World First Ragnaros and Onyxia Kill on Classic by APES - Gehennas EU

[deenman]

You realize apes clearing it this quickly is the equivalent of say method (Ba da tum) having the better half of a decade to practice <Insert mythic raid of your choice> then being able to clear it week 1 of release when its re released

By all means, if in say 3 months time when the general population hits 60, clears it in greens then I'll happily eat my hat. But they won't. Same as retail, using pros and top level gamers isn't a great indication of of how things are going to be.

Edit:

Actually that's not quite fair, lets say heroic instead of mythic. Mythic is defo harder than classic raids atm.

I rly wouldnt put vanila raids on heroic level difficulty,vanila is somewhere between lfr-normal,im talking mecanialy,even naxx didnt have all that much complexity,just tight tuning,as long as you had the gear,werent afk and knew the fight,there wasnt much that could go wrong,today people bash their heads even vs some hc bosses even when they know what to do

[Tucci]

Just to highlight the last part. Anyone else find this funny? Saying retail is over simplified compared to classic? Come on now, classic is stupid easy compared to retail. As long as you don’t face pull everything, you should never wipe in classic.

The raid mechanics are more complex in retail and quests are much more well-designed. But with the exception of things like focus macros (which I miss), Classic takes more thought and you feel more freedom, mostly due to the fact that you have so many abilities and items to work with and different ranks of those abilities and you can't just AFK half the game away through flight, LFG, LFR and the numerous hand-holding and quality-of-life updates that have accumulated over the years. There are tons of usable items with special abilities that you can acquire through questing, dungeons, raids, professions, etc.

I've argued both sides of this so I have no bias. And as far as wiping goes, I've died multiple times 1v1 with random mobs out in the world. That's unlikely to happen at max level when you're geared and have all your abilities and hit caps, but if you're not in coordinated groups in certain content, you have to rely on CC, cooldowns and mana to not die. I can't remember the last time I've died on retail outside of pvp and raid wipes. There's very little sense of real danger left in the game and everything is very straightforward.

[Tang0]

Sure, but that doesn't entirely explain beating the raid with sub-60 players and everyone with very poor gear. Modern expansions also have power creep in the form of new systems (The Essences of BFA for example), ilvl bumps and raid nerfs, but I'd never imagine a modern raid being entirely oneshot by such a suboptimal setup, even in Normal or Heroic difficulty, and even if everyone knew the fights.

In short, itemization creep isn't a good enough explanation when they probably don't even have many of the buffed items in the first place, and things like the dungeon tier 0.5 gear aren't even available yet.

As i've already mentioned, itemization does not necessarily only relay to number changes on items. It's also about making an item better just by changing stat values in the background, which vanilla had repeatedly on their way to 1.12. Also, as i've mentioned, the creep is not the only factor here. Stack it on top of class buffs, raid nerfs, overall qol improvements - and you have an even bigger swing.

Also, i'm not 100% sure, but judging by some posts in this thread they were using an insane fire resist buff on everyone. That basically invalidates most of the dmg you take, since mc is mostly fire dmg. I mean, it doesn't matter how low your dmg is because of bad gear. If the boss doesn't have a hard enrage timer and you don't die - you'll kill every time.

[Cmx]

so they use exploit for leveling? i know it, there was something shady behind this

[Pallamouna]

pfffff nothing special. World first was from Ascent back in 2005.

[Etoo]

Did anyone get the Hand of Ragnaros or the bindings?

[deathsreaper]

The average player is nowhere near as committed or skilled to pull that off within the next month. Hell, the average player won't even be level 60 by the end of the month. It's an impressive feat.

Classic will maintain stable population at least until All Hallow's End when people start mount farming. Classic doesn't have holidays and that'll be a downer for all the casuals.

Committed true but skilled not so much. Let's be honest the raid difficulty is barely above LFR. Just saying. Oh and the rotation of classes for classic is a joke even compared to the current watered down bfa specs.

[Jastall]

As i've already mentioned, itemization does not necessarily only relay to number changes on items. It's also about making an item better just by changing stat values in the background, which vanilla had repeatedly on their way to 1.12. Also, as i've mentioned, the creep is not the only factor here. Stack it on top of class buffs, raid nerfs, overall qol improvements - and you have an even bigger swing.

Also, i'm not 100% sure, but judging by some posts in this thread they were using an insane fire resist buff on everyone. That basically invalidates most of the dmg you take, since mc is mostly fire dmg. I mean, it doesn't matter how low your dmg is because of bad gear. If the boss doesn't have a hard enrage timer and you don't die - you'll kill every time.

As I said, these things are parts of the explanation. I very much doubt APES could have done what they did with an 1.1 version of the game instead of an 1.12 one... but at best it would have delayed them a bit, not more than a few days at the very most. They brought sub-60 players. They were mostly in green gear. They oneshot everything. They beat Onyxia with less than 40 raiders as well. This isn't a case of them spending a day there and struggling a bit before overcoming, they just entered the place like they owned it and cleaned out the vermin squatting there. It's hard for me to believe them having 10% less overall stats and a bit less fire resistance would have changed much.

[Davidd090]

This is exactly equally an excellent content I quite really liked checking. This isn't all the time which I possess the potential to work out an issue.

[Daffan]

Mage stacking with 1.12 talents = LULZ

Winter's chill gives mages 10% crit and it cost zero talent points. That's more crit than a normal mage would have on every piece of gear combined.

so they use exploit for leveling? i know it, there was something shady behind this

Not really an exploit but a huge bug in the Modern client. 10 man raids were possible for dungeons back in real Vanilla, they just gave no real xp.

I think the average time back in the day was around 150 hours played however these lunatics are doing in like 80 hours played. To say this is anywhere near the same experience as Vanilla is disingenuous to the real thing.

As I stated several times, wow classic is not wow vanilla and it won’t ever fee the same or experience the challenges of the original.

150 no way.

[Tang0]

As I said, these things are parts of the explanation. I very much doubt APES could have done what they did with an 1.1 version of the game instead of an 1.12 one... but at best it would have delayed them a bit, not more than a few days at the very most. They brought sub-60 players. They were mostly in green gear. They oneshot everything. They beat Onyxia with less than 40 raiders as well. This isn't a case of them spending a day there and struggling a bit before overcoming, they just entered the place like they owned it and cleaned out the vermin squatting there. It's hard for me to believe them having 10% less overall stats and a bit less fire resistance would have changed much.

I don’t know the exact number, but it was mentioned here multiple times that they had something like a 230 resist buff. That is over 60% damage reduction. I don’t know how it used to be at later patches, but when the mc was relevant getting fire resist took multiple layers of tedious grind. Not to take anything from them, they might really have the capacity, skill, the know-how etc. I couldn’t care less. Just chimes in to clear some misconception. Lack of resists would probably add up to extra 50% overall incoming dmg. They would have to put a lot of hours to mitigate that otherwise.

[Master Factician]

Not to mention 16 Boss debuffs vs 8.

Imagine still thinking this actually made any difference at all.

[Lodreh]

If classics content wasnt staggered, it would be dead in two months.

At this rate I'd say less than a month.

[Superdon]

I wonder if most of their raid team used the dungeon 10 man raid experience exploit to speed to 60 that only the cool kids got to exploit before blizzard fixed it...

[Tigz940]

Imagine still thinking this actually made any difference at all.

Imagine not having a clue how important debuff slots were in this game. Prioritizing debuffs was a huge part of the game. Demo Shout, Thunderfury, etc. Game changers. Them falling off would wipe a raid.

I was in Ascent back in vanilla and beyond. I was there for the world firsts. You're seeing a version of Classic that includes countless QoL features that simply weren't available during the initial Ragnaros grind. 230 fire resistance in five days is ridiculous. That simply wasn't a thing without major stat sacrifice and TONS of farming. Ragnaros nerfs. Countless bug fixes. Shaman, Mage, Paladin, Rogue, Priest class overhauls. Threat changes.

I held no illusions that Rag would be up for a while in a 1.12 release. If this was 1.2? Good luck.

Many people simply don't understand what end-game raiding was like back in the day. They see encounters that LOOK mechanically simple but don't understand the complexities happening out-of-sight. Things that are taken for granted today played a huge role in raiding back then - threat, for example. Debuff managing. Downranking spells. People also compare their experiences with casual raiding in later patches of vanilla against raiding today - how many times have you seen "Well the HARD part of raiding was just finding 40 people who weren't idiots!"

No.

The hard part of casual raiding, months after content was cleared? Sure. But if you honestly think that the best guild in the world (Ascent) wasn't filled with some of the best gamers in the world, I don't know what to tell you. We had fifty people showing up every night to raid. Fifty of the best. It still took half a year.

The game has changed, for sure. Raiding is different. But to say Rag lived as long as he did because "players were bad" is simply foolish. Method is no more talented today than Ascent/Fury/etc. were back then. They're simply playing different games.

[fiffer86]

Imagine not having a clue how important debuff slots were in this game. Prioritizing debuffs was a huge part of the game. Demo Shout, Thunderfury, etc. Game changers. Them falling off would wipe a raid.

I was in Ascent back in vanilla and beyond. I was there for the world firsts. You're seeing a version of Classic that includes countless QoL features that simply weren't available during the initial Ragnaros grind. 230 fire resistance in five days is ridiculous. That simply wasn't a thing without major stat sacrifice and TONS of farming. Ragnaros nerfs. Countless bug fixes. Shaman, Mage, Paladin, Rogue, Priest class overhauls. Threat changes.

I held no illusions that Rag would be up for a while in a 1.12 release. If this was 1.2? Good luck.

Many people simply don't understand what end-game raiding was like back in the day. They see encounters that LOOK mechanically simple but don't understand the complexities happening out-of-sight. Things that are taken for granted today played a huge role in raiding back then - threat, for example. Debuff managing. Downranking spells. People also compare their experiences with casual raiding in later patches of vanilla against raiding today - how many times have you seen "Well the HARD part of raiding was just finding 40 people who weren't idiots!"

No.

The hard part of casual raiding, months after content was cleared? Sure. But if you honestly think that the best guild in the world (Ascent) wasn't filled with some of the best gamers in the world, I don't know what to tell you. We had fifty people showing up every night to raid. Fifty of the best. It still took half a year.

The game has changed, for sure. Raiding is different. But to say Rag lived as long as he did because "players were bad" is simply foolish. Method is no more talented today than Ascent/Fury/etc. were back then. They're simply playing different games.

This is only half the picture though. The biggest hurdle with MC was not the mechanics, or even fire resist. It was the simple fact that nobody, not even the best players in the world, had any clue what they were doing, and didn't have the addon's and information that those people were creating at the time, in order to pull it off.

Things like optimal talent builds, weapon choice, rotations, spell levels, etc. were all being figured out. Addons like DMG meters, click casting, threat meters, unit frame changes, etc. barely existed. Communication was minimal, with many people, even in competitive guilds, not using voice chat.

So flash forward ~14 years, when all this information has been perfected, is it any surprise at all that a guild of veteran vanilla players was able to just smash it? Not at all. It's not so much that players were "bad" mechanically, it's that even the best players were "bad" when looking at the knowledge they didn't have at the time, versus what they would have now.

Put it this way, I guarantee that if we could go back in time to January 2005 when MC was first seeing progression, and gave Ascent access to all the addon's, voice chat, and optimized all their gear/talent builds... Rag would have been decimated.

Sure, if this was a true re-release it would have taken longer to get the fire resist, but nothing would stop the simple fact that Rag would get blown up within weeks still. Nothing about that fight was mechanically difficult aside from healing (hence the need for fire resist).

https://www.method.gg/video/Br1hXGXJ7Tg

I mean just look: world first kill... spends the majority of the fight standing in 1 spot, casually chats to the guild and whispers, does a fair amount of using the mouse to activate abilities.... this is not a world class player by today's standard... BUT in 2005? Absolutely. Because people were still figuring the game out, and working on becoming optimal.

[Master Factician]

Imagine not having a clue how important debuff slots were in this game.

Explain how important those extra 8 debuff slots were on this Ragnaros kill. Explain how much of a difference they made.


lol.

[toffmcsoft]

If APES wanted to they could get World First Kills in retail.
The guild is too smart to dedicate their time to a trash game though.

What many don't understand is APES plays classic because they can DESTROY an entire server. The guild literally exist to own the entire realm. Something you CAN'T do in retail. This is why classic shines. Closed Realms are miniature worlds.

Ok boiz pack it up. Classic is over. Now come back to BFA.

Unfortunately you don't want classic players to pack it up as they won't end up going to the trash of a game BFA is.
Classic players will quit and remove subs, not switch to trash.

[Frozenbro]

https://www.method.gg/video/Br1hXGXJ7Tg

I mean just look: world first kill... spends the majority of the fight standing in 1 spot, casually chats to the guild and whispers, does a fair amount of using the mouse to activate abilities.... this is not a world class player by today's standard... BUT in 2005? Absolutely. Because people were still figuring the game out, and working on becoming optimal.

That video made me puke, to think that was the top of vanilla is hilarious.

- - - Updated - - -

What many don't understand is APES plays classic because they can DESTROY an entire server. The guild literally exist to own the entire realm. Something you CAN'T do in retail. This is why classic shines. Closed Realms are miniature worlds.

Ever heard about competition? thats what retail has with Method/Limit and all those guilds doing mindblowing preparation for world first, something classic doesnt has cause, well, its classic.

[toffmcsoft]

That video made me puke, to think that was the top of vanilla is hilarious.

- - - Updated - - -



Ever heard about competition? thats what retail has with Method/Limit and all those guilds doing mindblowing preparation for world first, something classic doesnt has cause, well, its classic.

Yes because wow should be an esport, exactly what the mmo community needs!
Classic isn't about competition it's about rivalry & community and that's what closed realms have.

The only competition retail has is gear boundaries. The bosses are literally tuned to the T from a numbers perspective.
The retail mentality is just "race to be the first to down this mythic raid because it's a competition to progress" then rinse and repeat. Pretty boring if you ask me.

The Classic mentality is about enjoying an mmo in a world that you can escape in for hours on end. Something retail will never have again.

In all seriousness, it's RPG vs eSport or better yet, RPG vs Casino.