Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?

[lolo855]

People often confuse difficulty with being time consuming. Leveling was slightly more difficult in vanilla, instanced content not really. Most of the difficulty in vanilla relates to how time consuming the preparation was. Mechanically it wasn't very difficult.

I do think WoW has made a mistake with the super accelerated leveling in the game, and the speed at which you can do things now, it makes it all feel trivial. It took a lot of time to get a full resist set together in vanilla, if you need to pick up gear to run some specific content now it doesn't take very long at all.

Leveling slighlty more difficult ? slightly more time consuming ?

Took me 20 day's to lvl my first char to 60.

Took me about the same to level 10 more to 90.

Leveling gear, LFD, the new skills and talents system and all the xp buffs you can get makes leveling so damn easy these day's.
Which isn't a bad thing btw, I had my hard time leveling, now I am fine with how it is !

[vesseblah]

Wow. Just letting you know you really mind fucked me at how retarded this statement was.

It's still the truth even if you're dumb enough to not realize it.

[Deleted]

Vanilla wás hard. Anyone saying that it wasn't, did not play in Vanilla or had massive experience in other mmo's before.

WoW is my first mmo and almost my first pc game. Warcraft III was my first. I was a veteran on Atari/NES/SNES/Playstation 1 and 2 before that period.

I am now 34 years old.

Why do I feel that Vanilla was hard?

- it was new to many people (the mmo genre which included raids)
- the massive grind to be prepared to actually raid (BiS blue items/food/potions/flasks/elixirs/scrolls/tubers/enchants/Resistgear)
- the lack of decent skills in your spellbook

This last one here is very important. People who either played Vanilla forget this easily it seems. And people who did not play Vanilla assume that the skills and talents they have now are the same or about the same as they have now. Which could not be further from the truth.

And then we have skills that almost no one ever used. Personally speaking, I tought myself to learn how to Blessing of Protection (it was called a Blessing indeed not Hand) or Blessing of Salvation or even Blessing of Sacrifice until Karazhan. Sure I popped it here and there but I did not really see way to properly cast it at the right time. There were hardly afaik any addons that told me who had agro. There were agro addons (meters) but they weren't 100%. Also people who overagroed, were looked badly upon. Atleast this was so in my first guild I joined. This meant that people made damn sure they never overagroed. After Vanilla I made my own and wanted people to overagro so I could pop Blessing of Protection/Salvation/Sacrifice a lot more = more dps on the boss/trash and/or better tanks - not sure this formula would have worked in Vanilla though.

to continue my list

- idiotic short Blessing of Wisdom/Might/Kings timers (5 min - and you had to cast it per person in the raid = 40x, which took about 2 minutes = 3 minutes of play time and then redo the 40x again)
- idiotic long cooldowns on save mechanics like Lay on Hands or Divine Intervention (1 hour cooldown) which meant you never used them because "what if X happens next?"
- mobs in dungeons/raids were set so that once you killed a pack, you could not really move forward a lot without pulling yet another pack, especially in 5 mans

This made Vanilla harder a lot.

It was also harder to make a group then we do now. People on these boards yell left and right that it was horrid. I never had any issues making a group whatsoever. Probably because I was in a very decent guild. Which had a reputation for success in dungeons/raids. Which meant people wanted to join because they knew it would be succesful. And how did they know it would be successful? Because they saw people with extraordinary gear in Iron Forge. Or they had a friend who went in before with that guild. Word of Mouth was very powerful back then. So I guess you had a hard time only if you were in an asshole guild (those existed too) or you did not join a guild or keep track on what guild was successful on your server. You probably did not take the effort to grind for a key for UBRS did you? A key usually meant instant invite for such dungeons. I know it was hard to get that key (especially without any knowledge base), but those are ways to get yourself in the spotlight to get an easy invite.

I loved making groups. And due to the long adventure in those dungeons you easily made friends, unless you were an asshole.

On my server you had your:

- proper guilds
- your asshole guilds
- your immature guilds
- elite guilds (I did not say elitist)
- social guilds who liked having a laugh and did not care if you came to the raid with all your gear red.

Bottom line is that there were groups basically for everyone. And you sorta had a stigma if you wore guildtag X. If you had X other people knew what sort of person you probably are, and could avoid or befriend you more efficiently.

Atleast this is how it went down according to my EXPERIENCE. My experience could differ from yours but that does not make it less true.

To come back on how hard it was. Mechanic wise it was not hard, at all. But it was hard vs the spellbook we had - vs the gear/stats we got. People do not realise that there were no 500.000 hp tanks running around. There were tanks who had 4.000/12.000 and could get ONESHOTTED by a boss if they weren't careful of the stars aligned and got a crushing blow or a massive crit. Tanks were not as invincible as they are now. In Vanilla it wás hard to hold agro. It was not for nothing that people could start dpsing the moment there were 2/4 sunder armors on the boss. It was not for nothing that sometimes the tank would yell on TS/Vent to stop dps.

And people who have played Vanilla did not play Naxx 40. If you do not wish to understand or accept that it was hard, you can atleast agree that Naxx 40 was hard as fuck. It was so hard that even people in tier 6 in TBC would have serious issues getting it cleared. Sure Naxx 40 was the raid almost no one saw. But I saw it and I was actually affraid to go inthere. I knew it would be very very hard and based on a lot of random stuff/luck if you will and perfect timing of skills.

Anyway this was my 2 cents. I am not saying that we should go back to Vanilla. It would be insane to do so. If we ever went back to Vanilla or had a Vanilla like server. There had to be major changes to the way things were. Like those blessings and cooldowns and gear.

Vanilla was not hard, most peole were new and didn't really know wtf they were doing - Vanilla was so easy you could kill most bosses with half the dps auto attacking most of the time. The only time Vanilla became difficult was AQ and Naxx, and even still the only real hard part was getting 40 people who were not completely shit together at once.

[arcaneshot]

Haha, where was the difficulity in Cata? It was even easier then Wrath :P
And taking the Difficulty back up now would just make raiders QQ more as they already do, even about Flex raiding :P

The difficulty of Cata dungeons had a lot to do with the fact that many of the bosses and trash were raid-style bosses and trash scaled to 5 mans, where the 5 people were complete strangers and weren't necessarily on the same page with each other.

Similarly so, some of the Heroic bosses in Burning Crusade dungeons really were scaled-down raid bosses (the robot in Mechanar was just like Thaddius), but the difference between that and Cataclysm was a couple orders of magnitude of mechanics associated with them.

[Krommm]

Haha, where was the difficulity in Cata? It was even easier then Wrath :P
And taking the Difficulty back up now would just make raiders QQ more as they already do, even about Flex raiding :P

Except for DS, every single raid of Cata was exceptionally harder than nearly everything Wrath had to offer. (Yogg0/HLK perhaps) There used to be a trend of knowing whether the raids are "easy" or "hard". First tier of MoP was fairly brutal until some nerfs, ToT was a huge step up and Siege regular reminds me of DS as a whole. Killing bosses past 10-15% buffs is obviously trivial which is where most kills from both expansions started rolling in.

edit: Reading responses about dungeons as well. I find it highly amusing that Cata heroics were extremely harder than Wrath heroics at launch, and yet the 5m drake meta for Wrath was much more difficult than the Cata 5m drake meta.

[Megraam]

Haha, where was the difficulity in Cata? It was even easier then Wrath :P

They were talking about 5 ppl dungeons. Cata 5 ppl on 1st week were on par with BC.

[Nobleshield]

The difficulty of Cata dungeons weren't from the dungeons themselves (although most of the trash was total garbage; I don't mind some CC but not every damn pack) but from the fact you were expected to use LFG and group with random people with random skills. The TBC model of hard heroics as a stepping stone to raids falls apart and gets shown for how bad it truly is when you group with random strangers that you can't gauge until you see them in action.

Personally, I think Blizzard drops the ball with heroic dungeons period. I'd rather them do what the original RIFT Experts had: You take the normal dungeon and you add more to it; more bosses, additional areas, even more lore tying it to a raid or even another dungeon. I'll cite one of my favorite dungeons from that game, The Iron Tomb: On normal (it's like a level 17 dungeon, one of the first you do) you have three bosses. On Expert, you have six bosses (two of which are in rooms that are empty on normal) and an entire extra area that opens up after what was the last boss on normal, PLUS it has additional lore that explains why an NPC from that dungeon shows up as a boss in another Expert dungeon.

That sort of approach would IMO make dungeons in general better; the issue is that they still have to be pretty easy because of LFG and because their intention is no longer to be endgame for non-raiders (for better or worse, Blizzard has decided to try and entice everyone to raid via LFR) but as something you want to chain run for points and/or gear to begin raiding. But wait, you say. Then Blizzard would have the old "We don't have enough resources for big raids" anymore, wouldn't they? Perhaps, but also IMO large raids are a bad thing as well. 12 and 14 bosses are just a bit much, and in any event I think they should be separated into multiple raids not one huge instance. To this day I don't understand why Blizzard refuses to have multiple raids per tier outside of the first tier of an expansion. If you capped bosses at say 10-12 (maybe with an extra heroic only boss although I dislike that idea as well), you can split them up into two different raids that are on the same tier level, and IMO that would be infinitely better than a gigantic raid.

[Deficineiron]

I remember a lot of people in heroics being dumb as a brick, though. That's why I had a white, gray, and blacklist. I don't have one now because it doesn't matter, as I either queue with guildies or hop into a queue and get random people I'll never see again.

I agree it wasn't a catchall, but at least the folks who got keys were persistent. Imagine all the players you didn't have to try grouping with.

- - - Updated - - -

The difficulty of Cata dungeons weren't from the dungeons themselves (although most of the trash was total garbage; I don't mind some CC but not every damn pack) but from the fact you were expected to use LFG and group with random people with random skills. The TBC model of hard heroics as a stepping stone to raids falls apart and gets shown for how bad it truly is when you group with random strangers that you can't gauge until you see them in action

one thing to add to this pertinent point - there was no real party leader in LFG - you get stuck with a jerk or someone who doesn't know how to run with marked pulls/cc, you may very well be unable to remove them as well.

One nice exercise is to imagine TBC having had LFG for tbc heroics with only an ilvl gating mechanism, say 110 avg or so. It would have been an identical outcome - mass nerfing of content to the brain-dead level because otherwise lfg couldn't reliably complete it. hell even picked player pugs with a few randoms often couldn't finish even easier ones.

[Deleted]

Leveling slighlty more difficult ? slightly more time consuming ?

Took me 20 day's to lvl my first char to 60.

Took me about the same to level 10 more to 90.

Leveling gear, LFD, the new skills and talents system and all the xp buffs you can get makes leveling so damn easy these day's.
Which isn't a bad thing btw, I had my hard time leveling, now I am fine with how it is !

yeah i had fun leveling my first few characters to 60, and it taking me months (i was slow!) but now i just want to get to 90, not spend ages leveling! i made a new alt warrior 2 days ago, no heirlooms and im 60 already

[Deficineiron]

yeah i had fun leveling my first few characters to 60, and it taking me months (i was slow!) but now i just want to get to 90, not spend ages leveling! i made a new alt warrior 2 days ago, no heirlooms and im 60 already

this is a pretty big design change - removing leveling as a meaningful player time investment/experience. for the average player, getting to 60/70pre-2.3 meant months of sub revenue for blizzard by itself.

[Deleted]

Too much grinding in Vanilla. But I will be happy to see content that reward players if they do stuff with more skill. Like leveling buff that make you weaker, but give you extra xp. Or real heroic 5 man, where one mistake is a wipe, but give you real gear.