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Whatever happened to challenge?
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,348
My recollection of Vanilla is that in most situations, if you pulled one group at a time, it was easy. Pull two groups at a time and it's hard. The latter may force you to burn some long cooldowns or lead to people dying, but wasn't necessarily a wipe.
Now, people pull three groups at a time intentionally, and it usually doesn't get anyone killed. Sometimes they pull three groups at a time, one of which has a boss, even. It means the healer has less time to heal before people die, but so long as he can play whack-a-mole effectively, no one dies. Unlike in Vanilla, now everyone has infinite mana, at least apart from arcane mages, so a lengthy battle doesn't lead to people dying after the healer runs out of mana.
In some games, it's beneficial to pull a lot of mobs at once so you can AoE them down quickly. But WoW has little AoE, and so pulling multiple groups simultaneously doesn't even make it go faster. If anything, it makes it go slower because people have to stop to heal a lot more in combat, and time spent healing is time spent not dealing damage. In some cases, it also means that mobs heal each other a lot more, which also slows things down.
And it still seems like most groups pull multiple groups of mobs at once intentionally. It's not just accidents, either; I've seen tanks go intentionally pull three groups successively that were spread out considerably, to the extent that it would have been easier to pull one group at a time. And if the tank doesn't go off and pull several groups at once, someone else probably will.
You might think it's just because I'm low level. But I'm skeptical of that. The other day, I saw someone in Orgrimmar complaining about how awful the random people in PUGs were for mythic dungeons. His complaint wasn't that the groups were unable to finish. It wasn't even that they wiped occasionally. No, it's just assumed that if you throw random people who don't know what they're doing into a mythic dungeon, of course they'll complete it and get their loot.
Rather, his complaint was that they didn't rush through it to beat some timer, and it's unfair that they still got their loot for having cleared the dungeon. Perhaps he didn't realize that that's the point of WoW: you get an epic, and you get an epic, and you get an epic, and everyone gets an epic. It's all about time spent playing; actually knowing how to play is only marginally relevant.
In Vanilla, it was at least possible to make given content arbitrarily easy or difficult by attempting it at a higher or lower level. This had the enormous drawback that nearly all of the game's content was the wrong level for you. On paper, level scaling should fix it. The problem is that the level scaling scales things such that everything is way too easy for you.
Now, people pull three groups at a time intentionally, and it usually doesn't get anyone killed. Sometimes they pull three groups at a time, one of which has a boss, even. It means the healer has less time to heal before people die, but so long as he can play whack-a-mole effectively, no one dies. Unlike in Vanilla, now everyone has infinite mana, at least apart from arcane mages, so a lengthy battle doesn't lead to people dying after the healer runs out of mana.
In some games, it's beneficial to pull a lot of mobs at once so you can AoE them down quickly. But WoW has little AoE, and so pulling multiple groups simultaneously doesn't even make it go faster. If anything, it makes it go slower because people have to stop to heal a lot more in combat, and time spent healing is time spent not dealing damage. In some cases, it also means that mobs heal each other a lot more, which also slows things down.
And it still seems like most groups pull multiple groups of mobs at once intentionally. It's not just accidents, either; I've seen tanks go intentionally pull three groups successively that were spread out considerably, to the extent that it would have been easier to pull one group at a time. And if the tank doesn't go off and pull several groups at once, someone else probably will.
You might think it's just because I'm low level. But I'm skeptical of that. The other day, I saw someone in Orgrimmar complaining about how awful the random people in PUGs were for mythic dungeons. His complaint wasn't that the groups were unable to finish. It wasn't even that they wiped occasionally. No, it's just assumed that if you throw random people who don't know what they're doing into a mythic dungeon, of course they'll complete it and get their loot.
Rather, his complaint was that they didn't rush through it to beat some timer, and it's unfair that they still got their loot for having cleared the dungeon. Perhaps he didn't realize that that's the point of WoW: you get an epic, and you get an epic, and you get an epic, and everyone gets an epic. It's all about time spent playing; actually knowing how to play is only marginally relevant.
In Vanilla, it was at least possible to make given content arbitrarily easy or difficult by attempting it at a higher or lower level. This had the enormous drawback that nearly all of the game's content was the wrong level for you. On paper, level scaling should fix it. The problem is that the level scaling scales things such that everything is way too easy for you.
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Comments
If a game is stupidly easy except for some tiny sliver of content that is buried behind a mountain of grinding so that hardly anyone will ever see it, then it's stupidly easy, period.
I'm not claiming that the game was challenging in Vanilla. Only that it wasn't this stupidly easy unless you actively tried to make it so. Which most players did, and it annoyed me back then, too. They'd take a level 60 to a level 40 dungeon. At the level cap, they couldn't do that anymore, so they'd bring 10 players to a 5-man group dungeon. The problems it that the level scaling seems to force you into that level of stupidly easy content, rather than it being optional as it was in Vanilla.
For now, I've gone back to Kritika Online, where the challenging content starts at level 5. Sure, it's a low budget game, and it shows in a lot of places. But at least I'm not bored of going through the motions doing something completely stupid where people who actively try to wipe a group usually fail at it.
I'm not necessarily asking for something super difficult. But I am saying that if you screw up royally by, say, pulling three times as many mobs at once as you should have, there should be at least a significant chance of something negative happening as a result. Right now, there really isn't unless the healer happens to disconnect or go AFK.
Play Vanilla WoW on private servers., it's a totally different gameplay.
A WoW live player would struggle to keep the discipline and methodical preparation you need to play the Vanilla content efficiently.
You can't pull more than a group at a time, even if you are Jesus Christ.
Same for solo play, 2 mobs top, more than that and you are dead or almost.
Let's say that Vanilla WoW was more 'intense' and required more preparation and focus than the current version.
That's probably a better definition everyone should agree on.
a) if you use eeeevery cool down on every group, quite frankly, your mythic times suck.
b) "You have to use CC, kiting, and every cooldown you have almost every group." that actually was very close to normal instance runs back then
the prob nowadays? to actually find people who won't leave your fucking raid or guild after 1 whipe and jump to another random guild who just fucking formed.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Vanilla was a lot more time consuming with annoying farm aspects and game mechanics and most importantly the game was complately fresh back than. You didn't have enough information on what to do and you didn't now the mechanics and your class well enough to put out your real performance in the game. Right now you have all of these but fighs are much more complicated and challenging.
It wasn't just a matter of HP and DPS.
And if you pulled 3 mobs instead of 2, you would probably die with your Druid.
If you do the same with a Live Druid though, it's like you are not even trying.
its less about enduring and more about doing the dance correctly
b) Vanilla wow was logistically harder...
getting 40 people to be there and not fuck up is harder then 25
mandatory rep grinds and consumable farming was time consuming
less gear per kill equaled slower progress
and most importantly gear and classes weren't optimized for every fight...meaning difficulty could be artificially raised simply for the raid/dungeon team not having the most optimal classes and specs and....gear power also didn't always scale with content(most of early vanilla some BiS gear came from dungeons).
if you were fully optimized most of the content was a cake walk.....hell I remember 10maning MC during vanilla and I did 45min E-strat runs regularly.
to put things in perspective
1) Vaelastrasz "the guild breaker" basically had 1 relevant mechanic
2) 4 horseman required 6-8 prot warriors(basically 20% of a raid) having a specific 4 piece set bonus to prevent an rng taunt resist from wiping the raid
For example, see Kritika Online, which I'm playing now. With a character level in the 30s (as compared to a cap of 70), you might gain a level per 10 minutes of actively playing in danger zones. And you might also die in 3 hits, which isn't that disruptive to the leveling process, but does mean that you have to pay attention. That's a lot faster leveling than WoW has today, while being a massively greater challenge than WoW has whether today or in Vanilla.