i have no issue with "catch-up gear" or alternative progression systems, but invalidating any raid in the middle of an expansion is bad. my guild will probably down KT before we ever see that Garr Binding...
Eh, it was absolutely awful in TBC. I was on a relatively dead server with only 1 guild really progging BT when it was current content. That guild could poach whomever they wanted with very little resistance. For example, you could be 4-5 bosses into SSC and lose your nature resist tank (Typically a druid) to that guild, and then you can no longer kill the first boss in SSC until a new tank was geared. It was incredibly frustrating especially if it just kept happening.
The problem with not invalidating some raids is burnout. for example, my guild has five raids nights a week for 3 hours. 3 of them are mandatory nights for AQ40, BWL, and MC, the other two are for ZG/AQ20 due to their 3 day lockouts. That's a lot of raiding in a given week, and I'm feeling that burn to the point I only log on for 3 of the 5 nights. I think I'm not the only one, as one of those nights (which we tacked on with AQ) we have difficulty getting our full team for. Recently, we didn't even have a full 40 for our AQ40. I think I'm not the only one feeling the burn.
@@linkmastr001 thats the problem mate? you said it, 5raids a week for 3hours and 3 of the raids are mandatory, i really dont get it... thats too much, we do 1 raid night and clear AQ40 and bwl all of it in less than 3hours???? try make ur guildies do 2 raids in 1 night and see what happens..do main raids ofc = AQ40+BWL.
@Kokainuser I don't think the group was small. I think a lot of people were unhappy about running the same instances over and over for the shot of something titan-forging. I think that there is some merit to what forging was seeking to do though, it just shouldn't be randomized imo ofc
Back in Classic, Raiding was a logistical Nightmare. Especially when Naxxramas came. I remember having to farm Grave Moss from the Scarlet Monastery in order to brew myself Shadow Resistance Potion. Also running Felwood for these Special Herbs (forgot the names), in order to heal myself whenever necessary for that encounter with Loatheb. It was a logistical Nightmare and very very time consuming. I am in my 40s now and I quit World of Warcraft quite some time ago, since the game doesn't give me the same level of Joy it used to give me when I was younger. I still watch Videos though, but I don't think I will ever play again.
The extra difficulties weren't really options, it ended up being added progression. You beat all the bosses in normal difficulty? Now do it again but slightly harder. It weakens the fulfillment of killing a boss on normal mode because you know that's not the "real" difficulty and it also weakens the fulfillment of killing a boss on heroic mode because "well, we kind of already killed this boss already". I definitely understand the need for different difficulty modes but right now I think 4 difficulty modes is too much. Instead of "just do the entire raid again but harder", I'd like to see more use of heroic-only or mythic-only optional "superbosses" like Algalon, Sinestra, or Ra-den.
I just wrote a reply explaining this exact issue lol but yes I do agree, right now and even back then in wrath, 4 difficulty modes just too much and people end up burning themselves out. The super boss idea is nice but I don’t know how to tackle the difficulty modes. On one hand, you can cut out LFR and mythic out but still have that same empty feeling with raiding but on the other, you can just have multiple raids of varying difficulty but only one singular difficulty for each ones. They sort of did this in cata but ended up falling back into bad habits so really it’s on blizzard to make the raids.
I like the wotlk system. Sure the normal bosses are easy, but its fine cause bad players are happy while the good ones know that heroic is the real deal. Also everything was relatively easy to pug except for raid achievement runs (including uld hardmode) and a few HC bosses like Lk, syndra, lady (icc) and Halion(rs)
@@Titan990 during the icc+rs period of wotlk you only could grind one lockout of icc25 and one lockout rs25 for BiS. Some specs needed 1 or 2 BiS from togc25 or icc10H. So thats 2 runs a week or 4 in the worst case. Only toc had 4 lockouts, every other had 2. I cant remember exactly but maybe the dragon raids had 4 too but those were 30min each anyways and only used for mount runs since the loot was 220ish ilvl
Hidden end bosses were ALWAYS super hype. I wish they kept doing it, its just a bit unfortunate that ... well to keep the hype only internal testing teams try them afaik. Synestra was buggy af, Ra-Den was not a follow up challenge after Lei Shen, then they just straight up didnt bother with them anymore. Bit of a shame
Despite the criticism of Classic, Vanilla guilds are the reason I love Wow and why I have played so much vanilla. The mandatory mass cooperation, preparation, and execution with such a large yet close knit group.
Back in vanilla and in classic I did not have a similar experience. My experience was solo grinding/questing and skipping anything that took more than 1-2 people. I did a few dungeons but maybe like 3-4 ever.
@@Babaganoosh69 I think that's part of the reason why raid sizes were nerfed. Wrangling 40 people together is hard if you're not willing to put in the effort logistically. It's why in classic you had 100's of guilds per faction trying to become raiding guilds only to be absorbed into the same 30-50 guilds to actually get it done. 25 man raiding in classic tbc will see guilds split up as raid teams leave to form their own guilds, creating their own culture and closer knit group of friends. A smaller but similar shift will happen again in WotLK to very-casual guilds moving to 10 man content. You will always get people in mmo's who don't interact with other people or join a shitty guild that doesnt actually do any content together and don't know why. Blizzard is tasked with the difficult job of trying to get as many people to enjoy the game as possible, which meant making raiding as accessible as possible while still rewarding players of different skill levels, thus the four tiered raid system in retail (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic) where LFR can be seen as 'story mode', Normal raids into Heroic progression is for the 90% of raiding guilds, and Heroic raids into Mythic progression is for the top 10% of raiders.
@@Altobrun "Blizzard is tasked with the difficult job of trying to get as many people to enjoy the game as possible". While I agree with you that Blizzard 99% views their job this way, I would argue that this objective is why Retail is at the current state it is and the game has been hemorrhaging subs since MoP/WoD.
@@Babaganoosh69 I would argue that the game has been hemorrhaging subs for the same reason all MMO's are hemorrhaging subs and new MMO's aren't being developed at any significant rate any more. People have moved past the genre onto other things. It obviously has kept the diehards, but even classic didn't serve as a revival, with classic wow having a smaller population (1.1 million vs 4.9 million on classic v retail according to mmo-populations). mmo-population.com/r/wow/ mmo-population.com/r/classicwow
Ya I restarted it 2 times, almost thought he forgot his face Edit; 3 times cause I wasnt paying attention to the beginning of the vid typing this comment lol
Had Blizzard taken what they did with Ulduar and continued it, it would have made raiding a lot less tedious. Having to go through one raid 2-3 times over for each difficulty gets repetitive very, very quickly.
@Brian I’ve been playing on warmane for a good bit and I’m not bored yet there’s always more stuff to get and watching your gear score go up and up and up never gets old
@@jacobchevalier1909 same, im 6.5 now but its still fun to grind for SM with my guild and improve my dps from week to week by making small gameplay improvements.
I still remember how in wotlk icc I basically went up to icc in all 4 modes. 10/25 normal and hard Mode. On a p server tho. God did that suck balls in all honesty
I ses two possible reasons for this comment depending on orientation: 1. Gachibass! 2. You've had plastic surgery after being in contact with a radioactive substance that made your own fall off.
I don't know, this might just be me, but to me raiding didn't so much improve as that it lost it's "magic" over the expansions. The whole fact that even entering the raids was hard, was a part of what made actually achieving that feel awesome, whereas with easier and easier (as well as harder) raids, it just got more and more irrelevant to enter. For me personally I just slowly lost interrest with time, it didn't improve things so much as that it just made it all feel vapid and irrelevant. I'm not fond of different versions of the same raid, I can accept 10-man, 20-man, 25-man and 40-man raids, but I'd want one that's designed for the number of players, not the same one with a differing difficulty, whether that be due to boss health, damage or abilities, or whether it be due to the size of the rooms. Also the fact that 25-man raiding exists lateron, makes it even more confusing for me as to why 40-man wasn't an option. It's claimed that you feel more impactful in a smaller raid, I would tend to disagree with that, my raiding fantasy is being in an army that takes down the "big evil", not in being a couple of mates going into a "raid", so with those limited raid sizes it just feels less interresting to be honest. Also I think that the problems with 40-man raiding in the past was just as much because people weren't paying attention, and because the raids weren't tuned for 40 players.
@Johnny Guillotine I think that might be part of the problem, but honestly I also think the problem might be people not knowing what they truly want, and also not knowing what the consequences will be of what they think they want.
I get you on this for sure - im always going to be a heroic 10 man fanboy, because thats when I really got into raiding seriously and had so much fun playing my resto druid in the early cata tiers, and I think the difficulty component it was made it for me, over the scale of a raid being something massive, up to that point I had been solely a pvp player, cata was the start of me going all in on pve really
@@op4000exe I never raided until Wrath because the first raids either took too many people or were too hard and thus no one wanted to continue since wiping more than twice kind of discourages people from playing.
What a great points he is pointing out. They really keep the goal "You want to feel unique" ingame. It is so amazing to listen to this guy in the video itself.
Making the raids 25 man just made being a part of a guild even better, and Hard Mode should have been the idea going forward instead of mythic/heroic just needed more time to get the wrinkles out, but when they made 4 raid difficulties that's when you had so much bloat.
That would still run into the same problem and eventually blizzard would just make it a switch at the start of a raid as it stands. What they should have continued was super bosses. Optional balls to the walls bosses instead of the current “same raid but harder” mentality blizzard has now. Also flex raiding should have been at the start of the game because that solved a lot of issues with how raids worked.
No one's forcing you to the 4 difficulties. Most proper guilds don't even do normal mode beyond maybe doing it on the first week just to get a feel for the raid. The only real difficulties are HC and Mythic.
Oh Ulduar, my favorite raid experience from all the raid prior to Cata. Thanks for this video that showed how in one expansion (WotLK) we have been through different raiding systems.
I never had an issue with catch up gear but I always felt they went overboard with it in Wrath. Giving the previous tier essentially from doing 5 mans basically ensured guilds never ran previous content. I felt like in BC the badge gear was perfect. You could get some nice off pieces to help complement and fill the gap. The attunements I thought were important as well. It ensured some people still had to run previous content. Lightening up the restrictions towards the end was a good idea imo.
@Elecric Fication I wasnt complaining about any of them. It's all a matter of opinion. In TBC none of the catch up gear involved tier gear, which in wrath and TBC was very powerful. If the raiders in TBC were still after tier sets they still needed to run older content. In wrath that wasnt the case. You could just do some 5 man heroics and in a couple weeks you had the best gear from the previous raiding tier. I personally just think that was too much. What I did like about wrath was that they split the raids between 25 and 10 man. It was very nice for our small guild to be able to run both normal and heroic 10 man raids within the guild and then find pug or gold runs in the 25 man format.
@ Catch-up gear in wrath isn't strong or invalidating in any sense of the word. If you think catch-up gear from the eventual 3 ICC dungeons that gave loot compared to ToC 10 normal is strong then I don't know what to tell you. It's basically vendor trash that is better than blues, but not by much. Naxx was a rehashed intro raid made for lvling gear. Ulduar, ToGC and ICC were by no means easy on their hardest difficulties in any way. ICC casual heroic dungeons had better gear than Naxx made for newbies... Yeah, that's kind of the point. WoW vanilla was casual AF. The bosses didn't even have real mechanics. Half the raid could be dead and you could still kill Ragnaros. Try that on any raid from Made in WoTLK. BC was overtuned, that isn't a good thing. WoTLK did something amazing with ICC. You can't enter heroic without having someone in the group that has killed LK on normal. You can't get to LK heroic without killing the 4 end-wing bosses ( had 3 of the hardest up to that point) on heroic. Then you could attempt LK. That is ingenious. You can enter heroic with some random that has killed LK, BUT... You can't get to him without proving your worth as a raid. All of this was simply divided into 10 and 25 with heroic option based on individual boss for better gear on easier bosses fx.
@ Having only 2 difficulties isn't better in any way. If you get the base mechanics down you can create more challenging bosses. It's better for people to maybe pug a random 10 normal ToC and then get the basic idea of the mechanics, so as to have the confidence to seek a higher challenge. If ToGC 25 was all there was, then it would be unfair and a waste of time for most people. Higher tiers of content should be undoable unless you prove you can do mechanics (which is what ICC did). "And they overbuffed it to the point where it was only cleared like a week before or after the gradual buff, I cannot remember." They didn't overbuff him. This is what LK should be, an overwhelming foe. Private servers are even buffing him to make LK even more insane of a fight, which is doable because we have 3 other difficulties in which to practice him You are clearly having a moment of inspired stupidity for you to say this. "Then there is the stat issue where it reaaaally went overboard and they had to slap the mitigation debuff aura to prevent tanks from having 100% avoidance. " ...SO?! How is that bad?? Tanks (especially Prot palas) were still very good, they just weren't breaking the game. That is a good thing. The lore was great and is still impactful today through the ones that were there and how it changed them. WoTLK had more impact in terms of lore than any other expansion since. There must always be a lich king to ensure the scourge doesn't run amok aimlessly killing and turning everyone. This threat was actualized in-game with the wrath event. Showing just how unstoppable the scourge was. Just because Blizzard decided to go nonsensical with the lore doesn't invalidate the point of there having to be a lich king. Naxx looked like a back alley dumpster, not spooky or terrifying, just unclean. ICC was pure and went for the minimalistic approach, and they had it right. Less is sometimes more. ICC is very hard on 25 heroic (which you need for the best gear and loot), so to act as if it's easy is braindead. Is it easy on 10 normal? somewhat yeah, it's 10 normal. It's like an introduction to base mechanics until harder difficulty turns it up to the max. PP, BQL, Sind, and LK were by no means easy in any way. The coordination you needed was insane. You needed everyone to do their jobs perfectly with good enough gear, same as in retail. Ulduar was easy in comparison. ALL MMO's ARE BY DEFINITION CASUAL. Online multiplayer games will always be mechanically easy compared to single-player games, by default. Becuase the real challenge of any MMO is to make sure everyone does their job near perfectly. ICC was without a doubt awesome. Everyone dreads doing Ulduar because there is so much wasted time running to mediocre bosses (except Mimiron, his entire zone and boss battle rocks), and ICC had a more clear route to progression. You can skip several bosses in Ulduar if you want to. WTF. Ulduar wasn't hard, it was just time consuming (unlike ICC). LFD was the best thing ever to come to WoW. Especially as a tank. Not having to spam in chat and just do stuff while waiting is awesome + if you were in a guild your raiding made the dungeons almost obsolete, which is nice if you value your time. You wouldn't do all 4 modes of ToC. If you had done ToGC 10 you wouldn't ever have to do ToC 10 again. If you did ToGC 25 weekly, then you would never have to do previous difficulties, since their loot was worse than this tier. It's pure progression. Do you want an option where you'll eventually get decent gear if you do enough dailies? If so do rhc once a day to boost player count in old content so more people get to do it with added benefits to entice and lure them. WoTLK had weeklies that you go through some old content that helped push the uninitiated to do that content. If you wanted all the best things in WoTLK you had to do the hardest content, and seeing someone with "Kingslayer" was awesome as well as full tier set. ICC had problems but was by far the best raid up to that point. Ulduar was very creative, and very much an artificial time-sink.
@ Vanilla was garbage, TBC was awesome compared to that. WoTLK was awesome compared to TBC especially for class diversity and dungeons. You can't make a complaint that WoTLK is worse than the expansions in terms of raids... that's kind of what happens when you go 2008 to 2020. It's a natural improvement with time. WoW lore was always a complete joke. You have elves that studied the arcane arts for 10.000 years being outclassed by some upstart human 30 year olds. Malfurien supposedly being a half god not doing jack shit all of vanilla and TBC. Illidan was a great and tragic character just like Arthas. All we did in TBC was ruin the plans of someone trying to help us. What we did in WoTLK was dethrone a fallen hero. Both were awesome, and no! Retconning doesn't change what was. If you think that Vanilla and TBC is good logical lore then... I hate to break it to you, but there was no real reason to even play TBC. In fact TBC would be better if we never went to Outland and let Illidan do his war campaign against the Burning Legion. TOC was there to find the best of the best and make an army that could siege against Icecrown Citadel. This obviously didn't happen because lore and gameplay is different. Same with Onyxia. WE killed her but lore wise it was Varian and co. The only good fight in Ulduar is Mimiron, rest are garbage including Algalon. Whereas Sind, PP, BQL and LK were all great bosses. Timewalking means nothing. People that actually do Ulduar love it for the first 3 times and hate it after. Because it's a very creative waste of time. Which is why Raiders loved the Quickness of ToGC. No trash just straight up a boss rush mode. The only real complaint I have for ICC is that there wasn't a 2 boss simultaneous encounter which would have been mental. Vanilla didn't have mechanics to speak of, TBC isn't hard mechanics wise (people were just dog shit at the gane), neither is WoTLK or any of the expansions since. MMO's are by their nature easy, because you are dealing with people that are not that bright trying to get 25 idiots to stop doing "L33T DMG BRAH!!" and focus mechanics. Such is the way of an MMO. ICC was undertuned and players were nerfed along with a boost for ICC because it was too easy. It didn't become overtuned, it became normal. You didn't need amazing gear to enter ICC 10 or 25, you just need ToGC 10, ToC 25 or ToGC 25. Being able to upgrade your gear with a simple token was amazing. Especially as the token were rewards for doing an end-wing boss on harder difficulties. "No uneasy feeling, no dread, just boredom." If you felt that before WoTLK but not after you are legitimately mentally ill. WoTLK was the reason why defeating Arthas was not something we kind of wanted to (like Illidan), but something we needed to do otherwise the wrath pre-event would be how all of Azeroth turned into.
Never got to raid when Lich was current, but I remember the first time I went through Uldir working on the achievements. What an absolute monster of a raid. So unique and so much fun. While the vehicle combat at the beginning is a tad slow when mog farming, its still just so grand and wonderful. I do agree with many others as well that so many difficulties, especially with LFR, it causes insane bloat in gear. One thing I love in classic is that gear does in fact last an entire expansion. Not the car for every class, but there is at least one piece of gear from Ony/MC that makes it to Naxx, and I think that’s good design. It validates older content in an expansion, as well as lead to less bloat. Also, unique items are fun please bring them back.
Hearing you lay it out like this it’s easy to see why dungeon finder and eventually LFR came into the game. It sounds like Blizzard knew very early on that they wanted accessibility to be at the forefront for every aspect of the game. PvP was already accessible for anyone through BGs and it sounds like they wanted to retain more players by doing the same for raiding and dungeons (innkeepers have some kind of LFG in Classic but it isn’t the same). Personally I hope that when Classic WotLK does roll around that Blizz chooses to just outright remove the LFG system. I enjoy the system now for finding dungeons (asking in channels 1,2,4) because it encourages talking to each other and you can actually learn a lot when you’re not just pressing a button to join a group. The community on most servers is also at the point where you can find a PUG for almost any raid that isn’t the current tier (currently AQ). Long story short Classic is doing things right imo, there’s no need for LFG when WotLK does drop in 2023.
A great explanation but one thing you missed (or maybe deemed inconsequential) was Strength of Wrynn and Hellscream's Warsong of Icecrown Citadel that stacked up to 30% health, healing, and damage as the raid got older, letting more casual guilds experience the content or get past the bosses they have on farm more easily so they could go for the Lich King.
100%. I ditched my old dial-up and came back to raiding late Wrath as the buff just went up to 30%. As my team of dudes worked our way thru normal in short order and then thru heroic, we couldnt help but stand in awe of the people who first pulled it off unbuffed
Karazhan, The Eye, Black Temple, Ulduar, Firelands, Tier 11 Raids, Throne of Thunder, Siege of Orgrimmar, Hellfire Citadel, Blackrock Foundry, Highmaul, Nighthold, Antorus, Tomb of Sargeras, Battle for Dazar'Alor, Nyalotha.
i love your videos wille, now on to my point, i feel like you forgot a very important aspect of raiding, and that is the "feel" of the raids. I feel like we get too main straight line raids now a days, which are basically, go from point A to B fight a few packs of trash that feels like they are just there for the sake of having something so it's not a "boss rush". i miss the big open raids where you can choose what path and order you do things in instead of being guided from boss -> trash -> boss -> trash -> boss in a singular line. what i mean by big and open and not singular, is raids like icc, ulduar, naxx MC, firelands. and so on. yes we've had some here and there in newer expansions as well like surumar city. but i feel like they're doing more and more linear raids and that takes out a lot of the fun for me personally.
I'm not sure how many will agree, but I feel that the change to trying to make 10-player raids the same difficulty as 25-player raids in Cataclysm (as well as having them drop the same loot) ultimately led to the homogenization of classes. For example, on Nefarian you still need reliable interrupts on all of the add platforms regardless of raid size. As a Prot Paladin main, we did not have a reliable interrupt up to that point, but saw the addition of Rebuke to our spell book during that tier to fill the required niche for fights such as that one. This is, if I recall correctly anyway, also where we saw a proper battle rez added to DKs, and Warlocks being able to apply soul-stones to a dead target mid-fight. Mages also got Time Warp during this expansion as well I believe (could have been during the pre-patch, but essentially the same thing). Having limited space to fill niche roles actually made 10-player raids feel more difficult in some ways, and in trying to address this I feel the development team started giving classes a lot of tools that were previously exclusive to others. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved the difficulty of the content in Tiers 11 and 12, not to mention the notorious Heroic Dungeon difficulty...what a wake up call to players. Those tiers were probably the time I enjoyed raiding the most in WoW, but I think many of the complaints with class design stem from the decisions that were made then.
Classic is my first MMO/WOW experience and I really enjoy learning about WOW’s developemwnt over the years. I just started playing retail after hitting rank 14 and would like to see more content like this so I can learn how Raiding went from then to now. Thanks, Willie!
There's another important point that should be brought up in this discussion. Though I agree with everything WillE has said in this video there's one issue that came in WotLK during the Crusade patch and it was about reward CURRENCY in form of the emblem drops. I think that Blizzard made a huge mistake that wasn't never properly addressed, but in the end, made Ulduar and older raids of WotLK expansion completely obsolete. While in TBC you still had to raid Karazhan as a new player (which was, same as Ulduar, awesome content-wise) in WotLK after the Crusade patch Blizz made Emblems of Conquest (dropped from Ulduar bosses) drop from HC instances, therefore, making older raids obsolete even for new players that just came into WotLK after that patch. That wasn't such an issue, BUT in ICC patch they made currency emblem from the crusade patch drop in HCs, therefore, even making Ulduar (which is still one of the best raids ever made) obsolete. So at the end of the expansion all you had to do were those 3 end-game raids while almost nobody was running Ulduar, therefore, making arguably one of the best raids ever made completely obsolete. I applaud that they made end-game content more accessible to new players, but they shouldn't have done it at the expanse of natural progression. The content was still much easier in WotLK than it was in TBC so new people would quite naturally arrive at the endpoint of the game just the same, but with a more wholesome experience of the game.
Wrath was the decline of WoW raiding, while the difficulty and mechanics were good, the constant and complete raid tier reset every patch, was the worst decision that blizzard ever made. Once you had Ulduar on farm, there was basically no reason to go back to Naxx, other than alt gearing, once you hit TOC there was no reason to go back to Ulduar or Naxx because you could get similar or better gear from badges and the 5 man. It was a colossally bad plan, that they continue to do to this day, it drove so many people I knew that raided away, for long periods of time. They come back form time to time, but never stick around. Heroic raids was a dumb idea also.
With the “seasons” design they have made it even worse. At least TotC was still interesting when ICC was out. Especially for people learning the game. Now a 4 month old mythic raid can be easier than LFR.
I'll say, after having to run MC every goddamned week since 60, I am truly appreciative that previous raid tiers are made redundant in retail. While I don't like that it makes gear upgrades a literal 5-15% stat increase from the previous raid tier to the next, having to spend 6-10 hours a week farming old raids is not remotely fun.
@@odyssey958 I like raiding, I have no issue with it. Hanging out with people you like playing with helping your buddy get gear. IDK why it is a problem for some people.
I have played for 2 years on a blizzlike WOTLK private server before classic. With the huge advantage of the content progressing slower than real expansions there was no stress in getting BiS gear und thus i really enjoyed it. Raidlogging in WOTLK was still possible without missing out on anything, which i really enjoyed. Especially because it allowed to play more than one character at top level without falling behind. The encounters are easy enough, that you dont need to get mad at teammates when u wipe, but still hard enough, that you cant clear it entirely drunk or stoned.
Thanks to ketchup gear, myself and many other players that joined wotlk in the middle of the expansion, didn’t get to see Naxx and Ulduar 😕 They didn’t make it so more players can see more raids, they made it so more players can “finish” the game... I think the vanilla private server scene was the best WoW scene ever, purely for the fact that no matter when you joined the game, you had all the content to go through, creating a year to two years worth of playing for casual players
that only works for private servers tho, because if you join an expansion half way through, you dont have 2 years left to clear all the previous content before the next expansion comes out.
great vid Wille. Would like to hear more vids about raiding. I thought LFR sounded great when it was announced, but was disappointed by the reality that followed. You meet 10 other ppl who don't even care about mechanics plus another 5 ppl who tell everybody else they know wot to do when they are wrong. There are those who ask for instructions and even worse those people who do not even ask for instructions. The last LFR I ever did (in Legion), I stood in front of another person to soak dmg, as the mechanics required, only to see both of us die. The other player had no idea why he died, or why I died, or even why I bothered trying to soak his dmg.... and he did not even care as we chatted over our dead bodies, all he was interested in was loot.
ToC was the first time I stopped subbing from when I started all the way back in Vanilla. Raid difficulty levels might have been nice, but the whole raid was such a letdown after how amazing Ulduar was.
I haven't played WoW in general in years now. I got back into classic, and then dropped again, and I've got to say that the only time they got content difficulty right, was early Cataclysm. Everything had a nice, uncomplicated gameplay loop, with genuinely challenging mechanics, with numbers to back them up. I kinda lost faith in WoW when they nerfed Heroic dungeons because not everyone could do them. That was the point. If you make the content accessible to everyone, then you're left with the lowest common denominator. It wasn't unreasonably difficult. I'm not some top-10 world ender raid master, and even I was clearing Heroic Dungeons at that point with some regularity. The only thing you needed was a genuine understanding of your character's loop, and a familiarity with the fight phases; most of which was mitigated by Add ons anyways. I suppose I'm just dissillusioned. I feel like I'll never get that brand enjoyment from a game again. And it died in Cataclysm, like so much else.
You are so right, since they began to bring out the content for everyone, I felt like it didn’t even matter anymore, the heroic dungeons were fine back then and I would still be fine if they made the heroic dungeons hard again!
I really think Naxx80 is a bit underrated because a lot of the opinions that have carried on this day seem to stem from the more hardcore and serious raiders who were understandably very disappointed at how easy it was. For me it was a fantastic introduction to raiding. In Wrath I joined some random small guild after capping 80 and getting a bit of heroic dungeon gear. I realized we had 10 people and suggested we raid the next night which everyone agreed to. After 3 hours mostly spent trying to pug healers we managed to clear the Arachnid wing and wipe a couple of times on Heigan. It was a blast and a few months later we managed to downed 25man Kel'thuzad. I had so much fun in that raid. Yeah it was easy for the top end players but it wasn't really designed to be hard. It was meant to be an easy raid to get people into raiding. I think for a lot of people it really worked as an excellent introduction to raiding (personally I suspect far more than those who were disappointed by the lack of challenging content).
the multiple level of difficulty was excessive it really soured the raiding portion of WoTLK for me, it also invalided and cannabalized the content before it with gear bloat, but in classic you still have a reason to go back to MC,BWL, and AQ40( atiesh from cthun and a few pieces from cthun that are BiS forever), i dont know what happened its been puzzling me for years,how can they design items that are so less impactful and dont resonate with players.
@Zealadinn i dont mind catchup mechanics,infact AQ20 and ZG are there for that reason alone,but my point is there is reasons to go back to the older raids because there is always new recruits in my guild i am in,and i dont personally need anything from MC anymore but i know that there is warrior tanks in my guild that still need t2 pants,onslaught girdle, thunderfury,and a few other items that strengthen the core of my raid team, and AQ20 and ZG have powerful pieces of catchup gear,but dont invalidate the content before it in a way that is objectively harmful to the game, getting cloak of consumption from Hakkar doesnt make me want to stop killing cthun,its just one piece of gear that doesnt replace cthun at all, or any of the raids or dungeons before it, its hard to say what blizzard can do to make items spread out and impactful to all raids,playing the patch and not the entire game isnt good game design in my opinion.
@@metermaide1726 although they were hidden and not a known fact to most gamers, item levels between raids in Vanilla and TBC were fairly close to one another so loot wasn't quickly outdated or replaced. Also, before Wrath, item quality also affected stat budgets in addition to item levels
@@Spectacular66 that really has nothing to do with what i talked about,its the retarded game design that is multiple items of the same item that effect power creep, more items in the game the more gear bloat and more gaps in raid tiers, item scarcity is why classic is successful and memorable.
And also when people and guilds raid the old content new players will get catchup gear there so easily. Like everyone has Tier pieces in the core raid team.. new players can have about all of them .. just need some luck for them to drop.
@@Cizzo8 I wouldn't mind Cata up to 4.2, everything up to Firelands was absolutely great, after that is when it started to go down. Also MoP and Legion, if they did something to the AP farming and ways to actually get the legendary items more easily (like the vendor that they added at the end of the expansion), Legion was straight up one of the best, if not the bext, expansion out there.
@@Cizzo8 Tbf i personally really liked the dungeons in that patch, but yea, i can get behind that (or better yet, tune up Firelands to make that the endgame content, i would be down to redoing Firelands until the end of time)
From my "Vanilla" experience, we always had - at least - 7 to 8 tag-alongs in our 40-man raids (mostly MC and Onyxia). I didn't really mind that, but it meant that those earlier raids couldn't really be tightly tuned with 40 geared players in mind.
Willie -- this video was FANTASTIC! Seriously well done. I especially enjoyed this video because it pertained to my experience exactly. I was a hardcore raider all the way from vanilla thru the beginning of ICC. I was the raid leader and guildmaster of a Sunwell guild in TBC and then I ended my career in a US top 50 guild during Wotlk. I ended up quitting due to burnout about 3 weeks of ICC opening up. I was raiding about 6 days a week... 10 mans this, 25 manning that.. arenaing.. honestly.. it was too much WoW, BUT honestly WotLK was a fantastic expansion! To date -- my favorite fight in all of WotLK was hard mode firefighter. I have a request though ! I've never played WoW after I quit in WotLK because I've moved on due to RL responsibilities, however, I still watch videos and enjoy reading up on what's going on because I like to reminisce with my old guildmates about the good ol days. Could you expand upon this video to include ALL the raid content in WOW's history? I'm very much interested to see how raiding has evolved from when I quit! Thank you for your videos, I watch them all!
The only thing better than the changes made up to and including WotLK was flex - It made it so much easier to handle raidleading, since you didn't have to exclude people if 12-13 signed up, but only 10 fit in a raid.
Also, classic raiding has build a closer community imo. I would rarely make friends in retail, years and years up to me stopping. But now!! Oh man, I look forward to playing and I have people that just auto invite to run stuff, if I’m not locked lol!
always thought the organic hardmode had a much better feel than current "select difficulty" options that they moved to. Allowed for much more interesting fights, especially when you could mix and match which elements on the hardmode you would "turn on" too, whilst working up to the hardest. Gave the impression that bosses werent just robots with pre-determined mechanics and infact if you pissed them off/didn't deactivate abilities/didn't active your own buffs you would get a reaction out of the fight.
I’ve been raiding the last few weeks on classic. I love it. Waaaaay better than retail, when I quit a year ago. I am in a top raiding guild on my server, but I don’t raid with them due to time differences. But the pugs I get into are amazing!!!
I never liked the Hardmode Option. On paper it sounds great but when I experienced it in reality is just lead to more conflict over "Which version do we want to do"... I mean you had similar problems during Vanilla and BC when switching from one raid to another, but with additional difficulty levels it got worse and made raiding for me an overall less fun experience. An additional problem for me was that clearing the same raid/boss on a higher difficulty just felt "meh". Maybe that's why for me wotlk is one of the worst expansions. Sometimes less choice makes for an overall more relaxed life :)
Raiding nowadays is kinda nutty, i like it. Look at mythic nzoth, it was nuts. The amount of shit u need tho like weakauras and people to setup ERT and shit is crazy
Only complaint I have regarding wotlk is the fact that once the next raid tier comes out there's rarely a reason to do previous tiers for gear. If there is it's usually a trinket or another piece with a unique effect like Val'anyr. TBC was a big step in the right direction. Main drawback of TBC raiding was the massive attunement tree/reputation barrier which made raiding both very alt unfriendly and impenetrable for newer players.
One thing about alts after Wrath that I never liked is that people tend to switch main toons and it may generally screw up things in progression. Sometimes those alt characters aren't as geared or the player doesn't quite have the grasp on this class like they did with their original, so set backs happen.
Cata had the best class design. WotLK was the first good class design expansion. I agree TBC had the best raid philosophy, but I would prefer if all the raids were 10-man group sized, or just had the option for it.
I still remember people in guild from Vanilla to the end of Wotlk better than the people I played with from mid Cata to Legion. I can name alot of them, but I cant even give one player name from the guild I was in back in Legion.
Couple of thoughts: - Naxx was easy because of the amount of whining at TBC launch: "I rEpLaCeD aN ePiC itEm (from Vanilla) wItH a GrEEn qUeST iTeM!!1 WTF BLIZZ?!?!" So they made it so that the gear in Naxx was equivalent to T6. So Naxx was a faceroll for that reason: it was so that anyone would get the gear needed for later. Sure some achivements were a bit tricky but mostly just a chore to complete. Not fun in either way for the more hardcore player. The different difficulty modes and the badge system later in the exp made it so that you could run an incredible amount of dungeons and raids a week. Especially if you had an alt. I remember thinking: "This is grindier than vanilla" as I did dungeons and raids over and over and over and over again. And I think that this was true for alot of hardcore players: it was such a drastic change in the design and so all the completionists couldn't stop playing/grinding each week and burn out. Me and many of my guildies quit during Ulduar. True, one of the best designed raids I ever did but the amount of times I raided that place still haunts me to this day. Interesting quote you brought up at 13:20: "... we had three distinct levels of raid difficulty: normal (10 man), hard (10 man heroic and 25 man normal) and very hard (25 man heroic).". So more players mean increased difficulty? If we pair that together with 3:40: "if we can keep raid sizes smaller, each individual counts for more.", can we conclude that less people are more fun but easier? I never quite had this feeling, I felt I was doing my part regardless of the raid size (40 in vanilla or 10 in TBC/WotLK). I think in general it was better to have a casual attitude to WotLK and it was a more casual friendly expansion. The Hard modes were more fun in theory but in reality is was just another layer of cream added to the cake you've been eating for the last few weeks. About TotC and Argent tournament, I can only say: tried it, cried and unsubbed again... Still ICC was pretty cool, came back but only raided it casually on 25 man normal.
@@ricga6795 I was not saying rading HM or HC was casual, read it again. I said the expansion was more causal friendly. Totally different. You picked the hardest parts of the expansion and then compared to my generalization of the expansion as a whole. And as I wrote in my post: Ulduar HM was what burned me out. Edit. To try and prove my point at 6:00 "friends and family": if so many more people who never raided or even played the game before joined druing TBC and WotLK. Why did the sub numbers not sky rocket during WotLK? They were about the same during the launch of WotLK as at the end of the expansion. I think this means that alot of ppl from Vanilla and TBC quit during WotLK, at least that was my experiance.
EverQuest was 72/54 player raids. They were successful for many years until wow popularity exploded on the scene. I remember thinking 40 player raids were small. My vanilla guild struggled to go from 40 to 25 in TBC. Lots of drama for people being demoted to bench or rotation. Then similar drama on who got into 10 player Kara and then later ZA groups.
Touching on Wrath's style of raiding; I really don't like the idea of different raid sizes for the same raid. I think a lot of people agree that 40 man raids while epic can be incredibly unruly, and difficult to manage. I can understand why they made the max raid size 25. Leave it at 25 though, having fluctuating raid sizes for the same raid opens up a can of worms, and I would argue creates more problems that it solves.
The problem they have now is old raids become pointless as soon as the next tier is released. I think BC is actually the closest they ever got to a perfect raiding system. People were running Kara until the day Wrath dropped because they kept it relevant via badge gear. Which was perfect for new players coming in trying to gear up. Kara gear was perfect for doing heroics, which was your other main source of badges. And if you were just pugging another guilds badge run you basically got your pick of it since none of them really needed it. It's how my guild would gear up alts and fresh 70s coming in late.
I like how Blizzard kept saying 25-man mode was the hard mode, yet it was so much easier on 25-man than it was in 10-man, example if one person fucked up in 10 man= wipe, while on 25 man between 3-5 people as long as it wasn't healers or tank you would be fine. And yes I did raid in Wotlk and Cata, and tried both 10 and 25-man, when we switched to 25-man we "blitzed" trough the raids, where we would have struggled in 10-man.
First of all, definitely we need to the continuation of this, come one... and about the raids, personally I've been playing since Vanilla and overall I think I've had fun in raiding in all its iterations, but if I have to give my opinion, I think the raiding overall has improved. Both, the difficulty break down we have today but specially the mechanics-wise, I mean I do remember MC as something so dear to me but I know it doesn't compare at all with modern fights in design.
@Brian I guess you assume some one that has been playing since Vanilla wouldn't be doing Mythic? In any case, Mythic raiding is an example of what raid is today. More mechanics, more coordination, Mythic only phases. About Normal and Heroic I still appreciate the effort put on creating that. Heck, even with the passing of the expansions we got a more refined art quality in raids, as with the rest of each expansion's world. Is it perfect? no way, some new bosses can be terrible and suck. But either on Vanilla or current Classic did you go through raids filled with tank and spank bosses? In any case, in the end all this is personal preference, as there is no objective way to evaluate it without being skewed by personal biases. Just gave my opinion, coming from a player that kept engaged along the years and changes.
What I liked about Vanilla raiding was the progression. No matter the patch, everyone who started raiding started out in MC, Onyxia's lair and (later on) ZG. Today, it's just the latest raid that's played. That seems empty to me.
What I miss the most is ”mythic level” 10-man raiding. I enjoy a smaller tight-knit group that is so much easier to organize. Also it would fit very well in a guild with two m+ teams these days.
I miss epics being truly epic. I think a nice compromise in an MMORPG would be too have more raids, one kind of raids that are easier and allows more people to take part and one sort where its harder and you need to dedicate yourself more to the game. And Im not talking about difficulty, I mean seperate raids. I also think its nice when raids offer more than just a regular loot table, when there are legendaries and rare crafting reagents to be found in raids, there is an incentive for higher-tiered players to go back to raids they are "done" with. So that people who are late to end-game still has a chance of progressing.
I have a feeling that raids in WotLK having 10 and 25 versions was a Ghostcrawler change. I don't particularly like Ion, but the "inclusive" parts of wow were Ghostcrawler. The guy even introduced queued LFG and later LFR. Personally, I wish they would just launch raids with a normal mode then a Hardmode. Not mythic, but something that made the fight harder and rewards better loot. I hate the multi-level raid idea.
What he said about big raids vs small raids,that every person feels more impactful - at the same time is a downside. When you are trying to build a good raid team and you've got 2 fuckups, they make shit that much worse, and you genuinely want to kick them. In a 40 man, 10 people can afk and you can still get it done. And 40 people means more jokes in raid chat and discord, to keep the mood lighter. So in my opinion, 40 is better for the majority of players. Only super hard core people who don't tolerate mistakes and want more control over individuals in their raid enjoy the small raids, where they get less social interactions.
40/20 mans -> 25/10 mans. Goodand necessary change. Video explains it well Nerfing raids as new content is released - Great change. Raids are still necessary for some gear pieces (DST, anyone?) and are more farmable so that you would not waste time on 10 wipes with a pug. Badge gear - Change that got both good and bad consequences. Yes, catch up gear is a positive change, but pretty much invalidates the "middle" content. Easiest/ oldest content gets farmed for badges while new / hardest content is pregressed through. What about mid content, like SSC and TK in BC. It gets forgotten. 10 and 25 man raids on different lockouts (later on introducing HC modes) - Both good and bad for reasons stated in the video. Simply changing this 1 lockout per raid after Ulduar was rleased would have solved a lot of burnout problems caused by this. Hardmodes - great change. One of the biggest mistakes Blizzard did was not implementing this in every raid in later expansions. Hardmodes were just.. fun. And if you see that you are undergeared for the encounter - just roll through normal mode bossfight. The explanation given why the idea was screpped is just silly. Online resources were used on a large scale during WOLK days. You could expect even th e most casual players looking encounters and their secrets up before theyset foor in the raid. Undertuning of raids - obviously a bad change. It was the first time when I heard people openly quetioning Blizzard dicisions on a large scale. There is no reason to make things that easy. Making heroics easy to gear up would have been enought to avoid new players being gatekept for their gear. Also, Blizzard philosophy of allowing everyone to see the content isquite silly. If you butcher the content so that everyone can see it, it might not be something worth seeing. With badge gear, previous raid tiers being nerfed and information being much more available online, there were enough measure not to discourage newer players from trying to get themselves good enough to see the content. Making everyone be able to see everything with a click of a button (10 man normal AKA easy mode - go) was convenient but extremely damaging to the quality of the experience.
Encounter design continued improving after ICC... but the way you are expected to learn that encounter design was fundamentally broken. Instead of interacting with people, you were now supposed to see it in LFR when you can just afk the whole fight and watch what the others are doing, and learn the additional mechanics on youtube. That sucked a lot.
1:45 No, you don't need to be in a raid to be able to enter UBRS. Officially there aren't even such things as LBRS and UBRS. There is only BRS, which has a side which has no special attunment and tuned for five players, and there is the other side which can only be opened if at least one of the players has the Seal of Ascension, and it is tuned for 10 players (which is technically a raid and thus raid quests are in that area). But after all it is only one big instance where you can enter even without any kind of goup.
Having raided in almost all expansions, for me it was Wotlk -> MoP -> BC -> Vanilla. For some reasons the other expansions I didnt like at all to raid. Cant even remember anymore what raids there were in those expansions.
I miss when everyone was a noob, the most. Now, you go raid and feel fear because one single mistake can get you a kick, people might call you useless or other stuff. The more people got used to how raids work, the more they requested of you. Heck, it's requested of you to watch guides, have specific addons. Where's the fun in that. We passed from the era of world preparation to the era of, at the moment skill talent. Ofc there is preparation there, but the balance is unstable. It was to happen. This game was a future failure from the start. It wasn't supposed to live this long.
I actually think adaptive raid roster size is one of the best changes they ever made, while still maintaining the static 20 man for the truly hardest content. But overall from any expansion I've raided in, I have never been disappointed by a raid. Raids and their mechanics are not the issue I have with retail, the raids in retail are vastly more interesting than anything we had from vanilla to wrath, but wrath is still my favourite. Its all the other things blizzard have changed that have lost my love for raiding in retail, particularly loot value and loot identity.
I did raid 10 and 25man in wotlk.. and it was my favourite expansion off all. ICC and Naxx were the best raids ever created :) I am doing aq40 every week now and cant wait for naxx40.
I really *have* never done raiding. Been playing on and off since vanilla, at least touching each expansion and never stepped foot into a current raid tier.
i know this is about raids but what i loved about wotlk the most was that dungeons were a thing through the entire expansion. you were doing your daily heroic. high geared players would play with low geared players eventually and help gearing them up. now you can spam m+ on the same crappy dungeons you run with the launch of the xpac. across the xpac you get 1 or 2 more dungeons and thats it. everything is funneled into the m+ competitive playstyle for a very small playerbase. heroic raiding isnt even as enjoyable as it was when you were raiding in wotlk. m+ spammers join the heroic pug with close to mythic raid ilvl gear and thus just walk over the raid. it would be nice if heroic raiding would still be a minor challenge when you are fully geared with heroic gear and if dungeons would be meaningful outside of spamming m+.
i would personaly realy like it if blizzard returns to the old talentnts and stats, for example spell power, attack power, armor penetration, spell penetration etc... and i would straight up love it if they bring stats like intelect, agilaty, and streght back to what they originaly wore.... it would realy bring the old players back in touch with what WoW once was and give the new players an idea of what the game was in the peak of its quality
@ I dont agree, in Wotlk you could chose if you want youre warrior to go attack power or armor penetration, or if you wana make youre priest half shadow and half disco those are all examples of choises you could make in the old days, now you can only play one spec and simply must stick to stats that youre class needs, dont get me wrong i still like where wow is now a days but i just feel like the changes done to it made it so diferent that it no longer feels like the same game
Personally, I'd say I liked LK the best when you could do every raid in 10 and 25 in the same lockout. The only downside is hardcore players feeling obligated to do every raid so many times per week, but is that really a problem? Outside of the top 1% guilds who go for speedclears and world firsts raiding really isn't any sort of a competition. Having separate lockouts for 10 and 25 gave you the freedom to pug and play with friends without any clashes.
Yes it kind of is a problem in a way because usually the people that enjoy raiding the most are the ones that raid at higher difficulties. People shouldn't feel obligated by the game to spend up to four times as much time doing the same content but in a less enjoyable but equally mandatory way each time the difficulty drops. It leads to quicker burnout and in time detracts from a player's overall enjoyment of the game. Another thing worth mentioning is that it introduces a similar problem as 40 man raids do which is it's not really that challenging to do the content but the challenge of getting a motivated group of players together becomes more and more severe with the drop in difficulty. At some point none of your friends and guild mates want to go and then pugging becomes a necessity, which leads to the relationship between players worsening as people become dispensable and are merely there so you can obtain that last item that you need rather than depending on each other and developing a bond with other players.
@Brian real novel of a reply to an offhand youtube comment but OK. I stand by my point, if people want to burn themselves out feeling obligated to run 25 and 10 in the same week, that's fine, they clearly want to do it and probably enjoy it. Not every guild or player is going to do that, most players will run their 10 or 25 as a guild and maybe pug the other. I don't understand your point of having to do it or being SOL? SOL of what? Finding a guild? 10man will exist, it's easy as fuck to find 10 friends and do a raid, you're just creating a problem in your own mind.
100% agree, also I absolutely loved that ICC had entirely different sets for normal and heroic for several of the classes, obviously favouring plate wearers bc dk release but overall it just felt really amazing, and the gear looked phenomenal, like legion gear did
Aye, Everquest was groundbreaking. Wish it was more well documented but then again, it was during the early days of Internet. Fun fact, Jeff Kaplan leaded one of the best guilds in that game.
If you understand game design and have majored in it like myself you learn what gameflow is, you realize that all of the leveling experience in classic was a tutorial for raiding, and the early raids and dungeons were a tutorial for later raids that were harder, progressively getting harder, the game design on classic was genius, and the gameflow of wrath sucks.
I really liked wotlk raiding and the whole HC/Normal thingy. Since if a group was like: OK we need 25 ppl but like 4 ppl didnt come. We need 4 more. And then they would invite some maybe less geared ppl but they would suffice since they would still do the damage and whatnot. Better than nothin. Also What is your opinion on Flex raiding in MoP? It was quite good imo but i know alot of ppl did not like it :)
I made a guild prior to release of classic with brothers and mates. the guild became huge and really good, but it went really hardcore.. its not why "we" used to like vanilla or private servers for. its spending hours each week getting world buffs and items for raiding and fucking logs. so I quit it, after playing on private servers for four years prior to classic release. it was great, but the community went so freaking hardcore.
Honestly, just the change from 40 to 25 to 25 or 10 was the best. In vanilla I was the warrior class leader and found it annoying how I had to wrangle 6-10 other warriors to be geared/schedule and deal with all their shit. Pretty sure our raid leader had a mental breakdown dealing with 60-70 retards with all their shit, too. With 25, it got much better to handle since we could cut the fat. Then we went strict 10 man in heroic (after some faction/real life changes) and it was just the best.
For me TBC was the pinnacle of PvE and WotLK was my favourite spell of PvP (though I thought MoP after 5.2 and Legion once Tomb of Salt opened were awesome).
I lean closer to TBC in my preference, but some WOTLK changes were certainly good. There should always be a top-end challenge in some way which TBC didn't provide and certainly wouldn't provide with todays playerbase all leaning towards the more competetive side. But I also think that abolishing linear progression and adding straight up difficulties was a mistake. You end up doing only one raid for months and have no reason to visit older raids even with your alts since you could always get 10 man normal mode ready which dropped better loot. And the difficulties took a lot from the magic of killing a boss. It was either just way too easy and not "the real boss" or when you killed the hardest version you already killed the easier one before. Last thing: Limiting the amount of tries is terrible. There should be no problem learning the boss in the actual fight by playing the game instead of having to learn other versions or just even reading/watching guides instead.
And after WotLK 25man guilds died(mostly) for 2 expansions... to have 20 man mythic. By far the best Raid change, too bad it took 2 expansions to realize, and having "The worst" expansion to be first to have it.
i have no issue with "catch-up gear" or alternative progression systems, but invalidating any raid in the middle of an expansion is bad. my guild will probably down KT before we ever see that Garr Binding...
Eh, it was absolutely awful in TBC. I was on a relatively dead server with only 1 guild really progging BT when it was current content. That guild could poach whomever they wanted with very little resistance. For example, you could be 4-5 bosses into SSC and lose your nature resist tank (Typically a druid) to that guild, and then you can no longer kill the first boss in SSC until a new tank was geared. It was incredibly frustrating especially if it just kept happening.
The problem with not invalidating some raids is burnout. for example, my guild has five raids nights a week for 3 hours. 3 of them are mandatory nights for AQ40, BWL, and MC, the other two are for ZG/AQ20 due to their 3 day lockouts.
That's a lot of raiding in a given week, and I'm feeling that burn to the point I only log on for 3 of the 5 nights. I think I'm not the only one, as one of those nights (which we tacked on with AQ) we have difficulty getting our full team for. Recently, we didn't even have a full 40 for our AQ40. I think I'm not the only one feeling the burn.
@@linkmastr001 thats the problem mate? you said it, 5raids a week for 3hours and 3 of the raids are mandatory, i really dont get it... thats too much, we do 1 raid night and clear AQ40 and bwl all of it in less than 3hours???? try make ur guildies do 2 raids in 1 night and see what happens..do main raids ofc = AQ40+BWL.
@Kokainuser I don't think the group was small. I think a lot of people were unhappy about running the same instances over and over for the shot of something titan-forging. I think that there is some merit to what forging was seeking to do though, it just shouldn't be randomized imo ofc
@Kokainuser Because that system sucked ass big time.
I heard Usso is still taunting somewhere.
USSO TAUNTA ETIA.... TAUNT ETIA!!!
And Gd is still screwing up conflags somewhere
No king rules forever.. but Usso will taunt forevermore :')
Back in Classic, Raiding was a logistical Nightmare. Especially when Naxxramas came. I remember having to farm Grave Moss from the Scarlet Monastery in order to brew myself Shadow Resistance Potion. Also running Felwood for these Special Herbs (forgot the names), in order to heal myself whenever necessary for that encounter with Loatheb. It was a logistical Nightmare and very very time consuming. I am in my 40s now and I quit World of Warcraft quite some time ago, since the game doesn't give me the same level of Joy it used to give me when I was younger. I still watch Videos though, but I don't think I will ever play again.
The extra difficulties weren't really options, it ended up being added progression. You beat all the bosses in normal difficulty? Now do it again but slightly harder. It weakens the fulfillment of killing a boss on normal mode because you know that's not the "real" difficulty and it also weakens the fulfillment of killing a boss on heroic mode because "well, we kind of already killed this boss already". I definitely understand the need for different difficulty modes but right now I think 4 difficulty modes is too much.
Instead of "just do the entire raid again but harder", I'd like to see more use of heroic-only or mythic-only optional "superbosses" like Algalon, Sinestra, or Ra-den.
I just wrote a reply explaining this exact issue lol but yes I do agree, right now and even back then in wrath, 4 difficulty modes just too much and people end up burning themselves out. The super boss idea is nice but I don’t know how to tackle the difficulty modes. On one hand, you can cut out LFR and mythic out but still have that same empty feeling with raiding but on the other, you can just have multiple raids of varying difficulty but only one singular difficulty for each ones. They sort of did this in cata but ended up falling back into bad habits so really it’s on blizzard to make the raids.
Blizzard making a shared loot lockout across all difficulties would definitely help.
I like the wotlk system. Sure the normal bosses are easy, but its fine cause bad players are happy while the good ones know that heroic is the real deal. Also everything was relatively easy to pug except for raid achievement runs (including uld hardmode) and a few HC bosses like Lk, syndra, lady (icc) and Halion(rs)
@@Titan990 during the icc+rs period of wotlk you only could grind one lockout of icc25 and one lockout rs25 for BiS. Some specs needed 1 or 2 BiS from togc25 or icc10H. So thats 2 runs a week or 4 in the worst case.
Only toc had 4 lockouts, every other had 2. I cant remember exactly but maybe the dragon raids had 4 too but those were 30min each anyways and only used for mount runs since the loot was 220ish ilvl
Hidden end bosses were ALWAYS super hype. I wish they kept doing it, its just a bit unfortunate that ... well to keep the hype only internal testing teams try them afaik. Synestra was buggy af, Ra-Den was not a follow up challenge after Lei Shen, then they just straight up didnt bother with them anymore. Bit of a shame
Despite the criticism of Classic, Vanilla guilds are the reason I love Wow and why I have played so much vanilla.
The mandatory mass cooperation, preparation, and execution with such a large yet close knit group.
Back in vanilla and in classic I did not have a similar experience. My experience was solo grinding/questing and skipping anything that took more than 1-2 people. I did a few dungeons but maybe like 3-4 ever.
@@gary6631 You can play the game how you want to, but playing an mmo solo is defeating the purpose of playing a mmo.
@@Babaganoosh69 I think that's part of the reason why raid sizes were nerfed. Wrangling 40 people together is hard if you're not willing to put in the effort logistically. It's why in classic you had 100's of guilds per faction trying to become raiding guilds only to be absorbed into the same 30-50 guilds to actually get it done. 25 man raiding in classic tbc will see guilds split up as raid teams leave to form their own guilds, creating their own culture and closer knit group of friends. A smaller but similar shift will happen again in WotLK to very-casual guilds moving to 10 man content.
You will always get people in mmo's who don't interact with other people or join a shitty guild that doesnt actually do any content together and don't know why. Blizzard is tasked with the difficult job of trying to get as many people to enjoy the game as possible, which meant making raiding as accessible as possible while still rewarding players of different skill levels, thus the four tiered raid system in retail (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic) where LFR can be seen as 'story mode', Normal raids into Heroic progression is for the 90% of raiding guilds, and Heroic raids into Mythic progression is for the top 10% of raiders.
@@Altobrun "Blizzard is tasked with the difficult job of trying to get as many people to enjoy the game as possible". While I agree with you that Blizzard 99% views their job this way, I would argue that this objective is why Retail is at the current state it is and the game has been hemorrhaging subs since MoP/WoD.
@@Babaganoosh69 I would argue that the game has been hemorrhaging subs for the same reason all MMO's are hemorrhaging subs and new MMO's aren't being developed at any significant rate any more. People have moved past the genre onto other things. It obviously has kept the diehards, but even classic didn't serve as a revival, with classic wow having a smaller population (1.1 million vs 4.9 million on classic v retail according to mmo-populations). mmo-population.com/r/wow/ mmo-population.com/r/classicwow
Had to restart the video three times to find the intro WillE
Ya I restarted it 2 times, almost thought he forgot his face
Edit; 3 times cause I wasnt paying attention to the beginning of the vid typing this comment lol
What a pwetty fwower he has become :3
@@ashrasmun1 Hewwo Wadies and Gentwemen, Wiww-e Hewe
yeah i was almost worried that there is no WillE
Literally same
Had Blizzard taken what they did with Ulduar and continued it, it would have made raiding a lot less tedious. Having to go through one raid 2-3 times over for each difficulty gets repetitive very, very quickly.
Raids are fun
@@jacobchevalier1909 The first dozen or so times, definitely. After that, though.......
@Brian I’ve been playing on warmane for a good bit and I’m not bored yet there’s always more stuff to get and watching your gear score go up and up and up never gets old
@@jacobchevalier1909 same, im 6.5 now but its still fun to grind for SM with my guild and improve my dps from week to week by making small gameplay improvements.
I still remember how in wotlk icc I basically went up to icc in all 4 modes. 10/25 normal and hard Mode. On a p server tho. God did that suck balls in all honesty
You're the best WillE i've ever had
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Like raid groups, size matters, but bigger isn't always better.
I ses two possible reasons for this comment depending on orientation:
1. Gachibass!
2. You've had plastic surgery after being in contact with a radioactive substance that made your own fall off.
This was great. If you did a series I'd watch, like, and comment. Only complaint is I had to watch the intro 3 times to see that gd Gnome head
Sounds good!
I don't know, this might just be me, but to me raiding didn't so much improve as that it lost it's "magic" over the expansions. The whole fact that even entering the raids was hard, was a part of what made actually achieving that feel awesome, whereas with easier and easier (as well as harder) raids, it just got more and more irrelevant to enter. For me personally I just slowly lost interrest with time, it didn't improve things so much as that it just made it all feel vapid and irrelevant.
I'm not fond of different versions of the same raid, I can accept 10-man, 20-man, 25-man and 40-man raids, but I'd want one that's designed for the number of players, not the same one with a differing difficulty, whether that be due to boss health, damage or abilities, or whether it be due to the size of the rooms. Also the fact that 25-man raiding exists lateron, makes it even more confusing for me as to why 40-man wasn't an option. It's claimed that you feel more impactful in a smaller raid, I would tend to disagree with that, my raiding fantasy is being in an army that takes down the "big evil", not in being a couple of mates going into a "raid", so with those limited raid sizes it just feels less interresting to be honest. Also I think that the problems with 40-man raiding in the past was just as much because people weren't paying attention, and because the raids weren't tuned for 40 players.
@Johnny Guillotine I think that might be part of the problem, but honestly I also think the problem might be people not knowing what they truly want, and also not knowing what the consequences will be of what they think they want.
40man raiding is just plain boring, since you can't properly design good boss fights which are fun to play with so many people around.
I get you on this for sure - im always going to be a heroic 10 man fanboy, because thats when I really got into raiding seriously and had so much fun playing my resto druid in the early cata tiers, and I think the difficulty component it was made it for me, over the scale of a raid being something massive, up to that point I had been solely a pvp player, cata was the start of me going all in on pve really
40 mans also died off due to just how much harder it is to keep a 40 man roster raiding 2-3 days a week
@@op4000exe I never raided until Wrath because the first raids either took too many people or were too hard and thus no one wanted to continue since wiping more than twice kind of discourages people from playing.
What a great points he is pointing out. They really keep the goal "You want to feel unique" ingame. It is so amazing to listen to this guy in the video itself.
Making the raids 25 man just made being a part of a guild even better, and Hard Mode should have been the idea going forward instead of mythic/heroic just needed more time to get the wrinkles out, but when they made 4 raid difficulties that's when you had so much bloat.
That would still run into the same problem and eventually blizzard would just make it a switch at the start of a raid as it stands. What they should have continued was super bosses. Optional balls to the walls bosses instead of the current “same raid but harder” mentality blizzard has now. Also flex raiding should have been at the start of the game because that solved a lot of issues with how raids worked.
Old heroic/Mythic is just hard mode on a separate lockout
No one's forcing you to the 4 difficulties. Most proper guilds don't even do normal mode beyond maybe doing it on the first week just to get a feel for the raid. The only real difficulties are HC and Mythic.
Oh Ulduar, my favorite raid experience from all the raid prior to Cata. Thanks for this video that showed how in one expansion (WotLK) we have been through different raiding systems.
Good day m'ladies and m'lords, Sir William is here
Hey can you come dps diremaul? My lock friend is getting his mount...
@@colinhendry6116 on my way lad
@Snackybox can’t wait for the Naxx Experience
I never had an issue with catch up gear but I always felt they went overboard with it in Wrath. Giving the previous tier essentially from doing 5 mans basically ensured guilds never ran previous content.
I felt like in BC the badge gear was perfect. You could get some nice off pieces to help complement and fill the gap. The attunements I thought were important as well. It ensured some people still had to run previous content. Lightening up the restrictions towards the end was a good idea imo.
@Elecric Fication I wasnt complaining about any of them. It's all a matter of opinion. In TBC none of the catch up gear involved tier gear, which in wrath and TBC was very powerful. If the raiders in TBC were still after tier sets they still needed to run older content.
In wrath that wasnt the case. You could just do some 5 man heroics and in a couple weeks you had the best gear from the previous raiding tier. I personally just think that was too much.
What I did like about wrath was that they split the raids between 25 and 10 man. It was very nice for our small guild to be able to run both normal and heroic 10 man raids within the guild and then find pug or gold runs in the 25 man format.
@ Catch-up gear in wrath isn't strong or invalidating in any sense of the word.
If you think catch-up gear from the eventual 3 ICC dungeons that gave loot compared to ToC 10 normal is strong then I don't know what to tell you. It's basically vendor trash that is better than blues, but not by much.
Naxx was a rehashed intro raid made for lvling gear. Ulduar, ToGC and ICC were by no means easy on their hardest difficulties in any way. ICC casual heroic dungeons had better gear than Naxx made for newbies... Yeah, that's kind of the point.
WoW vanilla was casual AF. The bosses didn't even have real mechanics. Half the raid could be dead and you could still kill Ragnaros. Try that on any raid from Made in WoTLK.
BC was overtuned, that isn't a good thing.
WoTLK did something amazing with ICC. You can't enter heroic without having someone in the group that has killed LK on normal. You can't get to LK heroic without killing the 4 end-wing bosses ( had 3 of the hardest up to that point) on heroic. Then you could attempt LK. That is ingenious. You can enter heroic with some random that has killed LK, BUT... You can't get to him without proving your worth as a raid.
All of this was simply divided into 10 and 25 with heroic option based on individual boss for better gear on easier bosses fx.
@ Having only 2 difficulties isn't better in any way. If you get the base mechanics down you can create more challenging bosses.
It's better for people to maybe pug a random 10 normal ToC and then get the basic idea of the mechanics, so as to have the confidence to seek a higher challenge.
If ToGC 25 was all there was, then it would be unfair and a waste of time for most people. Higher tiers of content should be undoable unless you prove you can do mechanics (which is what ICC did).
"And they overbuffed it to the point where it was only cleared like a week before or after the gradual buff, I cannot remember." They didn't overbuff him. This is what LK should be, an overwhelming foe.
Private servers are even buffing him to make LK even more insane of a fight, which is doable because we have 3 other difficulties in which to practice him
You are clearly having a moment of inspired stupidity for you to say this.
"Then there is the stat issue where it reaaaally went overboard and they had to slap the mitigation debuff aura to prevent tanks from having 100% avoidance.
" ...SO?!
How is that bad?? Tanks (especially Prot palas) were still very good, they just weren't breaking the game. That is a good thing.
The lore was great and is still impactful today through the ones that were there and how it changed them. WoTLK had more impact in terms of lore than any other expansion since.
There must always be a lich king to ensure the scourge doesn't run amok aimlessly killing and turning everyone.
This threat was actualized in-game with the wrath event. Showing just how unstoppable the scourge was. Just because Blizzard decided to go nonsensical with the lore doesn't invalidate the point of there having to be a lich king.
Naxx looked like a back alley dumpster, not spooky or terrifying, just unclean. ICC was pure and went for the minimalistic approach, and they had it right. Less is sometimes more.
ICC is very hard on 25 heroic (which you need for the best gear and loot), so to act as if it's easy is braindead. Is it easy on 10 normal? somewhat yeah, it's 10 normal. It's like an introduction to base mechanics until harder difficulty turns it up to the max.
PP, BQL, Sind, and LK were by no means easy in any way. The coordination you needed was insane. You needed everyone to do their jobs perfectly with good enough gear, same as in retail. Ulduar was easy in comparison.
ALL MMO's ARE BY DEFINITION CASUAL.
Online multiplayer games will always be mechanically easy compared to single-player games, by default. Becuase the real challenge of any MMO is to make sure everyone does their job near perfectly.
ICC was without a doubt awesome. Everyone dreads doing Ulduar because there is so much wasted time running to mediocre bosses (except Mimiron, his entire zone and boss battle rocks), and ICC had a more clear route to progression. You can skip several bosses in Ulduar if you want to. WTF. Ulduar wasn't hard, it was just time consuming (unlike ICC).
LFD was the best thing ever to come to WoW. Especially as a tank. Not having to spam in chat and just do stuff while waiting is awesome + if you were in a guild your raiding made the dungeons almost obsolete, which is nice if you value your time. You wouldn't do all 4 modes of ToC.
If you had done ToGC 10 you wouldn't ever have to do ToC 10 again. If you did ToGC 25 weekly, then you would never have to do previous difficulties, since their loot was worse than this tier. It's pure progression.
Do you want an option where you'll eventually get decent gear if you do enough dailies? If so do rhc once a day to boost player count in old content so more people get to do it with added benefits to entice and lure them.
WoTLK had weeklies that you go through some old content that helped push the uninitiated to do that content.
If you wanted all the best things in WoTLK you had to do the hardest content, and seeing someone with "Kingslayer" was awesome as well as full tier set.
ICC had problems but was by far the best raid up to that point. Ulduar was very creative, and very much an artificial time-sink.
@ Vanilla was garbage, TBC was awesome compared to that. WoTLK was awesome compared to TBC especially for class diversity and dungeons. You can't make a complaint that WoTLK is worse than the expansions in terms of raids... that's kind of what happens when you go 2008 to 2020. It's a natural improvement with time.
WoW lore was always a complete joke. You have elves that studied the arcane arts for 10.000 years being outclassed by some upstart human 30 year olds. Malfurien supposedly being a half god not doing jack shit all of vanilla and TBC.
Illidan was a great and tragic character just like Arthas. All we did in TBC was ruin the plans of someone trying to help us. What we did in WoTLK was dethrone a fallen hero. Both were awesome, and no! Retconning doesn't change what was.
If you think that Vanilla and TBC is good logical lore then... I hate to break it to you, but there was no real reason to even play TBC. In fact TBC would be better if we never went to Outland and let Illidan do his war campaign against the Burning Legion.
TOC was there to find the best of the best and make an army that could siege against Icecrown Citadel. This obviously didn't happen because lore and gameplay is different. Same with Onyxia. WE killed her but lore wise it was Varian and co.
The only good fight in Ulduar is Mimiron, rest are garbage including Algalon. Whereas Sind, PP, BQL and LK were all great bosses.
Timewalking means nothing. People that actually do Ulduar love it for the first 3 times and hate it after. Because it's a very creative waste of time. Which is why Raiders loved the Quickness of ToGC. No trash just straight up a boss rush mode.
The only real complaint I have for ICC is that there wasn't a 2 boss simultaneous encounter which would have been mental.
Vanilla didn't have mechanics to speak of,
TBC isn't hard mechanics wise (people were just dog shit at the gane), neither is WoTLK or any of the expansions since.
MMO's are by their nature easy, because you are dealing with people that are not that bright trying to get 25 idiots to stop doing "L33T DMG BRAH!!" and focus mechanics.
Such is the way of an MMO.
ICC was undertuned and players were nerfed along with a boost for ICC because it was too easy. It didn't become overtuned, it became normal. You didn't need amazing gear to enter ICC 10 or 25, you just need ToGC 10, ToC 25 or ToGC 25. Being able to upgrade your gear with a simple token was amazing. Especially as the token were rewards for doing an end-wing boss on harder difficulties.
"No uneasy feeling, no dread, just boredom."
If you felt that before WoTLK but not after you are legitimately mentally ill. WoTLK was the reason why defeating Arthas was not something we kind of wanted to (like Illidan), but something we needed to do otherwise the wrath pre-event would be how all of Azeroth turned into.
Never got to raid when Lich was current, but I remember the first time I went through Uldir working on the achievements. What an absolute monster of a raid. So unique and so much fun. While the vehicle combat at the beginning is a tad slow when mog farming, its still just so grand and wonderful. I do agree with many others as well that so many difficulties, especially with LFR, it causes insane bloat in gear. One thing I love in classic is that gear does in fact last an entire expansion. Not the car for every class, but there is at least one piece of gear from Ony/MC that makes it to Naxx, and I think that’s good design. It validates older content in an expansion, as well as lead to less bloat. Also, unique items are fun please bring them back.
Hearing you lay it out like this it’s easy to see why dungeon finder and eventually LFR came into the game. It sounds like Blizzard knew very early on that they wanted accessibility to be at the forefront for every aspect of the game. PvP was already accessible for anyone through BGs and it sounds like they wanted to retain more players by doing the same for raiding and dungeons (innkeepers have some kind of LFG in Classic but it isn’t the same).
Personally I hope that when Classic WotLK does roll around that Blizz chooses to just outright remove the LFG system. I enjoy the system now for finding dungeons (asking in channels 1,2,4) because it encourages talking to each other and you can actually learn a lot when you’re not just pressing a button to join a group. The community on most servers is also at the point where you can find a PUG for almost any raid that isn’t the current tier (currently AQ).
Long story short Classic is doing things right imo, there’s no need for LFG when WotLK does drop in 2023.
A great explanation but one thing you missed (or maybe deemed inconsequential) was Strength of Wrynn and Hellscream's Warsong of Icecrown Citadel that stacked up to 30% health, healing, and damage as the raid got older, letting more casual guilds experience the content or get past the bosses they have on farm more easily so they could go for the Lich King.
Honestly a really good idea on blizzards part
100%. I ditched my old dial-up and came back to raiding late Wrath as the buff just went up to 30%. As my team of dudes worked our way thru normal in short order and then thru heroic, we couldnt help but stand in awe of the people who first pulled it off unbuffed
Absolutely disgusting.
took me 3 tries to spot the hidden Wille
Good job ramping up the difficulty
Ulduar is still the best raid and raid system I've ever seen
then toc comes out makes it not relevant anymore so sad
Dont know, 25 man or 25 man hardmodes, dont see much difference to heroic/mythic mode besides them sharing the same lockout
Karazhan, The Eye, Black Temple, Ulduar, Firelands, Tier 11 Raids, Throne of Thunder, Siege of Orgrimmar, Hellfire Citadel, Blackrock Foundry, Highmaul, Nighthold, Antorus, Tomb of Sargeras, Battle for Dazar'Alor, Nyalotha.
@@dusty_reaper96 And ToC is the worst raid ever made it also killed the growth of WoW.
i love your videos wille, now on to my point, i feel like you forgot a very important aspect of raiding, and that is the "feel" of the raids. I feel like we get too main straight line raids now a days, which are basically, go from point A to B fight a few packs of trash that feels like they are just there for the sake of having something so it's not a "boss rush". i miss the big open raids where you can choose what path and order you do things in instead of being guided from boss -> trash -> boss -> trash -> boss in a singular line. what i mean by big and open and not singular, is raids like icc, ulduar, naxx MC, firelands. and so on. yes we've had some here and there in newer expansions as well like surumar city. but i feel like they're doing more and more linear raids and that takes out a lot of the fun for me personally.
I'm not sure how many will agree, but I feel that the change to trying to make 10-player raids the same difficulty as 25-player raids in Cataclysm (as well as having them drop the same loot) ultimately led to the homogenization of classes. For example, on Nefarian you still need reliable interrupts on all of the add platforms regardless of raid size. As a Prot Paladin main, we did not have a reliable interrupt up to that point, but saw the addition of Rebuke to our spell book during that tier to fill the required niche for fights such as that one. This is, if I recall correctly anyway, also where we saw a proper battle rez added to DKs, and Warlocks being able to apply soul-stones to a dead target mid-fight. Mages also got Time Warp during this expansion as well I believe (could have been during the pre-patch, but essentially the same thing).
Having limited space to fill niche roles actually made 10-player raids feel more difficult in some ways, and in trying to address this I feel the development team started giving classes a lot of tools that were previously exclusive to others. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved the difficulty of the content in Tiers 11 and 12, not to mention the notorious Heroic Dungeon difficulty...what a wake up call to players. Those tiers were probably the time I enjoyed raiding the most in WoW, but I think many of the complaints with class design stem from the decisions that were made then.
Classic is my first MMO/WOW experience and I really enjoy learning about WOW’s developemwnt over the years. I just started playing retail after hitting rank 14 and would like to see more content like this so I can learn how Raiding went from then to now. Thanks, Willie!
There's another important point that should be brought up in this discussion. Though I agree with everything WillE has said in this video there's one issue that came in WotLK during the Crusade patch and it was about reward CURRENCY in form of the emblem drops. I think that Blizzard made a huge mistake that wasn't never properly addressed, but in the end, made Ulduar and older raids of WotLK expansion completely obsolete. While in TBC you still had to raid Karazhan as a new player (which was, same as Ulduar, awesome content-wise) in WotLK after the Crusade patch Blizz made Emblems of Conquest (dropped from Ulduar bosses) drop from HC instances, therefore, making older raids obsolete even for new players that just came into WotLK after that patch. That wasn't such an issue, BUT in ICC patch they made currency emblem from the crusade patch drop in HCs, therefore, even making Ulduar (which is still one of the best raids ever made) obsolete. So at the end of the expansion all you had to do were those 3 end-game raids while almost nobody was running Ulduar, therefore, making arguably one of the best raids ever made completely obsolete. I applaud that they made end-game content more accessible to new players, but they shouldn't have done it at the expanse of natural progression. The content was still much easier in WotLK than it was in TBC so new people would quite naturally arrive at the endpoint of the game just the same, but with a more wholesome experience of the game.
Thank you for using the correct music when talking about WotLK
Wrath was the decline of WoW raiding, while the difficulty and mechanics were good, the constant and complete raid tier reset every patch, was the worst decision that blizzard ever made. Once you had Ulduar on farm, there was basically no reason to go back to Naxx, other than alt gearing, once you hit TOC there was no reason to go back to Ulduar or Naxx because you could get similar or better gear from badges and the 5 man. It was a colossally bad plan, that they continue to do to this day, it drove so many people I knew that raided away, for long periods of time. They come back form time to time, but never stick around. Heroic raids was a dumb idea also.
With the “seasons” design they have made it even worse.
At least TotC was still interesting when ICC was out. Especially for people learning the game.
Now a 4 month old mythic raid can be easier than LFR.
I'll say, after having to run MC every goddamned week since 60, I am truly appreciative that previous raid tiers are made redundant in retail. While I don't like that it makes gear upgrades a literal 5-15% stat increase from the previous raid tier to the next, having to spend 6-10 hours a week farming old raids is not remotely fun.
@@odyssey958 I like raiding, I have no issue with it. Hanging out with people you like playing with helping your buddy get gear. IDK why it is a problem for some people.
I have played for 2 years on a blizzlike WOTLK private server before classic. With the huge advantage of the content progressing slower than real expansions there was no stress in getting BiS gear und thus i really enjoyed it. Raidlogging in WOTLK was still possible without missing out on anything, which i really enjoyed. Especially because it allowed to play more than one character at top level without falling behind. The encounters are easy enough, that you dont need to get mad at teammates when u wipe, but still hard enough, that you cant clear it entirely drunk or stoned.
Thanks to ketchup gear, myself and many other players that joined wotlk in the middle of the expansion, didn’t get to see Naxx and Ulduar 😕 They didn’t make it so more players can see more raids, they made it so more players can “finish” the game... I think the vanilla private server scene was the best WoW scene ever, purely for the fact that no matter when you joined the game, you had all the content to go through, creating a year to two years worth of playing for casual players
that only works for private servers tho, because if you join an expansion half way through, you dont have 2 years left to clear all the previous content before the next expansion comes out.
great vid Wille. Would like to hear more vids about raiding. I thought LFR sounded great when it was announced, but was disappointed by the reality that followed. You meet 10 other ppl who don't even care about mechanics plus another 5 ppl who tell everybody else they know wot to do when they are wrong. There are those who ask for instructions and even worse those people who do not even ask for instructions. The last LFR I ever did (in Legion), I stood in front of another person to soak dmg, as the mechanics required, only to see both of us die. The other player had no idea why he died, or why I died, or even why I bothered trying to soak his dmg.... and he did not even care as we chatted over our dead bodies, all he was interested in was loot.
ToC was the first time I stopped subbing from when I started all the way back in Vanilla. Raid difficulty levels might have been nice, but the whole raid was such a letdown after how amazing Ulduar was.
ToC is the worst raid to date, bar none. It also killed WoW's growth.
I haven't played WoW in general in years now. I got back into classic, and then dropped again, and I've got to say that the only time they got content difficulty right, was early Cataclysm. Everything had a nice, uncomplicated gameplay loop, with genuinely challenging mechanics, with numbers to back them up. I kinda lost faith in WoW when they nerfed Heroic dungeons because not everyone could do them.
That was the point.
If you make the content accessible to everyone, then you're left with the lowest common denominator. It wasn't unreasonably difficult. I'm not some top-10 world ender raid master, and even I was clearing Heroic Dungeons at that point with some regularity. The only thing you needed was a genuine understanding of your character's loop, and a familiarity with the fight phases; most of which was mitigated by Add ons anyways.
I suppose I'm just dissillusioned. I feel like I'll never get that brand enjoyment from a game again. And it died in Cataclysm, like so much else.
Rift MMORPG is clset to vahnilla WoW. But classes feel same. Still a very good alternative. Or Star Wars the old republic if you like scifi.
You are so right, since they began to bring out the content for everyone, I felt like it didn’t even matter anymore, the heroic dungeons were fine back then and I would still be fine if they made the heroic dungeons hard again!
Yeh Cata's original heroic tuning was spot on the money.
I really think Naxx80 is a bit underrated because a lot of the opinions that have carried on this day seem to stem from the more hardcore and serious raiders who were understandably very disappointed at how easy it was. For me it was a fantastic introduction to raiding. In Wrath I joined some random small guild after capping 80 and getting a bit of heroic dungeon gear. I realized we had 10 people and suggested we raid the next night which everyone agreed to. After 3 hours mostly spent trying to pug healers we managed to clear the Arachnid wing and wipe a couple of times on Heigan. It was a blast and a few months later we managed to downed 25man Kel'thuzad. I had so much fun in that raid. Yeah it was easy for the top end players but it wasn't really designed to be hard. It was meant to be an easy raid to get people into raiding. I think for a lot of people it really worked as an excellent introduction to raiding (personally I suspect far more than those who were disappointed by the lack of challenging content).
the multiple level of difficulty was excessive it really soured the raiding portion of WoTLK for me, it also invalided and cannabalized the content before it with gear bloat, but in classic you still have a reason to go back to MC,BWL, and AQ40( atiesh from cthun and a few pieces from cthun that are BiS forever), i dont know what happened its been puzzling me for years,how can they design items that are so less impactful and dont resonate with players.
@Zealadinn i dont mind catchup mechanics,infact AQ20 and ZG are there for that reason alone,but my point is there is reasons to go back to the older raids because there is always new recruits in my guild i am in,and i dont personally need anything from MC anymore but i know that there is warrior tanks in my guild that still need t2 pants,onslaught girdle, thunderfury,and a few other items that strengthen the core of my raid team, and AQ20 and ZG have powerful pieces of catchup gear,but dont invalidate the content before it in a way that is objectively harmful to the game, getting cloak of consumption from Hakkar doesnt make me want to stop killing cthun,its just one piece of gear that doesnt replace cthun at all, or any of the raids or dungeons before it, its hard to say what blizzard can do to make items spread out and impactful to all raids,playing the patch and not the entire game isnt good game design in my opinion.
@@metermaide1726 although they were hidden and not a known fact to most gamers, item levels between raids in Vanilla and TBC were fairly close to one another so loot wasn't quickly outdated or replaced. Also, before Wrath, item quality also affected stat budgets in addition to item levels
@@Spectacular66 that really has nothing to do with what i talked about,its the retarded game design that is multiple items of the same item that effect power creep, more items in the game the more gear bloat and more gaps in raid tiers, item scarcity is why classic is successful and memorable.
And also when people and guilds raid the old content new players will get catchup gear there so easily. Like everyone has Tier pieces in the core raid team.. new players can have about all of them .. just need some luck for them to drop.
And then to top it off make the encounters and mechanics harder as time went on... doesn’t make an appealing sentiment
I liked this :) Hope you'll continue this series
I really hope we get WoTLK Classic
I’d be fine if that is the last classic version we get. Vanilla, tbc and wrath were the golden age.
@@TyyTheFlyGuy Imo it can last until MoP, cata is... controversial though
@@Cizzo8 I wouldn't mind Cata up to 4.2, everything up to Firelands was absolutely great, after that is when it started to go down.
Also MoP and Legion, if they did something to the AP farming and ways to actually get the legendary items more easily (like the vendor that they added at the end of the expansion), Legion was straight up one of the best, if not the bext, expansion out there.
@@Yroxcruk666 or they make 4.3 just eh very short. Not like they put a lot of work into that patch either :P
@@Cizzo8 Tbf i personally really liked the dungeons in that patch, but yea, i can get behind that
(or better yet, tune up Firelands to make that the endgame content, i would be down to redoing Firelands until the end of time)
Galaxy brain move preparing the WOTLK Classic content this early.
And to this day the name Usso is still legendary in WoW, everyone wants it.
From my "Vanilla" experience, we always had - at least - 7 to 8 tag-alongs in our 40-man raids (mostly MC and Onyxia). I didn't really mind that, but it meant that those earlier raids couldn't really be tightly tuned with 40 geared players in mind.
Willie -- this video was FANTASTIC! Seriously well done. I especially enjoyed this video because it pertained to my experience exactly. I was a hardcore raider all the way from vanilla thru the beginning of ICC. I was the raid leader and guildmaster of a Sunwell guild in TBC and then I ended my career in a US top 50 guild during Wotlk. I ended up quitting due to burnout about 3 weeks of ICC opening up. I was raiding about 6 days a week... 10 mans this, 25 manning that.. arenaing.. honestly.. it was too much WoW, BUT honestly WotLK was a fantastic expansion! To date -- my favorite fight in all of WotLK was hard mode firefighter. I have a request though ! I've never played WoW after I quit in WotLK because I've moved on due to RL responsibilities, however, I still watch videos and enjoy reading up on what's going on because I like to reminisce with my old guildmates about the good ol days. Could you expand upon this video to include ALL the raid content in WOW's history? I'm very much interested to see how raiding has evolved from when I quit! Thank you for your videos, I watch them all!
The only thing better than the changes made up to and including WotLK was flex - It made it so much easier to handle raidleading, since you didn't have to exclude people if 12-13 signed up, but only 10 fit in a raid.
Also, classic raiding has build a closer community imo. I would rarely make friends in retail, years and years up to me stopping. But now!! Oh man, I look forward to playing and I have people that just auto invite to run stuff, if I’m not locked lol!
always thought the organic hardmode had a much better feel than current "select difficulty" options that they moved to. Allowed for much more interesting fights, especially when you could mix and match which elements on the hardmode you would "turn on" too, whilst working up to the hardest. Gave the impression that bosses werent just robots with pre-determined mechanics and infact if you pissed them off/didn't deactivate abilities/didn't active your own buffs you would get a reaction out of the fight.
I’ve been raiding the last few weeks on classic. I love it. Waaaaay better than retail, when I quit a year ago. I am in a top raiding guild on my server, but I don’t raid with them due to time differences. But the pugs I get into are amazing!!!
That gnome face at the end, just what I needed =P
Nice video. Nice to listen to this and learn how it use to be in 2005-2010. Thank you so much for showing this amazing history wow video.
I never liked the Hardmode Option. On paper it sounds great but when I experienced it in reality is just lead to more conflict over "Which version do we want to do"... I mean you had similar problems during Vanilla and BC when switching from one raid to another, but with additional difficulty levels it got worse and made raiding for me an overall less fun experience. An additional problem for me was that clearing the same raid/boss on a higher difficulty just felt "meh". Maybe that's why for me wotlk is one of the worst expansions. Sometimes less choice makes for an overall more relaxed life :)
Raiding nowadays is kinda nutty, i like it. Look at mythic nzoth, it was nuts. The amount of shit u need tho like weakauras and people to setup ERT and shit is crazy
Only complaint I have regarding wotlk is the fact that once the next raid tier comes out there's rarely a reason to do previous tiers for gear. If there is it's usually a trinket or another piece with a unique effect like Val'anyr.
TBC was a big step in the right direction. Main drawback of TBC raiding was the massive attunement tree/reputation barrier which made raiding both very alt unfriendly and impenetrable for newer players.
One thing about alts after Wrath that I never liked is that people tend to switch main toons and it may generally screw up things in progression. Sometimes those alt characters aren't as geared or the player doesn't quite have the grasp on this class like they did with their original, so set backs happen.
WoTLK had the best class design/maturity (as such PvP was amazing), TBC had the best raid philosophy imo.
Cata had the best class design. WotLK was the first good class design expansion. I agree TBC had the best raid philosophy, but I would prefer if all the raids were 10-man group sized, or just had the option for it.
Ulduar's system will always be my favorite.
Yep, more of the series please!
I still remember people in guild from Vanilla to the end of Wotlk better than the people I played with from mid Cata to Legion. I can name alot of them, but I cant even give one player name from the guild I was in back in Legion.
This game will never be the same without Jeff Kaplan and Chris Metzen. It's why I hold vanilla/classic and TBC to such high respect
Couple of thoughts:
- Naxx was easy because of the amount of whining at TBC launch: "I rEpLaCeD aN ePiC itEm (from Vanilla) wItH a GrEEn qUeST iTeM!!1 WTF BLIZZ?!?!" So they made it so that the gear in Naxx was equivalent to T6. So Naxx was a faceroll for that reason: it was so that anyone would get the gear needed for later. Sure some achivements were a bit tricky but mostly just a chore to complete. Not fun in either way for the more hardcore player.
The different difficulty modes and the badge system later in the exp made it so that you could run an incredible amount of dungeons and raids a week. Especially if you had an alt. I remember thinking: "This is grindier than vanilla" as I did dungeons and raids over and over and over and over again. And I think that this was true for alot of hardcore players: it was such a drastic change in the design and so all the completionists couldn't stop playing/grinding each week and burn out. Me and many of my guildies quit during Ulduar. True, one of the best designed raids I ever did but the amount of times I raided that place still haunts me to this day.
Interesting quote you brought up at 13:20: "... we had three distinct levels of raid difficulty: normal (10 man), hard (10 man heroic and 25 man normal) and very hard (25 man heroic).". So more players mean increased difficulty? If we pair that together with 3:40: "if we can keep raid sizes smaller, each individual counts for more.", can we conclude that less people are more fun but easier? I never quite had this feeling, I felt I was doing my part regardless of the raid size (40 in vanilla or 10 in TBC/WotLK).
I think in general it was better to have a casual attitude to WotLK and it was a more casual friendly expansion. The Hard modes were more fun in theory but in reality is was just another layer of cream added to the cake you've been eating for the last few weeks.
About TotC and Argent tournament, I can only say: tried it, cried and unsubbed again... Still ICC was pretty cool, came back but only raided it casually on 25 man normal.
Saying raiding was Casual but never did Ulduar HMs and ICC HC Lk. Sure thing mate.
@@ricga6795 I was not saying rading HM or HC was casual, read it again. I said the expansion was more causal friendly. Totally different.
You picked the hardest parts of the expansion and then compared to my generalization of the expansion as a whole. And as I wrote in my post: Ulduar HM was what burned me out.
Edit. To try and prove my point at 6:00 "friends and family": if so many more people who never raided or even played the game before joined druing TBC and WotLK. Why did the sub numbers not sky rocket during WotLK? They were about the same during the launch of WotLK as at the end of the expansion. I think this means that alot of ppl from Vanilla and TBC quit during WotLK, at least that was my experiance.
EverQuest was 72/54 player raids. They were successful for many years until wow popularity exploded on the scene. I remember thinking 40 player raids were small.
My vanilla guild struggled to go from 40 to 25 in TBC. Lots of drama for people being demoted to bench or rotation.
Then similar drama on who got into 10 player Kara and then later ZA groups.
Touching on Wrath's style of raiding; I really don't like the idea of different raid sizes for the same raid. I think a lot of people agree that 40 man raids while epic can be incredibly unruly, and difficult to manage. I can understand why they made the max raid size 25. Leave it at 25 though, having fluctuating raid sizes for the same raid opens up a can of worms, and I would argue creates more problems that it solves.
I enjoyed learning about the history of WoW raiding. Which expansion do y'all think was the pinnacle of raiding?
Wotlk raiding was the best, not having a debuff cap was awesome lol
The problem they have now is old raids become pointless as soon as the next tier is released. I think BC is actually the closest they ever got to a perfect raiding system. People were running Kara until the day Wrath dropped because they kept it relevant via badge gear. Which was perfect for new players coming in trying to gear up. Kara gear was perfect for doing heroics, which was your other main source of badges. And if you were just pugging another guilds badge run you basically got your pick of it since none of them really needed it. It's how my guild would gear up alts and fresh 70s coming in late.
I like how Blizzard kept saying 25-man mode was the hard mode, yet it was so much easier on 25-man than it was in 10-man, example if one person fucked up in 10 man= wipe, while on 25 man between 3-5 people as long as it wasn't healers or tank you would be fine.
And yes I did raid in Wotlk and Cata, and tried both 10 and 25-man, when we switched to 25-man we "blitzed" trough the raids, where we would have struggled in 10-man.
Ur a good UA-camr! Keep it up!
First of all, definitely we need to the continuation of this, come one... and about the raids, personally I've been playing since Vanilla and overall I think I've had fun in raiding in all its iterations, but if I have to give my opinion, I think the raiding overall has improved. Both, the difficulty break down we have today but specially the mechanics-wise, I mean I do remember MC as something so dear to me but I know it doesn't compare at all with modern fights in design.
@Brian I guess you assume some one that has been playing since Vanilla wouldn't be doing Mythic? In any case, Mythic raiding is an example of what raid is today. More mechanics, more coordination, Mythic only phases. About Normal and Heroic I still appreciate the effort put on creating that. Heck, even with the passing of the expansions we got a more refined art quality in raids, as with the rest of each expansion's world. Is it perfect? no way, some new bosses can be terrible and suck. But either on Vanilla or current Classic did you go through raids filled with tank and spank bosses?
In any case, in the end all this is personal preference, as there is no objective way to evaluate it without being skewed by personal biases. Just gave my opinion, coming from a player that kept engaged along the years and changes.
What I liked about Vanilla raiding was the progression. No matter the patch, everyone who started raiding started out in MC, Onyxia's lair and (later on) ZG. Today, it's just the latest raid that's played. That seems empty to me.
What I miss the most is ”mythic level” 10-man raiding.
I enjoy a smaller tight-knit group that is so much easier to organize. Also it would fit very well in a guild with two m+ teams these days.
100% agreed. 10 man groups are the best.
I miss epics being truly epic. I think a nice compromise in an MMORPG would be too have more raids, one kind of raids that are easier and allows more people to take part and one sort where its harder and you need to dedicate yourself more to the game. And Im not talking about difficulty, I mean seperate raids. I also think its nice when raids offer more than just a regular loot table, when there are legendaries and rare crafting reagents to be found in raids, there is an incentive for higher-tiered players to go back to raids they are "done" with. So that people who are late to end-game still has a chance of progressing.
I have a feeling that raids in WotLK having 10 and 25 versions was a Ghostcrawler change. I don't particularly like Ion, but the "inclusive" parts of wow were Ghostcrawler. The guy even introduced queued LFG and later LFR. Personally, I wish they would just launch raids with a normal mode then a Hardmode. Not mythic, but something that made the fight harder and rewards better loot. I hate the multi-level raid idea.
What he said about big raids vs small raids,that every person feels more impactful - at the same time is a downside. When you are trying to build a good raid team and you've got 2 fuckups, they make shit that much worse, and you genuinely want to kick them. In a 40 man, 10 people can afk and you can still get it done. And 40 people means more jokes in raid chat and discord, to keep the mood lighter. So in my opinion, 40 is better for the majority of players. Only super hard core people who don't tolerate mistakes and want more control over individuals in their raid enjoy the small raids, where they get less social interactions.
This is why we need Classic+ Not new content and not recycled content. TBC WotLK at level 60. 40/20 man raids. MAKE IT HARD BLIZZ!
40/20 mans -> 25/10 mans. Goodand necessary change. Video explains it well
Nerfing raids as new content is released - Great change. Raids are still necessary for some gear pieces (DST, anyone?) and are more farmable so that you would not waste time on 10 wipes with a pug.
Badge gear - Change that got both good and bad consequences. Yes, catch up gear is a positive change, but pretty much invalidates the "middle" content. Easiest/ oldest content gets farmed for badges while new / hardest content is pregressed through. What about mid content, like SSC and TK in BC. It gets forgotten.
10 and 25 man raids on different lockouts (later on introducing HC modes) - Both good and bad for reasons stated in the video. Simply changing this 1 lockout per raid after Ulduar was rleased would have solved a lot of burnout problems caused by this.
Hardmodes - great change. One of the biggest mistakes Blizzard did was not implementing this in every raid in later expansions. Hardmodes were just.. fun. And if you see that you are undergeared for the encounter - just roll through normal mode bossfight. The explanation given why the idea was screpped is just silly. Online resources were used on a large scale during WOLK days. You could expect even th e most casual players looking encounters and their secrets up before theyset foor in the raid.
Undertuning of raids - obviously a bad change. It was the first time when I heard people openly quetioning Blizzard dicisions on a large scale. There is no reason to make things that easy. Making heroics easy to gear up would have been enought to avoid new players being gatekept for their gear.
Also, Blizzard philosophy of allowing everyone to see the content isquite silly. If you butcher the content so that everyone can see it, it might not be something worth seeing. With badge gear, previous raid tiers being nerfed and information being much more available online, there were enough measure not to discourage newer players from trying to get themselves good enough to see the content. Making everyone be able to see everything with a click of a button (10 man normal AKA easy mode - go) was convenient but extremely damaging to the quality of the experience.
Encounter design continued improving after ICC... but the way you are expected to learn that encounter design was fundamentally broken. Instead of interacting with people, you were now supposed to see it in LFR when you can just afk the whole fight and watch what the others are doing, and learn the additional mechanics on youtube. That sucked a lot.
Liking for Grizzly Hills music. oh and nice video :)
Less than 100 subs away from 80k!!
C'mon guys, and the 3 girls! Let's get WilliE to 80k!
totally agree with you and i cant wait till bc is announced so I cant just get to 58 on 2 or 3 toons to be ready to hit the portal.
1:45 No, you don't need to be in a raid to be able to enter UBRS. Officially there aren't even such things as LBRS and UBRS. There is only BRS, which has a side which has no special attunment and tuned for five players, and there is the other side which can only be opened if at least one of the players has the Seal of Ascension, and it is tuned for 10 players (which is technically a raid and thus raid quests are in that area). But after all it is only one big instance where you can enter even without any kind of goup.
I really hope they do actual progression for tbc instead of starting on the last patch with nerfed raids.
Having raided in almost all expansions, for me it was Wotlk -> MoP -> BC -> Vanilla. For some reasons the other expansions I didnt like at all to raid. Cant even remember anymore what raids there were in those expansions.
I miss when everyone was a noob, the most. Now, you go raid and feel fear because one single mistake can get you a kick, people might call you useless or other stuff. The more people got used to how raids work, the more they requested of you. Heck, it's requested of you to watch guides, have specific addons. Where's the fun in that. We passed from the era of world preparation to the era of, at the moment skill talent. Ofc there is preparation there, but the balance is unstable. It was to happen. This game was a future failure from the start. It wasn't supposed to live this long.
I actually think adaptive raid roster size is one of the best changes they ever made, while still maintaining the static 20 man for the truly hardest content.
But overall from any expansion I've raided in, I have never been disappointed by a raid. Raids and their mechanics are not the issue I have with retail, the raids in retail are vastly more interesting than anything we had from vanilla to wrath, but wrath is still my favourite.
Its all the other things blizzard have changed that have lost my love for raiding in retail, particularly loot value and loot identity.
Icc will always be my favorite raid tho :(
Ulduar is a phenomenal raid as well, its got so much story and such a unique enviroment
I did raid 10 and 25man in wotlk.. and it was my favourite expansion off all. ICC and Naxx were the best raids ever created :)
I am doing aq40 every week now and cant wait for naxx40.
I really *have* never done raiding. Been playing on and off since vanilla, at least touching each expansion and never stepped foot into a current raid tier.
I just cant wait for Warlords of Draenor Classic
i know this is about raids but what i loved about wotlk the most was that dungeons were a thing through the entire expansion. you were doing your daily heroic. high geared players would play with low geared players eventually and help gearing them up. now you can spam m+ on the same crappy dungeons you run with the launch of the xpac. across the xpac you get 1 or 2 more dungeons and thats it. everything is funneled into the m+ competitive playstyle for a very small playerbase. heroic raiding isnt even as enjoyable as it was when you were raiding in wotlk. m+ spammers join the heroic pug with close to mythic raid ilvl gear and thus just walk over the raid. it would be nice if heroic raiding would still be a minor challenge when you are fully geared with heroic gear and if dungeons would be meaningful outside of spamming m+.
i would personaly realy like it if blizzard returns to the old talentnts and stats, for example spell power, attack power, armor penetration, spell penetration etc... and i would straight up love it if they bring stats like intelect, agilaty, and streght back to what they originaly wore.... it would realy bring the old players back in touch with what WoW once was and give the new players an idea of what the game was in the peak of its quality
@ I dont agree, in Wotlk you could chose if you want youre warrior to go attack power or armor penetration, or if you wana make youre priest half shadow and half disco those are all examples of choises you could make in the old days, now you can only play one spec and simply must stick to stats that youre class needs, dont get me wrong i still like where wow is now a days but i just feel like the changes done to it made it so diferent that it no longer feels like the same game
Personally, I'd say I liked LK the best when you could do every raid in 10 and 25 in the same lockout.
The only downside is hardcore players feeling obligated to do every raid so many times per week, but is that really a problem? Outside of the top 1% guilds who go for speedclears and world firsts raiding really isn't any sort of a competition.
Having separate lockouts for 10 and 25 gave you the freedom to pug and play with friends without any clashes.
Yes it kind of is a problem in a way because usually the people that enjoy raiding the most are the ones that raid at higher difficulties. People shouldn't feel obligated by the game to spend up to four times as much time doing the same content but in a less enjoyable but equally mandatory way each time the difficulty drops. It leads to quicker burnout and in time detracts from a player's overall enjoyment of the game. Another thing worth mentioning is that it introduces a similar problem as 40 man raids do which is it's not really that challenging to do the content but the challenge of getting a motivated group of players together becomes more and more severe with the drop in difficulty. At some point none of your friends and guild mates want to go and then pugging becomes a necessity, which leads to the relationship between players worsening as people become dispensable and are merely there so you can obtain that last item that you need rather than depending on each other and developing a bond with other players.
@Brian real novel of a reply to an offhand youtube comment but OK.
I stand by my point, if people want to burn themselves out feeling obligated to run 25 and 10 in the same week, that's fine, they clearly want to do it and probably enjoy it.
Not every guild or player is going to do that, most players will run their 10 or 25 as a guild and maybe pug the other.
I don't understand your point of having to do it or being SOL? SOL of what? Finding a guild?
10man will exist, it's easy as fuck to find 10 friends and do a raid, you're just creating a problem in your own mind.
100% agree, also I absolutely loved that ICC had entirely different sets for normal and heroic for several of the classes, obviously favouring plate wearers bc dk release but overall it just felt really amazing, and the gear looked phenomenal, like legion gear did
the MMORPG that invented raiding was Everquest, and it had up to 72 man raids.
Aye, Everquest was groundbreaking. Wish it was more well documented but then again, it was during the early days of Internet. Fun fact, Jeff Kaplan leaded one of the best guilds in that game.
@@esaesaeesaesa because Everquest pretty much died when WoW came along lol like every other MMO
If you understand game design and have majored in it like myself you learn what gameflow is, you realize that all of the leveling experience in classic was a tutorial for raiding, and the early raids and dungeons were a tutorial for later raids that were harder, progressively getting harder, the game design on classic was genius, and the gameflow of wrath sucks.
I really liked wotlk raiding and the whole HC/Normal thingy. Since if a group was like: OK we need 25 ppl but like 4 ppl didnt come. We need 4 more. And then they would invite some maybe less geared ppl but they would suffice since they would still do the damage and whatnot. Better than nothin. Also What is your opinion on Flex raiding in MoP? It was quite good imo but i know alot of ppl did not like it :)
SEVEN! Restarts to find Wille. Good Job!
I made a guild prior to release of classic with brothers and mates. the guild became huge and really good, but it went really hardcore.. its not why "we" used to like vanilla or private servers for. its spending hours each week getting world buffs and items for raiding and fucking logs. so I quit it, after playing on private servers for four years prior to classic release. it was great, but the community went so freaking hardcore.
Am I the only one here has never played WoW but has watched hundreds of hours and knows all the raids/bosses?
Honestly, just the change from 40 to 25 to 25 or 10 was the best. In vanilla I was the warrior class leader and found it annoying how I had to wrangle 6-10 other warriors to be geared/schedule and deal with all their shit. Pretty sure our raid leader had a mental breakdown dealing with 60-70 retards with all their shit, too. With 25, it got much better to handle since we could cut the fat. Then we went strict 10 man in heroic (after some faction/real life changes) and it was just the best.
I fucking knew ! I KNEW WHERE'S BILLY GONNA POP! I was looking at the flower's head and said ''There's he gonna be'' And BAM 0( ' , ' )0
'absolute units of computers' = best description of 2006 gaming 🤣🤣🤣
For me TBC was the pinnacle of PvE and WotLK was my favourite spell of PvP (though I thought MoP after 5.2 and Legion once Tomb of Salt opened were awesome).
The thumbnail is the mog I'm wearing rn
I lean closer to TBC in my preference, but some WOTLK changes were certainly good. There should always be a top-end challenge in some way which TBC didn't provide and certainly wouldn't provide with todays playerbase all leaning towards the more competetive side.
But I also think that abolishing linear progression and adding straight up difficulties was a mistake. You end up doing only one raid for months and have no reason to visit older raids even with your alts since you could always get 10 man normal mode ready which dropped better loot.
And the difficulties took a lot from the magic of killing a boss. It was either just way too easy and not "the real boss" or when you killed the hardest version you already killed the easier one before.
Last thing: Limiting the amount of tries is terrible. There should be no problem learning the boss in the actual fight by playing the game instead of having to learn other versions or just even reading/watching guides instead.
And after WotLK 25man guilds died(mostly) for 2 expansions... to have 20 man mythic. By far the best Raid change, too bad it took 2 expansions to realize, and having "The worst" expansion to be first to have it.
Where can I find the original presentation Jeff is giving? It looks really interesting!
Thanks as always WillE
1 Idiot in a 10-man Raid is much worse than 2 idiots in a 40-man.
ToC made us not happy.. running it in all difficult modes to get the best gear possible for 25m hc