Has raiding become too overcomplicated/convoluted for it's own good?

[Dilbon]

Raids are like porn. Simple mechanics do not excite those who have raided for a long time so they need harder and harder stuff.

[Deleted]

The use of the word autistic does not refer to the disorder autism in this case. It is a completely valid word describing something that can be considered repetitive/restricted or sterotyped patterns/behaviour and/or things that lack social interaction and communication.

More like it's a buzzword on 4chan

[Kivimetsan]

Raidings harder than ever. The reason people thought it was hard back in the days was it took ages to get 40 people to work as a team and everyone was new to either the game or MMO's in general. Shits overly complicated now because they've run out of ideas lol.

[Nobleshield]

Raidings harder than ever. The reason people thought it was hard back in the days was it took ages to get 40 people to work as a team and everyone was new to either the game or MMO's in general. Shits overly complicated now because they've run out of ideas lol.

I think its more they feel they need to add more and more fight mechanics to "challenge" people, so things get overly complex because people would whine about how easy everything is if each boss only had a single mechanic or maybe two. So once again they try to challenge the top echelon of people for some reason, instead of going with something more moderate and telling the best of the best of the best too bad, they don't get special treatment anymore because it's not a good business model.

[Celarent]

Basically there are tons and tons of throw away abilities on bosses now that you don't normally have to pay much or any attention to.

Then what's the point of them, other than to confuse groups unfamiliar with the fight as they pore through an overstuffed journal? If they're trivial abilities, an additional sub-section should be inserted so players understand they're essentially variations of boss melee.

For council fights especially, the encounter team certainly seems to have forgotten the concept of "less is more." Blood Prince Council was probably the best balance -- original, memorable abilities, not a lot of junk on the ground, spread out, etc.

[Tinykong]

What people don't remember about a lot of these Vanilla/TBC bosses was the hard DPS check. Literally, every member had to do X amount of DPS over the course of the encounter, or it was an instant wipe. These values were VERY tight, and required chugging potions on CD, rotating Shaman in and out of groups to chain heroism/bloodlust for high DPS players, and basically having BiS or near BiS gear in order to progress through the raid.

Honestly, I think the fights are getting too complex, but, I prefer that to the "every raider must have 4pc T6 or you cannot raid" requirement.

[Deleted]

Raiding is fun, and I don't personally deem it overcomplicated in any way.

[Deleted]

In what way? Every class I have played is more complex now then in BC/Vanilla days. There are more abilities, more cd to manage, more rng effects to look out for etc. Everyone has more things to do to get the job done.

Yes, in theory are they more complex, but as long as you are not a harcore raider, do you not need most of the abilities.
Yes, my druid hast tons of CC, but I can't remember, when I had to use them the last time. Same with so many other skills.
You no longer have to spend time with your talent tree (opposite to what some people claim has every raider I know, tried a lot of things during Vanilla and TBC), you no longer use differen gear setups for different fights as a healer, while I had during TBC 4 different sets (Mana regen, MT healing, Chain Healing, Raid Healing). And don't ask me about my Pally tank - I had so many different sets.

And since you can pretty much do everything on your own (dispel, heal, dps, cc ...) it's all in all quite simple.

And yes, my healing rotation involves more spells now, but just the fact that I have a rotation as a healer says all for me. In Vanilla and TBC I had to think before using a spell (at least on most progress raids) - which one, what rank to use, waste cd or not ... and now I can usually just spam my rotation.
Overhealing? Who cares? Mana issues? Long gone.
Picking the right totem at the perfect time in the right position? Gone.

Again: I'm not talking about heroic raiding, but for what is left for the rest of us.

So yes, the amount of skills make it more complex, but so many other things are lost, that it's in general too easy.

[Deleted]

I think its more they feel they need to add more and more fight mechanics to "challenge" people, so things get overly complex because people would whine about how easy everything is if each boss only had a single mechanic or maybe to. So once again they try to challenge the top echelon of people for some reason, instead of going with something more moderate and telling the best of the best of the best too bad, they don't get special treatment anymore because it's not a good business model.

One thing that people need to remember however is that raiding has developed. It is true that raid fights has become more complex overall since Vanilla, does that mean that vanilla was the best of the best of raiding models? WoW pretty much set the milestone for what raiding is, vanilla was the "beta" of WoW raiding, they realised how to make it better and then they made it better. If you compare wotlk, cata and mop bosses they are pretty much on-par with eachother in complexity.
Early TBC and Vanilla most fights was just a gear check and bruteforce with a few mechanics. Sure, there were some fights that actually was mechanically complex, but they were few in numbers. What happened in wotlk/cata/mop is that those gear check patchwerk fights were shaved away. Fights having mechanics became a standard. Fights having tight dps/hps checks has almost completely disappeared.

That said, to argue that the sunwell fights, fights like KT in the Eye or similar fights were less complex than current raiding fights is just bullshit. There were several fights that were complex in TBC and Vanilla that puts a lot of the SoO fights in a corner of shame. I would say that the Eye (mainly KT) was the turning point were blizzard realised what direction they wanted raiding to take, after KT the boss model has remained the same pretty much in terms of complexity.

KT, any sunwell boss, any wotlk boss and any cata boss could easily have been a boss in SoO and a lot of them would probably have been a harder boss than most bosses in SoO. Most SoO bosses are far from complex. Now when I am talking about WotLK bosses, naxxramas is of course excluded as naxx was a vanilla raid tuned up to 80.

[anaxie]

The difference is everything was fatal in TBC if it was avoidable. Even in hercoics today there is ALOT you can cooldown through and survive or just ignore.

[Aerna]

Paragon klaxxi have loads of abilities but you only really care about 2 or 3 of them.

[Fluttershy]

....

Are you serious?

You do realise Nihilum killed Vashj nearly 3 months after release, yes? 3 MONTHS. That's completely unheard of these days. And it was HEAVILY nerfed, along with Kael'thas, who took even longer to kill, a few months later. They were brutally unforgiving fights. And please, please don't pretend Nihilum wasn't a good guild compared to todays' standards, because that's just ridiculous.

Were bosses back then harder than bosses now? Normal for normal, of course they were. Heroics today in my opinion are easily harder than most of the bosses in Vanilla/TBC. Besides Vash'j and KT, I'd say only Twin Emps, C'Thun, The Four Horsemen, Kel'Thuzad, pre-nerf Gruul and Mu'ru would match up to todays' hardest heroics.

Those fights were utter nightmares. Twin Emps and The Four Horsemen killed more guilds than you can imagine. Even Vael killed countless newer guilds. Gruul pre-nerf was INSANE - 1 tick of shatter and you're dead. C'thun was virtually impossible to kill for months. Mu'ru was possibly the hardest boss the game's ever seen. I never saw Kel'thuzad pre-nerf, but so few guilds killed him - mustn't have been easy.

45 minute respawning trash on bosses before here
Sporebats were bugged and resetting the vashj, the only guild to have killed vashj literally brute forced it despite blizzard wanting it to be "impossible".
Gear was idiotically itemized (aka level 68 dire leather or whatever had better stats than tier 4/5) and people were still using blues and crafted entry level epics well into tier 5

Tier 4/5 was item level 105 instead of 115-125 and 128-136 we know today(was adjusted on june or so) and the bosses were not powered up at all after the patch that increased stats. Blizzard's tuned fights so bad just to prolong content.

When vashj was finally tuned properly, no more bugs and with appropriate 128 tier +136 BS weapons guilds just rolled right over.

[Xeraxis]

The use of the word autistic does not refer to the disorder autism in this case. It is a completely valid word describing something that can be considered repetitive/restricted or sterotyped patterns/behaviour and/or things that lack social interaction and communication.

The word autistic does not mean what you think it means.

[Fluttershy]

well it's impossible to change the thread title now, so not much I can do about that buzzword.

[Deleted]

The word autistic does not mean what you think it means.

Some words can have 2 meanings. Using a word to describe a living being or something like in this case, raiding, can have two competely different meanings.

[Xeraxis]

Some words can have 2 meanings. Using a word to describe a living being or something like in this case, raiding, can have two competely different meanings.

Yes, words can have two meanings but until you can convince the dictionary to change it's meaning this one does not share that. I'd suggest petitioning OED to change it's meaning in the same way literally was recently updated. Until then you're wrong.

[Belloc]

I love how the OP compared an encounter with 3 mechanics to an encounter with 20-30ish mechanics... and the 3-mechanic encounter was, without even the slightest of doubts, the more difficult one.

I also love how that 20-30ish mechanic encounter is the second-to-last fight of the tier, which is exactly where fights of that complexity are supposed to be.

[Flutterguy]

I wouldn't say so, though I wish I had an option to turn off everyone else's spell effects.

[Bullettime]

A lot of the difficulty in classic and BC was proper handling of poorly designed mechanics, incredibly overtuned damage on the very few skills the bosses had, and bullshit resistance checks.

Fights now are tuned to where they're more enjoyable along with having more active raid participation. It wasn't exactly fun standing around for 30 seconds at a time tunneling the boss then having an "oh fuck he used the skill to wipe out 6 people."

[Belloc]

Literally every boss up to the end of BC had 1-3 mechanics at most (except for sunwell), most vanilla bosses only did 1-2 things at most.

For pandaria you have a dungeon book with 10 mechanics just so people can keep up, the average mid-level pandarian guild can easily kill kael'thas and Vashj in 2 weeks tops if you could revert time back again.

1-3 mechanics at most? Let's see:

Moroes: Garrote, Gouge, and the multiple abilities of the 4 adds he had.
Oz: 4+ mobs that each had different mechanics, including having to fear the lion, use fire on the scarecrow, and kite tinhead, heal up the AOE damage from Dorothy, and avoid the tornado on the Witch.
Nightbane: Ground based AOE, AOE fear, Dispellable hit debuff, Tail Swipe, Rain of Bones and Smoking Breath.
Shade of Aran: 3 Interruptable nukes, 1 of which you did NOT want to interrupt, Flame Wreath (don't move!), Blizzard (don't stand there!), Arcane Explosion (run to the walls!), Dragon's Breath, Elementals (CC or, post-nerf, kill), AOE Polymorph and Nuke (hope no one is too low on health).
Netherspite: Pulsing AOE, Void Zones, and 3 beams that require a rotation, and the banish phase (with breaths).
Prince Malchezaar: Enfeeble, Shadow Nova, Shadow Word: Pain, Sunder Armor, Flying Axes, Amplify Damage and, oh yeah, INFERNALS!

And that's just Karazhan. The rest of the raids had similar/more mechanics. I guess maybe you don't remember BC as well as you thought, eh? Or maybe you never actually experienced progression on the bosses.