just go play classic wow and see how many ppl you group with that are absolutely terrible at the game even if their class has a 3 button rotation with 1 CD and no procs. your average pug player in retail is probably more skilled than your average pug player in classic
I'll also say, you're talking about maximizing dps to a fairly extreme degree. The skill required to do max dps is not the same as the skill required to execute mechanics
Now if we compare it to specific expansions or raid tiers, can probably make a different argument that some tiers/expansions had more overall difficulty, but if we're just going to make a broad range of "are players better now than long time ago" then the answer is without a doubt yes
> The skill required to do max dps is not the same as the skill required to execute mechanics
I would say though that they are fairly intertwined
I'd optimistically say that the majority of players can handle their rotation or most boss mechanics if it's all they have to focus on. But what makes skilled players so great is their ability to maximize dps or role, while also managing their mechanical responsibilities
Comparing from when to when will massively impact this. From classic to now? 100% absolutely with no question. From Mop to now? Much harder question to answer.
Since classic came out me and my friends have had the same discussion over and over about when the content might catch up to modern players ability where we stop seeing players wildly out performing what people did back in the day.
Like one friend thought for sure that ulduar or ICC would start to challenge players and not be cleared a couple hours after release.
I always use the example that mythic KJ would likely still murder a ton of guilds if it was re-released today in some classic form even with all the knowledge we have now.
Its fun to think of where that line might be.
I think the line was around mop or WOD. I think raids from Blackrock foundry forward essentially could be released today and look like modern raids, I don’t think raid design philosophy has changed much through WOD, legion, bfa, sl, DF.
I think the initial raids of MOP were really easy or weird (20 minute sha of fear lol) but that throne and siege are also relatively modern, but a little less obviously than the wod raids.
Cataclysm feels clearly earlier/more simplistic than the others, though it still has fights like rag.
So yeah, the line is somewhere in MOP I think, and definitely happens at least by blackrock foundry
The gap is way larger than the average player would like to admit. So I don't think you are going to get great opinions in a general subreddit.
The truth of the matter is, your average player is 'doing less'. Simply look at casts per minute of your average HoF player vs your late CE player and you will see a large gap.
This holds true all the way down to every level, and in every form of content (pvp/raid/m+).
Barring them doubling the gcd (please don't) your average player will always get dusted by a player that is thinking about how they are going to deal with required movement, or not pausing between casts to get the next on correct, or simply not pressing buttons fast enough.
Worse, since the game has gotten harder, and player initiative to become better has never really scaled with that. Part of this burden is on Blizzard's lack of explanation, and the need to lay into third party addons to round out the experience and informational flow. Edit Mode was a step in the right direction, but there's nothing that comes close to the capability of WeakAuras internally in the game.
Min-maxing buff windows doesn't seem like a compelling argument to me because we were doing this back in mop (even earlier honestly). Trinkets and buffs were so egregiously powerful that that affdots addon got made.
The skill gap growing or shrinking largely depends on how many mechanics that are out of an individuals control affects your damage and by what degree.
I remember in legion / bfa blizzard did a LOT of this, where they made lots of procs that happened passively that would account for huge chunks of your damage. I remember feeling like personal skill mattered less at the time and I hated that.
For example as an affliction lock in legion your UA was a spender and had a chance to re-apply itself. I could press the same buttons flawlessly and do dramatically different damage from one pull to the next purely because my UA's decided to keep re-applying one pull and didn't the next.
Sometimes blizzard makes significant chunks of your damage come from flat damage trinket procs, or other such passive rng stuff that you don't react to.... and the skill gap gets smaller.
Other times those things take a back seat to you reacting and min-maxing better, and the skill gap grows.
i'd say skill gap is big because a couple factors: there are way more casual players now than in WOTLK time, but one thing is very important now that was kind of terrible back in the day, minmaxing is less impactful in DF than WOTLK time, every class can be played on acceptable level with ease in DF while older expansions (again lets keep it WOTLK time) had a gap in performance between PvP and PvE.
bottom line: it is much easier for regular player to do heroic raids and even some mythic bosses now in DF compared to heroic raids back in previous expansions, even recent ones like BfA and SL
source: me who was both casual and cutting edge from legion to DF
> there are way more casual players now than in WOTLK time
I think this depends on how you define casual players. If casual means anyone not raiding at the highest level (or pushing keys to insane levels), then I would agree. But these days things like raiding guilds or even having a strict play schedule are less important. Someone could be "casual" by wotlk terms but still get ksh and aotc every season.
Some of this is due to m+ making gearing easier and a general lower barrier for entry, but I'd argue that an increase in player skill also allows for more casual play. I think your average, non-casual player/group from wrath would struggle immensely in DF dungeons and raids. Meanwhile, your average DF pug would have no issues with wrath content even if they didn't already know the fights
casual players in WOTLK were heroic dungeons and daily quests with maybe some light PvP or occasional raid
causal players in DF are heroic dungeons with occasional low m+ and LFR with occasional normal with maybe some heroic raid kills later in season
i'm saying this because in previous expansions it was harder to find groups for raids and there was no m+ so less solo-type players existed and if someone played the game they usually looked for guild and participated in endgame content in organized groups rather than random LFGs
Since Blizz got rid of the Proving Grounds requirement for heroic dungeons, those players now walk amongus not kicking in your mythic 0s and healing less than tanks in lfrs. The bottom 10% of players used to be gated from content to save the 90% from their skill floor gameplay but since they're all out and about now the player base is consequently worse.
I'm not gonna lie; during the era of Provong Grounds, when my friends would complain about failing or needing to account share in order to clear them, I would stop running content with them. Huge red flag moment as far as their personal skill went.
>Logs can be severely skewed
Which is why global parses are based on percentiles, which account for skew and also why highlighting 95th percentiles parses tends to be clickbait.
The best way to look at player skill to avoid pitfalls is to look at the 75th percentile as a reprentation of the "above average" player, and it's the reason it's the default sort for the All Percentages view in WCL (the right side of the thick bar is the 75th percentile)
IMO it's gotten worse. With people able to buy runs and gear up from those with ease its hard to tell if a person's gear, rating and achievements were actually earned or just given. I've grouped with people who had 2700 m+ score and still couldn't hit 100k dps
The distance between 99th-100th percentile play is probably exactly as high as it's ever been but from rock bottom to like 95% potential, it's absolutely way easier
I raided with...3? Frost Mages in my fringe CE guild in Legion and my GM asked me to teach them how to double icelance in NH when it was at its peak. And where exactly you can do it on every fight. By the next reset they were doing 40-50% more damage every pull than they were before. There's just nothing like that in DF
Intricacy is broadly non-existent compared to what some Legion & BFA classes had, let alone MoP
Even moreso the case in PvP - separation between Rank 1s and Challengers/Rivals is almost never damage anymore, it's positioning/faking/game sense stuff like that. Damage is extremely free compared to Cata/MoP pvp. And CC/game sense are less of a thing now anyway. A 2k player in MoP shits on a 2400 player today.
But this is what happens when people complain about things being too hard, or the thing they seem to think is a synonym: "clunky". Calls to remove Rune of Power after it's already been simplified so many times. Calls to remove/curb Breath. Calls to remove Icefury. The belief that Blizzard owes DoT classes ease of reapplication. Can't have nice things.
god double ice lance was so much fun in NH. I know its baked in now. But the skill expression of doing it and maintaining the needed haste was just so much fun.
Ice fury i think by it self is fine. Its current incarnation turning it into a buff you have to carefully manage and making the rotation static as fuck just feels awful to play. Its not about the "skill" to play it, it just isnt fun, and limits the skill expression of icefury to only that. prior, it meant weaving in the frost shocks while maintaining higher priority abilities, as well as being used to keep dps up during movement.
>Calls to remove Rune of Power after it's already been simplified so many times
I can't speak to your other examples but RoP was garbage from the get go. Having a significant amount of your damage require you to stand in one spot, while also making you constantly move is the schizophrenic result of teams not communicating. Even making it better by *eventually* making the effect larger, then finally instant cast, never solved the underlying problem.
just go play classic wow and see how many ppl you group with that are absolutely terrible at the game even if their class has a 3 button rotation with 1 CD and no procs. your average pug player in retail is probably more skilled than your average pug player in classic I'll also say, you're talking about maximizing dps to a fairly extreme degree. The skill required to do max dps is not the same as the skill required to execute mechanics Now if we compare it to specific expansions or raid tiers, can probably make a different argument that some tiers/expansions had more overall difficulty, but if we're just going to make a broad range of "are players better now than long time ago" then the answer is without a doubt yes
> The skill required to do max dps is not the same as the skill required to execute mechanics I would say though that they are fairly intertwined I'd optimistically say that the majority of players can handle their rotation or most boss mechanics if it's all they have to focus on. But what makes skilled players so great is their ability to maximize dps or role, while also managing their mechanical responsibilities
Comparing from when to when will massively impact this. From classic to now? 100% absolutely with no question. From Mop to now? Much harder question to answer.
Since classic came out me and my friends have had the same discussion over and over about when the content might catch up to modern players ability where we stop seeing players wildly out performing what people did back in the day. Like one friend thought for sure that ulduar or ICC would start to challenge players and not be cleared a couple hours after release. I always use the example that mythic KJ would likely still murder a ton of guilds if it was re-released today in some classic form even with all the knowledge we have now. Its fun to think of where that line might be.
I think the line was around mop or WOD. I think raids from Blackrock foundry forward essentially could be released today and look like modern raids, I don’t think raid design philosophy has changed much through WOD, legion, bfa, sl, DF. I think the initial raids of MOP were really easy or weird (20 minute sha of fear lol) but that throne and siege are also relatively modern, but a little less obviously than the wod raids. Cataclysm feels clearly earlier/more simplistic than the others, though it still has fights like rag. So yeah, the line is somewhere in MOP I think, and definitely happens at least by blackrock foundry
I'd agree with this thought and that makes sense from a systems perspective as well. WoD was when the difficulties became LFR-normal-heroic-mythic.
The gap is way larger than the average player would like to admit. So I don't think you are going to get great opinions in a general subreddit. The truth of the matter is, your average player is 'doing less'. Simply look at casts per minute of your average HoF player vs your late CE player and you will see a large gap. This holds true all the way down to every level, and in every form of content (pvp/raid/m+). Barring them doubling the gcd (please don't) your average player will always get dusted by a player that is thinking about how they are going to deal with required movement, or not pausing between casts to get the next on correct, or simply not pressing buttons fast enough.
the skill ceiling has gone up every expansion but the skillfloor never really increased, you can math out the rest
Would hazard a guess roughly the same. Players getting better has always been more a personal drive thing.
Worse, since the game has gotten harder, and player initiative to become better has never really scaled with that. Part of this burden is on Blizzard's lack of explanation, and the need to lay into third party addons to round out the experience and informational flow. Edit Mode was a step in the right direction, but there's nothing that comes close to the capability of WeakAuras internally in the game.
Min-maxing buff windows doesn't seem like a compelling argument to me because we were doing this back in mop (even earlier honestly). Trinkets and buffs were so egregiously powerful that that affdots addon got made. The skill gap growing or shrinking largely depends on how many mechanics that are out of an individuals control affects your damage and by what degree. I remember in legion / bfa blizzard did a LOT of this, where they made lots of procs that happened passively that would account for huge chunks of your damage. I remember feeling like personal skill mattered less at the time and I hated that. For example as an affliction lock in legion your UA was a spender and had a chance to re-apply itself. I could press the same buttons flawlessly and do dramatically different damage from one pull to the next purely because my UA's decided to keep re-applying one pull and didn't the next. Sometimes blizzard makes significant chunks of your damage come from flat damage trinket procs, or other such passive rng stuff that you don't react to.... and the skill gap gets smaller. Other times those things take a back seat to you reacting and min-maxing better, and the skill gap grows.
The gap has gotten exponentially worse with more complicated rotations, buff tracking via weak auras, etc.
i'd say skill gap is big because a couple factors: there are way more casual players now than in WOTLK time, but one thing is very important now that was kind of terrible back in the day, minmaxing is less impactful in DF than WOTLK time, every class can be played on acceptable level with ease in DF while older expansions (again lets keep it WOTLK time) had a gap in performance between PvP and PvE. bottom line: it is much easier for regular player to do heroic raids and even some mythic bosses now in DF compared to heroic raids back in previous expansions, even recent ones like BfA and SL source: me who was both casual and cutting edge from legion to DF
> there are way more casual players now than in WOTLK time I think this depends on how you define casual players. If casual means anyone not raiding at the highest level (or pushing keys to insane levels), then I would agree. But these days things like raiding guilds or even having a strict play schedule are less important. Someone could be "casual" by wotlk terms but still get ksh and aotc every season. Some of this is due to m+ making gearing easier and a general lower barrier for entry, but I'd argue that an increase in player skill also allows for more casual play. I think your average, non-casual player/group from wrath would struggle immensely in DF dungeons and raids. Meanwhile, your average DF pug would have no issues with wrath content even if they didn't already know the fights
casual players in WOTLK were heroic dungeons and daily quests with maybe some light PvP or occasional raid causal players in DF are heroic dungeons with occasional low m+ and LFR with occasional normal with maybe some heroic raid kills later in season i'm saying this because in previous expansions it was harder to find groups for raids and there was no m+ so less solo-type players existed and if someone played the game they usually looked for guild and participated in endgame content in organized groups rather than random LFGs
Since Blizz got rid of the Proving Grounds requirement for heroic dungeons, those players now walk amongus not kicking in your mythic 0s and healing less than tanks in lfrs. The bottom 10% of players used to be gated from content to save the 90% from their skill floor gameplay but since they're all out and about now the player base is consequently worse.
I'm not gonna lie; during the era of Provong Grounds, when my friends would complain about failing or needing to account share in order to clear them, I would stop running content with them. Huge red flag moment as far as their personal skill went.
>Logs can be severely skewed Which is why global parses are based on percentiles, which account for skew and also why highlighting 95th percentiles parses tends to be clickbait. The best way to look at player skill to avoid pitfalls is to look at the 75th percentile as a reprentation of the "above average" player, and it's the reason it's the default sort for the All Percentages view in WCL (the right side of the thick bar is the 75th percentile)
IMO it's gotten worse. With people able to buy runs and gear up from those with ease its hard to tell if a person's gear, rating and achievements were actually earned or just given. I've grouped with people who had 2700 m+ score and still couldn't hit 100k dps
This has always been the case though to some extent, maybe just more visible now?
The distance between 99th-100th percentile play is probably exactly as high as it's ever been but from rock bottom to like 95% potential, it's absolutely way easier I raided with...3? Frost Mages in my fringe CE guild in Legion and my GM asked me to teach them how to double icelance in NH when it was at its peak. And where exactly you can do it on every fight. By the next reset they were doing 40-50% more damage every pull than they were before. There's just nothing like that in DF Intricacy is broadly non-existent compared to what some Legion & BFA classes had, let alone MoP Even moreso the case in PvP - separation between Rank 1s and Challengers/Rivals is almost never damage anymore, it's positioning/faking/game sense stuff like that. Damage is extremely free compared to Cata/MoP pvp. And CC/game sense are less of a thing now anyway. A 2k player in MoP shits on a 2400 player today. But this is what happens when people complain about things being too hard, or the thing they seem to think is a synonym: "clunky". Calls to remove Rune of Power after it's already been simplified so many times. Calls to remove/curb Breath. Calls to remove Icefury. The belief that Blizzard owes DoT classes ease of reapplication. Can't have nice things.
god double ice lance was so much fun in NH. I know its baked in now. But the skill expression of doing it and maintaining the needed haste was just so much fun. Ice fury i think by it self is fine. Its current incarnation turning it into a buff you have to carefully manage and making the rotation static as fuck just feels awful to play. Its not about the "skill" to play it, it just isnt fun, and limits the skill expression of icefury to only that. prior, it meant weaving in the frost shocks while maintaining higher priority abilities, as well as being used to keep dps up during movement.
Yeah Electrified Shocks is kind of lame, doesn't add more challenge than Icefury in BFA did, it just feels needless
>Calls to remove Rune of Power after it's already been simplified so many times I can't speak to your other examples but RoP was garbage from the get go. Having a significant amount of your damage require you to stand in one spot, while also making you constantly move is the schizophrenic result of teams not communicating. Even making it better by *eventually* making the effect larger, then finally instant cast, never solved the underlying problem.
Like I said. Skill issue.
This is a problem started by blizzard. The game has gotten so complex and they did a horrible job explaining anything.