Is WoW getting easier or players are getting better?

[Dakara]

"Back in the day"... you needed gear from the early bosses in a new Tier to progress rather than clearing the place with BiS from the previous Tier.

How much of that was poor itemization and how much was intentional I can't say.

[Belisaurio]

Wrong.

Addons are nothing new.

There are more buttons used in actual rotations than there were in vanilla. Sure, you had more spells back then but the vast majority of them were completely useless in encounters and you just pressed ~ two buttons during boss fights.

For me, that's not a point to be more hard, it's a point to be more complex.
I mean, in MC, you didn't need a complex rotation to do dmg (2/3 buttons), or really complex mechanics to be in danger (move out of fire!!!).
But random RNG from a fear could wipe your team, and you didn't have alot of tools to stop that (heh! dwarf priests for alliance!!! Old tremor totem for Horde!!) some people used pvp insignias at the cost of dmg. But you get the point, just some bs about RNG can screw you, and 40 man wipe (and in some points, with wasted food/potions/resists) could fuck more than a simple wipe. Even some CDs were really crazy (60 mins CD!!), and after a wipe, you had one less tool for the fight.

Example of what I'm saying: If we lose one lvl after every wipe (so you need to lvl up again until the next try), the raids become really hard (and annoying, but that's not the point), even if they have the same abilities than now.
Dificult=/=Complexity.

In other words, dificulty are all the problems that we have in our progression system. Complexity can help, but it's not the only point.

[Netherling]

Mechanically harder, but not numerically...

Classes do not have more tools than they did in vanilla, not by a long shot. Have you played Warrior? Even Druid had just bars and bars full of abilities that they HAD to use to compete with other classes, unlike now where they still have by far the most tools and yet they are not "taxed" for it like in vanilla (late vanilla Druid and for pretty much the rest of WoW have been OP/top class no point arguing it). Death Grip is the only meaningful class mechanic added that would be considered game-breaking in vanilla/bc.

I played many classes in vanilla, i'm not talking about pure amount of abilities - that is not what this discussion is about. Yes, they had lots of abilities but most were not used in many situations. I'm talking about gap closers, actual tools etc. (sprints - that most (all?) classes now have). Many classes did not have cooldowns to use in life-threatening situations (yes, warriors did).

[Allenseiei]

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?

What is hard in your book? This is taking into consideration the HARDEST difficulties.
I mean if we look into the difficulties before WotLK paradigm (which is the one that reigns right now), the difficulty of the raid fights relied on around 10% the mechanics of the boss while the 90% resided in logistics. Logistics meaning in the amount of players, gearing(both proper gear levels and resistance gear), attunements and other time gated elements such as the reputation grind to summon ragnaros for example.

With the release of WotLK everything became extremely accesible, so the logistics part of the dificulty in a raid dropped drastically and dropped more and more throughout the expansions. In its place, dificulty started swaping from being logistics focused to mechanics focused. So right now, mechanics take 95% of the difficulty of a raid, while the 5% is the logistics part. AP system comes from everything you do in the game so it isn't considered as a logistic part of the difficulty.

This is with raiding, how about everything else? Again WotLK is the turning stone.
The difficulty of outdoor content has certainly dropped. Mobs were tunned for raiders, so non raiders took more time in killing things. While leveling up, the difficulty that made you stop to rest every 1-3 mobs was made to be a time dump mechanic so that it took way longer to level up. At the release of WotLK this all disappeared. Outdoor content was tunned for the worst geared and skilled players, and has been so ever since.

Dungeon content dropped drastically untill Legion with the Mythic + system since the release of WotLK. 5 man content was a joke and the valor system forced you to go there and populate it. But Legion brought the difficulty back and the incentives with it.


Players, on the other hand are better than what they were at 2004-2005. There is a base understanding of game mechanics and they are able to identify patterns in the development of fights that quickly let them think of strategies. Coordination has improved especially since there is no longer 25 man or 40 man in the highest difficulties, making this much easier to manage.

Addons? Well addons have been a thing since vanilla. The radar ones were going a bit too far to simplify mechanics but blizzard has taken actions against them.


So to answer your question:
1. In the raiding scene is extremely much harder than what it was in vanilla and TBC, mechanic wise, but its way easier logistic wise. You have much more to deal with now, but you have much less to do to prepare for it.
2. Dungeon wise, with the mythic + system, its way harder than it was before.
3. Outdoor content wise, its much easier now than it was before.

[Miatog]

A bit of both. Vanilla WoW had much worse math, but most simple fights. There were a few complex fights in there sure, but look at MC mechanics and tell me they're hard. Remove the curse. Don't dps the dogs. Interrupt the healers. Sooth the rage. Even the simplest bosses these days are harder.

These days the math is much, much more forgiving. On top of that the average WoW player is much better at the game than we were back then. It makes sense why too, most of us have been playing it off and on for over a decade. And the cherry on all of this is that we have better addons to help us. Very few people raid without DBM or Big Wigs. How many people use GTFO to help them stay out of bad? And despite what others might think, we have an amazing community that makes guides on how to play your class and helps you figure out what you're doing wrong and improve your DPS.

If we had unforgiving math like vanilla did (don't forget C'Thun was mathematically impossible at first) the game would be much harder, nearly unplayable hard in fact. The mechanics and math would scare off nearly all players.

[KaPe]

I did not say that addons are new.
Possibilities that you can do today with for example weak auras is ridiculous.
I will not even mention banned (in 7.2.5 if i am not wrong?) addons that could track raid member positions...

By the same logic, there were addon which could chose spells, ranks, pick targets and cast cancel for you. It was even more broken, just in a different way.

My vanilla paladin with...
- 2/3 ranks of Flash of Light
- 2/3 ranks of Holy Light
- Holy Shock
- endless blessings rebuffing during encounter
- dispelling and auras management
... says hi.

And you used all 3 ranks of both spells in the same encounter.... yeah, no. You picked one that was proper for your mp5/+healing and used it until your gear improved enough that you could downrank further. There were addons for Blessings and it wasn't long before Greater Blessings were implemented, so you didn't rebuff during fights except for combat res. With dispeling, Decursive was doing thinking for you and there weren't really any "don't dispel this until X seconds have passed" that required manual input.

Spellbooks were filled with useless stuff that might have looked good on bars, but had no point in raids.

[Deleted]

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

That is what I would have said. Nicely put. Should serve the post.

[Revak]

Let's just agree to disagree then.

- - - Updated - - -



Addons being better doesn't change the fact that WITH addons, the bosses are still not easy wins.

Addons telling you things =/= You actually playing at a level required to counter/avoid/perform in a fight.

As for the post-WOTLK players "not making it in Classic", you'd be surprised. A LOT of the people hailing Classic as the best era and the best iteration available on Private servers and something which should be kept as pure as possible, didn't actually play it whilst current. It wasn't difficult, it was time consuming which is something that can either appeal to or turn off players of all ages.

Oh I definitely believe a lot of people that talk great about classic didn't play, but that also applies to those who talk negatively about it.

Difficulty comes in many forms. Mechanics, large raid group organization, time sinks, attunements, etc. End boss mechanics are not the be-all-end-all source of difficulty in a game. For many the massive amount of exploration and time it takes to get from point A (start) to point Z (end game) is also a source of difficulty. Not only were raids difficult (for the time) but the amount of time leveling, exploring, gearing, attuning, before finally getting into a raiding guild and doing the bosses was way beyond what we have today.

I remember in vanilla when I FINALLY hit 60 on my holy priest (which was slow to level) I felt a sense of accomplishment that I had never felt in a game before. Immediately myself and 6 or 7 of us who had become in game friends (didn't know each other in real life) all began looking for a raiding guild, applied together, and then started farming our Tier 0.5 sets so we could raid. All of this was part of the challenge of the game. Ignoring raid bosses. The game wasn't just about end-game. There was an inherent difficulty in the whole process. And there was a commitment to your toon.

[Sansnom]

I cleared Normal ToS with a pug the second day.

I should have been more specific, I was referring to Mythic difficulty. Even so what was the item level of your PUG? If your group was geared for Heroic or above, I would be surprised if your PUG did not clear ToS in the first week.

[melodramocracy]

Both.

Players are getting better primarily due to the 'behind the curtain' knowledge available to those seeking it.

WoW overall is an incredibly forgiving game, so there's not much to comment on there. Bosses are getting far more technical than they were in the past, but gear is also much easier to acquire prior to facing said boss, so...

[Phuongvi]

Didn't have gearscore, ilvl or achivement back then, so yeah, you could find some players with blue gear or even purple in raid.

So now you have ilvl and achivement so you can buy a pass to raid group.

Pretty sure if you take the same team players who used to clear shit back then, would laugh at the current content with all the addons and shit.

[Lime]

It comes down to how you value difficulty.

- Boss mechanics
- Gearing up
- Class mechanics
- Role mechanics

Some of these are easier, some are harder.

There's also the argument of information, but you always had access to this if you knew where to look, which wasn't hard to find out. It also doesn't warrant it's own point as it's an aspect of all four of those.

[Sime]

Simple as 3 letters PTR...
at least for me, vs old vanilla content was harder cause we didnt have youtube, we didnt have PTR where people could sit and figure out bosses without the rest of the main raiders, few select could team up with other guilds and go in and "test"/learn bosses before release. Even dungeon journal + addons to show what you died of. makes it easier.

[CaptainV]

Tbh the other issue lies in the fact raids are simply becomming redundant as content, people are growing so aware of how to play content and how to avoid X, stand in Y, and do Z, that it becomes second nature no matter what boss your fighting. We are now getting too used to fighting bosses in a certain way, to the point raids feel samey all the time.

Really blizzard needs to fix raiding in that sense by doing two things:

1.

Make less raid bosses, but give them alot more interesting quirks and mechanics, stuff that requires coordination and actual strategy so that the bosses feel meaningful and actually interesting to fight.

2.

Less fucking mob battle bosses, seriously, this shit was overdone in WoD its overdone in Legion. Mob wave bosses with 3-4 phases is just archaic gameplay design. Its simply an artifical way of lengthening the content in a *non* fun kind of way. Also, HP pools aernt fun, farming the same crap over and over is boring afte ra while once you know exactly what to avoid/do.

[Maquegyver]

Bosses are mechanically more difficult now. However, the playerbase got considerably more unreasonable with the way the game is played. The unreasonable play styles far outpaced mechanical difficulty.

The way cutting edge guilds play the game is detrimental to the health of the game and to themselves. But we continue to glorify 12-18 hour raiding (which often results in brute force kills), split runs, and developing addons later determined to be against TOS so don't expect any change.

The remaining player base then has research and data to an obnoxious level that assists them greatly in beating an already beaten mechanic.

[Griffter]

Bosses are objectively more difficult than they used to be, but addons and MMO players' sheer determination to down them has made them seem easier. They're still quite difficult by any other game genre's standards, though. Imagine dying dozens or hundreds of times on every single boss fight of a single player game and just continuing on like that's an acceptable difficulty level.

[Laqweeta]

yes. vanilla was a joke compared to todays raids. the hardest part was getting 40 people to right click a boss and move outta fire.

Even then, half the raid was AFK.

[jon234]

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?

I mean addons make things much easier, account sharing in the "world first scene" makes that whole area a joke, with access to more sources than ever and the PTR yes the game has become much easier than it used to be.

[Leyre]

All this fucking people claiming bosses are easy yet i still dont see fucking logs of their mythic kills

[Wildmoon]

Why are people so concerned with how hards bosses are? It's not a hard thing to do on Blizzard's part to make "hard bosses". It's making bosses who are both fun and challenging that actually matters.