So How Many Of You Think WOW Vanilla Was Hard

[Cerebes]

So yesterday I met a guy who played wow in vanilla, So I talked to him for a while when I went to his house and noticed him playing wow.
So we started to talk about random wow stuff and then I asked him about vanilla wow, from the top of my head here is the conversation.

Me: So if you had to say which was better cata or vanilla. without a single thought he said
Him: Cata is way better then vanilla, vanilla is nothing compared to cataclysm. It was horrible back then nothing was balanced. I pressed like 4 or 5 buttons max in a raid. Im pretty sure wrath was better then vanilla as in enjoyment. he bashed the shit out of vanilla but did say one good thing he said he loved pvp at beginning of wow.

I have talked to 2 vanilla players so far in IRL, and they both say even cata is better overall and vanilla was definitely not hard at all.

So was vanilla really hard as people say it was.

comment please

edit: I cant say which was better expansion as I started in wrath.

[Travkin]

Been playing since MC days, and id say both have its ups and downs, PvP back then was so much greater then now . I miss 40 man raids (afk,follow thru trash ehehe). I personally dont like how you have cloth and plate gear with exact same stam.... just not right having casters running around with same health as tanks :/

[Kaneiac]

Been playing since MC days, and id say both have its ups and downs, PvP back then was so much greater then now . I miss 40 man raids (afk,follow thru trash ehehe). I personally dont like how you have cloth and plate gear with exact same stam.... just not right having casters running around with same health as tanks :/

Wait, same health? Horseshit.

In 346's and 359s, I'm running with ~120k buffed and the tanks are at 150-170k. It's not the same.

[Travkin]

should make a poll btw

---------- Post added 2011-01-08 at 07:13 AM ----------

Wait, same health? Horseshit.

In 346's and 359s, I'm running with ~120k buffed and the tanks are at 150-170k. It's not the same.

Yeah sorry i miss worded, cloth and plate

[Strakha]

It was not hard at all. It was just time consuming with less challenging mechanics. The worst was trying to organize 40 people to show up at one time, overall it was awful, practically a beta compared to now. PVP was "fun" if you were one of the classes that could destroy people in 1-2 moves, it was not fun if you were one of the many other classes that could not.

People just look back at vanilla with rose colored glasses because it was the first incarnation of WoW, it's not because it was technically superior or better in some way, it was just because it was the first and made people have a soft feeling in their heart for doing ZG for the first time or MC or doing BWL for a year and realizing how awful that was.

Overall, vanilla was great in the same way that Final Fantasy 1 was great, it was the first, it created a lot of interesting mechanics but overall most of them were not carried on in the later games and nobody misses them.

If they reverted all the game servers to vanilla tomorrow they would lose over 80% of their clients, because nobody would want to go through that shit again.

[schwarzkopf]

Vanilla was not hard as far as content goes, however it was far too time consuming for most people to do.

I know I didn't have the opportunity to do any end game content in Vanilla, even though I would have loved to.... back then guilds were for elites only, and there wasn't really pug raids.

And battlegrounds - well 26 hour queues were just insane, no way to maintain any PvP standing unless you had 3 clones to man your computer.

[Bluey111]

it was only hard because it was incredibly imbalanced

[Pascal]

Vanilla was more RNG, random death-y, grindy, time consuming, and required more cooperation - larger guilds, and you couldn't just be a dick to people and get away with it because no one on your server would ever group with you then. Most speccs were useless and trying to play one of them and still get into groups or raids was probably the 'hardest' part of Vanilla.

So, vanilla wasn't "harder", it was unrefined. Defining difficult was a challenge for Blizzard, so they just put in "someone in your raid will die randomly sometimes," into fights to make them "hard". They're in such a sweet spot right now with how they balanced health, damage, and healing capabilities. Cata is very refined.

[Noah37]

I would not really say that the game was harder back then. The mechanics have become more advanced over time and having fewer players and fewer battle rez availability means you have to make fewer mistakes. Really I think that Blizzard spent a long time making Vanilla and it was nearly a perfect formula. The 40 man raids felt like epic all out wars instead of small battles. I agree PvP was more fun back then, it just felt completely different. Really I think the biggest thing is that back then every one was on the same level where as now, there is a huge divide between people that know nothing about the game, and people that know it like the back of their hand. People also had to be a lot more patient in Vanilla, I miss real AV though.

[Kallozar]

I loved Vanilla because I had just finished playing WC3: TFT and reading War of the Ancients trilogy. I liked it cause it felt like a sequel. The best gear I ended up getting on my Orc Warrior was T1 and MC Gear. (The Casuals had blues the Elite Raiders were all decked out) I was on a PVE Server so the best Horde guild (which was basically the ONLY good guild) was downing all the endgame bosses and EVERY Alliance guild even the random ones like "heroes of teh alliance" or "servers of the gold lion" had MC,BWL,AQ20/AQ40 on farm or at least some progression on em. So downing one boss in Vanilla as Horde on a PVE Server was a huge accomplishment haha. This was mainly cause Alliance was so PVE Focused and Horde were all PVP Focused on our server. Alliance had Paladins. We had Shamans.

I played both Horde and Alliance in Vanilla. Horde was like: After 80 Wipes on the first boss of MC we finally downed it. It was amazing. We beat the game.

Alliance: Alright guys you know what to do...move in...move out...Cleanse or ur gkicked. ALright MC Cleared. Time to move to BWL Now..All in 1 day.

Anyway, I'd say Vanilla had lots of "Epic" moments like those 8 Hour AVs with summoning the Ice guy Lok Tar or w/e his name is and buffing him and watching him wreck alliance...AQ40 Opening Event was amazing...World PVP was AWESOME I remember forming 3 Raids full of Horde to attack Stormwind we lagged the server but it was the most fun I had on WoW...or Seeing the Top Guild on your server in your BG and them honor farming you....I remember we had huge respect and fear for the Elite Raiders...Every time we saw a guy in full AQ40 gear and Thunderfury and his Scarab Lord mount we ran haha

Plus If you want Vanilla PVP Described in a few words then: Unbreakable Sulfuras Shaman PVP. Youtube it. Awesome.

tl;dr

-Vanilla was fun mainly because it was the first of its kind. Everything was new and exciting. Raiding on Horde side was considered a gift from the gods. Raiding on Alliance was as easy
-PVP was at its infancy but it was fun cause Arena wasn't invented yet.
-Everything felt epic
-It was just an awesome game.

Cata on the other hand is like Vanilla 2.0 except it has its flaws like: Arena, LF Dungeon Tool, Tol Barad, Too Noob Friendly, and a bunch of other things but in the end Cata IS FUN and not a farmfest like Wrath was.

And yes im Horde

[Void]

from what i've heard,i think that vanilla wasnt hard,it was just very time-consuming(2 epics per boss,gl gearing 40 ppl for the next raid,farm resistance gear,grind 2/3 into scholomance each time you wanna make a flask,Loatheb requiring shitloads of consumables for ONE try).Apart of that the bosses themselves didnt seem hard at all(compared to tbc,wrath and cata mechanics).And the pvp model...well...you didnt need skill to get High Warlord,you just needed shitloads of patience and dedication to farm the honor kills required.So i think that cataclysm is harder in terms of mechanics etc(PvE PoV) and to get gladiator f.ex. you actually need to have a bit of skill(PvP PoV)

[Strakha]

As an aside I'd say the thing about Vanilla I miss that most is the disparity between the horde and alliance, where horde had shaman and alliance had paladin, felt better. It was a bitch to balance obviously, but they could have just kept paladins on alliance and horde on shaman and given paladins bloodlust since they gave it to mages anyways.

[Raynoth]

Ahh vanilla wow how i miss the... gotta say i love the changes in cataclysm.. but vanilla had its moments. tbh i wouldnt say wow was hard back then... nor is it hard now.. just... different... have to say tho i do miss the 6 hour long AV battles... such good times

[holyfist]

It wasn't harder in terms of boss difficulty.
It was harder because you had to invest much more time to accomplish anything.
Also soloing was pretty much no-no with so many world monsters being elites.
Today you can level by chain pulling and no downtime. Back then you try pulling bunch of mobs you end on GY.
Most nostalgic people don't miss hardiness of bosses or balance of PvP...they miss sense of accomplishment after you do something such time consuming.

[Narfwak]

Classic WoW was difficult because managing the amount of people you need to run a 40-man raiding guild is a lot harder than what you need for 25. A lot of the quality of life changes and balance changes weren't put into place, and the game was not as well researched and documented like it is these days.

AQ40 and Naxx had some pretty tough stuff, but for the most part (heroic) encounters are more complex and challenging as time goes on - expectations are higher these days, after all.

[Memphis-Ahn]

Vanilla wasn't hard. Vanilla was NEW. No one knew anything about the game. No one knew what to expect.

[carrierz]

It was and felt new, it was unexplored and exciting, it took quite some time even for the first damage meter to show up. It was exciting always exploring new stuff and stuff felt overwhelmingly epic. Nowadays everything is explored from day 1, the "expansions" doesn't really do anything, they just change a few stuff around, add 75 new skill points to all professions. It's not this overwhelming excitement anymore, so yes, to me vanilla was HARDER and better. There were no theorycrafting and people kicked rogues from raids cause everyone thought they sucked (they died from basically anything since they were melee). Suddenly a damage meter came and oops, rogues were on top, they were good after all. Theorycrafting were non-existant pretty much so you had to explore everything yourself. Nowadays it's just go to EJ or whatever site that has some good info, read up for 15min, adjust to the new mechanics, bam you are set. I wouldn't call that hard.

Although some stuff were retarded, like the real decursive. spam one button throughout a fight and you'd dispel the whole raid.

[ohlins]

We had less buttons to press in Classic BUT we also had allot less knowledge and info about the classes and the mechanics.
Classic was more of an adventure due to that, when you leved up and went trough the zones instances and raids it felt that you where on a journey and had to battle the problems you encountered. These days there is always someone that knows how todo it, also most players are experienced with most mechanics and are able to beat encounters with experience and knowledge they gathered troughout their wow 'carreer'.

TBC was the best period in my opinion, wrath brought great things to wow but also made it to noob friendly. Cataclysm is somewhere in between Wrath and TBC it seems, noobs wil be forced to learn and experienced players wil not struggle very hard to get trough. Its a fine balance because you can't make it to hard, the learning curve wil be to high for new players if they do.

[Triston]

The only hard parts about vanilla were the flaws in the way the game worked and the lack of current features.

Back then you had to farm for hours and hours to be ready for one raid. Back then you had 40 people raiding and only enough loot per boss to give to a handful of them, which made gearing slow as hell. Then, once you geared someone, if they left for one reason or another, you had to bring in a new player and go back in content to attune them to what you were doing and then try to get them to be raid ready. There were no faction transfers, no server transfers etc. There were attunement quests that had to be done. Then, after all that was in place, you had to get 40 people online at the same time.

If your MT quit the game, your guild basically crumbled since you were most likely giving him all of the loot possible since it was a necessity. The hardest part about vanilla was finding 40 people who had enough free time to make WoW a second 40+ hour per week job. There were plenty of excellent players and decent guilds that saw barely any content because they didn't have the required time. Everything in this game since vanilla has been an improvement. Vanilla was buggy, unbalanced, and generally a lackluster game. There was, however, a lot of promising pieces that were tuned and tweaked to give us the amazing game we play today and the great experience most of us have had from BC on. The game will only continue to get better until they stop trying to make it better.

[Garaya]

Well i started late in vanilla, but i have 20+ RL friends who have raided since vanilla and some of them are still playing.
My opinion on this is that nowadays we just have so much in terms of accessibility, we know what good performance is, and we know how to reach the level of play that we want to achieve. In vanilla some boss tactics were kept in secret for example, also there was no such thing as rotation as we know it today.
Back in the day, farming gold was harder. Also leveling and gearing was harder. The individual skill needed for PvE was not that high, although the hard part was to ogranise 40 people into working together and not fucking up. Nowadays in heroic raids u can hardly allow yourself to click the wrong spell which will fuck up your entire rotation and result in a serious dps loss.
One thing that i am really concerned about though, is that classes seem to be more and more alike nowadays. For example, every healer has HoT effects, strong direct heal, and instant cast heal. The difference between classes is just getting vague.