40 man vanilla raids = LFR difficulty?

[Kingoomieiii]

Yea those Paladins that were brought to hit literally 2 buttons every few minutes sure had it rough.

In Vanilla, casting a Blessing (which lasted 5 minutes) did not apply the blessing to all nearby raid members. It buffed only your target. Greater Blessings, which chaincast blessings onto all characters of the class you were casting on (so, seven casts), weren't introduced until 1.9, the AQ20/40 patch. Greater Blessings had 15 minute durations until 2.2.

It was 40 global cooldowns for your assigned blessing every five minutes up through the end of BWL.

On the bright side, addons had the ability to auto-target a player who didn't have the blessing you were casting, so...

[Bigbazz]

Vanilla was all about the class and the gear, the fight executions themselves in the early raids were if anything less complicated than LFR accross the board. Shit didn't get real until BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Even with those taken into account the raiding back then wasn't all that complex at all, it's all about the difficulty of gearing and getting 40 people online and ready to go, hoping that at least 5 of your 8 hunters (lol) will do more than autoattack while afk watching Friends.

The game was so much more simplistic back then, in so many different aspects but it also had a depth to it. You had world buffs that you could collect (and needed to collect for raiding), buffs buff and buffs, all about the temporary buffs... so annoying. You also had many classes/specs that were a complete joke compared to today standards, you had so many different layers of progress to grind through just in order to gear up, so many obstacles to overcome just to be able to raid, half the battle was just getting going. A massive grindfest just to get to the point where you're raiding.

It's not really comparable, I've only played Vanilla WoW on a private server (I won't name it but it's the most popular one) as I started playing WoW in TBC, but in some ways we could definitely compare oldschool raiding to LFR in actual encounter difficulty... Molten Core or Onyxia at least.

[Deleted]

Well, no. LFR has more mechanics, almost all of them irrelevant and without consequences, so people play as they don't exist and succeed. MC had 1-3 mechanics and none could be ignored, so: 1> 0. Ciao!

[Wythel]

Well, no. LFR has more mechanics, almost all of them irrelevant and without consequences, so people play as they don't exist and succeed. MC had 1-3 mechanics and none could be ignored, so: 1> 0. Ciao!

This sums MC quite well.
1 skill per boss, but no HP pool to survive in case of fail vs 8487621 skills in the codex that all does like.... 1% of hp pool if failed.

MC was more simple ? Yes
Was it easier for a random player ? No

[Deleted]

Vanilla was all about the class and the gear, the fight executions themselves in the early raids were if anything less complicated than LFR accross the board. Shit didn't get real until BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Even with those taken into account the raiding back then wasn't all that complex at all, it's all about the difficulty of gearing and getting 40 people online and ready to go, hoping that at least 5 of your 8 hunters (lol) will do more than autoattack while afk watching Friends.

That sounds about right.

Like, in order to do Huhu you needed to get 15 people in nature res. The boss would fire poison bolts at the 15 closest people to her, so you stuck your 15 high NR people at the front (the wall) and put the rest behind (normal gear). Everyone would be using NR pots (not that cheap, probably equivalent price is about 50g a go) every single try.

Now, to get that NR you'd need to:

- Farm Maraudon (annoying, slow) for NR trinkets and a few items
- Farm various reps (Cenarion Circle) to unlock items
- Have gear crafted (farm mats)
- Have BoP collected gear from a wide variety of dungeons, raids and mobs

Essentially, weeks of preparation for those 15 guys to prepare for that boss.

What you actually do might be easy - stand there and soak the boss - but in terms of invested time and organisation on the guilds part, it would be a lot higher.

There were a lot of fights like that. Vael (Fire res gear), Onyxia (Fire res gear), Ragnaros (Fire res gear), various Naxx bosses (Frost + Shadow res). Someone like Viscidus would require EVERYONE to have a full set of very good nature res gear. Few guilds did him for that reason.

Right now to get set up for a raid, you just spam LFR, do your legendary cloak quest, maybe use OQueue to do some (easy) flex pugs or normal pugs. Bam, you have your full epic set, fully tuned for you with perfect stats.

Back then, you'd have to do so much research, planning, farming mats, running bosses over and over and over (finding groups in general chat) to get your 10% droprate, and it would take 1.5 hours to clear your dungeon, not 20 mins. The timesink was HUGE to get anything done. And then you need 40 people that have all done that.

[Wilian]

Molten Core was fairly simple but they got increasingly complex BWL onwards.

Large majority never got beyond MC though so they tend to project their whole "vanilla raids r eez" via MC experiences. Or just repeat the mantra heard by other since majority people who played vanilla don't do so anymore.

It's a bit like how they love to say that tanking was only spamming sunder during vanilla (which would've led pretty much immediate death of the group if they actually tried it in that enviroment)

[gamingmuscle]

Some people in general discussion said that 40 man vanilla raids had the same difficulty as LFR. Is this true?!

I believe it was a PITA to get attuned, but were the raids/mechanics on a LFR level or were those people full of it?

Well, there were some fight that the 1 mechanic could wipe you easily. But you could do many of the fights in MC or BWL with 5+ people dead/afk from the start =P

[Deleted]

mechanins wise, they were easier than todays LFR, but you have to take into account, most players sucked back then. having full keytbindings wasn't even that common and class mechanics just were just straight up retarded. so its probably about even, today you have harder bosses, but player skill is greatly improved and class / specs are more balanced.

This is just about MC though, i don#t have experience with vanilla naxx/aq/bwl.

[Deleted]

The amount of rose-tintedness in this thread is over 9000

Infracted; Post constructively please.

[OrcsRLame]

Only a few Naxx fights had anything resembling difficult mechanics. Everything else was hilariously simple by today's standards.

[gamingmuscle]

Back then, you'd have to do so much research, planning, farming mats, running bosses over and over and over (finding groups in general chat) to get your 10% droprate, and it would take 1.5 hours to clear your dungeon, not 20 mins. The timesink was HUGE to get anything done. And then you need 40 people that have all done that.

You had to farm a lot, for the gimmick fights. The time required did tend to be high for some of it. You could get those dungeons to well under an hour once people learned their ways around some of them. But you didn't need to do nearly as much research or planning as today, you had to deal with 1 maybe 2 mechanics...now you have like 5 =P Granted you can get away with 0 planning for LFR in a lot of cases....But those doing LFR only wouldn't have been raiding in vanilla. So it's not really a valid comparison. It's a spin off product to catch another portion of the game's population and bring it to raiding.

[Sathnick]

Only a few Naxx fights had anything resembling difficult mechanics. Everything else was hilariously simple by today's standards.

Thing is - it's like comparing one of the very first race cars to a Formular 1 car today and then saying: "look how simply the car was, racing back then was piss easy".

[Deleted]

@OP: YES!

Anyway, Attunements, Resistance Gear, insane gear farming is the characteristics I miss from Vanilla these days.

Thankfully now that i have kids, a family, a job and a social life all this crap is gone

[OrcsRLame]

Thing is - it's like comparing one of the very first race cars to a Formular 1 car today and then saying: "look how simply the car was, racing back then was piss easy".

That's not really a valid comparison, because technology gets more advanced over time. I don't believe the average IQ of a person from 2014 is any higher than it was in 2004. There was just a huge barrier to entry because of all the grinding it took to actually be raid ready. Also information was more easily obtainable. The mechanics themselves were not magically made harder though just because most people didn't give enough of a fuck to raid and those that did were usually idiots that didn't have smart people to tell them how to play.

Aside from the grinding, all that's really changed is that the better players in the community have gotten better at directing the retards.

[Sathnick]

That's not really a valid comparison, because technology gets more advanced over time. I don't believe the average IQ of a person from 2014 is any higher than it was in 2004. There was just a huge barrier to entry because of all the grinding it took to actually be raid ready. Also information was more easily obtainable. The mechanics themselves were not magically made harder though just because most people didn't give enough of a fuck to raid and those that did were usually idiots that didn't have smart people to tell them how to play.

Aside from the grinding, all that's really changed is that the better players in the community have gotten better at directing the retards.

Well - most mechanics today are countered by addons...the Encounters are desined around them being available and used. In vanilla most People had no idea the game would even be able to run any addons. Also the General understanding for many things wasnt there.

I do not have any rose tinted glasses for the time...I wouldnt want it back. But I raided every Tier and I can tell you they had an appropriate difficulty for the time also after all attunments and grinds where done. You also had things you dont know today anymore like buffs constantly running out and tank aggro being an actual issue. I know it's tempting to Counter all the elitists claiming they are better because they played at the time with those "it was piss easy" comments...but it wasn't all just piss easy.

Also - cmon - there is no such Thing as "LFR" difficulty. LFR is meant to collect some total strangers and guide them through an istance with Minimum Problems. It's really not a fair comparision to any other Content...

[Yoshimiko]

Molten Core and Naxx were more about preperation than actual difficulty. Many groups would even take down Ragnaros without at least a dozen people getting a piece of loot. 2 drops per boss in a 40 man raid - you can see where the issues come up. Also, you didn't want to drop under your certain Fire Resistance.

Look at the original Ragnaros, too. He has three mechancis. Whaps your tank with his big ass mace, Throws people super high in the air, and into lava(which hurt), and summons adds you have to kill. We don't even have 5 man bosses this simple anymore. Ontop of this, you had OOC Rezzers, Pallys who were literally just buffing everyone 24/7, group-wide(not raid-wide) buffs etc.

However..the bosses hit hard. Mechanics would commonly 1shot entire groups of people - some of which weren't even avoidable unless you cheesed it. It wasn't uncommon that, on the heigan dance for example, you only see a few people alive ~a minute into the fight.A lot of specs were grossly underpowered and there were issues left and right with all kindsa stuff.

It was a completely different game. Nothing is more apprant than when you look at the top dps(2H Fury) vs the bottom DPS(Shadow) today vs the top and even average DPS of back then. Rogues and Warriors would regularly double or even triple other classes on horde side, and were roughly 1.5 - 2x as powerful on Alliance(no shaman, no windfury totem). Right now Shadow priest is 80% of Fury 2H dps according to sims. 519,300 vs 416,987. Compare that to the old ~1100 vs ~300-400, with some specs being below even that.

So there was a much greater focus on how your raid was built up, managing 40 people - who all were managing their own 5 mans and handling the basics of the fights, rather than the mechanics. Today if a healer can free cast heals on the raid..the raid generally won't die. Back then, Healers couldn't even cast that many heals before going OOM and having to fall into the 5 second rule to regen mana ( 5 seconds after spending any mana, you would get your OOC mana regen back - your mana regen outside of that was VERY VERY low or even ZERO for most ).

Different game, apples and oranges.

[zorkuus]

40 mans were pretty easy if you knew what to do. The hard part was managing a legion of noobs (and getting 40 of them online at the same to begin with).

[OrcsRLame]

Well - most mechanics today are countered by addons...the Encounters are desined around them being available and used. In vanilla most People had no idea the game would even be able to run any addons. Also the General understanding for many things wasnt there.

I do not have any rose tinted glasses for the time...I wouldnt want it back. But I raided every Tier and I can tell you they had an appropriate difficulty for the time also after all attunments and grinds where done. You also had things you dont know today anymore like buffs constantly running out and tank aggro being an actual issue. I know it's tempting to Counter all the elitists claiming they are better because they played at the time with those "it was piss easy" comments...but it wasn't all just piss easy.

Also - cmon - there is no such Thing as "LFR" difficulty. LFR is meant to collect some total strangers and guide them through an istance with Minimum Problems. It's really not a fair comparision to any other Content...

I never said the difficulty wasn't appropriate for the time; just that the mechanics when judged objectively were incredibly easy compared to today's mechanics. I'm also aware of the mechanical differences with how classes used to function.

[Zka]

Some people in general discussion said that 40 man vanilla raids had the same difficulty as LFR. Is this true?!

MC probably was, all honestly.
But the game was also harder inherently: almost all classes had only 1 useable spec, the rest was junk. 90% of players sucked incredibly due to lack of theorycraft information. Debuff limit: 16... Gear itemization: worse than crap. And I could go on. So it wasn't that easy, despite being very easy

[xfreeder]

Played Mage in Classic. The time you need for a LFR today is the time you needed for a 40man raid getting to molten core. Warlocks just port everyone? Forget it. You needed a single soulstone for every port and the soulstones had to be farmed before the fking raid. Make water/bread for the whole raid? Easy 10mins because every cast was a 5-stack.

Enter the instance kill the first corehounds and the raidleader constantly screaming at the raid to LOOT THE FKING DOGs so it can be skinned for the precious core-leather. Lucifron as a Mage? Spam the decursive button because it was autoaim at that time. Maybe a frostbolt from time to time. My dmg-rotation? Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Arcane Missiles, Frostbolt etc. Magmadar, Gehennas easy peasy but now comes Garr. The whole raid has to make a break because you have to assign 8 little adds that all look the same without fancy symbols you can put above their head to a random number of tanks, warlocks or hunters. So the raidleader takes an add, the tank has to pick his target through ct_raid and pray to god he won't switch his target. Do this for all 8 adds, get the other 30 man to tab into the game and then go. The whole instance was shit, the classes were shit, the addons (except decursive that shit was so cash) were shit and the itemization was very shit.

Todays lfr-raiders should rejoice and pray to god that they have their lfr with harder mechanics but better everything else.