A lot of people are so hung up over “omg we’re so much better now” and “easy vs difficult”. Even when Vanilla was brand new, it was a straight forward game. Those of us that knew how to play, knew exactly what to do. All that stuff regarding BiS and talent builds, etc were all there if you knew where to look.
And you are correct, all Vanilla content will be cleared day 1 - even Naxx. But the point being is this. We’re on 1.12 and a retail client - trivializing early content. MC, BWL, and even AQ40 are far easier.
There other thing not factored in is that when actually progressing through patches, it made Vanilla much more of a time investment. Want to clear MC as of 1.0? Make those scholo and strath runs with more trash and faster respawns. Spend 2-3 hours in there where one wipe = end of the run. Do less damage with garbage gear and talents. More time, impacted BiS as well as snowballing into guild dynamics. This idea of “we’ll just run MC for Thunderfury” - sorry not going to fly. When AQ40 first opened, MC was still taking 3 hours or so before it was dropped from our raiding rotation.
Why was it dropped? Time. Good luck convincing 39 other people to waste 3 hours of their time farming for a weapon for one person, when they want to progress.
By the time Naxx hit, most raiding guilds were running on fumes. We were tired, jaded, and burned out. We also hit each tier not completely decked out in the best gear. We had to gradually gear up.
Time taken was everything. No, private servers, or Classic, or any version running on a static patch without any sort of a re-tune is no where near the overall experience. And it is has ZERO to do with easy vs hard. It seems like people are so desperate to prove themselves - having oats to sow with the current game.
People don’t remember that. The amount of trash was of obscene. Add on the ridiculous respawn timers, and those instances were a nightmare. I personally never did them when they became 5 man dungeons in Vanilla (only 10 early on), but i did them in Classic and they got castrated.
My point was that even 1.0 client would not recreate the inexperience we all had back at vanilla launch.
I also remember those 4-5 night raid weeks as opposed to the max 2 night clears you see today (in retail or classic).
To the point where I still have boss mechanics memorized, no DBM, guides required.
That’s in stark contrast to at best looking up the guides (not much by way of videos at the time) and reading through all of the mechanics before seeing them for the first time ever.
I think we are saying the same thing.
You will never re-create the overall experience unless you could travel back in time and wipe all of your memories of how to play the game.
You took my quote out of context to try and create a got’cha but anyone who reads the full quote will see you are just a slime-ball trying to twist things.
Ya know whats funny to me , you all think WOW was ever considered hard. I’ll agree there is a difference in Vanilla 1.0 to 1.12. I do remember those days when you had every class that could CC , managing mobs on pulls. It was a different game. Mobs did hit harder , gear was not as good from boss kills , and gearing up took a much longer time and the content was harder for a longer period of time.
However I do want to make one thing clear. The players back then where not less capable of handling the content due to intelligence. They were less capable due to the infrequency of gear drops and the mobs did hit harder because of that which caused us to play using CC. AOE anything back then was a sure way to end up wiping.
Having the excuse of knowing the mechanics better is a load of crap. We knew the mechanics back then just as well as we know them now , but the meta game with more well geared people now is to just AOE everything which works being that everyone is much better geared over a far less significant time frame.
However to say that any of this was hard , at any point is just being stupid. Nothing was or is or has been as hard as EQ was or is. You look up Uqua , The Ocean God Chanty in EQ, that was hard , thats what actual hard content is. No one in WOW has any credibility of saying any content is hard. The entire game since launch has been a laughable joke at best for degree of difficulty.
actually if it had been releases in 1.1 state rag would still not be dead… it was bugged and he was unkillable…
the classis wow we are playing IS the nerfed version we have posted the various patch notes from data sites proving this… the mechanics are not that more complex in live that is wishfull thinking on your part… the general emplementation is the don’t stand in the fire or los the aoe… all the live devs have done is re gurgitate the same fight mechanics from wow vanilla fights with new mechanics… I got banned from the forums in WoTlk after I made a post pointing out every fight they reused the mechanics from…they were not amused it seems by being proven the emperor had no clothes…
just a point… after a raid was first cleared… we know the mechanics from you tube vids…even in MC…remember the hunter soloing a certain raid boss that must not be named here? yes we knew them… its getting 40 people to follow the strategies…
You are kidding. The very first greens dropped through the portal replaced current raid-tier epics. Nothing in Classic compares to the gear inflation that happened in TBC. To say our gear now is “balanced” for Hellfire Peninsula means you either didn’t play it, or you forget.
I actually remember being depressed when I found out that one of the first green that dropped in TBC was replacing one of my T3 Naxx gear that I spent months to obtain.
Link the green from Hellfire Peninsula that replaced Naxx gear. Naxx gear wasn’t replaced until you got 3 slot socketed blues and good gems or level 70 blues.
I used my Quick Strike Ring from MC until level 70. I tanked our realm first Illidan with Styleen’s Impeding scarab from BWL.
If I wanted to play digital whack-a-mole I’d get a modern ARPG like Path of Exile that has been built around fast paced, moment to moment gameplay. 30 mechanics in a boss fight? That’s horrendous. It’s as stupid as increasing boss HP to absurd levels to artificially increase encounter difficulty. Who enjoys that kind of play?
The game WAS harder at launch than by 1.12. However, I’d agree that retail raiding is much harder than can be found in vanilla.
That’s not important to me though. There is really no limit to how complicated or hard the devs can make an encounter. Classic raiding is still more fun to me than what retail has to offer. Even MC, a slapped together last minute raid.
The raid encounters become more difficult after MC. They’ll probably still be easier than fights found in retail. Once again, who cares? Classic raid progression will offer a modicum of difficulty, and still be more fun than the train wreck known as retail.
