Legend of Vanilla and the Paradox of Difficulties

[Queen of Hamsters]

also worth noting that only about 1% of original players even entered naxxramas, let alone beat it

?

This figure is entirely different on Classic servers these days.

1% didn't not see Naxx because of it being the most challenging raid designed. 1% saw it due to time restraints, logistics and the release of TBC coupled with such a large part of the playerbase being busy just getting to level 60.

Today, players attack this content with 13 years worth of knowledge on optimization, how the game functions and what the bosses throw at them. 'Nuff said.

- - - Updated - - -

Not hard, tedious.

Amen to that.

[Gwennie]

The difference between Vanilla and today's WoW lies in how the combat is approached.
Today's WoW is more "action-driven". It's about rotation and movement.
Vanilla WoW is more "tactical-driven". It's about MANAGING the fight (resources are a very real thing, mana DOES run out, threat DOES matter).

If you like jumping around and spamming keys, Vanilla will be very boring (rotations are really, REALLY barebone, fights are really "slow").
But if you like that you actually need to think a bit ahead and communicate with others because things require cooperation and some amount of planning and coordination, then Vanilla might pleases you.

Exactly! They have two different kinds of difficulty. I've described Vanilla as having logistical difficulty, whereas current wow has mechanical difficulty. Vanilla is about planning and managing resources effectively, modern wow is about executing your abilities well and responding successfully to raid mechanics. Both are good!

[valky94]

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.

as someone who raided in TBC, i kinda know the feel

[thatmikeguy]

A vocal minority have been crying for Vanilla servers for a while. It's only fair that they get the Full vanilla feeling warts and all.

This. Those warts dictated how we played the game. The version of vanilla most people want was only out four months before BC. The 1st year and a half was Vanilla. But that was so broken, that to recreate that level of broken only to need to fix it for a next vanilla event is bonkers to think about. This is why many employees are not talking about it much. The poor sucker that takes the lead software engineer job that is posted for classic will be recreating the game, and people will hate many parts of whatever he/she is told to do.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=231291

[valky94]

Not hard, tedious.

not wanting to bash vanila, but i agree, for someone who spent the last few months of vanila lvling (made it to 30 sometnihg, never made it to 60 before tbc since i started like 2-3 months before 2.0 came out), lvling was more of a pain in the ass then actually hard, 5+ people camping 1 quest mob, where the player who attacks it first gets the tag, same with quest objectives, you fight an npc, some ass just swings by and steals your items and stuff like that, those are more of an annoyance than signs of difficulty

- - - Updated - - -

The really hard part of vanilla raiding weren't the boss mechanics, but managing 40 players, especially on fights where individual input was important like for example Razorgore. Next to that threat management (Horde Warlocks who raided in vanilla know all about this) and the fact that bosses were immune to taunt required especially tanks to be on their game, as tank rotation on Vael wasn't just "next tank taunt!" Finally, number tuning in vanilla and TBC was brutal. A mistake usually ended in your death. Besides that, current raids are mechanically much much harder.

Also do not forget that during MC most raids had two shamans out of combat to resurrect people.

from what i noticed while watching my brother raid in vanila, it was more like managing 25ish people while the rest just died in the first min of the encounter being afk, not knowing what do to etc.

[Maudib]

This. Those warts dictated how we played the game. The version of vanilla most people want was only out four months before BC. The 1st year and a half was Vanilla. But that was so broken, that to recreate that level of broken only to need to fix it for a next vanilla event is bonkers to think about. This is why many employees are not talking about it much. The poor sucker that takes the lead software engineer job that is posted for classic will be recreating the game, and people will hate many parts of whatever he/she is told to do.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=231291

I suspect they will start with the last official patch before BC, and then reverse out the events, adding them back in some "patch-like experience". I would be completely fine with that.

[Cairhiin]

from what i noticed while watching my brother raid in vanila, it was more like managing 25ish people while the rest just died in the first min of the encounter being afk, not knowing what do to etc.

This was true at least in MC, but not so much in later raid encounters. MC you could easily just let 20 people die, and still kill the boss if you knew what to do. MC wasn't a difficult raid, but it was an entry raid, and almost everyone was new to raiding.

[thatmikeguy]

not wanting to bash vanila, but i agree, for someone who spent the last few months of vanila lvling (made it to 30 sometnihg, never made it to 60 before tbc since i started like 2-3 months before 2.0 came out), lvling was more of a pain in the ass then actually hard, 5+ people camping 1 quest mob, where the player who attacks it first gets the tag, same with quest objectives, you fight an npc, some ass just swings by and steals your items and stuff like that, those are more of an annoyance than signs of difficulty

This is also why that version you were playing 1.12 was not really the bulk of Vanilla, most everyone doing endgame had gotten there playing the broken ass version of the game.

Example.. This was the BWL patch, most people don't know what came out when, and how that directed our play over those two years.. Take a look at the changes.

http://web.archive.org/web/200507150...atchnotes.html

[Swalload]

so, one weird thing I've seen people complain about since WoW classic was announced is the perceived difficulty of vanilla.

people say that since we're no longer noobs we'll steamroll through all the content, thanks to better strats, better addons and better communication everything will be extremely easy

people have also rightly pointed out that a ton of the content has been nerfed after vanilla, elite quests became regular ones, bosses were nerfed etc.

people also claim that raiding will suck because too many speccs are just not optimal, why take a shadow priest over a warlock? why take a boomkin over a mage? etc.

also worth noting that only about 1% of original players even entered naxxramas, let alone beat it


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?

Paladin tanks was suboptimal mainly because their mana couldn't last the entire boss fight. You end up losing aggro and having no option to get it back. That's why rage classes like Warrior and bears were much better tanks. (TBH I only ever saw warrior tanks in all my vanilla time)

[Deleted]

so, one weird thing I've seen people complain about since WoW classic was announced is the perceived difficulty of vanilla.

people say that since we're no longer noobs we'll steamroll through all the content, thanks to better strats, better addons and better communication everything will be extremely easy

people have also rightly pointed out that a ton of the content has been nerfed after vanilla, elite quests became regular ones, bosses were nerfed etc.

people also claim that raiding will suck because too many speccs are just not optimal, why take a shadow priest over a warlock? why take a boomkin over a mage? etc.

also worth noting that only about 1% of original players even entered naxxramas, let alone beat it


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?

Elysium Anathema

3 DAYS to REALM FIRST AQ40.

[Zka]

Yeah warriors didn't get hit hard enough to generate rage if they outgeared the instance by too much, our Warriors used to take their pants off to run dungeons.

I used a /sit macro as a maintank in BC for such cases

[Nefastus]

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

10 man weren't considered raids back then. MC was the first oficial one. Also moving back them depended the player's awareness, not by a cluster of addons on the screen yelling what the player has to do. Won't even comment some of the changes that only showed up later on Vanilla, like marking mobs or even the debuff slots on the bosses.

- - - Updated - - -

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.

I belive everyone fought him at Garr' area (never heard of raids that did that near the lava waterfall or the corridor like area) but it doesnt make it much better. 40 people spreading around is still a lot of people. More recent raids are done by addons actually. No one even looks to the screens anymore, its awful to look any video of recent raids and I suspect most that are avaliable had to "clear" some of the addons so people could watch it.

Take those addons out and I doubt the recent "pro" players wouldn't even be able to do quests, let alone raids. Hell, around wrath time screens were already cluttered with addons, nowadays its even worse from what I saw.

[hulkgor]

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.

Most dudes mocking vanilla difficulty are into a rude awakening when they pull a centaur in barrens and a patrol with a hyena aggros them. Probably enough to make them rage quit and whine that vanilla sucks!

[Zeidia]

Leveling in vanilla was the hardest thing, not the raids or the unbalanced classes. I've been playing mage on vanilla since i was unable to level another character and when people start to remember things like you can't see any quest on the minimap or you have to know where you have to do the quest instead of going to the point on the map, many people will realize how easy is wow now.

[Serenity91]

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

They seriously had kill quests with hundreds of mobs? o.O

[Nefastus]

Most dudes mocking vanilla difficulty are into a rude awakening when they pull a centaur in barrens and a patrol with a hyena aggros them. Probably enough to make them rage quit and whine that vanilla sucks!

Hah, I think the forums will be a lot of fun! People that are doing heroic this or that in retail getting owned by a barrens centaur.

[unbound]

so, one weird thing I've seen people complain about since WoW classic was announced is the perceived difficulty of vanilla.

people say that since we're no longer noobs we'll steamroll through all the content, thanks to better strats, better addons and better communication everything will be extremely easy

people have also rightly pointed out that a ton of the content has been nerfed after vanilla, elite quests became regular ones, bosses were nerfed etc.

people also claim that raiding will suck because too many speccs are just not optimal, why take a shadow priest over a warlock? why take a boomkin over a mage? etc.

also worth noting that only about 1% of original players even entered naxxramas, let alone beat it


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?

Unlikely that anyone is going to steamroll through the content. Leveling content is *massively* easier than it used to be; and that is even without the impact of heirlooms. There was a reason people had to use things like cc back then...it was an expected part of the game that a leveling mage (e.g.) would have to kite and use cc to survive.

Raiding didn't suck because of the lack of optimal specs. It sucked for the same reason puging sucks today...too many idiots who don't know how to play their class combined with too many idiots that think people needed the optimal specs combined with too many jerks that can't be bothered to spend 2 minutes to explain approach.

Furthermore, raiding wasn't common because it was a) hard to get 40 people together, and b) there was plenty to do without raiding. Unlike today, most people weren't playing to get to max level in a few hours to raid. Most people played because they enjoyed the world and their characters and the unique things each character / class / spec had...you know, RPG (something Blizz has been moving away from for nearly a decade now). I only tried a couple of raids in Vanilla because I was invited by a guild I joined who worked with another guild. We did okay, but it wasn't a big driving factor for anyone I knew back then.

I did a lot more raiding in BC, and even there you would hear that you needed this spec or that spec even for Kara, but it wasn't true. It was easier with those specs, but I did *many* successful runs of Kara without any optimal specs. In fact, that is why I loved raiding back then...different specs made the run different and I had to figure out how to do it with the classes I had handy. Raiding now is the same boring thing over and over again because a) they are too short and b) every position plays the exact same way regardless of spec. I don't care if you bring in a mage (any spec), warlock (any spec), BM or mark hunter, boomkin, shadow priest, or ele shaman...that raid will play out in exactly the same way. That is fricking boring as hell.

[Deleted]

Elysium Anathema

3 DAYS to REALM FIRST AQ40.

Kel'Thuzad down in the first ID after Naxx release too. Idk if that's a tuning issue but it's kinda what I expected doing this content nowadays.

BTW: If anyone wondering how they did 4HM without enough T3 geared warriors --> spellhit trinket from ZG

[schwarzkopf]

I don't think you even hit max level in vanilla the way you talk

Of course I hit level 60 in Vanilla, that is how I know it was hard.

PS: you quoted a response to a different topic to the one you commented on, so my comment is out of context.

- - - Updated - - -

You know, "hard" is when you go "wow, i can't beat it,

LOL - no, easy, medium and hard are all levels of things you CAN do.

[Nheme]

Kel'Thuzad down in the first ID after Naxx release too. Idk if that's a tuning issue but it's kinda what I expected doing this content nowadays.

BTW: If anyone wondering how they did 4HM without enough T3 geared warriors --> spellhit trinket from ZG

People have been complaining about if private projects are tuning raids correctly and a guy behind one of the projects said that they had to tune things to be in the ballpark because they were lacking facts about stuff like boss hp, damage of abilities etc as there were few (if any at all) combatlogs from that era.

The patch 3.0.2 added health points of bosses. Patch 2.3.0 had a vague description, but it did only add health points to players which was in the same group as you.