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Clearing MC like that sounds impossible. Even if everyone was familiar with it by practicing on non hardcore servers they won't have the gear they need. Are peo

Clearing MC like that sounds impossible. Even if everyone was familiar with it by practicing on non hardcore servers they won't have the gear they need. Are people even clearing Scholo/Strat/UBS on hardcore servers? Probably died hundreds to thousands of times in MC. The easier runs later were possible because we were gearing up every week and then eventually had tier 2

minimaxir 2y ago
Classic has essentially been "solved." The main barrier back in 2004 was not difficulty, but knowledge, organization, and tooling. Modern "retail" WoW is orders-of-magnitude more difficult to offset those improvements. Guilds have enough resources and player skill to greatly limit the possiblity of unexpected chaos.
- vardump 2y ago
  Scratch all that. The main issue in 2004 preventing hardcore mode would have been server stability, or the lack of it.
spmurrayzzz 2y ago
On the other hand, MC is the most "solved" out of all the raids at this point though in terms of mechanics. The most experienced folks can low-man it with 10-20 people using mediocre gear (as long as they have some fire res). And its something that casuals can pug these days as well, I've hopped into a pug myself on an era realm with mostly blues as a resto shaman and was fine. I tend to agree though that for "content" reasons this sounds impossible, someone will wipe the raid just for the laughs.
- jason-phillips 2y ago
  It must have been nerfed then. No way you could do this back in 2006 vanilla wow.
  - bpicolo 2y ago
    Players are a lot better than they were two decades ago.
  - spmurrayzzz 2y ago
    I was playing back then in 2006, you absolutely could. I don't remember any 10-man groups at that time, but people were absolutely doing this with mage-heavy comps with 20 people. And then after Stormcraft Sandbox when all the private servers began to explode in popularity, you had the ability to run back every encounter as much as you wished to speed up the learning curve, test/learn new strats, etc.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    It's important to remember that perception of difficulty was different then, which is why classic can seem pretty dull to a modern player. If you know very little about the game, have mediocre tools and varying skills within the group, poor coordination, it'll be much harder. Mechanically it's nothing too interesting, it was just very involved time wise, and consequently much more immersive long-term.
  - Thaxll 2y ago
    People in 2006 were really bad overall. We live in a era of min maxing everything.
  - arthurbrown 2y ago
    People conjure various reasons for why things are different now, but routinely omit the changes in class talents and gearing. At launch there was zero spell damage or healing on raid gear as a stat. You might find some green of shadow wrath but items like Robe of volatile power simply did not exist yet. Warriors, the current top damage class, had a talent rework at BWL release which introduced their main damaging ability at nearly half the effectiveness of where it eventually end up. Throw in world buff scheduling and the game is very different from how it played at launch.
bpicolo 2y ago
Naxx has already been cleared hardcore: https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-classic-hardcore-squad-clutches-a-world-first-clear-of-naxxramasafter-the-heroic-sacrifice-of-their-guild-leader/ https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-classic-hardcore-squad-clutches-... The servers came out in 2023.
nozzlegear 2y ago
You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons. That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently." This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago. https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU ¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.
- rKarpinski 2y ago
  Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds. Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team. Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!" As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
deleted 2y ago
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minimaxir 2y ago

Classic has essentially been "solved." The main barrier back in 2004 was not difficulty, but knowledge, organization, and tooling. Modern "retail" WoW is orders-of-magnitude more difficult to offset those improvements. Guilds have enough resources and player skill to greatly limit the possiblity of unexpected chaos.

vardump 2y ago
Scratch all that. The main issue in 2004 preventing hardcore mode would have been server stability, or the lack of it.

spmurrayzzz 2y ago

On the other hand, MC is the most "solved" out of all the raids at this point though in terms of mechanics. The most experienced folks can low-man it with 10-20 people using mediocre gear (as long as they have some fire res). And its something that casuals can pug these days as well, I've hopped into a pug myself on an era realm with mostly blues as a resto shaman and was fine. I tend to agree though that for "content" reasons this sounds impossible, someone will wipe the raid just for the laughs.

jason-phillips 2y ago
It must have been nerfed then. No way you could do this back in 2006 vanilla wow.
- bpicolo 2y ago
  Players are a lot better than they were two decades ago.
- spmurrayzzz 2y ago
  I was playing back then in 2006, you absolutely could. I don't remember any 10-man groups at that time, but people were absolutely doing this with mage-heavy comps with 20 people. And then after Stormcraft Sandbox when all the private servers began to explode in popularity, you had the ability to run back every encounter as much as you wished to speed up the learning curve, test/learn new strats, etc.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  It's important to remember that perception of difficulty was different then, which is why classic can seem pretty dull to a modern player. If you know very little about the game, have mediocre tools and varying skills within the group, poor coordination, it'll be much harder. Mechanically it's nothing too interesting, it was just very involved time wise, and consequently much more immersive long-term.
- Thaxll 2y ago
  People in 2006 were really bad overall. We live in a era of min maxing everything.
- arthurbrown 2y ago
  People conjure various reasons for why things are different now, but routinely omit the changes in class talents and gearing. At launch there was zero spell damage or healing on raid gear as a stat. You might find some green of shadow wrath but items like Robe of volatile power simply did not exist yet. Warriors, the current top damage class, had a talent rework at BWL release which introduced their main damaging ability at nearly half the effectiveness of where it eventually end up. Throw in world buff scheduling and the game is very different from how it played at launch.

bpicolo 2y ago

Naxx has already been cleared hardcore: https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-classic-hardcore-squad-clutches-a-world-first-clear-of-naxxramasafter-the-heroic-sacrifice-of-their-guild-leader/ https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-classic-hardcore-squad-clutches-... The servers came out in 2023.

nozzlegear 2y ago

You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons. That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently." This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago. https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU ¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.

rKarpinski 2y ago
Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds. Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team. Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!" As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.

deleted 2y ago

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