To all the "raiding is easy now" ppl.

[Orcindauh]

Raiding is harder, only if you're willing to do the SAME fights just with more/harder mechanics.

I'm only willing to do the same fight so many times. I don't want to spend time wiping on one boss, only to beat it and say "lets wipe 100 more times on that same fight!".

You don't have to do LFR/flex.

You only have to clear normal once OR someone in your group has had to clear normal once, pass them lead, switch to heroic. Boom.

[Koji2k11]

if been discussing this with my guild alot lately they still hold on to their opinion vanilla was harder where it realy wasnt you just need to spend alot of time in WoW which you just dont have to anymore. so according to some ppl time spent in game = harder just compare some bosses from vanilla and todays SoO like paragons or blackfuse or garrosh it's like roket science back in vanilla most bosses were tank and spenk gear checks

[Deleted]

Well let's see. There are 26 25 man guilds and 17 10 man guilds who are 14/14 heroic and it's been out for 2 months. Or another way to put it 820 players out of the 7m+ who are subbed to this game have beat it on heroic. Yep it's easy so easy that 0.0117% of players have beaten it on the hardest difficulty after 2 months.

Ok you said the 1st 11 bosses are easy. 206 guilds have beat the 11th boss on 25m and 295 on 10 man. 8100 players out of 7m+ or 0.1% of players. After 2 months. If it only took 10 pulls then everyone who tried would have the achievement after 2 weeks easily.

You forget that the majority of the raiding community are shit keyboard turning dribblers, like the majority of the people on these forums. I'm in a 3 day / 9 hr a week guild working on Siegecrafter hc and let me tell you from experience - the first 11 bosses are an absolute joke compared to other tiers.

[Xeh.-]

Now raiding equals LFR and that is the easiest raiding that has ever existed in WoW, easier than vanilla, TBC, WotLK.

I hope you are trolling....

By raiding (in any expansion) Im talking about the CUTTING EDGE CONTENT, not the fill up stuff that are created for casual playing (or not even casual). Dont get me wrong sir, I dont mind at all that ppl are having an easy raiding mode like LFR or Flex is, I think its great so ppl can see the content but this topic is not about it.

We are here, comparing the highest and most difficult content, atm Heroic and back then regular CURRENT raiding.

Mechanic wise the game is way more complex because years passed and everything got better, im not here QQing about any of these.

[Ragedaug]

nice statistics, now please factor in that not all 7m are even TRYING nor care about clearing heroic mode, or aren't even level 90, or maybe don't raid at all.

but to voice my own opinion as a heroic raider the first 11 are a joke, ToT felt much harder than SoO.

It's posts like these where you invalidate your own point of view.

Only 500 guilds world wide have beat the 11th boss. You say it's easy and defend that point by somehow making an argument that the majority of the best players in the world do not raid.

Of course most players don't raid. We all know that. It's not in dispute. The problem with your counter is that the players in the worlds top 500 guilds are among the absolute best players in the world. The players leveling, and AH'ing, and doing LFR, and random BGs, and pet battles instead of heroic mode raiding are not the game's elite players.

So regardless of the fact that not all players raid, the heroic content is still tuned for the top few % of all players. The statement that shows that only the top 0.1% of all players are capable of beating this "easy" boss is still true.

When you call content that 99.9% (yes, literally 99.9%) of the player base cannot beat, "easy" - you have reached a point where no one would bother to waste two glances at anything else you say.


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Furthermore, if you are just saying "it's easy for you". That's fine. I can accept that. Just understand that you are wasting your time in saying it. No one here (I would guess) is going to pat you on the back for it. And the point itself is largely irrelevant.

Shooting a 70 on 18 holes is easy for a Pro golfer. Scoring a 240 is easy for a Pro Bowler. Running a sub 13 second 100 yard sprint is easy for an Olympic caliber sprinter, etc., etc., etc. Now granted we understand those feats are "easy" for them, they don't come out and say "that was easy", because they understand it will make them sound like idiots. Of course it was easy for them. They are world class ranked at what they do and are capable of better when they push themselves. But is it easy to the 99.9% of the audience listening to them? No, it's not.

[markdall]

What made old wow raiding harder was that there was a lot more personal responsiblity in raids. Almost every single fight had mechanics that penalized the whole raid if you screwed up, not just you. Now its much, much easier to hide bad players and have the responsibility on just a handful of good players.

Wait, what? After weeks (nearly a month) of horrible luck with attendance issues, we killed Garrosh on normal, finally, this lockout. (Last Saturday.) There were many fights leading up to and including that which, had I screwed up, would have wiped the raid.

But I used to raid 40 man Molten Core and the joke then was that the rogues were stoned, the hunters only used autoshot and were afk, etc. THAT was considered to be the time to hide bad players.

Maybe you're talking about 25 man raids though, I don't know about those. I can only tell you about 10 man normal so far this expansion.

[Deleted]

What made old wow raiding harder was that there was a lot more personal responsiblity in raids. Almost every single fight had mechanics that penalized the whole raid if you screwed up, not just you. Now its much, much easier to hide bad players and have the responsibility on just a handful of good players.

I highly doubt you even killed Hogger before 2.0

[Zatetic]

The game is better now than it was in vanilla by far. With that said though, raiding is still easy. It should be expected though. New mechanics are very difficult to come up with. Almost every mechanic is very similar to a past boss mechanic. If you can relate them in your head, you wont have any trouble with the encounters. That isnt to say, you wont wipe during progression. I'm just stating that in my experience so far in SoO, there have been no difficult mechanics or encounters. I'm expecting the malkorok 25hc dps check to be the biggest thorn in my teams side. Spoils hc, Klaxxi hc, Thok hc will all become trivial with gear, and I suppose maybe Malkorok in due time. Being in a semi-casual guild though, expecting people to do the required dps on Malkorok seems like it'll be the biggest issue before Garrosh unless we are averaging like 575ilvl+.

[Giya]

To get back to original post….

You have hit the nail on the head with much of what you have said. Others have added some great points as well. There are a couple more things which haven’t been touched on though. I want to explain a little about my experience. I am one of the few people who have been playing this game from day 1 and still continue to until today. In addition I am part of that 0.0001% of the player base who had cleared all of naxx 40 prior to BC. I am also part of the 0.001% of the player base who had cleared SWP prior to the nerf before wrath (things like this continue on until today). Many of the points I will mention have been mentioned already, I just wanted to give my take on them.
1) Mechanics: without any exceptions the vanilla mechanics were easy. There is no difference today. Pretty much everything can be broken down into: stand in this, don’t stand in this, big damage incoming, or taunt now. In vanilla there was hardly any room for error. In some fights there wasn’t any at all. Four horsemen in naxx 40 is the perfect example of this. Easy mechanic with no room for error. Screw up a taunt and you wipe. There was no chance for recovery.
2) Gear: especially T1 was TERRIBLE. I’m not really going to go into detail because this has already been said.
3) Drops: unlike many people who are going to complain about the number of drops, I didn’t have an issue with it. In general it took you an entire tier’s worth of time to gear your raid. You may have had a couple people missing a couple pieces but people were always in good enough shape to get the job done in the next tier.
4) Consumables: This is one of the huge differences. You NEEDED flasks, resist pots, minor fort potions, health pots, etc. Almost everything stacked back then so you needed everything on you. One boss in particular proves this point, Loatheb. You needed everything possible on you to make one attempt. This isn’t a joke at all. Your prep list to make one attempt was:
- Buff from completing BWL
- Buff from completing ZG
- Whipper root tubers
- Night dragon’s breath
- Health potion
- Health stone
- Stam flask
- Minor fort potion
- Dire maul tribute run buff
Not including the ZG and BWL runs which you had to do with at least one alt in the group to turn it in this took 2-3 hours not including realistic farming time. And if you wiped… do it all again tomorrow and come back.
5) Creativity: you don’t really need to be creative to succeed anymore. Healers out of mana? Regen rotation! Healers have threat on broodlord? Have them suicide and get a res! You had to be so much better and more creative just to do the bare minimum of your job then you do now. You didn’t have the tools that you needed, you just made due with what you had. This leads into….
6) Design: everyone should read through the old patch notes for a good laugh. You can find them on the wow website still I believe. It was comical to say the least. Nobody had the tools to do their job compared to how they do now. Nothing was more evident than with healers. Also dps was nothing more than a 1 button spam because there were no savageries.
7) Broken items: there were a few items which would make your life a lot easier. For healers there were a few set bonus’ and items like the rejuvenating gem (was still good even in BC). Things like 5pc T1 for shamans you kept on to until you were getting T3 sets. NOTHING was more broken than thunderfury. This made tank threat a non-issue. I can say without any doubt that a lot of the progression which I enjoyed in vanilla was due to my guild have 3 tanks and 1 rogue with a thunderfury. The proc itself was a VERY high chance and not only did damage but also additional threat. This was necessary because if you had a rogue with it and the tank didn’t they stood no chance of keeping threat. The rogue could do nothing but auto attack and cast feint on cool down. This was later fixed but at one time this was how broken the situation was regarding that proc:
- You had hand of justice which gave you a chance to proc an additional main hand swing
- Rogue sword spec gave you a chance to proc a swing.
- Your offhand swings would proc the main hand thunderfury swing with the above
- You had deadly poison ticking
- Slice and dice to increase attack speed making everything proc more
- Windfury totem to proc additional attacks if you were horde. Again, offhand procs caused main hand swings
- The thunderfury proc itself could proc additional procs
- Every single thing above could proc another of every other thing above which in turn could proc another of everything else… and so on.
There was so much happening that you would lag yourself and everyone else out around you. I couldn’t find the video of the rogue I wanted. This is one of a fury warrior which I believe should do well enough. just search on youtube "warrior nefarian thunderfury" and it will be the first thing.
8) Downranking!: This goes along with the creativity point. Down ranking to avoid over healing and conserve mana was amazing. It separated the good and mediocre players. One of my most memorable moments in WoW was solo healing the raid on twin emperors in AQ40 with 0.1% over healing. I was being so mana efficient that I could have gone on like that forever.
9) Carrying people: enough said. This wasn’t really an issue at top end raiding for progression though.
Well that’s all I can think of right now. I know I have forgot some things. I would also like to add that IMO SWP was the most challenging the game has ever been. A lot of the glaring issues I have discussed had been resolved and it was just downright tough.

[dmfg]

Current philosophy: perform difficult task, but if you fail it just costs you a few minutes and a handful of easy to come by gold.
Old philosophy: perform trivial task, but if you fail you get punched in the crotch and your family is set on fire.

It's hard to imagine the old philosophy gaining mass market appeal and longevity in today's world.

[Ledecor]

Heroic Garrosh was killed the week he was released.

[Glorious Leader]

The actual act of killing a boss in a raid environment is more complex, overwhelming, exhausting and yes difficulty then it's ever been. All the itinerant stuff (like gearing for resistance checks or having mats for pots and flasks) has all be improved (mostly by getting rid of) so the game appears easier but the act of downing a boss in a raid has never been more complex and that's the feedback the developers get from the heroic raiders.

[Ragedaug]

The actual act of killing a boss in a raid environment is more complex, overwhelming, exhausting and yes difficulty then it's ever been. All the itinerant stuff (like gearing for resistance checks or having mats for pots and flasks) has all be improved (mostly by getting rid of) so the game appears easier but the act of downing a boss in a raid has never been more complex and that's the feedback the developers get from the heroic raiders.

To add to this, there are documented dates for when bosses were down dating back to the earliest raiding in Vanilla. Bugged bosses beside, and a very small handful otherwise, the bosses in Vanilla and BC dropped as at faster pace then the bosses today.

Now considering it took fewer days, now also consider that the world 1st competitive guilds are raiding 2-3+ times as many hours as they raided in Vanilla and BC. On top of that consider how much of the raid time was corpse running and wipe resetting.

So now we are talking how many boss pulls did it take to down the bosses in Vanilla and BC versus how many pulls it is taking to down bosses now, and they aren't comparable. The best guilds in the world wipe far more often in today's content than they did during Vanilla and BC.

[Deleted]

Heroic Garrosh was killed the week he was released.

Yeah.

But no.

[Abysal]

of course we would, vanilla has virtually no tactics but thats why the game evolves to keep it suited to the playerbase.

The point was that raiding isn't easier than it used to be. You just admitted that vanilla raids would be easy for your raid group to do as 60s, so I'm not really sure what your argument is? Vanilla raids would be easy for a player of your skill and current raids are easy for a player of your skill. What do you want them to do? Design content that is too hard even for you and the other 0.01% of the player base? Make heroics unbeatable while they are current content? A game being impossible to beat has just as much risk of driving people away as one that's too easy to beat.

[melodramocracy]

It's all about conditioning, isn't it? As a fresh player in wrath, plenty of bosses felt difficult to me (Putricide, Mimiron, etc). Fast forward, and Protectors doesn't feel difficult to me at all, but it's a lot more involved than any of those prior fights.

It's not difficult to imagine that raiding for a fresh player now is a bit daunting. Even taking into account what to be mindful of, there's so much shit flying around thanks to both boss AND player abilities that you have to wonder where it's gonna go next.

[Glorious Leader]

It's all about conditioning, isn't it? As a fresh player in wrath, plenty of bosses felt difficult to me (Putricide, Mimiron, etc). Fast forward, and Protectors doesn't feel difficult to me at all, but it's a lot more involved than any of those prior fights.

It's not difficult to imagine that raiding for a fresh player now is a bit daunting. Even taking into account what to be mindful of, there's so much shit flying around thanks to both boss AND player abilities that you have to wonder where it's gonna go next.

You keep making reasonable posts like this and I just might have to come over there and plant a big one you

Yes the above is so true. For players who've been raiding for many years the current lvl of fights does not seem difficult because well you were grandfathered into raiding when it was bloody simple as shit.