Is WoW getting easier or players are getting better?

[Tengokuq]

I just watching a video on YouTube that shows who had the 1st kill on bosses. Compare to nowadays, it used to take a months to take down a raid/dungeon bosses. But now, it takes less than a week or couple of weeks max to take down the highest difficulty aka Mythic. Is it getting easier or players are just getting good?

[glowpipe]

Bosses are easier. Addons are better. People tend to overgear shit. Thats the gist of it

[Deleted]

Bosses have never been as hard mechanically as they are now. Back in the day the mechanics were easy but you just needed certain gear to beat them and that's why it took so long.

[Emerald Archer]

Bosses are easier. Addons are better. People tend to overgear shit. Thats the gist of it

Bosses are definitely not easier

[Pandragon]

Bosses are easier. Addons are better. People tend to overgear shit. Thats the gist of it

Bosses are not easier. It's 100% addons. If wow released with the addons as we have them now, then the first raids would be cleared just as easily.


*EDIT*
Well 90% addons, 10% class design. Classes deal with stuff much easier now than they did back then.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

COurse players get better. If you play more, eventually you are overly used to it. Also the amount of information on the game makes it easier to.

[Lime]

Bosses have never been as hard mechanically as they are now. Back in the day the mechanics were easy but you just needed certain gear to beat them and that's why it took so long.

Well, I mean, that could make a boss harder. Boss difficulty isn't simply measured in how easy/hard it is mechanically, but also how easy/hard it is to gear up for it. Obviously, fighting a boss in worse gear makes it more difficult.

Legion's gear acquisition can certainly decrease a boss's difficulty.

[Deleted]

Bosses are easier. Addons are better. People tend to overgear shit. Thats the gist of it

Bosses are far harder mechanically, lots of bosses in vanilla/tbc had nothing more than single mechanics or were just basic stay in one spot and dps down, tbc started to introduce more complex fights like kaelthas/illidan and sunwell but compared to mythic bosses are still relatively easy.

Bosses were just very highly tuned, take four horsemen in naxx 40 in vanilla , probably one of the longest times gone without being killed not because it was super hard but because you basically needed 8 warrior tanks with tier sets/thunderfury.
And this was a time when you couldnt have multiple alts geared to swap in.

You had things like attunements and resistance fights which also helped delay kills, it was so hard to maintain a raid roster back then it very often slowed progression.

[Alaexaender]

Bosses are not easier. It's 100% addons. If wow released with the addons as we have them now, then the first raids would be cleared just as easily.


*EDIT*
Well 90% addons, 10% class design. Classes deal with stuff much easier now than they did back then.

On a note to class design, they added more options for different raid comps. There's almost no class-specific mechanics (the only recent one was gul'dan, where you could use either a mage or a warlock).

However, more importantly, players have gotten better. I'm in a decent, but not top 100 world, guild. As soon as we got to phase 3 on sisters, saw the beacons which dropped pools, everyone instantly recognized the mechanic and could deal with it. Hajartan was a pushover, since we got to it, and were instantly able to coordinate where to stack for the correct eggs (and there's no addons for that). Every player also knows their class better (simple things, such as the boomkin shifting to bear once he gets targeted by rapid fire). These are things which wouldn't be seen in the top guilds of vanilla WoW.

Lastly, I'm guessing guilds can recruit better. I didn't play in vanilla, but I'm guessing that recruiting high-end players was difficult. Comparatively, my guild can get at least one or two trials a week if we need to. That makes adjusting to the raid much easier.

[VladimirM]

Find any boss kill from Vanilla (which was considered really hard) video on youtube. Look how half of the players are more walking around thinking what to cast next and when to cast it (yeah, mana saving was a thing but still, more than that). People used to use chat in middle of boss fights to talk to others. To run around 10+ seconds to find that one spot they want to stand and dps from it etc...

Now if you stop dpsing for few seconds, you fall behind on meters, if more people lose dps for few seconds, raid falls down on meters and boss doesnt die.

Too much information is involved in raids today. Top guilds are doing PTR, they are doing splits, gearing specific classes in each split, they know most of the fights by heart before they are out, and when something new comes in (secret phases), they just wipe enough times to get familiar with it and it eventually dies.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Bosses are easier. Addons are better. People tend to overgear shit. Thats the gist of it

The easiest mythic bosses of this expansion are probably Xavius, Skorp, and Trilliax. Those 3 are probably more difficult than anything you saw in Vanilla and TBC.

[Deleted]

Bosses are definitely not easier

They definitely are. You probably confuse something complicated with difficult. A common mistake nowadays.
Just because now bosses have more mechanics in a single fight does not mean they are more difficult. Numbers speak for themselves. You can have a boss with 100 mechanics to it and it can still be way easier than a boss with 1 that actually wipes the group and its near impossible to execute.

In other words, it doesn't matter how different attacks a boss has, when each of them hits like a wet noodle compared to the vanilla boss.

[Tradu]

Addons and players are getting better, players go into raids with much higher ilevel(relative to the raid's ilevel) than in the past, bosses are getting harder to compensate for the first 2 primarily, the 3rd is a bit iffy.

[Emerald Archer]

They definitely are. You probably confuse something complicated with difficult. A common mistake nowadays.
Just because now bosses have more mechanics in a single fight does not mean they are more difficult. Numbers speak for themselves. You can have a boss with 100 mechanics to it and it can still be way easier than a boss with 1 that actually wipes the group and its near impossible to execute.

In other words, it doesn't matter how different attacks a boss has, when each of them hits like a wet noodle compared to the vanilla boss.

The mechanics are harder in themselves, more punishing.

Are you seriously trying to say vanilla bosses were hard? That's a good joke lol. You clearly didn't raid then, or you have some serious memory issues.

Maybe try jumping on a vanilla server now, get a refresher, 25-30manning 40 man bosses, or 40 manning with all severely undergeared.

But yeah dude, 1 shotting mechanics, total wet noodle.

[FelPlague]

They definitely are. You probably confuse something complicated with difficult. A common mistake nowadays.
Just because now bosses have more mechanics in a single fight does not mean they are more difficult. Numbers speak for themselves. You can have a boss with 100 mechanics to it and it can still be way easier than a boss with 1 that actually wipes the group and its near impossible to execute.

In other words, it doesn't matter how different attacks a boss has, when each of them hits like a wet noodle compared to the vanilla boss.

yeah no, thats not how it works, barron gedon was not hard, it was easy, but people were stupid

[deadmanfred]

Well, I mean, that could make a boss harder. Boss difficulty isn't simply measured in how easy/hard it is mechanically, but also how easy/hard it is to gear up for it. Obviously, fighting a boss in worse gear makes it more difficult.

Legion's gear acquisition can certainly decrease a boss's difficulty.

Thats not what they mean. There were bosses you HAD to get special gear to fight, especislly when resistsnces were a thing. Some even required gear from world bosses that had eratic spawn times and higg end guilds required being available at any moment wether asleep or at work to kill said world boss (s).

[Aeluron Lightsong]

yeah no, thats not how it works, barron gedon was not hard, it was easy, but people were stupid

Not to mention things were just starting out.

[Deleted]

I just watching a video on YouTube that shows who had the 1st kill on bosses. Compare to nowadays, it used to take a months to take down a raid/dungeon bosses. But now, it takes less than a week or couple of weeks max to take down the highest difficulty aka Mythic. Is it getting easier or players are just getting good?

Bosses and raids are much harder now. Back then raid preparation was the boss.

[Sansnom]

I just watching a video on YouTube that shows who had the 1st kill on bosses. Compare to nowadays, it used to take a months to take down a raid/dungeon bosses. But now, it takes less than a week or couple of weeks max to take down the highest difficulty aka Mythic. Is it getting easier or players are just getting good?

It would be more interesting to see the stats in generally rather than world first guilds. How many guilds killed the boss in the first week?

The game should not be catering to the few guilds that chase world first. If it takes the best players weeks or even months to down a boss, how long would it take for the average raid guild?

[syllabic]

Bosses used to be mostly untested, the first raid groups that would go in would find out that the boss is too buggy and cannot be killed. Throughout vanilla and TBC this happened over and over again, so it would take months for the bosses to be patched and actually become killable.

Now with PTR and organized raid testing this doesn't happen as much anymore so bosses get killed much faster. In addition top guilds use the PTR time to formulate strategies even before the bosses are officially released. And on top of all that the top guilds will literally play 12+ hours a day right when the raids get released so they are just spending more time on it in a shorter time frame. Plus they spend more time beforehand preparing their optimal raid group with split runs.