Not everything was viable, but to put things in perspective my guild was a US top 20 guild. We had a warlock who insisted on rping firelock. He only casted fire spells. He wore tier 3 to black temple because he refused to degrade himself with nonprestigious loot. And he was in almost every raid. That sort of thing would never fly today.
The bar wasn’t very high. The game wasn’t hard, and the culture wasn’t as sweaty.
That proves the point, no? The content was that easy and people still wanted a warrior tank and a priest healer, etc., etc. when the content didn’t require it, there was still a meta. Especially in pugs.
Content is more difficult today, and meta is still looked for. Meanwhile, I’m over here timing +10s on my 168 priest because, while meta is more effective, it’s certainly not required.
I recently ran a +10 with no healer. We carried an alt through, and we just off healed some when we had to, mostly just destroying bosses in a few seconds.
You can still play all crazy if you want to. Nothing has changed.
These days people are a lot more uptight.
Just out of curiosity, where are you getting these stats from?
Everyone knew the kiting strat. I don’t even know how I knew it, it was almost like part of the collective unconscious I guess.
This dude is the reason we got a aoe cap and trash dungeons this xpac.
The 5-man I was doing when everyone was doing 10-man on scholo and strat was my Vanilla experience. Of course, there were lots of new players. But I had a veteran group back then whom I grouped up to Naxx40.
The difficulty back then is that most trash mobs in there have a patrolling mobs. When you mistakenly pull a group, you could aggro the patrol that would aggro a second trash group and it would overwhelm your group. Becoz I was the tank and I was the one who do the pulls, every pull was a precise with no patrol pulling. And we also use hiding on wall technique to pull Caster mobs that is rarely use by majority. WHen you do 10-man, precise pulling of mobs is not needed. But with 5-man, it has to be done precisely everytime. Of course, dungeon loots only being shared by 5 people instead of 10 is way better. That separated us from majority. My group were still the same group when we reached Naxx40.
Again, 5-man become trivial when you get raid gear. It doesnt matter if you mistakenly pull a patrol when you are overgeared. On M+, you cant really overgear it as there are always higher keys that match your gear level.
Raider io.
Like on my realm. It says I am at 33rd out of 86142. I havent even done M+15s and I am already at 33rd place. There are 0.03% above me out of 86142 people on my realm on Mythic+.
Well said OP. You are far from alone!
Especially if you factor in the people that played for a month and quit SL. Very few like this stuff. But there is a powerful financial incentive for Blizzard to keep at it since whales who buy carries are more valuable than ordinary subs.
Nah I like the timers makes you actually have to try
Source please.
J/k. More people m+ than pvp and raid combined.
Or the infinitely spawning Gargoyles in Strat.
Every activity has its participation propped up by rewards…
You think the mage tower would have been popular if it gave nothing?
You think people would raid it it didn’t give gear?
Players have changed.
The expectation of raiders in classic, despite content being a joke except 2 Naxx bosses, is to run around the world stacking multiple world buffs then setting up summoners to get people into the raid and log out immediately until ready so the raid can use world buffs.
Along with stacking as many consumables as possible.
…Man, was MoP really ten years ago? Almost. And yeah. It’s been a really long time since I’ve actually enjoyed group content. =(
These days it’s a lot more common. If I go into a group, I’m basically expecting to have a 15-20% chance of seeing DPS pull on purpose. And it’d probably be higher if I weren’t rushing as fast as I can to try and pre-empt it.
And the thing is, it doesn’t cause wipes. The mobs don’t hit hard enough to really threaten DPS. The healer’s mana isn’t particularly stressed by having to heal the DPS. Why wouldn’t they pull? The game lets them get away with it and they want to go fast. It’s a predictable outcome.
I guess I’m somehow lucky enough that in the hundreds of m+ I have ran across four characters that hardly happened at all. Like maybe twice I can remember a tank leaving due to DPS pulling.
Well, yeah now we’re discussing two different game modes. Maybe the reason you don’t see it often in Mythic+ is because Mythic+ has had its difficulty tuned high enough that the DPS feel discouraged from pulling.
Which is basically what I want from 5mans. When people say 5mans, they don’t mean mythic+. They mean like, regular/heroic dungeons. Right now 5 mans are tuned so poorly that I can forget to bring my shield to a dungeon and still tank it fine with most of my so-called “important” tanking abilities disabled.
I think that encourages people to dick around and do stupid stuff more often.
M+ is the only game mode that actively rewards failing a game mode with mythic raid quality loot.
They were a bucket of cold water in the face, that’s for sure. The level of challenge was great, but the issues (for me) were as follows:
it can be hard, but it doesn’t need to be “this dungeon will take at least 2 hours” hard
the orbs to propel every crafting profession forward were tied to the successful completion of the heroics (and only 1 person got the orb).
Remade Deadmines was an absolute blast (literally and figuratively). Those dungeons forced me to become a better player.