Jesus, Ironsides and Theo just absolutely /lawyering and dropping nuclear bombs of logic repeatedly against subjective wails of reproach.
This thread is COOKED.
I’ll post a video to this thread of my guild finishing Rag within 14 days after Classic launches.
Bookmarked.
Lol. Is it? We’re no further than where we started. And that’s the way it’ll be - forever. A lot of things are a guess. Blizzard are the gate keepers of data and calculations. Blizzard laughed at the accuracy of private servers. The Nost devs themselves said they guessed. This is fact, no matter how much reverse engineering or video watching is done. If private player want to defend that it is 99% accurate and that any inaccuracies are minor, that’s fine. If I spent 9 years of my life doing something, I’d be defensive too.
But, let’s not talk about “logic” or “subjective” - with logic insinuating private servers have the real values and what Blizzard has is secondary. I mean, c’mon. Really? I’ve had some stupid @#$% engineers reporting to me, where we have a client app and a heavy server component. They tested a server change by checking the client. Talk about /facepalm.
Let me make this very clear. MC is not easy because private servers messed up. Blizzard could make things different and it’ll still be cleared very quickly - with the importance of FR being the only time sink. MC will be easy. Period. Even if they do a re-tune as I want, MC will be easy. MC being easy - I don’t think anyone is arguing the fact. And that’s not the point.
But, things are an absolute steam roll now. If mages weren’t wearing greens and speccing arcane power because things were dying so fast, I think accuracy wouldn’t be as big a question mark as it is. The question is to what degree is it easier?
The answer will forever be a mystery. 1.12 wasn’t around long enough or taken seriously enough for people to know what what MC was like at the point in time. Anyone left that was seriously raiding was doing Naxx. Classic will be 1.12 numbers butchered through Retail. So who knows.
But, ultimately the very nature of the beast that are private servers and how things are done is wide open to skepticism. You have to at least acknowledge that. It’s understandable to be defensive, but let’s be realistic here. Knowing what we know, everything that has been said, the guessing, etc then turning around an saying private servers are the truth? That’s definitely going to get some heads scratching.
But at least this is a discussion, not some mud slinging fest that my biggest fans love to do on reddit. Those folks I hope stay the heck away from Classic as they’ll be nothing but toxic. But, unfortunately those are the ones that give private servers such a bad reputation.
So this thread, while interesting, can be as you put it, COOKED.
The post is off topic (yet extremely interesting and informing).
The original post suggested:
Classic raiding will be easy if you’re led by experienced private server leaders (talented leaders who recently mastered the raids on private realms). Otherwise you’re likely to see a challenge.
1 out of 10 people asserting what to expect with classic raiding have actually experience this themselves (while not being carried). Whereas the other 9 out of 10 are “know-it-alls”.
Ironsides, obviously one of the most experienced here, appears to solidly agree with point 1 but suggests there may not be any leaders left who are not pserver experienced. Please confirm or clarify.
Ironsides, three questions for you:
You mention 8 debuffs, 1.11 threat, and progressive itemization is a myth and won’t increase difficulty. Whereas what would make a real difference is stopping consumable abuse. What about starting with 1.1 talents/patch? Would this make a difference? Considering Ragnaros was beat in patch 1.3 and how many things changed after this patch. How would this affect the challenge?
As it stands, what’s your prediction on what percentage of raid guilds will clear MC in what time frame. i.e. 1% will beat Rag in under 10 days, 10% will beat Rag between 11 and 20 days etc…
Same question as above but with servers instead of guilds. i.e. what percentage of servers will beat Rag within what time frame.
Well not entirely true. My guild started raiding in July 06. I should also preface this with the fact, that about half had just left a different guild that was working on MC because guild drama. I don’t know how much of a difference that made, but we had rags down in about 3 weeks. At least I think it was 3 weeks. But as I said, this was a guild that was half made of up of people with a lot of epics.
let me answer your question by saying this
stock mangos is bugged to hell and back when it comes to Paladin spells/talents/abilities
it was literally a steaming pile of excrement to try and play on a stock mangos private server cuz you literally didn’t know what was working and what wasn’t - hence my efforts over the past several years to try and get things fixed
some notable examples of rampant bugs affecting Paladins in stock mangos
The one BENEFICIAL bug combo we had on stock mangos was unnerfed Seal of the Crusader + Consecration where we got the 40% melee haste and AP bonus without the “does less damage on each swing” bs. That combined with Consecration scaling with attack power meant that Consecration ticks hit really hard every second which made AoE fights and AoE tanking especially lulz for us.
All that being said, I can honestly tell you that Lightshope is as close as anyone has ever come to retail Vanilla WoW especially when it comes to Paladins. There are still a few lingering unknowns remaining only because I was unable to find concrete evidence one way or the other:
How long did it take for a clear? We stopped doing MC when we gained steam in AQ40. And it still took us a couple hours or so.
For the 1st time we downed him, I wanna say 5 hours… we had to stop that night we got him the next day.
You are so wrong it’s not even funny. I don’t have the time to entertain players who havent touched a mythic raid, but insist they know what it’s like. Mythic raiding and classic raiding are nothing alike. Classic will get steamrolled day 1 by any guild with top 500 guild level retail players.
The fights took so long because players were garbage in 2005. If you compare dps numbers on classic private servers to the original numbers, players have better builds, they have better itemization, they run more enchants and consumes, we understand the metagame now, whereas in 2005 it needed to be developed. In addition, the retail version of the game has been getting harder and harder on a mechanical level, requiring both better metagame knowledge and better personal mechanics. The skillset of a modern retail mythic raider is absolutely uncomparable to a classic raider. its comparing a war hardened veteran in his prime to a child.
I dunno, you clearly don’t have modern experience with both. You would agree with me if you did. I’m wasting my time even responding to this thread. Every raid will be cleared on the first lockout available, unless there is a hard gear check like 4hm.
That puts a few things into perspective. You guys were not all fresh out of the box 60’s that were only in dungeon blues.
Also it’s very important to note just how strong some of the quest gear, AB / WSG / AV gear, as well as the upgraded dungeon gear that did not exist in early vanilla actually is.
I am not even talking about Dungeon set 2, but the original set before the stats were changed and augmented.
Additionally the gear from Diremaul is quite strong, but not as strong as some like to make believe it is.
No one single change from Classic WoW was the straw that broke the camels back, but if you started raiding in Late Vanilla then you really missed out on the pre-naxx era of threat management.
I can assure you it was a very different experience before and after. Certain bosses in AQ went from extremely difficult to not so bad in a single patch.
I imagine that given the correct level of gear in MC and BWL the experience would be very similar to ours in AQ with the advent of Naxxramas.
Please remember I am not saying this single change alone did it all in, but it’s the combination that really killed the early raids and how they felt in their early days.
The threat management in 2005 was very different than the late 2006 World of Warcraft Vanilla.
Post June 2006 we went from a slow clip on most bosses to a total zerg rush that turned a lot of the encounters into a total joke.
Players then understood the meta-game then too. Maybe YOU didn’t but not everyone is the same.
Just because YOU the individual player or your guild improved does not mean others were so unaware of how to play an MMORPG.
That’s the point I have been trying to make for a very long time. It’s a point lost on a lot of players who’s first MMORPG experience is World of WarCraft.
Just to clarify, because I 100% agree with Drakonov, do you believe raids will be cleared easily? Most of us using the “better player” argument are solely doing so to get our MAIN point across: we believe raids will be a joke difficulty wise.
Anyone using the better player argument via skill / resources will gladly not care if you believe that statement if you agree with us on the difficulty raids will present for today’s player base.
And yet here you are.
You are right though: Mythic and Classic are NOTHING alike, and your ability to execute tank swaps while juggling three other mechanics is meaningless when you’re being wiped by an aura effect that you can’t avoid and aren’t equipped to deal with on day 1. You know better though, so good luck on the drakes and Nefarian without everybody wearing their Onyxia Scale Cloaks.
lolretail 
The Raids were not truly hard in Vanilla, but the play style, stats and strategy needed in early vanilla is VERY different from the play style, stats and strategy allowable in late Vanilla namely 1.11 and later.
Point is, the players did not get better, the raids got even easier. This is the point I am trying to establish here…
I never said at any point that Molten Core required an epitome of skill, it factually did not.
The point I am making is that the raid encounters Pre-naxx were designed for an entirely different mechanism of play.
Not sure where I am failing to make that point, but it’s just a fact of the situation at hand then and now… I played Vanilla from the start to the point it ended. I can tell you with out a shadow of a doubt that the raids got a lot easier as a result of 1.11.
It was a combination of several factors as I have pointed out earlier. The largest contributing factor is threat generation from the tank. The people who ignore that fact of data are just being silly.
Sure. By 0.1% of players. So what?
Disagree, because there’s as much or more hybrid prejudice as when Classic was live, and lots of people don’t seem to understand the difference between viable and optimal.
If people’s understanding is limited to “good” and “bad,” there’s literally no capacity to comprehend a meta which is made of more than top tier and trash tier.
There’s a lot of variance in between.
I’d wager on things yet to be discovered.
The skills and challenges required in Vanilla are different than Retail.
Retail, the difficulty is based on reaction time, memorizing mechanics, and rotations.
Classic, the difficulty was based on preparation, herding 40 cats, higher penalties, and resource management.
I would say Classic Raids are equivalent to Heroic Raids in Retail, for difficulty… with Last boss in AQ40, and half of Nax being mythic-ish level.
I also agree, players are no better or worse today as back then. People had access to the internet as well in vanilla lol. I think why people say this is because the demographic in Wow back then was much younger on average. And most of the people say this were also young back then. So yea, they were bad.
Yes they will be a joke if you are carried by experienced pserver vanilla raid leaders.
The question remains, will they be a joke for leaders who haven’t spent many times doing it already on pservers.
Most all video games become a joke after you play through them many times.
I for once agree with you. Haha. Let’s compare Vanilla to private servers, but retail?
But, I’m half kidding. Mythic + level raiding in Retail doesn’t seem to be anything to sneeze at.
It’ll be easy if you have competent players. If you take higher level raiders from Retail and have them raid Vanilla, they’ll clear content extremely as well. Vanilla wasn’t a hard game to figure out.
Edit: Gus, can you change your avatar for crying out loud? Hahaha.