Raid Difficulty Commentary!!
Agoney — Wed, 02/24/2010 - 10:37
This is taken from MMO Champion. I disagree with it strongly, I'll post my thoughts a bit later but would like to see what people's opinions are.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/general-discussions-22/warcraft-raiding-has-...
Copied word for word.
There's a long-running meme that going to 25 man raids from 40, or
easy/hard modes or difficulty tuning has significantly nerfed raiding.
This is simply untrue. Raiding in vanilla WoW was, in most cases,
relatively simple from a mechanics perspective. Molten Core and
Blackwing Lair, which are held up as guild-breaking raids, had boss
mechanics where the whole fight was as simple as "Run away when you are
the bomb," "Line of sight his ability," or "Tank him with your back to
the wall." There are trash packs in ICC with more complicated
execution requirements than bosses from early raids.
What's changed is this:
1. Tuning -
It's very easy to make a boss a progression wall. If boss X requires a
certain level of gear to beat and boss Y requires much better gear, or
special resist gear, then your guild has to farm V, W, and X for a
couple of months to beat Y. Blizzard used to do this. Ragnaros,
Huhuran and Vaelestrasz were originally hard gear checks, Rag and Huhu
required you to farm lots of resist gear, while Vael required very high
raid DPS, which meant a lot of guilds that were farming Rag had to farm
him a bunch more to be mathematically capable of beating the boss.
Nefarian is another extreme example. His shadow flame ability killed
anyone without a cloak made from Onyxia's scales. But you had to farm
Ony every week for nearly a year to outfit everyone in your raid with a
cloak.
This keeps people from completing an instance for a
period of weeks or months, and some people believe it's more "epic" if
an encounter is active for months before anyone beats it. But this is
an artificial barrier. And it's not fun at all when a raid boss drops
resist gear instead of something cool.
2. Guild stability - Unattractive
loot incentives in the old game made it much more difficult for guilds
to push progression. Bosses dropped 3-4 loots for 40 people. You
generally took about 5 players of each class. There were no badges.
And since the oldest raiders had been raiding outdated instances for
years to gear new raiders, and building massive amounts of DKP, they
got everything first. That meant that, when you were pushing new
content, about fifteen people in the raid knew that, whatever exciting
might drop from that boss, they would not see it for at least four
months. So many guilds struggled with attendance on progression nights
and were oversubscribed on farming down-tier content.
There
were also no server transfers in vanilla. If you lost a player, you
had to either poach somebody geared from another guild on your server
or gear up somebody new. And new recruits would always be undergeared,
because there was no casual progression. Between raids dropping about
half as much loot-per-player as they do now, and high raider turnover,
guilds never really farmed out an instance. Guilds ran MC for years
because new people always needed the loot. This bloated up the raid
week, making the game an onerous chore. And if a key raider burned
out, the loss could set the guild back weeks.
Also, having 40
people instead of 25 made ready checks more difficult and
disconnect/afk problems more frequent and time consuming. Originally
all buffs had to be single-cast. There were no summoning stones, you
could not summon inside an instance, and warlock summons required a
shard for each use. Just getting people to the instance took a long
time.
3. Commitment - This is tied closely to the guild
stability issue; since there were no server transfers, it was difficult
to get a group of the best people in the world together to focus on
breaking an instance. In many of the world-first screenshots, you'll
see timestamps of 3 AM on weeknights. Before server transfers it was
much harder to put a guild together that could raid that long. Some
guilds have leveled multiple alts of the same class and geared them up
into ICC to have more attempts per week at the limited-attempt bosses.
There was no way to put together a raid that would do something like
that in 2005; the world-first wasn't even the same kind of valuable
back then, because there wasn't the same kind of attention being paid
to top guilds' progress.
Those encounters, except when they
were impossible to beat due to bugs or unattainable gear requirements,
probably would not have stood up as well to the kind of super-guilds
that exist today.
Raiding in Vanilla also required a lot more
time spent preparing outside the raid. Since the gear available was
often barely sufficient, consumables were very important. You could
have unlimited elixirs on top of a flask, and pop a potion every two
minutes in vanilla, and there were also special healing tubers in
Felwood that people farmed because they shared separate cooldowns with
potions, and crystals in Un'Goro to farm as well. And people needed
enchanting oil for their weapons, sharpening stones, etc.
Ragnaros
originally required two greater fire protection potions per raider, per
attempt, and they were a pain to farm. People who were fourth or fifth
in DKP for their class simply wouldn't do this kind of prep for the
encounters, so officers in many raid guilds often spent 20-30 hours a
week farming consumables for raids. If there were no fish feast, how
many of your raiders do you think would show up without their buff food?
None of this stuff makes the encounters difficult from a mechanical standpoint.
Players in vanilla had fewer abilities and simpler rotations, and the
fights were generally as complicated as modern 5 man heroic bosses, up
until the last couple of bosses of AQ 40.
As it stands, the
presence of hard modes probably means that a normal mode encounter will
never be as difficult as the hardest stuff in original Naxx or Sunwell,
although Hard Mode Lich King may very well be the most challenging
encounter ever in the game. But the "difficulty" of the old-world
raids came from them being unpleasant to play, unrewarding from a loot
perspective, and saddled with onerous consumable requirements.
My main problem with this
Agoney — Thu, 02/25/2010 - 12:12My main problem with this post is the fact it completely ignores attitude. You had to put in time to be rewarded. Gear was so little of importance really back then up til about Naxx (not talking about resist gear for huhu etc). I think its complete BS how the author tries to say people weren't commited to raid because they had a minimal chance of getting gear.. The majority of people back then raided for the epicness of the fights and the feeling when you finally were able to beat the boss. When gear dropped and you got it, it actually meant something. There were no badges or anything else where you could get similiar gear.. you had to put in the time.
Im sure we all complained at the time for the farming of consumables etc, but in hindsight, I would love to have that level of commitment to the game again. Now its just sign on, buy stuff off the AH (since gold is so easily attainable), raid, do a couple heroics, and see ya. Guild members would often work together more, divying up the farming and creating good friendships at the same time.
The content has been really dumbed down as well. Outside of say, Karazhan and ZA, what raid instances in Vanilla & TBC could be pugged? Every raid instance in WOTLK can be pugged, and in time ICC normal will be added to that list, maybe even TOGC 25 too eventually. I haven't seen ICC hard modes yet but I'm hoping they are tuned well and aren't pushovers.
I think Blizzard improved on the concept of trash, at least in regards to the amount of it. I leave Hyjal out of consideration since that was just its own bag of uniqueness. Trash now for the most part is simple AoE. No thinking needed. How often do we sheep, MC, tornado aka CC any trash anymore? My favorite trash of all is huhu-twin emp trash. People hated it at the time, but I never had a problem with at all. It actually made the trip to the next boss interesting. It wasn't too difficult assuming everyone was paying attention. There were what, 4 anubisaths you had to kill? The first few times clearing through that wing, the feeling of getting through it was just as similiar to beating a boss.
Another thing that bugs me is the fact there has been zero resist fights in all of wotlk. Maybe they are lame, but I thought it put an interesting twist on things, whether it be Vael, Huhu, sapphiron, sharaz etc. It required extra dedication from your raiders, and made the fights more overly difficult, imo.
The authors take on dedication and commitment is really off base. I think people were more dedicated and commited then rather then now, just due to the time commitment. World first race was still pretty relevant, there was just less people playing then compared to now, so of course it gets more attention these days. I think Blizzard did improve on the 40 man to 25 man switch, with a sense that the majority of fights you could easily carry those extra 15 people if you had a good core of 25.
This isn't as organized as I hoped, I keep getting called away. I think boss mods and strategy pages have made things easier, but those always existed. Honestly, If it was up to me, I'd ignore all strat pages and just go in and throw ourselves at the encounter and figure it out for ourselves. I think you learn more and progress as a player this way rather then just copying someone elses work. Boss mods are nice, but if you pay attention to emotes and debuffs you could easily do without them (even in vanilla).
My Top 5 encounters:
Anyway, my favorite encounters of all time are as followed (AQ40 you'll see is my favorite instance):
Majordomo, Chromaggus, vael, Nefarion, Sartura, Huhu, Twin Emps, C'thun, Razuvious (original), Loatheb (original), Heigan (original), thaddius (original), Karazhan theatre (it was really creative lol), Leotheras, Vashj, A'lar, Kael, teron, sharaz, illidan, and all of sunwell except brut/felmyst
To this day Vashj is my all
Grasen — Fri, 02/26/2010 - 08:49To this day Vashj is my all time fav boss in wow.
I would agree with this and
saedo — Wed, 02/24/2010 - 11:30I would agree with this and add another point.
Players and Blizz design are smarter now.
1. Boss Strats/Vids sites are wide and easy to find. People can research in depth on a boss and there are plenty of players willing to give their insight and info to help you out.
2. Boss Mods. In conjunction with the above, the mods are more sophisticated nowadays. Timers, marking, health frames, etc.
3. Mods in general. Again more sophisticated to let you see the info you need to see to do what you need to do.
4. Ventrillo. Oh the hay day when we occasionally hear some guilds kill stuff using only raid chat. Well now with Blizz's voice chat, there's absolutely no need to gimp yourself on the communication front.
5. Elitist Jerks. Players may or may not use it, but to a degree, the information the people there research and calculate trickles down to every raider. Any time you copy a cookie cutter spec, or gem your favorite stat, its origins is likely from EJ.
6. Class mechanics substantially improved. I remember one my class had Improved Distract in one of the higher tiers, increase range by 4 yards, yay! The trees were full of stupid and wtf.
7. Item itemiztion substantially improved. Yay for sprit and frost resist on rogue gear. They were useful.... Yea. Also stam had double the cost back then so kinda like our stam is doubled nowadays.
In conclusion, if you want to raid Vanilla hard level again... Turn off vent, be oblvious to boss strats, run stock UI, put some spirit or spell pen or whatever's useless gems into every piece of your gear, and throw away about 20 of your talent points and put them in useless random shit or nothing at all.
That's Vanilla.