Classic was easy, TBC will be easy, but what about ICC 25m heroic?

[Woobels]

Heroic LK will be hard for people the majority (read: the majority isn't the most serious guilds) currently playing Classic. I'm big on the opinion vanilla/TBC etc are all really easy but the game did change a significant amount and Heroic LK was absolutely a huge step up from anything available in expansions prior to it.

[Viikkis]

it's all gonna be easy
there is no real casuals left, everyone knows about guides
help, you can even find great video guides on youtube in a matter of seconds (which we didn't have back in the day, finding a good VOD from your role's perspective was very very helpful and people shared it on guild's ftp server)

There are videos and guides about mythic Sire Denathrius. Is he an easy boss to kill because of that?

[slime]

You are asking if the first xpac that changed the game to make it very easy for everyone will be harder than classic and BC classic?

I can see a wipe or two on some of the tougher heroic bosses, putricide, sindy and LK... but that's a wipe or two - they will be cleared the night of raid release.

[Viikkis]

I can see a wipe or two on some of the tougher heroic bosses, putricide, sindy and LK... but that's a wipe or two - they will be cleared the night of raid release.

Cleared by who exactly? The top hardcore guilds or the whole raiding playerbase? Is a boss easy because the top guild can kill it with ease or is it easy when everyone can kill it with ease?

[ClassicPeon]

It will be much harder than Vanilla or TBC.
WOTLK is where the game changed, with a lot of personal responsibilities and cooldowns added.

Private server still have this content buffed by at least 50% to challenge the elite, but for "normal people" LK25HM will actually be hard.

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You know how the blizzlike OS3D is done nowadays? You enter and nuke the boss before second drake lands. 3.3.5 talents play a huge role in that obviously but even with 3.1 ones it would be done like that.

Unless you seriously stack for it os3d with the speed strat probably isnt going to be viable for most people at the start.

Doing it in naxx gear is pointless

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You are asking if the first xpac that changed the game to make it very easy for everyone will be harder than classic and BC classic?

I can see a wipe or two on some of the tougher heroic bosses, putricide, sindy and LK... but that's a wipe or two - they will be cleared the night of raid release.

If you dont think wrath had harder raids then all of classic and most of tbc then youa re absolutely kidding yourself.

Granted naxx is naxx. But the rest? Yeah. Different league.

[Mendzia]

It is gonna be very easy since WotLK is the most popular xpack on the private servers and poeple are really, really familiar with it.

[ClassicPeon]

It is gonna be very easy since WotLK is the most popular xpack on the private servers and poeple are really, really familiar with it.

Unless you dont count classic in that mix that would be wrong.

Why does it make the game easier for the rest of us that some people played it a lot on private servers btw?

[mmocfd1b0ab5a3]

I remember WotLK 25HC bosses were forgiving about one or two members failing and there wasn't that many personal responsibilities. If you had one or two players who died early on it wasn't necessary a wipe. I have raided in every expansion and I can say it's just getting worse and worse once expansions goes by when it comes to personal responsibility. Nowadays if one person dies early on it's pretty much a wipe since DPS checks are harsh and it's harder to not to fail compared to WotLK for example.

What about ICC 25HC? It's going to be pretty simple for decent raiders. LK 25HC needs everyone to be alive at first for majority of people but shouldn't be a problem for decent players.

[Marakesh]

I find these discussions funny. You could probably take the average person off the street, and given enough time and motivation they could fill a spot in a world first guild. There's nothing that hard or exclusive about raiding. It has a high entry fee in that you must spend time on research from the beginning and a good amount of grinding to boot. It has a low number of people that actually try to compete for mythic progression. Compared to more widespread esports, the pool is just too shallow to be very selective.

Its also funny to me because I've been running BRD lately and not having any luck. Out of 4 attempts, only one finish. 2 handed weapon tanks and aoe-ing dps doesn't work until you're overgeared, but they keep trying. But it made me remember the last time I spent more than a few months in retail WoW. As much as people complain about lfg M+, I had virtually no issues getting +15 in Legion. It took a dozen runs, slowly building up the keystone level, focused on the stone troll dungeon that was supposed to be the easiest to do, and couple weeks later it was done. Only a couple failed and one of them was because of a disconnect while the other completed but ran out of time.

I was lucky with the group finder? The crowd in M+ is more serious business and casuals don't join? That's counter to what everyone says though, but okay.

I have some other ideas. There are some hidden advantages with things like the many difficulty levels. This lets people succeed at the dungeon or raid, and learn the basics of the encounter first hand. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I suspect in actual practice this is a huge boost to the learning curve. It just doesn't fit the epeen arguing on message boards.

There's also the linearity and predictability of modern instanced content. I can't recall having to react on the fly like you do with pat's, especially something like the torch room in brd, in any of the Legion dungeons. I know raids were made more consistent as well after LK because the tournament rng. However, if most randomness is removed then you would have to amp up the reaction times on these very set piece encounters. Its a very narrow skill set to me, and not really that hard.

Oh, and the answer to whether LK or any other expansions raids will be harder? No, they're all old content, and the only limiting factor is whether people want to put in the effort to take them down. One other thing about Classic though - the high pop realms had an effect all the way to the end. There's no way this wb system would have worked back in vanilla on smaller realms with less people interested in raiding. It is a loophole that can't be repeated in future legacy expansions.

[Deferionus]

Heroic LK will be hard for people the majority (read: the majority isn't the most serious guilds) currently playing Classic. I'm big on the opinion vanilla/TBC etc are all really easy but the game did change a significant amount and Heroic LK was absolutely a huge step up from anything available in expansions prior to it.

This is pretty accurate. Heroic LK was a step above everything the game had seen prior and I think it compares to newer content in difficulty. Most of the early bosses weren't bad. The wing bosses gave people back then problems but I think people would cope with the mechanics to them pretty well now.

I do think Yogg Saron with no lights would give people problems too. Firefighter was hard back then for healers but I don't think it would be that huge of a problem outside of the first few weeks.

My biggest curiosity is how would TOC with the limited attempts go now. And Naxx/T7 content would be a breeze.

[Viikkis]

People keep saying that old content is easy, because reasons.

What is easy?? Is the argument only based on that the top guilds will down the raid without issues on release? Well what about the whole raiding playerbase??

So far the arguments have been "like riding a bike" => how many people actually cleared the whole expansion on the hardest difficulty when it was new?

The information is out there. People can read guides, bring optimal raid setup => the info is out right now. It is always out after the race to world first is over. So is the latest last boss (currently Sire Denathrius) on mythic then easy??

So is the difficulty of the raid only about how many days it will take for a "world first". Or how long it will take for each player raiding to clear the raid on the hardest difficulty. Where does the line go??

And this is not argument for "classic is harder than x" or vice versa.

I am genuinely curious which version of WoW would have the first raid content not considered "easy" if it was launched again. WoD? Legion? If Blizzard went mad and BFA went live as classic today would everyone just blast through mythic Ny'alotha?

[Kalexia]

This is a silly question. "Easy" is a relative term. Heroic raids in retail are easy for top tier mythic raiders. Does that mean the heroic raids are easy for the average player? No.

This seems to be wrapped up in the fallacious argument that if something gets cleared for world first quickly it is necessarily "easy" for everyone. There are tons and tons of guilds still progressing through Naxx. The fact that it was world-firsted so quickly is meaningless. If those people didn't exist, nothing would change for the average raider.

Furthermore, the earlier versions of wow were not designed to be very difficult. It's not the point. The point was for it to be fun, a principle that the retail designers forgot about quite awhile ago.

Will we see incredibly fast world firsts in every version of classic? Obviously. That's a no-brainer. That's not something anyone reasonable would argue with. The question is whether BC and LK will be easy relative to classic vanilla, and the answer is no. They will obviously be harder. Even classic would have been harder if not for the absurd world buff meta, which trivialized a number of raids for even average players.

I'm going to say something that is going to be difficult for a lot of people to understand or accept:
Difficulty for the bottom 80% of players cannot be inferred by the world first clear times. One has nothing to do with the other.

[Feliks]

It's going to be super easy and quick for hardcore guilds. For casual guilds with people that never raided ICC, many of them likely won't even get to LK 25H

People are comparing Molten Core difficulty to this. Molten Core came out when no one knew what they were doing. Things were fairly well fleshed out by Wrath. It's way more sweaty now, but ICC 25m is not going to be a joke of a raid by any means.

[Desscent]

The only real thing in tbc classic will just be who has the first glaive set.

[Eninya]

Mentioning 10m raids.

I think Sartharion +3 drakes 10m was insanely difficult compared to 25m version. On my old server, 25m was killed a few times, before my guild was able to beat it on 10m (server first!).

That was hard.

You just zerged it with as much DPS as possible to kill him before the drakes started killing your tank and annihilating the raid. E-Z Mount Oven.

[ClassicPeon]

You just zerged it with as much DPS as possible to kill him before the drakes started killing your tank and annihilating the raid. E-Z Mount Oven.

When people in totgc + icc gear think they did something by zerging a first tier boss on hardmode

[Tojara]

Most of ICC isn't hard at all.

It's going to be the exact same scenario as classic, and soon to be TBC. The content will be 'crushed' by people who prepare for it and as a general whole, it will be easier than what it was back when it was relevant.

People need to keep in mind that even though Naxxaramas was 'crushed' in a few hours upon launch, that wasn't really indicative of the entire population. People hand crafted compositions building towards this conclusion since the start of Classic, and were prepared months before with proper swaps to make it as easy as possible. Dad guilds on the other hand that have been conditioned to raid once a week and somewhat followed trends had a much harder time with Naxxaramas. Why? They didn't prepare nearly as much for the bosses that mattered, nor were they use to raiding a few days a week. Regardless, "dad" guilds eventually cleared the content at a much faster rate than anybody did back when Vanilla was current, it just took longer.

TBC and WoTLK are going to be the same thing, because, why wouldn't they? It's going to be smashed by people who prepare months in advance, while most of the player base is going to behave exactly like how Naxxaramas was approached by a more standard guild. The content as a whole does get more difficult, but completion rates regardless are just going to be way higher.

Stop basing what a couple dozen guilds do on classic versions of the game as the baseline for your difficulty. On live there's only several guilds at best who clear completely new content in a few weeks. Nobody then goes on to proclaim that the content is easy because guilds who plan for months in advance and raid for 8-16 hours a day for a few weeks, clear it that quickly. So stop saying that TBC/WoTLK (or whatever) is going to be smashed because several guilds on each server kill the content as soon as it's released, while preparing for a game where all the information is already known.

Again this isn't me saying that old content is hard. It's not. People who take it seriously and prepare for it are going to kill it incredibly fast. Those that don't are still going to have progression though and you can see that trend with how Naxxaramas was approached. If lots of dad guilds raiding 1-2 days a week for a few hours can clear all the content in a few months, that's pretty good, no? It certainly tells you it was easier than what people experienced years ago raiding 3-4 days a week and potentially not clearing the content when it was relevant at all.

Doing something twice or having a vast wealth of knowledge online is just a huge advantage. The information is out there and I don't expect things like Heroic LK to be remotely difficult. People who take it seriously will have multiple legendary maces crafted, will stack disc priests, and brings lot of DPS that can cheese the only really difficult part of the Heoric LK fight. If you don't have that capability, you're still going to clear it, it will just take longer.

[Xykotic]

Naxxramas isn't "easy" statistically. You might find it easy, but if you asked the entire community, you'd be a minority.

Casual guilds will struggle tier 5 and onwards and are very unlikely to clear Sunwell at all before Wrath comes out.

[Aphrel]

harder than classic naxx, but easier than current day mythic raids.

We already know all the mechanics, and if a guild can prepare for the entire expansion, theyll bring 5-10 warlocks to ignore as many valkyrs as possible (also locks was easily among the storngest classes in icc and on hc lk, so no downside stacking them).

[Chrno]

Not sure what you mean by that.
OS3D was release content, and you were not killing it before 2nd drake landed when it released.
As for 3.3.5 it was a huge buff for most classes compared to release.

We killed OS3D using a warlock tank and 1 healer (i believe a disc) very early on (server first).

This was pugged content on our server not much later. During naxx many pugs failed but later on during ulduar everyone did this for the mount.

People saying people were clueless back in the day are Just wrong. We cleared naxx 25 mainly wearing T6 /sunwell gear. I remember not everyone was even lvl 70