You could actually toss out Fear Ward. Garr’s fear was on a timer that could be stance danced using Berserkers Rage.
The fear ward was for dispel protection. Not for fear.
I noticed a lot of #%#* ups in a mythic raid constantly.
Vanilla never did AQ40 or Naxx40.
I can say from old raids in TBC before nerfs no mess ups or it was a wipe. Three long months of wipes till ppl did mechanics.
I can see up to BWL is simpler but I will not say it’s easy it was moderate difficult as like some heroic raids.
As blizzard stayed some seen c’thun as impossible but blizzard never said it was impossible. Meaning they had to nerf c’thun nobody beat him.
Vanilla is technically harder than current for many reasons.
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The adds do more damage in open world where if pull more than 3 it could mean your death. In current WoW you can pull an army and walk away.
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Longer to level by a long shot.
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Dungeons even a lvl 40 dungeon a lvl 60 cannot solo all bosses and adds. While in current some can solo mythic plus up 6 or to 10.
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Elites usually take a group but in current can be solo.
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World bosses can be solo in current WoW but takes an army in Vanilla.
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Raids gradually get more difficult. Meaning every difficulty is in each separate raid. You have normal to mythic in Vanilla.
In current the same. -
To get gold is more difficult in Vanilla
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Pvp server no escape.
It’s not all about the raid only difficulty in current is mythic plus and mythic raids.
downranking is essentially an additional spell to add. how many ranks did you have up? should add the ranks to your list. they are another decision that has to be made and a different spell
To a degree. Mages usually wanna pot the moment a pot or gem covered the mana spend thus far, to get the cool-downs going. Bad mages potted when they were low, and usually ran out fast before they could pot again.
Wasn’t Downranking nerfed somewhat by 1.12? Moreso in later expansions, but by 1.12 it wasn’t as effective?
Problem here is it doesn’t mean anything more than the hardest difficulty of CoD meaning something. Your retail adventures can have more mechanics and they can be completely ignorable except on 1 or 2 difficulties. Guess what? Everyone gets to beat that boss and the mechanics mean nothing. You can’t do that in Vanilla. Retail is meaningless in this regard. Its just a series of hoops to jump through for an arbitrary number called Ilvls that mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of modern retail design. The game itself is self defeating and pointless, and having 1 difficulty mode that means anything doesn’t save itself from this. Its 99% a joke game and the remaininig 1% is just for bragging rights, it means absolutely nothing and is in no way a core aspect needed to progress through the game.
Vanilla you HAVE to beat the game as is. That increases the meaning of each raid by magnitudes over Retail as you will never see a raid face to face, or a boss face to face and beat him unless YOU get there yourself. Not as many mechanics sure, but each one actually matters. They aren’t ignorable noise like in Retail.
People will eventually as Power Creep happens. People aren’t soloing 6’s or 10 mythis in retail or dungeons at the start of expansions. It happens as iLvl’s grow. It’ll happen in Vanilla too, especially after Naxx has been around.
There’s really nothing ‘Mythic’ about Ragnaros - Mythic difficulty may be equivalent to the end of AQ40 & Naxx.
Retail has had 14 years of inflation
notta clue. the extent of my vanilla experience was just trying to figure out how to play it before tbc dropped. i think i joined like 3 or 4 months before the expac arrived. so the bulk of my experience with vanilla is from the tbc perspective. also, i’m old and have forgotten alot about what i did know. will be fun to revisit it
I thought it was thoroughly appropriate that they selected the 15-20 range for the BlizzCon demo so that we had access to the Pillagers. They hit just as hard as I remembered. No joke, those guys will mess you up. If you pull a second, be ready for a corpse run.
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The game has dramatically changed since then, what made a good raider then has changed drastically since.
My old flat mate was a “good” raider in vanilla, he could keep his curse up,perform decent dps and be relied on not to die most of the time. He bailed in SSC because he found it too hard.
I know plenty of “good” raiders that steadily dropped off through the games history because complexity has shattered their illusions on their own skill level.
They’re no joke. Especially since they deal so much and you have so little life and you have very few ways of dealing with them since most classes don’t even have an interrupt in that range.
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I was playing a warrior, and definitely didn’t have pummel yet. I don’t remember what level it is gained at. I do remember being able to interrupt them with a rogue, so they must get kick pretty early.
Of course, everyone can “interrupt” them by breaking line of sight while they cast. The challenge then becomes breaking LOS without aggroing an add.
And this is exactly the kind of thing I miss from Vanilla. I couldn’t tell you a single spell or special ability on any of the creatures in BfA. But I can still remember a number of them from 15 years ago in Vanilla. I think that says a lot about what has happened to this game.
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Oh man, you didn’t get Pummel until you got Berserker Stance sometime in the 30’s - Otherwise you had Shield Bash but what newby Warrior wasn’t swinging a two-hander and soon as he got 10 silver?
to pick only one per encounter
uu’nat: unstable resonance. Clear auto-wipe if not done properly ( even while it’s overlapping with other mechanic.
cabal: any missed interrupt amongst your 10-something man rotation on 3 target simultaneously… with other mecanic overlapping, of course.
Jaina: heart of frost in P3. if not properly handled your entire raid will get frozen not long after. also Ice shard if someone get frozen.
Stormwall : not meeting the DPS check. dropping sea swell in front of the group, not soaking the ire…
mekka: this is a marathon fight where every small mistake wear you out… but not LoS’ing when you have the bomb ( one of 3 simultenously) is pretty darn close!
rasta : few people clearing stack at the same time, wrong people getting ported down, plague of fire in a close stack
conclave: paku + one mini boss dying at the same time.
Heck, even on grong a missed interrupt can lead to a 4-stack tantrum which is pretty much a wipe unless you can instantly pop multiple strong aoE CD at the same time, at which point you’re likely out of juice for the following tantrums meaning you just delayed your death… and grong is the 2nd boss of the instance.
Also keep in mind the DPS/HPS check are tuned tight enough to not be beatable when a third of your raid is dead… unlike heigan or thaddius in naxx.
If we have a quick look at uldir, the previous tier… zek’voz had the same chain-lightning beam as C’thun, vectis infection could instantly skyrocket if someone didn’t move on 6 stack, missing a particularly tight DPS check on fetid’s egg meant he healed a ton ( like, unrecoverable amount), getting dispelled too early on zul, double (triple) MC on mythrax, a missed orb on g’huun… and so on.
vlonk,
everyone who has responded to you, agrees that retail is mechanically more difficult than vanilla. you are just singing to the choir now. to argue the point, you -need to convince people who appreciate delayed gratification that they shouldn’t. ![:sunglasses:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sunglasses.png?v=6" ":sunglasses:")
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As someone who has a tank that cleared Naxx in vanilla, we knew and used all of these things. This is not some new knowledge.
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in wrath, when i finally ran naxx, i failed at thaddius, not because of being on the wrong polarity but because i always fell in the green water. had to do it several times before i finally got it. will need to run naxx on retail again, just to practice that jump if i ever get the courage to run it in guild on vanilla.
Honestly the worst part of Vanilla IMO. Flex raiding I wish had been a thing since the game’s inception. Oh well.
It’s also the thing that ultimately limits the shelf-life for anything worth doing beyond PvP in end game and why being on a large server is so important to the health of any individual player- dead realms makes for a terrible end-game experience when you can’t even PuG 40 people to raid.
I actually think it’s the complete opposite. WoW was the epitome of a casual MMO compared to other popular contemporaries like EQ and UO. The absolutely unforgiving nature of those games blow Vanilla out of the water.
In this day and age, gamers are conditioned towards a different, much more forgiving playstyle that makes something like Vanilla WoW vastly more frustrating in comparison.
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