What is the big farm that was supposed to make TBC time consuming?

[ryjkur]

My guild is pretty casual, majority of us got to 70 level last reset so my guild missed the first raid ID. People claimed TBC to be time consuming for raiders but I'm not seeing what is the time consuming part or am I missing something? We cleared Kara + 25mans mostly with dungeon blues and some of us had tier 3 gear so we have already secured T4 clear even tho Magtheridon took us one whole night.

The only faction I'm revered with is the Cenarion Expedition and I still need the Honor Hold rep to summon Nightbane but it wouldn't take that long if I only wanted to finish that. Guildmates can summon the Nightbane and HC instance / badge loot is not attractive enough to care about grinding them since I'll get gear from raid eventually. I'll get revered slowly but surely before Tempest Keep / SSC launches (for attunements) so reputations arent the time consuming part.

Consumables are cheap so I can't think any of "time consuming" part necessary for raiding. I'm ready for raid logging as casual unless I'm missing something? I think we'll get almost full T4 before T5 releases so gear shouldn't be a problem with raid logging.

[Afrospinach]

My guild is pretty casual, majority of us got to 70 level last reset so my guild missed the first raid ID. People claimed TBC to be time consuming for raiders but I'm not seeing what is the time consuming part or am I missing something? We cleared Kara + 25mans mostly with dungeon blues and some of us had tier 3 gear so we have already secured T4 clear even tho Magtheridon took us one whole night.

The only faction I'm revered with is the Cenarion Expedition and I still need the Honor Hold rep to summon Nightbane but it wouldn't take that long if I only wanted to finish that. Guildmates can summon the Nightbane and HC instance / badge loot is not attractive enough to care about grinding them since I'll get gear from raid eventually. I'll get revered slowly but surely before Tempest Keep / SSC launches (for attunements) so reputations arent the time consuming part.

Consumables are cheap so I can't think any of "time consuming" part necessary for raiding. I'm ready for raid logging as casual unless I'm missing something? I think we'll get almost full T4 before T5 releases so gear shouldn't be a problem with raid logging.

Probably your selective perception at work TBH.

I don't think anyone who played TBC was saying raiding was time consuming. You can only use one elixer? Check. No world buffs? Check. Half the raid size? Check. DRASTICALLY reduced travel times to anywhere? Check.

With this massive benefit of hindsight people are super focused on goals like revered rep(your guildies did this for you apparently so congrats on riding coat tails and telling everyone how easy and quick everything is lol). I cannot really remember how long it took to get into kara the first time. I was my server first lvl 70 back in the day and well, I got a lot of things done before kara or heroics were a thing let me tell you. It was an extremely lonely experience for weeks. This time there were multitudes of people at 70 within the first week.

Is the difficulty not what people remembered? Maybe. Heroics still punish you if you do not have a good comp or strat. Kara was easy because the perfect strat was already laid out. Actually some of the guides are pretty garbage but at least one person knew a way of dealing with any issues we had on the bosses from back in the day.

[ryjkur]

With this massive benefit of hindsight people are super focused on goals like revered rep(your guildies did this for you apparently so congrats on riding coat tails and telling everyone how easy and quick everything is lol).

Well I'm only missing the Honor Hold reputation for Nightbane summon and it needs like 2 SH clears for that. It's not like I was riding on coattails lol, I didn't finish that since few people happened to have 2 reputations needed for summon. It's still quick to get CE and HH revered after questing and dinging 70.

[Blackmist]

Maybe it was collecting all the shadow resist gear for Black Temple. Not sure how long that took because my guild back then couldn't even get past the second boss.

[Fitsu]

I think there may be some confusion here, I don't think anyone said TBC was time consuming compared to Classic a lot of people just say even though TBC is far less time consuming it's still to time consuming for them and that's just subjective. Also, your perspective seems to be that of someone who played Classic. Your carrying over from Classic so you've got gear and you've got gold already. A fresh boostie boy has a lot more to do to catch up.

I dodn't play Classic and from what I've read people average 40-60 hours to hit 70. So to hit 70 by the second reset requires an average of 5hrs/day played. Like, I literally don't have 5 hours of free time a day I would have to book holiday just to achieve this. Then it's farming gold, professions, reps, attunements, going to raids etc. Like yeah it's all pretty standard MMO stuff but to a lot of people it's still just to much. I'm lucky if I get 12hrs/week to play games, so for me it would of took probably 1 1/2 months to hit 70 and then I've still got everything else to do. Compare that to retail, I could do 50-60 in a week of play and then just hop straight into the actual content I want to do and even that I don't really have time for.

This is also compounded by the fact everyone else is rushing, like by the time I hit 70 everythings already on farm so for someone like me whos main joy comes from being atleast near the front with everyone else I need to be playing 5, 6, 7, 8+ hours a day to really get anything out of it and I just can't. So there's no real point.

[Borgmore]

Nether drake mount quest line is a grind…good luck

[rogoth]

netherwing reputation, farming up motes for transmutes, crafting gear/consumables and fishing for the best meat/other ingredients, there's a few other things i remember being a time consuming chore but other than that they don't spring to mind as readily as these did.

[Clawsout]

I think there may be some confusion here, I don't think anyone said TBC was time consuming compared to Classic a lot of people just say even though TBC is far less time consuming it's still to time consuming for them and that's just subjective. Also, your perspective seems to be that of someone who played Classic. Your carrying over from Classic so you've got gear and you've got gold already. A fresh boostie boy has a lot more to do to catch up.

I dodn't play Classic and from what I've read people average 40-60 hours to hit 70. So to hit 70 by the second reset requires an average of 5hrs/day played. Like, I literally don't have 5 hours of free time a day I would have to book holiday just to achieve this. Then it's farming gold, professions, reps, attunements, going to raids etc. Like yeah it's all pretty standard MMO stuff but to a lot of people it's still just to much. I'm lucky if I get 12hrs/week to play games, so for me it would of took probably 1 1/2 months to hit 70 and then I've still got everything else to do. Compare that to retail, I could do 50-60 in a week of play and then just hop straight into the actual content I want to do and even that I don't really have time for.

This is also compounded by the fact everyone else is rushing, like by the time I hit 70 everythings already on farm so for someone like me whos main joy comes from being atleast near the front with everyone else I need to be playing 5, 6, 7, 8+ hours a day to really get anything out of it and I just can't. So there's no real point.

Yes its a little overwhelming when alot of ppl are just rushing but to each there own journey the nice thing is dungeons will always be relavent due to badges

[sylenna]

i am still astounded as to why players rush through decades old content and have the gall to ask here why we did take so long for everything "back in the day®".

dude. every best practice is written up a thousand times, every old player is guiding you through everything and every dynamic, mechanic or other thing is well known in later iterations. you blew through the skill ceiling by jumping back in time and being the grown up in a kindergarten class. "what, you call simple math difficult and 500 words is time consuming to you? HA! ACED IT!"

go be happy. the olden times cannot be recreated and you wouldn't understand it even if i told you every little pain, progress bit or any guild drama along the way which impedes how you moved forward. i hpala'd lady vashj with 3-5fps whilst looking zoomed in on the ground with lowest details on a rocky internet connection with muffled noises called teamspeak. there is no way to recreate any of that or the lack of any deeper info on encounters when you were ahead of the pack.

ah, getting enraged again.

[Butterland]

It's not. Most of the grinds are optional. Raids may take up to 2 nights a week. Gold requirements are pretty non-existant. 15 years ago, I got through TBC by basically doing dailies once a week. Now, I probably have more gold than I can spend for the whole expansion.

[luciano]

Fast forward 6 or 9 months (nice) and T5 comes out. You and the gang have had T4 on farm forever. All three of the guild's Kara teams are kitted out, attuned to the T5 stuff, and ready to rock.

But, in the cutdown from 30 starters (3 kara teams, 10 ppl each) down to one 25-man raid team, you leave 5 people behind. Three others quit. Now you have 22 raiders for 25 spots. Time to recruit!

So what's the hard part? Now you have to drag those new recruits through the entire process again. Those recruits need to get attuned to stuff. They need their Mech key made. They need to run a bunch of shit. Their reputation is low, so now you've got guildies helping them level that up via level 70 dungeons. The T5 attunements are another chore to handle.

Now do that all again, every time someone is replaced or someone new joins the raid pool.

Then do it all again and then some for T6 when BT comes out. Attunements for that go through the T5 raids.

TL;DR It's not that BC is hard to set your character up. It's that there are few to no catchups for attunements and reputation, so every new person, even six months from now, is essentially starting over.

[TheLucky1]

We also downed kara and mag/gruul before reset, some people in full dungeon blues and some in quest/few blues, everyone working fulltime/no vacation/no no-lifing going on.

Tbh i'm kinda disappointed how piss easy all bosses fell and my motivation to grind rep, grind dungeons or grind gold for a few% damage increase is nonexistent now.

[Heathy]

it is more enjoyable to gear up a non-t3 alt you actually get upgrades. I always thought it was the whole exalted reputations that took time, the sha'tari skyguard and ogrila aren't in yet, the netherwing, these rep grinds take a while. just because you can only get so much rep per day. i vaguely remember farming netherwing eggs, there was still some ppl trying to get exalted (since i started doing it late when most ppl who wanted to do it had already done it) but I didn't really have a massive amount of competition, it still took an age to get exalted. I don't think tbc was really balanced around the vast majority having t3, it makes a huge difference. you can just see by the loot and itemisation that most of it isn't better than what you have. so you can just tunnel vision through everything you don't have to farm for specific upgrades. at least until you hit 70.

like others have said this expansion was meant to be less demanding than classic, which had heavy consumable requirements, for bc that is scaled back considerably. with potion stacking gone ( a lot of potions nerfed into the ground, like protection potions only lasting 2 minutes now, not 1 hour, limited invul potions no longer being a consumable BoP etc etc), that alone is huge. the actual rep grinds seem semi optional, some of them you'll want to do, but many of them you just get over time. you want revered to do heroic but depending on your gear you might not need many heroics. I don't really need any heroics, I've already cleared t4 in t3, quest rewards and regular dungeon gear. the only thing that is going to replace my warrior 6pt of (zg enchanted) t3 is full t4. no combination of (pre-raid) gear gives me that 5% hit back. while being equally as tanky. for me its just been a breeze, I still haven't ran a heroic I don't have a single badge. I can just chill with my warrior, get saved to karazhan, my resto druid alt on the other hand has to farm for upgrades. everything is an upgrade.

it is still a bit of a grind getting each of the heroic key factions upto revered, getting honored is done pretty much by itself through levelling, but you do end up needing to farm shattered halls, or steam vaults or mech/bot or shadow labs, several times to hit revered. the time consuming part ofc is when you start levelling alts and have to do it multiple times.

[Argorwal]

A lot of the dungeon grinding became irrelevant when the raids are face rolled.

Also there is nothing “casual” about putting in 20-30 hours of video game playing in a week to level up.

That is a part time job.

[Prag]

A lot of the dungeon grinding became irrelevant when the raids are face rolled.

Also there is nothing “casual” about putting in 20-30 hours of video game playing in a week to level up.

That is a part time job.

This, plus:

Imagine how much longer it’d have taken to be Kara ready if you hadn’t known to follow the dungeon rep grind, didn’t have Questie, Attune and had to get all your tips on items and locations from Thottbot.

Every convenience has been laid out and considered, plus people knew exactly where to min/max.

So, ofc it was easy.

[Argorwal]

This, plus:

Imagine how much longer it’d have taken to be Kara ready if you hadn’t known to follow the dungeon rep grind, didn’t have Questie, Attune and had to get all your tips on items and locations from Thottbot.

Every convenience has been laid out and considered, plus people knew exactly where to min/max.

So, ofc it was easy.

Yep, all of that too.

All the quest linking and grouping showing the complete auto message has made me think I may be the only person playing without Questie.

And to think Blizzard used to get blasted as dumbing down the game when they built in the quest helper.

[Magneto]

everyone, lets post a quick /played and pick it up from there

[Xykotic]

Compared to retail grinds, TBC is nothing. You can dedicate a weekend to a grind and comfortably see it finished.

Unless you're horde and want to grind PvP. Then you'll need be lucky to be done in time for Wrath launch.

[Shigma]

My god, this is really sad. Dafuq did some of you expect from an OLD re-iteration of the game trying to play exactly the same... but with all the new tech and knowledge you couldn't have then. Which also has been re-run on private servers and everything is known and documented.

For fucks sake, some people. It was hard on it's own way back then for a lot of reasons (and not precisely because it was mechanically hard, which for the most part is not and its miles away from what it is now. People had shit computers and different mindsets). Things weren't the same. You just can't compare. My friend's guild got the first clear on sunwell in my country and that was such a feat back then, and the competition was fierce and it was hard, i saw them wipe hundreds of times on twin eredars and Mu'ru before the nerf. Because they went in blind trying to beat if before noone else. Of course now, where you know the perfect setup + gear + strats will be easier, no shit. We're both playing it again and we both agree it feels so much easier with all the knowledge and helping addons + guides and media, and the mindset has nothing to do with what we lived then. I mean, if you are not a mage or a lock now the meta says fuck you. That wasn't like this then. It is classic vanilla all over again.

You wanna play those idiotic games? Yeah:

BFA mythic was a piece of cake, because i got invited to a pug carried by some russians to ny'alotha, that boosted our sorry asses while dead in the ground so we could get the achievs before SL, but of course not the mount.

Woohooo, i completed the xpack! That was easy, with no time invested at all! Why people claimed mythic was hard?

You see? It's dumb.

[Akka]

People claimed TBC to be time consuming for raiders

Who ever claimed that ?
It's the opposite, TBC was a huge reduction in time consumption compared to Vanilla, due to the massive cutback in consumables. The only "farm" parts are the reputation and the crafts, and the latter are a better option but not required. TBC is, on the contrary, the "just invest whatever time you wish to" expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

All the quest linking and grouping showing the complete auto message has made me think I may be the only person playing without Questie.

And to think Blizzard used to get blasted as dumbing down the game when they built in the quest helper.

This so much. I've this annoying feeling of being the only human in a sea of bots that just mindlessly follows the big arrow. I think I'm starting to hate Questie even more than DBM, and that's saying a lot.