Legend of Vanilla and the Paradox of Difficulties

[Deleted]

heh you reminded me of silkroad online - good old time of when around level 25 or 27 you were getting quests like "kill600 tigers" or kill"500 bandits"

right around time when i said t myself "f..............ck that shit" and given up and never took on another typical grindy asian mmorpg

people often mistake tedious with hard

vanilla was never hard - it was always just tedius slow and grindy . which was ok in 2004 - but nobody will deal with this shit in 2017 bedides few basementdwellers who never left their basements (or attic ) since 2004

Also big Big big Big thing people forget about that time wow was THE casual mmo, it was made to be easier than the others out at that time.

[agentsi]

Was real difficulty, not perceived. Levelling to 60 was itself a challenge.



A large chunk of players (who I spend a lot of time chatting to in IF) never had the opportunity to raid - mainly because they'd never had the opportunity to raid

Back then raiding was like having a job, lots of effort and you didn't get the position unless you had previous experience.

Leveling was the easy part.... Are you crazy? Just run some dugenons, easy 1-2 levels everytime, even in Vanilla. What wasn't easy was farming your quel if you were a tank. Or getting that UBRS key. I made a fortune opening the door because I was lucky enough to get the key very early on on my server. Getting epics was a challenge until MC opened up. Not to mention, raiding in Vanilla was by far the easiest raids ever. Some bosses only have 1-2 mechanics over the entire fight. Like.. easy, 100% avoidable mechanics.. Nothing, NOTHING about Vanilla was hard.

[Deleted]

Don't know if you played back then but Baron Geddon would make players literally blow up the entire raid. The fact the raid had even more players made the issue even worse. BTW thats just the entry raid in classic.

Actually the entry raid was lbrs/ubrs 10 man.
Mc was the first 40 man ( at least the first I did)
Barron geddit wasn't hard. But he became a meme for a hard boss mostly because he was one of the rare few that actually required any awareness to beat. Killing the dogs all at the same time was harder than him though especially with 40 people but that's a getting 40 brain dead lemmings to look at a health bar hard. Not today's mythic raiding positional awareness, timing hard

[Charge me Doctor]

Leveling and 5 mans are harder than live. Raids are not. People keep thinking Vanilla is all about endgame 60 raiding like live. It's not. That's the whole fucking point of classic.

You know, "hard" is when you go "wow, i can't beat it, i'm probably better doing it later or return when i'll get better at the game", not "i guess i have to kill 170 buzzards more to actually get quests that require level 37".
It is hard to beat DM with a warrior tank with a 2-hander. It is hard to beat UBRS without hunters to kite Drakk. But solution for this "hard" is "get proper players/classes".
Leveling in vanilla wasn't hard, it was long. It was tedious, especially when there is nothing new for you to explore. Which is the case for many players out here.

[Deleted]

Leveling was the easy part.... Are you crazy? Just run some dugenons, easy 1-2 levels everytime, even in Vanilla. What wasn't easy was farming your quel if you were a tank. Or getting that UBRS key. I made a fortune opening the door because I was lucky enough to get the key very early on on my server. Getting epics was a challenge until MC opened up. Not to mention, raiding in Vanilla was by far the easiest raids ever. Some bosses only have 1-2 mechanics over the entire fight. Like.. easy, 100% avoidable mechanics.. Nothing, NOTHING about Vanilla was hard.

Being able to sit on my ass for ages killing the same mobs over and over to afford to go to the next raid and not lose my shit and shoot up a school was kinda hard to do

[Saucerian]

Remember the LFR MC event? Raid mechanics may have been simpler but they were unforgiving. If you screwed up, you died, if not wiped your raid.

Even leveling was more of a challenge - mobs were more dangerous, elite quests abounded. Dungeons were tough. It was a lot harder for tanks to hold threat on multiple targets. CC was required. Mobs ran away and pulled adds.

It'll be a rude awakening from the AoE zerg of modern dungeons and LFR. There will be tears.

[Zka]

They'll also all be horde to have bloodlust most likely.

Most likely not, as bloodlust has been added in BC

[Charge me Doctor]

Yeah but there is definitely a difference between

"time consuming because we had to try this boss 600 times"

And

"time consuming because I had to kill 600 mobs to level up"

actually there is. When you try and fail 600 times you get better. doing same thing for 600 times which poses no challenge doesn't get you better

[Scrysis]

Don't know if you played back then but Baron Geddon would make players literally blow up the entire raid. The fact the raid had even more players made the issue even worse. BTW thats just the entry raid in classic.

That bomb mechanic was just like Vaelstraz's burning adrenaline, where you had to run out of the group. I'm not sure where you tanked him, but we always fought him in Garr's room, so there was tons of space, and everyone was very, very spread out. If someone were to blow up, they'd only take out a handful of people, and that was never enough to sink an attempt (unless you had some dip aim for the biggest cluster). More recent raids require more coordinated mechanics, AND there is a smaller margin for error as a whole.

[Charge me Doctor]

Or rend, I remember the times I went berserk on Team Speak as a Warlock, seeing my CoE drop off.

I remember a warrior going nuts for seeing his "rend constantly dropping off boss". That's fucking bad. He was our MT.

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You were either an idiot (Fury was the 2nd best DPS in the game once they got good gear) or you actually didn't play Vanilla (blessings were never 2 mn long).
I give you the benefit of the doubt because your description of what spec were design-wise seems to speak from experience, so I'll put this on being a bad class leader and having wrong memories.

funny that fury warriors geared up by leaching rogues gear... and after one-handers were revamped. You guild had to make a "we are gearing this fury warrior" decision for that to work out

[Deleted]

Leveling and 5 mans are harder than live. Raids are not. People keep thinking Vanilla is all about endgame 60 raiding like live. It's not. That's the whole fucking point of classic.

Sorry but that's a crock of shit. Vanilla is where the whole "the game dosent start untill 60" line came from.

Raiding is all that mattered by the end of vanilla. The whole end game isn't the only game was true till about 06 then it was all about min maxing talents, pushing for server firsts and world firsts, wanking over nhilum or your serves best guild (element kultiras eu I still remember). Vanilla was where the seed of the max level mentality began the game didn't change to make that people just mostly got to max level and that was the thing to do and the game went along and catered to it.

Get over your self if you think any one below 60 after 06 wasn't just anouther scrub to be ganked.

[Deleted]

I remember a warrior going nuts for seeing his "rend constantly dropping off boss". That's fucking bad. He was our MT.

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funny that fury warriors geared up by leaching rogues gear... and after one-handers were revamped. You guild had to make a "we are gearing this fury warrior" decision for that to work out

2 of our officers were rouges. Fury wars were basically banned haha

[Saucerian]

Honest question, would you consider a raid hard if it was cleared the first day in 2 hours by hundreds of thousands of people, if not more?

Only if all those hundreds of thousands of people had never done it before. But it sounds like you're talking about veterans who've already cleared it a million times.

It'd still be hard to a newcomer. Which admittedly there'll be far fewer of this time around. But I still wouldn't say the difficulty should be changed. Keep everything as authentic as possible.

[Deleted]

heh you reminded me of silkroad online - good old time of when around level 25 or 27 you were getting quests like "kill600 tigers" or kill"500 bandits"

right around time when i said t myself "f..............ck that shit" and given up and never took on another typical grindy asian mmorpg

people often mistake tedious with hard

vanilla was never hard - it was always just tedius slow and grindy . which was ok in 2004 - but nobody will deal with this shit in 2017 bedides few basementdwellers who never left their basements (or attic ) since 2004

tell that to all millions that play dungeon crawlers like PoE,grim dawn etc, they grind thier ass off every day and god forbid LIKE IT now scale it up to a 3d enviroment and you get classic, not hard to grasp that people actually like grinding

[Deleted]

tell that to all millions that play dungeon crawlers like PoE,grim dawn etc, they grind thier ass off every day and god forbid LIKE IT now scale it up to a 3d enviroment and you get classic, not hard to grasp that people actually like grinding

1. That's a small community nit big enough to generate the profit blizz want from wow
2. Just cos they like it dosent mean it's hard

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Right, so you agree then that the LFR MC was in fact faceroll because it was cleared no problem after people had simply seen the boss one time. And maybe I got lucky, but the only rough spot I had in that LFR was people trolling on Geddon.

Original Mc was face roll too, or face scroll wheel for Hunters

[Saucerian]

Right, so you agree then that the LFR MC was in fact faceroll because it was cleared no problem after people had simply seen the boss one time. And maybe I got lucky, but the only rough spot I had in that LFR was people trolling on Geddon.

Was it that easy? I wasn't subbed at the time. If so, that's too bad. I do remember reading about raids failing at the core hound packs. I figured everything else was as agonizing.

[Rotted]

I can see them giving a few specs a little tweak to make them a competitor to raid with, and I honestly don't mind that

[Maudib]

The hardest part of classic raiding was getting 15-20 people who weren't fucking mouth breathers to compliment the people carrying them.

Those who join classic servers with the goal of endgame raiding will clear it with ease.

I seriously doubt any measurable number of people will roll classic just to raid. The vanilla experience (and BC/Wrath too) was not about "endgame"... it was just about "game".

Seriously... somehow this game became ONLY about raiding and dungeons, and while they certainly are a very cool featur, they should NEVER have been made the sole activity

Case in point: Very few people cleared the vanilla raids... only something like 5% saw Sunwell in BC... And yet the game continued to grow. Why? If 95% of the players never even saw the raids, what was it about the game THEN kept them coming back? In Wrath... all those people who never saw the inside of a raid bought a NEW expansion and continued the experience... why?


Leveling, story, professions, guilds, farming, building wealth, exploration, earning pets/mounts... you know.. the RPG part of the MMORPG. Starting with Cata, the focus was put on raiding, and making sure everyone got into them... and the rest of the game suffered.

Now? You get to max level in 12 hours. Craftable gear is garbage because why craft anything when you will just out level it in an hour? So professions are lackluster. Guilds are all but dead thanks to cross realm groups and LFD/LFR. The entire leveling process from 1 has been more than just trivialized, it has been all but removed.

No. While there will be some newer players who roll Classic in order to "experience" vanilla raids.... the vast majority will roll it to play the ACTUAL game of WoW. When it was actually good, entertaining, engaging, rewarding, and fun.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

then playing retri pala or shadow priest will work fine?

I will personally raid, but I'm much more hyped for an actually rewarding leveling experience and more fun pvp, stuff like summoning elemental lords in AV is great

It's a community perception that those specs suck. They aren't balanced like legion but they are more than playable if you get full consumables.

Also don't expect that from av. The way everyone does it on private servers is just a zerg and if people stop to do that sort of stuff you get bitched at and people leave.

[Belisaurio]

1. That's a small community nit big enough to generate the profit blizz want from wow
2. Just cos they like it dosent mean it's hard

I know what is "hard", but hard become tedious after some trys (because 500 wipes in the same boss is not tedious).
In other words, hard it's just a label when something requires alot of time to be accomplished, and usually is associated with skills/player (only talking about videogames here).
Maybe grinding and farming are not "hard" for you, just time-consuming, like coordinating 40 players. Maybe that players don't have other "easy modes" to see the endgame, so maybe the pre-raid coordination that needs to be done will be not just time-consuming, but hard to accomplish If I want to progress (not saying that bosses will be hard, but the whole picture, of course will be).
If you are a hardcore player, I think that Classic is not for you if you are looking for Mythic hardcore difficult.

P.D: That's not a war between who has the hardest bosses (Mythic KJ>all), btw.