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  1. #1

    Has the game become harder than TBC?

    I was having a night of nostalgia and was stalking wow progress to see if any of the people I used to raid with daily still played.

    What impressed me is the world ranking we were getting back then compared to the ranking we get now.
    More specifically we were top1600 worldwide in TBC as opposed to top6000 now.

    The question that popped up immediately was did the game actually become harder after all these years? And that what I'd like to discuss.

    For your own agenda, what ranks did you get in TBC as opposed to nowadays?

  2. #2
    Scarab Lord Teebone's Avatar
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    People have just gotten better, in a nutshell.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Kreeshak View Post
    More specifically we were top1600 worldwide in TBC as opposed to top6000 now.
    there were roughly 1/6th as many guilds raiding in tbc as there are in mop, that explains the rank difference.
    Quote Originally Posted by Primohastat View Post
    That toxicity is normal in WoW. Even classic. And it comes from this what so called elitism, spreading everywhere. Average player say that classic is piss easy and every aspect can be done with minimal effort. But right after that, the same player ignites with rage when someone wants to apply that minimal effort

  4. #4
    There may be specific parts of the game that are more difficult than TBC but as a whole TBC was definitely stronger when it came to difficulty.

  5. #5
    Raids are more difficult, but characters have also become more powerful and players have become better.

    Dungeons, quests and 'worlding' have become much easier, too easy in my opinion.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Teebone View Post
    People have just gotten better, in a nutshell.
    The game has gotten much, much easier. Going from hour-long-wipe-fest heroic 5 mans in BC, to 15 minute roll-your-face-on-keyboard-easy heroic 5 mans in the last 3 expansions. Normal raids in BC were like heroic raids nowadays.

    Not saying that getting easier is worse for the the game or anyone playing it.

    I don't really know what I ranked world wide, but server I was always number one by a large margin.

  7. #7
    The Patient nulir's Avatar
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    The game is much harder now in terms of difficulty BUT TBC was "harder" due to grinding and farming specific resistances for fights. The fights themselves were LFR in complexity by HC Garrosh/ Ragg and Lei Shen standards.

  8. #8
    Raiding became harder without a doubt, on the other hand my current guild has only improved in the rankings since old times and I was thinking that was due to less competition overall. These days classes are all much more powerful, more utility and more survival cooldowns. Generally each class is much more capable of being responsable for it's own survival than in the old days.

    So along with that Blizzard made fights harder, put a lot more things in to get you killed and for sure raiding is more difficult on the average. The non raiding game is much easier though, for the exact reason that the classes became so much more powerful. This is why we steamroll 5mans with no CC and this is why we no longer die when leveling up alts. Some of the Brawlers guilds fights are a lot more difficult than most of the raids over the last few years, the only reason they aren't that hard is that you have nobody to rely on but yourself, a big part of the difficulty in raiding is not the encounter but getting everything to gel as a team. TBC/Wrath/Cata all had their fair share of genuinely hard fights that still stand up, but on the whole MOP is probably the most difficult raiding expansion to date.


    Game is definitely a lot less grindy these days too, easier to gear up and no attunements, though the legendary cloak is itself a sort of attunement/requirement for joining a proper raiding guild, so in that sense you could say MOP has retained some oldschool grinding requirement.
    Last edited by Bigbazz; 2013-10-06 at 12:56 AM.
    Probably running on a Pentium 4

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by IKT View Post
    there were roughly 1/6th as many guilds raiding in tbc as there are in mop, that explains the rank difference.
    I've thought of that as a reason. Another thought I had is that guilds were 25 man back then. So 1600 x 2.5 times bigger guilds would equate to rank 4000 (10 man) guilds.

  10. #10
    Deleted
    Dungeons and "the world" was harder/tougher in TBC.

    Raiding was undoubtedly easier, barring tuning errors that were later nerfed into the floor because they made the fight ridiculous. I don't think that's even up for discussion. Every raider now has more personal responsibility than ever and the boss ability list is longer and more unforgiving than ever.

    I feel like a lot of older bosses hit a lot harder with their basic attacks (tanks getting gibbed was very common back then compared to now) and tanks didn't have as much control over their damage intake as they do now. That can often lead to a nostalgic view that the bosses were harder. In reality, they were less fair and players were much worse than they are now.

  11. #11
    TBC had a major issue - a lack of tanks.

  12. #12
    There are a LOT more guilds now than there were in TBC. In TBC, we didn't have the option of doing a raid on 10- or 25-man. It was one or the other. Now we have that option, including LFR and Flex. It's also a lot easier to gear up for the content, so a lot more people are participating.
    “You have died of dysentery” – Oregon Trail

  13. #13
    Legendary! Airwaves's Avatar
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    It got harder in wrath. Heroic LK is harder then anything in BC. And please don't count broken bosses. The game is ALOT harder then it ever was.
    Aye mate

  14. #14
    While the fights themselves got harder, the game as a whole got more accessible. There are more gearing options, there are more grouping options, you are not required to farm so many consumables, wipe recovery is faster, strategy resources are more available (i.e. journal), specs and classes got polished, the whole UI got polished, and ultimately players got more used to various types of mechanics over the years. There are also some external factors, like better computers, better internet connections, better peripherals, etc.

    So, yeah, the game is harder. And it's also easier.
    I guess we could settle on "it's a different game".

  15. #15
    There was no such thing as a dungeon journal in TBC. There also wasn't 1000 guilds testing every fight on the PTR and 100 guilds releasing video guides that hold your hand through every single fight.

    If the community got better, it is only because they no longer have to think about fights. They read the dungeon journal, watch one video, and mimic what they read/saw.

    Information was not widely available during TBC as it is today. Most raiding guilds had to come up with their own strategies for fights and figure out mechanics themselves. Today, that is only done by 10-20 guilds, everyone else just copies them.

    I wouldn't say the game is harder now, just different. The game was plenty hard back when you actually had to think on your feet and figure out your own raiding strategies. Now you simply watch DBM/Bigwigs boss timers and put someone on follow.

    Imagine if you raided SoO and you literally knew nothing about the fight before you pulled it.

  16. #16
    In BC my guild peaked at 150 US on Muru, don't recall worldwide, but it almost killed us. We had some more top 150 US (top 400 World) achievements in Wrath, such as Firefighter (148/382), Heartbreaker (143/340), Unlock Algalon's Room (164/414), all in 25 player. By ICC however, in 25 Heroic the guild was barely top 500 US/1500 World most fights, while still getting some top 150 US/top 500 World kills in 10. By first tier of Cata the guild was barely top 1500 US/5000 World on some fights, falling to top 3000 US/10,000 World by Tier 13. By Tier 14 the guild was dead.

    Did the game become far harder? Well, truthfully we were always a middling guild at best and only posted some of our more respectable numbers because of our extremely intense raid schedule. That same intense raid schedule caused many of our core 25-man players to burn out by the end of Ulduar, myself included, which probably explains why there were still some good rankings in ICC 10 while ICC 25 was continuing to decline. As more core players quit, the decent players remaining who still wanted to raid transferred to other servers until the guild collapsed entirely.

    The thing is, we were well suited for the BC model of having a long time to work on each raid tier without an additional Heroic mode for each boss. Even early in Wrath, with a limited number of hard modes, we could swing it. But when the Heroic mode came about, it was too much. We couldn't be content with finishing Normal while there was Heroic to complete, and we just weren't cut out for the quantity of heroic encounters there ended up being.

    So the TL;DR I guess, we did well when there was only one difficulty and/or a limited number of hard modes, because of the amount of time we were able to invest. When Heroic mode was introduced the sheer quantity of Sunwell- or hard mode-level encounters did us in.

  17. #17
    only thing that made tbc hard were the bugs

  18. #18
    I am Murloc! Anjerith's Avatar
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    The game is harder but the amount of information available to players has greatly increased. Thus the misconception that the game is now "easier" than back in tBC.
    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Gold and the 'need' for it in-game is easily one of the most overblown mindsets in this community.

  19. #19
    Short answer, yes. Long answer, no.

  20. #20
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by urasim View Post
    The game has gotten much, much easier. Going from hour-long-wipe-fest heroic 5 mans in BC, to 15 minute roll-your-face-on-keyboard-easy heroic 5 mans in the last 3 expansions. Normal raids in BC were like heroic raids nowadays.

    Not saying that getting easier is worse for the the game or anyone playing it.

    I don't really know what I ranked world wide, but server I was always number one by a large margin.
    By your definition raiding hasn't got easier, there are just easier versions of them

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