Vanilla wasn't difficult but it is very true that the early levels are especially easy.
Levelling starts to get "harder" later on, but there are also a couple of brackets in particular that are a pain because of quest distribution and stuff like that.
The brackets I remember as being annoying were 34-40, 44-48, 50-56. The main reasons for this are quest and xp distribution which push you around the world far too much (because they often wouldn't give enough xp to level and unlock other quests in the zone), and the general state of some of the dungeons which could be a bit meh and have level brackets which can mean you just aren't going to clear them in one run (because you would hit walls due to entry requirement being too low while the end stuff could be much higher level than they should be).
Speciation Is Gradual
There is no "wall" that you meet during leveling that stops you from progressing, you always progress regardless of what you do. You won't die and get rolled back to beginning of your level, you won't fail a quest and will have to do it all over (outside of... like... 5 escort and timed quests). Leveling is hardly a challenge. It's still enjoyable, because it has proper pacing compared to retail, where game expanded so much that it basically invalidates all low-level content. Don't forget that vanilla was designed to be wanted by players who didn't like old MMORPG (more solo content, less punishment for failures, more rewards), there is literally no challenge that should've devoured anyone.
On a second thought, the only thing that could "devour" anyone is simple boredom since you may feel like you are wasting your time with it, which is the case with literally any other game.
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Fun thing i've noticed in packed starting locations during stress test: LOTS of players just sit around and camp quest mobs instead of murderhoboing everything in sight. That pesky gnome warlock who started yelling at me for me not wanting to join his group ended up like 2 levels behind me when i've met him on my way out from starting location to kharanos.
It really feels like 180 from vanilla, where most people who came from different MMOs mostly grinded mobs while doing quests, now people do quests avoiding killing "excess" mobs because it's "not efficient" and because they "don't need these mobs for quests".
Last edited by Charge me Doctor; 2019-05-26 at 06:27 PM.
Originally Posted by Urban Dictionary
My memory of Vanilla dungeons wasn't difficulty but just.... inexperienced design teams (which isn't surprising given the big MMO before then had been everquest). Dungeons tended to... ramble. Original Sunken Temple was a labyrinth. And not in a good way. It was just.... confusing. The later ones (Undercity etc) were HUGE and a lot of the time you'd have the group give up before the end because someone finally called it quits and left to go to dinner or bed because they had work the next morning.
The actual mobs/bosses were pretty basic... there were just a lot of them.
I'd probably say there were a few moments in wow history when dungeons felt really harsh. Late BC (heroic hellfire with those mob packed tunnels), Early heroic wrath (still great tho) and early Cata dungeons which were trying to encourage people to CC again (and a new breed of player was ignoring the devs on this one ^^).
Oh and +15 mythics atm.
Ahhahhahah. No.
You all act like LoS etc is some advanced technique that takes some genius to understand or months to master. It's not. Nor are all of you better than people 15 years ago. That's just self-stroking bullshit - people aren't smarter or faster or better today than then, you just want to think you are.
Only because retail doesn't allow you to equip gear without your main stats.
But classic was still easier. A bunch of blundering idiots still made it through.
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People today aren't smarter than people 200 years ago, we just have calculators to do extremely advanced math for us, encyclopedias, better nourishment during our formative years and a literal decade of intensive schooling unheard of 200 years ago, even by the elite of society.
People today aren't smarter, they just want to think they are.
So much to comment on, I know I won't remember everything, but here are a few key points I wanted to discuss:
What is the understood meaning of hard? Because if vanilla dungeons weren't harder than today's heroics, then today's heroics must be on a different level of easy than...breathing. Since Cata, I cannot recall more than a handful of normal or heroic dungeons that did not AoE almost all trash, or had boss mechanics so difficult as to cause multiple wipes...and I'm saying this as someone who went into said dungeons knowing basically nothing about the fights themselves. I stopped worrying about dungeon mechanics ages ago.
Now, if the litmus test of difficulty is today's mythics..well, I can't speak to them having not done any past M0, but I will assume they are as difficult as advertised. Mythic 0 is no different than heroic in terms of execution; tank pulls, we AoE, kill boss while not standing in anything.
Getting back to vanilla dungeons, I have always remembered them as a part of the game that required some care, and that dungeons since LK (with a few exceptions), you could be a lot more careless. How that will be in practice, we'll have to wait and see.
What I am going to use as a way to gauge the difficulty? Jintha'alor. Hard outdoor area with tons of elites, lots of patrols. If I go there with a couple of other players and we faceroll it, assuming we all have mostly green gear with some blues, it will feel off. Jintha took a while to do, care was needed when pulling, and without a healer, a death or three is not uncommon. This is how I will gauge because I have a strong memory of it. ymmv.
The argument of people wearing the wrong gear (rogues with int., etc.), only goes so far; by the time I started doing Zul Farrak, you rarely saw oddball stats like that anymore. It'll be even less so this time around.
Lastly...you know, everyone plays the game a little differently. If you base everything around speed and efficiency, you forget there is a certain charm in doing a dungeon where, while you might wipe a time or two, you have fun as well by hanging out with cool people. And there is nothing wrong with being fast and efficient, and if you are that type of player, you have a different memory and outlook than others, because we all see things differently.
"Can't you see this is the last act of a desperate man?"
"We don't care if it's the first act of Henry the Fifth, we're leaving!"
That's funny considering this thread's name. Or constant reddit posts which were trying to prove that dungeons are "too easy" because elite mobs were somehow bugged and not doing enough damage. Which then turned into "oh, it's just low level, things are *totally* different later on"... despite previously claiming that even levelling is incredibly challenging at all times.
Me? I'm just mildly amused. My levelling as a vanilla Holy Priest consisted of Renew, auto-wand and alt-tab. Slow, not exactly challenging, but I didn't really care. I three manned some dungeons, did others normally, wiped at times, didn't wipe at others. I barely remember any of the bosses, since most of them had no abilities worth mentioning. Wipes mostly came from pulling a patrol, which can easily happen in modern M+. That, or some instances having 10+ level spread (with Uldaman being a prime example) where you had to outlevel 70% of the place in order for the last part to not have "boss level" enemies.
I'm pretty sure raiding will be the same. Molten Core isn't a realy raid, just wait until BWL. I mean AQ40. I mean Naxx... well that's totally because they must have broken something, like Taunt hit chance or Frost resistance being too powerful.
By that logic, Dark Souls is dirt easy. You can repeat the fights to learn the enemy moves and all you need to be good at is to dodge.
Classic isn't hard in vacuum, it was a pretty easy game when it came out. But doing the same things in retail now is just miles easier. Can you really say with a straight face that Sunken Temple in retail are hard as or harder than it's iteration in classic?
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A guy from Method died 54 times 1-30. Many other had big struggles but this one sticks out
i can tell you never spent all your money on training and literally couldn't afford food. if you think mages are gonna be happy to throw food your way outside of dungeons you're also insane, it's a full time job being a vending machine, i mean, mage
that's the point though, you have to prepare to quest, you don't have to prepare to quest now, fuck, you don't even need both hands and gear in all slots, there is no threat of dying and mobs didn't always respawn reliably
classic wow was harder even if you define difficulty in some stupid ass off the wall way
Which means he's probably hamming it up for the viewers and doesn't really mind. I'm pretty sure he could have handled this a lot better if he cared, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as exciting - especially for the "#1 Guild in the world cannot handle Classic, suck on this, retailers!!!" crowd.
I'm sure he also didn't get any cloth drops from all these humanoid mobs, either. Or random food. Or greys to sell. Yep, can't afford anything, totally helpless, nothing he could have done.
I mean, sure, it is harder than retail. But "Method player died 50 times!!!" means little when guy plays roughly the same as average nobody - hell, probably worse so it's more interesting for his viewers.
Last edited by KaPe; 2019-05-26 at 10:14 PM.
If the difficulty check is "are you or are you not an idiot?" then it isn't much of a check.
Speciation Is Gradual