Reason why people say TBC was harder

[themaelstorm]

Most people make a big mistake of comparing things directly.

Yes, you had to do some other things then. Yes, you have more mechanics now.
You can't take one part of a complex mechanism, like boss mechanics, and compare it directly with tbc and say
"See, now we have more complex mechanisms, people were bad then."

You have to look at the bigger picture. The meta of it.

I would say that there are some key changes
1. Niches vs Homogenization Back then it was "we need warlock tank for this boss" or "we need humanoid CC for this dungeon." Now it's "Every tank should be able to tank single and multi target. Every dps needs to be viable at any time."
As a rogue, I had it rather easy in TBC. All dungeons had something I could CC.
I can't imagine how shamans must have felt. I was in a close-knit guild and we carried our own but I can see them being shut out purely because they didn't have CC.

So, classes had specialized kits back then and the situations called for it.
Now, we have wider kits and no special calls.

2. Mental checklist shifting from tools to mechanics Yes, sapping a mob isn't hard. Yes, it isn't "hard" to go back and blind that mob. But then again, is it really hard to remember you have to move away when you get a certain debuff? Especially when DBM shouts you to run away and even shows the cooldowns on the screen?

I think it's actually similar to first point. Mechanics are for everyone, while tools were up to classes. I mean, you can watch a video of any ranged dps and get a good idea of what you need to do. Back then, you would have needed to watch a mage do it or a warlock do it.

3. Game being more punishing I disagree that hard design is just wrong. I'm not big on nostalgia and I like where the game is going but what game toned down was things being less punishing. This is due to several reasons. For example, more classes have CC and kite mechanisms now. More aoe heals and ability to do aoe damage, keep threat easier. These means it's easier to recover from mistakes in tactical levels.
Also, CCing may not be hard, but it's definitely hardER than the aoefest wotlk started. Because if you aren't good at aoe, you kill mobs slowly. If you fail your CC, you're in a world of pain.

4. Game being more personal and local community oriented This is something people oversee. I'm not against LFG or anything but let's face it. If you were a good tank, people knew you in your server. If you were a ninja looter, that too. People would add each other because they needed good people. Because you needed personal coordination. You needed to know that particular person did its job and it was visible because, see below. It was easier to point fingers positively or negatively. Nowadays the other role slots are just that: slots to fill. I still meet and add people but it's much easier to find a random person. Back in the day, we had no chance.
Mythic kinda brings that sense but still you have a sea of players.


I think both of these have an important result.
You had tools others didn't.
You used your own kit.
You felt like you did something.
Even if it wasn't like you were doing something super creative and you did what everyone and their mother did, the feeling was different.

Now it feels like you are just obeying some rules someone made. Someone designed the content. Someone found the best way to play against it. You just follow the rules.
It doesn't feel like you accomplished something on your own.

And feeling, my friends, is what we make of the world.

[anaxie]

T4 shoulders, engi helmet and caverns of time sword ho!
edit: lol thats for prot nm

Oh no ret tier had into and sp till season 3.

S2 gear was better than T6. And T6 Set bonus....... No comment.......

[kary]

TBC as ret. Oh we are doing Dark Portal heroic. Hang on gotta buy the GOOD water

I remember how much our ret complained. Poor guy. Something something rank 1 seal of command something something.

[Serani]

Yeah, well, sorry but there isn't really much reason to debate with people who say melee taking damage thus requiring attention from healers who are already OOM, isn't a factor in difficulty.

Why the fuck was your healer OOM instantly on trash? By the end of a pack, possibly, depending on the length and severity of the incoming damage, but 90% of the time your healer sits and regains mana while you're setting up marks/CC so they're definitely not OOM.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

Playing Feral in an age where 93% of Karazhan couldn't bleed. I mean, they're ghosts, so I can see where they are coming from but it was slightly aggravating. At least I made up for that if I were Red Riding Hood.

If our Enhancement Shaman didn't die on each trash pack, he wasn't doing his job.

[kary]

Most people make a big mistake of comparing things directly.

Yes, you had to do some other things then. Yes, you have more mechanics now.
You can't take one part of a complex mechanism, like boss mechanics, and compare it directly with tbc and say
"See, now we have more complex mechanisms, people were bad then."

You have to look at the bigger picture. The meta of it.

I would say that there are some key changes
1. Niches vs Homogenization Back then it was "we need warlock tank for this boss" or "we need humanoid CC for this dungeon." Now it's "Every tank should be able to tank single and multi target. Every dps needs to be viable at any time."
As a rogue, I had it rather easy in TBC. All dungeons had something I could CC.
I can't imagine how shamans must have felt. I was in a close-knit guild and we carried our own but I can see them being shut out purely because they didn't have CC.

So, classes had specialized kits back then and the situations called for it.
Now, we have wider kits and no special calls.

2. Mental checklist shifting from tools to mechanics Yes, sapping a mob isn't hard. Yes, it isn't "hard" to go back and blind that mob. But then again, is it really hard to remember you have to move away when you get a certain debuff? Especially when DBM shouts you to run away and even shows the cooldowns on the screen?

I think it's actually similar to first point. Mechanics are for everyone, while tools were up to classes. I mean, you can watch a video of any ranged dps and get a good idea of what you need to do. Back then, you would have needed to watch a mage do it or a warlock do it.

3. Game being more punishing I disagree that hard design is just wrong. I'm not big on nostalgia and I like where the game is going but what game toned down was things being less punishing. This is due to several reasons. For example, more classes have CC and kite mechanisms now. More aoe heals and ability to do aoe damage, keep threat easier. These means it's easier to recover from mistakes in tactical levels.
Also, CCing may not be hard, but it's definitely hardER than the aoefest wotlk started. Because if you aren't good at aoe, you kill mobs slowly. If you fail your CC, you're in a world of pain.

4. Game being more personal and local community oriented This is something people oversee. I'm not against LFG or anything but let's face it. If you were a good tank, people knew you in your server. If you were a ninja looter, that too. People would add each other because they needed good people. Because you needed personal coordination. You needed to know that particular person did its job and it was visible because, see below. It was easier to point fingers positively or negatively. Nowadays the other role slots are just that: slots to fill. I still meet and add people but it's much easier to find a random person. Back in the day, we had no chance.
Mythic kinda brings that sense but still you have a sea of players.


I think both of these have an important result.
You had tools others didn't.
You used your own kit.
You felt like you did something.
Even if it wasn't like you were doing something super creative and you did what everyone and their mother did, the feeling was different.

Now it feels like you are just obeying some rules someone made. Someone designed the content. Someone found the best way to play against it. You just follow the rules.
It doesn't feel like you accomplished something on your own.

And feeling, my friends, is what we make of the world.

2/10 good troll.
Rogues were useless till heroics were nerfed a couple times and by then you could basically brute force them.
Blind still used a reagent in TBC and didn't last more than a few seconds.
And most dungeon packs had detection.

[vep]

Why the fuck was your healer OOM instantly on trash? By the end of a pack, possibly, depending on the length and severity of the incoming damage, but 90% of the time your healer sits and regains mana while you're setting up marks/CC so they're definitely not OOM.

Oh we're talking about trash mobs? Cause I don't remember a single trash mob having that sort of mechanics. On the other hand: if you drew aggro from a mob you were pretty much dead. Unless you were a paladin and you bubbled or a hunter who used feign death.
But either way: the scenario you described was a boss fight. In which case, yes, healers actually went OOM. And then again, have you basically tried comparing trash mob mechanics to nowadays raid mechanics?

[reauxmont]

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.

Well... downranking to the rescue! I remember downranked chainheal and circle of lol from priests dominating healmeters.

[Hyve]

The Burning Crusade wasn't harder. It had harder requirements to defeat the bosses, but in terms of mechanics The Burning Crusade itself was a bit of a joke. Compare a simple boss fight such as Gruul, to something today and you soon see that the personal responsibility per person is much higher, and while yes getting into raids is easier, that's not exactly a bad thing.

Raiding was "harder" then because you needed a certain amount of gear to even be able to literally defeat a boss. Now-a-days gear isn't the limiting factor, skill is, and that's when a game is much more fun, rewarding and challenging, at least in my view.

[kary]

Oh we're talking about trash mobs? Cause I don't remember a single trash mob having that sort of mechanics. On the other hand: if you drew aggro from a mob you were pretty much dead. Unless you were a paladin and you bubbled or a hunter who used feign death.
But either way: the scenario you described was a boss fight. In which case, yes, healers actually went OOM. And then again, have you basically tried comparing trash mob mechanics to nowadays raid mechanics?

Hellfire ramparts trash was retarded.
Blood furnace packs, especially the ones before the last boss with the felguards
Sethekk halls twin packs with the birds that used to hulk out (forgot the npc name, talon guards maybe?)
Auchenai crypts melee draenei ghosts with the staves
Any mob with mortal strike (which there were a lot)
Any mob that stunned (less frequent than MS, but frequent enough)
Mana tombs in general.

id say that trash was prob harder to heal than the bosses. I didn't do much heroics on my druid till the nerfs came in, though, so my recollection could be off.

[Sliske]

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.

With shield mastery and defense cap with any decent amount of block rating, blocks absorbed 100% of dmg. Maybe your tank in greens didn't, my warrior in epics did.

theres a reason every single guild had 1 or 2 prot warriors as their tanks.

[kary]

With shield mastery and defense cap with any decent amount of block rating, blocks absorbed 100% of dmg. Maybe your tank in greens didn't, my warrior in epics did.

theres a reason every single guild had 1 or 2 prot warriors as their tanks.

Well you had to be a warrior on illidan cus lol shear, but yeah.
People forget about block value and block rating. Stack BV gear and trash mobs don't do damage to you. Too much BV gear and you don't generate rage and have to tank without pants on.

[potis]

Um no, Shattered Halls was hard because there were large packs with several ranged mobs hat hit like trucks, making it difficult to gather them all up before the healer got aggro and died. It wasn't hard if you had a lot of CC or overgeared the instance but for your average PuG or group of non-minmaxed friends it was pretty tough. Even normal Shattered Halls was harder than all the heroic dungeons prior to MgT.

So, bad players and bad tanks, good logic, i repeat:

Nothing in TBC was remotely hard dungeon wise, the only "hard place" was 1 pack in Shattered Halls with 6 mobs inside the room with the beds with the chance to pull extra and the about 7-10 stealth dudes in Shadow Labyrinth which you probably never experienced since they got reduced to 2-3 before most people were 70, even the "Hard Arcatraz" was a joke if you werent half retarded.

Just because something is considered hard by the average player, it doent mean it was ever hard.

Let me explain basic dungeon thinking : Does it have mana and its name sounds like a healer or looks like a healer if humanoid? Probably heals, kill first.. Oh wait Captain name in there probably buffs the rest, or makes them immune, kill first, then healer second--> None of those exist --> Mana user first since they die faster.

Apply this to every dungeon ever existed in WoW and your chance to wipe drops by 90%

Sure, you are gonna wipe the first time you are somewhere to some different thing from waht i wrote above, like the 5 second stun in Sethekk Halls the first time you meet that pack which can surprise you, but guess what? Good healer, tracked debuffs from then, dispelled, i never actually wiped there cause my healer wasnt bad.

[vep]

With shield mastery and defense cap with any decent amount of block rating, blocks absorbed 100% of dmg. Maybe your tank in greens didn't, my warrior in epics did.

theres a reason every single guild had 1 or 2 prot warriors as their tanks.

That's not even remotely true. Wtf you on about? Block actually only blocked for the amount of block value you had. Yeah, don't remember that stat existing, do you? Block was pretty much used only to avoid crushing blows. Don't remember them either?

[Tasttey]

Oh no ret tier had into and sp till season 3.

S2 gear was better than T6. And T6 Set bonus....... No comment.......

At least you had S2 gear as an options, Frozen Shadow Weave until 4 pc T6 for us poor Shadow Priests.

And hell people want to talk about threat, I still remember being the intervene target for our MT on Illidan because we couldn't drop threat on transitions, so once the warlock tank phase was over he was comin right for me.

[kary]

At least you had S2 gear as an options, Frozen Shadow Weave until 4 pc T6 for us poor Shadow Priests.

And hell people want to talk about threat, I still remember being the intervene target for our MT on Illidan because we couldn't drop threat on transitions, so once the warlock tank phase was over he was comin right for me.

Frozen shadowweave was better itemized, though.
So it's not like you really lost anything using frozen shadowweave.
Ret straight up didn't have any good gear most of the expansion due to the "lol if im not a blood elf I actually need spellpower" bullshit.

[Spiral Mage]

WoW was a simpler game back then. We were also much simpler people back then.

We have infinitely better tools available to us to learn encounters, DPS, etc, than we ever did back then and we make it much more of a personal mission because it's expected of us.

[Deleted]

[SNIP] Topic of CC
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).[SNIP]

This is the reason why I had a focus macro and a focus-sheep-macro on my mage. This made things much easier. You could see that the sheep spell was about to expire on the focus target, and you could see on the focus-sheep-macro spell if you were in range to resheep or not. oO

I still have these in my bindings, I only seldom have the use for it because AoE is king now...

[Yoshimiko]

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.

Are you kidding me? Tank design was AWFUL back then. Block tanks WERE the only viable tanks 'cuz every other tank would randomly get 1-shot in raids to crushing blow. There's a reason you never saw bear tanks. We brought one to karazhan and prayed to RNGesus that when Prince Malchazar started swinging 'dem axes he didn't randomly one-shot our tank with double crushing blow.

...I was that bear tank. I was forced to change mains soon after.

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.

I played FFXI for 10 years - that shit was my jam. I still pop onto privy servers occasionally to play around. I absolutely loved XI. That being said, that game was piss easy to play once you got the basics down. You didn't have a 'rotation', you mostly auto-attacked. You didn't really have many abilities, you could legit play completely out of your spell book - and many players actually did. That game was more about resource management than technical skills. It's a very different monster from BC WoW.

Everquest just had real challenge frequently that anyone could have access to. Very different style from WoW's Mythic raiding or M+5 and higher dungeons.

[Deleted]

Hellfire ramparts trash was retarded.
Blood furnace packs, especially the ones before the last boss with the felguards
Sethekk halls twin packs with the birds that used to hulk out (forgot the npc name, talon guards maybe?)
Auchenai crypts melee draenei ghosts with the staves
Any mob with mortal strike (which there were a lot)
Any mob that stunned (less frequent than MS, but frequent enough)
Mana tombs in general.

id say that trash was prob harder to heal than the bosses. I didn't do much heroics on my druid till the nerfs came in, though, so my recollection could be off.

I remember that I did not want to heal heroics on my druid past midnight because my concentration went down massively at some point. Also, was healing in tree-form most of the time and had some macros for "oh shit!" situations to switch out and slap some big heals on the tank, and then switch back in.... all this with no raid gear or such, I only set foot in Karazhan once and probably got 1 item out of the run.