Warcraft raiding has not become easier

[anyaka21]

This thread is really full of win.

and while I agree that that doesn't make ICC or other raid instances hugely difficult, i do say this with only normal modes in mind

And yeah, i agree that there is just tons more information out there than there was before, all the theorycrafting, all the bosskillers.com, and add-ons have made the game a ton easier.

However, in terms of strats the fights are a lot more complicated. There is tons more to pay attention to.

The game has also changed hugely from previous expansions too. Circle of healing? Beacon?
Wild Growth and all the raid healing, etc... More specs are viable to raid with too, and all of these are good things.

But in terms of strats, etc... just look at Naxx, and while old Naxx was much more finely tuned and required perfect execution from about 20 of the 40 people if I'm not mistaken, I wouldn't call them difficult.

Farming certain gear and resistances are also not a good way of determining skill either. they really are just cheesy cockblocks.

Also add that whether people like the way raids are today, it most likely won't change too much in the future. More guilds than ever are raiding, 27000ish in ICC atm. That's a huge win for Blizzard

[veemon_ro]

These were the mechanics of early fights. They are annoyances that we don't put up with for current fights, but they were not more difficult. They are merely outdated.

I am sorry but I am confused here now. What exactly do you understand by a "dificult fight?".
In my opinion it is a fight where alot of things can go wrong. Having 1 out of 40 players be able to wipe the raid, is a pretty big thing that can go wrong in my opinion.

In vanilla content, the tank's threat generation was a functional hard cap on raid DPS. This was a bad game mechanic, because it made DPS upgrades meaningless, except for showing off and BGs. If a DPS was riding the tank's ass on the threat-meter (and there were threat-meter add-ons before BWL came out), there was nothing he could do to improve performance. They threw in encounters like Vael to let DPS go full out once in a while, but mostly, vanilla mechanics throttled DPS.

The dps was still gearing up so they have mana and be able to last long fights, and they still could do more damage once the tank geared himself up as well. That is why most guilds even gave tank prio...have you EVEN played vanilla before talking ?!

Here's the pro-tip: threat-limited DPS makes the game easier, not harder. It mattered a lot less if you were a poor DPS, because output is capped by threat. There was no point in developing efficient rotations, because throughput was capped.

Considering that in most guilds I go now, 1 out of 2 players have no clue how to play the game besides beeing in ice crown, I have to admit that I would be scared shitless if i knew any one of these jewls of players could wipe my raid by pulling agro.
So yes, it would be harder as you would have more oportunities to wipe and you would have to dps more carefully as to follow your rotation, but at the same time be carefull not to overagro and also know what spells to use when youre close to doing more tps then the tank.

The nostalgia crowd likes to trump up these threat mechanics like they were the hardest thing ever, but they actually made the game very easy, as long as nobody was stupid. Warlocks and Mages spent big chunks of many fights literally doing nothing.

As a warlock i never spent any chunk of the fight doing nothing past mc. But if vanilla was so mind numbingly easy for you, how far did you got in it and in what guild?

What are you talking about? The encounters were developed around the abilities players had. There was no raid healing, and there was no raid damage that required raid healing. Generally, raids were organized with a healer in each group who was responsible for keeping those players topped off, and raid damage was tame by modern standards, unless somebody stood in some fire.

Yes you clearely proven to me you have never played vanilla or if you did you never got past mc. I would only have to name princess from aq that did insane ammounts of aoe. Or the first boss in aq 20 where if you would stay close to the bubbles you would be silenced and take damage.
Taking damage by standing in the fire was sudently a big ass deal knowing you wont get any heals what so ever.
How can you tell me a fight isnt harder when you have to be extra carefull not to take any damage, and if you did then you had to bandage yourself. Bandage on cooldown? Tough.

"You are the bomb" was the whole Baron Geddon fight. There's a trash mob before Lady Deathwhisper that is as hard as Baron Geddon.

Lady deathwhisper has 40 people and the bomb from the trash doesnt wipe the raid while one bomb from geddon did cause a 80% wipe.
Not to mention that back then you didnt even have ct raid, you had to look at your debuff bar to see if you were the bomb or not.

And as i also stated, when one out of 10 people is the bomb its very easy, raid can just spread out.
When one out of 25 people is the bomb its slightly harder due to the fact that its easyer to find some one who wont run from 25 people.
When 40 man are involved you dont even wonder if some one will not run. You know for 100% that will happen and you pray that he doesnt get the debuff.

Requiring a certain amount of resist gear and then doling it out at a certain pace is the same thing as gating, except that, if it's reliant on random drops, there is an RNG component.

Ive already agreed to you that res gear sucks, but unlike gating you can controll the pace you unlock the boss.
If your guild has good managment and is prepared for it, then you will unlock it 10x faster then a guild who asks their members to farm for the gear the same day theyve unlocked the boss.

Requiring 4 weeks of beating bosses 1-3 to have the DPS to beat boss 4 is the same thing as gating. There's no point in having a mob in the middle of an instance that is, for whatever reason, impossible to kill. If there's a situation like that, it should be an end boss, and it should be the hard mode.

First of all imagine how it feels after killing a boss after 4 weeks, its an experience that has been deprived from the game for you and many other people.
Secondly why would you reach a boss where only 4 people have the gear to do it? You should be farming previous content more before trying it. Again gear used to have a purpose. You cant just jump and skip over content, last time i checked this was an rpg not a shooter that you can wallhack through levels.

Finally only very few bosses required 4 weeks, and they were mostly end game bosses that were placed at the end of an instance. Vashj, Kael, ilidan.
And the reason they were hard wasnt because people didnt have enough dps, but because the strategy was so much dificult. Usually every one in the raid would have to get 3-5 things right and if one person would fail and say 1 elemental would reach vashj in p2 it could pretty much end up as a wipe.

Now they can put content out 3 times a year instead of once a year, so they don't need insane and transparent resistance farming checks like Huhuran and Rag.

Dude seriously take off those roze tinted glasses and smell the coffee.
Youre actually happy with nax/os/maly ?
Instead of nax a 5 year old instance designed for 40 people that had 1/4 of the abilities we have now, id of rather had a new and original raid like ajzol nerub/vyrkull/troll raid. Something with modern age graphics similar to ulduar.

Youre also happy with TOC? Maybe you are but the vast majority of the players and even blizzard admited toc was a huge mistake.

So what content did we have after 1 year? Ulduar (that we played for 3 months since no one ran it after toc was out)
And ICC wich i belive will keep me ocupied for 1 tops 2 months after wich i will farm it endlesly untill 6 months later a new patch will be released.

I rather liked the system that i allways knew there is another instance for me to do as soon as i finish the one im curently doing.
It gave players a better purpose and goal rather then go ok..weve kiled yog saron...now what? Do we do hardmodes or do we cancel our accounts untill ICC?

ToC on normal is too easy. It was a gift to casuals. Ulduar was a challenging instance and the hardmodes were extremely difficult in the contemporary gear, and ICC is not a pushover in normal mode.

That gift to casuals efed it up for the rest of us. No one even wanted to run ulduar after TOC was released, and it also made raiders soft and rusty.
You dont want to know how teribad some people played after they eneterd ICC for the first time.
Also when you have instances like nax and toc and the first few wings on ICC, what exactly will help people train themselves for the hardmodes when sudently standing in fire is actually a big deal and healers cant go afk and watch youtube during a fight/

It will take most raids months to clear ICC on normal mode. There is no way to create an instance that will hold back the top guilds in the world for months, unless Blizzard cheats.

I coudlnt care less about top guilds, but i do care about my guild wich i belive is fairly mediocre.
I hate runing out of content and then having to do the same bosses over and over. Even hardmodes arent entertaining since its THE SAME BOSS.

Then why play the game at all? If you wait for the expansion, the gear will mean nothing. Eventually, nobody will play the game at all, so what's the point?

Some people play to see content. They saw it normal so they dont care about hardmodes. It might boggle your mind but its true. Not every one plays for the chalange and not every one plays for loot.
There are also those who play to see the story and lore.
In tbc they would wipe weeks on a boss, not for the epics but to know they got one boss closer to killjaden.
Now if a guild wipes for 2 weeks the guild disbands.

Is MUCH less of a guild-breaker than people wanting to push current content and others wanting to farm old content. Content now gets farmed out. Raids drop twice as much gear, and you can fill several of your slots from badges. It takes only a few resets worth of farming an instance to run out of reasons to do it "the normal way." By contrast, people farmed Rag every week for six months and still never got the loot they wanted.

Im sorry but the stats are there, guilds have broke far more in wotlk then they did in vanilla or in late half of tbc (first half doesnt count because of the raids switching from 40 to 25 so guilds had to disband).
Even blizzard has noticed this as a problem and is thus giving more rewards to players beeing in a guild for cataclysm

If pugs are as good as your guild raids, you need a new guild. The urgency fell out of guild raids the last couple of weeks of TOC for guilds that were not working on hardmodes, but taking a break isn't the worst thing in the world.

If i want to take a break i stop paying. I dont need blizzard to give me brakes. This is like your internet company sudently giving you a downgrade to 10 kb/s down from 10 mb/s . Then they say "Well taking a break isnt the worse thing in the world".

Is better than a whole guild collapsing because they lose one key guy and they can't get an appropriately-geared replacement.

This never happened before. You could replace said guy if you found some one who knew how to play but wasnt good geared.
In wotlk you cant do this. 80% of the trials are clueless people who think its ok to afk/dc in raids like they do in pugs, its ok to stand in the fire like in pugs, and "as long as the boss died, who cares how much dps i do?" mentality

3 hours of MC every week for three years? You don't see the problem? Do you want to go run Naxx, now, just for the heck of it?

Who said anything about 3 years? Once aq was on farm we would gear the new players in aq unless he was a main tank or something but even then we already had one backup dps warrior gearing up for tanking.
The only thing you would run for 3 years was zg due to the shoulder enchant.
And again it was more fun to run 2-3 instances at the same time then do the same instance over and over and over it gets you burned out 10x as fast. I wasnt as sick of MC after runing it for 1 year then i was sick of nax after runing it for 3 months.
Seriously you clearely show that you didnt play vanilla.

That's not hard. That's annoying, horrible grinding. That's a BS mechanic. There's nothing hard about farming Onyxia heads. It's going back to an entry level boss when you are on third-tier content. It wouldn't be hard now if you had to go kill Malygos to get a buff to use against Lich King. It would just be dumb and annoying.

The only difference is that if you would go now to kill malygos
1- you wouldnt get ANY loot from it while bosses like gruul gave you dst wich was one of the best items in the game at the time
2- it would be mindnumbingly easy while onyxia would still be able to kill people with deepbreath even if they were t3
3- people still run lord jaraxus, razorscale etc in wotlk for badges.
4- people run HEROICS in wotlk wich is lower then an entry level boss. its how you said "Dumb and annoying".
Yet you're not here to debate, you're clearely just a wotlk fan boy who cant make an objective opinion.
I know vanilla had its ups and downs, i know i wouldnt want it back, but throwing so much dirt at it and saying it was easy while at the same time pointing some flaws that wotlk also has right now is damn right hypocracy.

I am astonished at how many people fail to comprehend the difference between a legitimately difficult encounter and something that wastes your time for no good reason. Having a high tolerance for horribleness isn't a sign of skill or a badge of honor.

I take it lady vashj and ilidan were encounters that wasted time for no reason huh? Yep no skill involved there
How about archimonde then? It was done with t4 geared raid so gear wasnt the issue. Yet people would wipe on it for 3 weeks as you said. Encounter wasnt bugged and it was a perfect boss for the ending of an instance.
Whats your excuse for that type of boss then?

Modern encounters are complicated and have a bunch of different things going on at once, which ever raid member must understand and react to. Having to manage multiple simultaneous events, and having different people responsible for different tasks, and breaking down a hard fight are interesting challenges. The Rotface, Putricide and Blood Prince Council encounters each have a lot of stuff complicated stuff going on, and they call on each player to respond to the boss's abilities. They are challenging fights that punish you for raiding with idiots.

You want to know an encounter that punishes you for raiding with idiots?
Shade of araan. One idiot moves out of fire, BAM entire raid dies.
Teron gorefiend, one person becomes a ghost and allows constructs in the raid BAM wipe.
Ros, one mage doesnt spell steal BAM wipe. Tank doesnt reflect the deadedn WIPE. Enha shaman uses earth shock and messes up the rogues rotation BAM wipe.
I dont know of any normal modes in wotlk that makes it so one random person can wipe the raid from just one mistake like any of the previous bosses i mentioned.

If you went into those fights without step by step instructions for how to beat them, they would be extremely difficult to figure out.

Archimonde -> dont stay in fire. After 3 weeks. "YAY WEVE KILLED HIM OMGOMGOMG screen shot!!! WOW SO AWESOME!!!"

By contrast, being stuck for weeks at Huhuran because your raid needs more NR drops is not difficult. Farming six hours of level 40 earth elementals for a night of attempts on Rag is not difficult. It's just difficult to tolerate.

Youre giving rag as an example? I mean honestly the last boss in the first instance ever made. WHy dont you compare him with KT 25 man nax while youre at it?
Why not give an example like C'thun (after fix) or Hexxer or nefarian.

ToC was too easy and that was a mistake.

I wish they make only encounters like toc, so people like you can see where this game is heding. Hey! there are still casuals who play 2 hrs a week and cant raid. Content needs to be like toc since theyre the majority of players amarite?!

I would not consider Ulduar 25 a faceroll instance. Flame Leviathan was a free lunch. Marrowgar is in ICC, I guess. But, Deconstructor in Ulduar and Deathbringer Saurfang in ICC are pretty stiff performance requirements that will break most pickup groups for a while. I think ICC is a pretty good challenge.

My guild formed with random people had its first raid in icc 25 for the first time. Guess how many bosses weve killed in the first night after 3 hrs of raiding?

...Four.

[Kalanos]

^

biggest wall of text ive ever read...yea, i read it. i agree with pretty much everything you said amen

[Lori]

It's easier and it's not rewarding anymore. In TBC it was much more fun, because every encounter was new and exiting. it was so awesome after killing kael'thas and vashj to be able to go to hyjal/bt... and work your way to your t6. now every newb got the t10-shoulders and killed the icc bosses... And HardModes are a waste of time, 277er-Gear NICE, spend so much time and gold just for gear 2 level your char to 85? ...
TBC was the best time for a Hardcore-Raider EVER! And Casualclysm will destroy it completly.

[veemon_ro]

IMHO reality was (using BT as an example) that it got cleared real fast by advanced guilds. (We were still in TK when Nihilum killed Illidan).

Why do you care about what nihilum does. As you pointed out you were still in TK. And after finishing TK you wouldnt have to farm it for 6 months over and over despite the fact that your entire raid had the gear to progress for 2 months now.
You wouldnt have to wait for a new patch to go to MH, instead you would go to it when YOU chose to when YOU felt you're ready and not when blizzard would tell you to its ok.

So what option was left then? Yep..killing the same bosses over and over again, for 8 months. There was not "1 more boss" waiting for Top guilds.

And thats why top guilds were playing AOC and beta testing AION. Once you finish content and you see everething, the game is not as apealing as it is when you're actually looking foward for new stuff.

Maybe some would have wished then for "the same bosses i did before but now with newer gimicks" because all they had was the same old boss over and over and over....

Every one else but the few 5% had plenty of bosses to look up to. Even if not every one did killjaden.
Killing leotheras for the first time in SSC would feel just as epic for a casual guild. Now even casual guilds are bored as they get to do/see everething in just a few weeks and content that people might of liked (ulduar, malygos) gets outdated and left to dust while people keep farming the same heroics that were out on release over and over and over and over.

And for the OP. If you still dont think the game is easy, then why do encounters keep geting nerfed just weeks after release?
You think kologran, iron council, Hodir, thorim, Vezax, deathwhisper were buged encounters? Or they were just a bit too chalanging and they got nerfed so BAD (not casual) BAD players can do them?

[Soreila]

Raiding as an activity is easier. Its a heck of a lot easier. Farming stuff for raids is pretty much down to fish for feasts and frost lotus for flasks. The encounters are the same kind of difficulty though.

The only thing thats become harder imo is finding 25 people to form a raid who actually know how to play. Its not a problem in well organised guilds, but gets annoying elsewhere.

[MaritnR]

Old content was not diffucult in tactics, it was difficult in gear.

Miss one buff your all dead,

dont have 8 t3 tanks you cant finish the t3 instance.

The only reason top guilds didnt finish every raid in the first few weeks was because of one of 2 reasons.

1)Bugs, making the boss impossible

2)gear checks, be them ony cloaks 8 tank t3 requirements, resists.

Claiming that having one boss left is better than none, what if you knew that next week and the week after and the week after you wouldnt have any chance of killing that last boss becuase your guild still needed 15 ony cloaks that would take almost 4 months to farm.

Imagine if blizz put a req on starting the lich king encounter that you have to have killed festergut 40 times before he will fight you... and then when you unlock him he is so bugged it takes blizz another 2 months to sort him out. Welcome to the world of Vanilla raiding.

[nosebleed]

1. You had to find 40 members willing to be on to raid, and also have some for backup just incase.

You mean 39 other members... :

[conscript]

Old content was not diffucult in tactics, it was difficult in gear.

Don't forget to mention that Vanilla was only truly difficult because most classes had only one viable spec. In most cases each class had about one spec that was good for pve and pvp and the other two existed for basically no reason. I can't think of a single class that was viable in all three of its specs in Vanilla.

Gear just wasn't itemized at all. Rather than there being specialized tier and non-tier gear for every class and spec, gear was a mishmash of poor design and resistance. Everything had FR or SR on it. Druid gear had all five base stats and then a mix of melee and spell power stats. Warrior gear was a hodgepodge of physical damage and defensive stats. Hunter gear had spell power. And even with these facts MC and BWL were doable with pretty much 75% of your raid being unafk, for MC the number is probably closer to 50% for everything but Rag. Had Vanilla been as clean cut for itemization as WotLK it would have been a complete joke.

[Madhoof]

I didn't follow the discussion but I wantet to counter some points from the OP.

And it's not fun at all when a raid boss drops resist gear instead of something cool.

Pretty much your personal flavour. I definately enjoyed it to collect resi gear. Who says collecting AP, Spellpower, or whatever is more fun then collecting resis and stamina without loosing too much core stats? I'd follow you, if you put up the assumption that most people feel like this, but to say that it really is like this is just not true (even if I was the only example, which I know I wasn't)

And since the oldest raiders had been raiding outdated instances for years to gear new raiders, and building massive amounts of DKP, they got everything first.

You can't blame the game for guilds not being able to handle their loot distribution. There where concepts like dkp reset, loot councils, rolling on items an so on, back in vanilla days already.

[NoShutUp]

Crawford...

Crawford.... sounds like crawdad

Crawdads are like crabs...

GO BACK TO BLIZZARD FORUMS GHOSTCRAWLER.

I jest, anyway I disagree Crawford. The fights have gotten easier, and I'll explain why, and there are a lot of reasons why they've gotten easier.

1) Agro. Remember when warriors had to sunder? Remember when Salv(or whatever the crap shaman's totem was) was a must to be able to raid? These changes to agro where most classes now build it much slower, and tanks build it faster, not to mention tanks also being able to deal more damage as well means that bosses aren't going to go flying off at, say a warlock who's nuking to hard, a rogue who doesn't know that shiv is a good idea every now and then, the hunter who can't find his feign death button. So bosses stay pretty much where they need to be the whole fight unless they're supposed to move/be moved around.

2) Damage. Everyone now does crazy damage. With hybrids being out of their shell now for "just being brought for buffs" and they're doing "relativity" the same damage as "pure" dps, this is a very high boost in damage going on in the raid, far more then what was ever seen in BC or Pre BC. More damage means bosses are going to die faster.

3) Bosses have less health vs damage as they did in the other expansions. Meaning they're not scailing nearly as well as in BC or Pre BC, so less health means they're dying even faster.

4) Bosses lack the "phases" that was in BC. Remember when every boss had ~3 phases that totally changed everything you were doing to that boss? I do, there's not nearly as many of these situations as there were back in BC. Sure they change up, move a phase, but it's not as drastic as in BC where it changed EVERYTHING you were doing. Remember Kael or Vashj? Those were some crazy phase changes.

5) Lack of Gear checks. I'll admit, this one wasn't "fun" but it did make things more time consuming, meaning you spent more time in a place, and you felt like you accomplished more when you were finally past that part. Sure you had now a totally worthless gear set once you were past, but it was still challenging to be build up your resistance gear before say "next raid day" or whatever.

6) Lack of CC in raids. Man, I remember times where CC was life or death in some places. But I can't think of one place in WotlK where you "needed" it. I know in Ulduar it was nice at the time to have it, but it wasn't a necessity.

7) Predictable and there's nothing new. What I mean by that, is they're recycling a lot of differant aspects from other bosses (Not every boss, but there's a lot.) A lot of fights can be broken down into the following
A: This boss drops circles of death, move from them.
B: This boss has stuff on the ground, move him.
C: This boss puts a debuff on someone at random and it will deal damage to them, they need to be healed all the way through it/dispelled/etc
D: This boss needs two tanks due to stacks/damage/etc
E: This boss has adds so offtanks are needed.
F: This boss slowly kills the raid with an aoe ability
G: This boss will do X during Y so you have to stop it with Z.
H: Boss gets stronger as the fight goes on.
I: Don't stand near/Stand on X durring Y phase.

With This is how most of the fights have been here up. Some have exceptions, but this is most. Once you've done this set, you'll be able to quickly pick up on a fight and say "Oh yeah this fight is like X and Y put together!"

8 ) Mods/EJ/Armory/how to vidoes, bosskillers, etc. People now, more then ever can look at how to down a boss, what spec they should be in, how to gem themselves, how to play their class, etc. I for one, hate this more then anything.

9) Fights don't change enough between 10/25/hardmodes. If you do a fight without mods on 10, you can figure out quickly how to do them on 25, then hard modes don't really change a whole lot between them, it's not like it's a completely different fight where suddenly a poorly designed fight that's a loot pinata becomes an ultimate god of death once you change up.

10) Bosses are simply too forgiving. Lets take Kael again. You screw up and stand in his circle of death, you're dead, end of story. You can live a while in other people's circle of death. Lets take Vashj, you throw a Core at someone with a full inventory, the core goes away, it might be a wipe right there. Take Illidian, you have tanks that don't know how to walk backwards, and there' goes your whole raid. Prince from Kara, You moved yourself into a corner and here comes an infernal, GG. Archy in Hyjal, you caught a little bit of lag and your tears didn't go off in time? Well good job! you're whole raid is most likely going to die depending on what class you are.

You see, raiding has become much easier due to either what I would consider "wrong changes" or due to Blizzard not keeping up with the "wrong changes" that they made.

Also.... /thread imo

Edit
-----
Bloody smileys messed up my number 8...

[NGRazor]

I think TBC had the challenge of vanilla with some of the accessibility of WotLK. The problem was, as the OP has stated quite well, much of the difficulty of vanilla was contrived or artificial. At some point however, blizzard realized (most)casuals weren't dumb and that keeping them out of raiding was going to hurt the game in the long run.

I know you mentioned that in vanilla some raids required gear from that same dungeon to get through it; this is one thing that I don't think would be a bad thing in WotLK. You have greedy goblin beating algalon 10 in blues. The only places we see this gear requirement is in ICC on things like Festergut, which is usually a result of having raiders who never ran TOC with you.

Someone earlier mentioned the quick raiding burnout that occurs in WotLK because there's very few raids at one time that are worth doing. I totally agree with this. I liked the badge system in WotLK at first until I realized it made me not even want to bother with older content. It's rare to get "stuck" on a boss other than a last one in hard mode or one that is part of an achievement (Algalon, Anub, Yogg+0 etc).

Personally, I liked running Kara even while I was raiding BT. There is absolutely 0 reason to do Naxx anymore for anyone. It might as well have been part of a different expansion.

Blizzard has to find a better way to balance...
1. Casual accessibility vs hardcore need. 10 vs 25 vs Hardmode is not enough. Its all the same raid in the end which burns people out extremely quickly. I'd much rather be doing 4 distinct raids than two different 10 mans and 25 mans of the same bossed and raid every week. I feel like I'm somewhere between casual and hardcore, which usually means if I want to meet my personal WoW-needs I get stuck with the hardcore when I'd much rather play less.
2. Keeping raids from previous patches relevant without shoving it down your throat like it is now... "lawl go kill Sarth for 5 frost badges."
3. Give people more reasons to log on. After ICC came out I basically logged on for 30 minutes each day to do a daily random but never felt compelled to log on for any extended period of time except when there was raiding. Even then, a 4 hour a night, 4 day raid week felt empty and pointless that we were spending so much time on the same stuff when some of it no longer helps anyone. As much as farming for flasks and whatnot was annoying, it did give you a way to contribute to your guild's efforts in the off time. It'd be nice if there was a mechanic other than mindless grinding that would convince you to log on. If there's no holiday there's nothing to do unless you play an alt, and even most holidays can be finished in a day or two.
4. In Vanilla I felt more connected to my guild because we all worked hard together (well, at least 25 or so of us did, there were always plenty of slackers in 40 man). Now, some people only need to log on for raid time to keep up.
5. If you are going to have faceroll fights they should be a rare gimme that rewards progressing past another hard boss. Almost every raid encounter should be challenging and have you thinking about what you're doing. It simply isn't this way. Raids are 75% faceroll and 25% things that keep you on your toes.

Overall I think WotLK brought a lot of good changes in raid philosophy and accessibility, but I think some tweaks can be made that can reduce burnout and make raiding feel more fulfilling than it does now.

[Thalur]

Raiding in vanilla WoW was, in most cases, relatively simple from a mechanics perspective. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, which are held up as guild-breaking raids, had boss mechanics where the whole fight was as simple as "Run away when you are the bomb," "Line of sight his ability," or "Tank him with your back to the wall."

You need to differenciate a bit I guess. Yes, from the standard perspective of a lazy dps, you are absolutely right. Encounters in Vanilla were ridiculously easy for most dps, just hammering you main abilities and moving out of a fire once every 5 minutes. For dps, today's fights are much more challenging.

However, for tanks and healers, the opposite is true. As a healer, today you have unlimited mana and can spam anything you want, tank healing is spamming big heals, and raid healing is spamming AoE heals. Remember holy priests at classic patchwerk standing in a row to coordinate the casting of heals, because there had to arrive a big heal at the tank every .5 seconds? Sure, not that difficult on all bosses, and you generally took too more heal than necessary. However, as I recall, the boss fights themselves were not easier as a healer.

And for tanks -- I guess tanks have never had such an easy time as today

[Mermeoth]

Well preparing everyone for raid in Vanilla was really pain but atleast you were rewarded with Epic feeling.

There is not preparing in Wotlk you can skip almost all content and join to players who were progressing since start of Wotlk. There is no why to play until last big patch because why spend year in game when you can just join and in a while get there where are other one year raiding players.

Well TBC was between these extremes and I think it was probably best raiding time. (Well until raids nerfing and more Wotlk like shits added)

Raiding has become much easier and it's a fact that know even blizzard so stop posting these shit.

[Fenixdown]

Don't forget to mention that Vanilla was only truly difficult because most classes had only one viable spec. In most cases each class had about one spec that was good for pve and pvp and the other two existed for basically no reason. I can't think of a single class that was viable in all three of its specs in Vanilla.

Gear just wasn't itemized at all. Rather than there being specialized tier and non-tier gear for every class and spec, gear was a mishmash of poor design and resistance. Everything had FR or SR on it. Druid gear had all five base stats and then a mix of melee and spell power stats. Warrior gear was a hodgepodge of physical damage and defensive stats. Hunter gear had spell power. And even with these facts MC and BWL were doable with pretty much 75% of your raid being unafk, for MC the number is probably closer to 50% for everything but Rag. Had Vanilla been as clean cut for itemization as WotLK it would have been a complete joke.

I think this makes a great hypothetical.

If Wrath had been year one, and vanilla had been year five, think of a boss in vanilla that would actually be "difficult" by today's play standards. Keep in mind that we're only switching bosses, not requirements. In other words, vanilla bosses today would not require endless farming to prepare for and Wrath bosses would.

Basically, your first ever 40-man would have been Naxx, and it's retarded and insane requirements. Shadow resist for trash pulls. Not for a boss, just for TRASH pulls. Then the frost resist grind or gtfo for Sapphiron. Then from there, guess what you get? Fire resist for Sartharion and Arcane resist for Malygos. Then you get to do Ulduar as a 40-man raid in the eqivalent of T1 gear. Think you could have 15 AFK for Freya or Mimiron? Hell no, everyone would end up dead. Also, you would be doing all of this in the very poorly designed and itemized gear of vanilla. And without today's abilities and spells (no Sacrifice, no BoSanc, no death knights period, no expertise, no haste, ect.).

Then make vanilla bosses not require resists, not require vast amounts of preparation, and only need 25 people. Every boss in the game gets 1-shot by everyone. I think the redo on Ony is a clear answer on just how "hard" vanilla raids actually were. Until AQ40 you wouldn't even come across a seemingly challenging boss encounter. Tactics were the equivalent of two abilities in each fight. Don't blow up the raid, and cleanse. Ooooo, challenging. Also, then you would have expertise, haste, death knights, far superior item statistical setup, no necessity for resistance checks, ect.

So that's your answer to how "hard" vanilla was. If you tuned every vanilla raid to level 80 and Wrath standards, there's not a boss in it until probably Twin Emps that even poses a threat to wipe a raid unless it's full of you and 24 borderline mentally handicapped individuals.

Vanilla wasn't hard. It was brand new and very poorly designed. After five years, it was better set up and experience made it much easier. If anything, at least Blizzard places more tactics in new fights thinking we all maybe have a brain, instead of making more than half of the encounters tank'n'spank with a twist.

[Egilsson]

Can't forgot the advantages offered by 1) spoilers, which are far more developed now; 2) concept repetition (stay out of puddles used to be a more tricky concept...) 3) add-ons (life pre-DBM???).

Raids are too choreographed and complex now imho. Move here at this point, look over there, nuke that, move here, don't nuke this, move back here, etc etc etc.

Sucks to be a tank in the new encounters because you have to know everything about everything in the encounter before everyone else, which is somewhat ok if a guild raid is progressing together; its not fine if you are pugging.

[Crawford]

You can't blame the game for guilds not being able to handle their loot distribution. There where concepts like dkp reset, loot councils, rolling on items an so on, back in vanilla days already.

I absolutely blame the game. Bosses dropped three or four items for 40 people, and the loot tables were larded up with junk. At two drops per raid, per week, it took six months to get the tier slot for everyone, if you were lucky with the drops. And high turnover among raiders dragged it out further.

There is no reason to make loot from farm-status encounters very scarce, except to force guilds to keep farming the content for longer. When loot is very scarce, you get drama.

[Crawford]

[quote=veemon_ro ]
I am sorry but I am confused here now. What exactly do you understand by a "dificult fight?".
In my opinion it is a fight where alot of things can go wrong. Having 1 out of 40 players be able to wipe the raid, is a pretty big thing that can go wrong in my opinion.
[quote]

Complexity and tuning are very different. A tank-and-spank encounter is the simplest possible encounter. But if you require a raid to do very close to the theoretical max DPS with the gear available to beat the enrage timer, then it is a very difficult encounter. If you slash his hitpoints, or increase the raid's damage dealing capacity (buffs to players, nerfs to encounters, new gear) the fight, with the same mechanics, becomes a pinata.

Patchwerk 40 and Patchwerk 10 illustrate extreme examples of this phenomenon.

The dps was still gearing up so they have mana and be able to last long fights, and they still could do more damage once the tank geared himself up as well. That is why most guilds even gave tank prio...have you EVEN played vanilla before talking ?!

Judgement of wisdom+wand. It was not a fun or challenging mechanic. And, yes, giving priorities to tanks is pretty obvious in situations where the DPS gear doesn't matter and tank's threat generation dictates the entire raid's damage output. But that isn't a good thing.

Considering that in most guilds I go now, 1 out of 2 players have no clue how to play the game besides beeing in ice crown, I have to admit that I would be scared shitless if i knew any one of these jewls of players could wipe my raid by pulling agro.

The raiding with idiots problem was endemic to 40 man raids. When loot is a commodity to the extent it was in Vanilla, it took a long time for stuff to trickle down to the people who were the fourth or fifth priority for their class. That means that Hunter number 1 is stoked to kill Chrommag because he will drop the Crossbow of Unreasonable Damage, while Hunter number 5 doesn't care because he probably won't get the bow for six months.

If hunter 5 is as committed and skilled as hunter 1, he should try to go to a guild where he will be higher priority. As is, it was very hard to get uniform skill and commitment out of a raid guild with the loot distribution the way it was in vanilla.

But a guild so bad that people repeatedly pulled aggro off the tank and wiped was extremely bad. This was an easy problem to avoid. The raid leader called out "stop DPS" and everybody stopped DPS and let the tank build threat.

So yes, it would be harder as you would have more oportunities to wipe and you would have to dps more carefully as to follow your rotation, but at the same time be carefull not to overagro and also know what spells to use when youre close to doing more tps then the tank.

Someone with severe mental disabilities could figure out how to manage threat. Avoiding over-aggro was something guilds figured out in molten core. In BWL, they threw a few tricks in there to dump threat off the tank. But guilds that were semi-competent figured out all the threat mechanics. Blizzard didn't get rid of the vanilla threat mechanics because they were hard; they got rid of them because they were easy and boring and stupid.

It is much more challenging to do max dps, and to try to keep up with dps requirements while responding to other mechanics, than it ever was to avoid doing too much DPS and getting aggro.

And if you think one moron can't wipe raids now, then you obviously haven't seen people not running the blood link together on Blood Queen or sitting in the raid with a slime on Rotface.

As a warlock i never spent any chunk of the fight doing nothing past mc. But if vanilla was so mind numbingly easy for you, how far did you got in it and in what guild?

I didn't say it was easy. I said it was miserable and annoying and stupid. I played up to twin emperors in vanilla and then my guild fell apart.

And I saw stupid stuff. I saw a top guild finally beat Rag by poaching the second-best guild's top tank. I saw two guilds kick half their members and merge to have enough cloaks to finish BWL, and then they fell apart because of infighting among the two sets of officers before they beat Nef.

Vanilla's game mechanics poisoned the challenge and the social experience.

Yes you clearely proven to me you have never played vanilla or if you did you never got past mc. I would only have to name princess from aq that did insane ammounts of aoe. Or the first boss in aq 20 where if you would stay close to the bubbles you would be silenced and take damage.

Princess was a straight resist check. All of AQ 20 was a joke. Guilds didn't even do it. It was all pickup groups, and they roflstomped Ossirian.

And as i also stated, when one out of 10 people is the bomb its very easy, raid can just spread out.
When one out of 25 people is the bomb its slightly harder due to the fact that its easyer to find some one who wont run from 25 people.

The difference is that the bomb in a modern boss fight is one of five or six things that might be going on.

When 40 man are involved you dont even wonder if some one will not run. You know for 100% that will happen and you pray that he doesnt get the debuff.

It is very difficult to carry somebody through ICC now who cannot respond properly to these various mechanics. He'll wipe you on Rotface, on Putricide, on Princes and on Blood Queen, and he might wipe you on Saurfang and Festergut.

The fact that the social dynamics of vanilla did require raiding with such people is a serious knock against 40 man raids.

First of all imagine how it feels after killing a boss after 4 weeks, its an experience that has been deprived from the game for you and many other people.
Secondly why would you reach a boss where only 4 people have the gear to do it? You should be farming previous content more before trying it. Again gear used to have a purpose. You cant just jump and skip over content, last time i checked this was an rpg not a shooter that you can wallhack through levels.

Lots of guilds spent four weeks working on Mimiron. Lots of guilds spent four weeks working on Yogg and many of them never beat him. The wing bosses in ICC will take a lot of guilds some time, and the Lich King is very difficult.

And that's without discussing hardmodes.

So what content did we have after 1 year? Ulduar (that we played for 3 months since no one ran it after toc was out)
And ICC wich i belive will keep me ocupied for 1 tops 2 months after wich i will farm it endlesly untill 6 months later a new patch will be released.

ToC came too soon after Ulduar and most guilds didn't have time to finish Uld or work on hardmodes. I wish ToC had been tuned harder to force people to work on Uld.

I rather liked the system that i allways knew there is another instance for me to do as soon as i finish the one im curently doing.

Content comes out roughly every 3 months now. In vanilla, it was more like every eight months, and a lot of the releases filled in gaps. ZG and AQ 20 were sidegrades to Molten Core.

You dont want to know how teribad some people played after they eneterd ICC for the first time.
Also when you have instances like nax and toc and the first few wings on ICC, what exactly will help people train themselves for the hardmodes when sudently standing in fire is actually a big deal and healers cant go afk and watch youtube during a fight/

Players are better than they used to be. Vanilla was mindless for many classes, especially farm status raids that had to be run for months and months.

If i want to take a break i stop paying. I dont need blizzard to give me brakes. This is like your internet company sudently giving you a downgrade to 10 kb/s down from 10 mb/s . Then they say "Well taking a break isnt the worse thing in the world".

Okay. A lot of people will not unsubscribe because there's a two month lull between major content patches. Blizzard has NEVER been able to produce content as quickly as players have been able to consume it. They make it much faster now than they used to.

[flamey]

Content comes out roughly every 3 months now. In vanilla, it was more like every eight months, and a lot of the releases filled in gaps. ZG and AQ 20 were sidegrades to Molten Core.

6 very fun months of nax .
~4 months of ulduar
6 more awesome months of TOC

What 3 months are you smoking?

In TBC you already had

Kara Gruul mag ssc/tk on release

Bt/mh after and then za ad swp.

Sure there was a long period of time between patches but unless youwere in those 4% guilds you would never go out of content.
And every patch would probably nerf the content you were doing so that you could progress further.


Also LOL at you saying modern bosses have 10 more gimicks then a bomb.
While that might be true, you also leave out the fact that a moder boss doesnt wipe you if a player messes up the bomb.
In solarian one guy exploding would cause a 80% wipe. Yet what happens if a bombot manages to reach the raid at mimiron? Yeah thats right, every one gets healed.

[Tekko]

I've not read all the posts here, so it may of been brought up already.

It's not really the fact that the bosses have gotten easier, in my opinion they are harder than before, every (most) boss has a lot more mechanics and we have to move a hell of a lot more than before, one thing which makes it too easy is bosses being tauntable, that's just crap and one of the many reasons why the bosses seem easier.

Every class is a lot more advanced than before, back at 60 we had limited spells to use, was there many aoe healing spells? no. Now Paladins can aoe heal good enough, Blizz give into all the class whines and are destroying the originality of each class, making all of them more and more alike. Mana management for healers is broken, there is none, I never fear of going out of mana when I heal.

Tanking has been simplified, even a retard can push out imba TPS and AoE tanking is a piece of piss these days, it's even simple on a warrior, on a Frost DK or Paladin you don't even have to try.

Easy loot, you can be geared for ICC 10 in a week or 2 of playing... if not 25.

Raid mods are way too advanced as well, they give you a huge warning for everything, but this isn't blizz's fault. We all get forced to use DBM etc. by our guilds, but I would love to raid without it, having to rely on boss casts or emotes would make it much harder, would like to see the nubs call it easy then.

Grid, another addon which simplifies healing, again not Blizz's fault.

As the title says Raiding has not become easier, I would say this is wrong, it has become easier because the classes are so much easier to play now, have many more spells to deal with a variety of scenarios, addons are better than ever, loads of websites offering advice and tactics and gear being far to easily obtainable.

The bosses of Vanilla and TBC had a lot more gear checks, be it resist, enough geared tanks or the required dps, once you had it, it was easy. Farming is easier now, back in the day you had to farm loads to raid and gold was harder to make, now it's a joke.

All that being said, I would say the bosses are harder than before, but all the above make them easier :P