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

[Soon-TM]

So in other words if you did everything correctly it was easy. Shocking

That was precisely my point

[Chaelexi]

The DPS and idiot check mechanics checks in +20 are what makes it hard. There is not other real issues with the rest +20. Cata was difficult unless you had a Paladin tank because you would have to manage your CC's and agro on trash, for the most part the bosses were the easy part(take away a few fights where you have to be cautious of mechanics). Cata heroics added more incoming party wide damage so it was on the healer to be smart and aggressive at the same time, it separated the reactive healers from the good proactive/aggressive healers that could still manage mana. As a DPS the only things you had to worry about still was am I on the right target and do not break CC's.

IN the end Cata.TBC dungeons were all on the tanks.

[Softbottom]

The big issue I remember when Cata heroics when they first came out is healers were struggling. There was a significant increase in party damage and some healers struggled with keeping people topped up and not running out of mana. The few randoms I ran that seemed to always be the issue. Within guild I don't recall ever having any issues because the players in my guild were good players.

[kary]

The big issue I remember when Cata heroics when they first came out is healers were struggling. There was a significant increase in party damage and some healers struggled with keeping people topped up and not running out of mana. The few randoms I ran that seemed to always be the issue. Within guild I don't recall ever having any issues because the players in my guild were good players.

Yolo tanks from WoTLK didn't know how to watch healer mana.
I guess that's why I never had issues, gotta enable resources on your raid frames

[Softbottom]

Yolo tanks from WoTLK didn't know how to watch healer mana.
I guess that's why I never had issues, gotta enable resources on your raid frames

I think that was also a huge problem. WoTLK heroics were a joke. You literally could run through them and pull 2-3 packs at a time. That was suicide in Cata heroics

[Justpassing]

Well in TBC warriors were the tanks and shield wall had a 30 minute cooldown. So take it from there.

[Aestholus]

The biggest difference is that today mobs don't respawn in dungeons.

[ShimmerSwirl]

+20 > TBC > Cata

It's laughable that anyone can claim that TBC heroics were harder then a +20. TBC depended on CC for most dungeons. CC a few mobs kill the others then kill the CC. It was tedious, not incredibly hard.

This is greatly oversimplifying things. In TBC there were far fewer CC options, and CC was much more creature-type specific. If you had the absolutely perfect group comp for a specific dungeon, then things could go fairly well. If you were lacking certain CC, it was extremely difficult. And even with proper CC things were much harder. CC broke more often, aggro was a much bigger deal, most clothies would be one shot by any dungeon mob if they pulled aggro for any reason.

[flam]

I don't understand why everyone keeps saying warriors were the only tanks in TBC... I remember rolling my face on my keyboard with my paladin and laughing my ass off how easy it was to keep threat AoE style

[Deleted]

+20 > +2 > BC > Cata, in order of difficulty.

[CostinR]

Very early on when they were quite bugged and much of the gear was crap they were far more difficult then either Mythic 20 or Cata heroics, heck they were more difficult then raids, but that was very early on. I experienced that, you never forget the Felguards in Shadow Labs, the Gladiators in Shattered Halls or the Bog Giants in Underbog....or the naga guards that dual wielded with their SHIELDS in Slave Pens.

Once the bugs were fixed and item balance improved then they'd be easier then current Mythic 20, but not easier then Cata Heroics.

[ro9ue]

I prefer BC heroics. Not because they were 'harder', but they provided a different type of challenge.

Mythic + Dungeons are objectively harder because you can just keep upping the difficulty and there's really no ceiling.

My problem with Mythic+ is it's speed based.

For BC heroics, it was more about finding a group of friends and each person building their characters to handle all of the proper crowd control and aggro management. The strategy was in building your character (I remember taking some sap talent as a rogue back in the day), having friends you played with where you built your groups around certain classes, and then cautiously pulling each pack of mobs, applying CC and learning how to handle adds or broken crowd control.

The nice thing about it though was that you could take breaks in between pulls, take a piss, eat dinner, etc.

There definitely was a point though when you were grinding badges that you just learned how to do Mechanar in the quickest way possible and run it over and over.


For Cata dungeons, they had 1 shot mechanics and just massive hp/dmg numbers, but the community already was trained to not CC from Wrath so it was a mess. You had some groups CCing shit (those who had BC xp and had CC on their action bars), but the problem was most tanks just charging into a pack expecting it to melt like in Wrath.

[kaelleria]

Man, the nostalgia shit is always so out of control on this board, but this one might just take the cake. Fucking TBC dungeons harder than +20? That's got to be some baiting.

20+'s are about sustained dps, hps and knowing mechanics/pulls. TBC heroics at launch had 360 degree cleaves that would one shot a melee. TBC heroics were also required to unlock Magtheridon's Lair. M+ is not. You know that person in your guild who kind of fails their way through raids? Guess what, they need attunement too.

When you enter a high level M+ you're probably going to be appropriated geared for the dungeon. In TBC, people were in blues and greens on heading into heroics for the first time or epics from vanilla. Consumables hadn't been normalized yet, so it wasn't uncommon to see a flask, 2-3 elixirs, spell oil, etc...

The lack of gear available, blatantly unfriendly mechanics, and the requirement to do so made TBC launch heroics much worse than TBC or high level M+.

Post fix, TBC dungeons were not hard. Neither were cata heroics though either.

[Halicia]

BC and Cata heroics weren't difficult because of the dungeons, but because of the supporting technology (or lack thereof).

I remember somewhat fondly "healing" the daily heroic in BC as a shadowpriest... often because the dungeon chosen for the day was a bad one, and it was like pulling teeth trying to find any volunteers to tank or heal for the daily heroic if it wasnt Ramps.

Cata was awful because of the dungeon queue feature... I was still maining shadowpriest at that point, and at one point I waited over an hour. LITERALLY.. over an hour... for a dungeon as dps... because, you know... I was comfortable as dps and didn't want to heal. I got kicked from the group of total randoms, because the guy that waited in queue as heals for a fraction of the time I did decided he wanted to dps... and instead of booting the moron that exploited the queue, they boot me because my shadowpriest heals wasn't enough to keep the group alive.

And then there was the tankdrop issue.

[Alvito]

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



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.

That came down to ignorance and lack of easily found and common knowledge. People not understanding hit caps, mp5/spirit. You still see some of this now it just isn't as damaging.

[huth]

And people would learn to play Heroics again if they made a return to such "mechanics".

Especially considering one simple fact: lots of people playing today, played back then as well. They wouldn't suddenly have forgotten everything they learnt about the game since. People whom don't remember things like CC and threat management, would learn out of necessity.

No, they would whine about it until it gets nerfed back to current levels. Just like they did in Cataclysm.

[Lanfear1]

Early on and in blues (ps some dungeons were just easy):
Tbc: Easy mechanics, really hard gear check. Fun then, everyone was shit and you had to focus.
Cata: Semi hard (I guess) mechanics, some harder then others, fairly hard gear check. Fun then, people were better, you had to focus.

Bonus: Warloards CM: Harder then heroic raids. Many were impossible with certan healers and classes in general (note: early on). Healers could oom on one mob pull if non tanks took too much aoe damage. Every? boss fight like a raid. Suuuuuper fun. Damn I miss those dungeons. Hope they use the same gear scaling in next expantion.

[kaelleria]

That came down to ignorance and lack of easily found and common knowledge. People not understanding hit caps, mp5/spirit. You still see some of this now it just isn't as damaging.

It's also much easier to gear up than it was in vanilla and early TBC.

[Nihilan]

I mained a Resto shaman back then and i still remember getting a whisper after a successful pug of Shattered Halls where the Druid tank thanked me for a smooth run and commented that that was the first time she'd ever been on a deathless run of that instance.

Anyone remember having to use shadow resistance potions on Pandemonius (Mana Tombs iirc) because he did shadow melee dmg that ignored armor and completely shit on tanks? DPS CC being mandatory for survival? Healers having no choice but to chain mana pots and downrank spells while desperately trying to be efficient in order to avoid the dreaded oom.

Hell, if you wanted to tank Heroic 5mans as a paladin you had to get that ax from Kara just so you could throw it and pull from range. They did not have any other means of pulling single mobs that wouldnt break the cc of nearby mobs and get everyone murdered.

Well geared Prot Warriors had to remove their pants in order to drop their passive mitigation to the point where they wouldnt block/avoid every attack and be completely rage-starved.

Nowadays, if the run doesnt go flawlessly and or takes more than 20 mins, everyone is bitching at everyone else and pointing fingers.

[Cheze]

most of the reason BC heroics (and raids for that matter) were difficult was lack of information; addons were less developed, players were less experienced, no dungeon journal, video guides weren't really a thing yet, etc. Also lots of classes lacked the kind of utility (CC, stun, interrupt etc) needed for some dungeons.

In 'absolute' terms they were absolutely easier though; no time limit, simple encounters, DPS checks nonexistent, etc. If you could somehow grab an average player from 2007 and sit them down in front of the modern game they'd barely be functional