How do we bring back the authentic experience? Time, thus re-tuning

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I’ve been meaning to make a post like this for a while now.

Disclaimer: I am not insinuating or anywhere close to saying that Vanilla raids will be difficult - even with re-tuning. Nor, am I trying to make raid game play more difficult. I want to make this clear since it seems to be a very sensitive topic. I will also be using private servers as an indicator of 1.12. Take accuracy as you wish.

As a proponent of re-tuning, the question is often asked, why? 1.12 fans will say things will be easy anyway, in which I will totally agree. But that’s not the point. The point is, the authentic Vanilla experience - in its entirety needs to be replicated as close as possible. After thinking about it, the big thing that stood out was the idea of Time. Things could be straightforward and easy, but if things took Time - as it did in Vanilla when the original content was released, it will change the way the game is played today to be more authentic. If NPCs took longer to kill, as they did say MC as of 1.1, MC clears would take more Time. If it was original scholo/strath, it would take more Time.

Let’s look a little closer.

Guild raiding dynamics and burnout.

Things will be known and easier this time around so some things won’t be as big a problem. When we were 2-3 bosses in AQ40, right before we cut out MC from our raid schedule, MC was still taking us 2-3 hours roughly? So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that it’s pretty much a wasted night of raiding, if you wanted to progress faster. This means that the 1.12 mindset of “we’ll just farm MC for TF” and “BWL for item X” while we do AQ40 or Naxx will be …uhm annoying to say the least. Good luck convincing 40 people to run MC ad nauseam for one item. Having people sit through a 2-3 hour boring MC run is hard enough. Want to run every raid a week? Be prepared for 4+ day a week raiding times instead of 2-3 as it is on private servers.

Guild player poaching won’t be much of an issue anymore. People know everything. Burnout is unknown. It depends on how much time people are willing to dedicate to this game. But we were doing 4 day raid cycles, doing only 2 raids (not all). The current tier and the previous. Time sucks.

Gold and consumables. So you’re spending all this time raiding. So where do you find the time to farm gold? Where do you find Time to do all this? When you’re not raiding, you’re doing … this. This also has an impact on the server economy as well. Time sucks.

So up to this point, we’ve talked about Time as in, time invested and its affect on the player him/herself. And, how increasing the time will be more of an authentic Vanilla experience.

Now, how about Time taken and game play and the Vanilla experience?

Again, using MC as an example. In 1.1, gear was bad. Really, bad. Talents were really bad. Mobs died really slow. They took a long Time to die. So what’s the big deal? It added a new dimension to gearing up that is dead in 1.12. Resource/Mana management and resist gear. You have to worry about those things if your healers are going OOM because people are taking too much damage while the boss is still alive. Sorry mages. No spell power greens and arcane power here. This also meant that Ony was a partial dependency on Rag with its +15 FR neck piece. Again, more time required to gear people up.

By the time gear got better, we started hitting the threat limit. So again, another hard ceiling that we hit to speed up boss kills.

At the end of the day, gearing up at the outset was more than pew pew stack spell power and hit 2 seconds dead. For mages, +int actually mattered. BiS will change.

Summary:
At the end of the day, this is my goal with the re-tune. To some how introduce a flavor of what made Vanilla, Vanilla - NOT to make it “omg MC is so hard”. It was a struggle to get a guild to stick together to even venture into Naxx. This idea of “fresh” didn’t exist. People didn’t start raiding Naxx “fresh”. They were running on fumes. I’m not asking for the full grind. One, that’s impossible. People know everything. Two, I doubt people are going to stand for it. Yes, even the private server folks. But, I think something’s gotta give in order for Classic to be indicative of anything remotely Vanilla. As it stands, it isn’t.

And for the record, I’m never going to raid or PvP ever again. So none of this impacts me on how I play Classic - if I do. Vanilla was just too large a part of my life for me to see authentic Vanilla in any form, disappear for good.

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I think the best thing they can do is look at returning threat output to earlier than 1.12 levels, to make threat both matter more and cap DPS at lower values.

This also puts a damper on certain specs like Fury that can run away with the DPS meters.

Re-tuning the content itself can easily lead to scenarios where hybrids who don’t heal are knocked off the list of viable options as DPS requirements are increased for those fights to compensate for the high powered DPSers.

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I’ll take anything at this point.

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I wouldn’t.

The problem is that if they just increase the health of mobs in raids that doesn’t make it closer to the original experience. That just reinforces the 1.12 meta and the mindset of “If you aren’t a top end DPSer, you’re worthless”.

If we want to go back to the original experience, we need to go back to threat mattering beyond the first 5 seconds of the fight.

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This is a fragile ground to tread on. We’d have to trust that any re tuning wouldn’t change the experience. Can anyone say they trust them to let them try their hand at it?

I’d rather have an easier experience with an authentic 1.12 reproduction, than a crappy experience with retuning.

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They should have pushed launch to 2020 and found a way to work a pseudo 1.1->1.11/12 system in. They could have offered something more authentic then a private server 1.11/12 launch with gated comtent. Something that Nost, Project vanilla, Scriptcraft, LH, Kronos, and Elysium didn’t, can’t, and will not. Not 1.12 world of 1 shots.

I have hosted my own server and was pretty embedded into Ascent/Arcemu back during Wotlk and late TBC. Not a single project was able to keep up with patches well. When the people building cores are working with a everchanging client it hinders them. I am not sure why blizzard is merely providing a 1.11/1.12 server. Activision could have provided much better…

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Very true. I’m not holding out for a re-tune because god knows what could happen. But, if they could do it right, and that’s a big if, I’d like for it to happen.

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You can’t… Unless you never played vanilla it won’t be the same. Even after years of not playing I still remember a ton. So I’ll just be playing to play.

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I don’t know how it should be done. I’d leave that in the hands of Blizzard. But as so many have said, be careful of what you wish for. Blizzard could mess it up even more.

I just felt something needed to be said also because there seems to be this thinking that re-tuning = increase in difficulty. For some that may be the case, but it doesn’t have to be.

The thing that people forget about is, Time and what a huge impact it had.

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I think a light brush is needed in this scenario, but a brush nonetheless.

The encounters need to be tuned not to be hard, but simply to make the mechanics visible.

On private servers currently, all the mechanics of every boss in Molten Core can be ignored, and you can blow all cooldowns to kill the boss before he kills you and before his mechanics are even seen on the field. The gear is not appropriate, the talents are not appropriate, and consumables increase your power by a large degree.

Blizzard needs to adjust the defensive stats of each boss so that players will always see the mechanics of each boss at least 1 time while equipped with pre-raid BiS, 1.12 talents, and full consumes.

Now lets be clear here, with full consumes the bosses should still be a bit easier, but even with full consumes you must see the mechanics at least a single time. Ragnaros? It needs to be tuned so that, again with all the above attributes, you see the submerge phase.

Consider now a raid who is mostly pre-raid BiS, using 1.12 talents, and has only a couple consumes per player. This raid should see the mechanics of each boss for a longer period, but not too long that it’s overwhelming. Which means the most important aspect of tuning the boss is the elite group. As long as the elite group is seeing the mechanics a single time, the lesser elite group should be adequately tuned as well for higher difficulty.

In this scenario you avoid cheesing bosses, but you also reward people who are willing to put in the effort to maximize their consumables.

What change to bosses would allow this scenario to exist? Would a simple buff to boss health work?

Internal testing needs to be done.

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Agreed, the mechanism for threat management and generation was critical to the entire game; not just Raid.

My entire class is balanced around it, I know that warriors want to rule the DPS meter, but that’s just now how things were for the vast majority of the WoW vanilla experience.

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All that will do is cause Thunderfury tanks to be poached all the time and make progression a lot about how lucky you are and how well you can poach. The attitude of raiders is completely different today as people are much more about min-maxing. A better solution would be to just buff the mobs and bosses to compensate for the better talents and gear.

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Agreed, the biggest contender is threat, and hybrid will benefit from this, more then anyone besides classes that can drop there threat. (Rogues hunters.)

Re-tuning content is a lot of work, but decreasing tank threat, would make tanking harder, and more fun and give more viability to more dps, unless blizzard, (Which i doubt.) Will change threat values on all classes.

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All mobs in MC and Ony now have 150% more health and deal 30% more damage.

That took me 30 seconds to come up with and it’s pretty close to what would make it feel difficult again.

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If you want to retune end game PvE, you really need to retune ALL of end game PvE, to include underperforming talent trees. Otherwise, leave everything alone so the gimp specs will have a chance to participate in raids.

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Guess what? People are STILL not going to take the trash specs over a real dps even when MC is a joke. It still means they clear it in an hour instead of an hour and a half. That is just how min-maxers are and they WILL be the leaders of most of the decent raiding guilds.

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Bringing the threat based tanking back would also curb the fury warrior problem in addition to fix hunters for Raid.

It’s a big win-win for everyone excluding fury warrior hopefuls.

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If the min-maxers can never be appeased then there’s no point in trying to do so.

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I agree about the threat. This doesn’t directly affect values related to healing, damage, mob damage, or mob HP, which would have made me nervous.

It’s authentic, and at the same time makes it more difficult.

Love it.

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I spy a butthurt hunter. Even if they nerf threat like you want, hunters are still going to be sidelined when they aren’t needed for tranq shot because those fury warrior spots are just going to be replaced with more mages and rogues as they have solid threat reduction.