I most definitely have missed anything approximating theorycrafting that isn’t simply derivative. Please give me a link to a central repository because I’d love to engage with that level of thinking about this game.
The developers themselves are on record with redesigning itemization to relax players from having to think about things like gearing choices so I’m not sure which path you’re going to go down but I am genuinely curious to see what you’re referring to.
How do you think Omen got its values? They did rough tests to determine how and win aggro pulled, but they were often guessing and did insufficient tests to rule out variance and rounding issues.
It existed, and it was terrible, inconsistent, and driven more by ego and guild politics than by sound math and modeling. There’s a reason Kungen and I butt heads going all the way into WotLK concerning Tanking matters: he relied upon being in Nihilum, I relied upon math, which lead him to proclaim dumb things such as Druids being incapable of Tanking hardmodes in Ulduar.
Every bit of solid theorycrafting ends up like this.
aight. not going over your rant once again.
following bad advice, not realizing the advice is bad, not double checking, not gathering good info… wathever else. make them bad.
no, if you were you’d have found them out really quickly as the info is now everywhere.
stop pretending you’re more than a bumbling fool.
No, it makes them victims of the times they lived in.
They were good players, some of them were exceptionally good - the best.
They did they best they could based on the information that was given.
Women used to drink and smoke while pregnant, doctors said it was ok based on the data at the time. It wasn’t because the doctors were bad, or the women were stupid, they were doing the best they could with the information given to them.
At the same time, the content is also different from when it was first released.
Seriously, I have a very hard time believing that all those players made such a big deal out of threat when in reality threat was never an issue.
When Classic was released, there were many people saying warrior taunt was overturned, producing so much threat. SO MANY PEOPLE said “it’s always been that way” or “you don’t remember how strong it was”
In reality, it was overturned and Blizzard nerfed it.
That taught me that people screaming this version is identical to release also have faulty memories.
Imagine someone being upset over new records set by athletes in the Olympics.
That’s what you sound like.
It isn’t necessary because most of the equations and models are “solved” and only a few coefficients here and there need to be tuned based on in-game ratios. The last time they existed in a single resource, we had the ROLE forums, and Blizzard nuked those long ago. Things just aren’t hard to tally up once the basic structure is all put into place, which is why modifying my old Bear sheets from Cata was really easy to adapt it for Classic.
They wanted gearing choices to be less extreme, not less thought out. They didn’t want 40 Haste to be twice the value as 40 Crit, but it didn’t change the fact that we still had situations where that was exactly the case. We’ve also consistently had Devs misapprehend the lengths people will go to when they believe there is a good thing to be had doing so. The sort of blind-sidedness of late WotLK with regards to Armor Penetration is one such silliness, because the Devs even then still modeled and assumed the sort of averages that would make most bleeding edge guilds boot you, which is why fringe stat stacking produces the wonky results they do.
Our Vanilla-era theorycrafting was ridiculously crude and got it wrong. TBC things got better but a lot of base assumptions never were treated as anything other than unshakable foundations, like hybrid “tax” and who is “intended” to do things. Even into WotLK where EH became the meme statistic to stack to the exclusion of all others, many theorycrafters latched onto it while others argued justifiable about the importance of not ignoring Block, Avoidance, and TPS/DPS.
Models are only as good as your base assumptions and boundary conditions, in Vanilla these were simply lacking. Tallying up a few figures on a spreadsheet is only the start.
I far from hate Retail, I think it’s got some great improvements but completely misses the boat on crafting, PVP, immersion, social aspects, and overall challenge.
Yes, there are some areas that it does well on those things but players progress quickly and then hit a very hard wall. At least in Classic the progression is more gradual and you have more you can do before you stall at the end-game level.
I’d prefer a game with the modernization of Retail and the methodical progression of Classic. Particularly in the area of crafting.
I read, comprehended, responded, and now I’m done.
At least everything up through 55 has been a complete clone of what I remember from Vanilla… without the broken warrior stuff that was fixed by 1.12 (thank god). All the way down to folks that think they can skate past the patrols on the Dark Iron Highway and not have that turn out bad. Fun times.
I don’t mind them adding say Hard and Mythic levels to content… but so far this feels as close to what I remember Vanilla as you can get.
Exactly. Now, can this topic just die already? It’s been settled, and Blizzard isn’t going to reset/retune Classic servers at this point. Patch 1.12 (or as Blizzard can get to it now) is all we’re going to get for the “Vanilla” experience.
If you want a challenge, start a guild and only accept people who don’t know any of the molten core raid boss fights. Make sure no one looks anything up and try to figure it out for yourselves. Nothing is stopping you from having a hard time in MC except for the 15 years of knowledge you’ve built up.
And that we’re in 1.12 instead of 1.3 or whatever they were in.
No, no you didn’t. I’ll do it for you.
people thinking 1.12 was the BC pre-patch
AND others
claiming it was a catch up patch for TBC.
Were you not claiming that 1.12 was the catch up patch to allow people to CATCH UP and see the content before it was made irrelevant?
Except the people crying about 1.12 largely don’t have a clue what they’re talking about… but sure. Settled
I don’t disagree with what you’re writing here and I also don’t think it’s incompatible with my points. Where we seem to diverge is whether the current player base, in general, is more mechanically and theoretically better than wow catered to in its earlier iterations.
I think the top players were better informed back then and had to work harder to find the information. The general player base weren’t but they also never raided.
Currently, top players don’t need to be as informed about what’s happening under the hood and the general player base is accessing raid content more frequently.
How that fits into this discussion is we’re experiencing a melding of these two populations and the older players are disappointed that raid teams aren’t even being slowed by the artificial gates that existed to make accessing the content more difficult. The newer players are attributing it to their skill level but in reality were simply playing on a fun server.
My best advice there is to leave the forums. There are effectively 3 primary player bases: the speedrunners who have already put rag in the dirt, or will within 2 more lockouts, the tryhards who are hot on the speedrunners heels but have jobs and families or haven’t been practicing classic for a decade, and literally everyone else who are, at the highest, just getting into tanaris.
These forums are really only looking at the first 2 groups, because a significant majority of people who care to post here are part of those 2 groups. We’ll be fine.
To be fair if you watch some of the old videos there’s plenty of things that are bad. More than just “product of their time” bad.
Death and Taxes Nefarian kill has people keyboard turning and a Paladin healing with Sulfuras on. I have a hard time believing that in 2005 guides were telling you that a weapon with no beneficial casting stats was good for healing.
Ascent’s world first Rag kill has Priests sitting high on the damage meter. It has the Rogue who recorded it being hilariously underbuffed.
Did everybody in 2005 think that putting Windfury in the melee group was not a good idea or something?
and these aren’t just random guilds. These are guilds competing for world firsts. They’re supposed to be some of the best players in the game at the time.
No body old enough to remember wait for sunders calls it a meme. Old people don’t really use the word Meme to begin with. They use the word Joke. Everyone likes jokes.
Mechanically yes, theoretically no.
There aren’t any odd persistent concepts that AoE threat and damage are sacrosanct things reserved only for Protection Paladins.
There isn’t absurd resistance to stacking Spell Power gear, even to the exclusion of other stats.
There isn’t obsession over color quality as much.
Most of us old timers have rather bad memories as I remember being very “capable” at Healing while being utterly drunk playing with my fellow Army buddies using the rather shoddy post internet. Half the raid could be dead an a Lava Pack could still be killed. I would forget to swap my FR gear and not die and just chalk it up to luck.
I honestly think the newer players are coming in with 5man mechanics that make every Vanilla raid boss look dumb and easy and wondering what all the fuss is about. Think about how many TBC and WotLK 5man bosses are just carbon copies of Vanilla raid bosses.
When you’re old enough to have four kids that use meme instead of joke, it rubs off haha