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.

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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.