Will the raids be harder in tbc then they were in classic?
Kael’Thas will probably be the first remotely hard raid boss
As far as them being easier or harder, I imagine people will cruise through them, we have a lot more player knowledge now, and WA’s and Addons that basically tell people what to do.
2 Likes
We had those back then too, but we didn’t have the knowledge of the fights like now.
So it’s 100% knowledge. At some expansion skill will come more into play, but TBC is still mostly just a beefed up vanilla in terms of raiding.
1 Like
Any expansion has harder raids then classic. Many think the new ones have too many mechanics etc… its also purely personal opinion.
Well, harder doesn’t make them actually hard, TBC raids are still pretty mechanic-lite, anyone with at least 1/4 of a brain should be able to clear through SWP if they at least have the time.
2 Likes
TBC is an easier expansion than vanilla, both when it was current and when TBC will finally be released in its classic version.
The vast majority of people in TBC were either brand new to WoW or they never made it past BWL/Twin Emps/one or two bosses in Naxx in Vanilla. They didn’t even experience half the raids in Vanilla.
Naxx is the only raid in WoW history that went uncleared by 99% of the playerbase and had the longest time that a single raid boss went unkilled without being retuned or bug-fixed. The same guilds that struggled in Naxx >3 months like Nihilum proceeded to completely roll over the PvE content in TBC unless it was heavily time-gated like SWP.
2 Likes
For unprepared guilds. Yeah, sure, probably as hard as normal raids in retail now. FOR prepared guilds about as hard as LFR.
Why is this? Quite simply the bosses won’t have enough HP to really challenge anyone. It’s a resource based game, and unless those resources are being put to the test, then it really diminishes the difficulty of the content. Boss fights should be minimum 5 minutes. But they won’t be for a vast majority of fights.
Some. Not at first. Karazhan is pretty much a dungeon and both Gruul and Magtheridon are easy fights.
But Black Temple has some nasty bosses. Bloodboil, Mother Shazz, Council can all give raid groups some problems. Then Sunwell, ho boy. Felmyst is gross. Mu’ru literally destroyed guilds. It gets hard.
Is TBC as hard as retail Mythic raiding though? No. Not even close.
Molten Core was cleared within 6 days of Vanilla Classic launch
I expect to hear about Karazhan being cleared within 2
Oooph, I don’t understand how you can say Mags was an easy fight and then go on to say anything in BT was hard…
Assuming that we go live with the 2.0.10 version of Mags that we last saw on Beta there’s going to be a lot of complaining about needing to stack classes for this fight in 3-4 weeks.
I am worried we never got to see a pre-nerf version of Gruul on Beta, hoping that they test a re-tuned version in the next 2 weeks and buff it like they have been with Kara.
TBF, kara isn’t exactly the pinnacle of TBC raiding.
Fun raid though.
TBC raids today will feel about like LFR does in retail.
We know all the fights, there is nothing to “figure out” to progress.
Try it. I think you will find them fun.
1 Like
I mean, neither is Molten Core, but still
less than a week from launch includes the time it took to level in addition to the raid itself, lol
And if you look at it… 99% of that was leveling, it took them what… 2-3 hours at most to clear MC in greens with a bunch of people not even 60?
TLDR VERSION: Yes.
- Karazhan is generally an easy raid, with the easiest boss being around Molten Core (not Ragnaros) level, but has harder fights that are more on par with BWL/AQ40. Netherspite is mechanically the most “strict” encounter since beam control entirely makes/breaks the fight, but it isn’t challenging either.
- Gruul’s Lair is pretty easy, but definitely more at the AQ40/Naxx level of difficulty. Both fights have their own interesting requirements and you need a handful of people to do their job really well to succeed.
- Magtheridon’s Lair is the hardest of the generally easy T4, and is above Naxx levels of difficulty. You have multiple phases and adds to control, a hard hitting boss, personal responsibility to avoid death, and a gimmick that requires two groups of 5 people to be on-point with clicking their cube.
- Serpent Shrine Cavern and Tempest Keep non-final bosses are all roughly the same in difficulty, all harder than most of T4, with Magtheridon really being the only one at or above some of their difficulty checks.
- Mount Hyjal non-final bosses are all tougher than T5 non-final bosses, but not by any crazy amounts. The trash waves are a bigger headache than the bosses themselves to be honest.
- Black Temple bosses up to and including Shade of Akama are essentially at the Mount Hyjal level.
- Black Temple bosses up to and including Illidari Council are on a definitive next level of difficulty, especially Reliquary of Souls.
- Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep final bosses, Lady Vashj and Kael’thas respectively, are tougher than anything mentioned before and roughly above or around the Reliquary of Souls difficulty level. These are long fights, filled with multiple phases, lots of opportunity to fail, and more than one strict timer/DPS check. Their length is more cause for boredom and limiting your attempts than anything else, as the phases have a lot of downtime and many portions of the respective fights are very easy. Because these two fights are so difficult, these two alone were responsible for keeping hosts of guilds out of Hyjal/BT until attunement restrictions were lifted. Meanwhile, any guild that got them down got access to several easy bosses worth of gear and could just steamroll ahead.
- Mount Hyjal final boss, Archimonde. Learning this guy is quicker than the T5 final bosses, but expect less than savvy players to fail at his Airburst and Doomfire mechanic repeatedly simply because they’re both on the weirder side relative to other mechanics seen so far. Mistakes here can wipe you quickly.
- Black Temple final boss, Illidan. Like the T5 end-fights, this is a long haul encounter with multiple phases, lots of moving parts, lots of ways to fail in very short order, and so so so so much downtime. Your Tanks need to be more or less on point, DPS cannot be asleep dealing with adds, and Healers have some tough moments to power through, especially during P2 and the Flames of Azzinoth. By no means impossible and you can still win even with some screw ups, success is mostly getting everyone to be patient and do their jobs from phase to phase.
- Sunwell is the final raid, has the toughest bosses, and the final two are so difficult that it isn’t until we get to the Ulduar hardmodes that we see anything that gets close to their coordination, gear, and performance requirements. If you’ve done Heroic/Mythic raiding in later expansions, they won’t be too bad, but they are very strict in their success checks.
Expect progressively tougher content as you move forward with the only weird jumps being the end bosses of T5 and the smaller spike going from Shade of Akama to Bloodboil, Gorefiend, and Reliquary. If you’ve done hard stuff on Retail, none of this will be too bad for you, just tightly tuned relative to what you can actually do. If you’ve never done anything on Retail, expect everything to be harder than Naxx by the time you hit Magtheridon and for it to go from there.
Good luck!
8 Likes
I think some people will be taken aback by how much power they lose without world buffs. Most bosses will be more than just tank n spank. I think until ssc/tk itll be fairly easy. The t4 raids are more like letting us dip our feet in and test the waters. Let us get used to how raiding in tbc works and learning new mechanics on top of raiding with new class/spec combos.
I see what you did there lol
Karazan is entry level MC.
You won’t be able to cheese the raids with world buffs, so it should feel harder a lot of the time from that alone.
Obviously it’s old content and people know it by now, it won’t take as long to learn is it did for groups in the day.
But if you compare each tier of content to its classic equivalent, TBC is a substantial step up from classic.
There’s still some free fights in there, but MC/Ony has nothing on the level of say, shade of aran or netherspite, and nothing remotely approaching magtheridon.
The design philosophy gave earlier fights in the teirs very low difficulty to be a “reward” for managing to clear the attunements, so those tend to be easier than the final bosses of the previous teir. But as you progress, it gets harder.