Is WoW getting easier or players are getting better?

[Deleted]

Well I think it's fair to say that the game has gotten easier with respect to managing button rotations. It's definitely easier than ever to get away with using a controller without necessarily being much worse off for it after the pruning. And there's probably more information and video guides readily available than there used to be, making it nice and easy to prepare for encounters.

[Deleted]

I think a lot of that has to do with just having the numbers. You couldn't be as picky when you needed 40 people to raid 20 hours a week compared to the 25-30 guild have needed after vanilla. Especially since back then it wasn't anywhere near as easy to catch people up gear wise and sometimes having to even get attunments done for new recruits.

Definately, but also people had no idea how to use their spells, there was so much less theorycrafting and perfected rotations and builds.

[Deleted]

what id like to see is how many Bosses can be down "raw" the game as it is - NO ADDONS

[Maerad]

It's quite the opposite - WoW is getting harder and harder. Even LFR is - with start gear - not really easy and needs the tanks and healers to go all out to even the fails or ignorance of mechanics of many dps. The normal and heroic/mythic raids are harder and get harder everytime. Just look at the first raids when WoW was released. Those would be a joke today and even normal dungeon bosses have more skills / functions / phases then those.

Also the game changed quite a lot over the past decade. In BC we had a instant, no CD decurse/debuff remover that we needed in all instances. Today there are not many debuffs, because of the CD we got. Also no more resistance gear, every class has automatic buff and no need to bring specific or "that one" class for an encounter. Like Shamanstacking back in Wotlk.

Then buffs - if you still have them - work longer. Same with buff foods and whatnot. And the need for self made gear etc. is almost not there anymore. Back then jewellery or enchanter was great and had some nice benefits. Those are mostly gone.

And the Addons! Without Bigwigs or whatever, we would wipe like mad. Take boss mods away and the raids would be hard as fuck. Really.

Or the items itself.... with the shift from "leveling" to "endgame" concentration, we get more / better gear faster. It's not that much easier and still needs time, but the gear itself gets around faster. Now you have a fast LFR/LFG tool to upgrade your char, you can run them instantly, without wasting time traveling or waiting for players in chat. And with personal loot you get something usefull every time. Not like back then, when you had 2 leather items of 2 bosses and no one with leather was in the party.

But also the players got better, thanks to simplified player mechanics like you can't skill wrong, every gear works and only mythic at the highest level needs some runs for special pieces of gear, simplified stats (tanks no more avoid, parry, hit) or real soft caps you need to reach like with hit back then and so on.
And with the help of recount or skada + dummies, we can measure how well we fare with our dps, at least against a non-moving target.

Not to mention that the game gives more infos now. When WoW started, you needed for years guides etc. to get you char right for the best DPS or HPS... now you can't go wrong by much and get active info. I hardly read any guide with my other toons that I play not much - because all the important skills are listed and explained and the rota is easy found out. BAck then a bad player WAS bad, if skilled wrong. Now he can do quite ok, even if he plays bad.

The game changed, we changed, the world also changed. When WoW started it was more or less alone. Now we have a fuckload of free to play mmoprg and that also changes WoW to stay competitive. I don't think anyone today would play vanilla, if he had the alternatives at hand.

[Super Kami Dende]

People are getting better , here is a video from nostalrius which is a blizzard like server

People actually learn 2 play between now and 12 years ago

Indeed, having 40 co-ordinated raiders with the Mindset of current Raiding and the knowledge of Rotations/Gear/Boss Mechanics makes the Vanilla Raids immensely easy.

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what id like to see is how many Bosses can be down "raw" the game as it is - NO ADDONS

I've done most of the Mythic Content of Legion with only 2 addons. Bartender and Recount. Neither add anything to the management of mechanics.

[Dangg]

raid mechanics are harder
player seem to be more 'mature', raiding culture changed significantly
top guild raid more
raid preperation is way, way easier
numbers tuning varies. although older raid had more pure gearchecks on average. the easiest raid difficulty is easier than ever
classes have better toolkits
Playing perfectly is harder for most classes compared to vanilla/bc - about the same or maybe easier depending on class for everything that followed
There is more information available
Player are way better than in vanilla, after late BC there isn't much difference in skill and game knowledge which was available at that time. don't see how people in late wotlk or cata were worse than they are today. something like pargon LK25 looks like a 2017 fight other than the lack of radar

so I think it's much more complex than just saying the game is easier or harder

[mauserr]

What would this guy know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9kTpmAvcPs

Kungen is a fucking retard though. He's mistaking mechanical complexity with obnoxiousness like having to farm gear that was on a timer, like world bosses and other stupid shit like that. Naxx was not mechanically hard.

[Coffeh]

On the flipside, gearing is now much more important than previously, as key legendaries are required for most builds to perform well; and a rotation is added for each spec that must be mastered to optimize performance.

Eh...clearly you never had to grind fire resistant gear for MC.

Players are better now. They take the game WAY more seriously than back in the day. Back then for the vast majority of players it was about playing just to have fun. Now players treat it very professionally. They dissect every like thing and min max everything.

So I would say player skill is more important now. In the olden days you just had to have a ton of time and the willpower to grind out gear and attunements. With that said..I miss the old ways. I didn't give a shit about watching dps meters and fearing getting booted if I didn't perform perfectly. Could just chill, relax and have a good time.

[Zensunni]

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

I raided in Vanilla and TBC, the bosses were a joke. All of them. Even the 'hard' ones people are citing. If you had Fatboss guides, and 40 raiders that would be like, heroic level raiders today, along with current addons, that group of people woould skate through the Vanilla raids, even Naxx.

[vsb]

Anyone that compares current dungeons to Cata hc dungeons pre nerfs clearly had never experienced them. I think cata dungeons are akin to current things like Fortified+Teeming lower Karazhan 20 after the 7.2.5 patch = aka hours of trash because each pack is more likely to wipe you than any of the bosses.

I did cata hc dungeons just after leveling up in first cata days. We didn't have much problems. Now with the same party (one dps changed since then) we can barely close 13+ mythic. I can't imagine what Karazhan looks like on 20+, it's hell I'm sure. So you are wrong, I've experienced them and they are joke.

[Coffeexbean]

instanced content is harder but the world is a joke sadly I wish we had both

[epec]

Both. Back in the day (I've been playing since '04) you didn't have sites that gave you all the info from guides and data mining, boss mods were rare, and there was no journal. You really just went into fights blind and learned from there. It was a totally different experience. Current Warcraft vs Vanilla/TBC is night and day or apples to oranges comparison. Combine this with the fact that abilities have become more intuitive, classes more balanced, it's fairly clear the game is overall easier in terms of the time investment and the learning curve. However, the upper tier challenge is mythic raids much better than anything in vanilla wow, but again it's really apples to oranges at this point. They're basically two different games.

[Deleted]

Well I think it's fair to say that the game has gotten easier with respect to managing button rotations. It's definitely easier than ever to get away with using a controller without necessarily being much worse off for it after the pruning. And there's probably more information and video guides readily available than there used to be, making it nice and easy to prepare for encounters.

Absolutely. An important aspect that cannot be overstated. This is why different bosses in different expansions are incommensurable when it comes to difficulty levels.
Gear availability, addons, rotation complexity etc all play a huge role. In short - bosses must be viewed in their context.

Also, if the theory that bosses have constantly become more difficulty held, it would follow then that bosses of each following expansion are more difficult than the ones in the previous expansion. But that is just not the case. This thing is not linear. And to those saying we grew up with WoW, keep in mind that a lot of the players that once started are not playing anymore so Blizzard has to keep that in mind and design encounters with new players in mind.

For what it´s worth, Nighthold and Tomb of Sargeras could very well have been part of Cataclysm and nothing would have been different. No sudden spike in difficulty at all.

I am yet to see a tier more difficult than Tier 11 (Cata 1st tier) or Tier 15 (Throne of Thunder). Ironically enough, raid participation of these raids was the lowest it has ever been during the "popularize raiding" era.

[Deleted]

So Legion Raiding = LFR and NORMAL

In current HEROIC you can ignore most of mechanics = Please link us you ATOC KJ and relative clear lockout of TOS


You didn't play in TBC and this is pretty visible by the bullshit "you couldnt be overgeared in TBC" because you really didn't saw peeps in T6 doing "old" tbc raid and roflstomp it.

Yes i did played it. And yes yourt game difficulty is determined by game lowest difficulty level not the highest. As long as WoW will have LFR this game will never be harder than TBC or Vannila. I can finish game by doing nothing without gear and by clicking 1 button. Yeah totaly not easyer than old game.

[Melancolie]

Hardest thing about Vanilla raiding was that you needed like 55 raiders with 80% attendance to consistently raid...

[Lartok]

No. In fact, Ascendant Council Heroic (That is 2010) blows most of Legion´s encounters out of the water (I am 4/9 atm).
Again, the difficulty thing is not linear - the following tier/raid endboss is not always more difficult than the previous etc. It has never happened since Ragnaros that the first guild in the world kills an end boss 1 week earlier (1 reset´s worth less gear) than the second. That speaks testament to how bosses were not solely about gear these times, and formulaically timer-based like Fallen Avatar for example where your options for how to handle the boss are predetermined from the start. This falls in line well with Blizz general philosophy where they want to control how players play the game.

Again, bosses are not in general more difficult. Every once in a while there appears a difficult encounter but that´s it. But the difficulty curve between those difficult bosses is not linear!

Method killed Garrosh Hellscream 1 reset before Blood Legion and I'm pretty sure Madness of Deathwing also fits the criteria.

[Belisaurio]

I raided in Vanilla and TBC, the bosses were a joke. All of them. Even the 'hard' ones people are citing. If you had Fatboss guides, and 40 raiders that would be like, heroic level raiders today, along with current addons, that group of people woould skate through the Vanilla raids, even Naxx.

I raided vanilla too (until guild disband in 4horsemen), and I feel that they were harder.
I mean, this days, I need less effort from my guild to make a kill. Yeah, a lot of complex abilities in any boss fight, but we can start again alot faster after a wipe, we have alot more information/tools (even skills to pass some abilities if we fucked up, and we have the cd for the next fight if wipe), we don't need anything to fix some strategies (more farm, change jobs, etc...), and there are alot less people needed to do that.
Again, the complexity is over 9000, but not the dificulty to kill a Boss.

[Deleted]

Method killed Garrosh Hellscream 1 reset before Blood Legion and I'm pretty sure Madness of Deathwing also fits the criteria.

Nope. Paragon killed it on 10man 2-3 days later while solohealing it. After Paragon killed it, the 10man version got nerfed by 30%. 25man version remained untouched.
Make your deductions.

edit: killing it one reset earlier is still not the same as killing it a whole week earlier. Clearly it was about tactical flaws then? This happened on Ascendant Council, Ragnaros, Lich King and Nefarian where one guild was tactically clear above others and was able to kill bosses with much less gear than the following guilds. Right now encounter design has shifted to be very predictable, the zenith of which could be considered Fallen Avatar where everything has been designed so guilds can not come up with ingenious ideas to down the boss. Plenty of posts on this thread about the topic.

[Lartok]

Yes i did played it. And yes yourt game difficulty is determined by game lowest difficulty level not the highest. As long as WoW will have LFR this game will never be harder than TBC or Vannila. I can finish game by doing nothing without gear and by clicking 1 button. Yeah totaly not easyer than old game.

So when people talk about the difficulty of TBC you measure it by Karazhan, the "10" man raid that people were running with 4 to gear up alts? LFR seems more difficult than that because other people will often find a way to wipe you.

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Nope. Paragon killed it on 10man 2-3 days later while solohealing it. After Paragon killed it, the 10man version got nerfed by 30%. 25man version remained untouched.
Make your deductions.

So we're talking about difficulty of a raid and equating 10 man to 25? The deduction I would make and somehow you haven't is that they're vastly different fights and different difficulties so they shouldn't be compared. Also Blood Legion killed it prior to Paragon, so your point?

[Deleted]

WoW isn't easier, assuming you don't talk about LFR/Normal/Heroic which are meant to be easy. Talking about mythic.
Truth is there are only so many new mechanics that they can come up with and most bosses have mechanics borrowed from older bosses and slightly modified. For example, Boss 1 mechanics consist of mechanics of 4 different bosses from the previous expansions and one new mechanic. An experienced player will have and easy time reacting to the re-used mechanics. Combine that with the information and alerts provided by addons and you get quick kills.

They take a long time when the mechanics are brutal so you fail without perfect execution, when mechanics are completely new and complex and effective strategy hasn't yet been found and when they require a lot of coordination and communication.