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

[Royru]

So, WotLK Classic will happen and I'm curious if the callings in this thread will be true.

There are many challenges in WotLK, be it Yogg+0, A Tribute to Immortality, A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, LK heroic 25 with no buff...
Sure, a minority will be able to do them fast (talking about gearing, everyone knows about the necessarity for an unhittable tank). But for the vast majority, those are quite unobtainable.

If my memory serves me right, yogg 0 will be the hardest thing in wotlk. Heroic Lich king no buff is hard, but it isn’t even remotely as close to as hard, I believe that it’s honestly just a gear check and once you’ve done ICC heroic enough you should be pretty good. But yog +0… not a lot of people really did that.

[Gorsameth]

If my memory serves me right, yogg 0 will be the hardest thing in wotlk. Heroic Lich king no buff is hard, but it isn’t even remotely as close to as hard, I believe that it’s honestly just a gear check and once you’ve done ICC heroic enough you should be pretty good. But yog +0… not a lot of people really did that.

Yeah, no.

Yogg 0 is a special status for how long he stayed undefeated because no one knew how to actually do it until Stars showed the world how it was done. While Ulduar is current it may keep a special place but when people are ICC geared its certainly a doable fight, hard but doable.

[Royru]

Yeah, no.

Yogg 0 is a special status for how long he stayed undefeated because no one knew how to actually do it until Stars showed the world how it was done. While Ulduar is current it may keep a special place but when people are ICC geared its certainly a doable fight, hard but doable.

So your reason to say I’m wrong is that people will out gear the fight with an item level that two tiers above what the fight was made for?

[ifrah]

Don't know how many guilds were even progressing on yogg 0 until it got killed by Stars. On that day's standards, yeah, it was hard for sure. For people with all the knowledge & skill today? Hardly. Back then for even your average top100guild raider the concept of marking those adds on the fly, separating them, and then managing the whole mess was quite a challenge.
ICC25h didn't have too many roadblocks. Few DPS races (the guy after boat.. and...?). Putricide "required" some addon (your normal bossmods didn't have this from the get go back then and many guilds had their private made ones iirc) to ease the plague handling. Memories from LK have blurred out completely and I don't remember was there other woes than to keep up with the timers.

[Kralljin]

Yogg 0 is a special status for how long he stayed undefeated because no one knew how to actually do it until Stars showed the world how it was done. While Ulduar is current it may keep a special place but when people are ICC geared its certainly a doable fight, hard but doable.

I mean, we gotta keep things fair and compare Yogg+0 with Ulduar gear and not Yogg+0 with ICC gear.
Keep in mind that Yogg also received multiple nerfs, pre nerf vs. post nerf also makes quite the difference.

But frankly i believe it's going to massively vary depending on your comp, if you just stack Warlocks, Yogg+0 will be easy by the virtue of the last phase being over extremely quickly.
Same goes for LK HC ironically, just stack Locks (or anything that can bait the Val'kyrs) and a significant portion of the encounter's difficulty is gone.

I think if you don't have an overly optimized comp, both will be reasonable in their challenge, Yogg+0 should still be relatively tight in managing P2 w/o Keepers, while P3 just comes down to your hunter's / tank competence.

I'd probably still say that LK HC is a bit harder, the Sanity mechanic on Yogg is a lot more forgiving than most of what LK HC does.

[Whisp]

I had to go and recover my login just to comment on this. Now I am not saying that LK 25 H is going to be anywhere near impossible but there are a lot of people in this thread are drastically under estimating how hard the fight was. Sure there were bosses in Vanilla and BC that people had said were impossible, but they were due to bugs so you can not compare them in terms of actual difficulty.

Lk25 H was never killed without the 5% buff prior to the Cata pre patch.
bluetracker dot gg / wow/topic/eu-de/12730505378-icc-nerf/

Paragon killed him on March 26th 2010.
wowprogress dot com / achievement / 4584

The last guild that killed it prior to the Cata prepatch was Prophets on Oct 11, 2010 making them world 627 and this was with the 30% buff. The Cata prepatch not only increased player damage, healing and hp significantly but it also removed the chill of the frozen throne debuff making the fight significantly easier. The reason its important to point that out is that realm 1st H LK kills were still going out until nearly the end of tier 11. So even with tier 11 gear and +5 player levels H LK could still bring guilds to their knee's begging for mercy. Anyone that thinks the fight is was a push over even by todays standards was not around at the time doing that level of content.

Ok, lets jump back to TOGC...it wasn't out for nearly as long as some of the other raids but it was still being tracked until Cata released. TOGC had the hardest hard mode ever made, if you don't believe me just go look at A Tribute to Immortality. Only 11 guilds ever did it making it the hardest thing Wow has ever seen.
wowprogress dot com/achievement/4079

Ulduar.....well only 1343 guilds did alone in the darkness prior to the Cata prepatch.
wowprogress dot com /achievement/3164

Now if you consider that gave them 2 full tiers of gear above what the encounter was designed for that speaks volumes to how hard the fight was. Just go and look at how many guilds killed alone in the darkness 25 man prior to the world first LK H kill.....I'll save you the trouble. There was only 558 guilds in the world that did it prior to LK 25H having been killed.

Comparing what has been done on private servers with what these fights were like when they were current is comparing apples to oranges. There are a lot of things private servers have gotten right over the years but they all have underlying issues that that tend to make things trivial or certain mechanics simply don't work as they were intended. For the majority of the game these things are not an issues, but when your talking about the hardest fights... anything that's less then working 100% as it was intended makes it impossible to compare it to how is should have been. Simply adding health onto a boss to make it seem harder when one....or several underlying mechanics are not working correctly is simply a way to try and hide the fact that the fight is not 100% authentic. In older expansions these small variations are not enough to be noticeable or really change the outcome of a fight but when you start talking about the hardest fights in Wrath, well even a 1% variance will be enough to change the outcome. Paragon had said that they never beat LK H without the 5% buff and that even once they had him on farm they were skeptical if the gear they had gotten from him would have been enough to make up that 5% difference the buff was providing.

Now that's not saying that only a hand full of guilds are going to do it this time around and I fully expect to see LK killed without the 5% buff...but that's not going to happen in the first couple of weeks or probably even the first couple of months once he's avaible; even if they removed the pull counter entirely. Sure guilds from private servers will have a large advantage over people that played the content 12-13 years ago....but they are also going to have a learning curve once they find out just how far off the private servers they have been playing on really are.

The reason Wrath was so popular is that it offered a level of content for everyone.....new players weren't just looking for instant gratification with free handouts. Sure, everyone enjoyed the welfare epics in Wrath but none of those epics would get you anywhere near end game gear levels. The only way to get the best gear in the game was to put in the time and effort to learn the fights by wiping on them over and over again. It's also important to keep in mind that by the time ICC came out addons had progressed to the point that they were capable of providing the same level of information that you see in the game currently so there is no "new" advantage in that regard. Sure the UI's might be a bit nicer now but having the best addons is not going to be any added advantage over what it was 13 years ago.

[Hofazius]

Just because bosses were downed 13 years ago, it doesn't magically become easy to kill them just because of that. It's the same with any other game out there which requires some skill - you can watch dozens of perfect playthroughs nowadays, but do they make the game easy? No.
The amount of skill required to kill bosses rises with WotLK. Classic can be done by monkeys, TBC by trained monkeys. There are one-button classes everywhere in TBC, no need to even move a bit in most of the fights to handle some mechanics or even kill adds!
Compared to years ago, the general player base got much better, so bosses will definitely take less tries in WotLK. I can still remember Lady Deathwisper and Festergut wipefests on weekly wednesday heroic PUGs - this probably won't happen again. The first bosses will be steamrolled.
Also, we know what to do and what setup to prefer. But can the average guild build a perfect setup? Probably not. Sometimes strategies are based on the raid setup. Three Warlocks? Then you can do x, else you need to improvise, etc.

Me and my guild already knew quite precisely what was going on in a fight when we killed bosses back in Cataclysm, MoP and WoD. This was possible because we only raided on two days a week and had our clears a couple of months after the top guilds. Although we had a very good preparation back on Blackhand Mythic, we still needed more than 300 tries for him. If I had to guess, I'd say we'd still need 150 tries to down him again today with 8 core raiders from back then and 12 new ones. These bosses aren't easy, even if you know what's going on because many things can go wrong and you actually need coordination, dps and some individual player skills - all of which is almost completely absent in Vanilla and TBC.

WotLK will raise the bar a bit. Naxx is probably the easiest raid ever released, Ulduar a bit harder and ICC with 0 percent buff quite hard (I don't know if we'll still see a one-session clear after ICC's release - probably not). Time will run out for many guilds, they'll quickly find themselves buffed by 20 %. So clearing at 0 %: Few raids, clearing at all: Many more than 2009. Because the player base evolved, the easy ICC bosses will all go down very quickly, entering farm mode instantly. So we'll get gear more quickly, which results in more LK kills.

Edit: Sure. If TBC is hard for some people, WotLK will increase this up to 300 %.

[Exkrementor]

"Easy" is not an easy thing to assess. hehe

If you played any mythic bosses especially in BFA then everything up until WoD is easy. But I have played TBC for a while now and those players are fucking dogshit. Wrath will be a real challenge for most of them and Cata will be unbeatable. If you knew how many tanks I have seen getting killed by Illidans eyebeam you would go mad. Its super slow and it always goes through the same point of the map. HOW?

ICC will be easy. Professor, Sindragosa and the Lich King will be hard for bad players.

[Bigbazz]

"Easy" is not an easy thing to assess. hehe

If you played any mythic bosses especially in BFA then everything up until WoD is easy. But I have played TBC for a while now and those players are fucking dogshit. Wrath will be a real challenge for most of them and Cata will be unbeatable. If you knew how many tanks I have seen getting killed by Illidans eyebeam you would go mad. Its super slow and it always goes through the same point of the map. HOW?

ICC will be easy. Professor, Sindragosa and the Lich King will be hard for bad players.

Having done some pugs in TBC after my guild RIP I can attest, TBC content is hard for a lot of people. After doing some bad TK (post-nerf) BT and Hyjal runs in pugs and having basic stuff like "heal the raid, heal the tank" being a real issue (example players dying to slow death having recieved less healing than a potion during a T6 fight). And it's stuff like "stand behind this pillar to LOS" and people not doing it, so you can't LOS mobs. And things like the tanks just instant dying on Illidan P3 because they didn't block shear and also because the healers didn't bother to put hots or start healing in time. And it's when this sort of thing just happens 3 pulls in a row, you want to plough your head through your desk.

It's just like TBC is very easy if everyone does their things to keep everything controlled, but it doesn't take long when a few people stop doing whatever those "things" are before it turns into a complete shitshow. WOTLK will be plenty hard for most of the players, Sunwell is already way way too hard for most players even if people will claim it's easy because the best players in the world speedran it in under an hour on the first reset.

All that said, like TBC was we will be on end patch so WOTLK will still be easier than it was originally.

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

Just wait till cataclysm classic, now that will be hard. Spine of deathwing heroic, Rag heroic etc....

[Ehrenpanzer]

If my memory serves me right, yogg 0 will be the hardest thing in wotlk. Heroic Lich king no buff is hard, but it isn’t even remotely as close to as hard, I believe that it’s honestly just a gear check and once you’ve done ICC heroic enough you should be pretty good. But yog +0… not a lot of people really did that.

Yogg 0 was certainly tough, but H LK and H Anub are the 2 toughest fights in Wrath imo.

[Aydinx2]

Just wait till cataclysm classic, now that will be hard. Spine of deathwing heroic, Rag heroic etc....

First time any content will be "hard" is probably the first boss where a single person failing means a wipe.

[Dalinos]

Haven't read 15 pages of comments, but I will say this.

WOTLK was the beginning of the end when it comes to raiding.

Naxxramas was a joke. Malygos 25-man was a joke. Sartharion was a joke. Sartharion + 3 drakes was interesting. Malygos 20-man instead of 25-man for the achievement was interesting. Getting Immortal/Undying was interesting.

Ulduar is the exception. Ulduar was amazing. Nothing to say about Ulduar.

Then we got Trial of the Crusader. Shit raid. Gated bosses. Simple mechanics. Difficulty was added by having limited wipes and achievements were given for clearing the place with 0 wipes. Not hard, just cumbersome.

Then ICC came out. Shit boss fights. The only fights which were remotely interesting were Proff Putricide 25-HC, Blood Queen Lanathel 25-HC and Arthas 25-HC. The rest was a clown fiesta. Gunship was notoriously the easiest fight in the raid dropping best in slot loot.

WOTLK was the introduction of Wrath Babies and the moment most Classic-TBC veterans with 4yrs+ of raiding experience quit the game. We went from Sunwell Plateau and M'uru, the guild killer, to fucking Naxxramas that we had mostly cleared in Vanilla. We also got THIRTEEN MONTHS of ICC. THIRTEEN MONTHS. And no, Halyon and Ruby Sanctum don't really count. A 1-boss raid isn't enough content to counteract THIRTEEN MONTHS of ICC.

[Exkrementor]

WOTLK was the beginning of the end when it comes to raiding.

Everything before Wrath was just tank and spank so I guess you like idle games.

Wrath was the first time raiding was really good. No retarded attunements, no farming resi items so you can survive the boss but do 5 dps instead. That combined with actual class design and not just spamming shadowbolt for 4 minutes made wrath a pretty good raiding expansion.


Also Muru the guild killer lol. Yeah, because it was so bad nobody wanted to play it. Hey, kill trash for 10 minutes! Remember Hyjal?

[stevenho]

All that said, like TBC was we will be on end patch so WOTLK will still be easier than it was originally.

This is the most important thing to remember.
I did both original wrath and several private servers years later - stacking 3.3.5 affli locks (plus DKs) for Yogg0 makes the fight much easier than it was originally. I would go as far as to say that 2 minute Hodir will be the real cockblock of the WF race in classic Ulduar - you have to call a wipe if you don't get an almost perfect buff spread/fire uptime - your ID is bricked for the week if you kill him 1 second too late. If Blizzard decides to release a nerfed 3 minute version of this fight, it will be an absolute tragedy.

LK HC 0% will also be hard. Even with blizzlike values 0% kills on private servers are usually few and a result of long wipefests. For the vast majority of classic playerbase 0% will be unkillable.

[ifrah]

Was there some very early first...second week nerfs on Hodir or are you talking about some private server version? That was not even near a cockblock even back then.

[WaltherLeopold]

People only remember the absolutely nerfed version of ICC with 30% more hp, damage and healing.
Even with that buff only ~1100 guilds were able to kill the boss in 25m size, after obtaining more or less BiS gear.
The world first kill was done with the first buff available (and yes there were limited attempts!).

It's not about hardcore guild crushing ICC very fast. That will happen as it happens with todays raids.
It's about the casual player that crushes todays classic and soon-coming tbc raids.
Will that also happen to ICC 25m heroic?

Remember, during WotLK, 10m raiding never had the prestige of 25m, so just ignore that.

Guilds have a different tolerance for failure and a better mentality to push today than they did in the prehistoric times of 2006-2010, even bad guilds will try to push harder content and they will emulate better guilds for similar results. The encounters are not that hard, because they are not tuned that tightly so once some gear rolls in, emulating guilds that can do more with less isn't as much of a problem anymore.

This just means that the volume of players at the """high""" level (relative to the content) is much, much greater than it ever was in ICC historically, so obviously you will have way more people clearing it.

[ifrah]

Another contributor that benefits many guilds, especially the less serious ones where players don't have multiple geared alts. People know beforehand which classes will be the meta picks.

[stevenho]

Was there some very early first...second week nerfs on Hodir or are you talking about some private server version? That was not even near a cockblock even back then.

Originally the hardmode on Hodir was 2 minutes and back then was extremely hard (people were worse at the game). Ensidia killed it with spellstolen buffs on mages.
I don't remember how long it took for Blizz to nerf it, but they increased the timer to 3 minutes and turned the fight into a cakewalk.

[ifrah]

Originally the hardmode on Hodir was 2 minutes and back then was extremely hard (people were worse at the game). Ensidia killed it with spellstolen buffs on mages.
I don't remember how long it took for Blizz to nerf it, but they increased the timer to 3 minutes and turned the fight into a cakewalk.

Thanks for clarifying. Did some googling, and it appears that this nerf was done in ~3 weeks. Ulduar opened on April 14th, and 3min patch apparently implemented on May 4th. So not a whole lot of guilds managed to even take any serious pulls on that version (including mine as well as things stand), interesting to see how it goes on the second instalment.