Is this what Vanilla use to be?

I started mid-WoLTK. Pre-heirlooms. Elites were somewhat hard. I still remember how proud I was when I told people I could solo Knuckerot at lvl 14 on my hunter. All that time though, I was told that that’s nothing , and that classic is where its was all that.

Also, I play GW2 (ghasp!, that’s the place where the chat tells you ‘wow is that way, go away!’) and the community there says that soloing a gw2 Champion (hard!) is like fighting an elite in Vanilla wow – a 5-minute fight where you are on the brink of death half time, exercising your class skill-set to its utmost.

Well, I am not seeing it now. I am playing warlock, in random world grays, lvl 34, haven’t had any problem with anything yet including multiple mobs etc. Still waiting for that elusive elite that takes 5 minute fight to take down…

I don’t flatter myself that I am good, so the question is: Is vanilla difficulty overrated in the nostalgic mind of the first wow generation, or did Blizz nerf it now again?

thank you

2 Likes

Tbh vanilla was more about community than difficulty. Nothing was really that hard but everything was more engaging. Oh open world pvp was the max difficulty setting.

8 Likes

We are also patched into 1.12. Classes were buffed and content was nerfed.

25 Likes

People were saying it harder than it was because the game was new and people weren’t aware how to properly play. Now we have tons of resources online to huide you through everything

7 Likes

False false false, vanilla WAS hard when it came out, mobs hit super hard, clearing content was hard, everything was hard lol. Patch 1.12 is easy mode in terms of difficulty for sure, the original vanilla experience would turn new players away.

I still think this is under tuned by a bit, but its also fun to play again so I dont mind it that much

14 Likes

I don’t know…for some people it is hard…like my group who wiped 5 times in a RFK run…You wouldn’t be wiping on rfk in retail, that’s for sure…Other day I was doing SFK…We wiped on last boss…That wouldn’t happen in retail either…I’ve died more while questing in classic than I have in all of BFA…

8 Likes

I think warlock is the 2nd easiest class to level after hunter.

4 Likes

WoW was never hard.

Go back in time and fight Odin in FFXI during the CoP expansion, or tell me about fighting Kirin during Rise of the Zilart. WoW was always the easiest of the MMOs, it was just the most popular because it was also the most approachable.

4 Likes

That last boss hits like a truck carrying a freight train powered by a metor to be honest, was quite supprised at him lol

1 Like

It’s the patch 1.12. This isn’t vanilla. This is 80% through Vanilla after everything had been nerfed and the playerbase funneled to raiding.

9 Likes

This is why you shouldn’t listen to what people say.

No, Classic never gets hard. If a mob is hard, its you literally can’t solo this hard, and if its soloable, its not too hard to kill. Just out level or outgear a mob. No problem.

3 Likes

Every time I said Vanilla wasn’t hard - just more work - people berated me and jumped down my throat. Where the hell were you people then when I needed someone to defend me?

4 Likes

Classic wasn’t hard in general.

Heck, one of the reasons I started playing it in 2004 was because of how easy, forgiving and accessible it was compared to MMOs I played before it.

There was a reason EQ players were calling it baby’s first MMO.

That said, some classes could solo elites a couple levels higher than you, but not most. But if you could solo it 5 minutes sounds like a pretty big exaggeration.

4 Likes

Go to redridge and engage a few of those low level elites. Even 20 levels higher they will still smack you down unlike in retail where it’s LOLz.

Most people grossly exaggerate how hard the old versions of WoW were. Remember that WoW was originally baby’s first MMO compared to old school MMOs. No XP loss on death. No item dropping.

2 Likes

inb4 this thread turns into a dick measuring contest about how good they are at leveling in classic

2 Likes

Compared to bfa, Classic is very hard indeed.

Compared to existing morepigs like EQ2, WoW’s model was based on approachability. You could reliably kill enemies your own level alone–two at once, even!

For some people, the first paragraph caused them to forget or overlook the second.

That said, I’m curious. How many even-level elites has your level 34 warlock soloed?

1 Like

Vanilla was never hard. It’s just slower. You just pull one mob at a time and kill it with 1-2 abilities. you sit down to eat/drink. Rinse and repeat and that is basically the entire game. The only reason it seemed hard is because

  1. We are better players now. When vanilla released we didn’t have as many resources as we do now. With the rise of meta gaming everyone knows exactly how to play the game optimally.
  2. PCs, internet, etc are considerably better now. People aren’t held back by bad connections and bad pcs anymore.

When people say the game is harder… I can’t really see what they’re talking about. It certainly isn’t the raids or the dungeons. The dungeons are so easy that people literally just go into them over and over again to farm XP.

Lol I died like 6 times in a row trying to do a people’s militia quest on my rogue. They kept spawning on top of me and 2 mobs when I’m at 1/2 health on rogue is a no go😄 It wasn’t frustrating though. I just chuckled and got through it.

1 Like

Well what people are finding out it that a lot of the difficulty was caused by lack of knowledge about the game, not actual difficulty of the game.

A lot of things that would have made WoW seem difficult and daunting to a new player particularly if they’d never played an MMO before like itemization, talents, navigating the world, questing appropriately, dungeons etc… are actually really trivial and not at all difficult once you know how to do them.

So yeah when 99% of the playerbase falls into the category of not know WTF they’re doing the game seems hard, now in classic where the opposite is true everything seems easy because it is and always was actually easy.

1 Like