Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Queen of Hamsters]

How many boss mechanics are there in EN that haven't been done previously in some similar way in the last 2 or 3 expansions?
.

... Um, sure, if you're going to boil it down to some simple point, EVERYTHING we do in the game is just "repetition"... Doesn't change the fact that new raids come with new mechanics with a different synergy that you have to tackle in a certain way, all the while performing with your class to the degree where you contribute, which is no small feat. Those that can't do that, manage to die to LFR bosses.

Everything is always within the boundaries of the game's physics, of course.

I appreciate that there are differences between the different timelines and respect that people prefer one over the other for different reasons. I don't think it's very flattering however that some people pretend that there's always danger to the world of Classic... as if they never learned how to play and interact with the dumb-as-brick predictable AI which mobs always had and always will have in this game... Hell, even today on Live, people die just fine to world mobs and that's WITH the class toolkits on hand... Even I have died numerous times whilst leveling my characters in Legion, despite trying my darndest not to.

[RickJamesLich]

And in Classic people would pad their raid teams with members that didn't have a clue, that struggled with moving out of a patch of fire and performing the most simple class mechanics while doing so and you'd STILL be able to down an endgame boss if you only had the time and got people to show up. Since there was no LFR back then and LFR isn't considered proper raiding today, a better comparison would be Classic raids to Mythic raiding, as it's the very highest tier of endgame content in WOW today.

I'd love to see the progression guild that would down content whilst carrying 5 people that struggle with mechanics and class performance. Hell, even when boosting is a thing, they'll rarely bring more than 2 boosted players at a time. That's when they have done the boss fights numerous times and outgear it.

Like I said, only 1% of the player base killed a single boss inside of Naxx when it was current.... so the challenge was absolutely there.

If you are referring to to the idea of people clearing through MC or BWL quickly these days, the same thing holds true for all levels of raiding if they are out long enough. It just so happens that MC and BWL are the oldest raids out there and their mechanics are well known to all.

We've seen on retail that some classes can solo world bosses while the content is still current lol. Just check out some of those DK's vs Doom Lord Kazzak videos for example. No crazy bugs, no exploit usage involved.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Like I said, only 1% of the player base killed a single boss inside of Naxx when it was current.... so the challenge was absolutely there.

If you are referring to to the idea of people clearing through MC or BWL quickly these days, the same thing holds true for all levels of raiding if they are out long enough. It just so happens that MC and BWL are the oldest raids out there and their mechanics are well known to all.

We've seen on retail that some classes can solo world bosses while the content is still current lol. Just check out some of those DK's vs Doom Lord Kazzak videos for example. No crazy bugs, no exploit usage involved.

Was there challenge for the players of that time? Of course. Now imagine if original Naxx was released today, with the players of today. I can promise you that Method wouldn't have wiped 400 times on a boss with Classic mechanics.

Also, the Dev Watercooler on Raiding Azeroth (part 1) made all the points on why so few people ever saw Naxx in Classic that can ever be made.

[RickJamesLich]

Was there challenge for the players of that time? Of course. Now imagine if original Naxx was released today, with the players of today. I can promise you that Method wouldn't have wiped 400 times on a boss with Classic mechanics.

Also, the Dev Watercooler on Raiding Azeroth (part 1) made all the points on why so few people ever saw Naxx in Classic that can ever be made.

Pretty much with any boss in the history of wow.... once it's mechanics are revealed and if you have proper gear, you will have raid nights where you one shot it. I had like 150+ wipes on heroic Lei Shen.... but eventually I'd have raid nights where we didn't wipe on the boss at all. If I went back and did it now, it wouldn't take the same amount of wipes to master the fight once again because I'm already familiar with all of the mechanics.

But yeah Naxx was difficult to get into for a variety of reasons. Besides the bosses just being hard, you had to advance through the previous tiers of raiding, you didn't have catch up mechanisms that trivialized the rest of the game, including the first few bosses of the newest raid lol. No guides on how to kill the bosses in game. You had to put effort into your character outside of the raid itself in the form of consumables. You get stuff now like mass ressurection and if the whole group dies, when you re-enter the instance you are ported in front of the boss immediately lol. Not sure if this stuff they added is actually making the game more interesting though.

Long story short, raiding was just as tough back then. In many aspects though, raiding has gotten easier with LFR factored in and stuff like some bosses being solo-able while the content is current. Both versions had raids that were easy as well as raids that were tough, just retail has A LOT more stuff that is easy, to the point where you can afk it and still come out with gear.

[Deleted]

Modern WoW to Vanilla WoW is like Super Mario 3d World to Super Mario bros. Modern Mario games that will give you an invulnerability if you die too many times. Yes WoW is more casual compared to EverQuest, but WoW right now is like Hello Kitty Island adventures. It's not comparable anymore.

please dude lose your glasses it was HARD back then just NEW and EXCITING.

[Kyanion]

Modern WoW to Vanilla WoW is like Super Mario 3d World to Super Mario bros. Modern Mario games that will give you an invulnerability if you die too many times. Yes WoW is more casual compared to EverQuest, but WoW right now is like Hello Kitty Island adventures. It's not comparable anymore.

Hahaha you can't be fucking serious.

- - - Updated - - -

I appreciate that there are differences between the different timelines and respect that people prefer one over the other for different reasons. I don't think it's very flattering however that some people pretend that there's always danger to the world of Classic... as if they never learned how to play and interact with the dumb-as-brick predictable AI which mobs always had and always will have in this game... Hell, even today on Live, people die just fine to world mobs and that's WITH the class toolkits on hand... Even I have died numerous times whilst leveling my characters in Legion, despite trying my darndest not to.

Well said, I think it is one of the biggest things that has bugged me in this thread, people acting like Vanilla WoW was this ever constant world of danger, maybe it was to some people but it is really hard to take that at face value 12 years after the fact with everything being known now. There are people dying in private servers on Vanilla stuff and people dying in retail for being bad or underestimating shit. Not much changed there.

[Mahourai]

Like I said, only 1% of the player base killed a single boss inside of Naxx when it was current.... so the challenge was absolutely there.

Can you source this figure? This apocryphal number is thrown around a lot for Naxx.

Also, the "challenge" in defeating Vanilla bosses was in assembling resist gear on dozens of raiders, not in mechanical challenge or execution complexity.

[Deleted]

Can you source this figure? This apocryphal number is thrown around a lot for Naxx.

Also, the "challenge" in defeating Vanilla bosses was in assembling resist gear on dozens of raiders, not in mechanical challenge or execution complexity.

Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing

That's the only quote of blizzard i have seen. I don't know how much % "a few thousand people" is^^

[Vineri]

please dude lose your glasses it was HARD back then just NEW and EXCITING.

Vanilla was unforgiving. There was no mistake in the other person's post.

- - - Updated - - -

Can you source this figure? This apocryphal number is thrown around a lot for Naxx.

Also, the "challenge" in defeating Vanilla bosses was in assembling resist gear on dozens of raiders, not in mechanical challenge or execution complexity.

It was said by Blizzard, I'm sure it's researchable. The challenge was social, yes. Manage 40 players sometime. Overall it was fun to participate in, with so many people. D-bags got booted. The remainder were having fun, each in their own way - regardless if they were top notch or not.

[Deleted]

Was there challenge for the players of that time? Of course. Now imagine if original Naxx was released today, with the players of today. I can promise you that Method wouldn't have wiped 400 times on a boss with Classic mechanics.

Also, the Dev Watercooler on Raiding Azeroth (part 1) made all the points on why so few people ever saw Naxx in Classic that can ever be made.

One problem here, and mind you I fully support the notion that people are rocking some amazing rose-tinted glasses in this thread.

The game today is very very streamlined, classes have a solid and apparent function and most of the fluff has been pruned, and stats have been normalized.

The one thing vanilla did right, was that we as players were less powerful individually vs the mobs, our rotations were also alot simpler, and had you gone for the wrong talents, the game would be frustratingly hard.

So if you put a guild like Method in time appropiate gear for naxx40, with the same skills, resists and talents as back then..... Then yeah, it probably would be a quicker affair as they have years of experiance at their backs, and the addons of today are way more indepth. But would it be as faceroll as you say? No.


Vanilla had a good thing going with its stats and loot system, weapon skills, while annoying, served a purpose with immersion.

A good blue was almost always a solid upgrade, an epic was just amazing for the first half of the game, and then it became to norm for raiders.

Vanilla, even today, presents a game that went away somewhere mid WOTLK, a game were you could make REAL mistakes, where the good players truly stood out and a world were even the stupidest piece of gear or skill, somewhere, could have an use.


Should they bring Vanilla servers etc back? That's their call, I'm fine with Legion. But would I play it if they did? Absolutely, but only as an alt project.

[anon5123]

I'd love to see the progression guild that would down content whilst carrying 5 people that struggle with mechanics and class performance.

In vanilla raids, you could have half the raid die and still kill the boss.

Whereas today, if like 3-4 people die, especially healers, it's a wipe. Either to lack of healing or enrage timer.

just saying

[Zelorra]

They didn't say "never" so no reason to cry. They could have just come to the "never" conclusion again, but they still consider it. I think it's just very hard to estimate what that would mean from a business point of view and from a technical point of view. Remember when they just said "we don't have the source code" and all the idiots believed that, even though they were told by countless software developers that deleting code is unheard of in the industry? At least they don't try to come up with stupid bullshit reasons like that...

Resurrecting a 12 old game is not impossible, but no piece of cake either. After Nost was shut down there were these clueless vloggers and bloggers and other loggers that were arguing "if Nost could do it, then surely Blizzard can easily do it". Or even more retarded "why doesn't Blizzard use Nost code if they deleted their own?". Well, even if Nost is a kind of WoW the source code has nothing to do with the actual Blizzard game.

Blizzard can do it, but it will cost a lot of money, so here it depends if they want to just do it, without thinking about profit, because I don't think there will be much of it, if any. Every skilled developer they will use to bring up legacy costs well over 100k per year, you can't do this with the janitor in between toilet cleans. The skilled developer is being pulled from another project, so that project also is taking a hit. Then they will need an army of testers, because Blizzard won't just release something that doesn't work, which is probably the case when you install something that was shelved for 10 years.

If Blizzard is ever doing this it will be for the community, not for profit. Nost only had like 15000 active players, with NO subscription, even if they had a lot of accounts. Even I had an account there, but only played for 3 weeks or so, and that was the case for the majority. So the retention is a problem...

Now that applies to vanilla, imagine people wanting all kinds of legacy servers, then you have increasingly bigger games than need to be resurrected and fully tested, because Blizzard doesn't want their original servers to look worse than a private server

[Charge me Doctor]

Like I said, only 1% of the player base killed a single boss inside of Naxx when it was current.... so the challenge was absolutely there.

Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing

That's the only quote of blizzard i have seen. I don't know how much % "a few thousand people" is^^

Is this my reading comprehension or these quotes say about different things?

Still, the hardest challenge there was for naxx is tanks ego, inability of some guilds to run AQ on daily basis to gear up new tanks in place of ones who left to better guilds and getting into top guild forums to snatch some info about fights.

[Mahourai]

Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing

That's the only quote of blizzard i have seen. I don't know how much % "a few thousand people" is^^

Thank you. Of course the meaning of the quote completely changes when you're talking about people attempting Kel'Thuzad vs attempting any of the bosses in Naxx at all.

The idea that Vanilla was "unforgiving" is simply objectively not true. Everything about Vanilla was forgiving - the only demanding issue was the grind and whether you could get your core to show up on raid night. DPS, healing and execution checks are almost nonexistent. Look at the world first Ragnaros kill and you'll see people wanding, autoattacking, tying during the encounter because they're not using voicecom, using suboptimal gear and attacks, clicking their spells, etc.

The DPS check compared to modern hardmode raids essentially does not exist. Patchwerk required about 500 DPS from each raid member in order to beat his berserk. This figure is so low that in 1.12 I'm fairly sure most DPS classes could get to it with no 40-man raiding gear whatsoever. You can do almost triple the DPS check on Patchwerk as a rogue or warrior or fire mage. Checks on other endgame fights like Four Horsemen were just there as anti-cheese mechanics, i.e. to stop you from 30-healing it, not to put pressure on the DPS.

[Charge me Doctor]

Thank you. Of course the meaning of the quote completely changes when you're talking about people attempting Kel'Thuzad vs attempting any of the bosses in Naxx at all.

The idea that Vanilla was "unforgiving" is simply objectively not true. Everything about Vanilla was forgiving - the only demanding issue was the grind and whether you could get your core to show up on raid night. DPS, healing and execution checks are almost nonexistent. Look at the world first Ragnaros kill and you'll see people wanding, autoattacking, tying during the encounter because they're not using voicecom, using suboptimal gear and attacks, clicking their spells, etc.

The DPS check compared to modern hardmode raids essentially does not exist. Patchwerk required about 500 DPS from each raid member in order to beat his berserk. This figure is so low that in 1.12 I'm fairly sure most DPS classes could get to it with no 40-man raiding gear whatsoever. You can do almost triple the DPS check on Patchwerk as a rogue or warrior or fire mage. Checks on other endgame fights like Four Horsemen were just there as anti-cheese mechanics, i.e. to stop you from 30-healing it, not to put pressure on the DPS.

The main issue with patchwerk was threat (no pally = no deeps). If you lacked DPS, you just stacked more warlocks or rogues, the ones who gave 0 fucks about their resource depleting midfight

[Mahourai]

The main issue with patchwerk was threat (no pally = no deeps).

Patchwerk is one of the few Vanilla encounters where you will almost never pull threat thanks to the massive tank damage generating shitloads of rage, afaik.

[Tart]

1. You'd be dividing the community since some players will refuse to play modern or Vanilla content. Which is bad since a lot of effort was put into the game to make it seem big and busy.
2. It's admitting failure. Modern WoW sucks. The new talent system sucks. LFR sucks. There's just so much wrong with modern WoW that Blizzard doesn't want to admit and fix.
3. You'd have to update the client. Imagine going back to 2006 and updating net code, graphics code, and bug fixes for something you've already done to WoW 7.0. That's a lot of work.
4. You'd have to add the store cause how else will Blizzard pay for their cocaine?
5. You'd piss off the casuals, cause Vanilla WoW wasn't made for them. And they'll try cause everyone and their mother is preaching how good Vanilla was.


I'm not saying they shouldn't, cause they clearly should, but I'm just pointing on their perspective of problems. It's not as easy as what Nostalrius has done, cause Nostalrius doesn't have to hold up to those standards. Nostalrius doesn't have to worry about server population, or updating the client since it's literally out of their hands. They don't need to worry about the store, or pissing off casuals. But this is primarily a Blizzard corporate issue, than a game design issue. It's a free service, and if you don't like it then you can get back what you'd pay for. Which is why I'd rather have Nostalrius back instead of Blizzard going at it on their own.

Good points

[Deleted]

5. You'd piss off the casuals, cause Vanilla WoW wasn't made for them.

This always baffles me. Vanilla WoW was made precisely for casuals, for mass appeal. To capture the "visitors" who logged on to EQ and couldn't handle it. It was known for being the "kidde-game" at the time of Vanilla release. The hard-core people in EQ1/UO communities laughed at it. That is - until everyone and their cousins went to play WoW.

WoW was made for casuals. One can argue that over the years it moved to serve more and more the hardcore raiding audience - WoD being the crown-jewel release, with little to no other content than raids.

With Legion they seem to have taken a step towards more diverse design again.
Vanilla WoW is extremely casual friendly game - much more than the current version.

[Reapocalypse]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nostalrius/...stalrius_team/

"You'll hear from us again after Blizzcon." -Nano, Official Nostalrius Staff Member

[Relapses]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nostalrius/...stalrius_team/

"You'll hear from us again after Blizzcon." -Nano, Official Nostalrius Staff Member

My God, that subreddit may actually be the only thing on the internet more unintentionally offensive than /r/The_Donald.