Everyone in the beta reporting that dungeons are REALLY easy :(

[Elias01]

Not at the highest difficulty which is the only thing that matters... It's also really silly to compare a game that drops 2 pieces of loot to one that drops way more. Classic and live wow have to totally different systems. Mythic plus also makes gearing up a lot faster. If they wanted to make raids last longer they need to rework tuning and gear acquistion. They won't though.

No thats exactly what do not matter. Content is content and new difficulty is not new content.

[D3athsting]

Can't count how many fu**ing times i died into gnomeregan

[Villentretenmerth]

Most people did them overleveled. Dungeons were never hard in Vanilla, even with people early on (including me) having no idea about MMOs the Tank/Heal/DPS Concept.

[quite an expert in wow]

I'm happy. If I decide to do some dungeons I rather not spend hours in them.

[Kryos]

Just wondering: Is this picture actually from vanilla or a private server?

Vanilla - I never played on a private server. This image was done a week before the vanilla servers shut down and BC was released. We managed to kill Kel Thuzad on our last vanilla raid evening. I never felt more proud about killing a WoW raidboss after that (and we killed pretty much all of them - currently 7/9 mythic Battle of Dazar'alor).

[Dhrizzle]

One of the things that made dungeons seem harder in Vanilla was how unforgiving they could be and how wipes could come from one small mistake. DPS pulling mobs at the wrong time could easily transfer aggro to the healer who could go down super-quick resulting in a wipe. Pulling too many mobs could easily overwhelm the healers raw-output so we lost the tank, or force them to start healing too early, pull aggro and die, either way resulting in a wipe. This is especially true as people knew less about the mechanics - I played with quite a few decent tanks (and got fairly good myself during TBC) but it's only recently I learned there were players effectively AoE tanking with shouts and the sunder-everything gameplay was unnecessary.

[Kryos]

If you want DIFFICULT CONTENT - stay away from classsic. if you want TIME CONSUMING CONTENT - play it.

This! Your comment summs up the reality and we raided and killed pretty much every single boss in the game on the highest difficulty setting.

The actual difficulty (game expecting quick reaction times and awareness of your surroundings and communication between players during the encounter - for example color game in mythic Mekkadrill bots) is more demanding today, but preparations and organisation are very easy and simple.

[Karlz0rz]

And moder wow is hard? I dont know i can finish every single dungeon, raid, world boss by pressing 1 button and without saying single word.

Try playing retail WoW without addons, then come back to me . Only reason the game is fairly straight forward, is because you have a million tools helping you.
Classic WoW was NEVER hard. The only "hard" thing was the grind/getting 40 people together.

[Kryos]

It doesn't have to be. As you say, the content isn't that demanding so you really don't have to go sniff a flower for more DPS. If they were better players they could've just gone and killed the content without it.

We actually did kill him without it because we wiped so many times that we just lost the patience to get the buff again and again. We also had several external warlock soulstones on the raid and wiped after that anyway, didn't repeate that. But sometimes you needed the buffs to reach new phases in the boss encounter. May old raids had bosses that checked your raid dps. Most famous one was Patchwerk.

[Elias01]

Try playing retail WoW without addons, then come back to me . Only reason the game is fairly straight forward, is because you have a million tools helping you.
Classic WoW was NEVER hard. The only "hard" thing was the grind/getting 40 people together.

I am pretty sure can finish those normal dungeons and lfr raids without any addon.

[Kynario]

dungeons themselves didn't really change

The player characters got a lot stronger

People forget that there literally weren't any strict group composition rules like there are nowadays.

You'd have a Shaman with a shield as a Tank.

You'd have a melee Shaman as the Healer or a Feral/Balance Druid as a Healer, and all the others would do damage.

But the groups were very hybrid-ish. No one really knew what they were doing, otherwise WoW was the casual MMO at the time. Dungeons were always easy. Players improved

[Trbn]

Try playing retail WoW without addons, then come back to me . Only reason the game is fairly straight forward, is because you have a million tools helping you.
Classic WoW was NEVER hard. The only "hard" thing was the grind/getting 40 people together.

today interface give you everything to raid and m+

in raids it shouts, it has great raid frames, it has all the effects to show procs, bars are customizable.

all you missing are dps meter, aggro meter and timers. and you are clearly ok without it

[BenBos]

Dungeons were pretty hard for new people.

I remember TBC had hard dungeons at launch too (and by then we had played a lot more).

[Kryos]

One question.

Which fight in Naxx requires you to move and frostnova and sheep and dps at the same time?

Gothik. Frostnova the Unrelenting Deathknights, sheep the Unrelenting Trainee, dps the focus target and avoid getting hit by other Unrelenting Trainees and Deathknights.

Okay... MOVE AND DPS. What kind of dps can you do while moving as mage? Practically all dps spells require casting.

Firemage, (17/31/3) spec - fireblast on the run - the moment you can stand still you use everything with casting time just to move again.

In Frost spec I also had the job of frostbolt rank 1 kiting skeletons Gluth (rank 1 only had 0.5 second cast time IIRC), frostnova them and some DPS on the Boss.

It's 14 years ago - some details get blurry

[Shammyrock]

Was anyone expecting them to be difficult when armed with 15 years of knowledge?

[Kuja]

I think most, if not all of current beta players are streamers. And streamers play wow for living, so naturally they are very good at it. So even challenging content is trivial to them if they know how to play the game and how to minmax. I too sucked at the game when I played vanilla back in the day, and even in tbc. But since then I've became almost an elitist and accept nothing but perfect performance from me.

[Elias01]

today interface give you everything to raid and m+

in raids it shouts, it has great raid frames, it has all the effects to show procs, bars are customizable.

all you missing are dps meter, aggro meter and timers. and you are clearly ok without it

It doesnt matter. Mythic+ or mythic raids are not relevant in this discusion. People say classic isnt hard compare to mythic +10. NONONNO You have to compared vannila dungeons to normal dungeons of BFA. It is about how hard is to finish content no how hard is to finish diffiuclty level. So quit this comparison. As long as modern wow will have easy mods it wont ever be harder.

And if you want moder wow to actualy be harder than Blizzard have to remove LFR, normal, heroics, and all dungeon difficulties below mythic 10. Than we can say current wow is harder.

[RamGuy]

This is a really interesting and funny discussing and topic to watch. For me this seems to be two-folded.

On one hand you have people just telling that dungeons used to be harder in vanilla, and then you have people that are trying to compared damage numbers per hit from elites in the dungeons directly with what they can remember from vanilla and claiming them to be too low on the Classic BETA.

I'm not entirely sure if doing direct comparison of the numbers is a good idea and a good metric. World of Warcraft: Classic is not Vanilla. It's not World of Warcraft Patch 1.12.2. In order to have the game running on the modern infrastructure, integrate with Battle.net and run on modern hardware they had to take the modern database and the modern database labels and structure and retrofit patch 1.12.2 into this database structure to replicate World of Warcraft Patch 1.12.2 as best as they could.

As there are way more labels in the database today compared to back then, are we even certain it's possible to just replicate the values from the old 1.12.1 database into a database on the modern structure? I suspect this is not possible, so they have to input different values in order to achieve the same dps output from the mobs within the game.

So perhaps monster A hits for less damage, compared to vanilla. But perhaps there are other labels and factors that will account for it? Like attack speed being slightly higher so in order to get the overall same amount of damage output from the mob as in vanilla, they had to slightly lower the damage per strike as it was not possible to perfectly tune the mob to hit the same amount of time per minutes as before?

And how do you do a direct comparison? There are so many variables in play here. Character level, class, talent points, gear, buffs, potions and whatnot. Unless you have identical characters running on the old patch 1.12.1 vanilla client and server and directly compare it to the very same character on the classic beta how can you really tell what the damage numbers are supposed to actually look like?

Many seem to compare with private servers but why should we believe that these private servers have perfectly replicated damage numbers? I've played on many of them and I enjoyed it a bunch but they all have a lot of scripting issues and whatnot so I wouldn't use them for any kind of reference.


In terms of how hard vanilla dungeons really was I suspect this is more of instance when people have convinced themselves that it was harder than it really was. I also remember them to be difficult, I played vanilla, tbc and wotlk and to be honest it's somewhat hard to remember if my memory is from vanilla, tbc or wotlk and the content got tuned during both tbc and wotlk.

What I do remember is how god awful I was at the game. I was so young, had never played any MMO before and was utterly clueless at the time and I still managed to get through most dungeons without wiping too many times. Considering the wast amount of knowledge people have today when it comes to classes, optimisations, mechanics etc.. There is no wonder why things seems much easier.

It was a few things that made dungeons hard. It was because of having a tank that was clueless so bad handling of aggro would get DPS and healer killed all the time. Or having a healer that was just wasting mana for no reason, overhealing, getting aggro because of spamming out pointless heals etc.. Or because you entered dungeons undergeared, or perhaps the most common mistake going into dungeons underlevelled. It's normally a 10 level difference between the entry mobs and the end boss in most vanilla dungeons so I often ended up in groups trying to tackle a dungeon we had no real chance of doing due to us being too low level. It might start of looking half-decent only to go down the drain soon after when digging deeper into the dungeon.

From what I can remember we couldn't inspect talents of other players either? So you had no real clue if the tank was even specced into tanking before tossing the invite. And often you would not be patient enough to wait for higher level players so you just took what you've got making your group often becoming underlevelled.


With players being so much better and knowledgeable about the game and the dungeons, and with most players more likely to not take on dungeons while being severely underlevelled, with most tanks actually knowing about aggro and how to tackle it and with healers not as likely to waste healing and mana it won't look nearly as hard as it used to.

[Pepsoni]

They were never hard, just time consuming and requiring patience, sometimes confusing.

Vanilla was never truly "hard", you just had so many roadblocks (many of which we are now better at handling/have better ideas of), that it seemed hard. It was an illusion.

IMO TBC Heroics were the "hard" dungeons and even then it was easy, just once again tedious and time consuming. Same thing with the Cata heroics, people slammed how hard they were, people just didn't want to wait for healers to get mana.

TRUE, imo the best the dungeons have ever been were early Cata dungeon heroics.

[Sencha]

They weren't hard if you CC'd well.