Can we all now agree that Vanilla wasn't harder?

[TheRevenantHero]

I considered downloading "Azeroth Auto Pilot" which is what i "need" to know if im doing something incredibly bad or not.
But i refused...
I like the sense of "helplessness", "discovery" and picking my own path.

But Azeroth Autopilot would indeed be great for me if i wanted to min max time spent ingame.

Questie is good because all it does it mark quest objective areas on the map and minimap. It reduces a bunch of helpless wandering time but doesn't tell you HOW to get there so you still have to explore.

[MoanaLisa]

Classic and retail are like oranges and tangerines. Look a lot alike. Taste a lot alike. Are not the same. Difficult has more to do with the way you play and the thought you bring to it than anything else. Retail is probably more forgiving of mistakes but if you don't make mistakes and pay attention Classic isn't hard either. Slower, yes.

Probably the hardest thing about Classic is unlearning stuff you are used to from the other side of the game.

[kail]

Leveling is harder as mobs pose far more of a threat than they do in retail. Every class in retail has some access to self healing and earlier spells/talents than in classic. Retail leveling is effectively que for dungeons, spam aoe, repeat. Threat and mana management is far more forgiving in retail compared to Classic.

Endgame though, retail absolutely has the higher difficulty ceiling. Mythic raiding and M+ dungeon pushing, enough said.

[anon5123]

Vanilla's raid difficulty is coordinating 40 people to do their job and not fuck up and come to the raid prepared

Retail's raid difficulty is 5 different flavors of "move out of the fire" all going on at the same time

- - - Updated - - -

We also never use CC in dungeons. No need for that at all. We were all shit players back then. Now only some players are still that shit. For everyone else classic now is of course easy.

Try doing strat live with no mage for sheep

I dare you

[Wickedtongue]

Vanilla's raid difficulty is coordinating 40 people to do their job and not fuck up and come to the raid prepared

Retail's raid difficulty is 5 different flavors of "move out of the fire" all going on at the same time

That is true. In Vanilla you don't even need to move out of fire. And you just need 15 people in quest greens.

[anon5123]

That is true. In Vanilla you don't even need to move out of fire. And you just need 15 people in quest greens.

I like how you're basing the entirety of "vanilla" on its easiest raid.

Try doing BWL in "quest greens", I dare you. Oh wait, you won't, because you don't even play, you just shitpost on the classic forums about how bad the game is because you're jealous of it stealing subscribers from your precious Beta For Azerite

[Wickedtongue]

I like how you're basing the entirety of "vanilla" on its easiest raid.

Try doing BWL in "quest greens", I dare you.

Even Naxx will be done in quest greens. Guaranteed.

[anon5123]

Even Naxx will be done in quest greens. Guaranteed.

Curious as to how you're going to get past Patchwerk, who hits for 7-8k, with tanks who have 5k health. Curious as to how you're going to meet enrage timers with DPS who are nowhere close to hit cap. Curious as to how healers are going to not OOM immediately with a lack of spirit/mp5/healing gear.

Just more proof that you're a shitposter who hasn't even played vanilla. What a pitiful existence, spending your free time shit-talking a game that you don't even play.

[Sylvestra]

Casual content (leveling, non high m+ dungeons, collecting decent gear) is harder in classic than retail. Higher endgame content is obviously a lot harder on retail. It's not all black and white.

No one said classic raids are harder than mythic raiding on retail.

[brewclaw]

The thing that made vanilla hard was that no one had a clue what they were doing. There were no guides, there were no videos, there was no twitch. Everyone was new to the game, and no one knew anything. Combat rotations didn't exist. No one knew what stats were important, or what talents were best. Dps was bad, healers were bad, tanks were bad. Going into a dungeon blind and figuring it out as you went was what made the game so much fun back then. Now, with everything thoroughly researched and that information disseminated the game is much easier than it once was. Combine that with patch 1.12 optimizations and you don't really get the full picture of the true vanilla experience. It is nothing like it was back then. Trying to compare the two is impossible.

Why do people keep repeating this? This is completely false. Literally all of the leveling guides, the dungeon maps/guides, the add-ons that do everything except push buttons for raiders in "retail" were developed during vanilla, and surprisingly we even had a paper/pen style wowhead in the form of thotbot...no seriously, we actually did have the internet in 2004 despite whatever popular opinion espouses this ideal that we were all playing wow vanilla from caves!

In 2004, those of us who were gaming online were hardcore gamers. I'd say that anyone with a hefty computer capable of gaming online built it from pats and was a serious hobbyist. Broadband wasn't as ubiquitous and most often purchased for business or education reasons--and all of us justifying the expense were gamers on the "side." The game price, the sub price (which weren't standard at the time), and the time commitment made it so that, on the whole, online gamers in general and wow raiders specifically were pretty hardcore gamers. I haven't seen anything even remotely close to the theorycrafting behemoth at the time--Elitist Jerks (whose GM became the raid designer for Blizz and unsurprisingly took the franchise into min/max'ing to the nth degree)--and for all the theorycrafting that is actually done in modern times it's been built on the backs of those older tools and formulas (albeit updated as needed). Also, as a sidenote, Ion the player was a DC lawyer and I'd wager a typical hardcore, typeA kinda guy you'd expect to be in the DC law context.

I've had the distinct "pleasure" of leading raids in BFA and the player base is likely no worse (although I think in many ways they are) but certainly no better than vanilla raiders. The hardest part was getting 20 players together on the same days/times and that's when so many casual raiding guilds fall apart (going into Mythic). Up until then they generally do fine but that's because it doesn't take much more than listening to the calls and following whatever paint-by-numbers add-on is being used by the team. There's a massive social factor to this game and, arguably, that was even more true in the early years of the game--but that's not directly related to the "difficulty" of the content or whether players are more/less skilled now than then.

[Littleraven]

The world is 100% harder. That said dungeons and raids are not. I feel like that is because people know wtf they are doing now though.

Also the harder leveling can be instantly solved by just grouping with people.

[xGLxAnubis]

Please dont use the argument "Classic isn't Vanilla" nothing changed dungeon wise.

But the classes did. Classes are far more powerful in 1.12 than in 1.0. Classic ISN'T Vanilla. No one was claiming that the current Classic content was difficult at 1.12.

[Mrbleedinggums]

Curious as to how you're going to get past Patchwerk, who hits for 7-8k, with tanks who have 5k health. Curious as to how you're going to meet enrage timers with DPS who are nowhere close to hit cap. Curious as to how healers are going to not OOM immediately with a lack of spirit/mp5/healing gear.

Just more proof that you're a shitposter who hasn't even played vanilla. What a pitiful existence, spending your free time shit-talking a game that you don't even play.

lol wait so wait are you trying to make an argument that classic bosses are difficult because they needed.... gear? If that is literally the only curve as to whether a boss is killable, then that is not difficulty. That is just grinding and timegating thanks to the 2 items per boss that can drop random shit INCLUDING THE OTHER FACTION'S CLASS GEAR!

Vanilla is shit man, just admit it and stop trying to lie to everyone. If Classic was able to be revamped to a Classic+ experience so that players had better itemized gear and classes weren't stupid balanced and then bosses could be tweaked or even have new abilities to help compensate, then sure. But as it is and as it was before, it has always been a shit game that should have stayed in the past where it belonged.

People play D&D 1st and 2nd edition too, that doesn't make it a good edition AT ALL.

[Oakshana]

and there we start with the classic isnt vanilla BULLSHIT train
accepting that vanilla was NEVER hard is just to HARD for this crowd....

My point is, if Classic was tuned for 1.4 entering Molten Core, people would not be steamrolling it. It wouldn't have been cleared in the first week. It's simply mathematics. Stat weights when MC went live are VERY different than stat weights and class balance at 1.12. I am not saying that the leveling and overall game experience isn't true "Vanilla", I am saying the raids were tuned for different stat weights.

This isn't a complaint or a gripe. It's simply saying that if the game were as it was in 1.4, it would have been different. Running MC & BWL in 1.12 wasn't a challenge in any way. It was when they were viable raid content.

[brewclaw]

lol wait so wait are you trying to make an argument that classic bosses are difficult because they needed.... gear? If that is literally the only curve as to whether a boss is killable, then that is not difficulty.

That's literally the only sane way to describe difficulty in an RPG. The game consists of auto-targeting FFS, what other difficulty would you conceive of?

Now, to your point, I would argue that one shouldn't be using terms like "difficult" to describe any iteration of WoW and have long advocated for using "engaging" instead. For me, and countless others, the task of spooling up a character for a year and then finishing off a boss for a grand cinematic is/was engaging. For others, they'd prefer a more twitch-centric or platform-style level of engagement. There is some level of skill involved in gathering a group of people and directing them through a slog of content for not much reward other than the intrinsic gains from playing with friends or for an elusive end-goal--but that's not "difficulty." Similarly, there's a particular skill to twitch aiming or platform navigation, but it's not difficult compared to say lifting 200lbs above your head, which is difficult but doesn't require much skill to accomplish. It takes some level of training and practice, some would argue skill, to score a goal with a ball...but is it difficult? It's difficult in the sense of having to drag your butt of the couch enough times to get that practice in but not in the sense of the actual task at hand--launching some kind of ball across some kind of court. If you want difficulty try digging a trench manually or 100 post holes in a weekend. Buck some hay for a summer job; those are "difficult" to do. Difficulty doesn't really make sense in a video game context unless we're discussing brutal mechanics with the downside being players often feel brutalized from said mechanics. Difficulty doesn't necessarily equate to fun whereas engagement does.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Yes it is. Its even on the dictionary inconvenient its a synonym of "harder"

You have this tendency to pass your opinion off as truth and in a very insincere way.

And you're wrong, again.

in·con·ven·ient
/ˌinkənˈvēnyənt/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
causing trouble, difficulties, or discomfort.

Causing difficulty does not equate making things harder. A quest telling you to pick a flower in the Barrens and then a 2nd flower in Hillsbrad Foothills is not harder. It's incovenient. It's not harder.

If it takes longer is harder than something that takes less time.

That doesn't make it harder. It makes it longer. Don't try to pretend you know what words mean all of a sudden. You haven't before.

Tomorrow we will cover colors and shapes. Jesus Christ.

[Alteiry]

World of Warcraft never was hard, ever.

I dunno, some of the Mage Tower challenges were pretty fucking hard.

[anon5123]

lol wait so wait are you trying to make an argument that classic bosses are difficult because they needed.... gear?

Not what I was arguing at all, but thanks for typing up a whole paragraph whining and shitposting about a game you hate, based on that strawman

[Big Thanks]

You have this tendency to pass your opinion off as truth and in a very insincere way.

And you're wrong, again.



Causing difficulty does not equate making things harder. A quest telling you to pick a flower in the Barrens and then a 2nd flower in Hillsbrad Foothills is not harder. It's incovenient. It's not harder.



That doesn't make it harder. It makes it longer. Don't try to pretend you know what words mean all of a sudden. You haven't before.

Tomorrow we will cover colors and shapes. Jesus Christ.

Its all semantics...in my opinion you are all just circumventing semantics just to prove something that is wrong.
What i think is wrong:
"Classic requires no skill at all" and "Classic leveling is not harder than retails"

I already gave examples...i fail to understand how you find this examples to require "no skill".

Caves full of mobs that run away and call for help require SKILL from the player to not mess up
Killing high level mobs require SKILL in kiting the mob, slowing him and wait for resources

And i got owned by a pack of 2 mobs, 1 healer and 1 DPS that "nets" you and runs away to ranged attack you.
I started the fight by attacking the DPS (instead of the healer first, fail by me...SEE=? LACK OF SKILL)
The DPS nets me, and both the healer and DPS run away from me and start healing eachother and ranged attacking me.
I died

Examples of SKILL. "Decisions", "preparation" and "tactics" are skills.

Also you are arguing "stuff that simply take longer are not hard"
They are harder to acomplish.
Rank 14 in PvP requires a lot out of the body and mind of a person.
Its completely impossible for me, as for me its impossible to play for more than 4 hours...PHYSICALLY, i simply cant do it.

I think its fair to say PvP ranks in Classic are "hard" because i cant physically or mentally do it. And that by definition is "Hard"

[anon5123]

Stat weights when MC went live are VERY different than stat weights and class balance at 1.12.

Even on private servers with patch 1.1 gear stats and buffed raid bosses, MC still dropped week 1

/shrug