"Vanilla Wow wasn't hard"

[Vlonk-bleeding-hollow]

Do you think watching a video is akin to playing

if you are going to compared LFR to mythic, then yes.

to see the content

a youtube video allow you to see the content.

or heck, you can rush through those instance at 120 to ‘see’ the content. you can even do WotLK’s naxx to ‘see’ what naxx is like.

if you are going to pick the easiest possible difficulty made to please mom and pops who can’t commit to any raiding in order to judge retail VS classic… then I can’t take you seriously.

[Motors-korgath (Motors)]

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.

Everything in WoW is binary because the community is unable to effectively communicate anything other than trash or unicorns.

This is a reflection of the lack of intelligence of the community.

[Mistwynd-lightbringer (Mistwynd)]

If you put an average guild in Naxx with unlimited consumables they would clear it eventually.

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?

Fight mechanics for even the hardest Vanilla raid bosses are quite simple compared to the fight mechanics for the tougher fights in mythic difficulty Retail raids.

Simple fight mechanics mean they’re easy to learn. Easy to learn means it takes less skill and wipes to master the fight. From the perspective of individual skill required, most Retail mythic raid encounters are vastly tougher than anything in Vanilla.

Take a mythic raider from Retail and stick him/her in Naxx40 and the player will probably be bored by how easy everything is. So little mechanics to learn, so little stuff to avoid. Most of the time it’s just stand in place and spam. Easy.

That’s not to say Vanilla raids were easy though.

• Naxx mechanics might have been simple, but you still had to get everyone geared enough to do the fights, including sometimes farming resist gear.
• You also had to bring the right raid composition of classes and specs.
• and the toughest part - getting and retaining skilled players. There was no cross-server gameplay, and no real way to gear to a raid-ready level other than by raiding. This meant that when you needed recruits there was usually just ONE place to get them: Guilds lower in progression than your on the totem pole. You’d be constantly trying to recruit those guilds best players. And the same would apply for the guilds above you all the way to the top guild on the server.

If your raid group got stuck on a fight, you were more like to lose some of your best players to poaching by better guilds. But without your best players, your guild’s own progression would tend to stall out as you frantically tried to recruit and gear replacements. Gearing them could take weeks since the only place to get decent gear was the bosses you already had on farm. That meant progression further stalled and you were more likely to lose more players.

This sometimes caused a “death spiral” where the rate of players quitting exceeded your ability to recruit replacements. This could result in an entire guild’s raid team quitting. And the replacements never being able to perform at the same high level.

That kind of “death spiral” is much less likely in Retail since there is a vastly larger pool of replacements with cross-server gameplay, there is more overlap in class abilities, and it is much easier to gear up replacement characters as there are other avenues to get good gear besides raiding.