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

[Cows For Life]

No, as someone who was doing +10s in the first week of Mythic + in Legion, no TBC Heroics were not just about mobs dealing a lot of damage. Problem with people looking back 10 years is that they forget all of the actual reasons why TBC heroics were hard/frustrating. Go play on a popular private server and see for yourself, if it was just hard hitting mobs you could breeze through it, actually a lot of the mobs didn't hit that hard and it was CC mechanics without diminishing returns, debuffs and threat drops or random resets and brutal healing AOE threat that made them hard, the mechanics that could only be countered by certain spec and the RNG that infected every aspect of gameplay.

Like 90% of this thread is looking back with completely blurred lenses at 10 years ago and forgetting the actual reason TBC heroics were considered hard. As someone who has re-experienced TBC heroics in 2017, the level of frustration presented via the abilities some mobs or trash packs have is far beyond anything in Mythic +, because in Mythic + you're always in control of the situation and it's an exercise in execution, where as TBC was an exercise in "we're about to fuck you in the ass with some bullshit, deal with it".

In Legion it's about dealing with a situation with the tools you have, in TBC it's about hoping you have the tools available to you at the moment, and trying to hold together chaos because of how sensitive and on the limit everything can be.

Shattered Halls - mobs with scatter shot, fear, 50% Mortal Strike + 15% dmg taken debuff (fun without a mage or druid in your group)
Blood Furnace/Ramparts - trash with 360 degree cleaves, stuns, disarms, fears, etc. (cleaves nerfed at some point)
Mana Tombs - charge stuns, gouges, mana burns
Shadow Labyrinth - knockdown stuns, fears, mind control (number of trash packs were nerfed eventually)
Coilfang dungeons - fears, silences, mind controls
Arcatraz - aggro resets + random damage bursts, mind controls

People forget if you weren't losing control of your character as a tank you weren't in a TBC heroic

[Zyky]

Side note: clearing raids expansions later does not make you a mythic raider.

Look at you attempting to talk shit because you have no actual factual comeback for what I said.

[czyu1]

Both are equally hard for one reason and one reason only. Over-tuned numbers. Its the same reason why anything is hard in this game.

[Tiwack]

Shattered Halls, Shadow Lab, Arcatraz and the Steam Vaults... Good times. They were brutal in blues but a breeze in catch-up epics at the end. Had to cc and single target which made them take longer opposed to near end expansion where you could just pull and aoe with little problems. Besides the leveling dungeon you had heroic and that was it so it had to be at-least challenging for it to last and stay interesting meaning noobs would have to clear them eventually and hopefully learn while doing it to get attunements. Was a fun throwback in early cata while it lasted. Having to work around mechanics is a lot more enjoyable than sonic tank with no time to chat even if they wanted to because gotta aoe to go fast!

[Fkiolaris]

I remember being estatic when about midway trhough BC Druids were able to cast thorns indoors. Suddenly I was useful as a CC! I wasn't getting rejected from groups because "We need something with CC."

Hehe tell me about it. I still remember tanking with a bear that only had a frontal, 60 degrees swipe that would only hit 3 targets and had a 6sec CD :-). Oh yeah, and crushing blows, that was also fun times.

My view is that the comparison involves apples and oranges, simply because the design paradigm on almost everything (class design, dungeon design, gearing systems, player experience in general) is different between the examples, especially TBC and Mythic+ nowadays. For my taste, I had more fun in TBC/WotLK, but each to their own.

[Coffeh]

People saying Mythics are hard compared to old content makes me chuckle. Same people who say raids now are harder than Vanilla. Those people never raided in Vanilla.

[Leyre]

People saying Mythics are hard compared to old content makes me chuckle. Same people who say raids now are harder than Vanilla. Those people never raided in Vanilla.

Look at all the mechanics that hunter had to do, vanilla raiding was insane /s

[Kokolums]

Smart and true point that isn't seen enough. The dance itself is not difficult once you know the steps. But you have to learn the proper steps first. True in BC. True now for higher levels of raiding and mythics.

Id say a skill based game is more like street fighter 2 where it took skill to master to button/joystick combinations to perform certain moves. Not everyone could do Zangief's spinning piledriver. But some could do it easily.

[Dsc]

Besides requiring gear level being "progression" (half of it is hand outs anyway nowdays) M+ doesn't have a thing on slabs. Period/the end.

Here is a neat video that breaks Down vanilla too, alot of it I remember, some was before my time.

[Ange]

TBC heroics pre nerf were very frustrating for months.

* caster without propper caster itemisation (CRAFTED GEAR OR GTFO was the slogan for months for dungeons/raid groups)
* 360° cleave from most mobs, RIP melee
* huge pulls or you could say wipe-pulls without at least 2 mages for CC

A good group was the holy trinity with at least 2 mages (Warrior Priest Mage Mage + Shadow as ManaBattery)

A bad group was every other class combination.

[Wries]

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.

Pretty much this. We had fewer tools in our arsenal. Self healing or personal damage reduction was extremely limited (or non-existant) and so was in-combat cc. You simply had out of combat CC to use and if you didn't push enough dps in time (and on the right target) some mob broke loose and someone could die.

In a way Mythic+ definitely reminds me of TBC HC because we finally have difficult dungeons again. But it is pretty different in the ways we tackle them. I much prefer m+ over TBC-HC because more tools makes for more varying gameplay, as well as the fact you can overcome difficult encounters by learning on the spot and changing strategy while TBC HCs was more of a gear check that also required you to only run certain compatible group combinations.

[Kokolums]

If i had to build an ideal 5 man raiding group in bc wearing greens:

Warrior tank (druids were more difficult to gear up & paladins had a tougher time holding threat).
Druid healer (innervate was huge)
Hybrid priest that went halfway up the holy and shadow trees. (Could do good dps but could also offheal if needed)
Mage for sheep
Last one could be rogue/hunter/warlock.

[purebalance]

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,

You're talking when you outgeared them and you know it. Half of the people on here that make claims like you do are either thinking about normals or weren't clearing heroic until IQD gear other than Mechanar maybe. Arcatraz, SL, and SH heroic were definitely not a walk in the park.

[Super Kami Dende]

You're talking when you outgeared them and you know it. Half of the people on here that make claims like you do are either thinking about normals or weren't clearing heroic until IQD gear other than Mechanar maybe. Arcatraz, SL, and SH heroic were definitely not a walk in the park.

Or people like you were just horrible fucking players and remember easy dungeons being "WHOA SUPER DOOPER HARD GUYS!" When they were a joke mechanic wise and if your group wasn't full of knuckledragging spastics could clear them easily.

The amount of people I see write things like "WHOA SHADOW LABS WAS INSANE!" and I think back to Slabs and how none of the Mechanics were in anyway hard and basically required you to have an IQ that was higher than lukewarm temperature.

- - - Updated - - -

Warrior tank (druids were more difficult to gear up & paladins had a tougher time holding threat).

If you had a Pally Tank that had a hard time hold threat, you had a bad pally Tank.

[Coffeh]

Look at all the mechanics that hunter had to do, vanilla raiding was insane /s

You're linking a video of a release day raid on the last week of Vanilla 2+ years after the raid came out. What are you trying to prove here? That you have no idea what you're talking about? You're posting the equivalent of showing Method doing a Mythic Xavius kill the week before the next expansion launches. Those guys could sleep through that too. Hell, some people could probably solo it.

How about try a vanilla Naxx 40 raid. If you sneezed at an inopportune time you insta-died. There was NO leniency. Way less forgiving than Mythic raids now. You can talk all you want about mechanics, but there didn't exist all these mods and dungeon journals that told you exactly what you do. Nowadays the game plays itself for you. Even to get to the point to attempt raids nowadays is nothing. You think these 'top guilds' now would have had the patience to grind out +resistance sets just to be able to cope with certain mechanics? Please. Like 20 guilds cleared Naxx 40. Thousands and thousands clear the highest Mythic raids now. There's a reason for that massive disparity, and it's not because people are Godlike at the game now. WoW isn't and never has been a hard game to play mechanically. It just required way more investment in the past.

Please, the game is a joke right now. It requires minimal effort and time.

[KaPe]

How about try a vanilla Naxx 40 raid. If you sneezed at an inopportune time you insta-died. There was NO leniency. Way less forgiving than Mythic raids now. You can talk all you want about mechanics, but there didn't exist all these mods and dungeon journals that told you exactly what you do. Nowadays the game plays itself for you. Even to get to the point to attempt raids nowadays is nothing. You think these 'top guilds' now would have had the patience to grind out +resistance sets just to be able to cope with certain mechanics? Please. Like 20 guilds cleared Naxx 40. Thousands and thousands clear the highest Mythic raids now. There's a reason for that massive disparity, and it's not because people are Godlike at the game now. WoW isn't and never has been a hard game to play mechanically. It just required way more investment in the past.

Please, the game is a joke right now. It requires minimal effort and time.

You're full of crap and you know it. Only a few Naxx bosses could compare with modern ones and even then this was largely a combination of bugs, attunements, insane gear grind - including craftable frost resistance - or retarded consumables like Shadow Protection pots.

A joke like Razuvious could be "hard" if your MC broke at a bad moment and this was pure rng. Patchwerk was considered a hard boss at the time. Patchwerk, the ultimate gearcheck boss with zero mechanics other than hitting really hard. Probably the first time healers used mana flasks. Every other incarnation of such boss had extra things added because this was the epitome of boredom, spamming the exact same shit for five minutes.

The top guilds comment on difficulty being higher all the time - but of course we should trust the opinion of random nobody over them. Also, if you're talking about "the game playing itself" - Healbot was made in vanilla, same as Emergency Monitor. The epitome of game playing itself. But sure, pretend you know anything and aren't just being a nuisance.

And to be actually on topic - I'm surprised no one mention that in TBC, Warriors couldn't even use Thunder Clap in Defensive Stance. They had to change stances to use their aoe threat move. All of which took time, drained their rage and was fixed relatively quickly because it was absurdly obnoxious. Or that best early game caster gear had zero stamina, meaning they could be nearly one shotted by some random stuff. Or that graveyard runs could be insane. That's the kind of stuff people had to deal with back in TBC.

[MrExcelion]

TBC heroics pre nerf were very frustrating for months.

* caster without propper caster itemisation (CRAFTED GEAR OR GTFO was the slogan for months for dungeons/raid groups)
* 360° cleave from most mobs, RIP melee
* huge pulls or you could say wipe-pulls without at least 2 mages for CC

A good group was the holy trinity with at least 2 mages (Warrior Priest Mage Mage + Shadow as ManaBattery)

A bad group was every other class combination.

Yeah I had a great experience as a mage in TBC, lot of other classes definitely got left out though like you said

[Magnagarde]

Blizzard should make a 20+ Arcatraz run with a timer and affixes, then see the tears flood the WoW forums as never before. Pre-nerf Arcatraz.

TBC heroics were far harder due to the lack of optimization across the entire board, regardless wether its itemization or class functionality. There were no immediate responses from Blizzard whenever a guild complained and cried wolf, so players had to deal with what they have. Now not even a day passes without changes being applied to make content doable. Oh and don't get me started on DBM which literally guides you through every piece of content there is, with playthrough videos all over the internet and extensive guides.

[Beefkow]

Believe it or not, you had to CC some trash pulls before pulling.

Now a days you just yolo pull while interrupting random spells.

[Deleted]

Playstyle was different, big dick dps better had some big altar in their room and prayed to their tank every single morning and evening. Trash was more often the problem than bosses, knowledge about pull patterns were important. Most trash had some reduce armor/control/heal ability and hit a lot harder - dps getting onehit was normal. Hence DPS gettin flamed, spitted and kicked too.