Ghando

First I'd contend the original versions of the Eredar Twins and everything after them in SWP were as challenging as any other bosses in the game's history. Second I think you're losing perspective on something that made vanilla WoW "harder"...the fact that even the top guilds were lugging at least half a dozen complete retards and another half dozen basic incompetents through all the content. That slows things down and makes them appear more difficult than they are. Your retard contingent may have added two weeks onto the time it took to bag Sapphiron or KT, but does that really make the fights that much harder? Does it make the 40-man raiding model a better or more challenging design? I'd say no.

If you've experienced a lot of TBC and WOTLK raid content do you honestly think that those encounters demanded less of you as an individual player than vanilla encounters?

I'm a Shaman.

 

• Snowy

Also consider that players, both yourself and as a raiding force as a whole, have improved dramatically in both skill and knowledge from the old Naxx era to now. Look at how quickly encounters get picked apart now and all of the tools at your disposal. It's possible to know the PTR implications of any changes to your spec via simulators and whatnot before the patch goes live so you already know what to do, and so on. The fact that Blizzard could nail M'uru and K'J difficulty so well -- making us put over 20+ hours into both (and I think we approached that on Twins as well) -- was very impressive. Sure there's not much to compare it with now, outside of Sarth+3, and I still contend that was a reasonably challenging fight. It was certainly a multiple-night learning fight at the time. Now if you want to argue about the rest of the content being too easy, feel free, but that's a completely different argument and not the basis for this conversation.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Hate Monkey

You guys can't just start talking about the comparisons between raids without taking into account all the changes that Blizzard has given us in the ways of itemization, talents, and overall game play changes.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

 

GIJebus

Why is this still going on?

Early wotlk raids are easy, they are meant to be easy, blizzard has stated and intended this. If you want a challenge, quit for a year and come back when the other two raid zones open up. In the meantime there are achievement to do, if you want a challenge go for that. Your guild hasn't even gotten shocking done, try that for a challenge.

 

JamesVZ

I still refuse to buy into this theory. I mean sure, when the game was released those of us who were EQ raiders had a leg up on just about everyone else in the game due to the massive amounts of similarities between the two, but that gap quickly closed in subsequent raid dungeons and it showed. Raiding tools have largely gone unchanged since what, late AQ/early Naxx? when RDX was leaked for public consumption. Sure, guilds will continue to improve their organization, but even then there's only so much you can do, and the constant headache of roster management keeps that in check 9 times out of 10.

I, personally, don't think that the players or the guilds have gotten any better than they were back in the Naxx era. I also don't think the game has showed a large improvement in the raid game since then, either, like it did from MC->BWL->AQ40->Naxx. You could tell they were learning things from one zone to the next, with almost entirely different design philosophies in each, and considerably different and much more challenging encounter mechanics. Since then, the seperation of tiers has largely been on the tuning side of things, rather than on the design or mechanic side. I don't think that's a bad thing, per se, but I've also liked playing the game for the hobby side of it for quite awhile now.

Basically, if encounters are broken down and figured out much quicker today than they were before, I think it's because of the encounters, not the players.

Official Slackie Fanclub. The dude gets ALL the ladies.

In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

◊ Praetorian

Couldn't disagree with this more. The entire community's approach to raiding is different than it used to be. I remember when no one knew how to trigger phase 2 of Nefarian and the handful of guilds that knew kept very quiet about it. It's not that Nefarian was a particularly complex fight by any means (compare it to Kael'Thas, or Malygos, etc.). In today's world, though, that would have been shared immediately, and within a few days there would be a dozen videos of the fight showing multiple AoE strats, focus-fire strats, etc. In a world of open and shared information, all the strats immediately are put out there and the best ones quickly rise to the top of the heap. Look at how Twins worked out, with a series of strat refinements, starting with the brute-force SK approach, intermediate setups like those used by Last Resort and Nihilum that made use of the terrain but not optimally, and then the Fusion strat that basically every guild immediately switched to and used for the rest of the expansion. There were a million ways to do M'uru p1 in theory (it was far, far more complex than, say, Nef p1), but ultimately everyone settled on variations of the same basic approach (group on each side, ranged group on M'uru + sentinels, maybe 2 tanks for Sentinel/spawns or a single prot paladin to allow for an extra DPS if needed, etc.).

The community was able to figure out threat generation to the point that it ceased to make sense to obscure it from the client at all, and so now we can see exactly what is going on with a mob's threat table (how mysterious would Onyxia have been if this knowledge had existed back in 2005?). Boss mods aren't internal proprietary things anymore, and they are updated by people in top-tier guilds, often on the PTR even, so that we could get a top-10 US M'uru kill yet have for our use a fully functional public Bigwigs mod with timers for all the important events in the fight.

It's one thing to make a fight that will stump a guild. It's another to make a fight that will stump a community of hundreds of thousands of raiders. I don't really think the latter is fully possible without going to sadistic lengths in terms of design and obscuring crucial information.

 

Pachwa

I have a hard time believing this. After main tanking every boss in Sunwell, I really think I did some things and our guild did some things that I was truly surprised and impressed by. When I joined for the start of TBC I think our raid core gelled over the instances and we became a lot stronger as a guild.

If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh.

 

Silmeria

External log parsing has certainly come a long ways, and the community as a whole is much more transparent. Several guilds have their WWS index available to the public, for instance. Sarth+3 was dissected in literally a morning in a semi public thread.

In general, there are improvements in nearly every dimension of raiding at this point, and certainly in overall player skill. People who have been playing this entire time can quickly adapt to new fights if for no other reason than sheer experience and drawing parallels on what's worked in the past and what has not on a very abstract level.

 

JamesVZ

Huh, I guess I'm not sure where you get that from. The change in approach to raiding, to me, was cemented when Conquest released their strats in early Molten Core. Even before that, however, there were always places you could go to discuss various end game encounters. Before EJ, it was Conquest, before Conquest, it was The Back Alley. Players are largely the same now as they have always been in that regard, and the best will always look for ways to get a leg up on raw information -- and they'll get it, too. They always have.

There's only so many ways you can make an interesting encounter, though, especially based upon an established framework that has seen little improvement over the years. This expansion the new thing is vehicles, and we'll see how they end up using it. Before that, however, what was new mechanics-wise between the start of Molten Core and the end of Sunwell? Absolutely nothing. How many times is a good chunk of an encounter's explanation summed up by "Oh boss X is sometimes just like boss Y?" And even when it isn't, how many times does it seem roughly similar to something you have done before? Sure, it might be that the entire approach to raiding has changed and players are now much smarter, faster, and stronger than they were before, but I prefer the simpler explanation of the encounters being non-innovative for the most part for a very long time. Like I said before, though, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems a bit misleading to put it all on the players.

Official Slackie Fanclub. The dude gets ALL the ladies.

In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Malan

That's Gurg's point though - there isn't a way to 'get a leg up' anymore. Encounter information is permanently public the moment the first guild hits it on the PTR.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06