Everyone in the beta reporting that dungeons are REALLY easy :(

[Fascinate]

Oh, btw, what people fail to mention is that originally Vanilla dungeons baited people with low lvl to attempt them. Players would judge the difficutly of dungeon by mobs guarding the entrance, but the level of mobs increases as dungeon goes onward. In absurd case of Uldaman, the entrance mobs are level 36, but end-boss Archaedas is fricking level 47. Imagine a team of 35s (so entry mobs are yellow) entering Uldaman. They would get destroyed. I don't think its even mathematically possible to kill Archaedas with 5 level 35s. Now we know how it works, and people enter dungeons while being overleveled. If you are below level 42 you won't ever be invited for Uldaman, and people with level 45 or higher will be preferred. Some mobs could be GRAY for you.

Thats probably the best point that has been brought up so far. In actual vanilla people would try running deadmines with groups full of lvl 16-17's, sure you could complete part of it that way but good luck clearing the entire place. Lots of dungeons were like this, i think gnomer started around lvl 25-26 and the end boss was 10 levels higher than that.

[StrawberryZebra]

Running stuff with an offtank, or someone would could pick up monsters and reliably not die also wasn't uncommon. See: any dps warrior, most paladins, shamans with shields, hunter pets, and so on.

Having a Mage or Hunter kite wasn't unheard of either. Ultimately, they're all different solutions to the same core problem though. That your tank just couldn't hold aggro on that many mobs without either losing aggro on the kill target, and it hitting a DPS, or losing aggro on something else and it making a beeline straight for the healer.

I expect they'll all be less common in Classic because players are just better now.

[ManiaCCC]

Stratholme was also easy. Everything in Vanilla was easy. The 2004 average player was simply way worse than today's average player. This has been said millions of times because it is a fact. People still doubt it.

In all history of WoW, no 5-man dungeon was ever hard. It was harder in Vanilla, but that's about it. Yes, Cata dungeons were quite challenging at times, but because of system designs, not dungeon designs.

[Tehterokkar]

Right so if they were all so piss easy, why are the ppl in classic reporting the levelling to be much harder?

Quests give a lot less exp than private servers do. Private servers give TBC exp values from quest rewards, while actual vanilla quest exp rewards were like 30% lower.

[Triden]

At least part of the difficulty in some of these dungeons that people probably remember came from the huge level range in some of the earlier ones. Deadmines was 15-25. You get quests for it at 15, but the mobs and bosses toward the end are around level 25. If you're trying to put a group together, you'll probably end up with some people in the 16-18 range, which is fine at the beginning of the dungeon, but as you get further in you start missing most attacks and things get prohibitively difficult. A lot of the people you're seeing do it on streams now are going in with people they know who also know about the level requirement. If you do Deadmines with people who are level appropriate for mobs and bosses at the end, it'll be relatively easy if you don't do anything dumb. If you try it earlier (or are forced to due to who's available to go), it'll be harder.

[Teri]

1.12 tuning means people are stronger then at the actual 2004/2005 launch period.

[lollerlaban]

At least part of the difficulty in some of these dungeons that people probably remember came from the huge level range in some of the earlier ones. Deadmines was 15-25. You get quests for it at 15, but the mobs and bosses toward the end are around level 25. If you're trying to put a group together, you'll probably end up with some people in the 16-18 range, which is fine at the beginning of the dungeon, but as you get further in you start missing most attacks and things get prohibitively difficult. A lot of the people you're seeing do it on streams now are going in with people they know who also know about the level requirement. If you do Deadmines with people who are level appropriate for mobs and bosses at the end, it'll be relatively easy if you don't do anything dumb. If you try it earlier (or are forced to due to who's available to go), it'll be harder.

This. People's notion of "Hard dungeons" came from people trying to do Van cleef quests and not realizing that Van cleef himself is 8 levels above their own level. There's a reason why people ask for "be +20 level" for any DM runs these days except for maybe the healer

[Monster Hunter]

What do you guys think about this?

I played vanilla and definitely remember them being as hard if not harder than the levelling. The guys in the beta are reporting levelling being MUCH hard than private servers but dungeons being WAY easier. They are talking about the possibility there was a stealth nerf to dungeons in 1.12

I hope this wasn't the case as easy dungeons will really suck in classic imo, what do you guys reckon?

Come to think of it, I don't actualy ever remember wiping more than a handful of times in all the dongeons I did back then, I think when I did it was often in places like Strath from body pulling extra packs and odd bosses like the first one in ubrs, I know I defiantly Wiped once on zulfarak stairs but that was cos the healer went for a drink and the tank kicked the encounter off. I think Alot of people who claim vanilla required lots of coordinated cc and was hard are getting the memory mixed up with tbc heroics which were "hard" till they got out geared.

Mostly I remember the inconvenience of walking half way across the world to get to some of them and mostly getting lost in places like dire maul, dire maul was fucking shite for time, middle of fucking nowhere as alliance, fucking maze to navigate first time and one time we had to tick of the bosses our selves on a list to make sure we knew when We were done. Ugh

[Nitros14]

Did anyone think that deadmines or shadowfang keep were hard? I got through those dungeons in 2005 keyboard turning and having no idea how any of the game mechanics including aggro worked.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Not sure how anyone would really even know.
Would need to see actual level 60 dungeons to know if they are easier or not.

Talking about Deadmines and stuff being easy is just pointless.
You have like 2 spells at that point.

But ya, sadly at the end of the day PVE content is pretty straight forward in Classic.
If you want challenging dungeons, you'll want modern WoW.

Otherwise, you'll find dungeons being ran like a timed run in the live game anyway in Classic.
Mages AOEing things down, healers doing full dps, and mobs dying in 15-30 seconds max.

[Skulltaker]

What do you guys think about this?

I played vanilla and definitely remember them being as hard if not harder than the levelling. The guys in the beta are reporting levelling being MUCH hard than private servers but dungeons being WAY easier. They are talking about the possibility there was a stealth nerf to dungeons in 1.12

I hope this wasn't the case as easy dungeons will really suck in classic imo, what do you guys reckon?

I mean, I'm also fairly certain that dungeons in like 1.2 were a lot harder than in 1.12 as well.

No, they were not. What got better was Blizzards tech, the connections people had, the experience they had. The dungeons were always easy, you (not you two personally, of course) were just a lot worse at the game.

What made them hard was that you spent a significant amount of time even forming a dungeon group, getting there, and then a good part of them was just tedious. Just like to day, as soon as you learned what mobs and bosses did what, they became really really easy to farm.

Some of the design choices back then were weird, though. I mean, Black Rock Depths was at the same time awesome and really annoying to navigate.

[crusadernero]

Thats probably the best point that has been brought up so far. In actual vanilla people would try running deadmines with groups full of lvl 16-17's, sure you could complete part of it that way but good luck clearing the entire place. Lots of dungeons were like this, i think gnomer started around lvl 25-26 and the end boss was 10 levels higher than that.

I support this. I remember alot of occasions me, friends and other people I played with our were in guilds with often ended up being in dungeons that in the end were to high lvl for them from the get go.

In retail you get dungeons for your lvl or ilevel, but not in classic. People going in with bad gear/to low lvl was much more normal back then.

Oh and WC/DM werent THAT hard back in classic. Biggest issue was if you went on to slow mobs started to respawn haha

[Nitros14]

No, they were not. What got better was Blizzards tech, the connections people had, the experience they had. The dungeons were always easy, you (not you two personally, of course) were just a lot worse at the game.

Patch 1.3

Scholomance
Risen Aberration health and damage reduced.
Reduced the duration of Dark Plague from three minutes to 90 seconds.
Fixed a bug that caused the Cloud of Disease spell, cast by Diseased Ghouls, to do more damage than intended.
Blood of Innocents will now drop off both Doctor Theolen Krastinov (The Butcher) and Jandice Barov for players that have completed the Sarkhoff questline in Scholomance.
Shadow resistance now will be more effective at mitigating the damage from Unholy Aura.
The creature spell, Call of the Grave, has had its damage reduced by half.

Stratholme
Baroness Anastasi in Stratholme will now leave the possessed target when the target is below 50% health, instead of 30%. She will also cast Possession slightly less often.
Roaming Gargoyles will be set to a 30-minute respawn.
Roaming Shades set to 15-30 minute respawn (previously 5-15).
Patchwork Horrors set to 15-30 minute respawn (previously 6-10).
Overall respawn in the entire dungeon made longer.
Crimson Conjurers will no longer roam in pairs.
Crimson Conjurers can now only have a max of two "pets" at one time.
Changed the way the Gauntlet area works. The Crystals no longer respawn.
The Crystals no longer fire ribbon of souls (this was causing in-combat issues).
Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to leave combat in mid-fight, thus regaining all their health.
Various tweaks made to the Baroness encounter.


Patch 1.5

Several packs removed from Scholomance.
Several packs removed from Stratholme. Also, you will now be able to make additional attempts at Ramstein and/or Baron Rivendare should your initial attempt fail.

[Grimreaper]

I do quite well remember soloing all of SFK up untill the splitting wolf boss near the end on my lvl 32 hunter back in vanilla. When trying that today on PS's i get utterly destroyed. My warrior could also kill most elites my own lvl 1 on 1, not even close to doing that on PS's.

[Rexosaurus]

Classic WAS fucking easy, people were just clueless back then.

This times like a million.

When it launched, WoW was the first MMO for many of the people that played it and (unsurprisingly) many of them had no idea how to play the game. I still remember going through Wailing Caverns as a Shaman "tank" because our warrior never did the quest that gives you defensive stance. Stuff like that was far from irregular at the time.

[Drosul]

I mean, I'm also fairly certain that dungeons in like 1.2 were a lot harder than in 1.12 as well.

Gear differences, talent differences, general player knowledge differences, significantly weaker addons, and the major factor overlooked is that threat generation and taunt where both different by 1.12 as well...

Early vanilla warriors generated substantially less threat, and their taunt was far more potent after the Naxxramas patch, where it was changed to make the 4horseman fight's constant tank swapping even possible.

[Castia]

People are just much better at the game now.

It's been 14 years, when i played in vanilla i was a clicking noob who didn't know anything going into WC and Deadmines.....now ive run those dungeons 100 times and know every mob in the place, obviously it will be easier.

[Grimreaper]

This times like a million.

When it launched, WoW was the first MMO for many of the people that played it and (unsurprisingly) many of them had no idea how to play the game. I still remember going through Wailing Caverns as a Shaman "tank" because our warrior never did the quest that gives you defensive stance. Stuff like that was far from irregular at the time.

You really dont think thats going to happen again?

Ofcourse the streamers playing it now are breezing through it, because they are seasoned veterans. Come launch day and we'll be flooded with useless/ignorant/bad players again.

Player skill is static, it doesnt evolve.

[kendro1200]

They were never hard, just time consuming and requiring patience, sometimes confusing.

Vanilla was never truly "hard", you just had so many roadblocks (many of which we are now better at handling/have better ideas of), that it seemed hard. It was an illusion.

IMO TBC Heroics were the "hard" dungeons and even then it was easy, just once again tedious and time consuming. Same thing with the Cata heroics, people slammed how hard they were, people just didn't want to wait for healers to get mana.

One thing people easily forget is that it wasn't until the end of Vanilla that general knowledge on how certain mechanics worked spread out beyond the hardcore players. You would have warriors tanking in green spirit only plate because it helped hp regen out of combat. Priests in agility cloth because it increased their wand damage. Or the mage that would only cast pyroblast... To top it all off, Classic is using the 1.12 itemization, which means a lot of items got buffed. From level 14 to level 30 a green item basically had a +1 to one stat on it. A blue item would have +2 to a stat or +1 to two stats. I think it was when they did the T0 and T.5 revamp is when they did the general number revamp on many items as well.
TBC people knew stats better and had a better idea on how to gear a character, same with Cataclysm. The dungeons back then were designed around CC being used, not only because of threat was a thing the devs were using for active gameplay for tanks, but also because mobs had abilities that could be brutal if chained together with other members of the pack. Vanilla dungeons were hard because gear was closer to a D&D itemization mentality.
That is a huge conflicting design problem of Vanilla. There were a lot of concepts from the initial design of the game that were a mix of table top rpg elements, that just didn't fit in the CRPG/MMO game design, which they pulled heavily from EQ. For instance, there was initially a survival tradeskill (in the alpha), it let you make fires and torches, for lighting. Eventually that got scrapped and rolled into cooking, because there was no good reason to give up your offhand to carry a torch. Mages initially could use invisibility like stealth (in alpha) and had a "knock" like spell to unlock things. Hybrid class design, and general design for classes to branch out of specialized roles. Great idea for a tabletop rpg, where you go into situations blind in a one-shot game design. Horrible design for a game where players will go into encounters knowing what they need and be able to optimize for those situations, making any non-specialized class design useless.

[Segus1992]

I'll add that TBC per-nerf heroic dungeons were, imo, the hardest dungeons ever. Nothing like having all melee mobs 360 cleave.

Having played both, I found pre-nerf Cata heroics harder, and that's even considering I was worse at the game during TBC. Played healer & tank during both.