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

[Constraint]

It was just completely different, it's comparing apples with goats or something like that.

Mythic 20+ is about constant massive output, clever pulls, using numerous defensives and offensives with synergy, numerous mechanics at the same time etc.

TBC heroics were just completely different. There were SO FEW defensive abilities that it was almost unrecognisable. That's the main thing that people forget. On top of that, 360 degree one-shotting cleaves were not particularly rare. If you stood it in as, say, a Rogue (and it wasn't telegraphed in any way), you were instantly dead.

I mained a Rogue in early TBC, which is why I use them as an example. You had to actually spec into Improved Sap in Sub, something you'd otherwise never get. Otherwise you'd literally have to Sap, then Vanish, or you'd instantly die, as your untalented Sap simply had too short a range to be able to be safely used without half the mobs instantly one-shotting you.

On top of that, some of the mobs were just HILARIOUSLY overtuned. Anyone who did Old Hillsbrad on release knows what I'm talking about. Regular guards on the first trash packs would 2-shot a fully Kara-geared Druid tank. It was really retarded.

Cata? They weren't particularly difficult. Many dungeons were much easier with dedicated CC though. I was a Warlock and early on we ran with an Spriest too, and that was more than enough CC. MC was super strong on some of the pulls, and talented Warlock Fear was enough to survive any pack in any dungeon, even in early blues.

On top of that, it was super easy to gear up in Cata. Gearing up in TBC was a very, very, very long, slow process, second only to Vanilla in that regard.

[kary]

It was just completely different, it's comparing apples with goats or something like that.

Mythic 20+ is about constant massive output, clever pulls, using numerous defensives and offensives with synergy, numerous mechanics at the same time etc.

TBC heroics were just completely different. There were SO FEW defensive abilities that it was almost unrecognisable. That's the main thing that people forget. On top of that, 360 degree one-shotting cleaves were not particularly rare. If you stood it in as, say, a Rogue (and it wasn't telegraphed in any way), you were instantly dead.

I mained a Rogue in early TBC, which is why I use them as an example. You had to actually spec into Improved Sap in Sub, something you'd otherwise never get. Otherwise you'd literally have to Sap, then Vanish, or you'd instantly die, as your untalented Sap simply had too short a range to be able to be safely used without half the mobs instantly one-shotting you.

On top of that, some of the mobs were just HILARIOUSLY overtuned. Anyone who did Old Hillsbrad on release knows what I'm talking about. Regular guards on the first trash packs would 2-shot a fully Kara-geared Druid tank. It was really retarded.

Cata? They weren't particularly difficult. Many dungeons were much easier with dedicated CC though. I was a Warlock and early on we ran with an Spriest too, and that was more than enough CC. MC was super strong on some of the pulls, and talented Warlock Fear was enough to survive any pack in any dungeon, even in early blues.

On top of that, it was super easy to gear up in Cata. Gearing up in TBC was a very, very, very long, slow process, second only to Vanilla in that regard.

TBC heroics were only mildly difficult if you tried to play classes w/o hard cc.
I healed during early TBC and as you said, mage/lock/hunter/spriest were basically instawin comps. Rogues saw more use when they added imp sap baseline. But the other classes? Not till prot paladins became more popular and people got geared.

[Constraint]

TBC heroics were only mildly difficult if you tried to play classes w/o hard cc.
I healed during early TBC and as you said, mage/lock/hunter/spriest were basically instawin comps. Rogues saw more use when they added imp sap baseline. But the other classes? Not till prot paladins became more popular and people got geared.

Yeah that's true. Groups with spammable ranged CC could farm them pretty much from the get-go. It was more bad for hybrids from memory, such as DPS shamans, dps warriors etc.

[Gaidax]

It wasn't anything special, it was mostly a yawnfest apart from initially when nobody knew wtf they were doing. They were mostly long tunnels filled with chorebore trash, not challenging really just time consuming, that's why everyone and their mother ground Mechanar to death, simply because it was short.

Mythic+ is whole lot harder, especially higher levels.

[kary]

Yeah that's true. Groups with spammable ranged CC could farm them pretty much from the get-go. It was more bad for hybrids from memory, such as DPS shamans, dps warriors etc.

Yeah.
And that's why I'd say it's actually totally comparable... because skill wasn't what held you back, it was your class.
Today to do a +20 you actually have to know how to play, how to do damage, how to avoid stuff. Back in TBC, all you really had to know how to do was to keep your symbol cced until they were ready to kill it. Granted that became easier/harder depending on what class you played, that was the general idea.

[SoundOfGuns]

My experience as a healer had been that TBC was fairly allright overall as far as heroics went. Lets say balanced. You needed CC but not to much for one... the bosses were a bit simpler tho because WoW was in its third and fourth year, so... thats a given. Cataclysm i found atrocious. To much required CC, at parts hilariously stupid mechanics that were artificial in order to rise difficulty but only made things very tiring to do... Mythic seems to work better again. Mythic Plus that is. Don't ask me what Mythic level i would compare to TBC Heroic difficulty tho...

[Sencha]

TBC heroics were the hardest dungeon difficulty since the beginning of the game. You had to CC everything and tank could barely take more than 1-2 mobs at a time (before wearing raid gear of course as there is no point doing heroics any more when you start raiding). Good old times.

Cata heroics were easier.

[Deleted]

it was different, the game was very different, the classes were very different, maybe the players too, and ofcourse no LFG tool (for TBC anyway, cata heroics suffered from the already present GO GO GO mentality where CCing something was unheard of)

[Deleted]

Cataclysm heroic dungeons pre nerf were much harder than TBC dungeons. No matter what pace you went and what dps you had, if you didn't cc a few mobs you'd generally get wiped shortly after, whereas TBC dungeons, if you did them slowly, they were pretty easy to do even in pugs.

Mythic 20 is probably on par with Grim Batol HC pre nerf.

[Teri]

They were very awesome back in the day, especially when doing the attunements (before having full tier5/6)

As a mage it was a lot of CC, focus target and whatnot. I liked that better then the AoE fest.

Early Cata heroics were nicely tuned as well albeit somewhat different then TBC's mob tunnels.

Even vanilla dungeons went through multiple iterations of difficulty/loot, first time I did scholomance was actually with a raid (dropped group to loot barov scrolls for a quest), later on they were tuned and tweaked, and of course got much easier by the time you had full epics tier1/2+.

Difference with all this and M+ is it was static difficulty, while M+ scales upwards many times, and random affixes.

Time limits existed in some dungeons for bonus loots (Cata ZA Bear/Shattered halls Executions), but not as advanced as M+.

Blizz recently tweaked a ton of the loot in 1-60 dungeons, added personal loot as well and tweaked many BoE(green+blue) as well, mostly tweaking secondary stats and rings/necks/cloaks (not 100% of items yet), adding also str/int or agi/int to most pieces. So I wonder if we get scaling dungeons or timewalking vanilla, or just a more homogenized loot system 1-120.

[Deleted]

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 had to do shattered hall heroic (one of the hardest TBC heroics) in a limited amount of time though.

Also the number of try required to kill a boss aren't a good indicator of whether an encounter is well designed or not (especially with how random the game became in legion, with RNG procs on top of RNG procs and RNG in bosses mechanics). Vashj required more coordination from the raid than any boss we had in a very long time (actually I think Vashj was the raid encounter in wow that required the most coordination out of the raid).

Cataclysm heroics weren't "hard" but as they tried to artificially induce difficulty in the content and to return to a CC based gameplay, even though they designed and balanced the classes since 3.0 around doing AOE damage and healing, it didn't work out the way it did before 3.0 (where the gameplay was much more single target oriented).

TBC heroics were only mildly difficult if you tried to play classes w/o hard cc.
I healed during early TBC and as you said, mage/lock/hunter/spriest were basically instawin comps. Rogues saw more use when they added imp sap baseline. But the other classes? Not till prot paladins became more popular and people got geared.

TBC heroics were nerfed very quickly (in patch 2.1), allowing more lenient group compositions.

By and large, no. TBC heroics were not mechanically complex, but they were incredibly highly tuned and unforgiving. While executing the tactics for any given encounter was not particularly hard, a single mistake could result in a wipe. This was also often more to do with the trash than the bosses, since tanks had very little ability to generate AoE threat back then. You basically had to focus a single mob and CC as many of the others as possible, ideally only fighting 1-2 at a time if you could. If an ability was resisted, someone messed up their CC, or the tank lost threat for any reason, mobs were liable to run straight for the healer and kill them very quickly. Most CC also couldn't be cast without aggroing packs back then, so it all had to be coordinated to go off at the same time.

People tend to confuse "hard" with "punishing" when they talk about vanilla and TBC encounters. Almost everything since then has been more mechanically complex, but also far more forgiving, both in terms of the risk of a wipe and the amount of time needed to recover afterwards. Part of the perceived difficulty in old heroics and raids was that wiping could take a good 5-10 minutes to recover from every time, sometimes even longer. If you spent too long on an instance then the trash would also start to respawn, meaning that you'd either have to take the time to clear it all over again or call it for the night (as was often the case, since no one enjoyed clearing trash repeatedly).

With groups that had high end gear in late TBC the heroics became a lot easier, particularly if you had a Paladin tank who could generate decent AoE threat. It really was just about your gear and the level of CC/threat you had available to you. High level Mythic+ dungeons these days are *immensely* more complex and challenging than TBC heroics ever were, and infinitely more well designed to boot. It's also worth bearing in mind that most specs, too, are far more challenging to play compared to their TBC iterations.

The TLDR is that TBC gameplay was very simplistic compared to what we have now, but incredibly highly tuned and a lot more punishing by comparison. Basically it suffered from the cheapest and easiest form of difficulty tuning a dev can implement, rather than the challenging-but-fair high-end difficulty we have these days.

Back then wow wasn't about gameplay on a single character perspective but about macro gameplay at the group scale. It is not that the gameplay was "simplisitic" but rather the bulk of it consisted mostly in trying to strategize in order to solve the encounters.

Also, as already said, heroics in TBC were nerfed very quickly (in 2.1, when most players weren't geared as the heroic dungeons loot was better than anything that dripped out of the T4 raids, and you needed to complete the hardest heroic dungeons to unlock part of the T5 tier) and as such very few players got to experience the nightmare that were shattered halls, alcatraz and shadow labyrinth heroic at release.

You re also saying that nowadays specs are harder to play, bu I simply disagree with that statement, as back in the day the main problem was to properly optimize the characters (as stats used to be much more complicated than what we have now) there were far more people doing much lower DPS than they should. Also, back in the day, resources and aggro management was actually a thing to actively monitor.

[kary]

Cataclysm heroic dungeons pre nerf were much harder than TBC dungeons. No matter what pace you went and what dps you had, if you didn't cc a few mobs you'd generally get wiped shortly after, whereas TBC dungeons, if you did them slowly, they were pretty easy to do even in pugs.

Mythic 20 is probably on par with Grim Batol HC pre nerf.

Lol no way.

Farming dungeons like GB pre nerf were about not being an idiot, not having good output. I geared 2 toons to raid level solo queueing as tank/healer at that time.
If we're comparing 7.3 levels of difficulty, launch grim batol would be like doing a +5 with 865 gear.

[Deleted]

TBC heroics were the hardest dungeon difficulty since the beginning of the game. You had to CC everything and tank could barely take more than 1-2 mobs at a time (before wearing raid gear of course as there is no point doing heroics any more when you start raiding). Good old times.

Cata heroics were easier.

No they weren't lol.

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Lol no way.

Farming dungeons like GB pre nerf were about not being an idiot, not having good output. I geared 2 toons to raid level solo queueing as tank/healer at that time.
If we're comparing 7.3 levels of difficulty, launch grim batol would be like doing a +5 with 865 gear.

For me all dungeon content has been easy, that includes heroic tbc and cataclysm dungeons pre nerf. However TBC heroic dungeons had 0 actual mechanics and were much easier to execute compared to heroic cataclysm dungeons which required cc and somewhat brain function to get through it. In pugs, right, I pugged deadmines and grim batol once pre nerf, and we went through 20 people on average per run, that never ever happened in tbc dungeons at their most difficult point, because even at their most difficult point they were just easier mechanically wise.

TBC dungeons : Cc and nuke a target
Cataclysm dungeons : CC, do mechanics and nuke a target.

Not to mention I remember chain pulling half the dungeons in tbc the second week in, we tried that the second week in GB (the entire bridge area, didn't really work out that well lol). Yes, essentially not being brain dead makes dungeons easier, that's a given, but looking back to doing cataclysm heroic dungeons for the first time, compared to tbc heroic dungeons for the first time, I didn't recall we actually had to think about which mobs to cc in tbc dungeons, we just cc'd whatever and it worked out.

[kary]

No they weren't lol.

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Yes for me they were easy, I've never found any dungeon content to be hard. But if you went in pugs in GB Heroic, you generally went through 20 people per run because they all constantly left because it took too long or the cc wasn't being executed.

I played a blood dk at that point.
What's CC?

But I actually knew how to rotate cds and kite so I guess that could carry bads through dungeons. It's been so long but the only dungeon that i remember making me cringe back then was HoO, because it took so damn long.

Replied before your edit, but I totally agree with

TBC dungeons : Cc and nuke a target
Cataclysm dungeons : CC and do mechanics and nuke a target.

M+ is a step up, where you have to cc (may be hard ccs, usually interrupts for time efficiency) nuke target, do mechanics AND do high damage

[cface]

TBC heroics was pretty easy after a few tiers and welfare gear. I would say a +8 with braindead affixes.
It was much harder at the start of TBC though, like very hard. You didn't have a timer so that was a breather atleast.

[tankbug]

The hardest part in TBC heroics for me was getting a spot as a dps warrior, because of the lack of CC. Fear = wipe.

[Deleted]

I played a blood dk at that point.
What's CC?

But I actually knew how to rotate cds and kite so I guess that could carry bads through dungeons. It's been so long but the only dungeon that i remember making me cringe back then was HoO, because it took so damn long.

Replied before your edit, but I totally agree with

M+ is a step up, where you have to cc (may be hard ccs, usually interrupts for time efficiency) nuke target, do mechanics AND do high damage

I kinda wish dungeons would be more like cataclysm pre nerf dungeons again, it felt good doing a smooth clear in random daily q, now it's like a given, you can't really wipe anymore in heroic dungeons, which isn't a bad thing, but I liked the thrill of clearing GB/Deadmines smoothly because you knew what a potential clown fiesta it could become if cc's didn't happen.

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I played a blood dk at that point.
What's CC?

But I actually knew how to rotate cds and kite so I guess that could carry bads through dungeons. It's been so long but the only dungeon that i remember making me cringe back then was HoO, because it took so damn long.

Replied before your edit, but I totally agree with

M+ is a step up, where you have to cc (may be hard ccs, usually interrupts for time efficiency) nuke target, do mechanics AND do high damage

I kinda wish dungeons would be more like cataclysm pre nerf dungeons again, it felt good doing a smooth clear in random daily q, now it's like a given, you can't really wipe anymore in heroic dungeons, which isn't a bad thing, but I liked the thrill of clearing GB/Deadmines smoothly because you knew what a potential clown fiesta it could become if cc's didn't happen.

[Deleted]

TBC heroics was pretty easy after a few tiers and welfare gear. I would say a +8 with braindead affixes.
It was much harder at the start of TBC though, like very hard. You didn't have a timer so that was a breather atleast.

Except after a few tiers and welfare gear TBC heroics were nothing like they used to be when they were relevant in the expansion (they got nerfed, hard). And you did have a timer in shattered hall heroic (if you didn't beat it, you couldn't proceed into tempest keep).

For me all dungeon content has been easy, that includes heroic tbc and cataclysm dungeons pre nerf. However TBC heroic dungeons had 0 actual mechanics and were much easier to execute compared to heroic cataclysm dungeons which required cc and somewhat brain function to get through it. In pugs, right, I pugged deadmines and grim batol once pre nerf, and we went through 20 people on average per run, that never ever happened in tbc dungeons at their most difficult point, because even at their most difficult point they were just easier mechanically wise.

I would have loved to see how you fared in shadow labyrinth heroic, especially on the boss that spawned skeletons and healed himself if you didn't have enough DPS.

[kary]

Except after a few tiers and welfare gear TBC heroics were nothing like they used to be when they were relevant in the expansion (they got nerfed, hard). And you did have a timer in shattered hall heroic (if you didn't beat it, you couldn't proceed into tempest keep).

TK attunement was removed before most people were done with magtheridon. Only the cutting edge guilds actually had to attune for TK. The quests were still there, yes...

I would have loved to see how you fared in shadow labyrinth heroic, especially on the boss that spawned skeletons and healed himself if you didn't have enough DPS.

mages have frost nova. You're gonna have at least 2

[Deleted]

If the question is about cata hcs and tbc hcs the difference is VAST. m+20 are much more difficult specially since the requirement here is to finish in time and the bosses are hard in many ways. In TBC hcs things were different : Bosses were not much of a problem since if tank mechanics were executed the rest of the fight was trivial. Trash packs were the difficult ones were u should coordinate hard hitting targets, cc targets etcetcetc and some pullls were tricky and if not properly done u could end up wiping easily even with BT gear . One more mechanics that would prove tricky for the group could be threat since an undergeared / not skilled tank could end up having locks and mages afking for half the instance .
Anyways what they done with m+ was kinda refreshing and nice however going with timing requirements removes the cc mechanic from the game and well although simpler to form a group it is a nice mechanic lost during the expansions only used in pvp these days ...
But other than that they should try to find a way to make instances work again since there is absolutely no point in running normal and hcs these days ... basically i honestly believe that toons that dinged 110 with 2 hours played through 110 dont run hcs at all.