Reason why people say TBC was harder

[tj119]

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.

Yeah, BC was never hard. It just required an extremely rare thing....common sense.

[kary]

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.

TBC was tuned a bit harder because they didn't have to pander to the lowest common denominator due to matchmaking.
However, it was tuned around CC existing.

Every instance save maybe H arcatraz was easy (shittons easier) if you just elected to never take melee dps.
And they got easier still if you just took only frost mages in frozen shadowweave.

[SoundOfGuns]

I don't think they were harder, i just think they were horribly tuned... I remember certain bosses that just outright skullfucked you for no apparent reason... Or bosses that blastered the entire group if non-stop AOE and i stood in the middle as a Holy-Paladin in early TBC screaming like im about to go Super-Saiyan... The Game wasn't as much harder as it was less intuitive and required more headbashing of a wall till it broke... Thats not good game design tho. Of course... there was the concept of Crowd Control... which if ignored could be equite devestating.

[vep]

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.

You so have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. After having said that block used to reduce 100% damage, anything that comes out of your mouth from now on is utter crap.

And comparing challenge modes that are supposed to challenge you to heroics? Can you really be that stupid?

And no, people weren't simply worse back then. The fact that mechanics back then were easy compared to those of today means nothing when you consider how much different classes were back then. Paladins had only Crusader Strike back then and Swing Timer addons were a thing (do you even know why?). Also: people actually ran out of mana; healers were often forced to downrank spells.

[Deleted]

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.

Getting there shouldn't, and in my personal opinion isn't, be counted towards the difficulty levels, it's not like we can queue for mythic/mythic+/raids now.

If you're comparing heroic mode to heroic mode dungeonwise then sure tBC was harder, but the highest 5man difficulty of tBC shouldn't be compared to heroic modes in more recent expansions simply because they share names. I'd hesitate to put an exact mythic+ level for comparison simply because affixes will skew results.

Like people have said, stacking in general was as much a plague in tBC as it is now and it get's real tiring listening to people talk about the 'good old days' as if WoW is suddenly a casual fest.

[Deleted]

Well, class mechanics and boss encounters are more complicated today, which in a way is harder. But most games have more stuff going on these days due to people starting to play games at an earlier age and learn to play more complicated games compared to before.
But if you compare the gameplay then relative to the tools you had at your disposal, i'd say TBC was "harder", partially because of it being more punishing.

[Gandrake]

so in summary, the game was less forgiving.

its not really news. I mean, look at cars. Have you ever driven a vehicle without power steering? it's a luxury most people can't even begin to imagine. when cars were first being manufactured, standard transmissions (also known as straight drive, stick or manual), which only 18% of americans can operate, was the first driving option available.

So people got this idea, you know? Fuck the clutch. It's too heavy, it's too troublesome, we just want to cruise. Just give me a gas and brake pedal so it's stop and go! And eventually in the 1930s we came across a design for an automatic transmission and made one after the war.

And you know what sold us on it? Marketing to the unskilled masses of women.

[kary]

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.

Itemization wasn't really as bad as you make it out to be. (see primal mooncloth/frozen shadowweave. Tier wasn't always the best but sometimes it was too good -T4 rogue 2set looking @ you)
Token groups changed with T6, so only T4/5 had the defender/champion/hero affixes
There were mods similar to weakauras.

But yeah. Every class had 1 (maybe 2 if you were lucky) playable specs. Tons of fun back then. Rogue? Combat or boot. Hunter? BM or you'll do awful damage. Warlock? What's demo? gl oom pet lol. Shaman? Auto raid spot but you dont actually have to do anything but keep the totems to buff the rogues.

[Deleted]

TBC in general was harder, but there have been harder raid bosses designed since then. Rag HC for instance was harder than anything in TBC with the exception of Muru.

Health pools were ridiculous though. I remember having about 9k health on my Holy Priest when starting Black Temple. I think our tank had maybe about 30k? I was only just out of one shot range for Najentus.

[kary]

You so have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. After having said that block used to reduce 100% damage, anything that comes out of your mouth from now on is utter crap.

And comparing challenge modes that are supposed to challenge you to heroics? Can you really be that stupid?

And no, people weren't simply worse back then. The fact that mechanics back then were easy compared to those of today means nothing when you consider how much different classes were back then. Paladins had only Crusader Strike back then and Swing Timer addons were a thing (do you even know why?). Also: people actually ran out of mana; healers were often forced to downrank spells.

Ret wasn't viable unless you were horde, you had no instant attacks if you weren't ret.
Mana wasn't that bad tho cus you could use unlimited potions in combat and if you were horde you were pmuch always guaranteed JoW to "wand for mana"

[Aggrophobic]

I don't know where people get this crap from. TBC was not hard at all.
It took longer to get gear, there was attunements and rep gates but it was not hard.

No raid boss in TBC even gets close to Archimonde in HFC for instance.

The one button classes were also a thing and that didn't really add much complexity either. Remember how warlocks used nothing but shadow bolt? Shaman spamming chain heal all raid long or hunters binding their skills to the scroll wheel and still pulled insane DPS? Yeah, compared to todays WoW TBC was shit.

[Lamora]

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.

Solo content, sure. Dungeon content? There's nothing TBC could offer that's even close to higher mythic+ difficulties.

[Serani]

Bunch of people in here still suffering from the delusion that just because something takes longer, that inherently makes it more difficult.

People going on about attunes to Heroic dungeons in TBC. Oh my god, you had to do normal mode dungeons, some repeatable hand-ins and quests to get rep. That's SO DIFFICULT THO, OH MY GOD, TBC WAS THE HARDIEST.

People going on about having to CC mobs and acting like keeping CC active was some sort of amazing feat. Pressing one macro to resheep every 30 seconds does not constitute skill. Nor does tanking 1-2 mobs at a time because of how shitty the tuning on mob damage was (Slave Handlers in Heroic Slave Pens I believe they were, the 2 that stood in front of the passage to the first boss - literally brought 2 healers for the first month or so as a druid tank because the damage intake was unreal).

People going on about threat being difficult. No it wasn't. Your DPS just had to hold back for 3-5 seconds on pulls before going ham, and they were basically guaranteed to never pull aggro in dungeons.

Basically every mechanic and 'difficult' thing you claim from TBC just involved WAITING and I'm tired of people mistaking that for actual difficulty. It just feels like it is because something takes WAY longer than it should.

[vep]

Ret wasn't viable unless you were horde, you had no instant attacks if you weren't ret.
Mana wasn't that bad tho cus you could use unlimited potions in combat and if you were horde you were pmuch always guaranteed JoW to "wand for mana"

I played Ret the whole expansion. And I was competitive to fire mages. So /shrug. And yeah, Dwarf paladin, not filthy horde :P

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know where people get this crap from. TBC was not hard at all.
It took longer to get gear, there was attunements and rep gates but it was not hard.

No raid boss in TBC even gets close to Archimonde in HFC for instance.

The one button classes were also a thing and that didn't really add much complexity either. Remember how warlocks used nothing but shadow bolt? Shaman spamming chain heal all raid long or hunters binding their skills to the scroll wheel and still pulled insane DPS? Yeah, compared to todays WoW TBC was shit.

You really don't understand the concept of classes having worse skill kits. Take that into consideration and you'll understand that difficulty is really subjective.

[Deleted]

Bunch of people in here still suffering from the delusion that just because something takes longer, that inherently makes it more difficult.

People going on about attunes to Heroic dungeons in TBC. Oh my god, you had to do normal mode dungeons, some repeatable hand-ins and quests to get rep. That's SO DIFFICULT THO, OH MY GOD, TBC WAS THE HARDIEST.

Some of the TBC heroics were very very very hard.And that had nothing to do with their attunement quests.

I don't know where people get this crap from. TBC was not hard at all.

Sure it wasn't hard if you were waiting for the catch up mechanisms. But if you were doing the current content then it was hard.

[potis]

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

World content is never hard, its just lack of knowledge/skill, there was nothing hard about TBC mobs, it was just bad players, like once i saw a rogue using Kick for damage in his rotation, its just bad players combined with lack of knowledge and in some cases, as this rogue, plain stupidity.

First datamine and big guides started at the end of Sunwell, pretty much with the "pre-patch" of WOTLK, its when players suddenly got "better" and "Free gear" and "easier raids" and all the same bullshit, its just information was much easily obtained after that.

I still laugh at how "hard" people found Shattered Halls to be, only because none of the retard bad tanks knew that when you get knocked in the air = any sort of block/dodge/parry cant happen, therefor OMFG SHATTERED HALLS SO HARD, when in reality all it was, lack of knowledge, and only 1 pack was dangerous in there cause of that.

[Serani]

Some of the TBC heroics were very very very hard.

No. They weren't. Class stacking with VERY easy CC abilities (looking at you, mages) and doing SLOW, very boring pulls to avoid pulling things that were overtuned is not difficult. Shitty game design does not equate to difficulty. It equates to shitty game design artifically increasing difficulty by doing things like waiting for cooldowns between pulls and moving at a snails pace.

[kary]

I played Ret the whole expansion. And I was competitive to fire mages. So /shrug. And yeah, Dwarf paladin, not filthy horde :P

- - - Updated - - -



You really don't understand the concept of classes having worse skill kits. Take that into consideration and you'll understand that difficulty is really subjective.

Yeah, but see SoC ret was enhancement shaman level dps. You needed seal of suicide to actually get a spot in the raid for dps, not granted a spot for mana battery duty.
But, I mean this is coming from my experience and ofc ymmv. Killed kael 2.0, the first killable version of kael

[Deleted]

No. They weren't. Class stacking with VERY easy CC abilities (looking at you, mages) and doing SLOW, very boring pulls to avoid pulling things that were overtuned is not difficult. Shitty game design does not equate to difficulty. It equates to shitty game design artifically increasing difficulty by doing things like waiting for cooldowns between pulls and moving at a snails pace.

Yes they were. Heroic arcatraz had nothing with CC.

Also, you re talking about shitty game design, but if PVE is well designed in legion then I m mickey mouse.

[anaxie]

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




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.




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




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



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.



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.



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

Came in expecting an uninformed garbage spread. . thank you for proving me wrong. I can stand by everything you said as a SWP TBC veteran