Reason why people say TBC was harder

[anaxie]

Wonder how many people did TBC heroics in season 2/3 gear for queldanis badge vendor items and are like OH this totally isn't that hard. Yay ignorance and overgearing! Also people saying it wasn't hard then giving reasons like it was just overturned it took more time ect ect. Yes because it was hard and unforgiving and you couldn't aoe the entire instance in one pull or tank as a DPS spec.

[Ferrair]

I remember Najentus in Black Temple requiring everyone to be 8.1k hp MINIMUM or you would get 1 shot by one of the mechanics.

And the attunement itself to even enter BT, lol i saw that and went "NOPE".

I spent all my time in Karazahn and SSC, and we didn't even progress far enough to see Vashj.

The game is so different back then.

[bubbadubba]

Why are people stil compaing BC and Vanilla compared to Current tier During BC / Vanilla there was no Fatboss guides to bosses and people were just new to the game it was fresh therefor harder now the game is old so everyone has played it for a long time and saying vanilla was harder please say your joking 1 shadow bolt then wait 5 sec then use another shadow bolt just due to aggro that was not fun at all, and BC raiding is not as hard as people think not even close The game evolves the players evolve the game hasnt gotten easier people have just gotten better,

You had more to manage with casting the shadow bolt is the difference.

Now it is 'memorize your rotation and have it flash at you to hit buttons'. Put a sound when I get procs and I could do my rotation blind folded.

Compared to- Do a simple rotation but manage 10x the amount of things around it.

I think the game is still challenging if not more but in a different way. If players went back to TBC, they would probably have a difficult time due to the number of different variables thrown at you in TBC. I guarantee a lot would get confused by how classes worked because casting a shadow bolt every now and then sounds simple but it wasn't.

Now I think what makes the game less challenging now is not the Fatboss videos but the fact that we have addons to hold our hand when we cross the street.

Also we test raids now so they are tuned properly but it causes a lot of guilds to learn fights and have videos the first week it launches. They did not have that then so it caused that learning period to be happening while the content was new. That and some bosses were bugging or over tuned.

[mahesvara]

A mythic raid guild world 500 lets say.

Transported back to Kael'Thas right now would smash it in 50 attempts.

Now how about a world 500 guild of TBC vs Lei Shen 25 HC or Archimonde Mythic or Siegecrafter 25 HC in relevant gear item levels

First off, all of the hunters would immediately vomit around the idea of not being able to simply press steady shot and nothing else. All of the warlocks would burst into tears not being able to press shadowbolt and nothing else. The mages too, would fall to the floor and have a breakdown trying to wrap their heads around building a 'perfect combustion'.

Don't even get me started on MoP fury warrior vs tbc fury warrior.

As for the tanks? Well i've witnessed this myself. We got our prot pala from TBC and had him level up quickly and join us in ToT. Guy REFUSED to gear for haste. "tanks don't do dps" (in a time when tanks were top dps on almost every parse). Guy was dying constantly, (in a time when tanks were immortal when played well) guy didn't use half his cooldowns, or his healthstone. When we asked him to screenshot his UI, he had his bubble, healthstone and most of the rest of his cooldowns as clickable spells, not keybinds and even worse - they were covered by other elements of his UI, meaning he had no cooldown usage at all.

"fucking healers" was his favourite line, while in a raid with two multi rank 1 parsing healers.

Another good example - Kungen. Holy shit. Any tank who watches this guy play with his TBC mindset is baffled beyond words. Guy couldn't do bronze proving grounds.

TBC was slower. Not harder. A lot of people confuse the two. Heres a comparison.

A hard mythic boss these days asks you to sprint 100m in 13 seconds or less. Don't do it? You wipe.

A hard TBC boss asks you to walk 10 mile without falling over. Yes, the TBC boss takes longer and has more preperation in pots and attunements, but the mechanics themselves, the individual player input is fucking nothing.

To this day we laugh at the "2 button specs" like arcane mage in wotlk. Now what if i told you that hunters were 1 button, warlocks were 1 button, rogues were 2 buttons, fury warriors were 2 buttons and a bunch of others? MOST specs back then, even tanks and healers, were 1-2 buttons.

Holy paladins I distinctly remember stood for several minutes spamming rank 7 flash of light until the boss died. Shamans did the same with chain heal.

/thread. 10char

[xpose]

TBC was hard in the same sense Vanilla was hard. Poorly tuned instances and class balance was retarded.

[Kryos]

It wasn't as twitchy and fast - everything was slower but also cumbersome and annoying and took lots of time with little reward. Yes, I play since vanilla and yes I even raided and cleared Nax40 and all other raids. TBC wasn't harder, it just had more chores, much was very cumbersome and it took long time to recover. After a wipe the whole raid had to run through the world into the raid and then through the whole instance, slow, annoying. You had so many possible buffs and farming mats for them was also a slow and annoying process. It was like cleaning your room with a toothbrush and now we have a vaccum cleaner but also need to clear two additional rooms while taking a call on the phone. You have to have a much quicker reaction time today, but the game has much more quality of life changes and recovering from failure is very quickly done. Doing damage was waaaaaay easier with all class, with some it was a joke (Frostmage = frostbolt until oom, evocation, repeat).

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

The game was just poorly made. You can see the tanking situation change drastically already into Wrath. Even from the start of TBC to the end things changed.
Think about tanking in classic as well, when things were so backwards that there was only one viable tank in a world where dungeons could be aoe farmed with 5 frost mages.

The game simply was not balanced properly and now that is it, people mistake difficulty for something its not.

All the issues you mention in the OP are solved if you have actual defensive CDs and a way to generate threat on multiple mobs.

[Hctaz]

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.

The reason for this was the fact that they changed the way that they wanted healing to be done and had to increase everybody's health in order to achieve this. In Cata, health was raised 150% for no reason other than for a healing change. They no longer wanted mobs to do huge swing tank damage anymore and wanted healers to be able to think about healing and not just sit there and spam cast flash heal on the tank.

[RoKPaNda]

/thread. 10char

Nah, not even close to /thread. The person you quoted pulled half of that post out of their ass about how many attempts it would take X group to beat Y encounter, and the other half was a misunderstanding how how classes worked and what their rotations were. Comparing raiding then and raiding now is apples and oranges. There are things from modern raiding that Vanilla/BC raiders would struggle with a bit and then overcome, and there are things from Vanilla/BC that modern raiders would struggle with and then eventually overcome. The game has changed so much, but the raider mindset has not, bash your fucking head against it with whatever you've got until things click into place and you win. Both groups would require massive adjustments to their playstyle and in the end they'd both overcome the raid.

5-mans though? Mythic dungeons are a joke compared to BC heroics, and Vanilla 5-mans before they were nerfed to shit. Mobs out in the world were harder also. Outside of raiding this game is an absolute cakewalk right now compared to what it used to be. And that's okay, because that's just how the MMO market has changed over the years.

[blackblade]

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.

defence rating was also a thing, else you were crittable.

[bubbadubba]

The game was just poorly made. You can see the tanking situation change drastically already into Wrath. Even from the start of TBC to the end things changed.
Think about tanking in classic as well, when things were so backwards that there was only one viable tank in a world where dungeons could be aoe farmed with 5 frost mages.

The game simply was not balanced properly and now that is it, people mistake difficulty for something its not.

All the issues you mention in the OP are solved if you have actual defensive CDs and a way to generate threat on multiple mobs.

I know a guy that has been in a top 20 US guild since vanilla, he mains tank and those changes to tanks they slowly kept implementing ruined tanking in his words. He feels more of a dps that has the boss attacking him compared to an actual tank.

Threat is one of the thing he misses and personally I miss it as well. He does have some other issues with things they took out as it simplified everything.

I understand why Blizzard took it out though, a bad player or new player had a hard time wrapping there head around everything as the game had a lot to manage. In threats side of things, it was a better option to simplify everything so you didn't need to have a good tank to do anything. I remember when they stopped slowly buffing how much threat tanks could do and nerfed threat into the ground that it turned into more of a term that the tank just attacked the mob once. Every fight became so much easier which I didn't like but I also wasn't afraid of pugging a tank. I got used to threat being gone.

They didn't fix a mistake but simplified it to make LFG an actual viable tool.

The difficulty in TBC had nothing to do with imbalances. They took a lot of the management out of classes that wasn't visible in a tooltip and upped the rotation to make the difficulty more visible for players that were having a hard time understanding something that wasn't spelled out for them.

People mistake simple with hidden difficulties for something its not.

I don't think the game is easy on the highest difficulty now. However it is easier for the mediocre players, I am talking anyone that doesn't push hard progression. It was a smart move by blizzard because it makes the game more appealing to the average person if they can more easily understand how to play.

Also bosses were not tested like they are now so we don't get to see the long progression of learning fights because it is now done on the PTR or Beta.

[Deleted]

Agree with op. Also you didnt have radar addons or arrow addons to show where to stand which ofcourse is ridiculous thats is legal to use, might aswell play a facebook game.

[ZenX]

Back then the gap of "Easy to learn hard to master" was rather large, meaning the curve associated with playing the game was more linear and in turn rewarding. With the homogenisation of classes in terms of their role (Everyone basically having the same toolkit with some minor tweaks in flavour), the curve became akin to a slowly incremented exponential aka you are either drooling over keyboard terrible, a moderate player or a good one.

Of course these changes and in turn difference have arisen due to ever increasing complexity of game mechanics that a hostile NPC or player could have.

[bubbadubba]

TBC was hard in the same sense Vanilla was hard. Poorly tuned instances and class balance was retarded.

TBC was more challenging for the average player, it was about the same difficulty for top tier players.

They didn't simplify the game for those top world mythic players, they did however make it easier for a mediocre players and bad players.

This is why we have a big misconception of TBC and vanilla compared to now.

[Sliske]

REALLY???

I'd say the hardest boss of ALL time was Naxx60 Loatheb. Hands down the most difficult boss in the game.


Maybe you didn't kill him, but I definitely did. I remember farming whipper roots, buffs in Felwood, saving Ony and Nef heads, potions, elixirs, bandages, warlocks trading individual healthstones to 40 players (which you needed 40 _total_ soul shards per attempt for), all for 1 attempt on him. Then you had to get all your healers to heal at the right time while not dying. He was definitely killable, however he was the hardest boss to execute properly. As we all know, execution is the hardest part of raiding.

Gear came extremely fast in Naxx, so i don't even see how your argument is relevant for 4hm since warriors were one of the most popular classes in vanilla.



The point I was trying to make was that people are comparing difficulty of Legion to TBC, both are incomparable to Naxx60.

See this is the problem with saying naxx 40 is hard.

Half of your post isn't even naxx 40. Its felwood, its onyxia, its nefarian, its potions and elixers and bandages. This isn't a hard boss, its a tedious boss.

How fast do you think loatheb would've fell over if you could press a button and generate all those materials? Maybe 1 hour? 2 hours?

But because the materials were tedious to get, it took people days, weeks to kill him.

I'll give you that Vanilla and TBC were slower and hell, even more prestigious. I still think a guy in full t6 is wayyy more prestigious than a guy in full mythic HFC gear, but don't tell me the bosses are easier.

It takes like 200-500 attempts to kill hard bosses in post Cata world. It takes 20-50 to kill a hard boss in vanilla or tbc.

[Rhoe]

If I could return 1 thing from BC it would be threat. It was much much more fun to work for aggro as a tank and made a lot of difference in several things for healers and dps as well.

As someone who played spriest in BC, threat was not fun at all. All it meant was that when I reached 105% or so, I had to stand there and wand until it went down. Sometimes I couldn't even reapply dots for fear of overaggroing. Fun!?!

[Sliske]

The whole game is logistics...

I'm sorry but 40 people doing Thaddius and 1 person staying too long to heal the tank and wiping the raid is 10x harder than any of the following EN raid mechanics:
Avoid bugs
Avoid green puddles
Don't get breathed on
Kill adds
Hug a tree
Interrupt cast
Stand behind a group when targeted
Kill adds by giant eye
Don't stay in timed room too long
Don't drop tornadoes where the raid is
Clear your stacks
Don't spread corruption
Use immunity to destroy roots
Don't gain too much corruption while not dreaming
Don't run blades through raid.
If dreaming, dispel tank.

^^ how is any of that even remotely comparable? O Right, I must be nostalgic.

1 warrior mistiming a mass spell reflect, spawning 25 adds that instantly kill you 5 minutes into a Lei Shen 25 HC attempt is hard too.

Raid wiping mistakes have existed and still exist to this day. I don't raid EN Mythic, but i'd be willing to bet that theres at least 1 mechanic in there that can instantly cause a wipe if one person fucks it up.

In fact most bosses in general have this mechanic. Shit, Dragon Soul has like 6 of them in an 8 boss raid and DS is considered easy!

instant raid wipe mechanics don't make a boss hard.

Meticulous spec rotations on top of consistantly doing mechanics on top of movement on top of coordination with your raid and adapting to change is what makes a boss hard.

Archimonde has this. Lei Shen has this. Mistiming your MSR because you've just came out of a Lei Shen transition where you got the helm of command and the aoe damage circle in the solo soak group is hectic and hard.

Pressing shadowbolt for 6 minutes and forgetting to press W to run through the thaddius to the other side is not hard, its retarded.

i mean really im shocked you'd use THADDIUS of all fucking bosses to tell us how hard vanilla was. A boss with one fucking mechanic.

[Deleted]

Raiding in BC was easy, Heroics however, especially with lower gear levels were harder because they were tuned incorrectly. Even M'uru and Kil'jaeden weren't "hard" or difficult in terms of mechanics tbh. It was literally all about unavoidable tank and raid damage. As a DPS, there was barely anything worth mentioning for me to be considered taxing.

Not sure if I'd define something like that as "harder" though, CCing everything except one mob is not the definition of hard.
High M+ dungeons with a timer are certainly harder than whatever they threw at us during BC.

[bubbadubba]

See this is the problem with saying naxx 40 is hard.

Half of your post isn't even naxx 40. Its felwood, its onyxia, its nefarian, its potions and elixers and bandages. This isn't a hard boss, its a tedious boss.

How fast do you think loatheb would've fell over if you could press a button and generate all those materials? Maybe 1 hour? 2 hours?

But because the materials were tedious to get, it took people days, weeks to kill him.

I'll give you that Vanilla and TBC were slower and hell, even more prestigious. I still think a guy in full t6 is wayyy more prestigious than a guy in full mythic HFC gear, but don't tell me the bosses are easier.

It takes like 200-500 attempts to kill hard bosses in post Cata world. It takes 20-50 to kill a hard boss in vanilla or tbc.

I don't think you can compare attempts. Now it is so fast to get back to the boss that most guilds just pull over and over to quickly learn the fight and get quick attempts in. Because it was longer to get back to a boss, you practice without pulling, you took time to learn the fight so you didn't waste pulls. Having 50 good attempts is completely different then just pulling over and over till the boss is dead. It also took longer then 20-50 attempts but if you want to use that number then we can and it still wont change a bosses difficulty.

[Sliske]

Raiding in BC was easy, Heroics however, especially with lower gear levels were harder because they were tuned incorrectly.

Not sure if I'd define something like that as "harder" though, CCing everything except one mob is not the definition of hard.
High M+ dungeons with a timer are certainly harder than whatever they threw at us during BC.

Whenever someone says "hard" replace the word with "time consuming". If it fits better, then they're bullshitting you.

Most of this thread is people bullshitting.

I could make the 'hardest' boss in the game by that logic.

1. Go into Azshara, kill 736 stags.
2. Bring it to Emerald Nightmare, Xavius encounter
3. If you wipe during the encounter, you have to go back and kill another 736 stags.
4. The stags can only be killed in one sitting, meaning if you DC or log out, your counter resets.

There. Hardest boss in the game apparently.