It’ll be more important in cata. Cata raids were actually what we call retail difficulty. If classic players struggled in ulduar, bwd/bot will make them unsub. There’s hard enrage timers, mechanics, and every boss has a DPS check.
Cata was the expac that brought ilvl to the game, and do 20k DPS to the dummy or no guild invite.
Since sod parses are used to filter people who can’t DPS or do mechanics, people will be using it for heroic dungeons in this lol. Heroic dead mines are harder than 6/6 gnomer.
Older versions are also more restrictive. You can not get stuck in casual versions of the game of retail and have a dead raid ID. You can join a different heroic raid or use your down ranked keystone etc. in classic your lockout, is burnt. You can’t get your buddies who cleared heroic gnomer to hop in the flex raid and help clear the content.
This restrictiveness makes it this way.
In retail this restrictiveness exists in mythic raiding, and it’s much more exclusive club, than SoD raiding.
Emergent behaviors emerge because of reasons.
Fools choose to ignore them or posit illogical theories as to why.
It also brought LFR for us plebs. I’m starting to wish they could have designed LFR for the start of Cata, but at least putting it in when it was originally in the game is good.
This was never not a thing in WoW. I spent hours in the LFG channel every day trying to get a group in the original TBC, and everyone was asking for “AP/SP?”. And since I was a Shaman and my attack power didn’t scale like warriors and rogues, I couldn’t get a group unless my healer buddy brought me with him.
In the original Vanilla and TBC, there were still plenty of sweaty guilds with high demands for thier raiders.
The only thing that has changed is the ratio of sweaty to casual guilds.
There are still tons of casual guilds that wipe to easy bosses and simple mechanics, but they will have no demands of you. So it just boils down to your expectations. Do you have high expectations of your guild? If so, that guild will in turn have high expectations of you. But if you lower your expectations, you can find a guild who will take you as you are.
Not everyone can do that. If you’ve only ever dungeoned or raided with folks who don’t struggle with seemingly simple mechanics, you are playing in an elite bubble.
I don’t see how parsing in SoD or vanilla in their original iterations are remotely healthy for the game. Parsing culture only becomes beneficial when the game and fights are difficult and long enough (hello 30 sec vanilla fights) for parsing to actually show a players skill. This was very clear starting in ulduar in wotlk and continuing forward. The previous raids before uld you could pug and get 95+ parses outside of 40 mans which had too much variation in pugs.
Many folks have explained it. Those of us not privileged enough to only raid with elite players have run BFD and Gnomer with suboptimal Raiders. Sometimes this means early wipes and the raid falling apart, which leaves the player locked to an instance that you won’t be complete and you’ll be unable to earn loot from the final boss.
It’s the restrictive and potentially punitive lockout that causes pug leaders to ensure they only invite top tier players. WoL isn’t a flawless tool, but helps pug leaders make quick assessments to increase the likelihood for a smooth run.
Was that part really necessary? I don’t think anything I posted warranted being called a fool. I said I found the fixation interesting and asked why it seemed to be more prevalent in older versions of the game. You posted a good answer aside from your insult.
I also don’t think it’s illogical to say (as others in this thread have) that the vast majority of people that are fixated on parses are using Warcraft Logs for the competitive nature of it, and the resume/ego boost of seeing those orange and pink numbers. For every one person combing logs to see who can play properly to not risk their week’s lockout, what number of people are using logs for the other purpose I mentioned above?
Maybe a better question would be, if the site simply housed the combat logs, but didn’t collate the data and assign color coded rankings, would people be so fixated by it?
I’m going to assume this was sarcasm, but if it wasn’t it certainly says a lot.
Not by the word “parse”, but it has always been a thing to some extent. Just like retail focus on “raider(.)io” which is more or less parse culture. Back in the day it was checking gear… because at the time… gear meant something. When “parse” started coming around gear no longer meant what it once did.
As a genx’er who played 18 years ago I can tell you with 100% assurance folks were parsing logs. Look no further than the ElitestJerks.
That said I was referring to parse culture always being a thing. If you are not aware of sites like ElitestJerks and Rawr, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
All of classic has been min maxing try hards the content is so easy that parsing in it makes no sense. Best thing to do is join a guild that doesnt care for parsing. Cata will definitely have parsing.
Not an elite bubble, just happy to work through a few wipes and help the new guy or old man learn and manage the mechanics.
Too many ppl these days don’t want to waste the time helping others work through the wipes.
Other day in sod sm my group was complaining about the speed and size of the pulls. They wanted faster… At the end of the run they left the group. I replaced them and ran again, by the end of the next run I could still see them in Gen chat trying to fill their group lol
Sometimes it’s faster and more enjoyable to stay with the group rather than leaving it
That’s great. Wow needs more pug leaders like you. Either way, I never get your luck when I build a pug group. Every wipe sees 2-3 people bale. So after each wipe I’m back to LFG looking for backfills. It gets increasingly difficult to backfill after the 4th or 5th wipe, and most of the pug drops by that point. Dungeon or raid, pugs do the same thing.
The fact that you found pugs who were looking for progression is pretty amazing.
I know I’m replying to a seven day old comment, but I got around to thinking about this, and my take is that retail isn’t necessary less try-hard than Classic is. My belief is that in retail, people have become so accustomed to quantitative metrics to evaluate a player’s ability that it’s now an intrinsic part of the game.
While players have always tried to quantify skill since the beginning of the game, it is not nearly as prevalent as it is now, and they did not have access to the tools that we do now that make said quantitative analyses so easy.
Couple that with the fact the player base for Classic is a mix of returning vets of varying skill level coming back from a long break, first time players that were told by friends that Classic (vanilla, TBC, Wrath) is the superior version of the game, and new generation players that are used to the culture from retail WoW. I believe this leads to a clash of cultures between players that eschew tools/sites like Warcraft Logs, Raider io, DPS simulators, and players that are either just used to them, or actually embrace them.
And much like art imitates life, the presence of clashing cultures leads to conflict.