How hard was Naxxramas?

[Yig]

I had just stopped raiding for a minute, but my raid team went on to do 40 man Naxx and they seemed to have full sets of the tier gear, at least the warrior tank did.
MOst of the difficulty seemed to be in getting attuned for the the place with 40 other people. But in vanilla, end game for most people was running Stratholme 1000 times in a row with the occasional UBRS run, so a lot of people had the rep for the attunement and just had to pay the gold. It was a long rep run though as I recall if you were new.

---------- Post added 2012-10-21 at 10:56 PM ----------

People like you want all the loot and bosses brought to you on a silver plate. :/

Todays bosses are not that hard, sure its difficult at start now. But like my guild has downed everything up to Elegon on normal, sure thats not big progress compared to hc guilds alrdy but we have cleared 1-2 bosses in 1-2 nights. Only 3 hours raid time. So thats not too long.

In vanilla, even the running back and getting your next pull probably took 15+ minutes. EVEN today running through AQ40 takes quite a long time, maybe 5 minutes to run from cthuns room to the entrance. Imagine CLEARING it at the relevant level and gear.

As ingame character:
In vanilla raiding was an adventure. Today raiding is a job.

Most bosses back then were not hard. MC had a boss that literally just had 2 tanks DPS mobs away from the raid while everyone else zerged the target. It was mostly stuff like that, or having to do something in split seconds to avoid a wipe.

Encounters are much more complicated today on whole.

[Deleted]

Well, remember Naxx25? Was cleared in what, 2-3 days after Wrath release?

Four Horsemen - 25th August 2006
1. Death & Taxes, Korgath US
2. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU (EU First - 28th August 2006)

Sapphiron - 2nd September 2006
1. Death & Taxes, Korgath US
3. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU (EU First - 4th September 2006)

Kel'Thuzad - 7th September 2006
1. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU
2. Risen, Alleria US (US First - 8th September 2006)

( sk-gaming.com/content/16397-WoW_world_first_list )

Cant say exacly how accurate the list is, but it does give some look into how it was

[Varyk]

4 horseman was difficult only for the fact u needed 4 well geared tanks. none of the bosses are extraordinary difficult. nothing in vanilla rly was. the playerbase was just a lot worse than it is now and we didnt have the resources to break down and figure out mechanics like we can now, not to mention a lot of the fights were bugged.

[Deleted]

the playerbase was just a lot worse than it is now

Keep telling yourself that, wrathbaby.

Mod Edit: Infracted, post constructively please.

[Deleted]

Keep telling yourself that, wrathbaby.

Nostalgia is best. By the way, he is right.

[Deleted]

Broken specs, broken classes (Hunters were taken for hunters mark, since it had a melee component with the right talents, Warlocks for the hp buff), simpler game mechanics (You could only have one type of hot per player, ie. 1 renew, 1 rejuv, etc.), some brutal boss mechanics (ie. people getting DC'd on Thaddius' switch).

[Lysah]

It took a Mage 3 minutes to make a stack and a half? How is that possible when it was like a 2.5 second cast? Say there was only 10 per stack vs 20, that's 7.5 seconds to make 30(one and a half stacks) not sure if we were playing the same game or not.

When you make 2 water for half your mana bar things slow down a lot. Mages don't know how good they have it now with portals being free and making entire stacks of food. Some of the QoL improvements since classic would shock a lot of people. What hunters have had to go through to raid between ammo, food, pet food, elixirs, mana potions, scrolls...

Still, in wrath I raided ICC with a guild that was primarily composed of naxx veterans and we couldn't down the Lich King on normal mode with the buff at 20%. I wasn't there for naxx, but if those players were clearing up to KT every week back in the day, and also had years to get better at the game, it couldn't have been that hard =/

[Bathory]

Was pretty easy up until the final bosses of the wings. Thaddius destroyed my guild. Loatheb devastated everyone. Spider wing was easy.

It wasn't that we were WORSE back then, but we were still new. I'm definitely a much better player than I was back in the day, that's for sure.

[Xerra]

Some reason I really liked the idea of resist gear... something about the focus on survival and helping the healer out seemed really satisfying. It feels like nowadays everyone only cares about min maxing and that .001% increase in dps. I liked in the days where my combat rogue with just dalrend's sword set could tear things apart, but at the same time I had to use feint..... that those rose glasses... when feint was on your action bar...

[Lumineus]

Razuvious - even then not a very hard fight

Eh. Don't forget Razuvius had that AoE manaburn that you had to cheese with LoS, making the mind control cycle an even bigger pain in the ass than it already was.

[Peng]

Naxx must have been hard, because KT was only killed once on my server before patch 2.x. For that kill we provided the raid with 40 soulstones from 40 warlocks waiting outside the instance. ^^
It was hard, but what really killed the raids was the announcement of BC´s loot. We had to recruit 20 not so good/pvp players, because so many of our good players were exhausted and quit raiding waiting for BC green epics.

Back then some bosses were tuned to be impossible to kill until new content is ready. Hard? Yes!

[Deleted]

One of the more 'accurate' things you could check with regards to Raiding back in vanilla is to take a peek at WowCrendors 'WoW in a minute' videos on youtube. Yes, they are tongue-in-cheek, but still, raiders can reckognise this...

"So, are we ready to go?"
"There's only 38 people online..."
"*sigh* I suppose we'll have to try again tomorrow."

and

"Does everyone have their resist gear with them?... right... well... Guess we're not doing THAT boss today."

"Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse. Decurse..."

[Cairhiin]

Raiding was way different in vanilla due to the fact that overaggro meant death, and pretty much all bosses were taunt immune and tank threat wasn't that great to begin with. Take Vael for instance, needing 4-5 tanks to hold the right amount of threat so they would get to tank in order when the current MT blew up required practice. However vanilla wasn't as hard as TBC or current heroic bosses; simply because the mechanics of the fights were relatively easy. Just managing 40 people is way harder than 10. Some vanilla fights were crazy though like Twin Emperors.

---------- Post added 2012-10-22 at 10:22 AM ----------

Well, remember Naxx25? Was cleared in what, 2-3 days after Wrath release?

Four Horsemen - 25th August 2006
1. Death & Taxes, Korgath US
2. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU (EU First - 28th August 2006)

Sapphiron - 2nd September 2006
1. Death & Taxes, Korgath US
3. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU (EU First - 4th September 2006)

Kel'Thuzad - 7th September 2006
1. Nihilum, Magtheridon EU
2. Risen, Alleria US (US First - 8th September 2006)

( sk-gaming.com/content/16397-WoW_world_first_list )

Cant say exacly how accurate the list is, but it does give some look into how it was

What are you talking about Wrath Naxxramas? We're talking about vanilla Naxx, as Wrath Naxx was tuned like a joke and didn't compare at all to the original Naxxramas. We cleared Naxx on the first day we were in there in WotLK. It was that easy.

[Deleted]

It took a Mage 3 minutes to make a stack and a half? How is that possible when it was like a 2.5 second cast? Say there was only 10 per stack vs 20, that's 7.5 seconds to make 30(one and a half stacks) not sure if we were playing the same game or not.

Food Summoning got "better" with the levels. First, after you got the spell you summoned 2 pieces, after a levelup it was 4 pieces... 1 oder 2 levels before you got the next spell (you had to buy ranks of spells, not like now), you could summon a full stack.
As far as I remember, Mages got their highest water with 59 or 60, so it was 2 Water per cast. Around 2-3 Casts per Manabar. So it was 4-6 Water minus the one he needed to drink to cast more water.

[Tokru]

The boss abilities were a lot stronger compared to today when you look at them as % of player health.

[SamR]

4H was hard not just because you needed 8 geared Warrior tanks, but it was a really intricate rotation. Not sure how everyone else did it, but we had 3 separate rotations going on involving all 40 people. The DPS had their rotation that focused first on the first 2 guys. The tanks had their rotation going around the room and we had the healers on a slightly different rotation. The difficulty was being able to maintain and recover over a long period as rotations got desynced because of resisted taunts or deaths. It was a very large choreographed dance.

And resist fights suck. They're just a cheap way to nerf everyone's abilities so they wouldn't have to tune the boss super high. I absolutely hated building up a set of gear and min/maxing all the stats only to be forced to put on resist gear and watch as all my regen/heals/attacks/survivability got nerfed to hell. Having to blow wads of gold to enchant a whole set of gear you were only going to use for 1 fight is lame.

[Hellishreaper]

I did raid in Vanilla and managed to get to Sapphiron in Naxx 40.

It was hard back in the day in the sense that it required more players of your raid to actually know what you were doing. If you look at mc, you could have 50% of your raid essentially be auto attacking and you could still clear the place. As you moved up through vanilla raids it required more and more players to do individual jobs. Such as in BWL on chromaggus your entire raid had to know when to attack. Move on to AQ20/40 and your raid had to be doing good dps and not stand in shit. Move to naxx40 and your entire raid had some sort of specialized jobs on some of the final wing fights. Thaddius required 40 people to watch a debuff to not kill everyone, 4H required your entire raid to coordinate multiple bosses at once. Sapphiron required a lot of coordination to be able to survive the mechanics and KT tested a bit of every aspect of the game from add control to heal and dps maximization and positioning.

By today's raids would hey be hard? Probably not. But back when raiding was new and everyone was not playing at the same level was it hard? Yes.

Umm what? they wouldn't be hard by todays standards? is this a joke?
Considering how horrible itemization was in classic coupled with horrendous class design, (most classes literally only had 1 spec that was viable to raid with such as the old philosophy "If you have heal spells you're a healer" and the fact you had to coordinate 40 people.. and there is a reason less than 1% of the population got to do it)
naxx40 was the most difficult raid they ever made because of those reasons, also the attunement was insanely expensive and time consuming.

[Xothic]

What im gathering from this thread is tl;dr, Naxx was hard purely because Vanilla was poorly designed. I can understand that.

[SamR]

Naxx40 would have been a lot easier if we(as Horde) had Paladins, Shaman could bloodlust, HoTs could stack, and we were not so limited on debuff slots.

There are a lot of things which made vanilla raiding hard which isn't reflected in just looking at the encounter itself.

[Durandro]

Umm what? they wouldn't be hard by todays standards? is this a joke?
Considering how horrible itemization was in classic coupled with horrendous class design, (most classes literally only had 1 spec that was viable to raid with such as the old philosophy "If you have heal spells you're a healer" and the fact you had to coordinate 40 people.. and there is a reason less than 1% of the population got to do it)
naxx40 was the most difficult raid they ever made because of those reasons, also the attunement was insanely expensive and time consuming.

Its artificial difficulty.

It would be like only being able to do Mogu'shan Vaults in non-heroic blue gear. Technically possible, but harder then its supposed to be.

If we got Naxx40 with current specs, gear itemisation, flasks and addons... Well, it would be as easy as Naxx25 was.

Actually, I take that back slightly. Naxx25 was undertuned, and some of the fights were really watered down. But it certainly wouldn't feel 'hard' anymore.