An interesting comparison of raiding BFA and Classic

Community General Discussion
1

Classic raiding appears to be as, or more popular, at a glance as BFA does.

The latest Raid completion data, Nylotha, in BFA sourced from Warcraft Logs

Mythic: 141
Heroic: 7251
Normal: 6025

This is how many guilds have gone full completion and uploaded logs. There is most definitely overlap, but even assuming for some reason that each guild is completely different with 0 people doing more than one difficulty level, that comes out to 13,417 guilds completing and uploading logs to Warcraft Logs.

Same site, BWL completion

13,832.

Considering that in classic, raid size is 40 man and in BFA it typically ranges from 15-30, though usually on the smaller end, it appears that Classic actually has a larger raiding population than Retail does.

This bodes well for the future of Classic, and WoW as a whole IMO. People love this game and continue to play it just as much as they play the newest version of it.

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2

To add to this, raiding has never been as meaningless as BfA.

No tier sets.

Mythic+, PvP, and world content all providing alternative gearing paths to raiding up through 470 item level.

For season 4 and at the time of my posting. raider.io has tracked 5,068,600 mythic+ dungeon runs.

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3

Raiding rewards BiS azerite, guaranteed corruption and some of the best weapons/ trinkets.

There is no world content that rewards 470. 5 masks do once a week. PvP requires 2100+ cr before it starts rewarding 470 gear.

Classic is easier. By such a degree they aren’t comparable. Most of bwl is easier than retail LFR. WoW was always the casual mmo. You are surpised that a casual playerbase plays the easiest version?

4

I lumped visions in with world content being that it is soloable.

Visions and the weekly chest are by far the easiest method of obtaining 470 gear.

Also, we are comparing to classic where the gear is from raids nearly exclusively or a soul crushing 3 month grind of 10+ hours per day of honor farming.

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This isnt about whether one version of the game is better or worse than the other. Dont want to go down that path, it only breeds tribalistic negativity.

Just noting that the Classic version appears to be just as popular and enjoyed with the playerbase(Many of us play both BFA and Classic), as retail is.

6

They are once a week. Visions don’t reward trinkets, rings, or weapons. It’s months to get reasonable gear using that only.

Your best option for gear is a combination of raiding, keys, visions, and pvp. It’s light years better than raid or die.

7

It’s a tricky comparison.

In classic raiding is basically the endgame for character power progression because the alternative path is the most brutal grind ever put in WoW.

In retail raiding is just one of many end game power progression methods, and arguably the one with the highest barrier of entry.

And there is also much more pugging in retail for normal/heroic.

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That’s kind of my point.

The playerbase isn’t funneled into raiding for gear progression unlike classic so it’s not a great comparison.

I would argue mythic+ is pretty popular given that Raider.io has logged over 5 million keys ran so far in season 4.

9

Of course its more popular. Its capable of being completed by less skilled players.

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10

I don’t know if that proves anything. Classic raids have little to no mechanics, so more people can run them easier.

11

The tier isn’t over for a lot of guild while raids get cleared in less than a day in Classic. So you can’t really compare completion, you’d have to compare completion when this tier is over.

Moreover we all know that the difficulty of Classic raids ain’t really that high, so you’d have to compare with normal or even LFR numbers. And ain’t nobody logging that. Logging in Classic is mostly done because killing the bosses isn’t good enough, so you gotta show off another way. They even made rules for speedruns on warcraftlogs for Classic.