Question about RWF during early expansions (ICC, Cata, etc.)

[Biomega]

I'd say there's a bit of a difference between Exodus getting banned for a week for completely taking the adds out of the fight with the paladin and STARS distracting shotting the adds during empowering shadows.

Absolutely, and I'm in no way suggesting that strat wasn't legitimate. It 100% was. My point is rather that because there was a big fallout from an aggro-manipulation strategy, that made people less likely to want to investigate that kind of approach for a potential kill. They all just nodded, agreed it was unkillable, and stopped trying. And they were wrong.

[Nitros14]

What is the point of that list, besides just for historical record's sake? Cuz it sure doesn't translate which bosses were harder than others very well, which was my initial assumption of its existence.

Historical record, an interesting reminder of how different the playerbase and devs were back then. Like it says, it's explicitly not trying to measure absolute difficulty. I think you can only judge how bosses were in the context of their own time. Players were astonishingly bad in vanilla, and to a lesser extent in TBC. Tier 5 was considered so hard at the time that it triggered a backlash and they made Black Temple very easy, even for the era.

How would you order those bosses by difficulty?

[Ereb]

How would you order those bosses by difficulty?

I wouldn't even try to claim I would be able to order all of them in proper difficulty order. I was just curious the community viewed this list generally I've seen it here and there throughout the years.

[Relapses]

How would you order those bosses by difficulty?

Did any Classic guilds prog content sight-unseen? I know it's a ridiculous concept but that might be the closest we can get to an empirical estimation of the relative difficulty of older content.

[Nitros14]

That's true to a point, but it also comes down to Blizz's ultimate decision around ICC to tune/balance raids around the existence of combat addons. If Blizz decided to disable combat addons in raids, the raids would look a helluva lot different than they do now... or at the very least they'd wouldn't be tuned nearly as tight as they are now. They've even admitted many times in blue posts that the addon decision basically started an arms race, but I always found it odd that they'd almost play victim when they were holding all the cards. You can't stop players from wanting to optimize, but Blizz could put their foot down on certain issues so things don't get out of hand.

I remember Blizz did disable the AVR addon back in ICC (the one that projected textures on the ground to show where mechanics would be) because it would make mechanics too easy. While they've disabled other functions over time from being public since, they've fundamentally missed the point that quite often the addons being disabled were felt as necessary because the mechanics/content were being overtuned because they were allowed in the first place; furthermore, designed content around the existence of addons makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also doesn't help that Blizz was pretty bad at showing/signaling mechanics, which necessitated a bossmod addon for many. Weakauras (formerly Powerauras) was probably the biggest offender of them all, to where they have a pseudo-version of it as part of the WoW UI now. It's no secret that Blizz also used these addons as excuses to not fix things because they held the mentality that "why fix broken stuff when players will make addons to do it for us?"... again they made a statement akin to this back in BfA.

I remember people were upset when they broke decursive in Naxxramas in 2006. It used to be you'd just smash the decursive button and it would automatically decurse someone in the raid. After the hotfix you had to actually target their raid frame.

They also broke that add-on that would automatically assign players to soak spots in Blackrock Foundry, and the one that was mentioned for mythic Archimonde chaos beams.

- - - Updated - - -

Did any Classic guilds prog content sight-unseen? I know it's a ridiculous concept but that might be the closest we can get to an empirical estimation of the relative difficulty of older content.

Unsure what you mean here.

[Relapses]

Unsure what you mean here.

Well, the idea that players sucked when OG Classic was around sorta invalidates any 1:1 comparison to the difficulty of modern content. That's why the number of days a boss was alive is a pretty terrible metric. But if a group of 40 dudes decided to prog that same content in Classic without watching videos (sight-unseen) then that would, at the very least, provide us with an idea of how players might've engaged with the content when it was new. Obviously not the same since players are, again, just way better, but it'd at least be more a more accurate estimation of boss difficulty than how many days the boss lived.

[Nitros14]

Well, the idea that players sucked when OG Classic was around sorta invalidates any 1:1 comparison to the difficulty of modern content. That's why the number of days a boss was alive is a pretty terrible metric. But if a group of 40 dudes decided to prog that same content in Classic without watching videos (sight-unseen) then that would, at the very least, provide us with an idea of how players might've engaged with the content when it was new. Obviously not the same since players are, again, just way better, but it'd at least be more a more accurate estimation of boss difficulty than how many days the boss lived.

If you could find 40 people who've never played WoW before maybe. But Blizzard refuses to do a patch by patch release for classic so for some raids it's impossible to get the same experience. They also aren't going to release the hilariously buggy pre-hotfix versions of a number of bosses.

[Relapses]

If you could find 40 people who've never played WoW before maybe. But Blizzard refuses to do a patch by patch release for classic so for some raids it's impossible to get the same experience. They also aren't going to release the hilariously buggy pre-hotfix versions of a number of bosses.

Right, right, of course. But is it entirely impossible that a guild of dudes would go in without a real plan and just learn the encounters by themselves? I know there's the whole self-found thing in hardcore, figured there might be an analogous version of PvEers who just go into Classic content and slam their dicks against the wall. Seems unlikely, but figured I'd asked if you'd heard anything like that.

[Ereb]

Right, right, of course. But is it entirely impossible that a guild of dudes would go in without a real plan and just learn the encounters by themselves? I know there's the whole self-found thing in hardcore, figured there might be an analogous version of PvEers who just go into Classic content and slam their dicks against the wall. Seems unlikely, but figured I'd asked if you'd heard anything like that.

I'd go so far as to say as the very concept of gaming on a computer was still not mainstream, at least nowhere near to the degree that it is today. So gaming on a Keyboard + mouse in of itself presented unique challenges for some in 2004-2005 that just don't exist in today's world. Also keybinding, and so many other things we take for granted as 'givens' things to do that increase performance or efficiency which had not been invented, or at least majorly adopted, by your average raider.

It's like trying to compare olympic athletes from 1920 to 2020 they are just on a different level now in general.

[Tech614]

It's not just about going into encounters blind, people would have to go into the entire game blind. Classic versions all have sims and optimal setups completely figured out when back in the day even the top players where mostly feelcrafting without the tools we use today. Like we used to try to find optimal dps using spreadsheets ffs.

[Relapses]

It's not just about going into encounters blind, people would have to go into the entire game blind. Classic versions all have sims and optimal setups completely figured out when back in the day even the top players where mostly feelcrafting without the tools we use today. Like we used to try to find optimal dps using spreadsheets ffs.

I (probably) (definitely) over-estimated the tenacity of the dad gamer "hell yeah, brother" crowd.

[Zayele]

How would you order those bosses by difficulty?

You could probably order it by absolute difficulty, something like

Tier 1: Kil'jaeden, Uu'nat, Fyrakk (?)

Tier 2: Raszageth, Queen Ansurek, Tindral Sageswift (weird to rank non endbosses but definitely up there), Archimonde (honestly I'm unsure where to put this, this boss basically marks the start of the modern era esp wrt to trying to solve encounters with computational WAs, and was the hardest encounter ever when it was released obviously, but I'm not certain how it stacks up with today's harder end bosses, it would probably be fine though),

Tier 3: G'huun, Queen Azshara, Denathrius, Gul'dan, Argus (also there's not a ton of differentiation between t2 and t3 I suppose, I imagine this could be ranked much more accurately by someone participating in the progression for those)

Tier 4: Garrosh, Lei Shen, Blackhand, Sha of Fear, Imperial Vizier Zor'lok pre pre nerfs as a silly mention

Tier 5: forgettable endbosses like Imperator Mar'gok, Sarkareth, Gallywix. Mar'gok was pretty cool though, maybe it's harsh to put it down here with those two.

below that you have old bosses that are worth naming like Lich King or Ragnaros, but which are pretty straightforward and simple by modern standards. I'm unfamiliar with s2 S3 Shadowlands so I didn't include them here.

If you mean relative to the top playerbase at the time you immediately run into huge issues with subjectivity, although I think a lot of people will agree kj is #1 as said earlier in the thread.

[Biomega]

You could probably order it by absolute difficulty, something like

Tier 1: Kil'jaeden, Uu'nat

Those are probably the only ones on there that are near-universally agreed upon. And the data supports it, given that their pull counts were staggering amounts higher than anything else (731 for Uu'nat, 655 for KJ, with #3 being HFC Archimonde at 473, almost 30% fewer pulls). Fyrrak at 340 doesn't actually clock in at some insane amount, like one of the more difficult ones to be sure but totally reasonable for an endboss. Tindral, amusingly, was at 426 - and while pull count is by no means the only metric, or a good comparison across time, the fact that these two bosses were directly next to each other in the same raid makes pull count about as comparable as it'll ever get for a difficulty metric in that specific comparison

Speaking of pull counts, bosses like Azshara are a good example why counts are misleading, as she was basically in an unkillable state for a while which inflated pull counts. You can view it nicely on an HP timeline, where she just flatlines foreeeeever, i.e. basically zero progress until the nerf comes in and then she drops like normal. A similar case can be made for many bosses, i.e. Raszageth as a recent example, where the nerf threw off progression considerably because the boss that was killed really wasn't the boss that was being progressed - and how do you incorporate that into rankings? Like, you could of course say "well that's part of the difficulty!" but then what about bosses that were so overtuned/so bugged they couldn't be killed forever, like C'thun, Ouro, the usual candidates. It's easy to say "well that's different, those don't count" based on vibes and I agree, but how do you rank them, and others, based on such tuning problems?

Another thing is, of course, ranking before our current tripartite difficulty system. How do Lei Shen or Blackhand really stack up against mythic bosses? I ask because I killed them, and at a decent overall rank (I think we were still top 100 world then, or at least close) but I had NO SHOT at killing a boss like KJ in that range and most of the CEs I got in modern-day WoW were REALLY late in the tier (like, with N'zoth my guild considered just giving up because the expansion was going to come out soon anyway - that late). And of course that's a biased, personal, anecdotal experience but I know roughly where I stood as a raider in terms of ambition and skill and things like Lei Shen, while difficult, just weren't anywhere near the kind of challenge a modern-day mythic raid poses. I was younger, but I wasn't some kind of super gamer - and I got older, but I didn't drop off a cliff. So these bosses just feel like they're on such a different level, difficulty wise, it's not even comparable. But I will say this: irrespective of how difficult they were, both Lei Shen and Blackhand are imo among the best-designed endbosses they have ever made, possibly the actual Top 2.

I think most people will agree KJ and Uu'nat are at the top of the difficulty list and Xavius is at the bottom; but everything in between could potentially differ WILDLY, like by several ranks. Maybe there's a good argument to be made that Archimonde is #3, but I'd be pressed to come up with an answer already for #4.

What's interesting to note, though, is that the past two expansions BOTH had an endboss that's basically bottom-tier bad with Sarkareth and Gallywix. That's not a good sign in my eyes, but maybe I'm biased and the casuals love the fact that there's easy endbosses. That's a perspective, too.

[Saiyendra]

Another thing is, of course, ranking before our current tripartite difficulty system. How do Lei Shen or Blackhand really stack up against mythic bosses? I ask because I killed them, and at a decent overall rank (I think we were still top 100 world then, or at least close) but I had NO SHOT at killing a boss like KJ in that range and most of the CEs I got in modern-day WoW were REALLY late in the tier (like, with N'zoth my guild considered just giving up because the expansion was going to come out soon anyway - that late). And of course that's a biased, personal, anecdotal experience but I know roughly where I stood as a raider in terms of ambition and skill and things like Lei Shen, while difficult, just weren't anywhere near the kind of challenge a modern-day mythic raid poses. I was younger, but I wasn't some kind of super gamer - and I got older, but I didn't drop off a cliff. So these bosses just feel like they're on such a different level, difficulty wise, it's not even comparable. But I will say this: irrespective of how difficult they were, both Lei Shen and Blackhand are imo among the best-designed endbosses they have ever made, possibly the actual Top 2.

Nitpick but Blackhand was a mythic boss - the current tripartite difficulty system was created at the start of WoD (and applied retroactively to SoO for the WoD prepatch).

Also when comparing to bosses from WoD or something you gotta consider that wow in general sees a lot of power creep; classes get new abilities and defensive capabilities over time and so bosses just need to be naturally harder to be as challenging relatively (with the big exception being the MoP --> WoD transition where every class got pruned badly). This is ESPECIALLY important in the WoD --> Legion and SL --> DF transitions because of artifacts + legendaries and the redesign to talent trees respectively. So I don't really think someone who didn't do early progress on both bosses can blanket say Blackhand was a lot easier than Raszageth or whatever.

Obviously this argument doesn't extend to really early parts of the game like wotlk or vanilla or w.e. because player knowledge / ability was way way way worse back then, it's only in 2016+ that we really entered the modern era of raiding imo.

[Biomega]

Nitpick but Blackhand was a mythic boss - the current tripartite difficulty system was created at the start of WoD (and applied retroactively to SoO for the WoD prepatch).

You're right! That's my derp. Not even a nitpick, it's pretty significant Well, just applied to Lei Shen, then :P

So I don't really think someone who didn't do early progress on both bosses can blanket say Blackhand was a lot easier than Raszageth or whatever.

No, you're right, it's not as easy as that. We didn't have a particularly hard time on Blackhand, but we WERE a good guild, even if we weren't top-of-the-world good. So maybe that's just me being biased and nostalgia kicking in. I didn't find Blackhand hard, but WoD was probably the peak of my personal WoW in terms of skill and ambition so I could just be distorting my own memory of this unduly. Very possible.

And of course I stopped playing in SL so I can't REALLY comment on a boss like Raszageth with any kind of first-hand experience, either. But then Rasz specifically was a bit of a weird one for various reasons.

Obviously this argument doesn't extend to really early parts of the game like wotlk or vanilla or w.e. because player knowledge / ability was way way way worse back then, it's only in 2016+ that we really entered the modern era of raiding imo.

Yes that's a whole different thing again, for sure. Nothing in that era compares, even remotely. People scream about pre-nerf M'uru and whatnot - still not even close.

[Nitros14]

Yes that's a whole different thing again, for sure. Nothing in that era compares, even remotely. People scream about pre-nerf M'uru and whatnot - still not even close.

I mean, world first Kil'jaeden took longer than world first M'uru in Sunwell. Even by the standards of the time it wasn't the hardest boss. Of course any guild that could beat M'uru could probably beat Kil'jaeden so a lot more ended up stuck on M'uru.