The Masters of WoW

This is something I hear sporadically, most recently from Syncaine:

By making it so you don’t have to actually understand it, the average player can still progress and collect his ‘epics’ in WoW today, while back in 2004-05 anything at-level required some basic understanding of stats/mechanics, and raiding required an Elitist Jerks degree in theorycraft.

And here was Tobold

In vanilla WoW, somebody having geared up in 5-man dungeons would have no way to bypass Molten Core. Molten Core would not only be necessary for him to gear up for Blackwing Lair, but would also teach him how to play his class optimally in a raid environment.

I still think that anybody who waxes poetic about early WoW either did not play it, or does not remember it well.

I played WoW back in 2004 and 2005 and raided in 2005, and I remember it very well. It was difficult at the time, and even the best guilds had trouble doing it successfully – the final boss of Molten Core, Ragnaros, was nerfed before he was ever felled.

But it was hard in the same way it was hard to sail across the Atlantic in 1492, or fly (no airships allowed) across it in 1927. Sailing still has challenges, as does flying, but much of what was difficult in the past has become trivial.

Here’s how you raided in 2005 if you were a warlock : you spammed the “1” key, or whatever key you had mapped to your shadow bolt. There were only eight debuff slots so you couldn’t even keep your DoT’s on the boss. That was my Elitest Jerks Doctorate in Theorycrafting : the “1” key.

Compare that to modern WoW : I have raided with two different warlock specs, both with different playstyles, and both of them ten times harder to master than a 1.0 lock. There’s a third viable warlock raiding spec I haven’t even tried yet, but would provide an advantage in certain fights. All are far more complicated than the one viable spec/playstyle in 2005. And I have to further modify my behavior based on my trinkets and glyphs.

Just to give an example of how the difficulty of playing your class has changed : a trinket I just replaced had a stacking buff, and managing that stacking buff was pretty straightforward. It’s but a tiny, tiny part of what I do as raiding warlock. Just interacting with that one piece of gear was harder than every circa 2005 class-specific warlock task put together.

I didn’t raid with every class in vanilla WoW, but I can tell you that Warlocks, Mages, Hunters and Warriors were all significantly easier to play in 2005, and I doubt the other classes are much different. Blizzard has since made most classes depend on rotations or priorities so play is more challenging. There have been new situational spells and abilities added as well.

If playing your class was simple in 2005 by today’s standards, then the encounters were pitifully simple by today’s standards. The main fight mechanic in MC was “there are adds that you need to tank”. Then, depending on boss, either kill the adds first or the boss first. Occasionally (but not for every boss) there might be some movement involved. The biggest challenge for me was staying awake, and that’s no joke. My iconic raiding Molten Core memory was fighting to stay awake while my guild did Majordomo Executus.

BWL was a little harder, with perhaps one of the fights (the last) matching a modern raid in complexity. AQ40 (the third raid) was a further refinement, with Naxxramas (the fourth and last raid of WoW 1.0) pretty similar in complexity to modern raiding – except that, of course, your class was much easier to play in Naxx40 than it is now in a level 80 Naxx25.

This is how I remember my classic WoW raiding experience : sitting at my desk, bored out of my mind, fighting to say awake, jamming the “1” key for ten minutes at a time. Little did I know that I was some superhuman Master Of WoW.