How hard was Naxxramas?

[Ickler]

i think that the biggest reasons it was hard were:
ppl still didnt know how to play the game
40 ppl was way too much

there are other reasons but these seem to be the biggest (IMO)

This is where you're wrong, at Naxx time at least in any serious guilds players were already very much enlightened about rotations and stat priorities. You seem to be comparing Naxx to Molten Core, where as you could clear MC with 20 people in blues as long as you had a decent enough tank or two... Naxx was different. AQ started it off, but mainly Tanks had to be geared there aswell. This is the reason so many guilds FAILED at Naxx, because they didn't have people who knew how to play the game. That's the big difference. Naxxramas without having abundance of Naxx loot is VERY hard, and enrage timers pre-full Naxx gear was intense aswell.

[mmocfd1b0ab5a3]

http://home.kpn.nl/elikian/WoW/huhu.jpg
http://home.kpn.nl/elikian/WoW/anubrekan.jpg

Epic times!

It was fun, because it was new. Was it hard? Well it was definatly a step up from the previous raids. Also because stuff like Youtube were lot less common, so strategies were not so common amongst all 40 raiders.
Our very first Lucifron and (doggy after him) kills in MC were with 28 and 27 people respectively. You didn't need 40 really. You did in AQ/Naxx.

Also you played for recognition on your server more. Since your server was all that mattered.

There were some really epic moments in there, and I loved every minute of it. Now it's more like an addiction than anything else, and I realise full well that I would hate the game now that I played then. But it is rememberd for me as my best time in wow.
Still a good thing for the game that it's over though.

It was hard because some people like mage in those screenshots didn't care to optimize their character. How hard it's to keybind your ice block or ZG trinket so you wouldn't have to click them.

[Shamanberry]

Naxxramas was hard, not mechanically super hard.. But all-in all it was damn hard. The gearcheks, the retardchecks and the grind made Naxxramas what it is. Simply the hardest content released. Which is proven by statistics.

There was another pretty big factor back then - and that was a total lack of catch-up mechanic. It wasn't so much that nobody could kill the bosses in Naxx, it's that so few people were ever able to even get there in the first place. There was no LFR or normal mode to grind, no dungeons that gave you loot to get you started, no accelerated loot from old instances -- and the DPS checks were just as rough as heroic modes today. As a result, you had a huge barrier for entry. Basically, you had to have most of your raid decked out in gear from AQ40, which in turn required most of your raid to be geared out from BWL and MC. If a new player wanted to start raiding, they had to start at the beginning - and the more tiers came out, the harder and harder it became to find a group that was on the same level as you because there was just more competition. That in turn made it harder and harder for older guilds to recruit to replace people that left, which killed off many of them before they were able to finish and further deflated the numbers of kills.

Long story short: Naxx-40 is a cautionary tale about dividing the player base, not about making instances too hard.

[Doomaz]

This is where you're wrong, at Naxx time at least in any serious guilds players were already very much enlightened about rotations and stat priorities. You seem to be comparing Naxx to Molten Core, where as you could clear MC with 20 people in blues as long as you had a decent enough tank or two... Naxx was different. AQ started it off, but mainly Tanks had to be geared there aswell. This is the reason so many guilds FAILED at Naxx, because they didn't have people who knew how to play the game. That's the big difference. Naxxramas without having abundance of Naxx loot is VERY hard, and enrage timers pre-full Naxx gear was intense aswell.

so i am partially right? ppl failed naxx cuz they did not have enough ppl who knew how to play the game?

not claiming to know much, i played on a private server during that time, i mainly get the info about that time from mikepreachwow.

[mistahwilshire]

This couldn't be more wrong. While the start of TBC and everything up until SWP could be better tuned. The fights itself is some of the best in the game to this day.
SWP however was very well tuned. And I believe it to be the best instance Blizzard ever did release. However offtopic it may be

Stackwell wasn't well tuned at all. Objectively it's one of the worst tuned instances the game has ever had, due to it being borderline mathematically impossible with some raid comps.

All of the difficulty in Vanilla and TBC raiding came from logistics and gear checks. Mechanically the fights left much to be desired.

[Aphrel]

It was the first instance with tight enragetimers. the mechanics was very unforgiving (more unforgiving then todays heroic mechanics.. back in naxx anything you were suppose to avoid whould instantly kill you if you didnt, stuff you had to move out of didnt have a friendly 2-3sec activation time to allow you to complete your cast nd stuff)
naxx was hard not because of complex encoutners or advanced mehanics but simply because it was tuned really hard and was very unforgiving if you made mistakes (similarly to m'uru, wich had the easiest mechanics but turned out to be sunwells hardest boss).

[Ickler]

Stackwell wasn't well tuned at all. Objectively it's one of the worst tuned instances the game has ever had, due to it being borderline mathematically impossible with some raid comps.

All of the difficulty in Vanilla and TBC raiding came from logistics and gear checks. Mechanically the fights left much to be desired.

Why on earth should by any model raids be completable with ALL raid comps? This is just utter nonsense, and well this I guess is what Blizzard was drawn to. And this is why most of the old schoolers have quit. The generalization of everything, the lackluster class feelings and the Lore just being totally neglected in all of the raiding contents. There have been massive discussions and topics about this so let's not get into that. But you can searc it up if you want to SWP only encouraged raid setups that made sense at the time, and encouraged raid optimization. On all levels.

[Skarssen]

If you want to play something mechanically challenging you should aim away from MMO's in my opinion. Try a MOAB or strategy game This is my personal opinion that I feel many, many of the old-schoolers share with me. Hence also why WoW the past years has lost 4 million subscribers.

In every post you have made in this thread, you basically allude to how much more difficult WOW was back in Vanilla, and you admit that very, very few people ever saw much of Naxx, because of both difficulty and all of the associated requirements (attunements, consumables, farming, etc.).

AND then you go out and state your opinion that WOW is losing subscriptions because its "too casual". What you have described in post after post sounds ABSOLUTELY miserable, yet you seem to think people are leaving the game because they no longer have to deal with broken mechanics, retarded amounts of farming, etc. I just can't fathom why anyone would enjoy "playing" the game for hours and hours just to be able to raid and deal with retarded and broken mechanics.

[brunnor]

It's as a lot have already said. The fights weren't "hard" by today's standard, but they were hard for their time. Everyone know what a void zone looks like now. Well they didn't then, majority of the mechanics people see now and are like "that is easy/hard" were new back then. Seeing 10+ black circles in a 20 yard space might seem not a problem now, but when you have even seen a single black circle before and those circles kill you in 2 seconds and give no spawning warning? They are a bit rough.

Just take Klaxxi for example now. Xaril comes down and marks everyone with a color, you then have 30+ seconds to see your color, then another 5 seconds when he casts to react to it. You maybe do that twice in the fight. Jump to Thaddius, you have one less option than you do on Klaxxi but you have 3 seconds instead of 5 and if you are slow or move to the wrong spot you 100% die. On top of that, you do that 10+ times in the fight. All of that while dealing with a VERY harsh enrage timer and heavy tank/ae damage. Klaxxi if you are slow or wrong, you don't always die. Hell, yellow doesn't really even do anything and with most people being spread by default, minus melee, red barely does anything too.

Things we use today to help out weren't there either. Things like WeakAura or accurate boss timers for all abilities, hell dungeon journal for know what the boss even does in the first place without wiping 10+ times to learn all spells. Or WoWhead for giving you a detailed list of bosses and abilities or things like Icy Veins to tell you how to do them, or boss guide videos on youtube.

Are the bosses "hard"? Not really, looking back all mechanics are easy to deal with and come out on top of, but at the time, there was nothing else like it that could prepare you for it. It's like computers/internet/video game systems/cars/ANYTHING from back years ago, it doesn't seem special or hard or fun or new to us now, but back then, it was amazing and mysterious. The internet BLEW 15 years ago, but it was amazing 15 years ago. Now? It's more or less taken for granted anywhere you go. While it is vastly superior to it's former self in terms of useful and accessibility, does that make it better than the internet of 15 years ago?

[LazarusLong]

Of course you can't 40 ppl raid with 25, some mechanics will add way more compexity. And current design won't allow encounters like Loatheb. But last three bosses could still bу quite hard, if properly tuned nowdays.

[Darksoldierr]

It would seem like you took my post personally, for that I apologize.
However, while I didn't raid the newest content in MoP I keep up to date about it. And simply it's casual... I played enough MoP to know that, cleared SoO HC with some old friends (we levelled up started gearing and cleared it within 1 week) same story as it was during Cataclysm, where we cleared Dragonsoul without 1 piece of HC Firelands gear gear after 2 weeks(we started raiding / Gearing 2 weeks before Dragonsoul release). And continued to do so in HC. The story would be the same in the rest of MoP... The prior raids gave zero satisfaction, and let me tell you wether you believe me or not... It's 100% casual, the preparation you have to do before raiding is null and void compared to the old times. It's just not satisfying if you're an old-school hard core player.

You realize you needed several BiS geared BWL / AQ tanks to just do trash in Naxxramas.. Not to mention if they didn't have full consumables they'd just be 1 shot anyways... And full consumables in Vanilla was not buff food and flask... lol It was pots flasks, items, scrolls, elixirs random quirky things you could farm in the world etc.. Buff lines on a tank in vanilla was 30+ buffs, and Flask ontop of that..

In vanilla consumables such as flasks for tanks was 100% must even when in full T2 and farming BWL.
If you didn't bosses like Broodlord and Chrom would just 1 shot tanks. And a flask wasn't simply 10 min farming and you got it, a single flask farmed by 1 person if all herb nodes were up still took 60-70 minutes. Not to mention you had to be in Scholomance to make the flasks, at an alchemy table...
Twin emps, could hit a tank for a clean 10k hit.. (generally tank would be left with 300 hp after one of these if he was Decked out).
Naxx was harder, even trash could do that there.. It's simply something you can't talk about if you haven't experienced it.. Being a healer in Vanilla was A RUSH. Not like today's mindless spammfest. You had to manage mana at a superb level, Time heals avoid overhealing and make sure there was ALWAYS a heal in the air for the tank.. Doing so without spamming your brain out.
Using Pots, CD's, Felwood herbs, Demonic / Dark runes etc all to make sure you didn't run OOM. As priest, time heals to always have 1-2 seconds of while not casting regen etc was a must in certain fights.

Both in AQ and Naxx if you pulled trash and healers didn't already have heals in the air when the mobs reached the tank it was generally a wipe. The same if tanks didn't instantly get aggro from the one who pulled. Several trash packs required 3-4 tanks and CC targets. If CC was off, or if one of the tanks didn't pick his add the tank who then got this one would just die. It was extraordinary in the full extent of the word Glorious if you will.

As a Resto Shaman from UBRS till Naxx, i couldn't have said better the healing part

[Kesolovac]

All paladins were healers. The rest were retardins, the whole spec made no sense. Also, paladins topped healing meters through downranking their heals. FoL and holy light (rank 2 and 4 I believe) would be manapositive at some point in AQ (AQ geared). So paladins never ran oom.

Also the greater blessings were introduced before naxx for sure.

And in PVP all paladins could play shockadin (so they didn't have to offspec which wasnt that easy back then) half holy/ half ret. It would be like this:

- Heart of Hakkar
- stun (for extra JoC dmg).
- white hit with hopefully SoC dmg.
- pop the 100% certain holyshock crit spell
- holy shock
- iron grenade (stun for extra dmg)
- JoC.
- White hit with hopefully SoC dmg.
- hammer of GG which was added sometime in Vanilla (when paladin got their class review).

That would take off a good 60% from a naxx geared tank let alone your average player in MC epics. And the rest of the time you would be a pretty much unkillable healer with the true bubble, a melee bubble, good blessing of freedom, decurse.
So you could basically go into AV with your warrior mate and heal him forever, if anybody would thought it was smart to attack you, you would basically mess him up so he wouldn't do that again. It was pretty fun once you had the gear. Remember that in Naxx dropped offset pieces exactly for this playstyle? And the AQ and BWL gear wasn't too bad for it neither.


Also, anybody still remember that shard (meteor) trinket from AQ when it would still benefit from spellpower? It was only for a few weeks but it blew people up with the heart of hakkar trinket haha.

[Unproven]

just to add to the pvp aspect.
having full pvp gear (the blue) as the epic ones where for higher ranks and took ages to get - would equeal (if i remember correckt) full tier 1.
thus folks getting tier 2 - 2.5 and 3 would also be godlike in pvp simply due to dmg + healt being that much higher.

[Drithien]

I think if TBC were released today it'd be a laughingstock.

I think you mean crying-stock. The vast majority of raiders, wannabe-raiders, and most importantly the pseudo-pros (the people that religiously follow what the actual pros chew and spit out, pretending afterwards that their xy/xy completed in heroic mode using other people's tools, theory-crafting, tactics, etc, somehow makes them awesome) would raise quite the storm due to the obscene, by today's standards, amount of dedication required to be successful in such raiding content.

If vanilla were released today the room would go quiet and angry game nerds would nervously walk up to Blizzard and say "are you feeling alright? Maybe you should see someone..."

Likewise for raiding, just amplified, since classic was the time of "wild" expectations. Crusade is quite the streamlined version of classic even with its excesses.

But here is the problem: you don't seem to get it: you can't take things out of context and then say that they don't work. Even more, concerning time-specific matters, you can't take things as they were in their time, bring them to the present and claim they don't work. That's illogical.

Classic wouldn't work in the present? Why not?

In raiding having each class-specialization combination being its own thing would work wonders. Players in general complain often about homogenization. How would Classic's approach not be good in this case? And remember, all the unused, in raiding, specializations were so either because some specializations were meant for PvP mostly, or the developers didn't have enough time to finish them before the game's release, since it was planned for it to coincide with WarCraft's tenth anniversary, and afterwards were too busy maintaining and fixing a quite unfinished game to go back and finish that particular area. But what was there was actually, class-by-class, spec-by-spec, quite unique.

Gearing was more interesting as well with far less streamlining. Instead of having gear landing on your lap in each tier, best-in-slot was scattered throughout, forcing you to think and search. Almost each attribute contributing somehow was far more interesting than the increasingly-arcady attribute system we have nowadays, were gearing fixes itself and it's mostly by the developers' oversight that any interesting gearing options occur. What is so much better about the boring gearing of nowadays?

Similarly for pretty much every aspect of raiding: Classic was far more sandboxy and because of that interesting. It had two faults: there wasn't enough time to finish end-game content properly, or even most of the specializations; and there wasn't anything for more casual gameplay. But the complexity was amongst the best it could be for that time and, it had the added advantage of producing a raiding system that awarded dedication, not just copying a handful of truly high-performance guilds, essentially cheating your way to the beating of a tier. At a time when there were next to no strategy guides, gearing lists, boss tactics were kept secret, and you had to spend a large amount of time to just be able to step into a raid-dungeon, you were as good as you could manage on your own, not boosted by the internet and your array of I-play-the-game-for-you add-ons.

So please, can we stop with the silly "if Classic/Crusade/Whatever-past-expansion/game was released today..." rhetoric? It doesn't have a leg to stand on. Obviously if a game with Classic's philosophy was released nowadays, from Blizzard, it would include most, if not all, of the game-design advancements that have come to be ever since. It's the philosophy people are arguing, not the level of advancement; of course and now things are more advanced.

PS: And considering that Classic's main selling point was its world, and the leveling taking place in it, if there was to be another Classic: six main campaigns, mulitple mini, side and neutral campaigns, over almost 30 zones, offering an immense, compared to the expansions, amount of content and variety; it would have quite the chance to be a hit, the likes of which the current iteration can't even think of. Skyrim did exactly that and look at the sales, even with piracy taking away from them.

[Gangplank]

Hmm, why are we resurrecting a 2 year old post?

[Vermicious]

Naxx in Vanilla was so tough I never even heard about it until WOTLK came out. True Story.

For the necro OP: tl;dr

[Hecz]

Soooo many vanilla players complain about modern raiders not knowing the difficulty of classic raids but haven't raided in years and certainly haven't experienced heroic raids.

[Deleted]

Wtf is the point of necroing a thread from two years ago?

[Bathory]

Naxx was pretty damn hard.

[Seditian]

Necro-thread btw

First of all, why are you necro'ing a thread and even brag about doing so? Secondly, if you think the mechanics were harsher than in the current World of Warcraft, you're delusional.