Almost everyone who got this boss while live (pre-2.0) did the following.
Dire Maul tribute runs for the entire raid group to get the 2 hour buffs from the guards.
Capture all PVP towers in Eastern Plaguelands.
Turn in an Onyxia and Nefarian head in Orgrimmar (with raid present).
Come fully stacked with Flask of the Titans, Shadowpots, Whipperoot Tubers, bandages, every scroll you can think of etc. Shadowpots took hours of farming, very labor intensive.
Each heal cast puts a 1 minute debuff on the caster that prevents all healing spells. What heals there are basically had to go to the tank. 40 people had to not screw up their pot/bandage/consumable rotation for 6 minutes while managing the spores and putting up very good DPS. Good RNG for the tank to not take too much damage.
The realities of it all meant you basically got a couple shots at him per week.
Won’t even go into all of the one shot mechanics, LOS and other things that actually exist in Naxx 1.0 and how difficult latter AQ40 actually is, even the trash is super hard in spots.
True this is a good example but the examples are SO few and far between that even then why are these basic maneuvering / individual buffs (part of fight) difficult to mess up? Mind you Naxx IS the hardest raid in classic but compared to the expansions since it’s just the toilet paper we use to wipe with…
I’m also going at this from a better player mentality i suppose. Yes player’s / guild’s who aren’t prepared for “X” fight / boss mechanic will inevitably die.
The whole point isn’t arguing that there is a difficult boss here and there but that the raids, even through naxx, are WORLDS easier to overcome than today’s content. As you mentioned the difficulty is in pre farming world buffs and consumables, not that actual (once mechanically difficult) difficulty of that boss.
It means that the boss/mob was going to die in 20 seconds regardless of them having .1% less armor.
Are you actually a troll? The average hit is 100? And that’s classic? Just go with DPS and time to kill. That way we don’t have to imagine anemic warriors swinging their axes for 100 damage.
You don’t understand how armor scales or even works with damage. 0.1% less armor does not equal 0.1% more damage, not at all.
It’s not a linear equation, it’s an exponential one. https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Damage_reduction?oldid=323458
Let’s take a standard 3700 for a bosses’ armor. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3700%3D(x)%5B(400%2B85(60))%2F(100-x)%5D
3700 armor nets you about 40% damage reduction from all attacks.
Let’s just nerf the boss. 10% less armor for him. He now has 3330 armor.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3330%3D(x)%5B(400%2B85(60))%2F(100-x)%5D
Now we have 37% damage reduction.
Say a dps does 300 dps with 100% armor penetration (boss has no armor).
With 40% reduction, he’ll do 180 dps.
With 37%, he’ll do about 189 dps. A whopping 9 dps/5% increase.
Nerfbat again. Bluebies can’t handle the game. 20% less armor. 2960 armor for him now. Same 10% increment. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2960%3D(x)%5B(400%2B85(60))%2F(100-x)%5D
Now we have 35% reduction. Notice how it’s only 2% less this time?
With 40% reduction he’ll do about 180 dps.
With 35%, he’ll do about 195 dps. A whopping 15 dps/7.6% increase.
That same 10% armor nerf only netted 2.6% gain as opposed to the initial one.
I’ve never seen someone be so consistently wrong about the game yet continue to fight me on just about every topic. Should’ve just changed your forum toon when I called you out for “downranking damaging abilities” as if that was a thing.
You didn’t prove anything. Your knowledge of vanilla WoW is flat out wrong in just about every single topic I’ve seen you post in. The only thing remotely true to classic WoW about you is that you embody the huntard stereotype.
Great strawman to end the post. Really loved it.
Let’s try this .1% less armor business.
3663 armor.
39.97% damage reduction versus 40.21% damage reduction
300 damage at zero armor.
180.09 vs 179.67=0.42 dps difference…when multiplied out over 26 players…wow. You know what you’re right. That’s almost 11 dps. Gamebreaking. Earthshattering. Why, that 11 dps stretched over 7 minutes is 4,620 damage! That’s almost an entire half second of the raid fighting!! And the tank can do half a threat per second more!!! He’ll NEVER LOSE AGGRO!
I’m not arguing that modern content isn’t immensely difficult, I’m making the case that the original content in late stages is brutal and punishing and the best guilds in the world struggled to clear it.
Yes your statement is true. Vanilla and to a lesser degree BC raiding is heavy on preparation needs. Gearing, resist gear, consumables, et al.
In my personal opinion the original Gothik the Harvester is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in a game. Pre-nerf Mu’ru is often given that title, but for me it is GTH. The room for error from good players that know what they are doing and trying their best is exhausting.
What fans of live tend to do is compare Mythic difficulty late-content against MC, BWL, and even ZG/AQ20. That… is bullcrap. The second half of AQ40 and nearly all of Naxx 1.0 are worlds apart form “You are the bomb!”. So I reject the idea that “well it’s a few late stage bosses”. The early content in any expansion is fairly simple, that’s World of Warcraft.
Not sure why I was quoted in this, but Loatheb just requires a DBM configured properly in order to survive. He’s a braindead encounter as long as your healers know whats up. There was much more difficult fights in Naxx than this guy
edit: Like you said, Gothik.
Oh I only used pre farming to give you SOME merit in an argument…
It’s difficult to refute you because you’re so delusional with how easy the content truly is. The raids will be a joke with good people. Yes the best guilds struggled to clear the content back then but today’s AVERAGE guild will be just fine.
I don’t quite know what kind of player YOU are but for player’s who are 1) good at the game and 2) prepared, the raids will be a joke.
You do realize that the best and most successful guilds in the history of the game no longer play?
Nihilum, Method, Paragon, Death and Taxes et al?
Guilds full of ElitistJerks contributors, theorycrafters, the original raid mod developers, Tankspot authors, MLG caliber, multi-rank 1 arena players, world firsts, server firsts etc. Players invited to play at Blizzcon on stage in front of the world. You mean those guys?
I mean seriously. I’m sure you and your friends are really good, have fun. Good luck out there bud.
That’s exactly MY point! The best guilds back then WERE very good but NOT compared to players today. You’re not even looking at mechanics / itemization / and raid composition but hanging on the whim that “because it was hard for the best 13 years ago we stand no chance! (that it will still be hard today)”.
I’ve been rank 1 in arena 3 times and have missed it 3 times by 5-10 points. PvP and pve is vastly different but the point is the fights WERE difficult for the guilds and players at the time but today’s players are WORLDS better than what we used to be. And if you’re not… so help you God
You could be right. I think one possible outcome is that a couple of high end guilds from live come to Classic to make their case and we’ll see how it goes. I’m relatively certain that at least one of the old guilds like Nihilum comes back for the same. That will be fun to watch if it happens.
@kolben it has nothing to do against you or anyone else who argues the difficulty of vanilla raiding. Yes back in the day they were nightmarish (especially a few specific bosses) but the point most pro “easy” contenter’s are trying to use is how greatly player knowledge / helpful resource guides / skill has evolved in addition to raid difficulty expectation.
We’re not trying to devalue the raids, they had their place in history, but do believe if blizzard holds true to factual vanilla balancing / difficulty today’s player base will have no issue BECAUSE they’ve evolved so greatly.
when they did the molten core 40 man, for the like 12 year or whatever, i was a tank, and we had to kick like 5 other tanks due to them not understanding that the raid was not designed as a tank and spank
I do believe you missed the point on the video thing entirely. Most of the videos are honestly really bad regarding skill. The point I was making is very simple; the best players never made videos, they were too busy playing the game.
Now days the quality of skill in PVP videos has grown immensely because the people making them are doing it for a profit and need to show their leet skills to get views.
The old videos are for entertainment only, that’s all they ever were… The old videos are merely average players, many of them actually sub-average players at best who were also very interesting and creative people who decided to record and produce their own videos for WarCraft Movies.
Those movies were the impetus for the modern video hero that exists now days and since around late wrath…
Point is, there have always been the no-life crowd, and there are those who are supremely casual, and their average skill level has not collectively improved one bit over the years.
The only thing that ever changes is the graphics quality and the PC hardware used. Outside of that there’s a little more advanced macro use, and some cool new tricks that literally any one can learn. Skill vs Skill, new vs old it has not changed an iota.
Yours truly the last time I played really, which was S10 in Cataclysm. Kinda scary that was almost “7” years ago lol.
Some good points being made in this thread. I’ll be very curious how raiding and competitive PVP will actually be in the Vanilla reboot. I just hope I still have the APM for Warrior the way I want to play it.
Vanilla raids will be hard for all players who don’t spend hundreds of gold per week on consumables. Even the crazies who do spend job-like hours farming consumes will probably hit more speed bumps than they expect.
Except classic raids pre-AQ were designed to be cleared by 20 competant people carrying 15 window lickers and with 5 people afk auto shotting. Or with a good chunk of the raid playing on 10 fps/DC’d.
This is why guilds needed Mp5,resistance gear and other things too boost their longevity. They were not designed with 40 people buffstacking,knowing their class, spamming eng toys,using outside debuffs like nightfall and using consumables to push the kills to speeds the devs didn’t think were possible.
PS data maybe wrong, but it’s a math problem that PS players have come up with an answer for that’s obviously not intended.And unless blizzard doubles damage output,doubles health pools and nerfs certain classes it’s going to be a repeat of PS openings with getting right royally gutted within a week of people hitting cap.
I actually want a retune, but you need to come up with a better reason than “classic feeling” cause a certain patch tickles your nostolgia. My nostolgia is for patch 1.12 which still falls within the original classic timeline.
Brownies, if you can explain why showing how solving an equation two different ways leads to wildly different results and saying that it’s possible that private servers don’t have their equations correct even if the numbers are correct is a strawman.
Bro put down the argument. You can place links until you are blue in the face, you literally have no way to prove any of the work or equations on private servers are even 90% accurate. You want to know why? You don’t have the source code and you don’t have the databases. And yes, I am well aware this means I can’t prove you wrong either.
Go back and read what I wrote and you would see that I am not opposed to most of 1.12, but only certain features and states of play.
1.12 Classes are just fine.
1.12 instances are just fine too.
1.12 CRBG’s are disastrous to the community
1.11+ threat management is a disgrace to anything pre-naxx, but simply reverting to an earlier more mainstream Vanilla threat model is not enough to restore the original feel and play of pre-ZG raids, because of the 16 debuff slot limit and some of the upgrades made too the classes from 1.6 to the end.
Point is, if you want an authentic experience it’s possible; some people just reject that. I guess you’re in that camp and that’s fine. If I wanted raw 1.12 or at least something akin too it and that’s all that mattered too me then I would just play on a private server given what you all say about them being that they’re so accurately done.