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.
1 Like
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.
5 hours? Hmmm. That’s a lot longer than what I thought it would be. Really interesting actually.
Lol, sorry twin. It’s all I got!
Well I’m guesstimating. It’s been a long time and like I said, we had to go back in the next night and finish him. As we started progressing through BWL we got MC down to about 3 hours.
Okay. This method of play is easier than current mythic raiding by miles. It’s very different from the retail game, of course it is. But the retail version of the game during leveling and early cap is nothing like upper mythic level content.
So…3 days and 100 posts later you still haven’t listed these balance changes (yeah, GL with that) and QoL changes that (allegedly) don’t break the game or change actual content (authentic Vanilla experience).
![:cocktail:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/cocktail.png?v=6" ":cocktail:")
1 Like
I am clearly still failing to make the point that I was attempting…
Failing to provide a truly authentic experience is a wholesale failure on Blizzard’s part. Original raid difficulty level must be achieved…
This is not a matter of OMG PEOPLE WILL BLOW PAST MOLTEN CORE!
This is a matter of 1.12 is just not how that played out, and I could care less if people think Molten Core is easy, I really don’t care… BUT, if you give a damn about how the raid is suppose to feel, suppose to play and how it’s suppose to be progressed though regardless if its Molten Core, or Blackwing Lair or AQ or Naxx, then you should also actually care about the Authenticity of how raiding was done, meaning the mechanical properties and the duration of time / number of mechanic cycles should be at least REASONABLY close to the original experience.
Simply turning up the boss damage and health pools would do it, but that’s not a very good way to handle it. Throttling threat to be just like it was in the original experience (Before Naxx) is also a mechanism that must be employed to garner that authentic feel.
Again this is not about ZOMG PPL ARE BLITZING THE CONTENT YO!, this is about the authentic feel of the game… That is if you actually care at all.
I’m a proponent of hybrid play and I agree that they are viable and can be brought to a raid if the player is vetted and trialed. Every class can objectively make every dps check in one way or another. However a guild can, and probably should, run without them. Hybrids in classic, unlike TBC, provide nothing unique to a raid that their meta spec doesn’t offer, druids being the only exception.
A ret can bring blessings, auras, and passable damage, but a holy player can provide the best single target healing in the game on top of the buffing and support abilities. An Enhancment shaman isn’t bringing anything that a resto shaman doesn’t bring just as well. A boomkin does nothing a feral or resto druid can’t do.
Druids and Shamans also get hosed in various fights with nature and fire damage immunities, where mages and locks never get locked out of a boss.
There is no solid hybrid loot between MC and BWL, you don’t get jack for upgrades on a hybrid between pre-bis and AQ40. In AQ40, hybrids finally come online again. Blizz realized that str+int gear was a must, and finally added some. For the majority of endgame, you simply don’t have the itemization options needed to be a competitive dps. In the start of MC, in AQ40 and Naxx, sure, hybrids are going to be real dps, but during most of MC and BWL, you aren’t doing very much.
I’m with you, hybrids are underestimated, and the classic community is very hyperbolic about them, but there is a reason the stigma exists. If you want to be competitive and give your group every edge, odds are you’re not playing a hybrid dps. IF you aren’t playing like a tryhard, you won’t meet dps checks. In MC and BWL, you suck.
There is a very stark divide between good and bad specs, more than in any other version of the game. Sure, you can play very, very well and pass any dps checks, by playing perfectly, farming, etc, but difference in raid impact between a well played ret and a well played holy paladin is huge.
Tell that to a fire mage or any other caster than can benefit from boomkin aura, and there are numerous other examples of this sort of thing via odd-builds that I am not going to bother listing.
1 Like
Could you not apply this logic to the rest of the game? That patch 1.12 leveling won’t be the same experience as the 1.1.0 launch leveling process, that even if we go back to 1.5 or 1.6 AV, it won’t be the same due to the patch 1.12 talents and gear? Should we re-balance the leveling process?
I thought the raids were a minor part of the Classic experience, at least that’s what a majority of people on this forum claim, so why is re-balancing that particular part of the game such a big deal around here?
Dude the meta has changed. Classic will never feel like 2004. The world is just a different place. If the numbers are the same, players blow past the raid. If the raids are changed to accommodate the imediate access to critical information, better guides, better wikis, better addons, theorycrafting discords, etc, etc, etc then I’d say that Classic is DoA. Changing fights for the 1% or so of players who will steamroll it is a really dumb idea.
My entire point is that players now, in 2019, have better resources, better theorycrafting, better understanding of the classic WoW system, and have had 15 years to play with the game in one form or another. If you really understood MMO play in 2019 and watched even world first clips from 2005, you would see glaring flaws in gmeplay and sometimes even stratagies. How many times have you seen somebody keyboard turn in a classic montage? Much of the current classic metagame has been developed after 2004.
I dont want changes. I’m just saying that raids are going to be single lockout rolled.
Actually a very good point, and if I had my druthers… Every single NPC would be re-tuned.
Dungeons would even be reverted to their pre 1.3 states of being essentially mini raids.
1 Like
You have missed the entire point this is not about the top tier of players or even the bottom tier of players or even the raiders who would blow past content no matter how tough it was tuned… I would restate it, but that’s become tiresome.
Depending on talent builds but assuming 1.12, Balance has the boomkin aura for casters and Ferals have Leader of the Pack for physical DPS.
1 Like