Modern WoW is too hardcore

[sourlol]

IMO, people missuse Hardcore.

Hardcore is not difficulty, necessarilly.

Hardcore is time investment.

Mythic Azshara is a tough boss no matter what. Taking a raid in there and killing her is hard.

Pulling her 500 times in 1 lockout is hardcore.

Pulling her 500 times across 3 months is casual.

The difficulty of the content doesnt change (independent of your ilvl slowly going up).

Hardcore - Casual spectrum is about time investment, not talent.

Good - Bad spectrum is the players ability to play and adapt.

Hard - Easy is the difficulty of the content either in gear required or mechanical skill involved to dodge the bad and kill the bad guy before he kills you.

This is how you have hardcore guilds with a spectrum of good and bad players looking to dominate easy content with speed running in vanilla.

[Kaleredar]

People clearing mythic or trying are certainly the targeted demo of retail, despite being a low % of total players. When Classic is an option, retail guilds trying to be hardcore will take a major hit. Retail guilds with a history of clearing will be fine but will probably lose some people they didn't expect to lose.

I think you overestimate people’s desire to earn gear they’ve already earned, do quests they’ve already done, and grind reps they’ve already ground.

[Asrialol]

In Vanilla you had guilds progressing in MC while others were doing Naxx.

How many guilds have you seen on retail progressing in Uldir atm?

That's one of the things I liked about Vanilla.

[bloodwulf]

In Vanilla you had guilds progressing in MC while others were doing Naxx.

How many guilds have you seen on retail progressing in Uldir atm?

That's one of the things I liked about Vanilla.

That is a double-edge sword. Yeah it was nice seeing all the older content alive, but it also encouraged poaching. Guilds did not want to go back and regear healers or tanks, so they would just poach from the guilds below them (context, i was in one of such poaching guilds). If you were a casual guild slowly doing MC/BWL, and you suddenly lost your maintank, your progression basically stopped.

[apples]

In Vanilla you had guilds progressing in MC while others were doing Naxx.

How many guilds have you seen on retail progressing in Uldir atm?

That's one of the things I liked about Vanilla.

that only happened because people were bad at the game. a situation like that will not happen again

[RumbleShakes]

Wrong, modern WoW holds your hand and tells you when you can do things.

Classic WoW you're let free and can do things as fast or as slow as you want.

Vanilla WoW still had enrage timers and other timers including healers having mana where you can't heal anymore and players die. I think the OP meant is current WoW requires a lot of time raiding to keep up and how there are a multitude of things happening compared to what Vanilla used to be. In Vanilla strategies were basically staying out of one or two things of fire or killing things at the same time. Retail has 5+ things of fire, debuffs on you that requires you to do something whether that be going through a portal or stand in a certain area or even standing in the fire, enrage timers, tank swaps (Vanilla surprisingly didn't have many tank swaps), things to dodge, and curing players. Retail is basically Vanilla on steroids but with Addons that are the thing that do hold your hand.

[Askyl]

If 110 - 120 was boring, wait till you realise what classic consists of.

In classic, your rotation will consist of one skill.

I'd love to see you try top dmg meters in a raid as Rogue or Fury Warrior just spamming one skill. Or heal well with only 1 spell and no downraking what so ever. Good luck!

that only happened because people were bad at the game. a situation like that will not happen again

No, that happened because you don't get free "almost best you can get" gear as soon as you ding lvl 60. You need to start doing MC/ONY/BWL to gear up for AQ40 and Naxx. And a lot of guilds won't just pick up a fresh lvl 60 and gear him up. New guilds are formed and they start to seriously progress MC and upwards while other guilds do AQ40/Naxx.

Has nothing to do with skill, more to do with that progression is slow and you're not handed free items to catch up.

[TrollHunter3000]

It looks like nowdays when something is harder people just call it tedious. Nio it wasnt tedious it was fun difficulty type of content. It is tedious for you becouse you dont like being challeged in your game and loves welfare handouts.

The time it takes to complete something has very little to do with how challenging it is. Especially when it's completed in small intervals but essentially time gated. A marathon is a challenge because of the continuous longevity of it. If it counted as completing a marathon by walking half a mile a day, they'd be easy as fuck.

Nothing in classic was a challenge. It was time consuming. That's it.

[Naytham]

they're not even close to the same game anymore lol. people don't give up cause it's too hard they give up because the rewards are shit, progression is shit, classes are boring, ect.

[ifrah]

that only happened because people were bad at the game. a situation like that will not happen again

Strongly this. I'd love to have some old logs from the MC/BWL raids in 2005, I'd bet my balls more than half of the players (myself at least partially included) had absolute potato talents chosen and not doing their 1-3 button rotations right.
Understanding of what gear is BiS or even an upgrade, and how to make most of your backpack, probably goes in the potato department too. Maybe there was extensive simulations done at EJ or something, but I can bet my left kidney the majority of (semi)-casual raiders didn't bother too much with these. Introducing stuff like rawr and so on has made gear optimization a lot easier. Or even a thing people do in the first place.
OOMing was an issue if you didn't derank. When you did that and didn't mindlessly spam, you were good. In more intensive encounters that of course meant chugging a potion and dark rune every cd.

Then again,
When it comes to addons, damage meters existed for as long as I remember, but I have a faint memory there was no reliable threat meters until at some point in "later" stages of the pre-AQ times.
Decursive (or the same feature in CTRA) was used by majority, if not all healers and trivialized all cleansing.
CTRA had emergency monitor & mana conserve (this was chopped around the naxx patch I recall) which reduced the stress from generic raid healing a lot, in many cases you could just spam one macro to do an adequate job.
Encounter mechanics were easier than LFR until late aq40.
You could still down many of the bosses with multiple deaths. I haven't raided in the past few xpacs, but in tbc-wotlk at least I remember that not being the case too much. Unless happened at the last percents.

My estimate: MC will be cleared in no time. As soon as you have the bare minimum to survive few hits there, it's the cakewalk of your lifetime.