Then how come when I raided in 1.12 the vast majority of raiding guilds were still hamstrung by early BWL encounters and had never stepped foot in AQ40 let alone Naxx? How come the average player had never even stepped foot into MC and were actually actively prejudiced against raiders? The amount of geared people in any given major city was a fraction of what we see today.
Using 1.12 as an excuse for easy content clears doesn’t hold up for me from this simple fact alone. People are just better at the game because detailed, thorough and practically foolproof knowledge is more available and more importantly that knowledge is more readily disseminated player to player in real-time. The language of gaming is more codified and the “grammar” of game mechanics is innate to more of the population.
The game would be dominated no matter which content patch they attempted to recreate, that’s how it has happened on private or TLP servers for every old MMO ever. For many that’s the joy in keeping them around; to revisit the realm of our youth and correct past mistakes with accumulated wisdom. A common pathos.
Every aspect of the game from 2004-2006 is painstakingly documented. No patch is safe. World of Warcraft is an easy game and that’s okay. Your ego MUST accept that it will not be satisfied by virtual achievements.
I’m sure bad voice comms and bad computers also plays a roll in the content going slower in original.
If you’re a rogue say on Sulfuron Harbringer, and your job is to kick, well at lower framerate and higher input lag+the latency of vanilla servers could easily make you miss the kick, causing a heal to go off.
You have multiple things contributing to the ease of the game, not one factor can be singled out. You could know every raid by heart, but if you are at a low framerate your execution will be bad. Opposite is also true, you can have a newb with a monster PC but doesn’t understand the mechanics, and they make the same mistake as the first guy, but for a different reason.
TLDR
Game is old and understood
PC and voice comms are better
I dunno, if they opened BWL and AQ40 and Naxx, to 1.01-ish toons, we might all be dead LoL.
We were really badly made at first, like seriously flawed.
Took them a few patch cycles to learn how to balance out the classes and gear etc.
While I understand the 15 year old game. It would have been honestly a much more authentic roll out to have 1.0, and have all the paladins go full RET to get Blessing of Kings and have the most pathetic gear itemization possible. I do not think Rag would have been down the first week then.
If the more accessible sp gear was gone all that would happen is no one would bring mages and locks to raids.
Rogues and warriors already beat the hell out of mages and locks with sp gear available. Imagine how huge the gap would be when even ret pallies outperformed a bis mage.
Healing gear wouldn’t actually matter that much because a lot of raids already bring overkill in terms of healing, either as a safety measure or to do reckless speedrun strats. Raw throughput isn’t really tested in mc.
We’ll need to see when BWL comes out, it’s still too early to compare right now.
But back then I distinctly remember Ele shamans being almost non-existent. No spell power gear and the tree was really bad because no push-back protection whatsoever but also you had to have mana tide for the healer groups, this was 100% mandatory and I have yet to see that in classic so far. The last time I even heard the word innervate was me calling for it because of a botched pull on Golemag causing a lot of burst healing and I’m not sure I even got it nor did we wipe.
Also warlocks were considered bad back then, even by warlock players. They were referred to as fear bots and I remember having theorycrafting convos with locks about how spirit and armor were decent options as stats for them lmao.
By 1.12 no one was doing MC… The only raids being done were the ocasional onyxia for the buff, aq40 and nax.
Everyone actually quite raiding because tbc was only a couple months out, and pvp gear could be earned with honor points not ranking.
I am not sure what point you are trying to prove here. It is a fact we are using gear and talents that are 150% stronger than what was available at launch with MC… its a fact dude. My mage has around 350 raw spelldamage and BWL isn’t even out yet. That was not possible in vanilla until the very, very, very, very end. A mage raiding MC and BWL at that time would be geared like a boss if he had 150 spellpower.
As for player knowledge and player participation in raiding, well that is to be expected… it’s a 15 year old game. Retail WOW revolves around raid progression and made it accessible for casuals.
If you raided in vanilla you were not casual, you took gaming seriously to the point you had to fill out an application to join a guild… no half arsed scrubs allowed to sleepwalk through raids while checking their myspace page.
Without the 1.12 gear sets, these casual players would be unable to kill Ony or Rag without a whole lot of luck. The gear makes up for the fact they don’t care to get world buffs, bring pots, buff foods and only half pay attention as they watch “girls” on netflix.
I did server first Ragnaros in classic on my server. Since then I have been in 2 other guilds, much more casual and it took them weeks to kill rag. Eventually we recruited enough people that were “true” raiders and had enough dps to win.
All of the strats for beating the bosses in vanilla were posted everywhere on the internet… oh and there were video sites before youtube. This was all common knowledge, and before it was called wowhead it was called thottbot…
The difference is in blizzards best attempts to give the retail kids an easier time with the easiest possible content, and the best possible gear. I am honestly surprised we didn’t get 61 talents.
The people clearing MC + Ony every week in under 2 hours are your real raiders that care and have probably been playing since vanilla.
Anything longer than that, and people should turn off their netflix and actually try. Most guild are nowhere close to 2 hour MC… sooo