I cleared most of Legion on Mythic. I raided on a private server through Naxx.
I was playing Warrior, the most complex dps spec in classic, and I was basically falling asleep during most fights.
So, as somebody who has high end retail experience, and recent high end classic experience, I can safely say that classic raiding is pretty trivial. The hardest part is not mechanics, it is not your class, it is not even the boss, it’s organizing 40 people to do the same basic tasks together. That’s the only hard part about classic raiding. There is no soak or die, there are very few vital wipe or die mechanics, maybe 1 per boss at most. There are many bosses with one or two abilities.
Caster classes have 1 button rotations, and maybe keep 1 debuff up. Melee did most of their damage through white hits, and had at most 4 core dps abilities. Druid is the only class with genuine complexity, but even if you play it to the best of your ability, you won’t pull numbers appropriate for the amount of effort you put in.
Any player able to clear normal mode raiding in retail will have no problems with classic raiding at all.
I could care less if some guy gets rich for hosting a good product; that’s not the issue.
The problem’s are far deeper than that… Paying off the Host so that China gold farmers can conduct business is only the beginning of their problems. It gets worse when GM’s are duping items and just spirals out of control when you also read about the players who’s characters get “Banned” and then those characters get sold on the real money store.
And that’s just a very light dose of the corruption, because things only get worse the deeper you look.
Regarding the “Accuracy” of the private servers; even their own developers have said “They’re fun servers, they are not accurate” (paraphrasing there).
That’s a fair assessment from my perspective. Can you get close as you have personally claimed? Sure, but there are a lot of things that will play very different even if you get close because that’s how sensitive the tuning in an MMORPG is.
It’s for the lack of better words balanced on the edge of a razor, and any deviation changes that balance greatly.
MC isn’t designed to be a hard raid, and no first tier in any expansion since has been a good measure of the difficulty. MC is a fun raid, and I hope people look forward to getting into it as a real 60 as much as I do.
On difficulty, there is a pattern here.
MC vs. AQ40
Karazhan/Gruul’s Lair vs. Serpent Shrine Caverns/Tempest Keep
Naxx 2.0 vs. Ulduar
…
Players are different now and have far more resources than they did at the time but they are still just players.
My guild was quick to get Nightbane on farm and it ranked us high for the server because tanking dragons is what I do. That same guild struggled so bad on Curator… it’s embarrassing but totally true lol.
It’s going to be interesting for sure to see how all these elite gamers deal with having to spend better than 50% of a fight doing mechanics and not just pew pew button mash for meters.
It’s just a classic case of agree to disagree. But at least we’re doing it respectfully - which is different than my bigger fans over on reddit who are immature and i hope keep their toxicity elsewhere. If you want to ignore all the things I’ve said, it’s all good. Whereas you can give me all the numbers you want, but at the end of the day, I’ll still see it as guess work and you’ll see it as fact. You believe that strongly in what pservers have accomplished and I can respect that.
As for what Blizzard said, it is what it is.
And I completely agree with you. Blizzard saying everything is completely wrong is in their best interest. They would never in hell say the private servers are an exact replica. lol.
At the end of the day, people will just tally up the check marks for or against private servers and decide. I just happen to be on the skeptical side. Because that’s just me by nature.
But surely, you can understand why people have question marks regarding private server accuracy?
I mean, we know they aren’t. Ignoring raiding for a moment. We know there are things in the private server that apparently don’t match what is true of vanilla, like the warlock demon despawning when summoning a new demon thing.
I would imagine that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think the private servers are great for an entirely different reason than the private server guys do… Because it got us here right now and for no other reason.
Without the private servers it feel that Blizzard would have never actually considered real Classic WoW, it would have been a constant push to their grave to continue developing a failed modern wow rather than go back and revisit what works.
I can appreciate the fans of the private servers, but I cannot agree with their remarks regarding accuracy. It’s just a simple fact that human memory is a little shaky and that’s proven by actual science.
I have attempted to explain just how PVE balance can go straight off the rails with even the smallest change and yet it’s apparently a very difficult point to make.
I do bid you my best wishes trying to explain such a simple yet apparently complicated concept.
It’s less a difficult point to make and more a point that some people don’t want to accept that tiny fractions can add up over time.
You hit something 100 times. You average 100 damage per strike.
100 x 100 = 10,000
Now increase that to 100.1 a mere tenth of a percent of difference.
100.1 x 100 = 10,010 damage.
Let bump the average up to 1000 per strike.
1000 x 100 = 100,000.
1001 x 100 = 100,100.
Small difference to be sure, but this is just a .1% difference over a small sample size. How many swings do you think the average furry warrior or rogue gets over the course of MC? Somewhere in the mid thousands at least, I imagine.
At .1% of a difference 1000 swings is enough to basically get an addition swing. Every .1% above that is an additional swing or hit to that. So .5% is 5 additional hits per 1000 hits. Now multiply this by damage dealer.
Let’s just go with a simplistic scenario of 25 dps doing an average of 1000 per hit.
At .1% difference, every 1000 hits is 25,000 additional damage combined. At .5% that’s 125,000 additional damage combined.
Now that the DPS are doing a smidge more damgae because the tank is doing a smidge more threat the healers can now use less Spirit and more +Healing.
In turn the healers have better output, and in return the DPS don’t need to use as much fire resist, in turn the healers can get away with even more aggressive stat loadouts.
As a result the tank can now start using DPS gear instead of proper prot plate because the healers is no longer starving for mana because the fight duration is shorter in turn the DPS can push harder becaues the tanks are now producing crazy threat…
The situation as you and I can see runs away from it self (stats available permitting) and I am almost 100% positive that this has indeed happened on private servers because its factually possible by getting little tiny things wrong.
The net result is a very different PVE experience from the actual Vanilla experience.
I know that people like to boast about how much better players are now; and sure they are very well practiced, but in truth the top guilds of Vanilla are likely better at that point in time than the vast majority of the Private server crowd, yes even the “Elites”.
I will quickly point out that Practice and for-knowledge does not equal skill, it’s just that… Practice and knowledge; this does not make you a “GREAT” player, it merely means you’re well rehearsed.
Great players can go nearly blind into a new game and adapt quickly and overcome the obstacles of that game or situation because of their natural talent, skills and abilities.
I know that the private community has a ton of practice, but I tell them plainly to not be shocked when the skill cap that they thought existed is shattered by players that were great before and will be great again.
Regarding skill caps, the best of the “warcraft movies” videos from Vanilla were produced by entertainers, not truly the best players.
Some were individually skilled, but the best of the stuff on WarCraft Videos from that era was fairly average run of the mill to below average play for that era.
And that’s where people confuse the skill of the time VS now days video; back then there was no class of professional gamers, streamers or Youtubers. None of that stuff existed and those videos were made by people who wanted to show you their fun and let you experience things from their perspective.
Unfortunately people now days forgot what those videos are about and conflate them with a testament of Vanilla skill when that was NEVER the case.
I’m pretty sure with a statement like this you don’t quite remember what vanilla raiding is like…?!?
No idea if you play BFA, i personally quit a month ago, but Conclave and Rastakhan on heroic / mythic difficulty have more mechanics than every fight in vanilla combined… and even then they’re not terribly difficult fights once understood
Did you play the same classic I played? Do you play the same retail I play? The fights are dramatically more complex in retail than in classic. Mechanics don’t make classic hard. Classic has very few boss mechanics.
Did you play Classic past MC? “Very few boss mechanics” suggests you didn’t.
Even some 20 man bosses like Jin’Do the Hexer and Buru the Gorger are almost entirely mechanics and unique to those encounters. There are numerous fights in late BWL and beyond that cannot be beaten without excellent raid execution.
The wing bosses in Naxx 1.0 are still some of the most difficult in the history of the game in terms of how long it took the best guilds in the world to get them down. Loatheb 1.0 is basically a Mythic boss as are the others.
Not really sure how we can respond because clearly anything we say you won’t believe. MC has LITERALLY no mechanics… The raid(s) are a complete joke in terms of difficulty. They WEREN’T back then when everyone was new to raiding / mmo’s / organization and itemization but now…
Naxx bosses kinda introduced early versions of actually needing a plan but they’re so basic compared to what players deal with on a weekly basis.
alright that i’ll agree with but many people weren’t. Despite the degree players / guilds were familiar with in dealing with the four raids, the difficulty will be a joke for any actual player with basic mechanical skills and understanding of how to press keys.
The difficulty, as stated before, is in 40 people gearing to “X” degree and showing up each week. (or even pre farming mats / world buffs if you will).
…you mean Naxx right? 90% of fights have zero mechanics in classic unless you think “decurse” is a mechanic.
Maybe my bar on what constitutes a mechanic is set too high.
Heigan=a boss fight with mechanics.
Mandokir=no mechanics.
I guess now that I think about it, most fights do have some sort of thing that differentiates them from typical tank/spank. My hangup on calling them mechanics is that they are often so simplistic that I’d hesitate to call them a “mechanical” fight.
And that’s totally fine to be skeptical (and I understand the question marks, which is why I’ve sourced all of the formulas, timestamped videos, used nonvarianced data).
I’ve played private servers since Feenix so I know how horribly scripted they can be. I knew at the time how terrible they were, trust me (no heartbeat resist was my favorite bug).
I don’t see anything realistically different from the original experience, player mindset aside (which is huge and I suspect is what is making people doubt the server’s veracity), in current private server raiding.
There are certain mechanics which are inconsequential to your experience. I’d place the demon despawning thing in the “no one would notice” category.
Things like reflectors working mid missile flight would be interesting to see the “real” mechanics of. I’m not sure if they worked in vurtne’s videos because of spell batching or not.
Of course memory is shaky. Which is why when I lay things out–it has numbers behind it. So you don’t have to rely on your memories. You can just do the math.
I know it can go straight off the rails with a small change (armor being wrong, resistances being wrong, etc).
The issue is–that’s not the root cause of it (why MC/BWL/AQ being wiped out as fast as possible). The root cause of it stems from raid design not taking consumables into effect until Naxxramas (that is, MC was designed to be cleared without consumable usage and is possible without consumable usage, consumables just offer an immense powerspike to your raid when everyone is using them comparable to jumping 1 to almost 2 raids worth of gear).
This is why people are having such a hard issue with accepting private servers as legitimate.
They see ragnaros dying 14 days post server launch. Mages and warlocks are wearing greens and killing Ragnaros, how can that be possible? Stack supreme power/arcane/shadow elixirs, wizard oils, DM buffs, felwood consumables, and prepotting fire prot pots make a player just hitting level 60 have the damage potential of a player well into BWL.
When I played, just about every high end guild used full consumables for just about everything. This meant everything died. Very quickly. And it wasn’t because the content was undertuned, it was that everyone used consumables. And we never saw this in 04-06 until Naxxramas–I can point you to a thread on EJ if you want that discusses the issues of consumable usage in the context of raiding.
Ah finally, some math from you.
This is a flawed argument and the one that the majority of people arguing in favor of 1% haste over +8 str librams makes.
Reason being–do you know how much overkill goes into mobs? All those frostbolts/shadowbolts that just never make it? All that extra execute damage? Thousands of damage. Wasted
Small fractions get lost in the grand scheme of things because we simply aren’t fighting long enough in the majority of encounters for them to add up to anything significant.
If you’re looking at Molten core as a single encounter with 10 billion hp or however much the combined HP is for all the trash/bosses/etc, your logic would carry weight, but it does not.
I’ll do you one better by looking at an individual boss. I don’t think it’s relevant or even anything but misleading to look at an overall raid as if it’s a single encounter.
Take a standard Naxx raid looking to kill Patchwerk.
Patchwerk needs a minimum of 9,166 raid DPS in order to die before his 7 minute enrage timer.
Standard Naxx raids take about 26 dps to the raid, so each DPS will need to pull an obscenely low 352 dps in order to break Patchwerk before he enrages. The reality is they’ll need to do even less because I’m assuming the tanks are doing zero damage. But the tanks are not the point of it.
So 26 dps doing 352 dps each take exactly 420 seconds (7 minutes) to kill Patchwerk, just before he enrages. What about if each dps suddenly did 100 more dps? (roughly 22% increase)
452*26=11,752
3850000/11752=327 seconds to kill with the 22% boost. Incredible.
The first raid would still have roughly 852,000 hp left/~1.5 minutes on patchwerk by the time the 2nd killed him.
“Yeah, 100 dps is significant. What is your point?” I’m getting to it.
“I have 669+dmg. Pots add an additional 39% increase of +damage. It’s even more for people with less gear”
Here’s my point:
You all think private servers are wrong because bosses go down like flies. You think the root of the problem comes from these .1% or whatever muckups that severely influence the duration of the fights. “muh armor”.
You don’t understand that the private server players are all using consumables. All of the consumables. All of the buffs. This allows them to bypass mechanics. This is what makes you think private servers are poorly done. Players are min/maxing everything and destroying everything because these consumables and buffs scale exponentially far harder than your “well maybe armor is off by 100 or maybe the bosses should resist spells 1% more often” suspicions.
Here’s what does more for tank’s threat than anything. Gearing for it. Using dps consumables. Elixir of giants/brute force/juju power/scrolls all add significant threat to a tank. Every +crit/hit adds threat to a tank. Which means the dps can go harder. Which means the healers can gear for +healing over mp5.
Actually, let’s tackle this mp5 issue right now since I’m on it. A shaman post for context about gear setups and mp5.
+healing does less for mana conservation than it once did due to downranking changes, but it still can be more or less converted into some equivalent amount of mana regen since where +healing shines is generally in maximizing healing/mana rather than healing/time. There isn’t a boss out there that puts out enough damage to require max-rank spam, so whether the +healing means downranking or fewer heals cast per minute, there is a mana savings. Based on the HealPoints and itemization formulas, I’m going to say that 6 +healing = 1 mana/5 for easy approximations.
Using that conversion ratio, we’re left with the following:
Tier1: 119 mana/5
Tier2: 167 mana/5
Tier3: 277 mana/5
Unsurprisingly, tier 3 is a large step above the rest. That’s good. Now, how do consumables fit into the picture? For a healer, let’s assume the following non-exotic consumables:
Nightfin Soup = 8 mana/5
Mageblood Potion = 12 mana/5
Brilliant Mana Oil = 12 mana/5 and 25 +healing = 16 mana/5
Major Mana Potions = 1800 mana every 2 minutes = 75 mana/5 (!!)
Dark/Demonic Runes = 1200 mana every 2 minutes = 50 mana/5
Assuming all of the above used, I get a net benefit of 161 mana/5.
I think you can see the implications of the above without me having to explain a whole lot else about it since you touch on it just afterwards. I already made a thread on this exact issue with some more in depth discussion. Kinda funny that a certain poster from that thread still takes issue with me.
Again, it’s not little tiny things that are wrong. It’s player mindset that has changed dramatically. This mindset regarding consumable usage leads to:
Eh, watching some of the older videos, I’d have to disagree with you. They’re better than the majority yes, but not the elite poopsockers. Not by a longshot.
Good, it was getting crowded up here.
In closing:
Rag dies in 2 weeks post server launch. The math is there. The poopsockers are there. Unless Blizzard addresses consumable usage, this will happen. Maybe not on your server, but definitely by some welfare euroneets somewhere.
Not to take anything away from modern expansions, but the other side of it that everyone forgets is what players can actually do in Classic. All I have ever raided as is a Warrior Tank, MC to Icecrown Citadel Heroic so that is what I know.
In Vanilla as a Warrior tank I do not have Spell Reflect, Intervene, Heroic Leap and I cannot Charge while in combat. My only mobility in combat is Intercept which is on a 30 second cooldown, causes a rage dump twice (Defensive Stance > Berserker Stance > Defensive Stance), causes me to take more damage and do less threat while in Berserker Stance. God forbid I get unlucky and the mob’s auto-attack swing timer lands before I can get back into Defensive Stance…
Taunt (Defensive Stance), Mocking Blow (Battle Stance) are melee range only, and almost everything that needs a tank in raids is immune to taunt effects anyway. They are also immune to Disarm.
I rely heavily on Thunderclap and Demoralizing shout for my time to live and to smooth out incoming damage. One of the biggest threats to my raid is that I will not have a charge of Shield Block up and take a Crushing Blow that puts me in the dirt and (remember Threat tables, no taunt etc.) is an automatic wipe.
My big defensive cooldowns (Shield Wall and Last Stand) are on a 30 minute CD. Every attempt I may several times have to decide whether to blow them to save it, or wait so they are available next time. Raid bosses in Vanilla tend to hit really hard, not all do but on several if the healers are not heal bombing the damage to the tank will simply kill them.
I’m not going to get into the weeds on specifics of individual encounters, but those who think there are no mechanics are in for a rude shock when they actually play. Nobody has put out the kind of effort required to down an advanced boss that was commonplace in late Classic content since. That is a fact.
So kids, What does overkill, spells that don’t go off/hit, and execute damage have to do with you hitting 1000 times for an average amount of damage? Not a damn thing. It doesn’t matter if as a mob dies it’s overkilled or some spells don’t get off. That’s what an average is for and only counting the hits that land are for.
Now yes, for pretty much every encounter you aren’t going to hit it 1000 times. But let’s really think about it now. 25 dps. Take a boss that has 1 mill hp. We’re going to reduce the average hit to 100 to make the numbers more in line with Classic. 100 damage each means it takes 10,000 combined hits to kill a boss with 1 mill hp.
10,000 hits at .1% less armor/resistances is an extra 1000 damage. It’s not a huge difference no. But Remember this is just DPS we’re talking about. .1% less armor means the tanks are doing additional damage as well. Additional damage means additional threat and that the boss dies faster.
The boss dies faster and the tanks produce more threat, means healers can were less mana regen and more +healing and the DPS can wear better DPS gear, etc. etc.
The funny thing here is that this still doesn’t prove my point wrong. It just exacerbates the problem on private servers. Between Williams and I we’ve already proven how much of a difference being .1% off on armor and resistances can be. Throwing in a ton of min/maxing is just going to make that difference far. far greater.
The .1% difference goes from .1% to being 10% just because you put in all this effort to get every conceivable buff and debuff to make you as strong as possible. And this is assuming the way damage is calculated is done 100% perfectly throughout the entire process on private servers.
10 x (15+3)/ 4 - 3 = ?
10 x (15+3)/1 =
10 x (18)/1 =
180/1 = 180
10 x (15+3)/ 4 - 3 = ?
10 x (18)/4 - 3 =
10 x 4.5 - 3 =
45 - 3 = 42
How do you figure it causes a rage dump twice? Aside from the 10 rage the intercept uses.
The threat is a nonissue. You might get one autoattack swing in that will be calculated at an 80% level.
There are no mobs or instance bosses that will crush you for being in zerker stance for one attack. Raids, sure, there’s a couple that RNG can screw you over with. But why do you need to intercept when you’re MTing?
If you’re raiding, you shouldn’t be keeping thunderclap up. You have OTs for that. Likewise with demo, not that I think demo is very good at “smoothing out incoming damage”. I’ll reserve my judgement on it though as I don’t recall coming across any real math behind it or at least it’s not on my mind currently.
Why would you not have a charge of shield block up? Most bosses don’t have an instant attack. I wanna say the first one you should actually worry about getting hit outside of SB is broodlord lashlayer. Remember, you get 2 blocks every 5 seconds, and bosses swing speed is 2.5 seconds.
Last stand’s 15 minutes, but sure, I agree that it’s one of those “oh balls” CDs that should only be reserved for enrage phases. Last stand you can use on just about every boss.
The bosses do not hit that hard for what it’s worth till AQ. You can do quite a lot with stoneskin potions and stacking inspiration/ancestral healing/etc.
I re-edited my post. My gripe is with calling fights “mechanical” because to me that should be reserved for fights that it’s possible to mess up if you aren’t lobotomized.
Oh i didn’t fully read Kolben’s point here till now. This makes no sense, what do the thousands of guilds each week do progressing through heroic and mythic?!? The percent of players that completed raids in classic is very small compared to today’s content to player ratio but that hardly correlates difficulty wise.
In regards to mechanics, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=Br1PNfG2C5w is actual mechanics. It’s just King Rastakhan used as an example, a fairly easy fight once you understand what each group has to do but that video alone has more mechanics than entire raids in vanila…