Is WoW getting easier or players are getting better?

[Eleccybubb]

No they didn't, players still didn't raid. Forcing players to group up has never, ever worked. There is a reason FF14 got rid of the group levelling requirement FF11 had.

FF11 actually still has group quests. You just use NPCs to help you aka "Trusts" since the playerbase is kind of small. Kind of like hirelings in Guild Wars 1 basically.

[Aestholus]

"The Battle of Darrowshire"


The horror.

You may also remember the "Crimson Courier" and its follow up "The Scarlet Oracle, Demetria" patrolling vom Tyrs Hand to Stratholm and vanquising everything in their path.

[tikcol]

You may also remember the "Crimson Courier" and its follow up "The Scarlet Oracle, Demetria" patrolling vom Tyrs Hand to Stratholm and vanquising everything in their path.

The alliance version of that quest is even worse. You have to kill that undead dude on top of the hill that gives horde quests and his 2 undying dogs

[Every Pwny]

Resources are better, gearing is easier, leveling is easier, even gear is better optimized. Take back in vanilla Blizzard didn't even really stat gear well, you had to go through 60 long levels so it was harder to pug things and the resources to look at how to defeat bosses of what to gear was harder to come by. If you needed to pug someone it was a lot harder with no cross server and having to actually find someone geared enough at level 60. Not only that but they had to progress through raids, there wasn't catchup mechanics so pugging people for AQ40 was just a lot harder.

Vanilla was harder in a different way though, it was harder because you had to worry more about your raid composition and had to worry far more about mana management and rotating healing so you could get mana back from spirit etc. Maybe needing something like a dwarf priest for fear ward. Now boss mechanics are harder but composition isn't as important and addons do a lot more to help out than they did before so you have far better outside resources to help you out. There are probably though a lot more bad players because it's so much easier to level and gear up, far less farming to do and getting addons to do most of the thinking for you in fights so it's sooo much easier to coordinate.

[ls-]

Back in old days you had to interact with others otherwise you woul get nowhere. And no people actualy did enyojed group q, dugeons and starting smaller raids. Mostly becouse game forced grouping up as playins solo was kinda pain in the ass. And yes mmo is supostu force this type of behaviour on players and not be just optional thing.

Welp, you didn't really have to, many people lived on their own w/o others quite well. It's MUCH easier to be a solo player in WoW than let's say in DAoC or RO.

There's no point in complaining about solo players' hardships because it's the most solo-friendly MMORPG out there during that time.

[Teri]

The alliance version of that quest is even worse. You have to kill that undead dude on top of the hill that gives horde quests and his 2 undying dogs

Good old Nathanos blightcaller, now obviously back in Legion :P

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Welp, you didn't really have to, many people lived on their own w/o others quite well. It's MUCH easier to be a solo player in WoW than let's say in DAoC or RO.

There's no point in complaining about solo players' hardships because it's the most solo-friendly MMORPG out there, ofc, by today's standards it wasn't that single-player-friendly, but by standards of 2004 it's.

You can stay level 1 forever if you want to, but really the end-game at 60 was all group content, now automated group finders are basicly just solo queues with other players could as well be bots with chat AI and feel the same.

Group quests during leveling, and dungeons were optional but regular quests had really bad rewards/

Level 60 blues pretty much only came from those special long elite chains and dungeons, which got revamped/improved somewhere during vanilla too cause blizz knew the itemization was very bad early on.

[Anjerith]

Players have far more experience now. Encounters are MUCH more complex now than they were in Classic and BT (and even WotLK). Much of the older content was focused around making sure all your boxes were ticked and then sort of just Guessing as to the abilities - now, we have a hard amount of evidence explaining those abilities and so long as DPS meets a certain criteria, there is generally nothing for them to do that can't be easily done by anyone else.

HOWEVER, people will fondly remember those complex encounters because info from the community was comparably nonexistent. The BT Bosses in the TW version have had some abilities changed up due to how the game has progressed, but they are largely the same -- I expect many people to claim they have been heavily nerfed, but the reality is that the encounters were never difficult, the tools available now (including better addons and more comprehensive abilities) just were not there.

[ls-]

Good old Nathanos blightcaller, now obviously back in Legion :P

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You can stay level 1 forever if you want to, but really the end-game at 60 was all group content, now automated group finders are basicly just solo queues with other players could as well be bots with chat AI and feel the same.

Group quests during leveling, and dungeons were optional but regular quests had really bad rewards/

Level 60 blues pretty much only came from those special long elite chains and dungeons, which got revamped/improved somewhere during vanilla too cause blizz knew the itemization was very bad early on.

Raiding didn't matter to those solo players, and they're always a big chunk of WoW's player base, for instance, bigger than the one that's raiding. They also were the bads you encountered when the first iteration of Group Finder was added in TBC. That sudden exposure to bad players (and how many of them there's) was an eyeopening and shocking experience to many serious or even hardcore players.

Gear from questing was more than enough, people were doing other stuff: levelling profs, alts, etc, even back in the day there's people w/ multiple max lvl chars. You're thinking about this stuff from raider's perspective that doesn't really work in this case.

[Novakhoro]

From recent memory, Gul'Dan was all about attrition and a 14+ minute battle with your own concentration.
The "bosses are harder than ever" slogan is a myth. Addons make up for a loooot of work nowadays. WeakAuras and other conveniences.

Ragnaros Heroic is in no way harder than most if what we've seen since then. That's six years of standstill.

HRag was hard in a bullshit, your attempt might be have been perfect but these shit hammers make it mathematically impossible, kinda way

[Swalload]

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?

Better addons, better coverage of content, easier to get information, people are more used to the game as well. It's hard to tell if bosses are actually easier, but it's easier to know how to defeat them and easier to get the tools to make our life easier, so even if they design bosses harder than the old ones, it would still feel easier.

Times are easier, Blizzard isn't really getting lazy or sloppy, that's just a wrong perspective.

[Deleted]

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

"Alpha-CN has finally downed Fallen Avatar after 842 attempts"

Method had 463?

[SqweepS]

I'd argue that players are simply getting better, or the people who are participating in the content just aren't the casual player. The raids are much more difficult right now and the people who are making serious attempts at this content tend to be more than simple casual players.

[Schattenlied]

If you think bosses are easier do an entire raid tier without watching videos, without playing on PTR, and without addons and do mythic.

That's a quite silly thing to say. Bosses are designed assuming people use boss mods, they weren't back then... So saying they are harder now because doing it without boss mods would be impossible doesn't really count, you can't look at them in a vacuum, you look at them in context of how they are actually done, which is with boss mods that handhold like crazy...

[Novakhoro]

Resources are better, gearing is easier, leveling is easier, even gear is better optimized. Take back in vanilla Blizzard didn't even really stat gear well, you had to go through 60 long levels so it was harder to pug things and the resources to look at how to defeat bosses of what to gear was harder to come by. If you needed to pug someone it was a lot harder with no cross server and having to actually find someone geared enough at level 60. Not only that but they had to progress through raids, there wasn't catchup mechanics so pugging people for AQ40 was just a lot harder.

Vanilla was harder in a different way though, it was harder because you had to worry more about your raid composition and had to worry far more about mana management and rotating healing so you could get mana back from spirit etc. Maybe needing something like a dwarf priest for fear ward. Now boss mechanics are harder but composition isn't as important and addons do a lot more to help out than they did before so you have far better outside resources to help you out. There are probably though a lot more bad players because it's so much easier to level and gear up, far less farming to do and getting addons to do most of the thinking for you in fights so it's sooo much easier to coordinate.

You alliance think you had it so hard, shammy totems affected group only... RL would have the raid tab open moving people in and out of groups so the rogues could have WF

[getupkid55]

What would this guy know?

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

stupidest logic ever. do you know how inaccessible Naxx was for the majority of the playerbase? It's not because it was so insanely hard compared to today's raids, it's because it was gated like crazy between attunements, zero catch up mechanisms, requiring 40 players, etc etc. It also had an EXTREMELY short lifespan for an end-of-expansion raid, by far the shortest. The majority of people didn't even see it, so of course less guilds completed it.

Of course, this all depends on how you definite difficulty. If you consider exclusivity of a raid as a difficulty measure, or requiring asinine playtime just to prepare for it, then sure I will agree Naxx was the most difficult raid ever.

However if difficulty is about the challenge/mechanics of the actual raid, it was probably not any more difficult than WoD mythics were.

[idunnowatdo]

I feel like players are getting better. In vanilla you had limited resources. Yeah you had thottbot and alakazam but it did not always have info and you were lucky if you had a dedicated site to look up rotation and dps stuff. As it moved on we got smarter so blizzard had to keep up with us. Whats funny is ToS came out and a few days after Arguis PTR went up so blizzard is trying to keep up with how much people play.

[ls-]

stupidest logic ever. do you know how inaccessible Naxx was for the majority of the playerbase? It's not because it was so insanely hard compared to today's raids, it's because it was gated like crazy between attunements, zero catch up mechanisms, requiring 40 players, etc etc. It also had an EXTREMELY short lifespan for an end-of-expansion raid, by far the shortest. The majority of people didn't even see it, so of course less guilds completed it.

Of course, this all depends on how you definite difficulty. If you consider exclusivity of a raid as a difficulty measure, or requiring asinine playtime just to prepare for it, then sure I will agree Naxx was the most difficult raid ever.

However if difficulty is about the challenge/mechanics of the actual raid, it was probably not any more difficult than WoD mythics were.

Advice for the future, ignore anyone who mentions Kungen Seriously, it's a waste of time to try to talk to them.

[Deleted]

I feel like players are getting better. In vanilla you had limited resources. Yeah you had thottbot and alakazam but it did not always have info and you were lucky if you had a dedicated site to look up rotation and dps stuff. As it moved on we got smarter so blizzard had to keep up with us. Whats funny is ToS came out and a few days after Arguis PTR went up so blizzard is trying to keep up with how much people play.

ToS is 7.2 content, not 7.2.5 content. And without ToS 7.2.5 really feels like a fluke. They just advertised the same thing twice for more hype.

[Eleccybubb]

Advice for the future, ignore anyone who mentions Kungen Seriously, it's a waste of time to try to talk to them.

This. Never understood why some people took their word as law and everything they say is a fact.

Kungen is absolutely useless. He complains current content is too hard yet is carried through it half of the time. He tried to claim 40 man raiding was still hard when he was doing BWL at 60 in fucking grey and white gear with less than 40 people.

[meowfurion]

Go do An Impossible Foe (Agatha) as a feral cat druid. Then tell me WoW is easier.