Hardcore

[Qaedain]

Every time people would complain in WoW about how long raids were taking (OMFG FOUR HOURS), I would be reminded of my old PoS raids and then I would be ready to settle in for another go at WoW's endless supply of comparatively easy content.

[Anaiyah]

Vanilla wow through bwl>aq>naxx was FAR and away harder than anything eq has ever had technically. Anyone who argues did not play both games at the bleeding edge high end.

Eq raids were maybe more annoying at times, and if you include GoD bugs and cockblocks I suppose you have some ammo for argument, but if you are talking about pure coordination and guildwide skills, EQ never did anything approaching those original 40 man raids in wow.

[Overcast]

Originally Posted by Anaiyah [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Vanilla wow through bwl>aq>naxx was FAR and away harder than anything eq has ever had technically. Anyone who argues did not play both games at the bleeding edge high end.

See - I could never see it that way. Maybe the fight was difficult - but at what risk? A repair bill - any other risk?

No guild was going to come in behind your wipe and take the boss. No long involved corpse retrievals, just rez, repair, try again. Even if you never repaired the gear, the odds of losing the gear due to damage... zero.

Odds of losing your corpse. Zero.
Odds of losing the target to another guild. Zero.

[Wrot]

Originally Posted by Reiker [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'd pay good money to send a group of 60+ WoW players back in time against the Avatar of War and see how long it takes for them to master defensive tank switching and CH chain juggling.

Granted you say you never played in Vanilla, so not flaming, and I admit that I don't know what tanking AoW was like (I was a dps class). But you have no idea what tanking Vaelestraz was like. The succession of tanks had to have their abilities exactly planned out so that each one was in their proper place on the threat meter, and this was before threat meters existed (KLH was fucking garbage). One sunder too many and it was fucked up. Healers were not able to spam their shit either due to how touchy threat was on this fight, and how fucked up mana consumption was back then (I was a healer).


Corpse runs do not make an encounter hardcore. Corpse runs have absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of an encounter. CRs give you only the time you spend on them as misery, and the moment you kill a boss for the first time as enjoyment that you don't have a cr. Sorry but I raid for the enjoyment of the encounter itself. Why do you give credit to EQ for a difficult corpse run when any other mechanic, if repeated for every single boss, you would shit on?

I think some EQ players will grasp at straws to shit on WoW because they are still pissed that it killed their game. "I tanked a heroic on my paladin, it was too easy." "I had to disable graphic interface options, fuck this." You people who weren't good enough to be on the cutting edge are the ones who the easy content was tailor made for, so why complain?

[Overcast]

Originally Posted by Wrot [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Corpse runs do not make an encounter hardcore. Corpse runs have absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of an encounter. CRs give you only the time you spend on them as misery, and the moment you kill a boss for the first time as enjoyment that you don't have a cr. Sorry but I raid for the enjoyment of the encounter itself. Why do you give credit to EQ for a difficult corpse run when any other mechanic, if repeated for every single boss, you would shit on?

100% wrong - in my humble opinion.
The 'risk' of a lengthy corpse run made it must more imperative to do it right.

It's not the corpse run - it's the risk factor involved in the overall encounter, you can't just go charging into Chardok with 10 people, you WILL regret it.

In WoW - what would stop you from just charging into any zone at all? You have nothing to loose.

[Anaiyah]

Originally Posted by Overcast [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

See - I could never see it that way. Maybe the fight was difficult - but at what risk? A repair bill - any other risk?

No guild was going to come in behind your wipe and take the boss. No long involved corpse retrievals, just rez, repair, try again.

I played eq from 99-2009 and never lost a corpse or risked much more than needing a rez. Sure you have the dynamics of getting to your corpse, but if this discussion is about HARDCORE raid guilds, I dont see the argument.

Any guild worth a damn in EQ was quick to recover from anything, and had members that knew the game inside and out. What is the risk? Running longer through zones, losing xp at max level, I never lost anything of value in EQ except time. If you played WoW when these zones were new, you lost comparable amounts of time learning these intricate encounters with your guild.

[Malrubius]

Originally Posted by Anaiyah [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Vanilla wow through bwl>aq>naxx was FAR and away harder than anything eq has ever had technically. Anyone who argues did not play both games at the bleeding edge high end.

Eq raids were maybe more annoying at times, and if you include GoD bugs and cockblocks I suppose you have some ammo for argument, but if you are talking about pure coordination and guildwide skills, EQ never did anything approaching those original 40 man raids in wow.

Again, you make my point perfectly. WoW was a trivially easy game with some high-end content thrown in at the end-game that had pumped up stats. Does not make it a hard or challenging game by a long shot.

[Anaiyah]

Originally Posted by Malrubius [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Again, you make my point perfectly. WoW was a trivially easy game with some high-end content thrown in at the end-game that had pumped up stats. Does not make it a hard or challenging game by a long shot.

It makes the high end hardcore content (the subject of this thread so far) extremely difficult. It made guilds that could defeat encounters matter just like it did in EQ.

[Wrot]

Originally Posted by Malrubius [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

... high-end content thrown in at the end-game that had pumped up stats. Does not make it a hard or challenging game by a long shot.

I just don't believe you got anywhere at all in WoW. To say the raid content there has only ever taken stats to suceed at is just plain wrong. A hundred encounters over, wrong. Your points seem to be shot down and nothing you say about the either game holds much water.

[Overcast]

Well, it's subjective really. There's no right or wrong viewpoint. It's a game after all. It's like saying Soccer is better than Football or harder. It depends on your view.

It's just that WoW has zero risk. You will never loose your corpse, you will never have problems getting your gear back, you will never get a boss mob stolen from another guild because you wiped or whatever. You'll never fail on a trade-skill (profession) combine either.

Hardcore raiding or no, I like the 'risk' involved in Classic EQ.

Sure after a guild knows the area it becomes trivial. Which really - with P99 is always going to be the case. But I could never 'get into' WoW like I did EQ.

I never raided in WoW, because it never held my interest long enough for me to bother getting to that point. Don't get me wrong - I did enjoy the game. It just never 'grabbed' me like EQ did. I think the reason EQ did - is because of the risk factors. Small, perhaps - but they were there. Dunno, maybe it's hard to explain why I still prefer P99 to WoW. It wasn't entirely the WoW community that chased me off, although that was a large part of it, to be honest.

Thus why I'm not commenting on the difficulty of raids, only that no matter *how* difficult the raid is - your risk in WoW (and almost all other MMO's now) is still... Zero.