First this is not a post about Classic WoW being more difficult to retail or vice versa.
Been reading the arguments in the thread about vanilla/TBC raid difficulty vs Wrath ICC25M Heroic. I noticed an interesting thing. Even Wrath, the so often praised expansion with its Ulduar hardmodes and heroic ICC with The Lich King who didn't fall before being nerfed, is labeled “easy” by many people.
So, in your opinion which WoW expansion would not have “easy” raid content if it were to be released as Classic but first…
Let us think what does “easy” mean? I think many people associate the difficulty of the raid with the time that it takes for the boss to get killed from launch (aka race to world first)
But I think we can all agree that the top guilds don’t tell much about the overall difficulty for the whole playerbase. Blizzard has trouble even today to come up with challenging enough bosses without crossing the mathematically impossible threshold and yet it never really takes all that long for even current bosses to fall.
So race to world first != how easy the raid is for your average Joe.
Now let’s get to some usual arguments about Classic X raids being easy.
Like riding a bike.
But how many actually downed the raid at the highest difficulty when it was still current?
The content is OLD. It was beaten X years ago. It will be a cakewalk because everyone knows exactly what to do and what classes to stack etc.
There are guides for Mythic Sire Denathrius. There are videos. Everything you need to know about downing Mythic Denathrius is out there . Yet that doesn’t make him “easy” does it? Almost like you still need to have some skills not just a guide and a video to tell you the tactics.
It has been played for X years on a p-server.
Sure, but p-server players are a minority and they would fall to the “world first“ guys anyways. If private server players storm the content they’ve perfected for X years before why would it make it easy for your average Joe?
Also sidenote that no p-server is 1:1 perfect with retail ever. And their own guides are based on the situation and balance on that particular server.
The game is based on patch X.X.X so we know exactly how the classes and specs will play out
Now I thought of this argument my self actually and would like some thoughts about this. Most likely the last boss of the expansion would be the least affected because it would be the closest to the actual scenario but it could have interesting impact for the earlier raid tiers.
Let’s get some more arguments coming!