Has the game become harder than TBC?

[Memory]

I don't know if some changes in the database vanished or misplaced any possibly previous class forum, but earliest posts on class forums do not seem to date any earlier than July 2008, which is three months and half before WotLK.

[adorich]

Yep. And you get it at level 90 when you cant even find someone on trade who isin't so dumb they don't even know whats going on in a 3dps H Scenario (I think i've made this comparison like 5 times today)

There have been "dumb" people on /2 since Vanilla. This isn't new to MOP. People aren't running many H senarios on my server. There is difference between inexperience and stupidity.

I wouldn't even say "HARD" You go through LFR babby mode, then Flex which is easier/harder depending on your social skills (better groups and friends to carry)

You leave out normal and hard modes, which many people don't even try, because they are too difficult. Blizzard has given us more raid options than we had in TBC. This doesn't mean hard raids don't exist.

And 85-90 is -1/10 because you can 1 button heal or tank the LFG system.

That's simply isn't true. While many dungeons are AOE fests, the newer dungeons wipe leveling groups with players who aren't the right spec, aren't wearing gear or aren't using abilities.

I've also wiped many times, because I'm grouped with players who believe "Wow is easy mode." These are the same players who claim LFR is "babby mode," call players in trade chat "stupid" and make outrageous claims like, "you can 1 button heal or tank the LFG system..." These players never take responsibility for groups failing: it's always someone else's fault. These players are quick to call other people names and bash Blizzard for giving players access to content.

[Deleted]

Most of the rose coloured glasses uproar comes from people who were very "dedicated" but aren't as good at the more modern reflex based mechanics. Gone are the days of "I get to stand in 1 spot dotting things because I'm the warlock and I get all the epics because I'm online 12 hours a day and I know one of the officers IRL"
Now nobody is special. Everybody gets a chance. (This angers some people).

Its hard for me to approach this post without sounding like an elitist, but I am curious which bosses you'd killed in TBC that allowed standing and nuking, vs the ones that required movement.

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And you are utterly deluding yourself if you think the game was harder outside of dungeons/raid in TBC. There were still group quests, but the rest of the content was just as easy as it is now, rares were a joke compared to now.

I find it ironic that you disagree with my claim that 90% of the game outside raiding is dead easy, then spend 90% of your post talking about raiding
Anyway I can't speak for Pandaland as I've yet to visit, but old Azeroth is a shadow of its former difficulty. In the past you could actually die if you pulled an elite or 3-4 normal mobs and didn't have an escape method ready. And the dungeons actually took longer than 5 minutes, where people actually communicated a little bit as well. And its not an elitism thing. A game which requires no effort and no communication is not a good way to hook new players into the community.

[miffy23]

Its hard for me to approach this post without sounding like an elitist, but I am curious which bosses you'd killed in TBC that allowed standing and nuking, vs the ones that required movement.

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I find it ironic that you disagree with my claim that 90% of the game outside raiding is dead easy, then spend 90% of your post talking about raiding
Anyway I can't speak for Pandaland as I've yet to visit, but old Azeroth is a shadow of its former difficulty. In the past you could actually die if you pulled an elite or 3-4 normal mobs and didn't have an escape method ready. And the dungeons actually took longer than 5 minutes, where people actually communicated a little bit as well. And its not an elitism thing. A game which requires no effort and no communication is not a good way to hook new players into the community.

Oh look, how surprising, ANOTHER person not actually playing but spewing acid all over the game. Please, spare us. These threads are just full of guys like you.
Oh and I made a valid point. If you consider a good point to be "talk a lot about it" then you can't reason.

[miffy23]

I have a list of things I consider to be mandatory before anyone can say "teh garmez tis teh eezee" (or the game is easier now). Complete the following things to gain the right to be heard:
-Beat all brawlers guild bosses (bonus for the extra bosses).
-Reach 50th wave of higher on prooving grouds.
-Beat all heroic scenarios with bonus objectives
-Obtain gold medals on all challenge mode dungeos.
-Obtain a raiding cutting edge achievement (aka beat heroic mode while is relevant).

Thats the PvE to-do list if you want to say : WoW is easy. Until then, please stop posting about the subject.

This. Know what you're talking about, or GTFO. It's getting really annoying debating the differences in difficulty with people that act all defensive and whiny, and 3 posts later the truth comes out, that they don't actually have a clue about today's status because they're not playing, or haven't played in ages.

[Pariah]

I've played in a competitive raiding guild since near the end of Molten Core progression. The game is LEAPS ahead more difficult than it used to be with regards to what is required from individuals, leaders, and the group as a whole. There is an infinite amount of truth to the statement that players have become much more prepared and researched than our former selves. It'd be nearly impossible to not have improved just by sheer hours put into the game. But with preparedness and increased skill comes the creation of harder content to challenge it. Take *almost* (I used the word almost here) any fight from MC/BC, scale it up to today's level of HP and outgoing damage and watch it fall over by even the worst of active raiding guilds.

Vanilla/BC was A LOT of fun. I had some great, if not the greatest, times playing it but it definitely wasn't the hardest of content either.

[Deleted]

Oh look, how surprising, ANOTHER person not actually playing but spewing acid all over the game. Please, spare us. These threads are just full of guys like you.

I reactivated my trial last week with my bro, we're starting new characters and going through Azeroth. He hadn't played since TBC, so he noticed the drop in difficulty far more than I did, since I'd played up till 4.3 in Cata.
If you're saying leveling in the world/dungeons FINALLY gets difficult at level 85, that's fair enough. But that's not something the curious 7 day trial player is going to ever see.

[miffy23]

I will say one thing about BC-era PvE. Its not that it was "harder" per se. It was harder if you were using the "wrong" class/spec.

The design back then still held specific roles for each spec. So if you were a druid that wanted to be the main tank, you were "wrong" and thus it was "harder" for you to do the job because the "right" class/spec (Prot Warrior) was the one for that particular part.

So if you went into a heroic dungeon as a dps spec that had no cc, you were "wrong". You, as a hybrid, were meant to level up using that dps spec you had (that was the "right" use of the dps spec of hybrids) and then at max level you were to switch to the "right" spec and heal.

I assure you, going into a heroic dungeon with a Prot Warrior, a druid healer and 3 CC dps wasn´t all that hard. The game started to get rough when you started using the wrong class/spec combos.

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Ahead of the curve Lei Shen. ilvl 550 Enhancement Shaman main spec. Azjol Nerub USA: Titusx

What I meant with that list is this: I noticed that most people complaining about how "easy" the game is this days do so on the basis of completely ignoring all challenging content Blizzard has placed in the game.

If you ignore challenge modes, heroic scenarios, brawlers guild, proving grounds and relevant heroic raiding content... then yes, the other handful of things that are left (PvE side) are pretty easy. So I say, don´t ignore the stuff thats been clearly labeled the "challenging" and then say there is no challenge.

Thats what the list is meant to point out.

I was directing that challenge at exactly the people you were talking about
People that haven't actually bothered with the actually challenging content, or aren't even playing.

[Deleted]

Thats the PvE to-do list if you want to say : WoW is easy. Until then, please stop posting about the subject.

Its just apples and oranges at this point. MoP apparently keeps all its difficult bits in this segmented, max level only area. And you can avoid the difficulty and still see most of the same stuff. TBC and Vanilla had a lower max difficulty, but it started from level 1 and couldn't be avoided by picking LFR difficulty in raids, etc.

[Deleted]

As far as pre raid content... doing quests back then wan´t hard at all. I dont know whats the deal with people trying to imply that leveling was harder in BC. If anything Blizzard has gotten so good at developing questing content its now actually fun and interesting and that makes it go by faster. BC questing felt that way to the Vanilla drag and so on in every exp. Questing is just not challeinging imo.

Leveling in TBC was like a 3/10 vs the 1/10 it is now. You sometimes needed to stop and eat food, you had to watch for elites, or pulling too many mobs at once. People wiped in 5 mans to something other than pulling the entire instance. That does have a negative impact on my enjoyment of the early content. I'd be surprised if that doesn't put people off the game.

[Duronos]

Leveling in TBC was like a 3/10 vs the 1/10 it is now. You sometimes needed to stop and eat food, you had to watch for elites, or pulling too many mobs at once. People wiped in 5 mans to something other than pulling the entire instance. That does have a negative impact on my enjoyment of the early content. I'd be surprised if that doesn't put people off the game.

But it's already been proved that it didn't put people off the game... Sub numbers rose all throughout the BC. For someone like me it actually made leveling an actual piece of content and part of the game instead of just something that is in your way from doing max level stuff. The game was based around having leveling as a form of content.

I'm in no way trying to be subjective with the two sentences, it's very objective. The last two sentences are subjective, just pointing this out before someone goes off on a tangent about what I said.

[Deleted]

But it's already been proved that it didn't put people off the game... Sub numbers rose all throughout the BC. For someone like me it actually made leveling an actual piece of content and part of the game instead of just something that is in your way from doing max level stuff.

My bad phrasing, I meant that the current supereasy leveling is probably more offputting to newbies than the old mildly challenging TBC model. So we agree

[Duronos]

My bad phrasing, I meant that the current supereasy leveling is probably more offputting to newbies than the old mildly challenging TBC model. So we agree

Hehe I guess we do.

The easy leveling is a putoff for me, I can see how they could have made Cataclysm such a good expansion by making leveling more enjoyable but they made it so fast that the "new" Azeroth isn't something you can really enjoy so to speak. You outlevel zones so fast.

[miffy23]

Hehe I guess we do.

The easy leveling is a putoff for me, I can see how they could have made Cataclysm such a good expansion by making leveling more enjoyable but they made it so fast that the "new" Azeroth isn't something you can really enjoy so to speak. You outlevel zones so fast.

I agree that leveling is very fast and the game has become way easier at lower levels, even up to current content. However that doesn't make it a valid criterium of judging the overall difficulty, because the world in Pandaria is most definitely more challenging than it ever was in TBC.

Also, Blizzard faces the challenge of allowing players to catch up to the newest content at an acceptable and fun pace. That wouldn't be possible if everything were at the same relative difficulty and pace it was back when the content was current.

[Duronos]

I agree that leveling is very fast and the game has become way easier at lower levels, even up to current content. However that doesn't make it a valid criterium of judging the overall difficulty, because the world in Pandaria is most definitely more challenging than it ever was in TBC.

Also, Blizzard faces the challenge of allowing players to catch up to the newest content at an acceptable and fun pace. That wouldn't be possible if everything were at the same relative difficulty and pace it was back when the content was current.

Well the way I see it, if a compromise can be made regarding alts then I'd say fuck heirlooms but give them a buff that allows them to get more experience. Honestly heirlooms are part of the reason leveling an alt is just piss easy, just make the extra exp a buff instead of gear instead.

[Memory]

the world in Pandaria is most definitely more challenging than it ever was in TBC.

Doesn't really match my perception. Would you care to elaborate? Again about the supposed super hard rare mobs?

[Duronos]

Doesn't really match my perception. Would you care to elaborate? Again about the supposed super hard rare mobs?

Rare's in Vanilla were hard for many people to kill while leveling on their own, even locks and hunters had to play it right for it too work. Many rares were nearly as hard as elites and elites outside of instances weren't really soloable for a warlock or hunter.

[Deleted]

Also, Blizzard faces the challenge of allowing players to catch up to the newest content at an acceptable and fun pace. That wouldn't be possible if everything were at the same relative difficulty and pace it was back when the content was current.

Pace and difficulty are independent attributes though. Just have fewer, more dangerous mobs.

[Garehn Vi-Brittania]

I never played in BC and i can tell you that this game is not NEARLY as hard as it was in BC. FFS its a joke now compared to wrath and wrath was pretty easy.

[miffy23]

Well it really depends.
Leveling in greens through Pandaria, most of the rares were quite deadly. More specifically, nearly all of them had some form of oneshot mechanic plus interruptable stuff, having to kite, etc etc...you can belittle it as much as you want, but rares in Pandaria are quite challenging in the appropriate gear, for the average gamer.
Mobs in TBC did little but autohit, you learned to avoid elites on your own and get a group. In Pandaria, most mobs have some kind of unique ability you learn, and Rares become challenging mini encounters.