Oh god, yeah, from a recruitment standpoint, the easy gear up is fucking fantastic comparatively speaking.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
If anything, the more hardcore players can lord themselves around easier now, since they have unique titles that are unobtainable to the majority of the population.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
I think anyone who's interested knows who the best raiders are on their server. They're the ones with shiny titles and mounts that no one else has(but covets).
What is the achievement based off of? Do you have to have gear from KJ when the system was put in place? And what about post 3.0 kills? I killed KJ but never did any real raiding beyond Gruul/ZA. They just needed me for the Moonkin buff.
They said that you would have to have loot from the boss in order to get the achievement when they were implemented. Or have completed a quest that required you to kill the end boss.
But my warrior has a trinket (and bow!) from the last boss of Zul'Aman but I do not have the achievement for it. Item tracking for retroactive achievements is only in place for 25 and 40-man raids.
What is the achievement based off of? Do you have to have gear from KJ when the system was put in place? And what about post 3.0 kills? I killed KJ but never did any real raiding beyond Gruul/ZA. They just needed me for the Moonkin buff.
They said that you would have to have loot from the boss in order to get the achievement when they were implemented. Or have completed a quest that required you to kill the end boss.
But my warrior has a trinket (and bow!) from the last boss of Zul'Aman but I do not have the achievement for it. Item tracking for retroactive achievements is only in place for 25 and 40-man raids.
I have loot from SSC and TK on my Warrior but no achievements from either, plus it says I've completed no level 70 heroics because I didn't run any on that character after 3.0 hit.
edit: even though I still have my stupid Sun Eater
]I have loot from SSC and TK on my Warrior but no achievements from either, plus it says I've completed no level 70 heroics because I didn't run any on that character after 3.0 hit.
edit: even though I still have my stupid Sun Eater
do you have loot from the final boss? or completed a quest? that is required for the achievement.
I got Hyjal attuned, thats the only reason I have the achievement.
format on
You don't know if I am joking or not.
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
What never made sense to me was why they did the split of 40/20 down to 25/10.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
The being hardcore hasn't lost any luster; it's image has been completely shattered.
Not really. I'm still impressed when I see someone with "Starcaller" or "Grand Crusader." Or Valnyr.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Shit seems entirely random to me. My rogue has the BWL achievement but not the Ragnaros one. I had the BF piece from both at one point and neither by the time the achievements came out.
]I have loot from SSC and TK on my Warrior but no achievements from either, plus it says I've completed no level 70 heroics because I didn't run any on that character after 3.0 hit.
edit: even though I still have my stupid Sun Eater
do you have loot from the final boss? or completed a quest? that is required for the achievement.
I got Hyjal attuned, thats the only reason I have the achievement.
I think I still have those ugly green tank gloves that Kael dropped. I'm pretty sure I've equipped them before just to see if that would grant me the achievement.
What never made sense to me was why they did the split of 40/20 down to 25/10.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
It gives you a spare five people which makes sense as most raids aren't going to have 20 people that log on for every single raid.
I find the "Classic was harder" comment to be suspect. We lacked the raw resources we have now, as well as five years of theorycrafting and simple practice. Unless they dramatically change the mechanics of the game, there's only so many curveballs you can throw in raid design.
What never made sense to me was why they did the split of 40/20 down to 25/10.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
I find the "Classic was harder" comment to be suspect. We lacked the raw resources we have now, as well as five years of theorycrafting and simple practice. Unless they dramatically change the mechanics of the game, there's only so many curveballs you can throw in raid design.
Looking at individual fights, I don't think Classic was harder. Except maybe Naxx and C'Thun, because I never did those at 60 (well, one boss in Naxx doesn't count for much).
Looking at the recruitment problem, the managing during the raid problem, the understanding of mechanics problem, the poor itemization problem, the gearing up problem, etc etc, I think it's easy to see what he meant.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
What never made sense to me was why they did the split of 40/20 down to 25/10.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
It gives you a spare five people which makes sense as most raids aren't going to have 20 people that log on for every single raid.
I find the "Classic was harder" comment to be suspect. We lacked the raw resources we have now, as well as five years of theorycrafting and simple practice. Unless they dramatically change the mechanics of the game, there's only so many curveballs you can throw in raid design.
I'd like to see a platforming type element added, something like Al'ar only a few steps further.
Our guild is right on the edge there too. On Tuesdays we have 15 to 20 people logged on and we can pick up a few more to do 25 man weeklys, but not for real raiding situations.
What never made sense to me was why they did the split of 40/20 down to 25/10.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
It gives you a spare five people which makes sense as most raids aren't going to have 20 people that log on for every single raid.
I find the "Classic was harder" comment to be suspect. We lacked the raw resources we have now, as well as five years of theorycrafting and simple practice. Unless they dramatically change the mechanics of the game, there's only so many curveballs you can throw in raid design.
That's exactly why raiding is easier today than it was at level 60. Everyone has access to a winning strategy on day one, and great tools to help increase DPS and raid awareness.
People still fail really hard despite those things somehow, but that is a more likely a byproduct of raid accessibility than tough encounter designs. 90% of the game's population is just bad at playing video games.
My previous post wasn't aimed at the difficulties of vanilla raiding, it was mostly to refute a specific point.
In a sense vanilla raiding was much harder because of needing 40 people online and geared. Without badge gear and alternate progression like 10 mans, if you fell behind you were probably never going to catch up. And if you lost one of your geared tanks sometimes the whole guild fell apart.
TBC helped a bit with the gear and the 25 man limit, but the addition of vastly complicated attunement chains and very hard instances kind of messed this up. I hated the strategy of releasing really hard instances and tuning it down every patch until enough people were seeing it.
WoTLK has done by far the best job. Parallel 25/10 man raids, Normal/Hard modes and Achievements each bring a new level of difficulty so that those that want a challenge can find one, but everyone gets to see and enjoy the fights.
Encounter design has also improved, but the challenge seems to have remained pretty consistent between hard modes and the end game vanilla. Depends on how hard Lich King hard mode is to compare with original Naxx and Sunwell.
Quetzatcoatl on
0
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
My personal assessment of difficulty throughout the ages
Vanilla - Extremely simple to slightly gimmicky fights. Blizz didnt seem to know how to abuse their engine yet, so fights very often came down to more about numbers. Gear disparity was REDICULOUS so gear was basically a requirement for progression. Needing to gear 40 people meant you had to be hardcore in the sense you needed to sit through months of content A to move to content B, then repeat. No shortcuts.
Also people had no fucking clue how to play compared to now. Very little resources, people were often ignorant to the best specs, not to mention speccing was way harder since talents were unbalanced and you werent basically pidgeonholed down a tree.
TBC - My experience was the least involved here, but I definately was in on the ground floor of Kara and Heroics pre nerfs. Some slight improvements on mechanics of fights, making them more involved. While they were well thought out, there was less to each individual fight than there is today. However the major changes were how they tightened the reins on gear reqs with the hard enrage timers and such. This combined with shit like heroic mobs hitting for 5k on 8-10kish health tanks led to it being more of a numbers game and less about the mechanics. Instances were harder not becausr they took more brain power, but because they were just REALLY bad numbers vs numbers matchups. Raids went the same route, having heavy gear requirements even though progression was quite a bit better due to smaller raids and more organization on gear aquisition.
WOTLK - Gimmicks take the place of numbers. Many 5 man instances involve gimmicks used in TBC raids, and then some. Due to this blizz made the numbers much more reasonable. This is why IMO heroics were "easier" because if you could figure out the gimmicks, you could do it. If you couldnt figure them out, you could easilly outgear it something not possible for a long time in TBC. Combine this with the fact progression is completely gone since everyone is given easy access to the last tier quality loot and you have more people with access. Which means more information, which means every silly goose knows how to play thier class like a pro. Well they know how, doesn't mean they put knowledge into action.
Sorry if this is a jumble but i am posting right before class so its rushed as hell.
Vanilla - Extremely simple to slightly gimmicky fights. Blizz didnt seem to know how to abuse their engine yet, so fights very often came down to more about numbers. Gear disparity was REDICULOUS so gear was basically a requirement for progression. Needing to gear 40 people meant you had to be hardcore in the sense you needed to sit through months of content A to move to content B, then repeat. No shortcuts.
Also people had no fucking clue how to play compared to now. Very little resources, people were often ignorant to the best specs, not to mention speccing was way harder since talents were unbalanced and you werent basically pidgeonholed down a tree.
This is a pretty big misconception. Vanilla BWL, AQ 40 and Naxx all had heavy coordination fights, as well as some that were just gear checks.
BWL:
Razorgore - Big coordination fight, involved splitting up the raid into groups to handle the corners and great performance by kiters and one person to MC. (Unless you were alliance, DI lol)
Nefarian is really the next step, and was one of the funest fights at the time, multiple phases, AOE and each class call had an effect on how the raid had to respond.
I'll skip through most of AQ 40, but most fights involved more than just gear checks except for huhuran.
Twin Emps and C'thun were both very execution oriented. Twin Emps required great tanking and healing switches as well as dps running all over the place and switching targets.
C'thun required everyone in the raid to perform and do their job, with multitudes of different strategies for each.
I'll stop here since everyone has done naxx at 80 and at 60 it was similar in strategy.
Apart from that,
Strategies and gearing was pretty well known even back then. We usually had a strategy down from other guilds further ahead from us or from reading forums. The hard part was getting 40 people to understand it.
On top of that therycrafting and gearing was a lot simpler. There was pretty much just spellpower, AP, crit and hit to take care of, so it was always clear what to upgrade, on top of that gear sets. It was just harder to get what you needed. Specs and rotations were also way simpler since there was less choices. As a mage, should I frostbolt or frostbolt?
Really the reason raids are easier now is not that the mechanics are less challenging or dumbed down, it's that people actually have a chance to catch up on gear.
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
95% of the 'difficulty' in vanilla raiding was that the other 39 people you were raiding with struggled with the concept of breathing through the nose.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
You forgot about the AQ40 trash down to Twin Emps. Not terribly hard but you had to react fast to not Meteo'd or the like.
Jubal77 on
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
I should mention that I'm not saying that they were mouth breathers, just that the concept of breathing itself was a new and frightening concept that they struggled to understand on a day to day basis.
I was always surprised that our warlock class leader did not choke on his own tongue and die before every raid.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
The nature of the game has changed greatly over time. Vanilla you had to organize and gear up 40 people and we had fewer tools to work with then. Talents and the mechanics of the game were in rudimentary stages. Gear was a lot harder to come by. Addons weren't as prevalent or as robust. It was clumsy.
Then came TBC....gear checks, composition checks, cc checks. Things hit harder with less margin for error than ever and raids often required a specific composition....sometimes to the point of switching people out for certain encounters. Heroics were just that....heroic and difficult. It was vanilla wow tuned and turned up all the way to 10, the culmination of which was MgT and Sunwell. Few people got to see Sunwell.
Fast forward to this expansion.....it's like a finely oiled machine that's finally hitting it's stride. Tanking has been reworked. Talents have been reworked. CC and raid stacking aren't a necessity anymore. Gear is easier to come by. If someone leaves the raid or can't make it, it's not as big a deal anymore. It's easy to get someone up to speed to replace them. Raiding content in general is less restrictive and we have a lot more tools to work with these days. It's still difficult but it's a lot more manageable now.
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
That was the infamous "Hotfix it or we'll quit the game forever" threat, in which it was fixed within a week of the threat being made.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
You forgot about the AQ40 trash down to Twin Emps. Not terribly hard but you had to react fast to not Meteo'd or the like.
That trash was nothing. The stuff between twin emps and c'thun could break a man. C'thun himself was one of the biggest retard checks in the history of wow.
Jars on
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2010
From what I recall, the trash after Emps had random abilities, and some of those abilities made the trash impossible to kill.
You'd have something like meteor which required everyone to get in close, and then something that killed people for standing too close to others.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
That's the stuff before emps. Some combinations were much harder, but none were impossible because the spread out/group up abilities were mutually exclusive. The stuff after emps had the 4 guys with mind flay that horrified your tanks and did absurd amounts of damage.
The past emperor stuff was pretty bad. Some sort of ability that set non-tanks to 1 hp and then some tank messing powers on other mobs... I remember having to use the enviroment to keep stuff out of LoS of each other, and using distance as well... but a botched pull was instadeath.
Never killed c'thun though, we only took like 3-4 trips to get some gear from a dude next to his door.
Posts
;-)
They said that you would have to have loot from the boss in order to get the achievement when they were implemented. Or have completed a quest that required you to kill the end boss.
But my warrior has a trinket (and bow!) from the last boss of Zul'Aman but I do not have the achievement for it. Item tracking for retroactive achievements is only in place for 25 and 40-man raids.
I have loot from SSC and TK on my Warrior but no achievements from either, plus it says I've completed no level 70 heroics because I didn't run any on that character after 3.0 hit.
edit: even though I still have my stupid Sun Eater
I had no idea they didn't do it for 10man raids though. That surprises me somewhat (and hurts the numbers).
And I forgot it only counted retroactively for loot...so..take that how you will.
I know they didn't count loot for 5mans.
They gave some reason for not including 10 or 20 man raids, but I don't remember what it was.
MC: http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=686
TK: http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=696
Wow, I completely forgot that ZG and AQ20 were 20mans.
The size difference feels so comparable to our 25/10 that it boggles my mind that they're not also 10man.
do you have loot from the final boss? or completed a quest? that is required for the achievement.
I got Hyjal attuned, thats the only reason I have the achievement.
It's a very simple and rudimentary application of basic math principles. You can't split one 25 man raid up evenly into 10 mans, and you couldn't split a 40 man raid into a 25.
Steam
Only the strong can help the weak.
Not really. I'm still impressed when I see someone with "Starcaller" or "Grand Crusader." Or Valnyr.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Oh well, it's irrelevant content now anyway.
I find the "Classic was harder" comment to be suspect. We lacked the raw resources we have now, as well as five years of theorycrafting and simple practice. Unless they dramatically change the mechanics of the game, there's only so many curveballs you can throw in raid design.
I'm with you there.
Looking at individual fights, I don't think Classic was harder. Except maybe Naxx and C'Thun, because I never did those at 60 (well, one boss in Naxx doesn't count for much).
Looking at the recruitment problem, the managing during the raid problem, the understanding of mechanics problem, the poor itemization problem, the gearing up problem, etc etc, I think it's easy to see what he meant.
People still fail really hard despite those things somehow, but that is a more likely a byproduct of raid accessibility than tough encounter designs. 90% of the game's population is just bad at playing video games.
In a sense vanilla raiding was much harder because of needing 40 people online and geared. Without badge gear and alternate progression like 10 mans, if you fell behind you were probably never going to catch up. And if you lost one of your geared tanks sometimes the whole guild fell apart.
TBC helped a bit with the gear and the 25 man limit, but the addition of vastly complicated attunement chains and very hard instances kind of messed this up. I hated the strategy of releasing really hard instances and tuning it down every patch until enough people were seeing it.
WoTLK has done by far the best job. Parallel 25/10 man raids, Normal/Hard modes and Achievements each bring a new level of difficulty so that those that want a challenge can find one, but everyone gets to see and enjoy the fights.
Encounter design has also improved, but the challenge seems to have remained pretty consistent between hard modes and the end game vanilla. Depends on how hard Lich King hard mode is to compare with original Naxx and Sunwell.
Vanilla - Extremely simple to slightly gimmicky fights. Blizz didnt seem to know how to abuse their engine yet, so fights very often came down to more about numbers. Gear disparity was REDICULOUS so gear was basically a requirement for progression. Needing to gear 40 people meant you had to be hardcore in the sense you needed to sit through months of content A to move to content B, then repeat. No shortcuts.
Also people had no fucking clue how to play compared to now. Very little resources, people were often ignorant to the best specs, not to mention speccing was way harder since talents were unbalanced and you werent basically pidgeonholed down a tree.
TBC - My experience was the least involved here, but I definately was in on the ground floor of Kara and Heroics pre nerfs. Some slight improvements on mechanics of fights, making them more involved. While they were well thought out, there was less to each individual fight than there is today. However the major changes were how they tightened the reins on gear reqs with the hard enrage timers and such. This combined with shit like heroic mobs hitting for 5k on 8-10kish health tanks led to it being more of a numbers game and less about the mechanics. Instances were harder not becausr they took more brain power, but because they were just REALLY bad numbers vs numbers matchups. Raids went the same route, having heavy gear requirements even though progression was quite a bit better due to smaller raids and more organization on gear aquisition.
WOTLK - Gimmicks take the place of numbers. Many 5 man instances involve gimmicks used in TBC raids, and then some. Due to this blizz made the numbers much more reasonable. This is why IMO heroics were "easier" because if you could figure out the gimmicks, you could do it. If you couldnt figure them out, you could easilly outgear it something not possible for a long time in TBC. Combine this with the fact progression is completely gone since everyone is given easy access to the last tier quality loot and you have more people with access. Which means more information, which means every silly goose knows how to play thier class like a pro. Well they know how, doesn't mean they put knowledge into action.
Sorry if this is a jumble but i am posting right before class so its rushed as hell.
This is a pretty big misconception. Vanilla BWL, AQ 40 and Naxx all had heavy coordination fights, as well as some that were just gear checks.
BWL:
Razorgore - Big coordination fight, involved splitting up the raid into groups to handle the corners and great performance by kiters and one person to MC. (Unless you were alliance, DI lol)
Nefarian is really the next step, and was one of the funest fights at the time, multiple phases, AOE and each class call had an effect on how the raid had to respond.
I'll skip through most of AQ 40, but most fights involved more than just gear checks except for huhuran.
Twin Emps and C'thun were both very execution oriented. Twin Emps required great tanking and healing switches as well as dps running all over the place and switching targets.
C'thun required everyone in the raid to perform and do their job, with multitudes of different strategies for each.
I'll stop here since everyone has done naxx at 80 and at 60 it was similar in strategy.
Apart from that,
Strategies and gearing was pretty well known even back then. We usually had a strategy down from other guilds further ahead from us or from reading forums. The hard part was getting 40 people to understand it.
On top of that therycrafting and gearing was a lot simpler. There was pretty much just spellpower, AP, crit and hit to take care of, so it was always clear what to upgrade, on top of that gear sets. It was just harder to get what you needed. Specs and rotations were also way simpler since there was less choices. As a mage, should I frostbolt or frostbolt?
Really the reason raids are easier now is not that the mechanics are less challenging or dumbed down, it's that people actually have a chance to catch up on gear.
I was always surprised that our warlock class leader did not choke on his own tongue and die before every raid.
Then came TBC....gear checks, composition checks, cc checks. Things hit harder with less margin for error than ever and raids often required a specific composition....sometimes to the point of switching people out for certain encounters. Heroics were just that....heroic and difficult. It was vanilla wow tuned and turned up all the way to 10, the culmination of which was MgT and Sunwell. Few people got to see Sunwell.
Fast forward to this expansion.....it's like a finely oiled machine that's finally hitting it's stride. Tanking has been reworked. Talents have been reworked. CC and raid stacking aren't a necessity anymore. Gear is easier to come by. If someone leaves the raid or can't make it, it's not as big a deal anymore. It's easy to get someone up to speed to replace them. Raiding content in general is less restrictive and we have a lot more tools to work with these days. It's still difficult but it's a lot more manageable now.
They hotfixed it one day, and suddenly a bunch of guilds got it.
That trash was nothing. The stuff between twin emps and c'thun could break a man. C'thun himself was one of the biggest retard checks in the history of wow.
You'd have something like meteor which required everyone to get in close, and then something that killed people for standing too close to others.
http://n3rfed.blogs.com/n3rfed/2006/04/the_squeaky_whe.html
Never killed c'thun though, we only took like 3-4 trips to get some gear from a dude next to his door.