Cata: Most challenging and rewarding dungeons to date; you would run dungeons to get gear even at the very start of raiding as they were significant upgrades from quest rewards.
Firelands: the zone and the fight are some of the most interesting fights wow has done. The hunter guy you had to kite around and manage the dogs, ryolith (even if his leg and turning mechanic was both buggy and random wipe inducing)
The leveling experience got us our first phasing; changing landscape, npcs, and monsters as the story progressed. This introduced some bugs with mining/herbalism nodes being inaccessible, but you have to start somewhere
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I would say Cataclysm started off excellent and went downhill with a too-slow drip feed of lackluster content.
I would say Cataclysm started off excellent and went downhill with a too-slow drip feed of lackluster content.
Sort of like Warlords too. The experience at the start was fun, but then garrisons became a slog and they ran out of content a year before the new expansion would be ready.
I've got mixed feelings about Dragon Soul. I really love the raids that have a narrative built into them. Like Ulduar where you're storming the gates and freeing the Watchers vs like Firelands where its basically just look at this pile of bad guys you gotta go kill.
Granted mechanically they were the opposite where Firelands had great boss design and Dragon Soul....didn't.
Dragon Soul, that is, the idea that a raid centered around you actually defending a place, rather than being the invader, is really cool imo, and wish they would revisit it at some point.
Cata was hamstrung by the loads of development time eaten up by revamping old world content. BfA isn't in the same realm of comparison, and honestly I doubt any future expansion ever will be.
What's hurting BfA hype (for me anyways) is the lack of any good hook. We're clearly not getting the crazy amount of class revamps, the story is a much-hated faction war angle, and there's absolutely no mechanical hooks. Everything just feels like microwaved leftovers from other expansions: islands are the new scenarios, Azerite is diet artifacts, and I think we're also getting an even slimmer version of garrisons. Like, I have nothing to get excited about except new dungeons/raids/etc., which means I'm basically paying $50 for a bunch of content patch stuff. Meh.
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
Hmm, tempting. I haven't been back to the game since Cata.
They'd almost have to use the vanilla game based off "just before BC launch" you'd think right?
I couldn't see them putting in the old PVP grind just for nostalgia, and I wonder if this will bring back 3 day long AV fights haha.
Honestly, there were going to hit a point where there wasn't a ton of they could without taking huge risks.
I mean the good quests are as really polished and I'm not sure they can go much further in making new awesome quests. The certainly could do stuff like trim all the shitty "Do X number of world quests" or "Have your followers run Y missions!" Could also not implement shitty quests such as "Like the Wind." Could also make things more alt friendly, where once I run a chain on a character, I don't have to run it on other later characters unless I choose the option to have that character mark the chain as uncompleted. I mean those would be good improvements, if they do them, I'm doubtful they will, but those don't do much for hype.
Garrison could be made to be alt friendly and account wide, like the original plan was for the WoD Garrison, but again not super hype. I'll reserve judgement on Azerite, but it seems like that system might be worse than the current artifact system (easiest fix would have been a cap on total AP, it's fine if people stop playing. I'd rather they play for fun, than for a grind, which IMO probably contributes to some of the toxicity the community has. I mean it'll probably be shittier because we'll have to find upgrades for the slots that are impacted by the system. As melee, it was nice to not be at the mercy of the RNG gods in regards to getting a really good weapon. Yeah, Islands aren't that exciting.
I think the big killer for BfA is that the story is already clearly shit and the old and hated faction war. A damn good story married to solid game play can go pretty damn far, even if the game play is mostly tried and true. Problem is BfA has a shit story so far and the polish can't really carry that.
Anyways, I'm on the fence with Classic. Depending on what they do, it could be really neat. On the other hand, they could go with the "it's classic WoW for better or worse," and it's going to be worse because classic WoW is garbage. From what I understand, since I haven't played Vanilla, is that the TBC leveling experience was essentially Vanilla's. The only way TBC really set itself apart other than flying, was Heroic Dungeons and raid mechanics, which was mostly inaccessible to most players. It would have the broken useless specs, non-nonsensical itemized gear and worthless trap talents. If they can't at least admit that every spec should be worth a damn, even if it isn't the meta hotness and that every piece of gear or talent should be worth a damn, then they'd be better off not doing it. I suspect that's the big holdup right now, if they go with Classic as it was, that won't do much for them, but if they fix the bugs and some of the piss poor design, the load group of players demanding classic WoW will through a shit fit.
Theyve already said they arent doing an HD remix or anything, they are going to try and recreate the classic experience so that it can exist as a kind of museum. I suspect they arent going to do much more than have modern bnet integration. Everything else pretty much depends on which patch they decide to go with.
See there actually are people, like me, who played Vanilla WoW and do want to play it again. I'm not looking at it with rose colored glasses, I remember the flaws and the bugs, but when weighed against the reasons that current WoW doesn't appeal to me, playing a WoW just as fucked up and buggy as it originally was seems preferable to playing todays streamlined bug free game. Will I miss things like dual specs and flying mounts and non-pointless loot (like horde finding paladin plate) and the ability to loot a corpse without getting stuck in a crouched position for three hours? You-betcha! But all in all I feel their loss is worth the price for more defined class roles, more varied spec choices, more lived in and less streamlined world, no cross server, no group/raid finder and more group investment.
But not everyone has the same playstyle, so Vanilla will not be fun for everyone to play, just as WoW today isn't fun for everyone to play. What's good is that Blizzard will be offering both, so people who prefer one over the other can go with the version they enjoy.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
No matter how much they call you champion or dress it up as you being a big commander in the current game you still feel like a grunt, though. The most leader-like thing you actually do is have a desk job of delegating mission board postings to minions, between your jaunts out to do the same sorts of tasks you've been doing since you were a level 1 nobody in the valley of trials in 2003.
Eh maybe general isn't the best term, but we're definitely like some celebrity special forces person. It's always like "you're the only one that can do this". Which sure might have been narratively cool at one point, but it's hard to hear that then go do the quest and there are 12 other people rolling their face on their keyboard 1 shotting the big bad terrible evil guys. At least in vanilla, you often needed those other people around to kill mobs and prevent you from getting zerged down by closely packed enemies. God help you if you attacked a murloc camp solo.
Though that particular example was also the best way to level a paladin back in the day. Just go to different zones and aoe pull murlocs that would run and get friends while reflecting damage and judging wisdom/light for heals. Prot was so good for leveling. I think there was one time in dustwallow I was in combat for a solid 45 minutes because of respawns and gained like 3 levels. The only reason i had to get away was because i had to go to the bathroom.
Yeah I remember when I wanted to bring my rogue to MC, it was an enlightening and sad experience.
As a Paladin I had a similar awakening. I leveled as Ret and that’s all I knew. Switching to a buff/healbot was very different.
Marathon on
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StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
Vanilla was a weird ass place. Specs were very limited and DPS was weird too. My friend who was in one of the top 5 guilds world wide at the time DPSed MC with the primary raid group using the Skullforge Reavers on his Rogue and was top DPS.
The game was also just a mess for PVP. I'll never forget world of roguecraft or how I killed a level Rogue that tried to gank me on my level 50 Warlock.
Mages were basically forced to play Frost or gtfo. Hunters basically rolling need for anything cause they could equip anything.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Vanilla was a weird ass place. Specs were very limited and DPS was weird too. My friend who was in one of the top 5 guilds world wide at the time DPSed MC with the primary raid group using the Skullforge Reavers on his Rogue and was top DPS.
The game was also just a mess for PVP. I'll never forget world of roguecraft or how I killed a level Rogue that tried to gank me on my level 50 Warlock.
Mages were basically forced to play Frost or gtfo. Hunters basically rolling need for anything cause they could equip anything.
Let's see if I remember correctly : Only restoration druids and shamans, only holy priests and paladins, and only protection warriors. And if you did not show up with enough reagents to recast your raid wide buffs over and over again you were in deep shit.
I have no idea what private servers you guys played on, but like 99% of the time people had no clue what spec anyone else was unless they couldnt provide one of the spec buffs like divine spirit, BoK, etc. Like a mage could just be like "I'm frost" and just spam frost bolt in raids and everyone would just assume theyre frost. If bosses were dying, which they usually would even if 80% of the raid was afk, then nobody gave a shit about what other people were doing. groups regularly brought shadow priests to heal dungeons, and brought arms warriors to tank them. The only time people got sat for raids was if they just weren't consistent for showing up for raids and someone else was. We raided with NINE rogues and SEVEN mages in vanilla, we didn't give a fuck about group comp or spec. Yeah the one mage who actually specced raid frost did the highest damage, but the arcane/fire mages were much better to have around out in the world dude to pvp. respeccing was expensive AF so everyone had to specialize in something, or constantly be farming in order to keep switching things up.
And on the topic of mages anyway, fire was the better spec after BWL. But because most gear from raids was still relevent, guilds still did all the previous content as well, so there were some mages that wreck MC/BWL and others that wrecked AQ/Naxx. Is that the setup the top like 10 raiding guilds used? No, but 99% of the community weren't in those guilds, so people could use whatever spec they wanted and still raid. My druid for the longest time was 24/0/27, which believe me was not cookie cutter, because balance was seen as turbo garbage. But i still usually was 1-2 in heals, and bosses died.
I raided, pvp'd, and did dungeons at 60 on a lock, druid, and rogue as all 3 specs for each at different points. At no point did anyone threaten to bench me because of it. I think the most anyone ever paid attention to my spec was whether i had the 1/2 or 2/2 healthstone talent at that time, or when we got into a philosophical debate about whether hemorrhage was a net raid dps gain while sacrificing personal dps.
The more I think about it, I feel like all they can really do is just reproduce vanilla almost 100% as it was, and put that out there for the people who really want that. Bringing vanilla up to the level of quality that modern WoW players expect is just not gonna happen, you'd have to remake everything - the graphics, the quests, the dungeons, etc. Just none of it has aged well at all, unless that purity is exactly what you're looking for. Better to appease the hardcore vanilla crowd than to land somewhere in the middle and appease no one.
I played vanilla on the live servers when it happened not some potato private server set up. And DPS/healing meters were used all the time to tell people they were shit and had to improve or get DKP hits.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
Yea, I never played on a private server. My experience was live servers. Everyone absolutely cared if DPS was bad or not so someone not specced frost couldn't just sit there and shoot frost bolts. Also never had group that let arms tank because they couldn't reliably mitigate damage which was what tanking was all about back then.
There is also absolutely no way a boss was dying with 80% of the raid afk. I wanna know what vanilla you played that was so easy and magical.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Let's see if I remember correctly : Only restoration druids and shamans, only holy priests and paladins, and only protection warriors. And if you did not show up with enough reagents to recast your raid wide buffs over and over again you were in deep shit.
Nah, Warriors got to go DPS when they weren't tanking, because you'd need them to off-tank on certain fights like Garr or Domo or replace the main tank when they died on Vael.
Yea, I never played on a private server. My experience was live servers. Everyone absolutely cared if DPS was bad or not so someone not specced frost couldn't just sit there and shoot frost bolts. Also never had group that let arms tank because they couldn't reliably mitigate damage which was what tanking was all about back then.
There is also absolutely no way a boss was dying with 80% of the raid afk. I wanna know what vanilla you played that was so easy and magical.
Well we killed plenty of bosses with 80% of the taid dead because people couldnt do mechanics. Geddon, shazzrah, sartura, and onyxia have distinct memories of doing them with like 5 people for half the fight.
Maybe my guild just had a huge stratification of skill, but we never benched anyone for being poor dps. I even distinctly remember those people refusing loot we wanted to give them to help them improve in favor of better dps. They just wanted to come hang out and down bosses. And even despite not being great dps they still got their fr and more importantly nr gear so they could soak huhuran.
It seemed to work for us. We ended up killing about half the bosses in naxx which most guilds didnt even step foot inside of. It certainly wasnt easy carrying so many people, but we liked the people not their character’s dps, so we progressed slower, but we had remarkably low turnover.
Yea, I never played on a private server. My experience was live servers. Everyone absolutely cared if DPS was bad or not so someone not specced frost couldn't just sit there and shoot frost bolts. Also never had group that let arms tank because they couldn't reliably mitigate damage which was what tanking was all about back then.
There is also absolutely no way a boss was dying with 80% of the raid afk. I wanna know what vanilla you played that was so easy and magical.
Well we killed plenty of bosses with 80% of the taid dead because people couldnt do mechanics. Geddon, shazzrah, sartura, and onyxia have distinct memories of doing them with like 5 people for half the fight.
Maybe my guild just had a huge stratification of skill, but we never benched anyone for being poor dps. I even distinctly remember those people refusing loot we wanted to give them to help them improve in favor of better dps. They just wanted to come hang out and down bosses. And even despite not being great dps they still got their fr and more importantly nr gear so they could soak huhuran.
It seemed to work for us. We ended up killing about half the bosses in naxx which most guilds didnt even step foot inside of. It certainly wasnt easy carrying so many people, but we liked the people not their character’s dps, so we progressed slower, but we had remarkably low turnover.
Look, I don't think there is really any point in talking about this anymore because I absolutely do not believe you.
It could be true and that was your experience which would basically mean your guild was both best guild in the world and the laziest because if you are carrying a majority of dead players through MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx then there would be no reason your guild to not have all the world firsts.
I've been in all of those raids in vanilla with my geared and well coordinated guild and there is no way we could have carried 80% of the raid being dead through AQ or Naxx fights. MAYBE some MC and BWL bosses but not many. Not even just my guild, I was friends with people in the top end guilds on my servers and got a lot of tips from them and we would talk about how ridiculous some of those fights were.
I know I said there isn't any point in this conversation and then made a big post but I just wanted to explain why I'm bailing on this conversation. I'm really happy for you if that was your raiding experience because that sounds awesome but I just can't believe it.
Stragint on
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Yea, I never played on a private server. My experience was live servers. Everyone absolutely cared if DPS was bad or not so someone not specced frost couldn't just sit there and shoot frost bolts. Also never had group that let arms tank because they couldn't reliably mitigate damage which was what tanking was all about back then.
There is also absolutely no way a boss was dying with 80% of the raid afk. I wanna know what vanilla you played that was so easy and magical.
Well we killed plenty of bosses with 80% of the taid dead because people couldnt do mechanics. Geddon, shazzrah, sartura, and onyxia have distinct memories of doing them with like 5 people for half the fight.
Maybe my guild just had a huge stratification of skill, but we never benched anyone for being poor dps. I even distinctly remember those people refusing loot we wanted to give them to help them improve in favor of better dps. They just wanted to come hang out and down bosses. And even despite not being great dps they still got their fr and more importantly nr gear so they could soak huhuran.
It seemed to work for us. We ended up killing about half the bosses in naxx which most guilds didnt even step foot inside of. It certainly wasnt easy carrying so many people, but we liked the people not their character’s dps, so we progressed slower, but we had remarkably low turnover.
Look, I don't think there is really any point in talking about this anymore because I absolutely do not believe you.
It could be true and that was your experience which would basically mean your guild was both best guild in the world and the laziest because if you are carrying a majority of dead players through MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx then there would be no reason your guild to not have all the world firsts.
I've been in all of those raids in vanilla with my geared and well coordinated guild and there is no way we could have carried 80% of the raid being dead through AQ or Naxx fights. MAYBE some MC and BWL bosses but not many. Not even just my guild, I was friends with people in the top end guilds on my servers and got a lot of tips from them and we would talk about how ridiculous some of those fights were.
I know I said there isn't any point in this conversation and then made a big post but I just wanted to explain why I'm bailing on this conversation. I'm really happy for you if that was your raiding experience because that sounds awesome but I just can't believe it.
Yeah I second this. You are literally the only person I have ever seen talk about how easy old school raiding was. For everyone else it was a nightmare of strict gear requirements, dps minimums, and dkp losses.
it was definitely a thing in the early raids (ZG, MC, BWL) that about a quarter of the raid could basically just be fucking around; mechanics were simple and there weren't really throughput checks so if your raid's performance was low it just meant the fights took a minute longer or whatever. I didn't raid that much in vanilla so I dunno if the same was true in AQ/naxx. "80% of the raid dead" probably is an exaggeration but it was a lot more possible to string out a kill with half a raid than it is now.
The more I think about it, I feel like all they can really do is just reproduce vanilla almost 100% as it was, and put that out there for the people who really want that. Bringing vanilla up to the level of quality that modern WoW players expect is just not gonna happen, you'd have to remake everything - the graphics, the quests, the dungeons, etc. Just none of it has aged well at all, unless that purity is exactly what you're looking for. Better to appease the hardcore vanilla crowd than to land somewhere in the middle and appease no one.
it wouldn't be that hard to make all dps/heal/tank specs perform at about the same level, especially since they have successive expansions' concepts to draw on. It wouldn't that that much to make your rets, balance druids, shadow priests etc functional enough to be useful. It'll always be a really simplistic game by modern standards but there's a lot of stuff they could do to improve balance, social experience etc. without changing the basic grindy gameplay that people claim to want.
fwiw there actually is some decent data from nostralius (sp) about what modern players did with a vanilla environment; the preponderance of players were warriors, rogues and mages, with priests and paladins dominating the healer representation. Which is a pretty fair expectation of what you'll get if 'vanilla' servers go live now, with the data tools being so much better than they were back then
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited March 2018
BWL was also typically cleared within a week of going live on any Blizzlike private server, Nostalrius being no exception. To the point where most "blizzlike" private servers implement across the board buffs to every raid instance to stop it being consumed so quickly.
Vanilla was a weird ass place. Specs were very limited and DPS was weird too. My friend who was in one of the top 5 guilds world wide at the time DPSed MC with the primary raid group using the Skullforge Reavers on his Rogue and was top DPS.
The game was also just a mess for PVP. I'll never forget world of roguecraft or how I killed a level Rogue that tried to gank me on my level 50 Warlock.
Mages were basically forced to play Frost or gtfo. Hunters basically rolling need for anything cause they could equip anything.
Let's see if I remember correctly : Only restoration druids and shamans, only holy priests and paladins, and only protection warriors. And if you did not show up with enough reagents to recast your raid wide buffs over and over again you were in deep shit.
Posts
You keep saying this and yet almost all I see here and elsewhere is excitement over the new stuff and the changes.
Cata looked exciting when it came out yet holy is still unlevelable with the lack of DPS
Change is not always good
and cata was fun. especially firelands
Cata to start with was a disappointment
Firelands onward was an apology.
ok
Firelands: the zone and the fight are some of the most interesting fights wow has done. The hunter guy you had to kite around and manage the dogs, ryolith (even if his leg and turning mechanic was both buggy and random wipe inducing)
The leveling experience got us our first phasing; changing landscape, npcs, and monsters as the story progressed. This introduced some bugs with mining/herbalism nodes being inaccessible, but you have to start somewhere
Sort of like Warlords too. The experience at the start was fun, but then garrisons became a slog and they ran out of content a year before the new expansion would be ready.
And then it ended with Dragon Soul.
hork
Granted mechanically they were the opposite where Firelands had great boss design and Dragon Soul....didn't.
What's hurting BfA hype (for me anyways) is the lack of any good hook. We're clearly not getting the crazy amount of class revamps, the story is a much-hated faction war angle, and there's absolutely no mechanical hooks. Everything just feels like microwaved leftovers from other expansions: islands are the new scenarios, Azerite is diet artifacts, and I think we're also getting an even slimmer version of garrisons. Like, I have nothing to get excited about except new dungeons/raids/etc., which means I'm basically paying $50 for a bunch of content patch stuff. Meh.
They'd almost have to use the vanilla game based off "just before BC launch" you'd think right?
I couldn't see them putting in the old PVP grind just for nostalgia, and I wonder if this will bring back 3 day long AV fights haha.
I mean the good quests are as really polished and I'm not sure they can go much further in making new awesome quests. The certainly could do stuff like trim all the shitty "Do X number of world quests" or "Have your followers run Y missions!" Could also not implement shitty quests such as "Like the Wind." Could also make things more alt friendly, where once I run a chain on a character, I don't have to run it on other later characters unless I choose the option to have that character mark the chain as uncompleted. I mean those would be good improvements, if they do them, I'm doubtful they will, but those don't do much for hype.
Garrison could be made to be alt friendly and account wide, like the original plan was for the WoD Garrison, but again not super hype. I'll reserve judgement on Azerite, but it seems like that system might be worse than the current artifact system (easiest fix would have been a cap on total AP, it's fine if people stop playing. I'd rather they play for fun, than for a grind, which IMO probably contributes to some of the toxicity the community has. I mean it'll probably be shittier because we'll have to find upgrades for the slots that are impacted by the system. As melee, it was nice to not be at the mercy of the RNG gods in regards to getting a really good weapon. Yeah, Islands aren't that exciting.
I think the big killer for BfA is that the story is already clearly shit and the old and hated faction war. A damn good story married to solid game play can go pretty damn far, even if the game play is mostly tried and true. Problem is BfA has a shit story so far and the polish can't really carry that.
Anyways, I'm on the fence with Classic. Depending on what they do, it could be really neat. On the other hand, they could go with the "it's classic WoW for better or worse," and it's going to be worse because classic WoW is garbage. From what I understand, since I haven't played Vanilla, is that the TBC leveling experience was essentially Vanilla's. The only way TBC really set itself apart other than flying, was Heroic Dungeons and raid mechanics, which was mostly inaccessible to most players. It would have the broken useless specs, non-nonsensical itemized gear and worthless trap talents. If they can't at least admit that every spec should be worth a damn, even if it isn't the meta hotness and that every piece of gear or talent should be worth a damn, then they'd be better off not doing it. I suspect that's the big holdup right now, if they go with Classic as it was, that won't do much for them, but if they fix the bugs and some of the piss poor design, the load group of players demanding classic WoW will through a shit fit.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
But not everyone has the same playstyle, so Vanilla will not be fun for everyone to play, just as WoW today isn't fun for everyone to play. What's good is that Blizzard will be offering both, so people who prefer one over the other can go with the version they enjoy.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Though that particular example was also the best way to level a paladin back in the day. Just go to different zones and aoe pull murlocs that would run and get friends while reflecting damage and judging wisdom/light for heals. Prot was so good for leveling. I think there was one time in dustwallow I was in combat for a solid 45 minutes because of respawns and gained like 3 levels. The only reason i had to get away was because i had to go to the bathroom.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Maybe they mean assuming you never want to run dungeons or raids or pvp?
PSN:Furlion
It's true, you can pick any talents you want if you don't care about playing the game!
pleasepaypreacher.net
As a Paladin I had a similar awakening. I leveled as Ret and that’s all I knew. Switching to a buff/healbot was very different.
The game was also just a mess for PVP. I'll never forget world of roguecraft or how I killed a level Rogue that tried to gank me on my level 50 Warlock.
Mages were basically forced to play Frost or gtfo. Hunters basically rolling need for anything cause they could equip anything.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Let's see if I remember correctly : Only restoration druids and shamans, only holy priests and paladins, and only protection warriors. And if you did not show up with enough reagents to recast your raid wide buffs over and over again you were in deep shit.
PSN:Furlion
And on the topic of mages anyway, fire was the better spec after BWL. But because most gear from raids was still relevent, guilds still did all the previous content as well, so there were some mages that wreck MC/BWL and others that wrecked AQ/Naxx. Is that the setup the top like 10 raiding guilds used? No, but 99% of the community weren't in those guilds, so people could use whatever spec they wanted and still raid. My druid for the longest time was 24/0/27, which believe me was not cookie cutter, because balance was seen as turbo garbage. But i still usually was 1-2 in heals, and bosses died.
I raided, pvp'd, and did dungeons at 60 on a lock, druid, and rogue as all 3 specs for each at different points. At no point did anyone threaten to bench me because of it. I think the most anyone ever paid attention to my spec was whether i had the 1/2 or 2/2 healthstone talent at that time, or when we got into a philosophical debate about whether hemorrhage was a net raid dps gain while sacrificing personal dps.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
pleasepaypreacher.net
There is also absolutely no way a boss was dying with 80% of the raid afk. I wanna know what vanilla you played that was so easy and magical.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
They were the only real hybrid in Vanilla.
Well we killed plenty of bosses with 80% of the taid dead because people couldnt do mechanics. Geddon, shazzrah, sartura, and onyxia have distinct memories of doing them with like 5 people for half the fight.
Maybe my guild just had a huge stratification of skill, but we never benched anyone for being poor dps. I even distinctly remember those people refusing loot we wanted to give them to help them improve in favor of better dps. They just wanted to come hang out and down bosses. And even despite not being great dps they still got their fr and more importantly nr gear so they could soak huhuran.
It seemed to work for us. We ended up killing about half the bosses in naxx which most guilds didnt even step foot inside of. It certainly wasnt easy carrying so many people, but we liked the people not their character’s dps, so we progressed slower, but we had remarkably low turnover.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Look, I don't think there is really any point in talking about this anymore because I absolutely do not believe you.
It could be true and that was your experience which would basically mean your guild was both best guild in the world and the laziest because if you are carrying a majority of dead players through MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx then there would be no reason your guild to not have all the world firsts.
I've been in all of those raids in vanilla with my geared and well coordinated guild and there is no way we could have carried 80% of the raid being dead through AQ or Naxx fights. MAYBE some MC and BWL bosses but not many. Not even just my guild, I was friends with people in the top end guilds on my servers and got a lot of tips from them and we would talk about how ridiculous some of those fights were.
I know I said there isn't any point in this conversation and then made a big post but I just wanted to explain why I'm bailing on this conversation. I'm really happy for you if that was your raiding experience because that sounds awesome but I just can't believe it.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Yeah I second this. You are literally the only person I have ever seen talk about how easy old school raiding was. For everyone else it was a nightmare of strict gear requirements, dps minimums, and dkp losses.
PSN:Furlion
it wouldn't be that hard to make all dps/heal/tank specs perform at about the same level, especially since they have successive expansions' concepts to draw on. It wouldn't that that much to make your rets, balance druids, shadow priests etc functional enough to be useful. It'll always be a really simplistic game by modern standards but there's a lot of stuff they could do to improve balance, social experience etc. without changing the basic grindy gameplay that people claim to want.
fwiw there actually is some decent data from nostralius (sp) about what modern players did with a vanilla environment; the preponderance of players were warriors, rogues and mages, with priests and paladins dominating the healer representation. Which is a pretty fair expectation of what you'll get if 'vanilla' servers go live now, with the data tools being so much better than they were back then
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget