Reason why people say TBC was harder

[Deleted]

[...] One thing many people forget or even didn't know was a thing is parry hasting. This alone caused so many issues for ignorant melee. Best example of this was Prince Malchezaar, a lot of new people to raiding and it was fairly heavy movement. Melee DPS would find themselves sitting in front him often and on Phase 2, you could see even an overgeared tank go from full to dead in the blink of an eye.[...]

Haha that used to be fun.

[Deleted]

I remember hitting the Curator in Karazhan just as he switched modes with a Shadow Word Death and thinking "What the **** just hit me" as I lay dead on the ground.

- - - Updated - - -

I loved BC but the game is far more challenging now than it was back then.

LOL

[Kahmal]

TBC had far more personal responsbility, in particular for DPS. DPS had to kite, CC, manage threat(this was a dps problem not a tank problem). I loved the tight rope walk of threat management. It separated good tanks from bad tanks, bad dps from good dps.

One thing many people forget or even didn't know was a thing is parry hasting. This alone caused so many issues for ignorant melee. Best example of this was Prince Malchezaar, a lot of new people to raiding and it was fairly heavy movement. Melee DPS would find themselves sitting in front him often and on Phase 2, you could see even an overgeared tank go from full to dead in the blink of an eye.

I miss the threat the most, I really enjoyed old school warrior tanking, I miss it. Being able to aoe tank 4 mobs in dungeons and raids in Vanilla/TBC was an accomplishment. You were a standout if you could do it. The healers loved you if you could hold an entire group of mobs.

I miss the personal mechanics, it made characters feel different, challenging and unique. Nowadays everything is starting to feel the same. I honestly have no sense of accomplishment from any WoW activity anymore.

This is one of my peeves about DPS now. I'm seeing so many people complain now that they can't get into groups because there ilvl isn't high enough. Thing is ilvl = dmg normally. But back in TBC and Vanilla I could give a rats ass about your DPS. Hell damage meters were shunned in 5 mans all together. It was about how resourceful you were. Could you CC, not pull aggro, defend your teammates when things get ugly if the tank can't. Etc.

Also with threat I found DPS more exciting since the threat of pulling aggro and dying was forever present. Now we just blow our DPS wads as deep as we can. Understand though threat was very problematic also at the time. For example a geared DPS could barely do damage if the tank was either bad or not geared enough.

[Sarevokcz]

The hardest part of BC was playing through your framerate on a circa 2007 PC. Shattered Halls had it moments early in the expansion, but it was by no means difficult. I cant wait to hear all the nostalgia next week when 7.1 comes out and the rebirth of the Flame Wreathe meme. Arguably the most infamous fight of that tier, and it was defeated by putting your hands on your lap for 8 seconds.

yeah, i remember those days

http://shadeofaranchant.ytmnd.com/

[TheRabidDeer]

And no one in their right mind would go in their dungeon 70's, let alone having a succesful run in karazhan gear. Having T5 was ideal so i don't know why you keep insisting that it was outgearing it, since there's a reason why people thought the tuning was retarded.

I definitely did heroic dungeons in dungeon 70s. I wouldn't pug it, but in guild groups they were easily doable. Hell, by the time you were in karazhan gear you should've been working on your SSC attunement which meant you had to clear shattered halls within a time limit.

[Tyrgannus]

Modern WoW is infinitely more complex, but the tuning from threat, damage, healing, mana regen, etc. ranged from pathetic to ridiculous with very odd spikes despite the fact the game was simpler.

Simpler =/= Easier
Complex =/= Harder

Think of it as a separate axis on a graph. easy to hard is the x-axis and simple to complex is the y-axis.

[Sarevokcz]

myth + 5 with 850 feels like heroic tbc instances in blue /kara starter gear, minus the aggro struggle for tanks, minus random stuns from mobs that need to be guess-pre-shieldwalled to survive them. (but u got pretty good at guessing them with experienc, and with t5 those mobs didnt always kill you)

no it doesnt, tbc most heroics were easy as long as you were blessed with a class that could CC, shattered halls was the only one problematic, since tank had issues tanking all the archers and casters if you didnt have CCs for them, but shattered halls was one heroic, sure, shadowlab was decently tuned (but easy if you werent ninjapulling half the room) and auchenai crypts were just super annoying for casters especially, but we had facerolls that were farmed for the primal nethers like slave pens, underbog, mechanaar etc. You go ahead and try teeming arcway demon packs or teeming nelths pelter packs without CC (and not overgear it in 870) and then say with a straight face tbc heroics were harder...

[OrcsRLame]

Everyone thinks the content they used to do was the hardest ever. Reality check, that's called being a has been. Imo, you're not an expert on hard dungeons unless you've cleared a mythic 15. You don't even have the right to talk if you haven't cleared a 10.

[Holofernes]

And no one in their right mind would go in their dungeon 70's, let alone having a succesful run in karazhan gear. Having T5 was ideal so i don't know why you keep insisting that it was outgearing it, since there's a reason why people thought the tuning was retarded.

u had to do those dungeons to get into karazan for attunement. I for sure know, because i tanked a shitload of attunement runs for my guild, and for a lot of recruits later on. They were hard but doable in blue gear, wihtout 2 cc classes u often had a few wipes. U think the guys that went into kara first got their key from a gm or what?

I still remember tanking malchezaar the first time, with 3/4 of my gear being dungeon blue. this guy hit like a truck in phase 2, once he chewed through shieldblock, i instantly pressed shieldwall and hoped to survive

- - - Updated - - -

no it doesnt, tbc most heroics were easy as long as you were blessed with a class that could CC, shattered halls was the only one problematic, since tank had issues tanking all the archers and casters if you didnt have CCs for them, but shattered halls was one heroic, sure, shadowlab was decently tuned (but easy if you werent ninjapulling half the room) and auchenai crypts were just super annoying for casters especially, but we had facerolls that were farmed for the primal nethers like slave pens, underbog, mechanaar etc. You go ahead and try teeming arcway demon packs or teeming nelths pelter packs without CC (and not overgear it in 870) and then say with a straight face tbc heroics were harder...

i dont get what your problem is with teeming? i did a +8 teeming + necrotic run this week, in 860 tanking gear. Necrotic is a bitch, and it is not hard, but unfair in some instances. I think, because the bats in blackrock hold that spawn endlessly perma stack it. if it wouldnt be for that (for example those bats dont have bolstering, but they give necrotic debuff) than it would be perfectly doable. but those bats with necrotic are pain in the ass, and cost us like 25 minutes to get through them. Never died so often, but its nothing that can be done with any skill, its just unfair stuff. Probably cheesable if u play with a battle rez class and run trhough, but without cheese this instance is not doable in necrotic.

I am really curious if any group did a sucessful run through the bats on necrotic /teeming combi (without cheesing them).

[TheFirstOnes]

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

/thread

Saying that doesn't make that certain expac more difficult to do. TBC was broken, not hard. Nowadays, it's more balanced, and we should keep it this way.

- - - Updated - - -

I remember hitting the Curator in Karazhan just as he switched modes with a Shadow Word Death and thinking "What the **** just hit me" as I lay dead on the ground.

- - - Updated - - -



LOL

Dude, on the PTR for 7.1, I died from some moves for no fucking reason! Infact, we wiped like....26 times before we finally brung em to 50%! AND THAT WAS HALF! Most of the time, we had em at around 90%. We had ilvl 860+s with us. The fuck you mean current wow is a "Slice of cake". AHHAHAHAHAHAA

- - - Updated - - -

Everyone thinks the content they used to do was the hardest ever. Reality check, that's called being a has been. Imo, you're not an expert on hard dungeons unless you've cleared a mythic 15. You don't even have the right to talk if you haven't cleared a 10.

I've cleared a mythic 6. But as of now, i'm stuck on mythic+ 8-9. It makes me 45 mins to do 8-9. But hey, in due time, i'll get there

[Deleted]

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.

I think the best change over the years is definitely the mana change. I remember being the mana battery in Kara on my SP. I like that it's became a healer only thing because managing mana as a tank should have never been an issue in the first place.

[Deleted]

People are so eager to dismiss difficulty because [insert thing] was "easy". But lets compare it with today's mechanics.

Today players need to:
- Smash buttons in perfect rotation. Some classes have rotations, some play whack-a-proc game. That's all there is to it.
- Perform perfect boss dance. Move from stuff, move to stuff. Same as always, but more steps.

That's it. Those players that dismiss BC difficulty because "insert random reason from any post above" are wrong. Current WoW difficulty could also be easily dismissed using similar logic.

BC was hard, but it was also fun. It was both MMO and RPG. Today we have single player game, the only group part is synchronized dancing on bosses on harder modes.

[Sarevokcz]

i dont get what your problem is with teeming? i did a +8 teeming + necrotic run this week, in 860 tanking gear. Necrotic is a bitch, and it is not hard, but unfair in some instances. I think, because the bats in blackrock hold that spawn endlessly perma stack it. if it wouldnt be for that (for example those bats dont have bolstering, but they give necrotic debuff) than it would be perfectly doable. but those bats with necrotic are pain in the ass, and cost us like 25 minutes to get through them. Never died so often, but its nothing that can be done with any skill, its just unfair stuff. Probably cheesable if u play with a battle rez class and run trhough, but without cheese this instance is not doable in necrotic.

I am really curious if any group did a sucessful run through the bats on necrotic /teeming combi (without cheesing them).

we dont really have issue with teeming outside of some specific packs, but its the most obvious one when one complains how mythic 4 feels like tbc heroic, other affixes can be overcome with execution. but we did get blessed with arcway 10 this week (again) and some of the packs were bonkers, the first pack had 4(!) casters + one melee in it and without CCs it would be pain to get through, then there was another 5 mob pull in the tunnel to Xakal and then at Xakal, there was one caster, the blinking melee and two floating whatevers, that summon the eyes. Ironically, thanks to the fact we had CCs, we manage dto clear trash maybe not optimally, but without wipe, but we werent prepared for Xakal with tyranical, not only did his unavoidable aoe hit for like 1,7M, so everyone had to play without a slightest mistake to not get oneshotted (which wasnt easy, since we couldnt misdirect bats to tank as it would refresh his necrotic), it was really, REALLY hard for our DH to reset stacks on him, since the boss is incredibly fast and we had to resort to our DH double jumping away after some boss cast and when the boss got near him, pala healer had to taunt from the original location and run away on horse before DH stacks dropped and he could retaunt again.

my point is, mythic+ with atleast one suffix are way above tbcs "sap left, sheep right, wait for two sunders" tbc style

[Uoyredrum]

It was hard because the classes and specs were less powerful on a personal level. That and they were generally pretty niche. As time went on, more specs became capable of doing more things, gained more mobility, more specs gained interrupts, cooldowns, self heals, etc. This just homogenized everything. TBC was pre-homogenization, and in general everything hit a lot harder than it has since, and was less forgiving.

The mechanics were simple, but things like tanks having to stance dance to avoid a fear or potentially wiping the group isn't something that exists anymore. There was generally a much bigger impact to mistakes like that. If you pulled aggro, prepare to die. If the tank didn't pick something up right away, you're either going to kite, CC or die. Dungeons don't hurt as much as they used to (outside of mythic+).

[kary]

People are so eager to dismiss difficulty because [insert thing] was "easy". But lets compare it with today's mechanics.

Today players need to:
- Smash buttons in perfect rotation. Some classes have rotations, some play whack-a-proc game. That's all there is to it.
- Perform perfect boss dance. Move from stuff, move to stuff. Same as always, but more steps.

That's it. Those players that dismiss BC difficulty because "insert random reason from any post above" are wrong. Current WoW difficulty could also be easily dismissed using similar logic.

BC was hard, but it was also fun. It was both MMO and RPG. Today we have single player game, the only group part is synchronized dancing on bosses on harder modes.

Lol, people conveniently forget that they played a hand in making the game how it is today. Look at the legions of autists on these forums that won't join a guild, for instance.
TBC wasn't any more rpg or mmo than the current game. Only real difference was that you were "punished" for solo play before and now you can actually manage to do a decent amount of content alone, which isn't bad by any means, as much as I'm not a fan of complacent world of queuecraft. The main game today, is just like the main game back then; organized PvE.
WQ's are no different from TBC dailies, save they are practically endless. And just like there are people who only do WQ now, there are people who only did dailies back then.

[ohlins]

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...

I did bother, with 2 CC (one of them being the shitty random warlock fear), as a warrior tank. You just had to coordinate every trash pull and not have trigger happy dps.

- - - Updated - - -

Only bad paladins didn't have enough mana. BC used down-ranking. No one used their highest ability spell. Instead of using, say, level 8 of a spell, they used rank 4 instead. This enables them to constantly cast spells to keep tank alive. Usually there was one tank. Usually there were 2-3 pallys and usually there was not a lot of movement. So they stood there and just spam healed tank. Difficult indeed.

The bad players are the ones that say that BC was difficult. It really was not difficult, just more grindy. Rotations for dps were non existant. All dps that raided, there were lots that just were not viable such as elemental, oomkin and ret, had simple 1-2 button rotations. The top dps of the whole expansion was a lock just spamming shadowbolt. Mechanics on bosses were near non existant. Difficulty was a joke. You just needed to be lucky (not good) enough to find a guild that raided what you wanted.

1. People had far less HP. This was a function of Cata when Blizzard really didn't know how to stop people being globalled AND they never knew how to balance healing. In Vanilla/BC and LK, a tank was in constant danger of exploding in 1-2 globals. This was basically because bosses had no mechanics, so it was harder to kill a raid. You had to wipe a raid somehow and this was the way. By the time we got to Cata (and it didnt really pay of till WoD), Blizzard decided that it was OK for tanks not to be healed for a few seconds, because the raid would be wiped in mechanics. Having less HP does not make a game harder.

2. AOE tanking was not really a thing and CC was used in Raids as well as Dungeons. Only warriors tanked raids, but the other two were pretty good at off tanking or dungeons. Warriors had a max of four targets they could thunderclap so CC was a thing. This did not make the game harder. It actually made it easier because you had mobs that were out of the equation. Sheeping was not hard to do. I played hunter in SW but I bought my mage with 7k HP during trash to sheep mobs. He was in greens and yet he was in the hardest instance in all of BC. Yeah. It was difficult.

3. People had to remember to resheep or the warrior had to not thunderclap next to mobs? You must have really played with bads. CC was the easiest thing to do. I remember having 7 targets CCed in some trash pulls. Compared to today, that is just crazy. But it wasn't hard. Get assigned to a target, and CC it on pull. How hard is that? Not very.

4. There was two aoe spells and that was it. You may or may not have had a priest, but the had circle of healing for their group. Great heal depending on the boss. But who cares. You had 2-3 palladins and 3-4 resto shamans. All shaman did was cast chain heal. That was it. Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal Chain Heal. Maybe a hero. How is that hard. It was the most OP thing in the entire game. Even more OP than warlocks. If you were struggling on a boss? Lose a dps or two and bring more shamans for chain heal. Not difficult at all.

Tank Skill. You just described a tank for any expansion. Yes, threat is a non issue now and it was great as a dps to push a tank as hard as I could without pulling aggro. But really, there was no real skill to keeping threat. All dps used omen and the ones that were going to pull aggro, except warriors, had a threat dump. In BC you brought Locks, Hunters, Rogues with a smattering of other classes just to fill it out or buff the raid (shadow priest for example, a single mage for food maybe, encahnce shaman for windfury). There was also blessing cant pull from a tank, a paladin buff that lowered dps threat. As long as you MDed at the begining, it was very diifuclt to pull off a tank unless you were just bad at the game.

Conclusion. You would have had a very bad time at the game if you think BC was hard. It wasn't difficult at all. You just had to use common sense and use the tools at your disposal. I loved BC but the game is far more challenging now than it was back then.

While you make some good points. And some of the bosses where indeed, a joke. The average guy couldn't even get to endgame content because the Black temple and Mount Hyjal attunements where in the way. Ironicly those 2 raids where a shitload easyer then the previous content, accept for a few bosses. And how many guilds cleared Sunwell Plateau? Bosses had no mechanics?

Did you even raid in early TBC? Or did you clear everything at the end when everything was gimped and everyone outgeared it from Quel'Danas gear?

[Notdev]

Like vanilla, a lot of the difficulty (but less than vanilla, of course) is artificial difficulty that didn't have to do with actual encounter design. Things like attunement, slower gearing rates, there only being one difficulty of raids that would be closest to current mythic raids, etc. It was clunky. WotLK went a huge way in getting rid of a lot of the "clunk", which is why many people say it was easier, when in reality it was just less grindy and less clunky, as WoTLK had quite a few incredibly challenging bosses.

Imagine how few guilds would have killed M Arch for example if:
-Every single applicant to your guild had to have completed mythic Highmaul and mythic BrF.
-Mythic was the only difficulty, you couldn't run multiple difficulties for more loot and learn the bulk of the fight on lower difficulties
-Gearing was not only slower due to one difficulty, but a lot clunkier because of stats like healing power, shadow spell power, fire spell power, resistances etc.
-Random fights would all but require you to drop your main set of gear to make a resist set, or at least grab a couple pieces of it.

Though I will agree in the case of 5 mans, BC's were just harder. And while some of that difficulty came from CC being required at lower gear levels, but you had to know what most boss/trash mobs did. From WoTLK to WoD, 5 mans were mostly just a mindless AoE fest outside of a small blip here and there (HoR in WoTLK, most instances at the beginning of Cata)

And I'm not even mentioning things like the playerbase just improving as a whole due to more experience, or the fact that addons have come a huge way since BC, but its probably a factor.

[Joeydivision82]

The guild i was in for Vanilla / TBC supplied everyone with the required resist gear, it wasn't that hard to get due to the WHOLE guild working together and everyone farming the mats needed. This was the goal of Blizzard, to make guild work as one big team. Now guilds these days all fight over silly shit and it's one of the reasons i gquit the guild i was in since the start of MoP( I was Lead Officer / CO-GM )

I remember running with the guild tanks ( I played a MM hunter in Vanilla ) through Mara for the poison resist gear, fun times.

Exactly. Most of that stuff was done with everyone working together and now people barely want to run stuff within guild or don't even know people in their guild and it's a bit strange.

I run my guild with a very old school feel in the sense that we run stuff together all the time and guild members are always asked first, we don't takenougs on our raids and we don't pug raids on off days. Guild loyalty is at an all time low and I think I found a handful of people willing to stick with that method and it's working so far.

[Deleted]

Lol, people conveniently forget that they played a hand in making the game how it is today. Look at the legions of autists on these forums that won't join a guild, for instance.
TBC wasn't any more rpg or mmo than the current game. Only real difference was that you were "punished" for solo play before and now you can actually manage to do a decent amount of content alone, which isn't bad by any means, as much as I'm not a fan of complacent world of queuecraft. The main game today, is just like the main game back then; organized PvE.
WQ's are no different from TBC dailies, save they are practically endless. And just like there are people who only do WQ now, there are people who only did dailies back then.

Yes it is bad.

[skindown]

Thank god the game evolved for the better