Reason why people say TBC was harder

[Dhrizzle]

You mean the no focus one button macro dps bm huntards? Yea it wqs real diffixult let me tell you...

They also had to remember to turn pet-taunt off and hit feign death occasionally.

[Deleted]

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.

Blizzard would somehow cater to the brain dead and make barrage auto cast MD on a tank or do no aggro. They do try to panda to every demographic these days, being a jack of all trades is just shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

[Lamora]

Most people probably think it's harder because they don't factor in that they're much better players after 10 years of practice.

[Dhrizzle]

Only bad players and nostalgia people think TBC was any harder.

TBC had lack of information, so the average idiot in WoW today that gets on here or on WoWhead and reads everything, had to discover it by seeing someone else wearing or doing it, making them take 10 times the time required to do anything today cause they simply couldnt get it ready.

Its the same people "clearing" Karazhan with Badge gear that was meant to be used in T6/Sunwell to fill up empty slots, the same reasoning of a 880 Mythic raider, going in Normal TEN and saying "lol easy".

Maybe with raids, but world content and 5-mans were definitely harder, both strategically and numericallly.

[cuafpr]

well tank design went from threat mgmt to CD mgmt, back then you had a few big CD's on longer timers.. now its all about "Active" tanking vs keeping threat. i'd rather go back to keeping threat with fewer longer CD's and better passive dmg reduction. you also wanted 102.4% mitigation to basically never take a full hit. I still have the macro around for that....

[Natylyaz]

Things were NOT hard, they were BROKEN.
Bring 3 mages to Magisters' Terrace or a paladin tank, and it was very easy.
Same applies to Shattered Halls.

[Hatorri]

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.

1. In Tbc spec's was totaly different.. hunters wasnt broken as now.. instead of this hate against them hunters was a+ in the groups and in the raids, today blizzard came to a point that they have messed so badly with spec's that not even them can see the mistakes they did.. and when something goes really bad they nerf a class or they make a patch..

2. new players they could'nt even survive at original tbc with the spec's and gear as it was that time, no LFR to help them get gear and the only way was via a guild raid. today they believe everything belong to them and its them right to get anything in the game without any effort.
This is one of the main reasons why game is going so badly, seasonal players come online when a new exp pop up or a new raid, join a guild and stay there as long they can get gear, pug raids and soonest they kill end boss they quit until the next exp.

[ComputerNerd]

Healthpools are still the same now, tanks having more.
Evereyone else having less.

CC sucked when it was so inconstantly brought by various classes.
It meant some dungeons heavily favoured a very narrow selection of classes.
CC is only ever a good dungeon mechanic if any random group is likely to have the necessary tools.

A large part of the old content being harder mentality is experience, of which you have more now.
The game cannot have the bar endlessly raised to suit that long-term experience.
There has to be a cap which recent players can progress to.
Therefore there will be a ceiling the more skilled and experienced will reach, and could exceed.
That minority cannot be catered to without being detrimental to others.

[Nahela]

Bad design is not the same as more challenging.

It baffles me that people bring up Threat as something that made the game 'more challenging' or 'skill-based'. It didn't, it just dramatically limited your options and put actual tank-defense entirely in the hands of healers. In BC there was almost nothing involved in tank survivability to the actual tank. Multi-target threat also wasn't nearly as difficult as people seem to think, it was just tedious. Same goes for CC. In BC you had all the time in the world to sit around and pre-cast CC and reapply with target macros. That's not 'skill'.

In fact the only content that really ended up posing any sort of skill-based challenge was Zul'Aman bear runs, which are extremely similar to how we do Challenge Modes or high Mythic+ now. Saying that the emphasis on 'speed' makes it so mechanics don't matter is just silly. If you're doing Challenge Modes at a high level or now the new Mythic+ at higher difficulties, there's a lot more that goes into it than just 'go fast'. It's all about coordination and timing, certainly more than went into heroic BC dungeons.

The game is dramatically more challenging now than it ever was in BC. To say that it's less-punishing now at the highest difficulty levels than it was then tells me that you're not doing content at the highest difficulty levels. Content then was designed to allow an enormous number of mistakes. Top-level raid content now allows for practically zero with a large number of personal responsibility factors that never existed then. In BC you had 2-3 people in a raid on any given encounter that held the keys. Now nearly everybody does when it comes to Mythic raiding.

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

This is a simply false and a gross exaggeration, the only reason Shattered Halls was ever difficult is it was poorly designed. The only challenge in that instance came from the fact you couldn't reasonably stack melee classes which were dramatically stronger DPS-wise than ranged at the time. Nearly every mob in the instance 360 cleaved with no warning, some of which chain-cleaved on top of that. Harder? Yes. More challenging? No, it was just artificially inflated difficulty based on abysmal design. Once you ran it once or twice to figure that out it was no longer difficult.

[Echocho]

More players killed mythic archimonde in WOD than kil'jaeden in TBC.

/thread

[xindralol]

- more buttons
- while rotations weren't as 'smooth' as they are today, it was generally way more difficult to do top dps
- mechanics were more like -if you don't interrupt this shadowbolt volley everyone dies- instead of -if you don't interrupt, healers need to heal a bit more-

[voidillusion]

Most people probably think it's harder because they don't factor in that they're much better players after 10 years of practice.

It has nothing to do with how much better players were or weren't before.

OP did a nice job pointing out key differences. Threat mattering, limited aoe abilities and the correct dmg taken vs health pools (my opinion) are sure amongst the most important. You needed to be more aware, it's not nostalgia, its just how it was. Ppl prefer aoe grind fests now.

Ofc this is talking about solo and dungeon content, because raids are much harder to compare imo.

[Deleted]

Reason why people say TBC was hard: MMORPGs were a relatively new thing and everyone was terrible at the game.

It wasn't harder, you just had less resources lying around to stop you from being a shitter, so the average % of shitters in the game was higher than it is today (though queueing LFR would certainly make you think otherwise)

[Flarelaine]

- mechanics were more like -if you don't interrupt this shadowbolt volley everyone dies- instead of -if you don't interrupt, healers need to heal a bit more-

I still recall being part of an interrupt rotation as late as Cata on the mad scientist boss in Blackrock whatever.

[Natylyaz]

BC difficulty:
- Spam shadowbolt with your warlock
- Spam circle of healing with your priest
- Spam consecration with your paladin
- Bring 3 mages to Magisters' Terrace and Shattered Halls
=> Piece of cake

[kary]

A large amount of people didn't do dps as well.
You sit here badmouthing 1 button macro hunters and 2 button shadowbolt warlocks, when most people didn't have the foresight to even play those specs. Back then, most people not in a high tier raiding guild played absolute abortion specs.

How did you gem a rogue in TBC? All yellow hit gems ofc! How do you spec? Combat swords with only 2 viable offhands, Latro's shifting sword, or blade of savagery from black temple. Don't like a rotation of rupture/slice and dice? Too bad.

BC difficulty:
- Spam shadowbolt with your warlock
- Spam circle of healing with your priest
- Spam consecration with your paladin
- Bring 3 mages to Magisters' Terrace and Shattered Halls
=> Piece of cake

Don't carry melee anywhere 2kforever.

[Sencha]

Very good and fair post OP and reading it made me want to play BC again.

Fully agree with the conclusion.

[Ratyrel]

Reason why people say TBC was hard: MMORPGs were a relatively new thing and everyone was terrible at the game.

It wasn't harder, you just had less resources lying around to stop you from being a shitter, so the average % of shitters in the game was higher than it is today (though queueing LFR would certainly make you think otherwise)

While suboptimal gearing was certainly a factor, I don't think it's decisive. TBC was harder because options were more restricted and it was tuned and designed tougher. Things like heroic shadowlab or shattered halls were 5 man content that put you against packs of 8 mobs with far more restricted cc spells and far less utility. Getting there was also harder, as there was no dungeon finder, so gearing up was much, much slower (remember attunements?). The game simply made it harder for you to do things back then and that decelerated pace contributed to perceived difficulty.

[Flarelaine]

I killed that once in half green gear. There was a green set with huge stam and spellpower on it and it was pretty OK for shadow priest... I had like 12K hp, it was smooth
I think it was something like 8K raid damage when the bubble bursted, you absolutely needed 8K. Preferably more, to leave room for some mistakes.

I remember 9k-something but yes, there had to be a margin. It was also a headache for us healers to keep everyone (EVEN AND ESPECIALLY THE BLASTED WARLOCKS) topped up just before. How I hated their life-to-mana spell. I always saw that as them basically casting spells out of my mana.

[l33t]

OP, you forgot some very important things.

- People were total noobs learning how to play - there weren't a fuckton of video guides or even written guides for every spec, like it is now. You had to go so elitistjerks and read through forum posts, searching for bits of precious info you needed. Compare that to now, when usual common players use different kinds of simcrafts, addons and logs to improve and there are tons of info on every spec nuiances from every available content. This is, I fear, the greatest contributor to a topic of vanilla/tbc being "hard", when in reality, current WoW content is way harder, just players are too experienced nowadays. Even the bads nowadays perform much better than good players performed back in the good days of old.
- Itemization was uber shitty, thus you had to wear all sorts of bad stats = obvious gimping your character.
- No bonus rolls + fixed raid drops per kill = much less gear and way slower gearing than now. (plus, again, shitty itemization).
- Tier token groups were awful. Good luck gearing your priest, when literally 2/3 of your raid is in your token group.
- No dualspec, which is a huge simplification.
- No Weak Auras.
- Half of specs being unplayable. Not like today, when people start drama topics about fury being "literally unplayable" because he deals 8% less damage than Arms in latest simcraft. Really unplayable.