Reason why people say TBC was harder

[veehro]

So after playing TBC again and comparing it to legion I've made a few conclusions.

1. People had far less HP

Besides the tank, every one in the group had very few hp. An elite mob could kill a healer in one or two hits.
This was also an issue when questing outside. If you would pull more then one mob you probably would be killed right away. This is why murlocks were quite a pain since they would spawn close together and you could easily pull more then one.

AOE tanking was not a thing

The only class that could reasonably AOE tank were paladins. Most guilds had one paladin tank to aoe the trash in instances like Mount Hyjal. But you would have to give them quite allot of gear to be able to survive. So the number of paladin tanks on a server were quite low.

Warriors could aoe tank to some degree that is true but only skilled warriors were capable of maintaining aggro on 3+ mobs. And even then you had to dps the target the warrior was focusing on or else youd risk pulling aggro (and remember what i said about mobs 2 shoting people).
Pulling aggro off a warrior would mean that now he would have to run around and chase the add that is in the raid and would not be able to build threat on the two other adds that people could still be dpsing.

This is why people marked targets and CC`ed some of em . You had to do a kill order so that the warrior could focus building threat on the target that was dpsed down.
Grouping targets up and aoe-ing was not possible back then.
In wotlk most tanks got aoe threat generating abilities and thats when the tactic of grouping mobs up and aoeing them down became a thing

3. CC-ing was a thing

While sheeping or banishing one mob was not difficult. The problem comes when you have to remember to resheep the mob. As i said people had very low HP and you could get 1 shoted by a sheep that broke. Thus the mage had to constantly keep an eye on the sheep timer as well as his rotation.
Even worse the sheep could break if the warrior tank would use thunderclap next to it, or if some one would pop an aoe next to the cc mobs (happened more then it should).

Most packs required two or three sheped mobs at a time and things could of went wrong quite rapidly

4. Very little aoe healing

While there were a few aoe healing spells (chain heal) most healing was done with direct spells. Aoe healing costed allot of mana and in the first raid tiers up to sunwell and black temple, you just couldn't afford to spam aoe heals.
Thus people had to be very careful not to take damage when they shouldn't.
As a dps the healers would most likely skip over you as they had to keep the tank up. So you mostly had to deal with damage yourself.
Allot of guilds were using first aid especially in Tempest Keep and SSC as you just could not afford spending healers to heal the raid.

Now a days every healer has some form of aoe healing and first aid is quite usless.

Tank skill

As i mentioned before threat was an issue. A tank had to keep threat on 2-3 targets at a time in some cases. As a dps you also needed to know what target you should and what you shouldn't dps or risk pulling aggro and wiping the raid.
It was the healers job to keep the tank up and a good healer could pride himself on the tank never dying
It was the tanks job to keep threat and survive by avoiding damage and poping his cds at the right time.

Conclusion

While addons and people did improve since tbc , we have to be real that the game was different back then. Most of the abilities that are available now did not exist in TBC and the total HP of people made it very difficult to survive most mistakes.

I kinda like the game back there more as there was more comunication and coordonation required to kill trash and there was also a sense of strategy required while questing solo.
now the trash is mostly round em up and aoe , a boring grind that serves no purpose rather then to take more time to complete an instance

[owbu]

BC had very simple mechanics, probably mostly because the technology wasnt really there yet, and made up for it with badly tuned numbers (sometimes entire heroics were a joke, sometimes mobs instantkilled the tank). I think that and us becoming better players is where most of this "bc was hard" perception comes from.

I do agree that lack of aoe tanking/healing made the game much more challenging for tanks and healers. I think they deliberatly added those to get more people into those roles (they play more closely to dds these days) and that a whole lot of what made tanking and healing interesting has been lost because of that. But other people probably feel very different about that.

[Aeula]

TBC's main issue is that all the abilities were weak. Compare playing a paladin then to playing one now. Back then you had to use a seal and auto attack. Mana didn't regen as fast, so if you used too many abilities you'd become useless and you'd be forced to use wisdom to regen your mana.

Now you get your full rotation pretty early on, mana isn't an issue at all and your abilities hit like a truck due to how they scale.

[Phuongvi]

An heroic dugeons of Burning Crusade must have the equivalent of a Legion Mythic ++++ *something something* ( see Shattered Halls or Shadowlab, you're gonna shit your pants when you need 3 cc's for trash pull )

Now,Regular mythic is a little hard ( see a Slave Pens heroic), while the new form of heroic is like ... normal.
They just put cool title to scare the people or just for cool name.

Now you have too many difficulty to chose from, let's throw all the people in mythic and let's see who wins.

[Bboboo]

It's funny to see people saying that CCing and assisting the tank was such a skill intensive thing back in the day for WoW. I remember playing EQ and FFXI and that sort of stuff was just common knowledge. In fact you didn't really make it to the higher levels in the game if you were bad at this sort of stuff.

[Deleted]

Even using misdirect and feigning death i would still have to ask for Blessing of Salvation on blood lust pulls to avoid being insta gibbed.

I do miss those days. Threat being a non issue toned the game down drastically.

Having to use like 7 CC's including priest mind control on the first pack of trash in Sunwell was a bit OTT but these days using none and just AoE'ing everything down is just dull.

Making a mistake use to have consequences I.E certain death, Now a couple of heals and everything is jolly. I like much of what the game is now but i do miss lots of what the game used to be rose tinted glasses or not.

[Deleted]

Translation: BC seemed harder because it fucking was harder.

shh, don't upset the kids of last years who think 2016 WoW is hard

i did some mythic bosses in WoD , when they were current content, Shattered Halls heroic in the first months of TBC was 5x times harder

[LanToaster]

Besides the tank, every one in the group had very few hp. An elite mob could kill a healer in one or two hits.
This was also an issue when questing outside. If you would pull more then one mob you probably would be killed right away. This is why murlocks were quite a pain since they would spawn close together and you could easily pull more then one.

Mostly this.
It dawned me how much Stronger we are HP wise in TimeWalking BC.

I had with my tank 14K Life unbuffed raiding the second tier. (Well, i had a shit ton of avoidance)
Now in timewalking I had 30K. Thats more than double, and that after the statsquish of WoD. 30K was around the Starting Life of Raiding in WotlK.

Its just in BC the mobs hit like trucks.

[Sliske]

Different mechanics doesn't nessesarily mean the game was harder.

As a hunter throwing a trap down once every 5 minutes doesn't make the game harder. Shit like challenge mode gold is hard, much harder than tbc heroics. Raids too.

A mechanic like siegecrafters belt if put in TBC would break the game. People would take weeks , months to kill that boss.

People were simply worse at the game back then.

- - - Updated - - -

Its just in BC the mobs hit like trucks.

Which was bad design in itself. It basically meant the only viable tanks were block tanks (block used to reduce 100% dmg, not 30% like now)

And a mob had a lot of magic attacks you just had a warlock tank it.

[PassingBy]

shh, don't upset the kids of last years who think 2016 WoW is hard

i did some mythic bosses in WoD , when they were current content, Shattered Halls heroic in the first months of TBC was 5x times harder

No Shattered Halls heroic was not harder than mythic bosses in WoD. Unless you're talking about the first mythic fight of HFC.

What is true though is that Blizz has taken away some crucial game mechanics (like threat management), and gave us more tools to deal with stuff (like AOE abilities, AOE heals, etc).
This has resulted in blizz being forced to keep piling up different boss mechanics, or additional difficulty increases (like affixes in M+, or having to do it on a timer being forced to make bigger pulls etc).

But saying that a HC in TBC was harder than a mythic raid - no it was not.

[aziras]

Most of the OP points are true.

Or summed up in quick bullets:

* Group-/raid-wide damage was rare - when it happened it was typically 100% avoidable and/or happened when the tank did not need healing
* Aggro management was a key tank skill
* AoE tanking was very difficult for most classes and required a lot of skill
* Hitting the right target was a key dps skill
* Margin for errors were much lower than modern WoW
And the most important: No dual-spec'ing. Tanks were tanks, healers were healers. You geared for your spec and unless you played a ton you did not swap around on a whim.

It wasn't until WotLK that they added health pools to everyone and make encounters do damage to everyone. Before then healers had AoE heals with massive mana cost or long cooldowns because they were only meant as o'sh*t buttons or as a limited way to recover from someone screwing up big time.

The biggest reason for many players either calling TBC heroics hard is that they probably did not play "well". The contrast between "below average" and "above average" players was very large. Back then you could get a group where the skill-set could prevent you from completing a heroic if it was too low. Good dps could rarely carry a bad tank, and a good tank could not do enough damage to carry a group of 3x bad dps and a lousy healer (unless the tank massively outgeared the content - in which case they almost certainly did not have to pug anything).
After the AoE-zerg eras of the past few expansions, the difference between "good" and "bad" has been reduced to "fast" or "slow" runs. So it becomes a more linear scale.

Personally I believe it is a shame. The focus on speed-runs has ruined many of the mechanics in the game. Many players rarely bother to find out which mob in a group is the most dangerous, and as a result makes it disproportionately harder for the healer to keep up. And it seems that all those relaxations in the error margin has done nothing to remove the tank problems. Tanking with pugs is still masochistic. Non-tanks are still complaining about tank's player skills, and dps are still tunnel visioning on a damage meter.

[LanToaster]

Which was bad design in itself. It basically meant the only viable tanks were block tanks (block used to reduce 100% dmg, not 30% like now)

And a mob had a lot of magic attacks you just had a warlock tank it.

Nah, Blocking absorbed a fixed amount of Damage. Mostly based on which Shield you used.

You had to get to 100% Blockchance, and then Stack Stam and Avoidance. The important part would be to get to 100% Blockchance, because of Crushing Blows.
The TankDesign wasnt really bad in my Opinion.

[Deleted]

Mostly this.
It dawned me how much Stronger we are HP wise in TimeWalking BC.

I had with my tank 14K Life unbuffed raiding the second tier. (Well, i had a shit ton of avoidance)
Now in timewalking I had 30K. Thats more than double, and that after the statsquish of WoD. 30K was around the Starting Life of Raiding in WotlK.

Its just in BC the mobs hit like trucks.

My 13k survival pvp hunter back in the day begs to differ, or all the fuckin' warlocks with their tanky health pools.

[Sliske]

Nah, Blocking absorbed a fixed amount of Damage. Mostly based on which Shield you used.

You had to get to 100% Blockchance, and then Stack Stam and Avoidance. The important part would be to get to 100% Blockchance, because of Crushing Blows.
The TankDesign wasnt really bad in my Opinion.

unless you were a druid.

it also was the WHOLE reason mobs HAD to one shot dps, because tanks themselves took so little damage

[PassingBy]

Different mechanics doesn't nessesarily mean the game was harder.

As a hunter throwing a trap down once every 5 minutes doesn't make the game harder. Shit like challenge mode gold is hard, much harder than tbc heroics. Raids too.

A mechanic like siegecrafters belt if put in TBC would break the game. People would take weeks , months to kill that boss.

People were simply worse at the game back then.

- - - Updated - - -



Which was bad design in itself. It basically meant the only viable tanks were block tanks (block used to reduce 100% dmg, not 30% like now)

And a mob had a lot of magic attacks you just had a warlock tank it.

I have tanked all of TBC from Kara to SWP as a feral druid.
Never had problems with not having block. Hell before they nerfed feral few times I felt more tanky than our warrior MT.

And what is wrong with using a warlock to tank? Before the whole "bring the player not the class" bonanza classes used to have their own niche uses. Such as warlocks having a potential to tank, hunters being specifically good for kiting, etc. What was wrong with that?

And mechanic wise - I'd say if we take the current raiders, give them the ilvls of that time, hp pools and tools of that time, and put them against the Kael pre nerf, without the possibility to pick difficulties, with no flex difficulty, just the one difficulty it had - I am sure it won't be a walk in the park either.

[coprax]

Translation: BC seemed harder because it fucking was harder.

And its difficulty also had a lot to do with stricter class/spell requirements, even for 5 man heroics.
Like Shattered Halls: Don't have a paladin tank (for aoe aggro), and no mage and rogue (for sheep/sap)? Don't even bother...

[Sliske]

My 13k survival pvp hunter back in the day begs to differ, or all the fuckin' warlocks with their tanky health pools.

14k WAS what tanks had in tempest keep and such. 16k-17k was what you saw on geared to the teeth black temple tanks. 21k was fresh 80 in some blues and sunwell gear. 30K was ulduar geared prot warriors. bears where much higher though

[Deleted]

TBC required from you to use your class toolkit. Trash pulls in heroics required multiple CCs, mobs sometimes resisted CC and you had to scramble, adaptation was possible if the players were skilled enough.

Not only were you required to kite and cc, but both dps and tanks had to manage their aggro. Say whatever you wish, I always felt this was a good mechanic as it required further knowledge of the game, of when to push for damage and when to take it slow.

The game was much more satisfying for me due to all the above. Compared to now where everything is an AoE snoozefest and the only two questions the game asks of you is "can you not stand in shit?" and "how much dps can you crank out?".

Ironically class fantasy was more alive back then than it is now.

[Deleted]

Even using misdirect and feigning death i would still have to ask for Blessing of Salvation on blood lust pulls to avoid being insta gibbed.

I do miss those days. Threat being a non issue toned the game down drastically.

Having to use like 7 CC's including priest mind control on the first pack of trash in Sunwell was a bit OTT but these days using none and just AoE'ing everything down is just dull.

Making a mistake use to have consequences I.E certain death, Now a couple of heals and everything is jolly. I like much of what the game is now but i do miss lots of what the game used to be rose tinted glasses or not.

Can you Imagine..... Current Huntards in TBC? Barrage + having to control aggro? It would lock out 90% of hunters just on the fact you have to use your brain a bit.

[Enan1981]

Uhm, Circle of Healing was a beast back then if you say theres lack of AoE heals. No CD... Id spam the hell out of it and top meters LOL....