Legend of Vanilla and the Paradox of Difficulties

[Vintersol]

Wait wait, people really believe Classic servers will be real Vanilla versions ?

Blizzard will comply with complaints, that's obvious, otherwise it won't work, so :
- There won't be 2 loots for 40 people, more like 6-8
- Some classes won't be undertuned, they will attune everything
- They'll reduce the "leveling difficulty"
...

Vanilla would never fit the 2017 era in terms of gameplay, they'll have to balance everything. And that's why anti-Vanilla people didn't want it to happen : a lot of Blizzard resources will be busy working on Vanilla instead of BfA/future xpacs.

These "Anti-Vanilla" people can play retail and leave classic for people who wants this experience. Blizzard doesn't have to balance anything, there is a second version with all the convenience stuff and balancing and such called World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. There is literally no reason to change anything for classic. If you don't like it how it is, don't play. Simple as that.

[Scrysis]

Shadow priest? Ret pala? In a raid. There are unconfirmed reports of the odd ret paladin in raids in late vanilla but in my experience you went holy or you got kicked and that was that.

I never saw a shadow priest in vanilla. I think shadow was still kinda trying to be a healing spec back then

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And also from those who think there wasting there time on classic servers and should make us another live raid instead.

If you were a priest, you were holy. . . unless you pvp'd, and then you might be disc. If you were a warrior, you were either protection, or arms (although, we did have a pair of really crazy fury warriors that we carried). If you were a paladin, you were holy. If you were a druid, you were resto. All hunters were marksman. Depending on the patch, if you were a mage, you were fire (pre-ignite nerf -- ignite was friggin hilarious). Although, now that I think about it, even after the ignite nerf, you were still fire. Frost for pvp maybe. Warlocks were destro or affliction, if I remember correctly. I can't remember rogues or shaman. Actually, shaman were something you brought for bloodlust. And totems. They didn't really do anything else enough to care what spec they brought. Paladin blessings had to be renewed every 2 minutes, so that's pretty much all they did all raid long. That, and get absolutely smashed on whatever alcohol they had near by. Alliance had an advantage in PvE due to paladins, and Horde had an advantage in PvP due to Shaman. And shaman just frostshocked everyone to death.

There were some good times back then, but that was back then, and I'm happy to move forward. I wish the nostalgic WoWers well.

[Deleted]

Blizzard doesn't have to balance anything, there is a second version with all the convenience stuff and balancing and such called World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. There is literally no reason to change anything for classic. If you don't like it how it is, don't play. Simple as that.

And they are putting in the scaling stuff to fix the leveling pacing so that people can actually experience the lvl 1-60 content in a more meaningful way on retail. So there is zero reason to ask for balancing or QoL in WoW Classic.

[Hiricine]

vanilla raiding wow is a level around heroic raiding, however the logistics are the biggest challenge. Horde is almost a full difficulty step harder than alliance without blessings and judgments, though there will probably be more luck finding tauren warriors and dwarf priests.

The biggest part of that is gearing up an entire crew. You need MC geared players to clear BWL, BWL geared players to clear AQ40, and AQ40 geared players to clear Naxx. There really isn't much of a catch up curve, especially pre AQ40. The new sims and mods should help tremendously though, people will actually have a clue how much dps they can do.

[Scrysis]

Comparing difficulty on Retail vs. Vanilla is a more or less pointless endeavor because both are difficult in their own ways, but the type of difficulty is completely differently.

Granted, if we're talking about purely leveling content and solo stuff like that, Vanilla wins hands down but that's obvious - the game has constantly been updated to make it more user friendly and accessible and easier to get into. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's important to keep new players coming into the game when it's as old as WoW is. The gaming community has changed and expectations for user friendliness and tedium and time investment have changed over the years. Go back to the Everquest days if you want to see how casual Vanilla WoW was relative to its predecessors. WoW has always tried to appeal to this market.

In terms of high end play, talking about max level raiding and dungeons, then both games have the difficulty level. But while retail is about complexity of mechanics, reaction times and the handling of complex classes and rotations, Vanilla difficulty came from patience and planning, and the unforgiving nature of it.

Juggling your rotation to do 1M+ DPS while target switching and soaking randomly placed swirlies while simultaneously using your defensive cooldowns to survive that random raid damage burst that's going out at the same time takes a LOT more personal skill and coordination than most Vanilla players were used to (those videos of a mage standing there pressing frostbolt, frostbolt, frostbolt while never moving in the fight aren't a massive exaggeration with most Vanilla raid bosses). But in Vanilla everything was 100x more unforgiving - if you were a mage and you get melee'd by a loose add on a boss fight you were instantly one shot. Oh and picking up threat on that add was much harder for the tank, and you didn't have any ranged attacks and taunt was melee range only (chances are, if it was a raid, the add was immune to all taunts and CC anyway).

It's just a different world and a different game. Both were hard when talking about the actual high level difficult content.

Vanilla leveling wasn't hard at all. Blizzard just tried to help eliminate the middle-man. You had things like Thottbot and Alakazam (?) that would tell you where to go and what to do, just like WoWhead today. You want to run a dungeon? Then you have someone stand in the middle of town and spam general chat. Not hard, just more tedious and time-consuming.

And vanilla wow wasn't unforgiving at all. It was extremely forgiving. DPS just had to sit and chill for a couple of sunders. If they didn't. . . so what? Nothing bad happened to the raid if the boss kicked their face in. In a 40-man raid, you could very easily lose a couple of people and not have issues. Hell, we had a backup tank for shits and giggles most of the time. Some of the fights were designed with multiple off-tanks, and the damage was such that if you lost one tank, you generally had another tank to pick it up. And tank survival was a lot softer. Healers had mana pots that gave more mana and could be used multiple times per fight.

All the unforgiving mechanics came later, and more of them came with this xpac even. Lose a person, and you won't make the enrage timer, or worse yet, you could literally blow up the entire raid.

[Cairhiin]

I never saw a shadow priest in vanilla. I think shadow was still kinda trying to be a healing spec back then

They were okay in PvP but in raids you rarely saw one. On Horde side they only made Warlocks overaggro even more and their DPS wasn't great.

[Akka]

If you were a priest, you were holy. . . unless you pvp'd, and then you might be disc. If you were a warrior, you were either protection, or arms (although, we did have a pair of really crazy fury warriors that we carried). If you were a paladin, you were holy. If you were a druid, you were resto. All hunters were marksman. Depending on the patch, if you were a mage, you were fire (pre-ignite nerf -- ignite was friggin hilarious). Although, now that I think about it, even after the ignite nerf, you were still fire. Frost for pvp maybe. Warlocks were destro or affliction, if I remember correctly. I can't remember rogues or shaman. Actually, shaman were something you brought for bloodlust. And totems. They didn't really do anything else enough to care what spec they brought. Paladin blessings had to be renewed every 2 minutes, so that's pretty much all they did all raid long. That, and get absolutely smashed on whatever alcohol they had near by. Alliance had an advantage in PvE due to paladins, and Horde had an advantage in PvP due to Shaman. And shaman just frostshocked everyone to death.

There were some good times back then, but that was back then, and I'm happy to move forward. I wish the nostalgic WoWers well.

And here we have one of the most blatant example of trolls who come here just to shit up the forums, and have actually never played Vanilla. This post is just a pileup of forum hoaxes and ignorance.
Let's make a quick parse :

- Priest in PvP were shadow. Even a blue made a joke about how Shadow melted faces.
- Warriors were arms in PvP, but for PvE damage it was fury. Anyone saying fury did shit damage is also either ignorant or a troll.
- Mages were fire only from AQ onward. Being fire against fire-immune foe isn't a great idea.
- Shaman with bloodlust in Vanilla ? 'nuff said.
- Palaidn blessing were 5 mn, not 2.

That's just with a cursory glance.
This guy is a current WoW anti-Vanilla troll who is pretending to know things from Vanilla but is just copy-pasting the clichés that have been repeated on the forums for years. And don't kid yourselves, most of the retarded posts in this forum come from people just like him.

[Leih]

Vanilla leveling wasn't hard at all. Blizzard just tried to help eliminate the middle-man. You had things like Thottbot and Alakazam (?) that would tell you where to go and what to do, just like WoWhead today. You want to run a dungeon? Then you have someone stand in the middle of town and spam general chat. Not hard, just more tedious and time-consuming.

And vanilla wow wasn't unforgiving at all. It was extremely forgiving. DPS just had to sit and chill for a couple of sunders. If they didn't. . . so what? Nothing bad happened to the raid if the boss kicked their face in. In a 40-man raid, you could very easily lose a couple of people and not have issues. Hell, we had a backup tank for shits and giggles most of the time. Some of the fights were designed with multiple off-tanks, and the damage was such that if you lost one tank, you generally had another tank to pick it up. And tank survival was a lot softer. Healers had mana pots that gave more mana and could be used multiple times per fight.

All the unforgiving mechanics came later, and more of them came with this xpac even. Lose a person, and you won't make the enrage timer, or worse yet, you could literally blow up the entire raid.

I'm sorry but you seem to have missed what I was saying. Vanilla was definitely unforgiving in some aspects - specifically in terms of the BASIC aspects of the game. That was the only thing that made it "difficult." If your mage started the fight by going ham on the pull and aggroed the boss that was it. The bosses were consistently immune to all taunts and threat was so tricky that the boss would just run around bam-bam-bam one shotting all your raid while your tank with his hopeless melee-only abilities and low mobility ran around desperately trying to throw sunders on it to get it back. Oh and the boss probably had some kind of one shotting 270 degree cleave just to further take the piss.

Nowadays, all these very basic things are much friendlier, and this would never happen. You don't have to worry about little things like aggro. The game is more about dealing with complex fights and multiple mechanics. That in itself is unforgiving, but it's more about the combination of all that you have to do. Vanilla game was super simple, but one little thing could cause big problems, whereas the modern game tends to be about handling a huge amount of things all at once and being able to react to those things quickly.

If you fuck up and someone dies in Legion, you're probably going to wipe because you will lack DPS to meet the encounter check or the berserk timer, or you will lack enough people to soak some mechanic that requires X amount of people later in the fight. In Vanilla it was more common for someone fucking up to spiral the whole raid out of control... but it was harder to fuck up on that level because the mechanics were so much easier. It just felt more meaningful if it happened.

Best example? See the whelp caves on Onyxia. Some idiot stands on the tail, spawning 20+ whelps. If you were learning the fight (i.e. not overgeared) in Vanilla this was for sure going to lead to a chaotic wipe - Whelps spread out everywhere, two shotting clothies, tanks scrambling around sundering individual whelps trying to do something about it... Nowadays? If that happened you'd just pop some raid and DPS cooldowns, tanks would leap in there and grab everything, you'd throw out some CC and deal with it.

Certainly there are one-shot-the-whole-raid mechanics in the modern raids too, but they tend to be rare and significant when those are a thing (that's one of the reasons Mythic KJ is so significant, because it's uncommon for a fight to be so packed full of these mechanics).

Vanilla was about being patient and prepared, the Live game is more about the actual dynamic gameplay. Which one you prefer depends on what appeals to you.

[schwarzkopf]

It was "a challenge" only because there wheren't enough quests to level to 60.
The words you're searching for that is time consuming.

No - the word I was searching for was REAL difficulty.

However, in addition to actually being difficult it was ALSO time consuming.

[Mendzia]

'Paradox of Difficulties' sounds like a great name of next xpack leak!

[FertsBlert]

so, in the end, if this time around 4% of players end up beating naxxramas, and one of your 6 tanks is a bear (slightly sub-optimal) and one of your 6 tanks is a pala (quite suboptimal), is that really so bad?

My problem with palatanks or bears tanks anywhere was as a geared up warlock I would rip aggro off them if even looked at the mob before it was almost dead. Hell I used to 'tank' LBRS\UBRS later on when AQ40\Naxx geared because unless it was a main guild tank there was no bloody way they could stop the mobs trying to eat me, eventually we just gave up on having the alts tank and I did. Sure I was tanking on the 'huge wad of health with 20-25% damage reduction' but it worked.

[Belisaurio]

My problem with palatanks or bears tanks anywhere was as a geared up warlock I would rip aggro off them if even looked at the mob before it was almost dead. Hell I used to 'tank' LBRS\UBRS later on when AQ40\Naxx geared because unless it was a main guild tank there was no bloody way they could stop the mobs trying to eat me, eventually we just gave up on having the alts tank and I did. Sure I was tanking on the 'huge wad of health with 20-25% damage reduction' but it worked.

Shammy here, so I didn't tank.
But from what I remember, Tank warriors had problems in maintaining aggro when they overgeared 5man dungeons because of some class-mechanic bs (they recieved alot less dmg or something, but the result was that they didn't have enough rage).
After ZG patch, druids where really awesome (BWL+ZG sets gear/weapon) for 5 man dungeons, and some classes with mini-burst dmg skills...well, made warriors to have a hard time tanking.

I'm not saying this is what you saw at that time, but it's another point to take in consideration.

[Nheme]

As a mage who raided in Vanilla, this was a cumbersome situation:

Raiding BWL and attempting AQ. In BWL (like MC) you had to go frostspec due to immunity/resistance to fire from bosses, but you did more damage as fire so you either had to respec between doing BWL and AQ, or you just had to stay in frost, bringin sub-optimal dmg in AQ. Luckily my guild payed the mages for the respecs, but it would be really time consuming farming those 50g twice a week hovering between these two raid instances.

[Deleted]

If you were a priest, you were holy. . . unless you pvp'd, and then you might be disc. If you were a warrior, you were either protection, or arms (although, we did have a pair of really crazy fury warriors that we carried). If you were a paladin, you were holy. If you were a druid, you were resto. All hunters were marksman. Depending on the patch, if you were a mage, you were fire (pre-ignite nerf -- ignite was friggin hilarious). Although, now that I think about it, even after the ignite nerf, you were still fire. Frost for pvp maybe. Warlocks were destro or affliction, if I remember correctly. I can't remember rogues or shaman. Actually, shaman were something you brought for bloodlust. And totems. They didn't really do anything else enough to care what spec they brought. Paladin blessings had to be renewed every 2 minutes, so that's pretty much all they did all raid long. That, and get absolutely smashed on whatever alcohol they had near by. Alliance had an advantage in PvE due to paladins, and Horde had an advantage in PvP due to Shaman. And shaman just frostshocked everyone to death.

There were some good times back then, but that was back then, and I'm happy to move forward. I wish the nostalgic WoWers well.

A missed note on mage.
Frost for molten core and bwl because of fire resistance so fire barly did any damage

Yep I'm glad in one way that classic is coming because it gets all the vanilla hipsters out of the way but I'm not sure people who didn't play back then are really prepared for the many level cluster fuck of a game wow was back then.

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They were okay in PvP but in raids you rarely saw one. On Horde side they only made Warlocks overaggro even more and their DPS wasn't great.

Thing is and people who want to go check out vanilla will need to realise is. The idea of a spec being a pure thing wasn't around back then. You wernt really a ret paladin. You were a paladin that had put points in ret. Take my old pala. I mostly did pvp because that was my only option as a non healer I wore plate over cloth wish alot of palas wore (int plate was rare) and used a 2 hander, looks like ret on paper right? Technicaly I was prot as most of my points went into prot for reckoning and defence in pvp.

People also forget some talent trees wernt ment to be real specs, they were utility tress you splashed to compliment the main tree. Survival, fury, arms, ret, prot, shadow, demonology, enhancement and many more were not real or viable things to pour all your talent points into.

Also the raid tier you did made a difference as bosses and mobs had resistance to certain schools of magic. You simply couldn't play a fire mage in molten core because the bosses and mobs resisted your spells.

I really am not sure people who wernt there truly grasp the complete fuck fest vanilla was.

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And here we have one of the most blatant example of trolls who come here just to shit up the forums, and have actually never played Vanilla. This post is just a pileup of forum hoaxes and ignorance.
Let's make a quick parse :

- Priest in PvP were shadow. Even a blue made a joke about how Shadow melted faces.
- Warriors were arms in PvP, but for PvE damage it was fury. Anyone saying fury did shit damage is also either ignorant or a troll.
- Mages were fire only from AQ onward. Being fire against fire-immune foe isn't a great idea.
- Shaman with bloodlust in Vanilla ? 'nuff said.
- Palaidn blessing were 5 mn, not 2.

That's just with a cursory glance.
This guy is a current WoW anti-Vanilla troll who is pretending to know things from Vanilla but is just copy-pasting the clichés that have been repeated on the forums for years. And don't kid yourselves, most of the retarded posts in this forum come from people just like him.

They were 2 at launch. Fury wasn't a thing I know I kicked 2 from the guild back then. Warriors were prot or gtfo in my guild. Ur right on fire mages I pointed that out. Shadow was op for like a patch then it was terrible.

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No - the word I was searching for was REAL difficulty.

However, in addition to actually being difficult it was ALSO time consuming.

It really really wasn't hard. Took me 7 months 0 to 60 but at no point was it like a challenge mode or mage tower or bursting m+. Was just pick up quest do quest hand in for months till that ran out then grinding mobs. Any one who finds that hard should Probly move to Facebook games

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My problem with palatanks or bears tanks anywhere was as a geared up warlock I would rip aggro off them if even looked at the mob before it was almost dead. Hell I used to 'tank' LBRS\UBRS later on when AQ40\Naxx geared because unless it was a main guild tank there was no bloody way they could stop the mobs trying to eat me, eventually we just gave up on having the alts tank and I did. Sure I was tanking on the 'huge wad of health with 20-25% damage reduction' but it worked.

Only warriors had taunt and decent aggro gen with sunder stacks. So only warriors were real tanks

[tikcol]

vanilla wasn't hard, it was fun.

[Deleted]

As a mage who raided in Vanilla, this was a cumbersome situation:

Raiding BWL and attempting AQ. In BWL (like MC) you had to go frostspec due to immunity/resistance to fire from bosses, but you did more damage as fire so you either had to respec between doing BWL and AQ, or you just had to stay in frost, bringin sub-optimal dmg in AQ. Luckily my guild payed the mages for the respecs, but it would be really time consuming farming those 50g twice a week hovering between these two raid instances.

Don't forget mats for spells and repairs. God raiding was a dick ache back then. Being a pala Needing to grind gold to buy the item that lets me cast the buff that is the only reason I'm in the raid anyway. Fook dat

[Serenity91]

Is there anything that's not time consuming?
I mean, if some Bosses are "hard", you play more focused on them, repeat the same mechanics alot of times, study thems to see their weakness, etc...

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"

[Deleted]

Best part of vanilla were warriors taking up all the debuff slots with deep wounds

[Bladesyphon]

No - the word I was searching for was REAL difficulty.

However, in addition to actually being difficult it was ALSO time consuming.

...leveling in classic wow wasn't difficult, it was time consuming. I mean, sure, if WoW was your very first MMO, you might find it difficult...But coming to WoW from FFXI, leveling in WoW was like playing easy mode on any other game. No XP loss on death, no need to group at all to hit 60, being able to level strictly off of questing gear and never having to grind money to purchase gear needed to actually level, and mobs having no mechanics other then hitting and running away.

Leveling in WoW during classic was a joke, there is no arguing this fact.

[Cairhiin]

Thing is and people who want to go check out vanilla will need to realise is. The idea of a spec being a pure thing wasn't around back then. You wernt really a ret paladin. You were a paladin that had put points in ret. Take my old pala. I mostly did pvp because that was my only option as a non healer I wore plate over cloth wish alot of palas wore (int plate was rare) and used a 2 hander, looks like ret on paper right? Technicaly I was prot as most of my points went into prot for reckoning and defence in pvp.

People also forget some talent trees wernt ment to be real specs, they were utility tress you splashed to compliment the main tree. Survival, fury, arms, ret, prot, shadow, demonology, enhancement and many more were not real or viable things to pour all your talent points into.

Also the raid tier you did made a difference as bosses and mobs had resistance to certain schools of magic. You simply couldn't play a fire mage in molten core because the bosses and mobs resisted your spells.

I really am not sure people who wernt there truly grasp the complete fuck fest vanilla was.

You make some good points but I think the vanilla server will mostly appeal to players who know what they are in for and are returning players. There is little point in spending a lot of time on the vanilla server if you are actively raiding in Battle for Azeroth. If you don't raid and you want to just play vanilla casually on the side. In which case, you can, most people didn't raid in vanilla.

Vanilla appeals to a specific type of player however. The type that doesn't mind farming, running BFD to craft, socializing with a large guild, running dungeons together, raiding together, farming together. When you are in such a guild it is fairly easy to play a class that is necessary for raids and as a result I don't think you will see only Rogues and Warriors for example.

When we raided MC in the early days of vanilla, our class leaders (yea you had actually class leaders) were quite strict on specs in raids but for example Shamans were allowed to be DPS on trash (some were even allowed to be enhancement) as long as they healed on bosses, etc. Sure, you couldn't really be a Fire Mage or Destro Lock in Molten Core but I think most classes back then were restricted to one viable raiding spec. Class balance was pretty much in its infancy if not nonexistent all together. You know the struggle it was to do Vael only to find out you only had 5 Holy Priests online, etc. Nowadays, this would really not work anymore I totally agree. Yet, it still had a certain charm.