World of Warcraft

Removing for a second the nostalgia goggles that seem to be permanently affixed to people's heads in regard to Vanilla, AQ40 and Naxx were not what I would call "hard", if we're talking about the complexity of the encounters and mechanics. The "hardest" thing about those were, again, simply getting 40 people who were all geared, available, and attuned. That by itself was the biggest hurdle, then you had to make sure that they all had plenty of potions and that some players were willing to be buffbots, literally just standing there and buffing people (see: 90% of Paladin players in Vanilla). Oh, and if you weren't a Prot Warrior then you outright weren't allowed to tank. And even if you WERE a Prot Warrior, your "tanking" amounted to Sunder Armor ---> Sunder Armor ---> Sunder Armor ---> Repeat. The "difficulty" in Vanilla raids came from Blizzard's nigh-complete inability to balance classes and make even half of the specs in the game playable from 2004-early 2008, not because the fights were engaging and required everyone to meet some standard of performance, and their eagerness to ape EverQuest in making almost every raid require 40 people, when that was a big complaint about EverQuest before WoW's existence.

They made dungeons hard again in Cataclysm, after everyone complained that they were too easy in Wrath. The response? "[Dungeon Name] is too hard! Nerf now!" Then 4.1 came around and introduced the troll dungeons, which were difficult similarly to the Cata launch heroics. The response? "ZG/ZA are too hard! Nerf now!" Hell, when Mythic dungeons were introduced in Warlords, people were saying the same fucking thing again, particularly when it came to Auchindoun and Grimrail. Hell, do a +15 nowadays without massively overgearing it and see how smoothly it goes. Because it won't go smoothly at all. Or just look at 7.2, when Return to Karazhan was split and had keys applied to it and when Cathedral of Eternal Night was new. What was the response? "Kara/CoEN is too hard! Nerf now!" If Blizzard releases a hard dungeon, people shit themselves and want it to be nerfed. Then when they release an easy dungeon to placate those people, that same audience turns around and shits themselves again because it's too easy, yearning for "the good old days" of when everything was ball-breakingly difficult. Then Blizzard releases more hard dungeons and everyone shits themselves into a coma and wants yet more nerfs. Basically, this argument is not a good one and the history behind calls for difficulty in this game are fraught with hypocrisy and the Mandela effect on crack, steroids, and heroin all at once.

Classes are either "no bad choices" or they are "cookie cutter builds". You can't have it both ways, those are conflicting ideas. To actually address this point... No, there are most certainly bad choices. I main a DK so I'll use them as an example. At the start of Legion, Unholy was ass-tier garbage. Blood was too. Frost was just sort of alright. Come 7.1, and Frost becomes one of the best melee specs in the game while Unholy becomes out-and-out the worst melee spec, while Blood is buffed and becomes a mid-tier tank. 7.2, and Unholy becomes god-tier, Blood comes just short of God-tier, and 7.2.5 utterly skullfucks Frost and makes it not only the worst melee spec, but possibly the single worst DPS spec, period. Even ignoring for a moment that classes and specs can become good or bad pretty much at Blizzard's beck and call, "no bad choices" doesn't apply to talents either. Again, going to DKs, if you're Unholy and you take the talent that gives you a Risen Archer, then you'll be laughed out of mythics since both of the talents on that tier vastly outperform it pretty much in every conceivable situation. If you're a PvP Unholy player and you don't take the Sludge Belcher talent, you'll get laughed off of your Arena team since the Abomination's utility is simply too valuable to ignore. Risen Archer has never been good at all during Legion's life cycle, and Sludge Belcher has never been bad. There are certainly "bad choices" when it comes to talents and classes, thinking otherwise is simply untrue. That or you're a FOTM-monkey who only ever plays the best specs at any given time.

To be fair the difficulty of some of the raids in vanilla depend on which patch you're talking about. As many people are pointing out on the official classic forums right now, patch 1.12 had changes that heavily nerfed anything that wasn't Naxx and previous patches made MC/BWL/Ony a fair bit easier(especially when they increased the debuff limit from 8 to 16).

Though in either case I've already acknowledged that current day mythic raids are at the very least on par if not harder than any raids from vanilla, so it's a moot point.

There is no Mandela effect going on here with me. I'm fully aware of all the changes that have happened to dungeons over the years and the complaints that happen every time Blizzard has tried to go back to more difficult dungeons since WotLK. That doesn't change the facts that A:

> The vanilla dungeons were harder, specifically because they keep nerfing modern ones.
> Many people prefer the longer, slower paced, harder dungeons of vanilla.

The entire point of why people were even asking for a vanilla server in the first place is because we know the Blizzard has taken the game in a certain direction at the behest of the community, and it's a direction we don't enjoy anymore.

When I say no bad choices in talents and cookie cutter builds I'm not talking about how an entire spec can be underperforming, but rather the talent choices themselves.

The thing is that there are talents that out-perform other ones because mathematically speaking that will always be the case. However there was a time when Elemental Blast was considered the best talent for Elemental Shamans, but it's not like I would have been a garbage Shaman if I took one of the other two talents on that tier. The difference between any of my talents weren't significant enough for there to really be a wrong choice, but people will still seek out sites like Icy Veins to tell them the mathematically superior option even if it's only a 1% increase(this is one of the things the new talent system was supposed to address according to Blizzard).

The trolls are probably my second-favorite race behind the orcs. I'm just wondering how the Zandalar trolls go from bloodthirsty would-be conquerors trying to take over other lands, to friendly allies.