You know why raiding is harder in retail? Activision is completely bankrupt of ideas so they make the raiding so hard that people have to keep resubbing to finish it.
Ok so maybe it was a factor for someā¦ But not for people raiding world 1st content.
Short story time:
After WotLK I went and played FFXIV for the entire Heavensward expansion. Their style of raid encounter difficulty was somewhat flipped from my WoW experience in that the 24, or large group content, was always very easy and handed out catch up gear. The difficult content came in the form of 8 man, or medium group content, and it was staggered into 2 difficulties of normal and savage/extreme. As a sidenote, the 4 man or smallest group content, only came in one, easy, difficulty.
The savage/extreme versions of content were legitimately difficult and constituted the endgame, and it took a practiced and dedicated group to down it. Predictably, the normal versions were as free as the large group content. Hereās where the parallels to retailās difficulty spectrum come into play. The normal modes of content, and the 4man content, were accessible through an LFG/LFR system. The most difficult modes could only be played by manually creating a group.
This caused the playerbase to split into two distinct groups, one that did the ārealā endgame content, and one that ignored it for the free LFG loot. Iām guessing that will sound familiar to a lot of retail raiders.
In the end, the game fell apart for me because the savage/extreme player pool was miniscule compared to the rest of the player base. At the same time, the savage/extreme content bordered on being a mechanically dense ābullet hellā nightmare at times. This is the style of raiding that retail has adopted. I personally dislike it. I think it splinters the player base into camps, and I think a āhand holdingā version of content dissuades players from stepping outside of their comfort zone. I also think creating four distinct versions of the same content results in a version that plays itself on the low end, and a version that is mechanically overwhelming on the high end, and it has to be that way so that each of the 4 versions can feel different for the players.
I think itās a mess, and I think it destroys the community around grouped content.
2 Likes
āolder brotherā.
The core audience at the time had jobs and had disposable income. Cable was everywhere.
Now if you were living on a farm somewhere, maybe not, but if you had dial up, you werenāt getting into a progressive raiding guild.
This. You werenāt getting into a guild worth their salt without dial up.
Raiding in Classic and TBC were never āharderā than current (pre-LFR), just that more people were oblivious to what they needed to do, and/or the playerbase was a LOT more divied between hardcore and casual players. On top of that, a lot more players were on a mix of bad/lower grade PCs and internet connections, unlike today where the lowest-end PC can run either game with 30+ FPS consistently, even in large fights.
Players in WoW Classic have embraced the streamer/sweaty meta of World Buffing the āchallengeā straight into oblivion, so the only real challenge is people just zoning out from boredom, answering a text while they auto attack and not moving, or just not caring about the .5-3 mechanics they need to manage at DBM-announced intervals to succeed. Bosses consistently taking only 17-40 seconds to kill is just not how it used to be.
In short, WoW Classic is a shadow of what it once was, and scripted PVE fights have always very, very predictable and scripted. People new to Classic are just seeing that firsthand.
Definitely not fair.
But I also think Vanilla raiding ādifficultyā is different from Retail - from I can tell since I donāt actually play it. Vanillaās isnāt some twitchy jump around type thing. Vanilla was a time sink where the road to the actual raid was harder than the raid itself (short of figuring out the road block bosses). Which is why in part, Classic right now, things are steam rolled. And with world buffs ā¦ ouch.
Yeah I quit early on - when people first started MC. But when I came back, I did see a lot of people in raiding gear.
If they release TBC - re-tuned, with all rep and grind requirements intact, i might come back and finish the xpac. I quit after ā¦ like Gruul or something lol. Or maybe SSC. All i know is I had the 2 piece tier 5 and blew stuff up with arcane blast, and missile rotation with my shadow priest mana battery.
I donāt play Retail. In fact, I barely played TBC. Iām a Vanilla baby through and through.
Nothing wrong with liking things easy. But some people like to stand out and be rewarded for their time. And Iām one of them. Which is why i find retail silly. Even LFR gear looks cool. Frankly, LFR should have garbage looking gear compared to Mythic. Mythic gear and the highest pvp gear should be the coolest looking gear by far. At least itāll give people a carrot on a stick.
When i came back to retail, for a little bit, i did LFR and i actually did feel I ābeatā the instance. The gear was cool looking. It was the worst feeling in the world. I did nothing but sit there eating a snack while on auto follow.
LFR is good. People should experience the story and potential fun that comes with raiding without the headache and massive time-sink that is mythic raiding.
Hundreds of wipes on bosses that exclusively drop the best loot? Sounds like a disaster.
If you want to skip to the end of the book without reading the entire story, more power to you. Itās your game to play.
You can see the story on normal which is only slightly harder than LFR. Im not sure what your point is.
I agree with this a lot.
Iāve raided in ff14 and in SWTOR at the high ends as well.
I think what I liked most is the way SWTOR handles gear is everything gives gear and everyone can get to raid content gear. The HM raids make titles and mounts and are actually just hard and fun. So people doing them do them for actual enjoyment instead of gear.
This is actually a really good point. However, maybe there could be something done so that it would provide players an incentive to step out of their comfort zone. As it stands, LFR gear (when i played a bit) looked just as cool as high end gear. This homogenization makes transmog a thing because everyone looks ācoolā - making cool nothing special. Might as well play dressup.
So who knows, maybe make lower level gear look not as appealing. Or if youāre a higher end level raider, provide a title or something. Similar to PvP.