"Vanilla Wow wasn't hard"

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
21

Vanilla isnt hard, its punishing. It asks you to stick to the rules that it very clearly tells you, such as:

  • Pay attention to healer mana.
  • Dont over-pull.
  • Wear the right gear for the fight
  • Dispelling > DPSing
  • Loot the Hounds

If you fail to do these things, you are violently punished. It isnt mechanically hard in the way that Starcraft 2 is, but failure is still always a heartbeat away because of how narrow the path to success is.

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22

At least half of the raid happens outside of the instance in Vanilla. I think that’s pretty cool in an immersion sort of way. Feels more strategic, I guess.

Anyway, the window for error is smaller. Last time I raided was LK, and we had wriggle room for mistakes. You mess up a Classic mechanic like Baron or drakonids and you can kiss your butt goodbye.

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23

People miss the point of vanilla. Mythics are probably harder than old content. But, who cares about the gear from retail mythics. I mean like getting gear is whatever. It doesn’t even matter. In PvP your stats are all adjusted to be equal. Your gear means nothing. So there really isn’t a reason to do anything. Unless you’re playing arena competitively for esports or something

In vanilla when you got an epic, you could now 1 shot people. It meant something. It was fun.

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24

It’s gonna be funny when 95% of the people who say “Vanilla Wasn’t Hard” rage quit at level 30.

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25

I got High Warlord as a Warlock when I was like 10.

The idea this game needed to be made easier is bull. A lot of us who started out back then were kids. Most of the older people long ago got families or more demanding and satisfying careers that also demanded their time.

MMORPGs are by design time-sinks. It requires a lot of dedicated time playing (at least an hour or more a day); learning the meta for your class, farming materials for professions to deal with your Achilles heel as a class or supplement your strengths, making connections so you get get into groups for content like elite quests and dungeons and raids, doing PvP and being good enough to maintain your rank, etc. etc. Once you know how to do these things the game is not hard in and of itself. It just takes time and dedication; to be blunt that is very hard to do if you have a very demanding life where you can’t sit at a desk for three hours a day or the experience of the game isn’t rewarding/challenging enough to make you want to do that.

Especially now that you can look up everything and comprehensive guides exist for pretty much anything in Classic it definitely isn’t hard now. The mechanics are a lot less forgiving but once you know what to do and what not to do you will be fine.

26

I keep seeing this on these forums. Not everyone was 12 playing WoW. People had been playing DaoC, UO, raiding in EQ and FFXI and min maxxed then too.
There was tons of theorycrafting going on before WoW came out, there was a LOT more stuff the devs did not tell the playerbase and they needed to figure it out.

People aren’t “better” at games now, they are just different games. There are top notch players in all games, and there always has been.

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27

I try to play games on my NES Classic and I fail miserably. I’m terrible compared to what I was when I was a kid.

But yeah, people like to pretend 2004 was the dark ages or something. That no one knew how to use a computer. I’d been playing video games for close to 20 years. I’d been playing pc games for over a decade. We weren’t as clueless as people think.

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28

Well, it’s completely different game from retail or other MMO’s, the difficulty was added by other factors like wrangling 40 people to farm materials, show up in time. 5 mans were “easy” if you knew what you were doing, by that i mean, using proper CC, assisting. The game had a completely different meta and it was far more punishing since the early levels.

I did complete AQ40 and did half of Naxx when it was new and the mechanics weren’t overwhelming, you’d usually have gear check bosses, the resistance gear boss and only AQ and Naxx introduced the IQ check bosses that wiped your entire raid if one people DC’d mid fight or were reluctant to do proper mechanics.

29

Vanilla was very gear dependent, although patch 1.12’s welfare epics made gearing little easier for newer players. The mechanics of the game were rigid, there was no scaling, no content flexing and most casual raid guilds struggled in progression as there were only 25-30 out of the 40 who bothered to farm consumables, get up to a minimum gear level etc.

Only the dedicated guilds would see progression through AQ40 and legacy Naxx

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30
  1. Defias Pillagers are calling.
31

Some mythic fights in retail wow are definitely significantly harder than vanilla raid fights. At least mechanically wise it is.

32

everquest, the 3d mmorpg that predates wow, was harder. for example:

  • you had to run back to corpse fully visible with no armor or weapons to defend yourself with cause they were still on your corpse and if you didn’t find your corpse within 3 days it would rot along with all your game currency and gear, unless you found someone to locate it for you (a bard or necromancer) before then or managed to get a gm to get it. there was no indicator on the game map where you died so if you died while running thru the woods, if you didnt know the location exactly you might never find it again unless you did get help.

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  • if you died you lost xp and could even de-level. clerics could rez you within so many minutes and recoup a percentage of your lost xp but you first had to find a cleric and second it was never 100% xp recovery

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  • there were no horses /mounts till many expacs later and never any flying mounts. you had to either run everywhere on foot and take boats to travel between continents or hire someone who could port you (either a druid or wizard). some ports were deadly as you could arrive at a dragon spawn

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  • boats took upwards of a half hour to arrive and another half hour to travel to your destination port, and had been known to glitch out, killing you at sea or even while standing on the dock waiting for their arrival.

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  • dungeons and raids were not instanced, meaning you had to compete with everyone else in the dungeon or raid, for mobs and bosses, and quest items.

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  • the same guilds could end up monopolizing a raid for months or even years

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  • there was no auction house for several expacs so the players found a centrally located spot to hawk their wares and had to stand there and spam the chat with their merchandise for hours and sometimes days on end
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  • quests were rare and quest givers were not indicated. you had to go up to each npc and /hail them to see if they had a quest and then remember where they were in the game, because there was no indication on them that they had given you a quest. no ? or !

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  • professions were hard to do and rarely earned enough game currency to be worth the effort monetarily. you usually did them because of their benefit to your guild and thats about it.

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  • mobs were not tagged to you until you did at least 51% of the damage, until that point, someone else could step up, do 51% of the damage, get the xp and loot instead, while you took all the aggro
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  • higher level zones were off the charts dangerous. you could enter a zone and be instantly summoned to the other side of the zone by a high level mob

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  • raids were stupid hard. zoning into a raid, you were immediately confronted from groups of roaming mobs that hit hard. if you were just curious and zoned in, you were dead and getting your corpse back was nearly impossible and in some cases, would end up rotting.

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  • there were no mana potions or heal potions (at least, not worth mentioning) and mana had to be recouped by sitting on the floor, meditating. for at least 2 years, you had to meditate with your spellbook filling the screen which meant you couldnt see danger approaching and it was quite boring to boot.

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  • enemies had no tether and once aggroed on you, or once they had added you to their aggro list, they would chase you till either they were dead, you were dead or you zoned into a different instanced zone.

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  • everything had faction so you could end up accidentally getting bad faction with someone you didnt want bad faction with.

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  • other players could pull a huge train of mobs across your location, thereby adding you to the aggro list of that train, who would then come back to get you after those players either died or zoned out of the area.
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33

I believe ppl think Vanilla is easy or current mythic raiding is easy are ppl that are projecting themselves onto others.

Just like when a NFL team wins the Super Bowl. Guess what you did not win they did.

If you didn’t clear naxx 40 in Vanilla not pserver. Then guess what you didn’t clear it. Same goes for mythic raiding in current.

I look at it they are both hard.

Now leveling in Vanilla was harder.

It takes less than 24hours to get max level and possibly never die. You solo world bosses and elites.

In classic you will die a few times before lvl 10 takes about 7 to 10 days played to reach max level. You cannot solo same lvl elites as you are. World bosses take an army.

If you say dungeons well mythic plus never ends so obviously that’s harder.
By mythic 6 below I would say vanilla is harder and you could get lost in them.

Point is if you cannot clear heroic raiding in current and kill some mythic bosses. Don’t expect to be clearing NAXX40.
NAXX 40 equivalent to a mythic raid. It’s not easy, if it was everyone would clear as in LFR. We will find out in classic how many guilds clear it. I am going to say about 15% or less of player base.

H@$$ some ppl pay for black temple clear for time walking. That was beyond nerfed and same dang ppl say Naxx40 is easy.

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34

People just take for granted that mmos were a niche, and there wasnt any formula for designing an mmorpg - which meant most games were wildly different and often painful because they wanted you to no-life through an mmo.

WoW was not hard by comparison. Everquest and other games had a penalty when you died. Loss of xp and gear. Wow stopped that. You didnt lose gear on death, or xp.

Wow vanilla did not punish you as hard as other games. Repair gear and go.

Anyone comparing to retail is missing the point of that statemeant. In vanilla, players of other mmos, like EvE Online, called WoW a care bear game because it did not have high stakes or punish as severely for failing.

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35

Watch a Nefarian fight? Every class had a specific reaction to their class call, all while managing fears, add respawns, and generally hitting the big lizard.

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36

Yeah you are right. People refer to MC and ZG most likely when judging vanilla raid hardness, but what they forget is that there is no difficulty setting in raids, but that they get incrementally more difficult.

We will be able to judge this stuff lot better by winter 2020, but still some fights in today’s game are very hectic and there is so much stuff going on. Haven’t tested the newer raids only did the first one of BfA on heroic at the start of the expansion.

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37

I agree on one of the ‘hard’ part of Classic WoW is that you need prep to farm for consumables required to beat Naxx. But I dont agree an ‘Average’ guild would beat Naxx.

I remember Black Wing Lair has DPS checks. You cant get pass to it if the raid DPS is poor. So is Ahn Qiraj 40, it has DPS checks. And what would you expect with Naxx 40? It’s the same it has DPS checks. To beat this DPS checks, the raid has to be properly geared. And Each member has to be very good with their respective class.

I was a very decent Warrior in Vanilla and I was with a very decent guild who reached Naxx and killed at least 6 of its bosses. There were times, I was invited to join other weaker raid group to either DPS or tank for them on some of their raids. I saw the other guilds were doing the same exact strat of what my guild was doing but how come they cant kill Bosses? It ended up with their healers running out of mana, or boss got enraged. The reason they fail is that their DPS was weak. Looking at their damage meters compared to my guild, they were far behind than us. Naxx 40 requires skills not just gear. I dont believe an average guild would beat it even if you give them infinite consumables.

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38

As Marty Feldon said in Young Frankenstein, “ON THE NOSEY!!!” Here, have a cookie. :cookie::rofl:

39

The ones you described are not game difficulty. To me, they are bugs or glitch or stupid fail mechanics. It doesnt make that game hard. It’s just full of fail or annoying features. Vanilla has some of it and modern WoW eliminated most of annoying features so that players would concentrate more on content challenges.

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40

i’m a wow fan believe me. lol i am just answering his question about what was harder than vanilla wow that people are talking about. most of what i listed was not a bug. it was deliberate design by the devs. they wanted you to know the factions of the mobs. they wanted you to learn how to use /location. they wanted you to not just waltz into a raid portal by yourself. they wanted you to lose xp if you died. they wanted that dragon to spawn at the druid ring. etc.

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