I don't think people realize how easy the raids will actually be.

[Dangg]

Current mechanics and class optimization have absolutely nothing to do with Vanilla WoW. It's an entirely different game. Boss mechanics were the least of your issues back then. Resource management (mana, primarily), threat management...these were real things back then that anyone who started in Wrath or beyond know virtually nothing about.

And class optimization? I don't know what optimization you think existed back then, but it was practically nil. Everyone knew the optimal talent builds for their class (or anyone who raided regularly did, anyway). There wasn't an embarrasment of epic gear coming from multiple sources to choose from where you could go "Do I want this purple item with obscene stats, or this purple item with slightly different obscene stats?" No, it was "Do I want this blue chest with +10 damage, or this blue chest with +25 fire res?". Guess what? You probably needed both depending on

People who actually raided in Vanilla back then will have an easier time now progressing it. Already did the fight and strat is known. What's there to disagree?

Many players did not know the optimal build or had a clue about stats very early on.

[Daggot Ur]

Big wigs is around since vanilla. All with countdowns, bars, notices. That won´t be new. Other addosn like decursive and the addon that cancelled heals on full targets (forget the name) were broken in classic but were much better for raiding.

And again, mechanics didn´t make the encounter hard nor do the today. It´s all about the numbers. As example look at Trillax now. Compare LFR to normal and HC. There are cakes, you have to eat the cakes. LFR? Doesnt matter. Normal? Doesnt matter. HC and mythic? wipe. Same with Maiden. In normal a side fucks up and you have 10 bombs? Doesn´t matter.

And then we have some bosses in vanilla with pretty hard numbers (DPS Check nefarian in Progress, mana/DPS on Patchwerk, Fire Rain on the widow, etc). On farm you can carry people like you can carry them now. In Progress with the slow gear Progression you dont want to do that.

And on top of all that, you had such a limited toolkit to deal with the mechanics. On alliance side our only AoE heal came from a priest. Pally/druid AoE healing was nonexistent. You had bosses like Veal, Huhuran with big AoE, so you better had priests. Onyixa/last boss spider wing with Fear/Stun on the heals while the boss continues damage? Put hots on the tank. Oh wait, only one set of hots could be on the tank. On nefarian we couldn´t even put hots on the tank because there was a limit on buffs. Hot the tank, flask falls off.

It is a hoax, that it was so easy and progress only took so long, because there were no addons and people were bad. In fact there were addons so OP they had to be broken and Elitist Jerks were around in classic too. So the knowledge of the game was pretty big back then. Progression was slow, because the toolkit was limited and outgearing wasn´t a thing. My prediction is, that the progress will be faster, but it will take month until we see Naxxramas clears.

100% agree with you good Sir. I'd just like to add that only those top guilds will be able to clear it fast - as for the rest it will be much slower than that. The game will be both challenging (if you try to rush) and acceptable (if you do it slowly) at the same time.

[kenoathcarn]

People who actually raided in Vanilla back then will have an easier time now progressing it. Already did the fight and strat is known. What's there to disagree?

Many players did not know the optimal build or had a clue about stats very early on.

ass loads to players who were raiding back in vanilla were not clueless and/or bad players, there was years and years of prior experience taught by previous games(EQ, DAoC, lineage etc.)

There were allot of VERY experienced players in vanilla, not just the newbies who didn't know how to keybind or seeing an mmo for the first time.

The sheer effort of the pre-raid prep will put allot of people off from even trying, Those that do try will likely find that it doesn't matter how good you are when maths just isn't on your side and you need to progress past gear checks and not just skill checks.

[Wallmaker Yahzarah]

This isn't mean to be a "shit" post to Vanilla WoW. It has pros that vastly beat current WoW at (vice-versa as well).

I just wanted to quickly talk about this (before I go to bed too), because I know many are expecting awesome stuff from classic return. Dungeons, quests, slow leveling, the RPG aspect (basically the whole jazz) will be fun to return to. I do however, want to touch upon the raiding. I think the main reason why Vanilla raiding was so "fun and challenging" was because, for the most part, the game was new and people were new to this kind of stuff. It was a different game.

Preparing for raids, the farming, the 40 peoples, and so forth, were the hard part. The actual content, was never difficult. There was a post sometime ago by a fella here (He was from paragon world top guild, so he can vouch (hopefully)) that he actually thought that all of this content was doable with 20 players and the other 20 doing warm body stuff (standing there, being there for mechanics and so forth). And he said this for Sapphiron. Now imagine that when all 40 people are actually decently skilled, and have knowledge on the mechanics of vanilla wow raiding. Threat meters, debuff limits, rogues taking off poisons, all that jazz... It won't be too much.

The MC rehash that Blizzard did back in 2014 wasn't much of a success or a good incarnation and it's only because they dastardly overtuned the living crap out of it. I think Tanks were almost able to get 1 shotted at the time during the event (I died to a single hit from Ragnaros -_-).

Only wanted to add to this, but don't be surprised that once people get to 60, guilds start forming, raids get cleared quickly. As Noxious said, the real challenge will be the leveling and dungeons, while the raiding will be the part where easy stuff can happen.

It was never the difficult of the raiding, that was never was a consideration up until C'Thun and its mechanics. The difficulty behind raiding in vanilla, is having enough people out of the 40, who actually knew how to dps and sustain(IE heal, and manage buffs).

[Queen of Hamsters]

Nope, see my sig.

Classic and Classic raiding = only for the hardcore, pro players of today. Classic was an MLG-factory and never allowed anyone to succeed lest they were extremely pro.

/s, if it's not clear.

Can't wait for the servers to come out, although I suspect there will be a lot of vitriol going on anyways between purists and other groups. Opening Pandora's box is fun!

[jackofwind]

We actually do know.

/char

[judgementofantonidas]

Raiding will be a joke because 1) our current addons are OP AF and are much more advanced than addons used back in Vanilla, so they will carry hard 2) mechanics of raid bosses in Vanilla are a joke compared to current 5 man dungeon bosses

yeah. they should definitely roll back addons as well if they wan the true vanilla experience................

[Varitok]

We know. I don't know a lot of people personally who are in it for the raids. Most are in it for the leveling.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Yea. People have this fantasy that Vanilla raids were far harder than today (probably just taken from the stories of the overturned C'thun fight). Sure prepping pots, res gear and gathering 40 people was time consuming but bosses were nowhere near as complex as today's.




But that's exactly what has taken away from the excitement of raiding over time for some of us. It was a great feeling killing bosses without the 'great now I need to kill it on another difficulty' feeling. For me that's nothing to do with a 'pure vanilla stance' I'd be happy with live if there were only one or max two raid difficulties.

Right but when that one difficulty is somethign that takes 5 attempts to kill for the first time does that really apply? Maybe the best option is to just buff the fuck out of raids so they are actually hard.

[Caliph]

I don't think they'll be that difficult either but BWL was still tough after MC no? I mean was there any other "guild breaker" boss since? How bout Patchwerk he broke some guilds.

I think there'll be a lot less wiping than original vanilla for sure as we all know not to stand in stuff etc. the tough part will be getting people used to using their aggro dumps properly.

[Deleted]

A proper incarnation of vanilla won't be compatible with current addons. The API has drastically changed over the last decade and a half.

and there will be a TON of new addons that never existed back then...

Like the one that had to be broken in WotLK (can't remember the name, was drawing in the open world for everyone)
Weak Auras/ better dbm just out of my mind

[Racthoh]

it's the prep work that drains you not the mechanics of the raid. everything just take a long ass time to set up.

[Tabrotar]

Will be glorius to see the first threads open with: My pala can´t do anythinf and the buffs only last for 5 minutes all i do in a raid is buffing.

Or similar things like only a set amount of debuffs on the boss certain speccs not available for raiding because almost all the enemys have resistance against a certain damage type and so on.

[Racthoh]

A proper incarnation of vanilla won't be compatible with current addons. The API has drastically changed over the last decade and a half.

we don't know if the api will be rewritten or not, although it seems likely. they might even do something to prevent more modern addon functions to block things like weak auras and group finder. although there's already a backport of oQueue in development called vQueue. which i heavily suspect will recieve even more development as soon as the classic server is released.

[Eurhetemec]

There was a post sometime ago by a fella here (He was from paragon world top guild, so he can vouch (hopefully)) that he actually thought that all of this content was doable with 20 players and the other 20 doing warm body stuff (standing there, being there for mechanics and so forth).

You don't have to be "world top guild" material to know that.

Anyone who played Vanilla and was reasonably realistic and in a fairly advanced raiding guild knew that. I mean, we used to say more or less precisely that in the guild I was in, in Vanilla - you basically needed 25 people playing and 15 just standing around - 20/20 seems entirely viable.

It was part of the charm, of course - at least 5 people in the raid would be talking shit at any given time, and amusing us all, even though they were typing way too much to play properly. Other people would be fucking up, or half-asleep and so on. And we were the top guild for progression on our server in Vanilla.

But yes if you have 40 people actually playing well, even with shit gear and not having farmed properly and so on, they're going to fucking MURDER the Vanilla bosses.

we don't know if the api will be rewritten or not, although it seems likely. they might even do something to prevent more modern addon functions to block things like weak auras and group finder. although there's already a backport of oQueue in development called vQueue. which i heavily suspect will recieve even more development as soon as the classic server is released.

That's be totally fake though. You absolutely could have had WA and so on, it's just that people didn't. It wasn't because the functionality wasn't there, though. The Vanilla implementation of LUA was VASTLY MORE POWERFUL than modern LUA. You could do 10x more with it. You could access a million things that got banned in TBC and Wrath.

So what they really need to decide is either have modern LUA, which is limited but well-supported by addons, or revert to some earlier version of LUA, which is OPAF, but maybe not as well-supported initially.

[Count Zero]

Weak Auras by itself will solo all the raids

[kenoathcarn]

Right but when that one difficulty is somethign that takes 5 attempts to kill for the first time does that really apply? Maybe the best option is to just buff the fuck out of raids so they are actually hard.

I actually think what they tried in HFC was a noble effort to capture some of the essence of vanilla/tbc raids, Where there was a scaling difficulty between the first few bosses, middle bosses, and end bosses. But i just can't see it ever working without removing LFR/normal/heroic/mythic and just having one.

its probably one of the biggest draws for classic wow for me, It just flowed so much better.

killing earlier(easier) bosses -> more loot(making harder bosses easier) -> repeat

It actually had a sense of progression. killing Normal/Heroic bosses on live a minimum of like 6 times before i even see the mythic version really kills the experience for me.

[Eurhetemec]

I don't think they'll be that difficult either but BWL was still tough after MC no? I mean was there any other "guild breaker" boss since? How bout Patchwerk he broke some guilds.

I think there'll be a lot less wiping than original vanilla for sure as we all know not to stand in stuff etc. the tough part will be getting people used to using their aggro dumps properly.

BWL will not be tough. We were the first guild on the server to clear it and we were maybe 25 people actually playing and 15 people just fucking around.

AQ40 similarly.

Farming resist gear and potions may be an issue of course.

Patchwerk broke guilds because Naxx was the first raid in WoW that didn't let about half the raid just be fucking around. You needed "all hands on deck". Any/all normal, modern raid bosses need that, even on Normal (at appropriate gear levels), but when Patchwerk hit it was shocking and strange to actually require all players to play.

- - - Updated - - -

It was never the difficult of the raiding, that was never was a consideration up until C'Thun and its mechanics. The difficulty behind raiding in vanilla, is having enough people out of the 40, who actually knew how to dps and sustain(IE heal, and manage buffs).

You seriously only needed about 25 actually playing decently in my guild's experience and we were the best fucking guild on the server lol.

Until you got to Naxx.

[tss]

I raided on Nost and while yes, the raiding content was relatively easy (save for coordination checks like Chromaggus which is really reminiscent of Maiden and Avatar on mythic in that respect IMO), people went overboard with consumes and world buffs and we also had the Naxx-level PVP gear due to an oversight. I don't think most middle-of-the-road raiders (your normal and heroic crowd) are necessarily going to be going into MC/BWL/ZG/AQ20 fully stacked with consumes (flasks especially), Dire Maul tribute buffs, Ony buff and so on, on top of disallowing suboptimal support specs like DPS shamans and paladins. I think the difficulty of the content is both being undersold and oversold in certain ways.

[kenoathcarn]

and there will be a TON of new addons that never existed back then...

Like the one that had to be broken in WotLK (can't remember the name, was drawing in the open world for everyone)
Weak Auras/ better dbm just out of my mind

This isn't really true, Most of the newer broken addons were because the Lua API was opened up to expose more data to addons, If the vanilla experience is authentic then there will only so much you can do with addons.

For example, you cant have a "better dbm", bosses in vanilla dont have abilities that trigger on timers, they just have abilities, and those abilities have cooldowns, all you can do is track that the ability is able to be used, not when it will be used.

Weakauras cant read data that isn't exposed by the API

For example, Radar was only possible after 6.0.2 (WoD) because they added the UnitPosition API (see https://wow.gamepedia.com/API_UnitPosition)

Stuff like this will not work in vanilla because they simply were not possible.