I see this opinion echoed a lot on the forums. Specifically, people say Vanilla wow wasn’t “mechanically difficult”. I don’t think any game i’ve ever played has been mechanically difficult other than games in the fighting genre like Street Fighter, so it is odd to me when people mention this.
I haven’t played retail since WOD, but the little that I did play felt pretty basic so I can’t comment on Legion/BFA.
When people say Vanilla isn’t hard, it makes me wonder what MMO they would classify as “difficult”.
By saying that vanilla wasn’t hard, it implies that none of the content was hard which includes aq40/naxx.
I never did either in Vanilla, but from what i’ve seen Naxx looks challenging. I’d go as far as to say, it looks hard, but then again i’ve never done it.
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Every Raid is “hard” until its beaten. Then it’s “easy”. Its impossible for them to consider anything they know how to beat to be hard. Therefore everything is easy.
We just won’t know how much gear really matters, until we do it on real servers (instead of guessed at private versions).
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Not only that, but Vanilla WoW was much more forgiving than other MMORPGs at the time. Raids are harder due to logistics. They’re more punishing than modern Raids and its’ harder to herd 40 cats than 10 or 25 cats.
Modern Raids, however, have more glowy to dance around and other mechanics of that sort.
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Most mmos are the same kind of hard than Super Mario world. It was hard the first time you played it but after countless hours playing it, you can clear it with your eyes closed and one hand. MMOs aren’t mecanicaly hard, it’s just that something easy that has to be done right by 40 people at the same time makes it harder. But like any game, once you catch up and figure out some tricks, it becomes easy.
Pad it with some grinding and people will remember the task as something brutal even though it didn’t have to.
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Think of it like this.
If you put an average guild in Naxx with unlimited consumables they would clear it eventually. The ‘hard’ part of classic WoW is the prep you need to do by farming gold and consumes but the actual fights themselves are not very challenging.
Put an average guild on Uu’nat, Mythic with unlimited consumables and they will NEVER kill it unless it gets nerfed.
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Do they also have more mobility spells/skills? I honestly do not know. The last time I played was WoD and while I raided some, I have been out of the game since.
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Ultima Online - MMORPG in which early game you start with virtually nothing, spellcasters started with a handful of casting reagents, 100 gold and virtually no gear other than clothes and a dagger. I kid you not, a rabbit could kill you.
When you died, you dropped all your stuff.
In the earlier renditions pvp could happen anywhere. You could be attacked or killed anywhere, including inside major cities or the capital. If you could not type out “guards!” or hit your macro for it fast enough you would die, and drop all your stuff. No, a ghost calling the guards did not work.
Genuinely difficult character progression. It took over a year to grandmaster magery or magic resistance in the earlier iteration, a few years before WoW. And that was utilizing your “power hour” every day.
Events and high level enemies that could kill in 1 to 2 hits even with the best gear available. Events that took hundreds of players to complete or beat.
That is one example. I could list others and go into detail. Others that come to mind, like Lineage 2. But instead I am going to watch a movie with my wife ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
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I just don’t think this is true though.
Edit: Do you really think that guilds that cleared vanilla naxx would not be able to complete mythics given unlimited attempts like in your example?
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Difficulty comes in many forms. A lot of people who want to say Vanilla is either hard or easy want to look at specific areas that reinforce that.
For one, something taking a lot of time to complete is a sort of difficulty. Getting to rank 14 in PvP in Vanilla isn’t mechanically difficult, but it’s still difficult due to a very high time investment over a short period of time.
For mechanics, Vanilla WoW wasn’t terribly mechanically complex but it did punish you more harshly for making mistakes in most places compared to BfA with the exception of high end raiding. Pulling too much while leveling in BfA means very little, while pulling a single extra mob in Vanilla can mean a corpse run.
Which the “compared to BfA” is an important note, because WoW was always the casual’s MMO from the start. It’s just that since 2004 they’ve gone overkill on that idea in some areas of the game like world content.
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I felt UO in the 90’s was much harder. You had no guided experience. You literally just get dropped in the world and left to your own devices. It wasn’t uncommon, especially during beta 97, to be murdered by other players within minutes of creating a character and having all your starting stuff and money taken. It was freaking brutal!
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Vanilla leveling and 5mans were hard, mostly for tanks. It also took longer, which can often create a false illusion of difficulty. Most, if not all raid bosses in Vanilla have less mechanics than modern WoW’s 5-mans, but we’re all also better at the game. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a somewhat blurry distinction between what made Vanilla difficult, and what makes retail difficult.
The largest difference is that everyone had to experience difficult content in Vanilla, since leveling and other casual content was often difficult, whereas in modern, retail WoW, the only stuff that gets hard is Mythic+ and raiding.
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I don’t remember the vanilla raids clearly, but I think most classes didn’t have many jobs to do in a fight.
This one boss in last parts of the first raid of BfA. Oh mi god, I had to heal, move all around the place, use mass dispel and dispel effectively to disperse mobs that feared everyone if they got too close. That was so hectic and hard.
I have never done AQ40 or Naxx so I don’t know how hard those get. Vanilla difficulty gets downplayed a lot, but many of them really are mechanically easier than what they are nowadays. Surely the raid difficulties take a lot away from todays raids.
When the majority of people are saying that vanilla wasn’t hard. They are referring to raid mechanics and bosses.
nearly every boss in vanilla had very basic abilities compared to today’s raids. Simply in terms of boss abilities.
The difficulty back than wasn’t the boss, it was gathering 40 people together to work well. The boss was almost secondary.
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What I loved about vanilla is that it challenged the dedication (and time) you put in order to reap the rewards, whatever that may be. It made it strangely addicting to push yourself toward whatever goal you set for your self. Some were legitimately difficult. Freakin’ Scarab Lord comes to mind.
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40 man raids instead of 20
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Raiding is much harder even in BFA because we benchmark things by mythic 20 mans which are much harder than even naxx.
Classic WoW was hard for meta things outside of the actual raid itself. Finding 40 ppl who aren’t mouth breathing retards for one, the grind to 60, the grind for consumables buffs, attunements etc…
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I guess i prefer the term “straight forward”. “Difficult” and “hard” are kind of loaded and subjective.
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I played EQ from 2000 into PoP before taking years off. I found it much more challenging to raid, quest, dungeon crawl and get back to body. Plus exp loss was brutal.
I have a couple friends that played corpse looting pvp games prior to EQ and that sounded harder to level, get items and maintain them.
If you definition of hard is defined by fun then it varies but personally I found WoW a lot easier than EQ. Everquest ended up getting too watered down and multi-boxed it was not fun. WoW still has the interaction aspect I enjoy even at retail (quit earlier this year). But my experience to 60 in WoW was far easier than my experience to 50 in EQ and even to level 30.
Some classes just could never solo past 15 like warrior, rogue, cleric (some undead spots), paladin (unless hunting undead) - all the classes Dwarfs could be. A few could solo to 50 like the necro, druid and mage and with a lot more risk, the wizard, enchanter and bard. Every class has a chance to level to 60 albeit difficult or challenging for some in WoW. Harder doesn’t equal better though.
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You would be surprised at the number of people who are either.
- Mechanically challenged.
- Not nearly as invested as us.
To those people, Vanilla was ‘hard’. I played with some of them. They exist too.
The people saying vanilla wasn’t hard are usually people responding to people claiming that vanilla was so much harder than retail. Which is first off only true in very limited ways, sure leveling was a little harder but the actual hard content in retail is harder than the hard content in vanilla.
And also misleading if leveling in retail is a 1 on a scale of 0-10 difficulty vanilla was only a 1.5 at best, so really not that much harder at all.
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It really does being up an interesting point about perspective and how we interpret not only what we consider as “challenging,” but also what we think of WoW Vanilla as a whole.
In my opinion, vanilla was hard - for its time. Vanilla was back in 2005 where the internet was fresh, YouTube was born, people didn’t know the fundaments of full blown MMO RPGs, and there was just so much going on that most players had a difficult time understanding.
Look at it now, I can see why some people would say vanilla was easy now since we can compare it to even more challenging games in our modern day community.
Vanilla is like the Dark Souls of MMORPGS; it requires a tremendous amount if grind, slower paced, great challenge, and many annoying bugs. Now, we have YouTube boss guides, class and race guides, tips and tricks, open forums with people who know what they are talking about, and more understanding of how MMORPGs work.
So, yes. Now, in 2019, vanilla is less hard than it was before. I wouldn’t say its easy, but just less hard.