"This is the hard tier"

People told me BWL would be so much more difficult than MC and now I keep hearing that AQ will be the tier where things really get challenging. Not sure if I buy it. Classic has been a sleepwalk so far.

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LiveJournal is up, BTW.

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Bobby didn’t talk to me, I saw him talking to Sarah and she should know better because I totally told her I liked him but I want him to make the first move.

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Everybody says the trash after Twin Emperors is really really annoying. But I think the Suppression Room is more annoying because moving at 20% of normal running speed is just really really annoying.

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Give it two weeks and “AQ40” will be replaced with “Naxx”.

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Distributing loot gets harder and harder yes

It is possible we’ll see some more challenging content with Naxx due to alignment with patch progression. But without needing to learn the raids coupled with the availability of external resources, Classic raiding will never really be the same type of difficulty as retail. It’s just different from Mythic raiding, it’s more about time put in before raiding and coordinating 40 people week over week in preparation for raid than the raids themselves.

That said, I’ve seen pugs fall apart in raids, so without decent coordination there can be some difficulty

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Imagine watching guides and how to videos on what to expect from raids while reading up on the best gear composition as well as literally every nook and cranny in terms of positioning and focus weeks before the raid even releases and then coming here and sarcastically calling it “the hard tier”.

You heroes crying out how easy is it is or gonna be: BRAVO. Man what elite gamers you are. Gotta be tough watching a 5-25 min youtube tutorial and just copy cat whatever the guide tells you to do.

Such stronk gaming. Go in blind and try your luck before judging the raid, especially if you want a challenge, as so many of you claim. Spoiler alert: you really kinda don’t

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We are doing this for AQ20, should be fun. Sadly we couldn’t convince 40 people to do it for AQ40.

“Difficult” and “more difficult” do not mean the same thing.

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And they were right. BWL is harder than MC. Some guilds still haven’t killed neferian. Some guilds took 5 months to get their first kill. Some guilds broke up over the inability to get past firemaw. What you’re demonstrating here is a selection bias and ignoring examples that are contrary to what you want to believe. The fact is BWL is marginally harder than MC. This doesn’t mean it’s extremely harder, or much harder. Just that it’s slightly harder.

IT’s also fair to say AQ40 will be harder than BWL. Many guilds will not kill C’thun. Many guilds will break up because of their inability to progress into the content. Yeah, lots of guilds will kill c’thun, and in general aq40 isn’t a super hard raid by retail standards. But once again it is marginally harder than BWL. Everyone has to know what they’re doing or your raid will fail. For vet mmo players this won’t be a problem. But for the inexperienced and LFR heroes of retail, they will struggle to coordinate their raid in aq40.

Naxx will definitely be the hardest raid in the game. But again that doesn’t mean it’ll be super hard or remotely challenging for competent guilds. Just that it’ll be hard for people who don’t know what they’re doing and didn’t prepare. Most guilds will struggle a little bit in naxx as that’s when tuning starts to catch up with us a little. The pro guilds won’t have a problem. But it won’t be cake walk for average guild.

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I think people underestimate naxx and aq40 and how annoying and difficult they can be for disorganized guilds.

Yeah the well-organized guilds will be fine and it won’t be hard. But most casual guilds will probably fall apart in aq40 and certainly in naxx.

Heck, I raid in a semi-casual guild with a quality core of ~20 people that cleared BWL on the first night, but I’m like 70% sure its going to fall apart in AQ40 due to the casual people in the raid and annoying runbacks and wipes.

There’s a lot of guilds that can tolerate easy raids, but not any wiping. I did these raids back in vanilla to the end, and its a lot different than BWL/MC.

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Naturally all the resources make it easier to perform well. However, many guilds do this for mythic raiding in retail as well, but continue to fail hundreds of times to progress a single boss. It’s just different types of difficulty, but the raids themselves in vanilla aren’t as complex mechanically, which leads to the “its soooooo easy” commentary.

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The only thing in MC that was hard was the trash, and the bosses in MC are actually easier than in most cases the trash.

Many parts of BWL are that way, but good tanks can make BWL look and feel a lot easier than it actually is. Bad tanks will make you be thanking your lucky stars that you have good ones.

AQ is very much the same, great tanks and being prepared make an easy raid, but if your tanks are not good then it’s going to be miserable.

AQ like BWL is trash heavy and the trash is a big part of the raid, also some of the boss fights are a little harder but only because we don’t out gear them yet. Once you out gear AQ with the gear your character gets from AQ it will be very easy.

Being truly hard mode has never actually been a wow trait, but it is for some people who just don’t yet have the practice or knowledge, and that has never changed.

Well right - WoW isn’t a hard game… it was never meant to be. How come people are complaining about it being low difficulty then… perhaps because they are afraid to play something that requires great skill?

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I can not speak for the mechanics for retail, since I have not touched that garbage in years. I assume they are more complex. I do believe though that progression and raids would not gather threads like these mocking it if the information was not so readily available. The raids are still tough, specially if you do not know what mobs or npcs do. The first mobs in AQ would prolly wipe most raids if said raids actually had no clue what to expect from em.

Its just the audacity to mock it whats bothering. Also if retail is such a great version of wow with such sophisticated mechanics, id recommend playing that. The bleeding subs must be explained somehow though.

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Every single thing indicates that AQ40 will be a significant step-up across all tiers of raiding.

Yes, region-first runs will be ~30min but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s over-researched and fully understood.

However, even top guilds will have to do a lot more preparation for speedclears, especially once there are specific trash requirements as well as requirements to kill all bosses.

Average guilds will most-likely not survive a full run with world buffs and casual guilds will experience serious struggle. If it takes you 90min to get through BWL - good luck.

And finally, if your goal is to simply beat the boss and call it - congratulations, you have beaten Classic WoW. I can’t see many players actually unable to clear a 15 year old raid after multiple attempts and raid-nights.

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Agreed entirely. The one point I’d contend with is concerning retail, personally I believe top end mythic raiding and arena PvP is a good time and challenging. The rest is pretty meh; especially as expansions grind toward the end and power systems become broken. I raided BfA mythic and had a good time, but quit before the corruption system and have logged in once since then without any idea of what to even do =P

From a strict raid perspective, I really enjoy the initial mythic raiding at the start to midway through retail thanks to the grind to progress even a few percent closer to a boss kill over the course of hundreds of attempts. Overall, I love how classic plays.

But comparing them from a difficulty perspective concerning raiding just doesn’t make sense to me since they are very different. As you said, if you had no idea what you’re doing and ran in unpreped and undergeared, you’d be bug lunch. Researching extensively, optimizing every little detail, rolling bosses before mechanics activate, then saying how “easy” it all is seems disingenuous at best.

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Here’s the thing though, every single guild in retail goes into each tier knowing how the fights work and what to do.

The game even has an adventure guide detailing each of the mechanics.

all the raids up until Kael is going to be easy (and Kael might be easy too for all we know). remember back then, the internet wasnt as publicly available as it is now. there wasnt all this information we had for mechanics and builds. we had to learn them along the way. people should probably accept it at this point that all the raids in classic/tbc/wrath are going to be a cakewalk because everyone knows everything now. unless blizzard releases prenerf versions but doubt they will do that to appeal to the casuals.

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