I played quite a bit of Everquest, but the thing is I find the relation from Retail->Vanilla similar to the relation between Vanilla->EQ.
Retail is mechanically more difficult on things like Mythic raids than Vanilla. Vanilla is more mechnically involved than everquest in my opinion. I played P99 for a good amount of time and everquest is a lot slower paced than even Vanilla wow. Everquest felt a lot more methodical than anything else i’ve played.
That being said, everquest is way more hardcore than Vanilla in the game design and relative strength of the enemies you fight as well as for many of the reasons you listed.
It seems like Vanilla is also more hardcore than BFA in the game design (hard to obtain gold, repairs are costly, consumables necessary for raid progression, grindy, standard enemies are much more difficult as well as dungeons are more difficult).
TLDR: It seems hard to say one game is harder than the other because they are both more difficult in their own ways.
There’s a lot of factors at play on both sides, and boiling it down to mechanics and consumables doesn’t do it justice I feel. While mechanics have gotten more numerous or more complex, classes has also been given the tools to deal with it. Vanilla had a limited tool-set compareable, and the encounters had to reflect that. Also, modern day raiding and vanilla raiding calls upon different strengths on the player.
Then there’s the whole spectrum of tech, available information, internet speed (any raid is difficult with ping 600+) time spend preparing, amount of people and the list goes on. It is almost like comparing a 18th century soldier to a modern one. It is still a hard job, but the tools to overcome the hurdles are vastly different in both scale and equipment.
yeah everquest was just nuts. even today, maaaaaany expacs later, the game is stupid hard. they’ve given you access to mercenaries to help you quest and dungeoneer but its still over the top eventually. we tried to four man a raid that was many levels below us (this was like 2 years ago) and it was so bad, so much aggro (the entire zone aggros when the raid boss (tunare) is confronted and clearing the zone first doesnt help because it has an insane respawn rate), the lag alone crashed the raid. how did people ever manage to beat that back in the day when it was new content, i will never know.
Compared to the competition at the time? Vanilla was with out a doubt easy. I feel that many people felt that vanilla WoW was also their first mmo. Newbies make a lot of mistakes, picking wrong stats, wearing wrong armor type, not spending talent points or picking objectively bad points, etc, etc. It all goes to making the game harder or easier.
I’m not saying there were not hard parts about Vanilla but the game over all not so much.
Not original Naxx, it was just too unforgiving of human error. If you have 40 people trying to do it and they weren’t very coordinated then a lot of the fights would fail every time.
There weren’t as many finicky mechanics like current raids but there was overall very little room for error and since there were more people the errors compounded quickly. If you didn’t have the gear, the consumables, the coordination, and the overall skill you were going to keep failing. Consumables and time weren’t enough, even with a lot of effort very few guilds cleared original Naxx.
A few things contribute to Vanilla being ‘hard’ in my opinion. Some are historical and we might not see it again, some are the game.
Class Mechanics:
Vanilla classes have a simple and class specific, albeit simple toolkit. In many cases there is only one version of that ability in the game and it is class specific.
Game Mechanics:
The game doesn’t use the same combat table since Wrath and combat has been simplified each expansion.
Another simple example like the Rogue’s Backstab ability which had its positioning and weapon type requirements removed.
Trash:
Trash is a significant part of raiding in Vanilla and BC.
As we saw with the Molten Core anniversary event, as simple as the raid is the Trash is non-trivial. You can very easily wipe to trash that hits tanks as hard or harder than the bosses.
Boss Mechanics:
Most are simple for the modern player and easily understood. However they can be unforgiving.
Moam is draining your raid’s mana for most of the fight, when he reaches 100% he will Arcane Explosion spam wipe the raid. About every 90 seconds he becomes immune and summons three big elementals that AOE spam and hit hard that need to be banished.
So it is basically a race to kill him before he a) drains all your mana b) gets 100% mana and spam kills you and c) to CC the adds as fast as possible. Not a complicated fight, but things can go bad very quickly.
I think some people make these statements having never done the fights as a real level 60 with ordinary raiding gear, or didn’t do them at all and just look at the modern frogger encounters and say ‘Seee! hardmode’.
WoW raiders like to think they are pretty elite players too. How many thousands of times has the Hardcore vs. Casuals debate come up…
Exactly… What made vanilla’s raiding difficulty were the logistics, not the encounter mechanics themselves, which consisted (mostly) of 2 elements for the dpsers:
get out of the fire
kill adds
Nowadays, dpsers and sometimes even healers have to deal with mechanics regarding clicking interactive objects to do something, or to take stuff out to specific places, or to coordinate themselves with specific players. AOE’s follow any number of different patterns now, instead of the classic “cone breath” that had to be aimed away from the raid. There are so many layers of complexity to the encounter mechanics now, that even dungeons have it bigger than naxx back then.
Now, the logistics back in vanilla, consisted:
Real healer coordination because of mana
Dps assignments to dispels and cleanses
Having the required amount of resist + gear
Having the right consumables
Watching closely for threat
Watching for buffs falling out
Bascially everything not related to the encounter mechanics themselves. Of course, there were some special occasions, like mind controlling in Razuvious, etc.
Some things made classic content seem more difficult.
Leveling was serious business
Questing took significantly more reading and initiative to explore
Dungeons and raids required more patience, skill while pulling and strategy on those pulls
Making money was harder
Building dungeon groups and raids took more social effort
Travel took significantly more time
Quality of Life changes over the years, in some sense, were well thought and appreciated. They added a bit more accessibility/convenient convienience to the game. So, in that sense, the game was harder.
Every time these threads pop up, people conveniently forget that there are no such things as resource, gold and consumable management, threat or wipe recovery in the modern game, only spastic twitch mechanics and visual diarrhea.
People here are trying to compare things that aren’t really directly comparable. The difficulty around modern raiding has a lot of focus on mechanics where a lot of vanilla difficulty was centered on logistics.
Here are some things that made vanilla raiding difficult that just don’t exist today:
Mana management. Let’s be honest, very few classes outside of those player who are cutting edge content ever have to worry about their mana anymore. Vanilla required a ton of awareness to manage Mana.
Threat management. These days a tank just has to brush against a mob to have permanent aggro. Sure they’ve tried to make threat matter but mid content cycle tanks are nearly impossible to pull threat from. Threat was a huge part of encounters to the point of having tanks in DPS specs to maximize threat by the end of Vanilla.
Stacking consumables. In vanilla it wasn’t just possible but almost expected that you would be bringing as many consumables as possible. Mana potions, demonic runes, elixirs, bandages and so on. There was no limit other than cooldown for how many potions/runes you could pop during an encounter.
Herding cats. Just getting 40 people on the same page in order to execute the game plan of an encounter was something raid leaders had to deal with.
Modern day raiding is very different than vanilla and hard to compare. Even Naxx from Wrath had a ton of general nerfs because they just wouldn’t work with a smaller raid.
Both are difficult in their own say. Both have things that are easy in their own way.
naxx40 is a snoozefest compared to modern mythic raiding.
the amount of mechanic happening simultaneously, everyone having jobs, the overlap and CD to track …
or, if you prefer… Remember Thaddius? big guy, boss of the abom wing… basically the entire fight was to not mix + people with - people ?
They took the same mechanic, renamed positive/negative charge to poison/toxic, slapped few more mechanic on top of it like naj’entus spears and that’s the first boss of Eternal Palace, the upcomin raid in BFA.
keep in mind, first bosses are considered loot pinatas now… Thaddius + few more mechanic on top of it… is now a loot pinatas by modern standard.
Mana management was mostly a problem because of the super low DPS. super low DPS was mostly a problem because 1- there was a huge stigma against DPSer and 2- tanks didn’t knew how to hold threat ( which … was spamming sunder, over and over… queue’ing heroic strike).
but now that every tank know how to hold threat, and the stigma against DPSer shifted, boss will drop waaaaaay faster and mana management won’t be an issues… not that ‘downrank your heals and drink a pot every 2 min’ was much of a management.
Threat : see above. until naxx there’s not much AoE tanking going on anyway.
3 consumable : that wasn’t a big deal until naxx… and players are much better nowadays / know strategies, so the consumable count will be cut in half or more.
herding cats : it’s actually not that bad when only 4 or 5 player in your 40-man raid have any specific jobs other than caring about their own self.
or if you want a better comparaison… the first boss of eternal palace, BFA next’s raid… is basically Thaddius + naj’entus combined together… and as a first boss he’s considered the loot pinata of the place.
and people also forget how bad player were in vanilla… tank not knowing how to spam sunder for threat, healer not downranking their heals, DPS being soo afraid of outaggro’ing (because tank sucked) that they would do nothing but autoattacks…
remove those problem and bosses fall over in record time, reducing the need for consumable / gold. All bosses are known with detailed strats, reducing the learning curve. We know how to gear, so we have more optimized character… and quite frankly, proper execution when there’s only 2 or 3 , without overlap, in the entire fight as opposed to the ‘‘visual diarrhea’’, as you described it, will be really easy.
Remember 4 horseman? legendary encounter, was supposely incredibly hard…
tank were so awfull guild would get 8 of them to taunt swap instead of 6.
and spreading to not chain lightning was apparently really hard too, even if less than half of the raid was on the chain lightning boss.
Yeah, even naxx people were friggin bad.
it’s not like we don’t have a ton of private servers we can use as reference, withs tons of guild clearing Naxx in 2, sometimes 1, week after it’s release.
and nevermind all the bugs and glitched bosses we won’t have to suffer through… aka no people randomly falling to their death on c’thun or people DC’ing for no reason in naxx.
That has nothing to do with what you had posted though. You claimed that people didn’t know to spam sunder for threat, healers didn’t downrank, and DPS didn’t know what threat meters were so they’d just auto attack which is so far from the truth that I can’t tell if you’re trolling.
ETA: If it was so easy shouldn’t they be clearing it within a couple hours vs 2 weeks on private servers where all the mechanics may not even be working as intended?
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