40 man vanilla raids = LFR difficulty?

[blasterion]

It wasn't reduced to 6 seconds until patch 3.0.8, in Vanilla it was 20 seconds if I'm not mistaken and you really did need to set up a tranq rotation for Magmadar.

The rotation wasn't for the cooldown persay but for the occasional "hey guys I am not hit capped....OH SHIT IT MISSED"

[Deleted]

One of my fondest memories is trying to convince our raid leader that it was better to spread out on the lava surger trash mobs. I never managed so we kept stacking up on them with 40 ppl getting flung around every surge because that's how we'd killed them the first time we were in there and why change a winning formula?

- - - Updated - - -

It's hilarious the only argument vanilla haters have is to compare the first ever raid Blizz puts out to LFR. But hey let's forget the other four raids that were in vanilla. More than any other expansion btw.

TBC had like eight.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Why do people like to act as if it's impossible to die from messing up in the raiding content today? "Oh u know in Molten Core if you messed up YOU'D DIE INSTANTLY!!".

So...we've never had mechanics like that since? Or fights with extremely high personal pressure when it comes to performance? Common...this whole nostalgia and "I played back then so I'mma pretend it was the pinnacle of skill requirement to e-peen myself above those that did NOT play back then"-crap is getting old.

[Morbownz]

The same is true for LFR. Stand in Garroshs Annihilate, and you get killed. If you stay in front of Horridon as a DPS/Heal, you are in trouble. Most of the MC mechanics however, concern only a very small number of people (eg. Lucifron: I could not care less what's going on as a Warlock or Hunter...as long as the guys with decursive did their job). If a Warlock on Thok doesn't know how and where to kite, the raid is in deep sh**.

Whether or not the mechanics require a small amount of people or the whole raid is not important, the mechanics couldn't be avoided... that was my point. So if a Mage didn't first decurse himself and then the healers on Lucifron the Healers would go OOM very quickly or the tanks would die, then you would care about what was going on.
Also, Most the classes in WoW today are massively better equipped with much more utility to stay alive, you can even respec before the boss to tune your talents to suit the boss (unlike vanilla).
Regarding Annihilate, according to the dungeon journel it does 300k damage or 150k in the realm of Y'shaarj on LFR, if you have 500 item (roughly the item level required to get in to SoO LFR} you'd have much more than 300k hp.

If the lock on Thok doesn't know how where to kite? Are we still talking about LFR??? Sounds like you're reaching...

And where exactly was the soft enrage on Lucifron? On Magmadar? On Gehennas? On Garr? On Shazz? On Majordomo? On Golemagg? On Harbinger? And Healer mana on Raggi? Please...maybe in Dungeon blues. As soon as our healers had T1, they could have done Raggi all day long. The Mana-Burn was completely irrelevant btw., as it was limited range. So with a bit of movement, heals could avoid it completely.

You should go back and read what I said. I never said that every boss had an soft enrage timer, I said they existed in the game and MC had a good example of one... you're getting good at making stuff up.
Healers coping with raggy all day long? I really think you're getting carried away now. Mana-Burn is completely irrelevant? It was only irrelevant if the adds phase was done properly. It required good execution, how many classes had instant aggro dump? how many tanks had a spammable AoE taunt to gather up adds? what if a player was on low HP as the adds were coming in to the raid, any healing done would generate threat... see? This phase could quite easily get messy.

Well, then our raid apparently was the high elite, because incredibly unlikely as that may sound, we actually managed to RUN BACK TO THE PLACE WHERE WE STARTED, AFTER A KNOCKBACK! Ohhhhhhhhh! So Skill! Very L33t! Much Paragon!

That moment when you realize you're arguing with a 12 year old...

BTW. You are talking about you and your guild, this discussion wasn't about how difficult you found it, we are discussing how difficult it would be for the current LFR audience and the original WoW playerbase, most of which were knew to MMORPGs and raiding.

Btw. have you been to Raggis chamber? There is a Rock, if you stand before it, you get knocked back 3 meters, and still land within casting range. Please tell me, what elite, super secret skill is required, to plant ones butt next to a rock the size of a house?

Yes, I have been to this chamber. So you are advising that if everyone just stood in one spot the knockback wouldn't affect the ranged dps? What about the damage of the knockback? What about it constantly hitting more that one players because people are bunching up to avoid losing DPS? What about the limited amount of AoE healing to cope with all this damage? What about the fact that raid healers had to be split up around the room to cover the healing of each group?

If by "movement" you mean "walk out of the fire" (Magmadar), "walk out of the raid" (Geddon) and "walk back to where you stood" (Raggi), then you are correct.

Yes, I am correct.

And we are not talking about C'Thun. We are comparing LFR and MC.

Are you sure? because if you go back a page and read your original response to me, you were talking about BWL too.

Tranquilizing Shot was on a 6 second cooldown. Magmadar used Frenzy once every 15-20 seconds. There are somewhere between 3-6 hunters in a 40 man raid, minimum. Would you like to add something to these numbers?

This is where you're whole argument falls on it's ass. Tranq shot wasn't on a 6 seconds CD. It appears that way on WoWwiki but it was changed from somewhere between 16-20 seconds. So... I think we can both agree that not only are you completely wrong, but you're sources are inaccurate which calls into question the validity everything else you've claimed.

Except at some point hunters even began skipping Aimed shot, when they realized the DPS gain was minimum. Multishot I give you. What you conveniently left out here: These abilities were not used as a "rotation" in nowadays sense of the word. They were simply fired whenever ready, as the class not even had a limiting energy mechanic (with hunters using mana). It was pure faceroll mode, and it was the same with almost every single class.

No, I did not conveniently miss anything out here. The cylce/rotation was the window of time between your aimed shots, I have explained it clearly.
Mana was a limiting mechanic because you didn't have much of it, it was much more limiting than any resource mechanic is today. Example, I could attack a target
dummy today for 10 mins without having to worry about Mana, this would not have been possible in Vanilla.

No, really? Less people got to Ragnaros? Wow! That surely is indicative of a much higher skill requirement, and has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the fact, that LFR can be reached with an automated search tool used by almost 7 million people, whereas Ragnaros required you to gather 40 people in an organized fashion, on your own, limited to people from your realm.

Ragnaros wiped a higher percentage of raids than Immerseus LFR... there you go, d'you understand now?

Here is a little experiment for you: Try to get 40 guys, each with a cup of tea in the same room, and tell them to take a sip, all at the same time. Boarding your Train of thought, from that we can logically deduce, that drinking a cup of tea is WAY MORE DIFFICULT than doing LFR *facepalm*

All we can deduce from this is as usual you miss out the important things when trying to make a point... like the dimensions of the room.

Here is a little out of the box thinking for you: What percentage of LFR raids broke up on Thok/Siegecrafter/Garrosh, and what percentage of raids who made it to Raggi downed him?

You should try thinking clearly before advising others to think outside the box.

[KaPe]

Why do people like to act as if it's impossible to die from messing up in the raiding content today? "Oh u know in Molten Core if you messed up YOU'D DIE INSTANTLY!!".

So...we've never had mechanics like that since? Or fights with extremely high personal pressure when it comes to performance? Common...this whole nostalgia and "I played back then so I'mma pretend it was the pinnacle of skill requirement to e-peen myself above those that did NOT play back then"-crap is getting old.

There are pretty much no instant kill mechanics in LFR, because they are delibateraly nerfed. Garrosh Annihilate hurts, but doesn't kill instantly. Thok's Fixate takes multiple hit to kill players - and it looks absurd, with huge chunks of meat flying around, but them surviving. We had instant kill mechanic back in DS, tanks just died, got ressed, boss died... Wait, I know - Elegon collapsing floor of death! Except half your raid died and you still killed him - while standing outside during final phase, in supposedly "lethal" aoe.

Of course this stuff murders players on *higher* difficulty levels, to a degree most vanilla bosses never did. But this is LFR. Mechanics are gutted so they are more a of suggestion to follow rather than a requirement to kill bosses. Enrage timers are absurdly long, dps checks nearly non existant and yet people still fail to beat them. Mana doesn't exist, threat doesn't exist, kill order barely exists, crowd control doesn't exist. Just think about Majordomo and CCing multiple adds - it's a trivial mechanic and yet I'm sure LFRers would repeatedly break sheeps... assuming they would even be used in the first place.

No one is saying that Molten Core was the pinnacle of raiding. But it was designed to kill you, it had annoying trash respawns, multiple patrols and few gimmicks. You wiped repeteadly, until you outgeared the place so much that you could 20 man it. Except some people conveniently forget the first part and only remember full T2+ players carrying others through there. It would be like complaining that Stone Guards is easy in SoO gear.

Edit: Just imagine. "Lol, tank only has 150 FR, gg. My grandma has more fire resistance than you. I'm out of here." This is what LFR would look like

[Perkunas]

LFR is harder than vanilla raids. Seriously.

Yes, I can see your point. I think this is probably the most insightful thing I've read on MMO-Champ. Kudos to you, sir. I tip my trilby to somebody who by his intellect and articulation must be scoring quite highly in the karma department on Le Reddit.

[Stormspellz]

Imagine an LFR raid trying to assign the right targets for tanking and banishing Garr adds without raid markers. It would be a brick wall.

or getting healers to dispel the magic burn debuff or remove the boom you dead curses.

[Xjev]

Vanilla was harder that LFR, way harder, if you think it was easier you probably had a good raiding guild. I remember twins in AQ40 was very hard and we got stuck there

[FoshayFox]

Some people in general discussion said that 40 man vanilla raids had the same difficulty as LFR. Is this true?!

I believe it was a PITA to get attuned, but were the raids/mechanics on a LFR level or were those people full of it?

This is a bit of an understatement, and I'm sure many other people will agree that LFR is in no way a reflection of classic/ vanilla raiding.

Think about coordinating 40 people, with a ridiculous gear check, and plugging through content not farmed and typically not shown on YouTube.

It was very difficult and very reward back in those days, and everyone still had eyes full of wonder with WoW.

Good times, with lots of improvements since then. WoW has come a long way, and vanilla raiders would never wish to revert back imo. It's a bit of "grass looks greener" scenario.

Fox

[Zka]

As many have said already, there were some bosses in MC that were no more difficult than LFR ones (Golemagg for example). However, if you took your average lfr group, and gave them ye olde talent specs and abilities, they'd just wipe on the trash.
They'd pull aggro off the tanks on the giants, and wipe.
They'd all be feared by the core hounds into more trash, and wipe.
They'd be knocked back into lava by the surgers, and wipe.
Then there's bosses such as Geddon and Rag, where positioning / not blowing up the raid was important.

That sounds like the current LFR. I've yet to run Durumu without 20/25 dying in the disintegrator beam and that's just 1 quick example.

[FoshayFox]

No the average LFR group would wipe over again on Onyxia. The afk guy would get feared into the whelps and it'd be over.

This made me LOL, irl. Thanks for that, may I also add "We need moar dots!".

Fox

[Deleted]

raiding in vanilla wasn't really that hard at first. raid management was hell though. gearing up tanks and be reliant on them to be online for every raid. so yeah i'd agree with that 40 raid = LFR but only for MC. comparing current raiding to vanilla isn't fair though. that shit happened so long ago that it may seem easy now since the game has matured so much but once that was the cutting edge it was pretty hard and it only got harder with newer instances. for me personally the golden age of raiding began with BWL and died when LK got killed. changing raid size was one of the dumbest moves blizzard made.

[dejaa]

I don't think you can compare fairly. The game was less sophisticated but so were players and the tools used to help play the game. Simple evolution. For example, I don't think what we consider "modern raiding" could have evolved as it did without the parallel evolution of addons. Back in the MC days I remember one person designated to use a stopwatch for raid warnings. (Without automated timers of some sort the "overload point" for the complexity and number of simultaneous mechanics to navigate would have been much lower while still providing a similar challenge.)

Not all classes were effective in pure tank, dps, or heal roles back then. Paladins buffed, reapplied buffs every five minutes, DI'd someone for wipe recovery, and helped the priests heal as best as they could. Druids innervated the priests and helped them heal. Rogues died at the first cleave unless they were really lucky. Etc.

Most of the complexity and challenge has been around "twitch" mechanics like avoiding poo on the ground, I honestly wish more of it had been focused on intelligently using all of one's class abilities rather than testing reflexes and reaction time.

[FoshayFox]

DI'd someone

Totally forgot about this ability! xD

[BicycleMafioso]

Back then hunters had two buttons that mattered: Arcane Shot and Spacebar, to keep their character from afking.

I realise you posted this ages ago, but hunters had a rotation, even back then, and if it involved Arcane Shot, you were doing it wrong. :P

[Varabently]

It really truly is impossible and unfair to compare the two. If you scaled up the raids to level 90 they would certainly be easier than LFR. They had less mechanics, easier enrage timers (did they even have enrage timers?), etc. They were also tuned differently. Remember having to chug mana potions? It was a different game back then. Rotations were different (easier), gear was harder to get (3 items for 40 people per fight?), etc.

Also, don't forget all the broken talents and gear (that either didn't work or gave useless stats). Entire specs were written off by serious guilds.

It's silly to compare the two.

[Tekkommo]

Not a chance, if you put in your bog standard LFR group into a vanilla 40 man raid, they wouldn't kill one boss. Remember, back in vanilla we had limited specs, limited spells. If we had the same abilities at our disposal as we do today, then yeah sure, it would probably be fine.

I'm not saying vanilla was hard, but almost anytime I do LFR, everyone is usually below 100k DPS. Sometimes you get a LFR hero who is in heroic gear, but that would not be counted for reverting back to vanilla 40 mans.

[dejaa]

Totally forgot about this ability! xD

The ones in midair when Rags punted people were the best.

[Deleted]

I realise you posted this ages ago, but hunters had a rotation, even back then, and if it involved Arcane Shot, you were doing it wrong. :P

If by "rotation" you mean that you had to wait for the autoshots in between firing aimed and multis, then yes, they had a rotation. And Arcane Shot could be used on the move. Aimed could not.

[Donald Hellscream]

Mechanics wise LFR shits all over classic Of course there are a few bosses like Nefarian with the class-calls etc. That was considerably more challenge than the majority of tank n' spank bosses but generally LFR completely shits over most of the classic raid encounters.