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  1. #41
    Quote Originally Posted by Tommo View Post
    No they made a horrible expansion and didnt scale the difficulty even remotely well.

    Dont ever use Cata as a justification for any argument, its better if we all just forget that expansion existed.
    I remember a lot of people saying that about Wrath during Cata, Yet now Wrath is revered as one of the best expansions...

    Personally I enjoyed Cata having PvPed and PvEed through it, I would say the beginning was a very good example of how hard heroics SHOULD be, they are heroics, they should be harder than normal's, not just more HP on boss which is what it feels like now.

  2. #42
    Warchief Sand Person's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cirque View Post
    That and because you got twoshot if you didn't have 4 sets of different resistance gear that you spent hours farming off AH, mobs, and old bosses you killed a gazillion times.
    you mistook difficult for time consuming.

  3. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by jbombard View Post
    People often confuse difficulty with being time consuming. Leveling was slightly more difficult in vanilla, instanced content not really. Most of the difficulty in vanilla relates to how time consuming the preparation was. Mechanically it wasn't very difficult.

    I do think WoW has made a mistake with the super accelerated leveling in the game, and the speed at which you can do things now, it makes it all feel trivial. It took a lot of time to get a full resist set together in vanilla, if you need to pick up gear to run some specific content now it doesn't take very long at all.
    I always get annoyed when people say this, particularly about the leveling. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you that difficult and time consuming are two different things, absolutely. But things like leveling don't need to take longer than they already do. It isn't fast; faster than it used to be, sure, but it's still a huge grind that seems unnecessary after the first character. If people want leveling to take longer, they can make it take longer by not using the boost gear or by finishing zones even when they're above that level. But there's no reason to force it to take longer for the rest of us.

  4. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by lettuce View Post
    They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.
    Pretty much this.

    People HATED the difficulty of Cataclysm, so they nerfed it substantially over the course of the expansion. From the community reaction, they're not likely to go back to that.

  5. #45
    They 180'd that with Cata they made it hard and most people are noobs. It didn't go so great.
    Hi Sephurik

  6. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by CosmicGuitars View Post
    Pretty much this.

    People HATED the difficulty of Cataclysm, so they nerfed it substantially over the course of the expansion. From the community reaction, they're not likely to go back to that.
    I loved 4.0 5mans that weren't boring, dull, and an aoe fest was a welcome change, healing wasn't hard you just couldn't spam your classes go to wotlk spell mindlessly, the raid progression of difficulty was most certainly off, what killed it was after you did your rep grinds you had nothing to do.

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Volitar View Post
    They 180'd that with Cata they made it hard and most people are noobs. It didn't go so great.
    And look where we are now. Further down the sink hole :O

  8. #48
    Because 'One Difficulty To Rule Them All' will not work. Cataclysm proved funneling everyone into a single game mode and level of difficulty was not going to work anymore. They tried to expand game modes, now they're trying to expand difficulty levels by appealing to the 'random queue and go' crowd as well as the 'organize and go' crowd.

    They're also trying to integrate the new-fangled idea of open-participation world events to their game. WoW is doing its best to catch up and keep as many types of players engaged in a market that is growing more diverse, especially as the number of buy-to-play/micro-transaction games goes higher and higher. For a game this old still running on a sub-based model to have so many players is nothing short of amazing.

  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by kendro1200 View Post
    "Roots of the game in difficulty" is vanilla, which wasn't hard, it was literally one button spam and having the right resis gear on, and having a quarter to half of your raid knowing what they're doing.
    Apparently using CC is too hard for the "majority" so its necessity was removed from use in most forms of PVE despite it being something that I had learned and used in my first VC run back in Classic as well as every other CC capable class for the next four years. I even learned how to teach new tanks how to tank despite not being a tank myself. There was still mechanics in raids that had to be handled and involved group coordination starting with ZG. Not every fight was solely comprised of spam dispel and stack resists.
    Quote Originally Posted by lawow74 View Post
    Because 'One Difficulty To Rule Them All' will not work. Cataclysm proved funneling everyone into a single game mode and level of difficulty was not going to work anymore
    It proved that random queue systems do not work well when players looking for carries force themselves upon others and drag groups down and players who cannot handle the random factor of the random queue system refuse to take responsibility and form their own groups. By leaving Challenge modes and heroic scenarios out of the random queue system these features have been doing well.
    Quote Originally Posted by lettuce View Post
    They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.
    So you speak for the majority?
    Last edited by nekobaka; 2013-09-19 at 05:02 AM.

  10. #50
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    Quote Originally Posted by lettuce View Post
    They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.
    Not true actually, many agree that the first raids were perfect in terms off difficulty. I only ever read some bitching about dungeons taking longer, but Blizz nerfed that after a week anyway.

    I even dare to say as much that the first tier in Cata was the best times I ever had in raids....and I'm a big TBC fanboy.

  11. #51
    Quote Originally Posted by Karenai View Post
    People who claim Vanilla raids were "as easy as LFR now", did not raid in Vanilla. Not with their own chars, before every boss got nerfed. Vanilla was not hard, but it was harder then what we have now. Not just because the bosses were hard, most of them were easy in design, but because at first no one had the equip for it and no one knew what to do, also some were extremly chaotic.
    For those of us who raided MC before there were ANY guides, in blues and greens, it was kinda hard. And do not forget, Horde did not have Paladins, who made some encounters almost trival. So if you raided as Alliance and do not remember going into raid in greens and blues, you did not raid. You went into raids. There is a difference.
    That is the biggest difference in raid "difficulty" now. You go into the raid already sligthly over equipped. Every mechanic is known, every tactic is out there. And most of the time there is only one way to do it right. If you want a challange, you go into hardmodes, where you are not overequipped, if you just started raiding and one slight error can wipe your raid.
    I leveled a priest to lvl 90 just before the patch. Ran exactly three heroics, went into LFR and did all LFR raids in three days, because I did not want to push it. Could have done it in one day. As a healer. That is how easy LFR is. Was I carried? Maybe, but I do not think so, as in every raid I put out the second best HPS numbers out, while mostly trying to save the tanks and one raid even the best HPS all the way. All the first time I was in there. I did not even know the mechanics. Did not read any guide, because I wanted a slightly challange.

    Now, you have to move faster, react faster. In Vanilla you had to think faster, on the fly. This is lacking from WoW completly. It is what I miss the most. Picking up adds as a dd, because the tank was almost one hit and saving the raid. Tanking more adds then deemed possible. Healing trough the kill, after a wipe was called, because most of the other healers went down. A Boss kill, where at the end every one is still alive is way less satisfying then one where half the raid did bite the dust, but you killed the boss anyway.

    One very good point made is the extremly fast leveling. It is just wrong. Especially for your first char. If you want faster twinks, give them a buff to xp after the first char reaches max level. But pushing new players to max level in under a week. Then letting them see all raids the week after is just wrong. It cheapens the experience for everybody.

    I very much doubt that WoW could go back anyway. Not to Vanilla like grind, not to harder raids, not to trying to balance PvP. That ship has sailed in WoTLK. It would hemorrage subscribers, not just bleed them. Maybe they copy the idea Wildstar has and give the 1% top players something to do. They try it already with invitationals and time runs for charity, but it is not enough, because those are for the 0.1% who get in.
    You contradict yourself a few times in there. And your opinion is not a fact.

  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by Shelly View Post
    Bolded the important part.

    The hardest parts of Vanilla and which remained through BC mostly had to deal with travel times and coordination. Other than that actual raid mechanics back then were FAR weaker than what we have now. In most cases where there was a large amount of difficulty it wasn't in the bosses but mob-saturation. Stratholme is a good example of this, where you just had mobs upon mobs walking and patrolling everywhere and so when doing it under duress (timed run) with 9 other people (it used to be a 10-man dungeon) it was flippin' hard not to aggro everything by accident!

    Now days bosses are much harder and raiders are much smarter. WoW has not and NEVER HAD lost their core gameplay experience of offering platformer style battles in a group setting.

    What WoW has lost over LK through Cat and MoP is a sense of community. Some mechanics they've dumbed down to the betterment of the game - defense level for uncrittable and crushing blows being two major pains in the asses that just didn't matter. But these mechanical changes are paltry compared to the loss of community that got sacrificed to convenience.

    No real need to zone broadcast to gain a dungeon group that may turn into a guild, no real server PuGing, very little need to actually populate your friend's list, removal of elite mobs in the open world that questing directs you into that would encourage PuGs.

    Now we're seeing the hopeful return of the PuG with Flex raiding. The PuG as often reviled as many people make it out to be is the true proving ground for friends and guildmates. It's how you learn how others play, it's how you get impressed with someone pushing their gear hard and it's how you make real lasting friends. Something that LFR was never able to accomplish, as is it's seldom you see anyone even type hello.

    If Flex works in their favor that's what will keep the population stable because PuGs turn into guilds, guilds turn into a social event, social events turn into you inviting real life friends into games which equals higher subscription numbers.
    I agree so much with this post. I do like where the game is heading. One needed feature imo would be an easy interface to blacklist people you never want to group again with in future "instances" applied both to pve and pvp.

  13. #53
    raiding difficulty in wow : went from almost zero ( MC ) up trough BWL and AQ, then a big UP fro SSC and TK, and since then it's been downhill and downhill. It ended up in wotlk with karazhan as a total joke of a entry lvl raid.

    Sure, mechanics got harder again, and if you do hardmodes the later bosses in the instances are actually quite tricky. But on average ( considering lfr, flex raid and normal modes being piss easy ) raiding difficulty has been going down and down since the release of Black temple.
    Ecce homo ergo elk

  14. #54
    lol people need to get this 'vanilla is the dogs bollocks,bee's knee's,sunshine out the arse wankfest' thing out there heads.
    Ive been playing this game since day 1 and ive got 1 thing to say about vanilla ; Over the top time consuming hindering inconvenience.(not talking about content here just so the simple minded mmo-champ forum warriors dont get confused)

  15. #55
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    Quote Originally Posted by Valyrian Stormclaw View Post
    The challenge is not to make the game more difficult by increase boss health and damage and reducing player stats, but to require the players to actually work up a strategy and be able to compensate when things go wrong, rather than simply opening up a WoWpedia guide on that boss and just do everything it says word-for-word.
    Sadly, that Pandora's Box is wide open and it's unlikely that it will ever be closed. PTR's, Videos, Strategy Guides and a very vocal element that bellows that you're a bad player if you don't know everything about the raid the day it launches will see to that.
    "...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."

  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    Sadly, that Pandora's Box is wide open and it's unlikely that it will ever be closed. PTR's, Videos, Strategy Guides and a very vocal element that bellows that you're a bad player if you don't know everything about the raid the day it launches will see to that.
    In terms of the community sharing knowledge with each other it is something that the developers both designed WoW to have and encouraged it. Only more recently has Blizzard brought in more in-game help and resources. If you really want to see the challenging things fresh then you gotta be the pioneers that set out there to do just that given how mature the information sharing among the community has become.

    I remember there was a lot of complaint about having to read guides to do Cata heroics. Well I read only one prior to running them and did fine with players sharing information with each other. If the group got stuck on a fight that we did not know how to handle then we looked up the fight. No shame, we just wanted to get it done and this was with solo queuing and completely random groups. Even ZA and ZG I went in blind and we actually did not look up the fights and we just learned on the spot with ZG really being the new one comparatively. Interesting what random groups can do when they are interested in learning and working together as a team. Just sucks when someone who doesnt care about group oriented content pulls the rest of the group down.

  17. #57
    have you cleared hc mode yet?

    hc mode is freaking hard. myself killed 1 hc boss inside a raid dungeon when it was current content.

    the scale from normale to hc mode is insane. the guilds who clear SoO right now are ppl who are extreme hardcore. only small amount off players.
    it is actualy way harder then it used to be.

    ye we got LFR now. but that is not real raiding. it is just to see the fight. have some fun and get some shiny stuff.

  18. #58
    The roots of the game are "more casual than their competitors" which they seem to be delivering on

  19. #59
    Vanilla wás hard. Anyone saying that it wasn't, did not play in Vanilla or had massive experience in other mmo's before.

    WoW is my first mmo and almost my first pc game. Warcraft III was my first. I was a veteran on Atari/NES/SNES/Playstation 1 and 2 before that period.

    I am now 34 years old.

    Why do I feel that Vanilla was hard?

    - it was new to many people (the mmo genre which included raids)
    - the massive grind to be prepared to actually raid (BiS blue items/food/potions/flasks/elixirs/scrolls/tubers/enchants/Resistgear)
    - the lack of decent skills in your spellbook

    This last one here is very important. People who either played Vanilla forget this easily it seems. And people who did not play Vanilla assume that the skills and talents they have now are the same or about the same as they have now. Which could not be further from the truth.

    And then we have skills that almost no one ever used. Personally speaking, I tought myself to learn how to Blessing of Protection (it was called a Blessing indeed not Hand) or Blessing of Salvation or even Blessing of Sacrifice until Karazhan. Sure I popped it here and there but I did not really see way to properly cast it at the right time. There were hardly afaik any addons that told me who had agro. There were agro addons (meters) but they weren't 100%. Also people who overagroed, were looked badly upon. Atleast this was so in my first guild I joined. This meant that people made damn sure they never overagroed. After Vanilla I made my own and wanted people to overagro so I could pop Blessing of Protection/Salvation/Sacrifice a lot more = more dps on the boss/trash and/or better tanks - not sure this formula would have worked in Vanilla though.

    to continue my list

    - idiotic short Blessing of Wisdom/Might/Kings timers (5 min - and you had to cast it per person in the raid = 40x, which took about 2 minutes = 3 minutes of play time and then redo the 40x again)
    - idiotic long cooldowns on save mechanics like Lay on Hands or Divine Intervention (1 hour cooldown) which meant you never used them because "what if X happens next?"
    - mobs in dungeons/raids were set so that once you killed a pack, you could not really move forward a lot without pulling yet another pack, especially in 5 mans

    This made Vanilla harder a lot.

    It was also harder to make a group then we do now. People on these boards yell left and right that it was horrid. I never had any issues making a group whatsoever. Probably because I was in a very decent guild. Which had a reputation for success in dungeons/raids. Which meant people wanted to join because they knew it would be succesful. And how did they know it would be successful? Because they saw people with extraordinary gear in Iron Forge. Or they had a friend who went in before with that guild. Word of Mouth was very powerful back then. So I guess you had a hard time only if you were in an asshole guild (those existed too) or you did not join a guild or keep track on what guild was successful on your server. You probably did not take the effort to grind for a key for UBRS did you? A key usually meant instant invite for such dungeons. I know it was hard to get that key (especially without any knowledge base), but those are ways to get yourself in the spotlight to get an easy invite.

    I loved making groups. And due to the long adventure in those dungeons you easily made friends, unless you were an asshole.

    On my server you had your:

    - proper guilds
    - your asshole guilds
    - your immature guilds
    - elite guilds (I did not say elitist)
    - social guilds who liked having a laugh and did not care if you came to the raid with all your gear red.

    Bottom line is that there were groups basically for everyone. And you sorta had a stigma if you wore guildtag X. If you had X other people knew what sort of person you probably are, and could avoid or befriend you more efficiently.

    Atleast this is how it went down according to my EXPERIENCE. My experience could differ from yours but that does not make it less true.

    To come back on how hard it was. Mechanic wise it was not hard, at all. But it was hard vs the spellbook we had - vs the gear/stats we got. People do not realise that there were no 500.000 hp tanks running around. There were tanks who had 4.000/12.000 and could get ONESHOTTED by a boss if they weren't careful of the stars aligned and got a crushing blow or a massive crit. Tanks were not as invincible as they are now. In Vanilla it wás hard to hold agro. It was not for nothing that people could start dpsing the moment there were 2/4 sunder armors on the boss. It was not for nothing that sometimes the tank would yell on TS/Vent to stop dps.

    And people who have played Vanilla did not play Naxx 40. If you do not wish to understand or accept that it was hard, you can atleast agree that Naxx 40 was hard as fuck. It was so hard that even people in tier 6 in TBC would have serious issues getting it cleared. Sure Naxx 40 was the raid almost no one saw. But I saw it and I was actually affraid to go inthere. I knew it would be very very hard and based on a lot of random stuff/luck if you will and perfect timing of skills.

    Anyway this was my 2 cents. I am not saying that we should go back to Vanilla. It would be insane to do so. If we ever went back to Vanilla or had a Vanilla like server. There had to be major changes to the way things were. Like those blessings and cooldowns and gear.

  20. #60
    i like where normal difficulty is right now. i think heroic should be much harder than it is.

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