Just How Hard Were TBC Heroics vs Cata Heroics or Mythic 20+?

[TheEaterofSouls]

I often hear alot of people praising the difficulty of TBC heroics. Bragging about how much easier things have been since then. I've always been curious just how hard these dungeons were. Was the difficulty entirely skill based? I found this old video from Preach while watching some of his old stuff. He's saying how he was challenged by TBC heroics but found the launch week Cata heroics to be trivial in comparison. Is this true? Were pre-nerf cata heroics really that much easier than TBC heroics? Has there ever been a difficulty in the game besides mythic raiding as hard as a TBC heroic?

Also, TBC raids took months to be fully cleared by a single guild. Why was it that Lady Vash took so much longer than Mythic Kil'jaedin to clear? Was he really that much easier than her? I assume she was so bugged that it was impossible.

[Nathreim]

High level Mythics are sometimes harder but some of the BC heroics were super long and comparable to short raids.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Mythic 20 wut. That shit is harder by a MILE. Old five mans are easy comparatively, because there is no timer. You could take as long as you want and CC every mob in there if you want.
Now imagine doing MGT without being able to CC mobs and having to do it in a half hour. Then it would be hard.

idk what the fuck you are on about with KJ as well. It took dudes what, 850 pulls? Was it more?
100 percent sure it didn't take guilds 800 pulls to kill Vash. It took longer time wise, but that's not at all relevant to difficulty.

[Super Kami Dende]

High level Mythics are sometimes harder but some of the BC heroics were super long and comparable to short raids.

lol fucking no they weren't. the longest was about 30mins and that was Slabs.

TBC heroics were relatively easy. Most people just think they were hard because they were Bad players at that time in the early years of WoW and remember it being difficult for themselves.

Mechanics were mostly braindead,

[Daetur]

My experience with BC heroics compared to modern ones is this:

One of the most noticeable differences is that we had far fewer tools to deal with mechanics than we do now- interrupts and stuns are much more widely available, tanks have significantly more active mitigation, and packs of trash enemies are tuned to be dealt with as a single pull without Crowd Control. Healers had fewer cooldowns as well.

In BC heroics, MANY pulls were simply so threatening to the tank that they had to be Crowd Controlled, and CC was more limited then than it is now.

[Bigbazz]

TBC Heroics were mostly about the danger of threat/agro, every single one had some mechanic that actively caused the tank to drop agro or reduce his/her ability to hold agro, including stuns with no diminishing returns, fears, blinds, mind controls and other types of CC's and also brutal debuffs that reduced attack power/attack speed by massive margins for limited time periods.

So most of the difficulty was in keeping threat off the healer, who could if not careful entirely out-threat a tank vs multiple mobs. So the solution to that was to where possible use CC and make the most of class utility, timing the use of taunt by for example allowing a dps to pull huge threat on a mob and then taunting to steal the threat (in other words, strategically using a dps to generate threat for you). When it came to AOE taunts with their 10min cooldowns it was about planning ahead...

Pretty much TBC heroics were only hard because rather than presenting you with hard/challenging/complex mechanics, they instead presented you with challenges that negated your ability to function as a class.. Part of the reason Paladin tanks were so superior compared to Warriors for dungeons was due to the ease at which they could multi target tank and due to having strong burst threat by being able to do every pull on full mana.

Cata heroics in this sense were nowhere near as difficult. The challenges (or rather frustrations) of doing Arcatraz or Shattered Halls heroic at relevant gear levels and with a Warrior/Druid tank were in a completely different league to Cata heroics.

[DrIvoRobotnik]

lol fucking no they weren't. the longest was about 30mins and that was Slabs.

TBC heroics were relatively easy. Most people just think they were hard because they were Bad players at that time in the early years of WoW and remember it being difficult for themselves.

Mechanics were mostly braindead,

30 minutes? Musta been geared to the teeth to fly though that fast.

[Super Kami Dende]

30 minutes? Musta been geared to the teeth to fly though that fast.

kara/mags/gruul stuff, didn't takes us long from launch to get heroics farmed easily. used to knock them all out 1 after another on a Saturday arvo with partner and friends.

[Cows For Life]

My experience with BC heroics compared to modern ones is this:

One of the most noticeable differences is that we had far fewer tools to deal with mechanics than we do now- interrupts and stuns are much more widely available, tanks have significantly more active mitigation, and packs of trash enemies are tuned to be dealt with as a single pull without Crowd Control. Healers had fewer cooldowns as well.

In BC heroics, MANY pulls were simply so threatening to the tank that they had to be Crowd Controlled, and CC was more limited then than it is now.

Back then tanks had (mostly) no AOE tanking abilities, threat generation didn't scale to keep up with DPS, defense rating gimped scaling even more, and to top it off many heroics were used as raid attunement gateways for geared players.

[Schattenlied]

Mythic 20 wut. That shit is harder by a MILE. Old five mans are easy comparatively, because there is no timer. You could take as long as you want and CC every mob in there if you want.
Now imagine doing MGT without being able to CC mobs and having to do it in a half hour. Then it would be hard.

idk what the fuck you are on about with KJ as well. It took dudes what, 850 pulls? Was it more?
100 percent sure it didn't take guilds 800 pulls to kill Vash. It took longer time wise, but that's not at all relevant to difficulty.

you only have to abide by the timer if you want to go to the next level of mythic+, you still get loot if you take longer.

[Vorality]

I don't think TBC heroics were as hard as pre-nerf Cata or M+20 now. The game and players were different back then. The mechanics were definitely not as hard, but the average player didn't know anything close to what they do now. Just one example is keybindings. The majority of players had little to no keybindings and clicked a lot of their spells. Game sense was also much more poor than people tend to have now...i.e. moving out of the fire quickly, popping CD's correctly, etc.

On top of both of these things, the pool of people that were at max level and attempting heroic dungeons in TBC compared to the pool of players doing dungeons in cata and now was much smaller. So it was definitely much more of a feat to complete TBC heroics because it wasn't the norm. Mechanically, the game is much more tough now. But when comparing the average player to the game from then and now, one could argue that it was tougher or as tough back then.

[clevin]

kara/mags/gruul stuff, didn't takes us long from launch to get heroics farmed easily. used to knock them all out 1 after another on a Saturday arvo with partner and friends.

No one is talking about how hard this stuff was when you massively outgeared it. The question implicitly is about doing these at the appropriate gear level.

In blues you did not fly through Shadow Lab in 30 minutes.

[Kaleredar]

People were generally very poorly geared back then as well. The number of people doing them was generally very limited due to attunements as well. And furthermore, finding groups was very difficult due to having to trawl trade chat for potentially hours on end to find people.

Take your pick of those factors

[kneehidude]

Also, TBC raids took months to be fully cleared by a single guild. Why was it that Lady Vash took so much longer than Mythic Kil'jaedin to clear? Was he really that much easier than her? I assume she was so bugged that it was impossible.

A big reason would be quality of life changes they have made to the game since then. Such as respawning. If your raid wipes now, a healer can soulstone and mass rez the raid and within a few minutes, you can be pulling again. Back then, a healer could soulstone, get mana, rez a few rez capable classes, get more mana, rinse repeat until everyone either ran back or was rezzed.

In terms of running back, every few bosses or so there is a new "load point" in the raid where people are automatically ported to make the run shorter. If you wipe in ToS, you're not too far from the boss you're on. If you wiped back in SSC, you had to run all the way through Zangarmarsh to SSC, zone in, then run all the way back to the boss you were on.

In short, no the game wasn't harder back then, it was shitty design along with the addition of quality of life things to the game that make the difference between then and now.

[clevin]

I don't think TBC heroics were as hard as pre-nerf Cata or M+20 now. The game and players were different back then. The mechanics were definitely not as hard, but the average player didn't know anything close to what they do now. Just one example is keybindings. The majority of players had little to no keybindings and clicked a lot of their spells. Game sense was also much more poor than people tend to have now...i.e. moving out of the fire quickly, popping CD's correctly, etc.

On top of both of these things, the pool of people that were at max level and attempting heroic dungeons in TBC compared to the pool of players doing dungeons in cata and now was much smaller. So it was definitely much more of a feat to complete TBC heroics because it wasn't the norm. Mechanically, the game is much more tough now. But when comparing the average player to the game from then and now, one could argue that it was tougher or as tough back then.

Bull. This idea that people today are just SO much better is one of the more conceited arguments people use here. You might have played with shit players but I didn't.

As a couple of people have mentioned, things were just different then. Threat was an issue, CC was needed in TBC and in combat CC (Blind, Kidney Shot, Sheep, etc) were one of the things that set good DPS apart from not so good DPS.

- - - Updated - - -

A big reason would be quality of life changes they have made to the game since then. Such as respawning. If your raid wipes now, a healer can soulstone and mass rez the raid and within a few minutes, you can be pulling again. Back then, a healer could soulstone, get mana, rez a few rez capable classes, get more mana, rinse repeat until everyone either ran back or was rezzed.

In terms of running back, every few bosses or so there is a new "load point" in the raid where people are automatically ported to make the run shorter. If you wipe in ToS, you're not too far from the boss you're on. If you wiped back in SSC, you had to run all the way through Zangarmarsh to SSC, zone in, then run all the way back to the boss you were on.

In short, no the game wasn't harder back then, it was shitty design along with the addition of quality of life things to the game that make the difference between then and now.

Also, there wasn't some super-easy version of SSC. You raided the one difficulty there was and you did it with the gear from T4, maybe some Arena gear.

[Pandragon]

TBC heroics were easy, if you knew what cc was. Back then you actually had to control the size of groups you pulled.

[SupBrah]

TBC and Early Cata heroics separated the boys from the men

[Bigbazz]

I don't think TBC heroics were as hard as pre-nerf Cata or M+20 now. The game and players were different back then. The mechanics were definitely not as hard, but the average player didn't know anything close to what they do now. Just one example is keybindings. The majority of players had little to no keybindings and clicked a lot of their spells. Game sense was also much more poor than people tend to have now...i.e. moving out of the fire quickly, popping CD's correctly, etc.

On top of both of these things, the pool of people that were at max level and attempting heroic dungeons in TBC compared to the pool of players doing dungeons in cata and now was much smaller. So it was definitely much more of a feat to complete TBC heroics because it wasn't the norm. Mechanically, the game is much more tough now. But when comparing the average player to the game from then and now, one could argue that it was tougher or as tough back then.

Having re-done the TBC heroics recently I can absolutely attest that most people do not remember the frustrations of those old dungeons at all. Cataclysm Heroics didn't actually pose any challenge to my guildies when it launched, I heard about the "difficulty" only by reading the forums, they were just harder than WOTLK dungeons but we cleared them all right away. On a contrast to that, going back to do the old TBC heroics there were some that I did and remembered why the hell I didn't ever farm them back in the old days, because of absolutely stupidly frustrating and punishing mechanics that made little sense.

Like in Arcatraz Heroic, you probably don't remember that the constructs that come alive when you go near them did enough lightning damage to anyone nearby to kill them in 2-3 seconds, so you'd ideally only put ranged dps on it and have the tank healed up... But the mob also focus targetted players and chased them down, so that single mob could wipe an entire group very easily. There are literally countless situations in old heroics with mechanics that you would think are simply broken design, they only resulted in wasting time and causing frustration but are core to why the old Heroics were difficult.

There is a pull in Slave Pens HC, fairly easy dungeon.. But there are 2 main mobs + a secondary mob, the 2 main mobs are completely non-ccable and also both have a long 4-5 second stun that has no diminishing returns.. If you got unlucky the tank will be stunned before his first attack, and Warriors started fights with 0 rage, or 10-20 rage if they have Bloodrage available, it's entirely possible that the Warrior tank is stunned for the first 8-10 seconds of engaging them, while being entirely unable to avoid any attacks, causing the healer to have to spam heal the Warrior resulting in pulling threat and possibly being 1 shot.

That was the difficulty of TBC, having no individual control over a situation due to RNG was common.

[Crimewave]

You cant compare the difficulty.
Cata heroics were difficult because of really challenging mechanics and healers having to actually know how to manage their mana and cds for a change (after retarded ICC era when every healer was just mindlessly spamming spells).
Legion is difficult because of the % difficulty slider.

[Stickinator]

oh shattered halls. How i missed you!

Tbc dungeons felt harder since you didnt have the amount of dps as you have now.
comparing the hp of mobs and the dps you had then.

but cata dungeons was way harder then tbc before they had to nerf all the dmg (and health) on pretty much 80% of the mobs.