[wow] Mists of pandaria - Page 16

You know what? You're right. People have definitely gotten better at this game.

I actually spent an hour or so thinking about it because man, the vanilla/TBC days I had with my guild were some of the most fun I have ever had playing a game in my life.

Really high end guilds generally had custom mod makers in their ranks. It was a requirement when the game was in vanilla/tbc. Needless to say the really top end guilds had generally the same tools that everyone else has now in maybe a slightly more primitive form.

So I want to go about how I define what a difficult boss entails. I was pretty much on the cutting edge of raid content from Vanilla through Ulduar. My guild stopped being super hardcore after Ulduar because that fire just ran out. At any rate when I'm talking about hardcore raiding I'm talking about those draconian 8 hour a day raid schedules with NO DAY OFF when we were going for progression...hell the application to our guild was basically "Raid Schedule is subject to change. When we're doing progression it's from 6pm until you're dragging your bloody face across the floor as you crawl to bed." . Yes it's insane, but I played WoW to get world firsts...or at least stay within the top ten. It took dedication, time, and a whole hell of a lot of effort. I played most of my WoW while I was in college and did fine. Most of all I HAD FUN doing it so that's what I did.

Bosses are 100 times more difficult to defeat when you do not have a guide that tells you everything. Furthermore, this was exacerbated in Vanilla/TBC because they had many more concepts with which to mind fuck you with. These days a warlock tank isn't exactly an alien concept. When Twin Emperors came out it was more along the lines of "HOW DO WE TANK THE MAGIC GUY WITHOUT BLOWING OUR RAID UP?" Sure having a warlock tank is an obvious solution when you already know the answer, but let me assure you that when someone suggested that the first time around he was told to shut the fuck up and not talk unless he had something important to say(In a joking manner yes but it was dismissed rather quickly). He was rewarded later when it turned out that's exactly what's needed. Now add that really odd concept while trying to figure out why the fuck these two bosses are constantly healing themselves, when they teleport, how the immunities work, etc etc etc. It is incredibly overwhelming to figure out how to defeat a boss when you just don't know how they work.

The game is very different now than it was back then. I find two changes to be the most important. The first one was that stamina was just plain lower. This was a mix of obviously, lower ilevel gear...but the biggest change was that in TBC Stamina was valued at half the points per ilevel that every other stat was. HP took a huge leap in TBC for that very reason. A priest in full t3 (I go with this because I mained a priest) was lucky to have 4000 hp raid buffed. Tanks were amazing if they hit 10k HP. This meant of course that there was little wiggle room for boss abilities. They either hurt a fucking lot or didn't hurt at all. There really was no in between.

The other main change is healers being able to downrank their heals. I lost a lot of my passion for healing when this was removed near the end of TBC. I thought it gave an incredible amount of depth to healing and how to do it in your own way. I healed in a very different way than my raid leader (he was a priest as well) but neither of our assigned tanks really had issues dying. The fact that there wasn't just ONE WAY to do something was always a big draw for me.

Anyway I generally rank boss difficulty on how difficult it was to deal with what they did and how long it took to figure it out. For demonstrative purposes I'll use a relatively simple boss to explain the thought process even with a simple one. 40 man Loatheb was considered completely impossible when guilds first reached him. Everyone basically wiped at about 55-60% until people started to figure out how to go about killing him. Loatheb really only has five abilities that need to be worried about.

So you're engaging Loatheb for the very first time and have to figure out how to kill him. For us at least we noticed the obvious thing immediately. This corrupted mind debuff kinda sucks. Healers could now only cast one healing spell A MINUTE. This concept was hella new and never before seen. The next couple of things fell in this order...First Loatheb doesn't hit very hard. This is really odd for Naxxramas and starts to send off alarms in everyone's head. Second, melee is receiving this really weak ass poison aura. It's obviously melee range only because ranged isn't getting it but it's only doing like 200 damage every 6 seconds. This doesn't make any damn sense whatsoever. By this time Blizzard didn't do shit without a reason in boss fights. The other thing was that Loatheb's health was dropping awfully slowly, so he had a fuck ton of HP. The calculations were already coming out at roughly 5.3mil HP...that's a lot of HP.

Then you see this yellow spiky ball appear to the side. You send a tank and a few people to go kill it because who the hell knows what it does. To the shock of everyone the thing dies in one hit. One DPS notices he got a buff. A few others got the buff but not everyone that went got the buff. The buff is pretty neat, 50% melee crit and 60% spell crit with no threat? Yes please.

So he has a lot of HP but there is this huge damage buff from these spores we can get. Figuring out that there has to be a healing rotation on the tank is an absolute no brainer. So hey, if this is all there is to the fight...we're figuring he enrages in like 5 minutes or something. A tight DPS race sure but nothing too bad.

Then the first Inevitable Doom hits. Nobody has any clue what the hell this does, the tooltip tells us nothing, and its on for ten seconds. Everyone knows it's something bad but WHATEVER lets go.

It hits for 2550 shadow damage. Most everyone is going "WTF?" For the majority of the raid that's at least 50% of their hp. For the healers its closer to 60%. Well healers can't heal this damage back up because they only can cast a heal every minute. Well maybe it only comes out every minute or something.

30 seconds later it comes out again. A wipe promptly occurs.

Most everyone is baffled. Initially we think well maybe we need shadow resistance? The issue with that is that there was no shadow resistance set out there. Frost/Nature/Fire sure..but not shadow. Even then we go through the damage logs and find that nobody resisted any of the shadow damage at all so clearly the damage isn't resistible and resistance is useless for us. Healing potions are on a 3 minute cooldown so it just wont be enough.

So starts the epic wipes. Around wipe 30 or so we finally figure out when the Spores spawn and how many people can acquire it at the same time. Turns out to be 5. This night is over, we spend our free time drawing up a bunch of spreadsheets to figure out the most efficient way to spread out the buff so we get the most out of it. Clearly this fight has to be done quickly because we just can't survive for very long at all.

The next day we wipe a good 10 more times and figure out a DPS rotation we like. By now our healing rotation is comfortable but that inevitable doom nonsense is just an epic road block. We probably wipe another 30-40 times that day trying shit. We try EVERYTHING we can think of, from popping spores onto loatheb to silencing to whatever else we tried. Nothing at all would stop him from casting this shit.

Day 3 comes around and we've finally figured out we just have to deal with the Dooms. They come out every 30 seconds after roughly 2 minutes. So we try a bunch of different Prayer of Healing rotations with Health pots and see where we get.

30 more wipes or so later and we get to minute 5 and boom all of a sudden Dooms come at 15 seconds instead of 30...the fucker is still at like 50% hp because we took away DPS to heal damage... and yea. Hysterical laughter from sorrow ensues.

At some point during our late night drunk induced brainstorming session during Day 4 or so some asshole comes up with using healthstones with greater shadow protection pots and bandages. The reason he was an asshole is because GSPP are notoriously annoying to farm because the materials used for them are really really just annoying to get.

However, we are pretty much reduced to this. We need more dps so dps has to heal themselves with stuff like that. We quickly figure out that GSPP last an hour but the cooldown is only 3 minutes sooo if we use one before a fight then we can use three throughout the course of the fight. We can use different ranks of improved healthstones etc etc.

Back to the drawing board. Spreadsheets are made up AGAIN, this time for people healing their own damage. We wipe terribly as usual until we figure out something that works. BAM all of a sudden we're wiping at 25% instead of 50%. OH DEAR GOD WE'RE MAKING PROGRESS. 10% hits, 5% hits. We hit a minor road block at 5% A lot of lament that maybe we're still doing it wrong (That's possible after all, you don't know for sure without a guide telling you)

Whatever, we muscle on. Squeeze every bit of DPS out we can, even from healers (who actually switched to DPS consumables O.O) and finally the fucker dies. I don't remember what our ranking was but it was satisfying.

This is just from Loatheb. I still have the original spreadsheets for that dumb boss on my old computer. Loatheb is simple on paper. Put something down like 40 man Kel'Thuzard...40 man 4Hm...unnerfed Vashj and my post would be three times as long as this mammoth one already is. The shit was a challenge, a big big challenge.

Once Wrath and Cata came around...it was difficult for Blizzard to come up with new things to surprise people with. Everything by then had in some way been seen before besides some parts of YoggSaron and Lich King (Its not coincidence that those tend to be the most well liked fights in wrath)

My guild was much more fluid and able to see a boss mechanic, figure it out, and know the best way to deal with it in Wrath by an order of magnitude when compared to Vanilla.

So perhaps Cataclysm end boss heroics ARE actually harder than Vanilla but we were just able to figure it out much easier because we knew what to do. I don't really know the answer to that question.

I will never take away from guilds like Paragon, Vodka, Method etc etc that are the current cutting edge. They are all really good guilds and would still be successful in Vanilla/TBC if those bosses were indeed more difficult. However, I believe it was Paragon that said something to the effect that Lich King Heroic was the hardest boss that blizzard ever made...and I just couldn't disagree more. I found Lich King easy as all hell to figure out how to kill, it just came down to pure execution. No late nights trying to calculate shit out, no drunken fun times, nothing like that was required to kill him. I still hold that 40 man Kel'Thuzad was the most difficult boss that blizzard ever made, followed by a toss up between C'thun, 40 4HM, and Hard Mode Yogg Saron.

I'd go into a rant about why I think the achievement system is dog shit but this post is long enough as it is....