For Everyone Saying Speed Clear Raids Are Evidence of Classic's Lack of Difficulty...

[Trend]

Sure bud, and speedrunners aren't constantly breaking records that were previously deemed impossible.

Well sport, that's not really logical. A bunch of kids wanted to pretend Classic raiding was really hard when it never was ... and that proves that Mythic NYA in base gear does not require nearly perfect execution?

[NineSpine]

Well sport, that's not really logical. A bunch of kids wanted to pretend Classic raiding was really hard when it never was ... and that proves that Mythic NYA in base gear does not require nearly perfect execution?

Nobody ever argued that classic raids were mechanically complex.

My point is that you are drastically underestimating how people break games over time. If there were private servers running for over a decade, people who played on there will know how to obliterate the content in a day.

[Trend]

Nobody ever argued that classic raids were mechanically complex.

My point is that you are drastically underestimating how people break games over time. If there were private servers running for over a decade, people who played on there will know how to obliterate the content in a day.

Yeah you still don't get it and you have not even said a single word to address what I actually said. You just believe that if one group of people was wrong before then a kind of similar group of people must be wrong about the same sort of thing again. You seem to have no concept that as communities mature there isn't the same kind of opportunity for improvement. I would guess you are totally detached from the modern raiding scene and you just have no idea how far the needle has moved.

Very unlikely there will be BfA private servers for a decade or an official re-release, but I find your reasoning quite poor.

[NineSpine]

Yeah you still don't get it and you have not even said a single word to address what I actually said. You just believe that if one group of people was wrong before then a kind of similar group of people must be wrong about the same sort of thing again. You seem to have no concept that as communities mature there isn't the same kind of opportunity for improvement. I would guess you are totally detached from the modern raiding scene and you just have no idea how far the needle has moved.

Very unlikely there will be BfA private servers for a decade or an official re-release, but I find your reasoning quite poor.

Alright internet debate champion, calm down. You aren't impressing anyone.

It is doubtful that anyone will ever want to play BFA again. However, the point you were responding to was that with a similar circumstance any content would be broken by players that had years to practice and prepare. It doesn't matter if it's vanilla or BFA. You took issue with that. You are wrong, and even a cursory glance at the speedrunning community shows you are wrong. You wildly underestimate what time can do to the ability of players to absolutely bend a game to their will. The point is not that BFA and classic are equally mechanically complex. The point is that it doesn't fucking matter. No matter how mechanically complex it is, someone will do it day 1 if they have years to practice.

[vitor210]

Nah.

Vanilla raids are a complete joke because you have all the modern trappings applied to raids designed for a Classic reality:

• crappy computers (esp. considering 40-man raid size)
• shitty internet connections
• casual raiding mentality (what was considered hardcore then would not be now)
• largely static raid difficulty (Classic pre-dated the move to introducing super hard raids that would be progressively nerfed and made more accessible by systems like AP and corruption increases)

With the base gear you would start at, including the very low corruption levels, NYA Mythic requires nearly flawless execution and the number of years that pass will not change that. You're not going to have better connections or more hours in a day so there is nothing that will naturally nerf the difficulty.

lmao again this fallacy. What if I told you 15 years ago people said the same about how Vanilla was hard and look at the speedrunners now. 15 years from now you'll have BETTER INTERNET, BETTER COMPUTER, REFINED STRATS for current raids, even better addons..

Thinking in 15 years mythic nyalotha will still be hard as today is laughable mate and I dont get why people keep repeating this

[Sezh]

Anectodal I know, but my 60 year old colleague used to play retail where he exclusively raided LFR. Normal difficulty was to him an insurmountable challenge. He switched to Classic when it came out and clears every raid comfortably with his casual guild. He couldn't defeat mythic Nyalotha even if you gave him 150 years.

[NineSpine]

Anectodal I know, but my 60 year old colleague used to play retail where he exclusively raided LFR. Normal difficulty was to him an insurmountable challenge. He switched to Classic when it came out and clears every raid comfortably with his casual guild. He couldn't defeat mythic Nyalotha even if you gave him 150 years.

The question isn’t whether everyone will be able to do it. The question is if SOMEONE will do it day one, and the answer to that is yes.

[erifwodahs]

Alright internet debate champion, calm down. You aren't impressing anyone.

It is doubtful that anyone will ever want to play BFA again. However, the point you were responding to was that with a similar circumstance any content would be broken by players that had years to practice and prepare. It doesn't matter if it's vanilla or BFA. You took issue with that. You are wrong, and even a cursory glance at the speedrunning community shows you are wrong. You wildly underestimate what time can do to the ability of players to absolutely bend a game to their will. The point is not that BFA and classic are equally mechanically complex. The point is that it doesn't fucking matter. No matter how mechanically complex it is, someone will do it day 1 if they have years to practice.

I'm pretty sure that gear requirement alone would not let clear some raids day one. Gear and skill matters way more in new expansions. You have to play really good and be able to meet the requirements which is like well your window is this 5% where you either play better or do more dps. Classic is like a 80% window where you can have low dps but good players (naked onyxia) or high dps and trash players. Also people clearing classic are just generally better at raiding due to general experience not specific raid experience while in newer raids you have to be good at specific fight rather than just being good at raiding. Hence it takes multiple attempts to reclear the fights for the best guilds have cleared a week ago after 300 hundred attempts. Ofc it's like 20 pulls and not 300 but 20 deep pulls take away most of the raid night. And they have already done that last week. Imagine being generally very good at the game and killing that same boss 10 years later with years of practice in other fights. Would not happen in day one buddy.

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The question isn’t whether everyone will be able to do it. The question is if SOMEONE will do it day one, and the answer to that is yes.

Again, for something like KJ, Helya, Nzoth, Crusible, Argus... you would not have the gear to do it day one. Also who says you have to have years of experience? Most classic fights can be mastered in 10 kills or so.

[scelero]

I'll give you an example. LFR N'Zoth. It's been out how long now. Go queue up for that. Tell me how casual the LFR has become in that aspect.

[NineSpine]

I'm pretty sure that gear requirement alone would not let clear some raids day one. Gear and skill matters way more in new expansions. You have to play really good and be able to meet the requirements which is like well your window is this 5% where you either play better or do more dps. Classic is like a 80% window where you can have low dps but good players (naked onyxia) or high dps and trash players. Also people clearing classic are just generally better at raiding due to general experience not specific raid experience while in newer raids you have to be good at specific fight rather than just being good at raiding. Hence it takes multiple attempts to reclear the fights for the best guilds have cleared a week ago after 300 hundred attempts. Ofc it's like 20 pulls and not 300 but 20 deep pulls take away most of the raid night. And they have already done that last week. Imagine being generally very good at the game and killing that same boss 10 years later with years of practice in other fights. Would not happen in day one buddy.

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Again, for something like KJ, Helya, Nzoth, Crusible, Argus... you would not have the gear to do it day one. Also who says you have to have years of experience? Most classic fights can be mastered in 10 kills or so.

The question here, which everyone wants to change because it is inconvenient for their arguments is the following: If players had TEN YEARS to master the content on private servers, would they be able to do it Day One when it launched officially. The answer is so obviously yes that it is delusional to believe otherwise.

You wildly underestimate what years of players trying to break a game can do to mitigate any mathematical hurdle.

[chrisnumbers]

The question here, which everyone wants to change because it is inconvenient for their arguments is the following: If players had TEN YEARS to master the content on private servers, would they be able to do it Day One when it launched officially. The answer is so obviously yes that it is delusional to believe otherwise.

You wildly underestimate what years of players trying to break a game can do to mitigate any mathematical hurdle.

Literally no one disagrees, which is exactly the reason these threads always go off on a tangent. There is literally nothing to argue about since 100% of people agree.

[ydraw]

People will still wreck TBC content. The thing is the harder the content gets, the more people will actually have to actually progress. Top guilds will clear everything in the same reset, but others might actually have progression time, especially those who aren't familiar with it.

Vanilla/Classic content is easy, but despite being easy each progressive raid they've added has been getting incrementally harder, and you can monitor stats based on instance completion to verify that.

TBC will change the landscape a bit though because the difficulty does indeed increase, and the skill cap of most classes goes up. I forget what 'top' classic guild it was recently, but I remember seeing clips of their raid leader having a melt down on Firemaw and wiping because lots in their raid aren't use to dealing with the one mechanic the fight has. Lots of guilds will be like this in TBC because the level at which you can ignore mechanics completely just doesn't exist in the same capacity in TBC.

Again, TBC will be easy. It's been done before, people know what's strong and there's no mechanical mystery. Things like ignoring a whole phase on Ragnaros, or most of the class calls on Nefarian just wont be common place in TBC.

"Dad" guilds ironically get a much more accurate read of classic difficultly because they don't require the raid to be fully flasked or have every consumable in the game.

TBC raids will have every single person in the raid with drum buffs 24/7 which will make a lot of encounters a lot easier.

The hardest thing about TBC will be the attunements making PUGs much more difficult, that is if they launch a version of TBC with attunements still in place.

[Shaetha]

The reason why content is getting cleared in classic so easily is cause of

1. we're at pre patch for TBC in terms of class strength, the only thing that is missing is TBC talent trees

2. with those said "buff" state of classes people are using every buff/wb known to classic to clear this content. Back in vanilla that wasn't a thing where people would literally not raid w/o WB, it was go or go home.

1. No, we're not. Prepatch is 2.0. This is a real long way from 2.0 in more ways than talent trees. Never mind that balance didn't significantly change after the AQ patch until 2.0.

2. Okay? That doesn't affect the content itself in any way. The numbers are tuned the same regardless of your buffs. In fact, you never need them. People that need them to raid are trying for parses.

Raids are tuned more loosely because it's 40 people. Raids get cleared fast because "bad" players in 2020 are better than "good" players in 2006.

[Hellobolis]

The question here, which everyone wants to change because it is inconvenient for their arguments is the following: If players had TEN YEARS to master the content on private servers, would they be able to do it Day One when it launched officially. The answer is so obviously yes that it is delusional to believe otherwise.

You wildly underestimate what years of players trying to break a game can do to mitigate any mathematical hurdle.

Would they? practise and experience makes up for a lot of stuff, but modern raids tend to have a few numberchecks (especially healing) in them you can't make without gear from the raid itself.

maybe if people did play it obsessively over 10 years they could find a bunch of weird bugs to exploit so it does become possible, but i have my doubts. there are a dozen crazy bugs like that in classic while they are one every couple of years on modern wow.

The experience unfortunatly cuts both ways, the devs also have had 15 years to idiot proof the game. e.g. look at all the items with just blanket "doesn't work in this area" preventative measures on them. no fun allowed meme is rooted in truth, while back in classic days fun was very much allowed.

just look at 8.3 players already pretty much do double damage with corruptiions compared to the start of the patch which is what allows most guilds a 1 night clear. But trying to replicate that much of a damage increase on patch day with bugs exploits and items from 8.2? i dunno it feels like a stretch in modern wow.

[Shaetha]

Literally no one disagrees, which is exactly the reason these threads always go off on a tangent. There is literally nothing to argue about since 100% of people agree.

Except they do disagree. The person you replied to was replying to someone that was disagreeing with this exact point.

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Would they? practise and experience makes up for a lot of stuff, but modern raids tend to have a few numberchecks (especially healing) in them you can't make without gear from the raid itself.

maybe if people did play it obsessively over 10 years they could find a bunch of weird bugs to exploit so it does become possible, but i have my doubts. there are a dozen crazy bugs like that in classic while they are one every couple of years on modern wow.

It depends. Are they being released post nerfs? If so, they're cleared day 1 easy(assuming a similar phase structure). Blizzard has to artificially inflate the difficulty of raid bosses on release to make something challenging for bleeding edge raiders and still have it cleared by people that aren't.

As far as bugs go, it's impossible to test everything. Something can test perfectly fine every time and break as soon as it's pushed live. That's just the life of a software developer. The key is how quickly the bugs are fixed. People are still finding new bugs(and new ways to use existing bugs) in SNES games. It's fair that over the space of 10 years in an environment with no developer oversight there will be many new(and new ways to use old) bugs found, solved, and reproduced for advantages.

[Hellobolis]

It depends. Are they being released post nerfs?

that's kinda a thing too. modern raids have few nerfs and a lot more of over time player power increase instead. has anything in 8.3 been nerfed for more than 5% of it's hp? most other nerfs are mechanics nerfs which wouldn't matter to a guild that can clear it on day1, not a lot of dps helping nerfs.

and yeah, people find bugs in SNES games. games from a period where patching was all but impossible. and were comparing it to a game with 15 years of idiot proofing patches. i just have a feeling that there will be at least 1 boss per raid where w/e tricks they find won't cut it, especially the healer focussed fights. and 1 boss is all it takes.

[delus]

Classic raids were balanced for half the raid playing on potato hardware and/or being window lickers. Mechanics were easy like stay out of fire. The really hard part is getting a raid with 40 players filled.

[TheRevenantHero]

lmao again this fallacy. What if I told you 15 years ago people said the same about how Vanilla was hard and look at the speedrunners now. 15 years from now you'll have BETTER INTERNET, BETTER COMPUTER, REFINED STRATS for current raids, even better addons..

Thinking in 15 years mythic nyalotha will still be hard as today is laughable mate and I dont get why people keep repeating this

Nyalotha at the level it released at will always be incredibly difficult. Vanilla was only perceived as difficult because the MMO scene hadn't been properly built yet. So most people had absolutely no idea what they were doing. There was also limits on internet speed compared to now. Vanilla was NEVER difficult gameplay wise. What made it difficult were the players not knowing how to play the game yet.

[SmokesTooMuch]

Trash in EP and Nyalotha has more mechanics that entire classic raids had. Look at logs and watch the mage press frostbolt 33 times and thats all. Such engaging gameplay. The game isnt hard, its just dead slow to a crawl all the time.

[Vordie]

Why is no one talking about the trash mobs....?

OP is suggesting that the difficulty of classic is comparable to retail because guilds speed clears at a SIMILAR pace.

Let's compare, shall we:

The fastest 3 Ny'alotha logged runs are 1:38:43, 2:01:31 and 2:04:39.
The fastest 3 AQ40 logged runs are 48:10, 51:32, 53:17.

Now, you might say, double the time is not THAT big of a difference (I personally think it is, but let's go with it) and it's possible that there are people that haven't logged even faster runs (same can be said about classic).
The biggest issue with comparing difficulties is the BOSS FIGHTS. Comparing clear times does not give you a full picture of difficulty because such a huge percentage of classic times is just fighting trash mobs.

For example, the fastest boss fight ever logged on retail is a 1:17 Skitra kill. The slowest boss on AQ40 is C'thun, with the fastest time being 2:33. That's two times the time spent on one of the easiest bosses of Ny'alotha.

The fastest retail guild, Entropy, spent ~49 minutes on boss fights. That's literally how long it took the fastest classic guild, APES, to clear the entire instance. How much of it was boss fights? 14 minutes. FOURTEEN MINUTES.
If we compare the fastest overall times and not specific guilds, it's even worse.
~35 minutes for Ny'alotha.
~8.8 minutes for AQ40.


So, unless you wanna argue that classic trash mobs are harder than retail trash mobs and reference clear times, then I don't think you have any leg to stand on.