It just has become very very tightly managed. Mythic Archimonde caused people to create a beam of death between themselves, and it selected multiple folks, so without an addon to rapidly lay out safe and not safe places to stand, you’d lose most of your raid in Phase 1. There just wasn’t any real way to guarantee solid positioning with all the other required movement and nonsense in that overwrought fight.
I haven’t done BfA, but folks I know that Tank it regularly have all more or less described the same thing: Tanking is now all about being EXACTLY where you need to be, either to control mobs or to position yourself for debuffs or w/e. So right now Monks are kings (for mobility) along with Death Knights (for insane mob positioning).
That’s all they’ve really been able to do, make everything that could be a problem be an EXTREME problem by having even the slightest hesitation. Contrast some of the shenanigans I had to pull off Tanking in WoD compared to my online-offline internet that still let me kill and successfully survive Heroic Lich King 25man. It really wasn’t until Cata that some of the boss mechanics just became rather ludicrous ‘YOU SHALT DIE’ if you messed them up. It was a rather rude awakening for anyone the first time they pulled Heroic Halfus, even though he wasn’t that hard at all, but just the sheer amount of damage thrown out at the start.
The 18 versions of every fight is a bit tedious, but Mythics have really stepped it up in terms of both fun and difficulty expression. Some definitely miss the mark, but there are just some fantastic examples. Mythic Blackhand and Heroic Lei Shen are just top notch encounters in my book. Everything is rather intuitive, the DPS checks are ultra tight, and it really does require near perfection of play to compensate for all the clashing mechanics.
Contrast that with nonsense like Heroic Dark Animus or Heroic Spine of Deathwing where the cheesy mechanic just sucked all the fun out of doing it, or the 25min needles-under-my-nails nonsense that was Heroic Ragnaros.
This easily, especially if you’re a Druid for that sexy 20% Stamina from Heart of the Wild.
I can see the appeal of tightly tuned fights and players who want to challenge themselves in an extreme way. The problem occurs when that accomplishment is given a reward. As far as I can recall, higher ilvl gear, along with cosmetics like mounts, has always been a reward for higher difficulty tiers. I think that’s a massive problem for the game.
If the 4 difficulties are here to stay, the ilvl scaling needs to stop after heroic and a different type of reward needs to be associated with mythic clears. This still leaves mythic+ dungeons as a huge issue for ilvl bloat.
The subsequent tiers are scaled such that you aren’t going to be hanging on to the previous loot for long (IIRC Normal next-tier was similar to prior Mythic, Heroic was better, and Mythic was way way better). I currently cannot stand that I’m still clearing MC for bindings and BWL for the off chance someone gets a Rejuv Gem or DFT.
So is it just the amount of power difference between start of expansion and end of expansion?
You might be misunderstanding. Classic is the easiest iteration of WoW when it comes to raiding, period. There is nothing wrong with this. Go have fun and stop worrying about it being “EZ” or “HRD”.
Yes. The amount of stat squishes leading into a level squish is a result of adding 4 tiers of ilvl with each new raid. Legion to BFA was a big stat squish, and then within one expansion, we’re getting a level squish to bring numbers back to a reasonable place; in two consecutive expansions, the devs have had to suck numbers out the game from the ilvl bloat.
The content itself isn’t the issue. All the technical problems pop up in the rewards.
This is largely due to the need for near exponential growth in gear stats to be meaningful upgrades. Getting another 5-6 Strength when you only have 150 is rather big. Getting 5-6 Strength when you have 850 is rather lame. This impacts both the fun of getting better gear (oh boy I got a whopping 1.2 DPS increase from the Big Bad Sword of God Slaying) as well as the tuning of the harder encounters. Without the huge jump in Armor/Stamina and secondaries, Heroic Lich King would have been much closer in damage output to say Heroic Anub’arak, meaning progressing would have steamrolled over him rather swiftly.
But it is definitely a two-edged sword. You have the weirdness of “deleveling” or getting weaker despite being… stronger?.. from expansion to expansion, and you have some encounters so grossly overtuned in the stat department that without the biggest exponential gains from the newest stuff, you simply cannot even try to compete.
I understand us not doing 25m DPS at this stage of the game, as it gets Diablo III levels of silliness. Heroic 25m Lei Shen had just shy of 2 billion HP, and I want to say Mists saw us getting some stat squishing as well.
Yeah that was a thing with Garrosh’s fight being designed into 4+ stages because of his health.
In heroic 25-player mode, the damage players are required to deal to Garrosh across all phases - his effective total health - is greater than the largest number the game can store with the 32-bit integers it uses, about 2.1 billion. His multiple self-heals allow this limit to be effectively exceeded without any re-coding of the game engine. The undesirable conditions this software limitation imposes on encounter design are a significant technical reason for the stat squish taking effect with the Warlords of Draenor expansion.
It’s also one of the reasons that they had to make pvp dmg do otherthings than what was shown in PVE that caused so much anger in BFA for arenas and such.
The cleanest way to do this would simply be award mounts or titles for mythic raiding only like some other MMO’s do and cap gear at an item level per tier, which helps with stat bloat.
It still allows people that actually enjoy super hard raiding to have fun at that level but it weeds out all the people that are their only for the better purples to out scale everyone.
It also allows for easier PVE tuning from the dev side is they know the maximum they can expect in item level wise going into tiers.
Except this has way more to do with Itemization then it does anything else.
You realize that life giving gem scales more than halfway through TBC as BiS right?
And that scarab brooch and life giving gem had to be nerf’d to not work because they were just that good.
Same thing with the Thunderfury, the reason its good is not its DPS in TBC, its that it has a unique attack speed slow that stacks with thunderclap on raid bosses so it gives a massive overall dmg reduction over the course of a fight.
It also gave a uniqness to loot instead of everyone looks the same just a different color, based on ilvl of the gear.
Vanilla to TBC itemization isn’t even the same ballgame, let along ballpark, as the extreme stats obtained in later expansions that necessitated stat squish. I’ll be using Mark of Tyranny through Karazhan until I acquire the better raw Stamina trinkets from reputation rewards and complete the DMF deck. The unique, lack of foresight, scaling stuff that exists right now is a typical symptom of Vanilla and only Vanilla scaling problems.
Look at relics right now, notably the ones that alter costs or cast time by a significant degree. None of those stay the same because they absolutely can’t without remaining exceptionally powerful or outright BiS. Idol of Brutality literally lasts until I get the Black Temple Mangle-proc idol, despite the fact it gets changed from reduced Rage cost to increased damage.
Vanilla itemization was, frankly, junky and ill-conceived. Developers had to learn rather quickly that by giving too good of a bonus or effect or whatever, they risked everything else becoming default obsolete. Regardless, the silliness of Vanilla itemization didn’t continue for long through TBC and by Wrath it was nearly entirely eliminated. Trinkets continued to be fantastic and hard to give up sometimes, but there were always an abundance of excellent options, and tying most trinkets to secondary stat ratings (which had definitive limits), they placed necessary shelf-lives on them.
Hardly anything unique about everyone wearing the same clown-suit. Paladins aren’t exactly looking very unique in Classic with their green shoulders, teal robe (either the 5man or AQ40 variety), and some kind of cloth hat (turban, pimp hat, or biretta). Really it comes down to whether you’re rocking a Lok’amir or a giant scarab-themed baby rattle.
Plus, most of the meta-setting/breaking gear comes in the form of a trinket, something no one can see. The guy rocking DFT and Jom Gabbar looks exactly the same as the guy rocking HoJ and Royal Seal.
IT is easy if you do your home work. If you don’t, then yeah, you probably will struggle a bit.
One good raid leader can carry some of the worst players in the game. I’m not sure who you’re talking about when you say you’re watching people fail, but chances are you’re not presenting the actual context of what you’re viewing.
The game is hard for egotistical guild leaders/raid leaders, who don’t really put the effort in to learn the things they need to know and have poor communication skills. But it’s still easier than LFR in retail for anyone who puts minimal effort in.
This specifically is more about mega servers than anything, and how massive amounts of the population farm end game.
What I mean by that is you look at a piece of gear and how it looks on someone and you KNOW what the piece of gear is. That’s almost impossible in retail even before transmog because they re-use armor tiers constantly and only re-color a lot of them.
You can tell how far someone gets in raid tiers by looking at armor, thats not really a thing in retail and hasn’t been forever cause everyone looks the same.
I mean that wasn’t expressly true. A few tiers had very similar looks (the ICC tier for Rogues, the Ulduar tier for Druids), but in Cata everything had rather vivid color differences between the sets. In TBC there was either PvP or PvE sets, but very few people were rocking one or the other in the opposite role.
Once xmog came out, sure, all bets were off, but by then we had already seen the rise (and fall) of GearScore and other rating/achievement style grading addons. Also, you’re talking to a Druid, who finally got updated colors on his Bear/Cat form when we got a barbershop option based on our main character’s hair color. I’ve never looked like anything and it took until Legion before we finally got anything neat.
“But muh progressive visuals” will forever fall on deaf ears.
/shrug
Mythic gear (and prior Heroic gear) often received unique models and twists on the gear that existed. PvP gear was separated from PvE gear. But also, sometimes the models just look like utter garbage and don’t fit together well. The reason we got all the semi-drab looking metal/leather looks in Northrend is because everyone, and I mean everyone, whined and joked about the clown-suit nonsense.
Plus, having “walking about town” outfits has been a thing since Vanilla. Even before xmog became a thing I had some items I just enjoyed the look of and felt they were rare enough to not want to get rid of, like my first Draconic Maul.
But none of this really has anything to do with the problems of difficult raid encounters, progression, stat management, etc.
It’ll be easy for those top private server speedrunning guilds that have seen the content a million times before. But for pugs and guilds that never cleared Classic Naxx before I reckon it could be a challenge. I am concerned some of the raid groups I have played with will ever see Kel’Thuzad, even if they give us 6 months before TBC is launched. Though I suppose that’s Classic for you.
they were never intended to emulate action combat games. especially not tab-target MMOs. There are plenty of memorable easy fights in WoW. Like Mr Smite.