were required not to tell you when you could press the next ability, but to press a stop casting macro so you could press the next ability. Things were just chaotic. It took a Mage about three minutes to make a stack and a half of food. Hunters needed mana pots.

    Naxx was a huge step up from the other tiers. Before it didn't matter if fifteen people were auto attacking. As long as they were there and doing something. There were no active rotations. The patch with Naxx changed most of that and suggested rotations rolled forward. If someone zoned out they caused the entire forty man raid to wipe. It was a sickening leap forward, but some of us did it. Not many at all , but some experienced Naxx while it was relevant and it was glorious.
    It took a Mage 3 minutes to make a stack and a half? How is that possible when it was like a 2.5 second cast? Say there was only 10 per stack vs 20, that's 7.5 seconds to make 30(one and a half stacks) not sure if we were playing the same game or not.

    I think a lot of people are over exxagerating things in this thread, personally sounds like a lot of people here didn't actually play during Vanilla.

    Yeah, things about the game were broken, but people say a lot of off the wall things that are obvious that they weren't there. First of all, farming resist gear was not that bad, it was a week long process that was semi leasurely well before even getting to a resist fight, so it wasn't like it stalled raiding. On top of that, most guilds had several tanks already from other fights, and Naxx really only took gearing one other tank prior to the fight, which everyone knew, so preparations ahead of time were made.

    What it seems like is people are taking the few things a few people looked at as negative and blowing them out if proportion because they never experienced it for themselves.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Egzis View Post
    Raiding was literally crap. Moronic trash respawn timers, low amount of loot from bosses, bad addons and pre-raid grinding... Lots and lots of grinding. The bosses themselves were meh mechanics wise. Looking back, i cant believe the sub-numbers that WoW got with such design.

    I swear, if vanilla was released right now with updated graphics, it would be the laughing stock of the decade.
    People like you want all the loot and bosses brought to you on a silver plate. :/

    Todays bosses are not that hard, sure its difficult at start now. But like my guild has downed everything up to Elegon on normal, sure thats not big progress compared to hc guilds alrdy but we have cleared 1-2 bosses in 1-2 nights. Only 3 hours raid time. So thats not too long.

    In vanilla, even the running back and getting your next pull probably took 15+ minutes. EVEN today running through AQ40 takes quite a long time, maybe 5 minutes to run from cthuns room to the entrance. Imagine CLEARING it at the relevant level and gear.

    As ingame character:
    In vanilla raiding was an adventure. Today raiding is a job.

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