You’re asking for Classic+… so just call it that.
In classic though: #NoChanges
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Cataclysm launch is a bad stick to measure by just because of how stupidly broken raiding was. They claimed 10 and 25 would be equal difficulty then went and released a 5 tank fight as the door boss on Heroic. A problem that was pointed out to them within an hour of the fight going on PTR. By someone on their internal test time (Xav from Premo). Other broken fights that tier included but are not limited to:
Chimaeron
Robot didn’t work properly, Would push the final phase between 20%-30% and cast Feud too often)
Magmaw:
Unkillable* adds, fight received a massive overhaul ~3 months in
*Adds were technically killable, but DPS at that gear level was only barely able to keep up with spawns, not to mention DPSing the boss who had a massive health pool.
Omnotron:
No enrage timer, massive healer stack, unavoidable instant-wipe combos, reflect shield bug causing instant wipes
Atramedes:
Unkillable without exploits until a massive overhaul 3 months in. Gong strat best strat.
Nefarian:
Stolen Power only applied to the first hit out of mind control, that buffed damage could then be carried through the rest of the fight (this is why paragon used 11 feral druids). Required 3 mobs with a 1s cast to be kept on spell lockout simultaneously and continuously throughout P2. Minimum of 9 interrupts on rotation assuming no backups.
Halfus:
Required* 5-6 tanks on both 10 and 25 man, Debuff applied on mob release instead of mob death, Atonement healing wasn’t affected by his MS debuff initially, and the boss took 500% more damage while all the adds were active.
Valiona & Theralion:
Impossible to leave Shadow Realm without invulnerabilities initially. 10m add health was identical to 25m. Valiona’s shadow breath ability would hit the entire room on ~3/4 of attempts causing guaranteed wipes.
Ascendant Council:
P3 Liquid Ice damage massively buffed after Paragon’s kill making melee essentially worthless. P3 DPS requirement was similar to, if not tighter than M’uru 1.0.
Al’akir:
Just watch Paragon’s video. The fight was obviously never tested internally.
From what I remember Conclave of Wind, Maloriak (even if it had a stupid 1s interrupt or wipe mechanic), and Cho’gall worked properly, so there was that I guess…
General raid bugs:
Battle Rez! Limited battle rezzes were introduced in Cata, this of course led to a wonderful bug where battle rez was often completely unavailable for use. We never were able to figure out the cause for this
Guardian Spirit: Oftentimes didn’t work when it should, also related to an attempt to ‘fix’ mechanic cheesing with it.
On top of that we went from the easiest dungeons WoW has ever had in WotLK to the hardest with LFG being a thing. We had people who could raid at a top 50 world level but would struggle in 5 mans. At gear level they were roughly equivalent to a Mythic +15 if you removed the timer and affixes. There was no other endgame outside of raids as well.
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Ulduar was the only time they did multiple difficulty levels in raids right. ICC was a 1 boss raid. And once the buff started rolling in it just got easier, to the point where we were pugging 11/12 25m heroic on alts multiple times a week.
Yeah, but T11 was the hardest raid tier they’d ever released. And H Rag was the hardest single boss they’d ever released (rest of the instance was a joke though).
ICC was far from challenging or loved on release. Limited attempts pissed all over that pie and all the difficulty was in H LK.
I never understood why people say it will be better for the majority of players? You can’t speak for the majority without some statistics, which none of your posts have shown. Sure there are people on your friend’s list who are quitting and people complaining on the forums… but there are still a lot more people who don’t even visit the forums. I’m sure you are an above average player, as well as your friend’s list, and want harder content because it is boring and easy… but I do not.
There are still plenty of bad players who are raiding and can’t clear MC… in fact, due to my particular circumstances, I don’t have hours on hours to raid and so I’m stuck either doing pugs or the leftover people in my guild. We cannot down Rag and wiped on Ony because the people in the raid aren’t very good.
Yes when I get into better groups, we can steam roll the content… but I’m also 15 years older and have less time than I did back in vanilla. I personally enjoy being able to raid only a few hours without banging my head on the wall and have a chance at loot weekly. I’m also excited for pvp and spending more time there, outside of raids.
MC and Ony have never been hard, but we still don’t have the rest of the raid tiers out… no doubt the rest of the content will be cleared by a good majority of guilds, but some people will still struggle or take months and months trying to get there. Guilds will disband and be remade…people won’t have time commitments, etc. for much harder raiding.
I’m only speaking from my experience and what I personally see, again not the majority though. Maybe classic isn’t the game you want to play if you want very hard raiding? I’m not sure if you are right about the majority, but from my perspective and my friends, we do not agree with this statement that harder raid content will make our experience better.
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Classic raiding isnt really that easy tho. We have people STILL taking MC as the baseline for how easy Naxx will be rofl. You guys are still delusional as all hell man. Look, this is Vanilla. The low end to see the content is HARDER and the top end is EASIER. Not having 100 difficulties of the same thing deluding and diminishing any sense of adventure, immersion and progression is exactly why I wanted Vanilla. I dont want 1000 alternate realities of the same concept that doesnt make any sense at all from any perspective. I want an adventure to the end boss with a group of friends. Thats why im playing.
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would have to agree with foror. many people are in “bad”, “casual” guilds who take awhile to clear MC. for these guys, filling up their raids for cthun/naxx is going to be a real challenge. the players who know what they’re doing, have done it for years, were never going to have trouble
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Pugs of 20 something clear MC regularly. Just stop.
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you have proof of that?
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People who don’t like a challenge, people who want things easy are the reason wow kept tumbling downhill in the first place.
That attitude is what led to things like LFG and LFR. There’s a small minority that cries on the forums and ruins things for the majority that are bored and quitting the game because it’s so insanely easy.
If you like content that’s so simple that you don’t have to try, you are already different from the typical person.
It is in our nature as human beings to take on challenges. It’s in our nature to become bored and complacent when something requires almost none of our effort. We naturally feel rewarded when something we accomplish requires us to put in some effort.
So designing a game for you and your group of friends who don’t want the endgame to require any effort at all, is going against the average player.
You see, most people want something in between. If it’s too easy, there’s no sense of reward. If it’s too hard (Mythic) the effort-to-reward ratio isn’t there for most.
So upscaling the raids to make them require some effort, without making them agonizingly difficult is logically speaking, the safest way to satiate the core player-base
All of you non-60s who grind a quarter of a level a day, make a million alts and just like to goof around don’t represent the majority of the playerbase. Nor do the speedrunning stay-up three days straight until there’s nothing to-do crowd.
Typical people and players enjoy a moderate amount of challenge so it feels like they are at least accomplishing something.
“Where’s your data?!”, it’s called common sense and human nature.
You want hardmode?
Raid naked.
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Whats the average guild? Theres so many levels to an average guild it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t average.I’ll tell you this bad guilds will take weeks or months to clear BWL.
I’m not sure you want to have an actual discussion about this… I clearly stated in my post I don’t speak for the majority, and yet you continue to speak for the majority for your argument? And your proof is common sense? Not sure I understand this, especially when you asked to have an open honest discussion and yet shut down everyone who speaks against your argument?
You talk about having some type of middle ground, and yet we haven’t even seen the rest of the raid content yet. New players (both skill and gear) won’t be able to complete the harder raid content, they need to go back, grind out MC, Ony, BWL, etc. And compete with 39 other people who want to get gear… that will take them a long time, no matter how “easy” the raid content is. Again, speaking from my experience… the people I see don’t have that kind of time if the raids were much harder than they are (which is the same difficulty as vanilla…).
So again, it’s not the majority you are speaking for… it’s your perspective and your friends who are above average at the game, have cleared everything and need a “challenge” to be satisfied in a video game where everything has been out and clearly detailed for 15 years.
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Difference between 5 man and raids are not relevant to your original claim that people want hard content.
You…never went to the forums during wrath did you? It was people complaining about how easy everything is and how quickly raid content gets put on farm as far as the mouse could scroll down. Its actually why they went overboard with cataclysm.
Because it reinforces a poisonous mentality of “im better than you as a person because i spent more time farming consumables and did more drugs than you so i could play DDR on my keyboard better than you”.
If you want a less hyperbolic example i refer you to the trainwreck of GearScore back in wrath.
Weird, i must have hallucinated all those iron man challenges ive seen in games. And the times ive seen people beat halo with just melee. And those people who beat final fantasy 1 with just white mages. And all the guys doing speed runs in video games (games done quick? Games get done quick? Something like that).
Eh, .more like “if you have the wrong class combo you physically cant complete the dungeon” and “oh you had a muscle spasm and missed an interrupt, enjoy your corpse run”.
Counter data: server queues showing that people are still playing and willing to wait to play
Translation: i have no evidence other than my personal feelings and that should be as good as peer reviewed studies with a sample size of thousands
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Pretty sure ToS eclisped that for overall raid.
CoS as well, but its only 2 bosses so probably doesnt count.
Granted vanilla content is not nearly as difficult as modern Mythic+ raiding content, I would say that the easier the raids got with implementation of things like LFR, and the ease of access based around the idea of “Everyone” should be able to raid, the more people quit the game.
Classic is fine. Hope for some Classic+ if you want more, or BC if that’s your flavor.
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Ehh, it is a bit of a mixed bag on difficulty honestly. It is definitely true the game grew when less than 1% beat Naxx, when difficulty scaled, when things were out of reach, and there was tons to strive for all the way into BC and then Wrath. Wrath is when it stagnated, but Wrath didn’t grow that much off the back of the end of TBC. I think a lot of people were waiting out Wrath to see how it turned out because well, TBC was amazing.
Of all the points we actually have very few point to difficulty or keeping interesting content to progress into being what led to WoWs current state besides early Cata. I think Dungeons being hard again like BC just showed how much Wrath weeded out the old playerbase and injected new players with ez mode expectations, BUT I also think if you look at the data Cataclysms 1.7 million drop early on pales in comparison to the drop that happened mid Cata when they nerfed the content and then late Cata when LFR was introduced. This was the FIRST time the very real concept of content droughts really started to become common place and then into MoP and WoD the concept of people bailing in mass became a norm.
So while you maybe able to say difficulty made Cata lose subs, it would appear that ez mode made it lose even more subs and has been bleeding them ever since. Beyond that its just impossible to say whether the harder content was the true issue as SO many things changed in Cata any number of things outside of difficulty could have driven people off. Vanilla and BC being as well received as they were STILL to this day (especially BC) seems to provide a lot of evidence difficulty and unique rewards for completing content like, getting into a new raid with unique gear, and unique bosses, was a much, much better system.
Its actually really strange were having a conversation on why things coming easy is good in regards to WoW. Until these people beat Naxx and its not private server completion, I don’t really care what they say. Fact is the vast, VAST majority never beat it before. Vanilla and BC was literally was led them to thinking handouts for everyone was a good idea so the idea of arguing easy mode is better in regards to Vanilla or BC is really, really out of touch on both sides.
bro lets see if your guild can even clear naxx before tbc launches. it is not as easy as everyone thinks
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I keep seeing this thread title and reading it as;
The Case for Hunter Raid Content.
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