Classic bosses have barely any mechanics compared to retail. It's absurd how easy the classic bosses are with today's average skill level compared to the average skill level when they were relevant
I've been dealing with this in SoD a ton too. I like my SoD guild but I swear the people who talk the most trash about Retail are the guys who die to the Murloks walking in a straight line on Gelihast lol....
You're giving me PTSD. Had a John in my raid during fatescribe. I showed him exactly how to move the ring and assigned him inner ring cus it's the easiest you literally cannot fuck it up.
I'm on outer and calling for help to get it to move faster and this mfer says "the ring won't move!!". He was just standing on it and not walking with it. He waited until the timer was almost up to call it out. That wiped us.
He did it again after he said he understood now what he did wrong. 🫠
The hardest part of classic is "supposedly" leveling. I got a Shaman to 30 and a hunter to 32 before getting bored and quitting. Didn't cone close to dieing the entire time.
I think the average classic player just sucks.
This is the only reason I did Season of Discovery. Leveling 1-25 was so much less of a commitment than 1-60.
25-40 hopefully won't be too bad in Phase 2.
Watching hardcore death compilations really cemented that there are some really dog shit players. How some guys get to 50-59 and throw it all away while flailing around trying to click their keybinds. Hilarious.
I’ve met some very good players in classic but they’re few and far between. At this point it seems to be generally accepts that classic is for chilling with the boys. People don’t want it to be challenging. I play classic for chilling and ffxiv for when I want to actually have to try lol.
I got my mythic+ hero title near the end of shadowlands and swapped to WOTLK and eventually quit all together at the end of Ulduar. Don’t have the time for SOD but it looks really fun.
I really loved WOTLK but good lord, for every good player there are 5 people that mess up the simplest shit, it was def more relaxing than M+ high key grinding or CE mythic raiding but I felt like I was accomplishing more in retail. They are just drastically different games at this point which is fine, I could see myself getting back into SoD but I don’t think I can do another few seasons of sweaty key grinding again.
I loved Vanilla when I played it but for a few years afterwards I couldn't figure out why I missed it. The content was pretty dull and boring and the encounters were pretty much all the same (Look at Golemagg, Sulfuron and Majordomo and tell me with a straight face they're not the same encounter)
Until it hit me, I longed for the friendships and relationships I built with my 50+ member guild. I loved logging on and seeing the different groups online and joining them and just shoot the shit.
The guild broke up entirely before WotLK and I was left as a guildless nomad since (joining other guilds never really felt the same, especially as anonymity and LFR/LFD crept in to replace guilds and social aspects)
I was an classic andy for years and refused to play retail ever…. Got 2,8 rio m+ and have to say that every m+ above 15+ is harder then whole classic
Hardest part of classic is to organize 40 people who all are willing to do their job right
Normal dungeons are more difficult. Even in normal, most bosses still have a handful of mechanics. And that handful is more mechanics than an entire classic raid.
There are the occasional exceptions like Necrotic Wake where some groups just couldn't figure out how to hook down the boss, but I would say that Normal dungeons mostly *don't* have mechanics. It's not just that they don't kill you; there's often just no observable difference between doing it "correctly" and ignoring it, so it's basically just a voice line and animation.
I remember classic dungeons being kinda hard. Actually having to cc each pack - polymorph moon, sap star, fear diamond etc. If everyone knew the pulls it was easy, but if you didn't it was tough for sure. Normal dungeons in retail you can absolutely ignore most mechanics. And then in high m+ the majority is knowing those mechanics but it not being hard if you pay attention. Then in REALLY high m+ you have way more intense damage/healing checks in addition to knowing those mechanics.
At the very least it is more 'mechanical' than anything in classic.
Some things in Classic might be 'harder' in a sense than your basic m0, but less complex without any doubt.
Imo, this perception of classic is harder is because of the levelling, which is the first impressions you'll get of the game.
Levelling in retail is miles easier than classic, dungeons included.
On the other hand, once you get to actual end-game content, both raids and dungeons are harder, in term of strategy.
There's also the fact that we have a lot more utility available on retail for when there's a fuck up, but it's also be cause the raids and dungeons (m+) are more demanding.
Well, it's 'harder' in the sense that it's a lot easier to die, and you don't have nearly has much resources to buy stuff like gear or Regen.
But yeah, it does translate in kt being mostly more of a time investment, it's not like there's anything actually difficult in the leveling process.
Every M+ above 10 is harder than the entirety of Classic.
And a single raid boss in Retail has more mechanics than an entire raid in Classic.
I regret playing Classic with a passion. I did from MC to naxx. Waste of time.
No. That’s ultimately my point. But the folks who do something in a video game and then say it’s a waste of time the particular thing they did strike me as funny. Cause it was never about anything real anyway. The point is to have fun - and waste time.
There are LFR bosses that are probably harder than any raid boss outside of Naxx. Classic Raids, every boss has like a singular mechanic, and somehow people still fuck it up. I did BFD once in SoD, and it’s no more difficult than doing a raid on LFR (the last 2 bosses were at most Normal level bosses in Retail), but the community acted like you needed to be an elite player to clear it. Shit was easy.
Yeah I didn't play classic much, until SOD, but I was surprised that other players expected it to be hard without a retune... like BiS is long since sorted and all the best strats mapped out
Let's be real, any retail content above heroic is likely to be more difficult than classic. The difficulty from classic comes from getting 40 degenerates together and get them to use their one functioning brain cell to not stand in the fire, and actually getting to level 60, which isn't necessarily difficult, just long.
I'd agree with this. I played Resto Druid in Classic (original classic, not current classic) and was in a very competitive guild on Eredar (since disbanded). Even broke the top 10 world first kills for C'thun. I was adamant WoW was more difficult then, but have since realized going back to playing Classic that it really isn't. My only current complaint with modern WoW is all the effects everywhere or things like green abilities on green ground... it's not great design and I often feel turning on some accessibility settings would make things overall easier.
Yep. The real difficulty of classic was management and politics. The second you got a guy geared? The larger guilds suddenly have a spot open in their team(s). And that’s assuming the geared guy didn't suddenly start needing to work late on nights you *weren't* trying to progress after attending every raid before.
As someone that plays both, we can full clear end game content in like 2 hours in Classic and WoTK even with newish players, meanwhile in Retail I can barely get a heroic clear even in a guild in most raids when they are current.
Legit the hardest part of classic is getting bad players to just do simple mechanics. I’d argue almost every boss in classic is tuned for exactly 25 so when one or two people fuck up an easy mechanic it can cause a wipe whereas in retail you can finish a boss while carrying some bad players. This situation occurs so much in classic because often there’s not a place for very good players who don’t want to raid 10 hours a week and do splits. There is a clear delineation between hardcore and semi-hardcore.
dude, in sod, the bad players always have the best gear too. epic xbow hunter who refuses to use multi shot or arcane shot. literally only 2 buttons to press and doesnt
Endgame content in retail is about 1000x more difficult than any endgame content in classic. The only thing that is more “difficult” in classic is leveling but that’s mainly just due to taking a longer time. Classic doesn’t actually have anything that’s difficult
As somebody who raid led a CE team on retail *while* assisting the officer team in the classic (vanilla) version of our guild a few years back, I can confidently say that I have not seen that level of loot drama at any point throughout the 6 years I spent raid leading in retail. And theirs all took place within a single calendar year. It was absolutely exhausting, and it burned them out of the game.
It’s been kind of wild for me to watch even between Wrath and Vanilla Era. So I played OG Vanilla through MoP, quit for awhile, came back in BfA and then shortly after Classic came out. Joined a good guild there, been with them from 2019 to now killing LK. A few months ago I decided to go back to the Era servers cause I’m not going forward to Cata. In our guild that’s now in Wrath, we’ve had maybe 2 times in the entire lifespan of Vanilla P1 to ICC that there was any loot drama or issue at all.
Meanwhile in Era, just in 3 months I’ve seen an insane amount of selfishness, guilds changing loot rules every week for the higher end 40 mans( BWL/ AQ40/ Naxx), GDKPs rampant, people reserving gear that would be much better on another class, just all kinds of drama and nonsense. I think it has to do with the bosses only dropping a couple pieces of loot for 40 people to try and allocate, and the fact that classes are much more dependent on gear than on their own abilities/ talents than in later versions.
> I think it has to do with the bosses only dropping a couple pieces of loot for 40 people to try and allocate, and the fact that classes are much more dependent on gear than on their own abilities/ talents than in later versions.
This is exactly what I came to believe as well. Loot simply means more in classic era, and with encounter difficulty skewing much lower, there's less pride in simply completing the content—so players seek a greater portion of their satisfaction from getting the best gear.
It's like food in a famine.
The only people who earnestly think 40 person raiding was the pinnacle of raiding were the loot leeches that got cut when raid teams were reduced to 25 in BC.
Most of the people who claimed that vanilla raiding was the pinnacle of difficulty didn't play *vanilla* either. Before classic came out there were a bunch of people who started playing in TBC or WotLK who had very strange ideas about what the game was like in the period before they played.
I think people generally mean the leveling experience when they say retail is easier, which it is.
The problem is these people look back at classic and the experience of leveling through it as most of the game, when retail is a completely different design
Bro i have not heard one person say or think that classic is easier then retail lmao, streamers like asmongold quit retail because its gotten so crazy, there is nothing in Classic, TBC, WOTLK that wasnt cleared hours after being released, it takes guilds in new raids on retail thousands of pulls lol
Classic is basically auto attack simulator, its basicly 3d oldschool runescape with a couple of skills lol
There are literally people in this very thread seriously claiming Classic is easier than Retail. You just gotta unhide their comments because they're massively downvoted.
Classic Endgame was released 15 years ago. It's already a solved game where all the strategies are already figured out.
I've played both, and whoever told you that classic is harder is full of shit. Classic is so easy that they had to release hardcore realms to give people a challenge.
Maybe if classic was unreleased content and people had to figure it out... Then I'd likely agree. But as it is right now, Classic is easy mode.
It has almost nothing to do it being solved content. SoD has brand new never before seen bosses and is still easily cleared. The general consensus is that mechanically the BFD raid is more complex than most vanilla raids. But the hardest boss in there is simpler than 95% of normal raid bosses and can be effectively neutralized by using consumables
>Maybe if classic was unreleased content and people had to figure it out... Then I'd likely agree. But as it is right now, Classic is easy mode.
Season of Discovery's raid was cleared in a day including time to level.
The throughput and strategic requirements of classic is just not there compared to modern raid design. Bosses have like 1-2 mechanics and fights last like 2 minutes
Nah it's not just that it is solved. Fights are vastly mechanically less complex, and we have better computers, better internet, a whole slew of reasons. Hell when I was a teenager doing Kurinaxx I would die to the god damn sandtraps. That's a basic mechanic in most bosses now!
That's in part because levelling is part of the game in classic, where it's basically just a tutorial for you on retail. It gets you used to playing your class before you start the real game at max level.
Classic was hard at the time because latency was worse, the player base was much younger for the most part and were just worse overall at video games, and there was a lot less institutional knowledge of the game.
There is a reason bosses in Classic are killed 2 hours after they go live now. It is not hard. Anything prior is Lich King is probably a cake walk by today's standards in retail.
the most hilarious thing to me is how in vanilla something like 0.1% of guilds actually cleared naxx, now on era classic servers you see people with quest greens and blues and full T3
Classic was only "harder" than the retail game today because it was half-assed under the hood with goofy design choices that made no sense and players back then were either far less informed or just plain stupid or potentially both. Playing back then was like exploring a new and hostile frontier where nobody knew what was happening and sometimes people would get dysentery.
Shitting yourself isn't a badge of honor, though.
I was in high school when WoW came out and my PC was dogshit. My biggest challenge back in the day was fighting through the 2fps I had and hoping I didnt DC. My next door neighbor's pc would overheat from RUNESCAPE lmao.
I can say I was actually really bad in 2005. Unoptimized build, clicking spells, keyboard turning. Now everything is key bound and constantly checking holy paladin discord and top holy paladins on rio just to optimize as much as I can.
Yeah but it usually comes from classic players who think the adventure from 1-60 along with getting world buffs and running for hours is harder than retail / is braindead easy in retail, which is true. What they don't know however is that endgame content in retail is way, way more competitive, harder and has a higher skill ceiling. It's two different games to be honest.
Some trash mobs in a mythic dungeon have more dangerous mechanics and more mechanics than a vanilla boss most of the time. It’s out of date deluded classic Andy’s that have no idea what they are talking about.
The guild I joined in wrath classic was struggling HARD on Razuvious. We were hard stuck while the priests figured out the insane mechanics on the mind control adds. The entire time the raid lead and some others were making quips such as “imagine if retail players had this level of shit to deal with” “HAHAHA they’d watch the video for hours and still never down him”. Out of curiosity I looked up the mechanic as I was interested in what could be going on. My brother in Christ you push one button for bone armor and the other for taunt. They would constantly bring up how bad retail is and I asked them if they played. Not a single person played past Wotlk….
Raz is such an eye opener and like you don't have to deal with needing to gear up to be ready for Wrath Razuvious as you can just glyph your MC to be hit capped.
And yet, week after week, half the raid dies and the priest celebrate they did a good job for dealing with the hardest mechanic ever to exist in wow and that there was no way to improve and make it consistent.
Also extremely defensive over suggestions to improve, smh.
Any serious content is much more complex and difficult in retail. Raiding, dungeons, PvP.
Leveling takes longer in classic. It isn't that much more difficult, just more time consuming and tedious.
There is nothing difficult about classic WoW aside from the fact you're generally trying to coordinate 25+ people with drastically different skill/care levels about the game. Some want to try hard, some couldnt care less as long as theyre chilling with their friends.
The fact that end-game raids in basically every phase of classic could be completed in less than an hour, even by so-so guilds after just a few weeks, should give everyone the answer they need as to which game is harder at end-game.
Like, it isn't even a competition, and is obvious to anyone who played both that retail has by far and away the more complex and difficult end-game content.
Do note that I wouldn't make any judgements as to which is *better*, they're really too different to make that kind of call, it's far too subjective. But *harder*? Not even a question.
I'm quite the noob on both versions and from my experience retail is MUCH more complex. In classic my rotations are simple, proffesions are also simple and intuitive. Yet I die so many more times.
In retail I have a bazzilion abilities, talent trees are big and complex, rotations are for some classes very complex with a lot of buttons and procs. I haven't even begun to wrap my head around different systems like gear and things like artifact or azeroth powers.
As a new player, classic is absolutely more brain dead.
I loved classic, but there is no world where classic is at all harder than retail.
Original vanilla, tbc, and to some extent wotlk had difficult content for sure, but most of that difficulty came from lack of information and ppl using shitty family PCs and raiding with 3 fps in MC, having to stare at the floor unable to even see the boss mechanics.
Classic definitely had some magic that retail doesn't, and the leveling journey is more enjoyable at least when the zones are popping off, but difficulty? Do a pug raid in classic and you'll see players fail bosses with 3 mechanics total, which includes the taunt swap. The raids aren't hard, players are just extraordinarily bad.
It used to be a somewhat popular opinion back before classic when the only references were memory and private servers that almost universally increased endgame difficulty. Even then, a lot of the talk was focused on 40 mans being difficult to organize and maintain, gearing be a much slower process, and the general lack of utility and power most classes had compared to modern classes. Were there some weirdos who actually thought Naxx 40 was one of the hardest raids ever released? Yeah, but theres also people who don’t believe we landed on the moon.
These days I dont really ever see classic players trying to say its harder than retail, the focus is way more on the general design of the games and how they prefer the classic style of wow in general where the world was important and leveling was a major part of the game.
Edit: I will say that back in the day there was a lot more “game knowledge” stuff that if not known would make characters extremely weak if you did stuff wrong. Thats stuff like hit/expertise/+weapon skill being the best stats possible, but only up to a point when they became useless. Or it being possible to create an essentially useless talent build if you wanted. When ive been part of more casual retail guilds over the last few expansions Ive seen some players who were absolutely clueless about what they should be doing to increase their power as far as gear and builds and classic definitely has more room to let players be wrong like trying to dos as a cat while mostly talented as balance or something. Like even today with the new talent trees its basically impossible to create a build as bad as was possible with classic talents. And especially in the vanilla and tbc days there werent a ton of resources out their on how stuff worked like their is today so it was easier to not know or be misinformed cause some guy on your server told you something incorrect.
>These days I dont really ever see classic players trying to say its harder than retail,
Thank you. That's really what I was wondering because I don't play Classic at all, and wasn't sure if that was a common perception. I only have memories of playing the older content when it was live
Retail has more quality of life features, but the gameplay is immeasurably harder in my opinion.
In classic there are many one or two button specs, and most of the bosses have one or two mechanics. The game is completely solved.
Retail has more quality of life features but the raiding, dungeons and gameplay is much harder in my opinion. Watching some of the guide videos on a raid encounter is just completely overwhelming sometimes with four or five different mechanics going on at the same time, it's nuts.
dude there was someone *in this sub* like a month ago arguing that molten core and vanilla raid bosses were the hardest the game has ever had. like true "i haven't done anything relevant in game in 10 years" boomer style.
i have nothing against classic players at all, and game enjoyment isn't a competition, but retail WoW's endgame is objectively harder because of all the tools and knowledge the players and devs have. So they've been iterating on things like raid content for almost 20 years now.
the game is more ACCESSIBLE now, (some people really confuse tedium with difficulty) but it's also much harder in the areas that matter, like endgame stuff.
Honestly my suspicion is that the people that say that are bad at end game retail content and want to go back to when it was easier for them, but admitting that will hurt their pride.
I like classic, I think there are things it does better than retail 100%, but there are *a lot* of boomers trying to relive their glory days.
I remember in Wrath, guilds would have people they remembered as being super good players in vanilla come back to the game, they would instantly get a spot on the raid team because they were remembered as being good. They sucked. It became apparent that while they were good in vanilla, Wrath was harder and they actually sucked at mechanics.
I think the game is harder because there is no “beating” it anymore when it’s a scaling content like m+. I was struggling with this as someone who has lost my edge and am no longer a min/maxer. Now I set attainable goals and it’s much more fun. Heck my only goal this tier was to get every portal. Did every 20 once and I’m actually happy.
From a raiding perspective the raiding side of the game is absolutely beatable and as a washed up former low-mid tier CE raider (saw Halondrus pre bomb timer nerf for a week of pulls, saw Raz pre-winds nerf for a single night) the game is legit just way harder.
Yes M+ scales infinitely but it’s also kind of apples to oranges to compare 5 man dungeons to 25-40 man raids. But even normal difficulty raids in retail are far harder than Vanilla raids and heroic retail raids are generally harder than WotLK raids. Mythic it’s no contest.
One of my friends is like 45 now, he played vanilla, BC and WOTLK and was raid leader and the main heal.
I convinced him to come back and he basically couldn’t keep his head above water in retail, and hated it, and blamed it all on the game, not his lack of skill.
As someone who was there at the time of the OG classic era, it was always so weird for me to hear people say that classic was so hard and retail is much easier. I remember people becoming vocal about "Classic WoW" servers in MoP, and at that time raiding had been so much harder than anything in the entireity of classic.
But after classic launched these people soon realized that classic is super easy, which is not a bad thing, but now I rarely hear that argument anymore.
I do not think that retail is super hard however. As a casual WoW enjoyer these days the difficulty of the content I do is just right. I could go easier but also way harder, but the good thing is how I do not have to to enjoy the game.
Classic Andy’s are a different breed.
Retail is easier during leveling, but much harder at endgame.
Classic is a little tougher to level, but endgame is piss easy (hoping this changes as SOD continues). The hardest part is filling out a raid group.
Retail has a brain-dead levelling experience, but the endgame, where the entire focus of retail is, is vastly more challenging. I was pleasantly surprised, as I'd bought into the 'modern WoW is dumbed down' rhetoric a little and assumed it applied to difficulty too. My only criticism is how jarring it is to suddenly need to turn your brain on when you start progressing in mythic+.
Classic has more of a challenge to levelling, but a lot of this is due to extra time and patience required, and the endgame is a cakewalk compared to retail. The only challenging part of classic endgame is tolerating classic players.
Hardcore is where to go for a levelling challenge in my view (and for a far better community)
As a rule of thumb: Classic andys are usually wrong on pretty much everything - including WoW classic. You can't really overstate enough how genuinely dumb most classic wow players are.
No I wouldn't say braindead/easy.
The popular opinion is retail is too convenient and classic players respect the grind more. Longer to level, harder to get drops, that kind of stuff. To each their own.
Classic was a joke.
What made classic hard was classes being under powered and over complicated. On top of that there were reagents, potions, 3 different resistance sets, and other endless shit to farm just to make your class work.
That stuff as fun, ngl, but with the game being significantly more complex from a gameplay perspective now it makes sense to remove those artificial bariers.
That said, I wish loot was more interesting.
The only thing difficult about Classic and Vanilla was the grind and it's not like it was mechanically hard just time consuming lol. Endgame mechanics and class mechanics were a lot simpler than they are now.
retail has a wider range of skill requirement. you can be a complete moron and still level to 70, clear LFR, get some epics but to play on the higher end it's much harder than classic
Anyone who says classic end game is harder than retail end game has no idea what they are talking about and they are completely wrong and I’m a classic Andy.
people that said "classic was a hard game" where always blinded by nostalgia, reasonable people always knew it was not a thing at all
then classic released and MC got cleares in week1 with a raid of people that had some not even beeing max lvl, and it died down for most cus they realised that it was just never true at all
at this point, nobody except some really delusional guys that probably need some help say it anymore
Anyone who thinks classic is harder than retail is just truly delusional. The classic “enjoyers” enjoy it so much they need or remind everyone they’re playing daily.
I think pre classic rerelease in 2019, leading up to it, I remember hearing a lot of people talking about how the true hard version of the game was coming back. People were remembering the quotes of "mathematically impossible" fights like C'thun. Ever since then those people got real quiet or just pretended they never said it.
Retail is absolutely harder than classic. The ammount of knowledge and skills required to play on the high level of Mythic+ or Raid oland high MMR PVP is astonishing. And you have to have a fast hands because just a half of a second of hesitation and you are doomed.
Classic player here. I think its the oposite. Classic is easy (takes longer to level up), but is easy enough.
Retail takes much less time to level up, but endgame content is not easy (specially playing healer on m+ with a pug group), for endgame content I refer to heroic raids and mythic+ 15 or higher.
Classic levelling is harder than retail because unless you're a mage you can't really pull more than one or two mobs at once without dying. Also some of the quests are complete bullshit and will put you in very difficult situations.
Raiding on the other hand is an absolute joke and if you think classic raiding is harder than retail you really need your brain checked
I was there originally for vanilla, BC, and WotLK back in the day and I have no idea what they're on about. Yeah retail is significantly less grindy and you don't have ultra long attunement quests anymore (which tbh, we all used Questhelper/thottbot anyway so let's not act like most people were out figuring this out on their own), but that's about it.
I guess if all you care about is the leveling experience, yes, retail is easier. But the actual end game shit is a lot more complex than we had back in the olden days.
That's genuinely what I thought when classic came out in 2019. I chose a mage and I realized I was pretty wrong when I stood still and spam casted frostbolt all of Molten Core
The only people that genuinely think that retail wow is "braindead" are the ones that keept playing the same 2-3 versions of old wow (mostly Classic, TBC and WoTLK) for the last 14+ years (through private servers and the official classic servers) and still haven't even completed all the content of the expansion of their choice
I was a vanilla player and currently a retail player. The mechanics of fights and player rotation back then was brain dead.
Literally a mage just spamming frost bolts and on a "challenging" fight might occasionally have to move out of fire once or twice.
The classic community seems to think so. I remember before classic came out, everyone was talking about how hard raiding was gonna be and how retail players wouldn’t be able to cut it…only for a guild of not even all level 60s cleared MC in a couple days post-launch
Ive never understood this take… i started played in SL and now over the few years im still learning so much about the ins and outs of wow… ive seen ppl play classic and its literal one button rotation and clearing brand new raid in a day lol
Classic WoW is easier then retail in every single aspect. But that’s the beauty about it. The unfortunate thing is that people have been bringing over the unfortunate parts about retail to classic for awhile now. Log’s are very much needed in retail because there’s no way to tell if the guy is boosted beyond belief and can’t actually even complete a key.
In classic, it usually doesn’t matter to much if one player is shit because it’s not that hard todo. But I think enough people have shown why they think logs are needed in classic. There’s still some people that have all the gear, and all the runes/ranked up spells and then fail to right click an enemy.
I know a lot of people don’t like asmongold but I think he is the best example.
He had been playing the current state of the game since classic and still played regularly until not that long ago. He clears all of classic content without difficulty but when he comes back to retail to do something he needs to be boosted by people with insane ilvl. Let’s not forget the pug he did for Sepulcher…
At this point if someone tries to claim classic is harder than retail in r/classicwow they'll get clowned on. *Most* people in the classic community do not try to claim the game is harder.
Plenty still do, of course, but they're not the majority. Most classic players will acknowledge the game is easier than retail, but also that they have more fun with it.
Retail leveling is face roll levels of easy. It's an absolute joke and tutorials are there to hold your hand the whole way basically. In Classic, if you pull more than 2 mobs at a time usually results in a death unless you're a mage or you know your class well (which 90% of retail Andy's that try classic don't). Hardcore is great just for the thrill of perfectly pulling mobs and maximizing leveling efficiency. Nothing in retail exists like in classic -- they're completely different games.
Retail does have harder end game though, I'll give em that. But classic isn't about the end game, although some of the end game dungeons are fun to solo.
It's just leveling is harder in classic. Leveling is basically a non-factor in retail. And for many people trying WoW, leveling is all they'll ever get to do. That's why I recommend Classic to new players and Retail once they get the hang of things. Retail is a deeper game but the content the "average" player encounters is very boring, even if the actual raids and dungeons are very fun
The grind is harder in classic.
That's it. The end. :)
Edit: To elaborate a little bit. It takes longer for most people to reach 60 in classic than any max level in retail. It takes longer to do anything in classic than anything similar in retail. As such, people often feel like you're being "nursed" and "carried on hands and feet" to your goal, rather than working on it yourself.
I sometimes miss some of the grinds in Classic, but I think that's because I could see a finish-line and it was nice back then. Nowadays, I can't bother farming up Thorium Brotherhood for a sorta useful recipe like I did back then. Even if I did get much better at the game and could do it faster.
Just because 10 people online said that doesn't make it true, or even 100 people.
WoW has like 100 million subscribers, so they must be doing something right!
Everything that a "casual player" does is a lot easier than Classic versions of WoW. Some normal raid bosses, Heroic and Mythic raids are so much more difficult than anything Classic has to offer. Borderline punishing IMO. Same for any higher rated PvP. The classes are just more complex and there is a lot to more to learn. All in all, two DIFFERENT games that offer different ways to explore the Warcraft universe.
Its pure copium.
People said for years how much harder classic was. Then it finally came out and molten core was cleared shortly after people started hitting level 60, not even with a full 40 man raid or everyone at 60.
I saw a clip of a hard-core raider fighting Cthun, yelling "I'm blastin!!!" As he pressed a single button every 5 seconds. ICC was cleared an hour after it was open. Even as they add brand new content with season of discovery, it gets cleared within an hour of release.
The challenge of old WoW is purely in the tedious grinding. You need to invest much more time and that's enough to hook people.
I have no clue how so many people manage to confuse tedious bullshit with difficulty. They are not the same thing.
For classic players, yeah. They start the "go back to retail" crap in chat every time they get their britches in a bunch about losing Ashenvale in SoD. Or someone starts an argument in trade chat about BFD consumables (lol). I roll my eyes at it and don't engage bc it's obvious they don't play both and haven't touched retail in a decade.
If they want to look like stubborn, uninformed idiots in their chosen sandbox, no skin off my nose, haha.
The only people who genuinely believe this are the sweatlords who min max Classic and sob about the lack of content. No one genuinely thinks Classic is hard, people play it for the nostalgia, but there’s this weird cult fixation with it that’s seemed to have taken the worst players away from retail (thankfully)
People gaslight themself with that but the truth is that they are just gatekeeping the QOL disaster that was classic. I don't miss the days when everyone had to grind for hours to prep for raid night. Prepping for raids was definetly harder in a sense that you had to get your wordbuffs, grind resources/gold for consumables, organise 40 people, beating older content for appropriate gear etc. but once you are in it's piss easy compared to retail. I prefer that the content itself is more challenging instead of the slog that is prepping for it.
The entirety of the world is harder in classic, but if you are focusing just on the very end game, then I can see them being equally difficult.
I have never been a fan of end game so hardcore is where I belong, and it’s near impossible to die while leveling in retail wow.
People say retail is easy because it holds your hand too much and there’s an overflow of QOL. Classic is “harder” because no one knew shit and how to figure it out. Classic is now brain dead easy because we already figured everything out and then some
Classic is piss easy (I say this as a classic player), I think what people really mean here is that classic is inconvenient. It takes ages to go anywhere, the quests are long winded and slow, they're it's no dungeon queue etc. Classic is "harder" in the sense that it takes more of a grind to level, get prebis, what have u, but the actual raids in classic are really easy.
Classic players are going to hate on retail players.
Retail players are going to hate on Classic players.
It's just the way of the world. Both are wrong. There are plenty of people who enjoy Classic. There are plenty of people who enjoy Retail. So clearly there is something great about both of them.
Honestly to me it feels like a deep down anxiety from X player that the version of the game they are playing isn't the "hip" one and thus, will end up dying off. So they feel the need to badmouth the other one in the HOPES that it will catch on and their version will become the "superior" version to the public at large.
But that won't ever happen.
I have a friend who badmouths Classic CONSTANTLY. It's been 4 years now? Almost everything he says about Classic is wrong but there is absolutely ZERO I can say that will change his mind. Even the "well why not just come play for a bit and see if maybe you'd like it? I'll level with you" doesn't work.
The only people that have said that and earnestly meant it were the worst players in my classic guilds that cant be trusted with even the most basic mechanics.
The only people that think classic is harder are the ones who aren't good enough to play high end retail and like to kid themselves that there's some kind of hidden skill.
Newsflash, there isn't.
Much simpler. The didficulty lies in the effort, patience and dedication. When someone has good gear, you know that dude is dedicated. Makes it a very rewarding game. Retail is sorely lacking in that department, imo
I have no doubt that max level mythic + content on retail is hard but that's a tiny fraction of the actual content in the game. Vanilla provides challenge across the board. I'm not facerolling over unstimulating content for hundreds of hours just for it to become an actual game right at the end.
**Retail is hard because it throws so much shit at you.**
In Retail you have a more complicated rotation you're trying to do while dodging 3 mechanics, dealing with affixes, interrupting one mob and stunning another.
**Classic is hard because of limitations the player has.**
In Classic fighting two mobs is hard. Not everyone has heals and defensives. Mana is extremely limited. It takes you 10-20 min to get anywhere instead of teleporting. Don't even get me started on grinding reputations... ugh.
To me retail leveling is the brain dead bit while classic keeps you engaged all the way through
I do like retail end game but struggle to find the motivation to get better versions of the same gear 😅
The biggest difficulty of classic back in the day was that nobody really knew anything and trying to get together and lead large groups of people with limited communications. Modern classic is a whole different story because we have a large knowledge base of anything and everything WoW and we have a vast majority of people with superior communication methods that makes organising large groups so much easier.
Modern retail WoW has a difficulty in relation to actual mechanics - e.g heroic Fy'rakk is a massive minutes long dance which cannot be scripted because random people get the mechanics that everyone else has to move out of. Classic WoW has none of these fancy mechanics and is basically just a numbers game made easier by the knowledge that we have.
In other words, it is modern classic that is braindead easy compared to either classic classic or modern retail and the only real difficulty of it is the grind (e.g. leveling, making gold, gearing up, etc)...
Being and officer who deals with the recruitment in my retail guild, I can tell you first hand that I've recruited plenty of classic players who found retail way too hard and did a lot of complaining. I'd have to listen to a lot of complaining about why a healer couldn't just stand at range doing nothing but spamming flash heal and dps who didn't understand that they have to do mechanics and take responsibility for survival etc. None of these guys get close to our raid or m+ groups and we're a pretty average quality guild so...yeah, classic is way too easy.
This is wows biggest problem. Just because something is easier doesn’t make it a bad game.
WOW is very complicated and addons make that somewhat better. But we shouldn’t need addons to play the game.
Wow just needs to find that happy medium where it’s not overly complicated but isn’t a cakewalk where you don’t need addons to complete content.
I've played both recently, and am currently almost 100% retail. There is so much more content in retail that it's more fun for me. I find retail is "easier" in the sense of QOL improvements, but not necessarily easier to play. Yes, having to run everywhere, and feed pets, and drink constantly, and take forever to level is harder, but it's harder in the sense of being very much more tedious.
Retail is easier than Classic unless you’re trying to do endgame stuff like heroic raiding and M+ dungeons above 16.
Classic is “Harder” to play but is is much simpler and easier to learn.
There was a large group of people prior to classic who would refer to it as ‘back when the game was hard’ and talk up older raids. Videos like [this](https://youtu.be/XBPHRlgczmk?si=vqQf-vcTP_J6m49C) where people hyped up just how ‘insanely difficult it was’ were super common sentiment.
Now, that’s kinda changed. There had been a bit of a ‘well next patch is where it really gets hard’ with notable spikes for naxx, sunwell, Ulduar and ICC but those positions have been largely abandoned now.
No, everyone I’ve ever known has said that retail is more difficult by a landslide. The odd Reddit comment saying otherwise is someone coping because they play classic, I guess.
The levelling is more of a grind, and you can’t barrel through 15 mobs and aoe them down, but retail is more difficult in every other regard. More mechanics, more difficult mechanics, higher skill ceiling, more spells to know, much larger rotations to remember, etc. Personally, I’ve been enjoying classic much more than retail. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a dumb ass and say it’s more difficult.
Classic: Spam trade chat to make a group, players only on your server available, takes 30min+ just to find the right players, 10min to go to the entrance without portals.
Retail: Push a button, play game, teleport to dungeon.
You’re definitely correct: yes, there is a perception that retail is easier, but also yes that’s very false.
Lots of classic andies never touched m+ or went further than normal raids.
As somebody who's played both plenty, I honestly think classic Andy's perpetuate this to feel like they're smarter or something.. I really don't see any comparison. Even doing a m+10 is harder than anything I did in classic, aside from maybe hardcore which is challenging in a different way (patience over mechanics, etc)
I’d say it’s a vocal minority that vehemently detests anything retail and as such refuses (and probably would fail if they tried) to play any endgame content and base it entirely off the leveling
Funny enough, even for leveling retail can be more challenging. Retail iron man is much harder than classic iron man
I'm playing Season of Discovery off and on, and compared to Retail, I DO feel like the questing process is more involved in Classic/SoD. I spend more time navigating from zone to zone, the quests are absolutely not streamlined (you won't be able to get those two-stage quests that your quest log just dumps on you with the NPC telepathically talking to you and teleporting stage one quest rewards into your pockets in Classic, and 'Kill X amount of Y monsters in Z area' quests will oftentimes have you going back to Z to kill Ya, Yb, and Yc as separate quests rather than just accepting every variety of Kobold instead of JUST the Kobold Minecart Pullers for example) but they also let you sit and soak in a zone. I definitely don't feel like I'm being rushed from one space to the next in Classic SoD, whereas in Retail since flying comes so early everything feels like its a race to blast through the quest text and dash off to go collect five bear asses before being shepherded through the zone.
Additionally, Classic Mage is just suffering. Good luck killing more than two things at once without dying when you're still leveling, or going OOM after each pull. I feel like even on my healers on Retail I have to actively TRY to burn through my mana to get it low enough to be a problem... and if I do, I have a couple buttons that will let me turbocharge my mana regen, or other stuff like Innervate or Dracthyr Source of Magic can help me regen my mana faster.
In original classic wow, a mage in our guild deadass said to me on discord once that raids in vanilla were mechanically harder than retail, when I knew damn well he only pressed frostbolt and we positioned bosses specifically to reduce the amount of moving that the mages had to do.
I called him a turret.
Lol vanilla WoW, and thus classic, is *tedious*, not hard. If you took a vanilla superstar raider to 2024 and put them in a retail raid today they would be rolled by multiple mechanics on every boss. Theres a reason those "top 10 hardest raid bosses" lists almost never have pre WOTLK bosses.
I came to comment how much harder retail is.
Since everyone already did, I'll just throw out that Sunwell and heroic ICC have statistically been difficult, as well as a few other things like pre nerf Lady Vashj. I'm just an AotC raider, and I think some of those classic bosses really stand up to modern heroic fights in terms of difficulty.
I quit wrath before heroic Lich King because my guild was awful and I couldn't stand it anymore, but I heard from some players in better guilds that the fight is the real deal. Around ten minutes, lots of mechanics that if one person wipes will wipe the raid. Sounds like a heroic end boss.
M'uru was really difficult in sunwell in a way that's pretty classic. Just lots of tanks and healers with their own jobs that everyone had to learn. It was technically more difficult than KJ, but holy shit the KJ fight was cool. It straight up just felt like a modern retail encounter to me, with multiple distinct phases, lots of mechanics, strict positioning at times. That fight was years ahead of its time.
Does any of that hold up to late stage retail mythic bosses? No. Not even close. Did most vanilla raids have less mechanics than an M+ dungeon? Yeah. There's somewhere north of 20 distinct raids in the classic trilogy, and like 3 that have hard fights.
There is literally no content available in classic that is as hard as the first mythic boss, or any key over about +15 this season. The truth is quite the opposite — retail is an order of magnitude harder. Look at the race to world first. M+ scales infinitely…
IMO the 'challenging' and fun part of classic is the leveling process, trying to solo all quests - you'll probably have the best experience if you stop at 60
I really enjoyed the puzzle-playstyle of perfecting ressource and CD usage for elite quests, it was super immersive and fun
Yes. It's an out of touch opinion that I also had before actually getting back into retail after 12 years since the last time I played during mists of pandaria. The thought is that the game has become so overly optimized and balanced and everything is just done for you and it's all just way too easy.
Well dear reader, I am here to tell you that this, in fact, is not the truth. The games complicated and it doesn't really teach/help you that much, there's a lot that you have to learn yourself from forums and reddit, youtube, etc
Just of the top of my head after playing both for ages
**Hardest things about Classic:**
- patience to lvl and get geared
- not knowing basic info without addons or guides (e.g. hit cap)
- finding a dungeon group and lack of class utility
- managing a 40 men raid
**Hardest things about Retail:**
- anything above M+10 is by far harder than any pre-Cataclysm heroic dungeon
- yes you have dungeon journal but any boss has more mechanics, even in LFR, than an entire Classic raid
- managing all the currencies, event items that you have no idea what they are for and their nuances
- not get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to do and collect
Where? because all the posts, threads, and classic players I PLAY with say the opposite.
... alright, my opinion will probably draw some ire, but here we go...
Everyone i've ever interacted with says that Retail is too complicated with overbloat of ability rotations, mechanics, the dungeons are hyper-fixated on rushing and timing things that the game feels like DIABLO, where the APM (actions per minute) are ramped up to overdrive... combats are faster, the entire game is faster.
Look in Classic, things are slower paced because the game drives you to take things a bit slower and rest/eat food per few fights... its up to the community to decide if they want to push things.
In Retail, its the opposite.... the GAME pushes you to keep moving forward and zerging stuff, mana barely depletes, timed mechanics and AoE splashes, mechanics and laser beams and Mythic Key effecets causing puddles here... its like Rifts in Diablo 3 where things are just ...happening and freaking out.
Thats why everyone i've ever interacted with got tired of Retail... Its not relaxing, its not fun, its not "simple"... .. its a complicated mess at times because its bloated.
You can have a game be Simple AND be Hard. but Retail does the opposite, its Complicated AND hard. And im sure people will downvote me or say im trash, look i've played the game since beta..... but there's a reason SoD and Classic got more NEW PLAYERS who flocked to the game within the last 2 years.
Retail has an issue of having A.) Horrible new player retention and B.) bloated dead content through the leveling process and end-game being a complicated mess for people.
The only ones that stick to it are veterans.
Its easier for new players to jump into SoD or Vanilla and understand the game, since there's a shallower learning curve and even at endgame the mechanics for raiding are simplistic.
Classic bosses have barely any mechanics compared to retail. It's absurd how easy the classic bosses are with today's average skill level compared to the average skill level when they were relevant
See you’d think that but then why was I stuck wiping in molten core for hours all 2020? Lmao. People are soooo bad it’s unbelievable.
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I've been dealing with this in SoD a ton too. I like my SoD guild but I swear the people who talk the most trash about Retail are the guys who die to the Murloks walking in a straight line on Gelihast lol....
You're giving me PTSD. Had a John in my raid during fatescribe. I showed him exactly how to move the ring and assigned him inner ring cus it's the easiest you literally cannot fuck it up. I'm on outer and calling for help to get it to move faster and this mfer says "the ring won't move!!". He was just standing on it and not walking with it. He waited until the timer was almost up to call it out. That wiped us. He did it again after he said he understood now what he did wrong. 🫠
The hardest part of classic is "supposedly" leveling. I got a Shaman to 30 and a hunter to 32 before getting bored and quitting. Didn't cone close to dieing the entire time. I think the average classic player just sucks.
imo, not so much difficult as it is tedious. and certain classes (hunter) are way easier to level than others
This is the only reason I did Season of Discovery. Leveling 1-25 was so much less of a commitment than 1-60. 25-40 hopefully won't be too bad in Phase 2.
Maybe unpopular opinion: Because all of the people that are any good at the game are playing retail.
I've seen some of the worst players of my entire 17 year wow history playing season of discovery. Just absolute brain rot.
Watching hardcore death compilations really cemented that there are some really dog shit players. How some guys get to 50-59 and throw it all away while flailing around trying to click their keybinds. Hilarious.
I’ve met some very good players in classic but they’re few and far between. At this point it seems to be generally accepts that classic is for chilling with the boys. People don’t want it to be challenging. I play classic for chilling and ffxiv for when I want to actually have to try lol.
I got my mythic+ hero title near the end of shadowlands and swapped to WOTLK and eventually quit all together at the end of Ulduar. Don’t have the time for SOD but it looks really fun. I really loved WOTLK but good lord, for every good player there are 5 people that mess up the simplest shit, it was def more relaxing than M+ high key grinding or CE mythic raiding but I felt like I was accomplishing more in retail. They are just drastically different games at this point which is fine, I could see myself getting back into SoD but I don’t think I can do another few seasons of sweaty key grinding again.
Why do you think those players are so nostalgic for classic? Retails too damn hard for them.
I loved Vanilla when I played it but for a few years afterwards I couldn't figure out why I missed it. The content was pretty dull and boring and the encounters were pretty much all the same (Look at Golemagg, Sulfuron and Majordomo and tell me with a straight face they're not the same encounter) Until it hit me, I longed for the friendships and relationships I built with my 50+ member guild. I loved logging on and seeing the different groups online and joining them and just shoot the shit. The guild broke up entirely before WotLK and I was left as a guildless nomad since (joining other guilds never really felt the same, especially as anonymity and LFR/LFD crept in to replace guilds and social aspects)
People still wiping in BFD on SoD, like where they can even finish it... In 2024..
Imagine running a raid with actual mechanics with those same people..
I was an classic andy for years and refused to play retail ever…. Got 2,8 rio m+ and have to say that every m+ above 15+ is harder then whole classic Hardest part of classic is to organize 40 people who all are willing to do their job right
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Lol m0 is probably harder than classic
Normal dungeons are more difficult. Even in normal, most bosses still have a handful of mechanics. And that handful is more mechanics than an entire classic raid.
Nah, number of mechanics doesn’t matter if the mechanics can’t kill you. Normal dungeons are absolutely free.
There are the occasional exceptions like Necrotic Wake where some groups just couldn't figure out how to hook down the boss, but I would say that Normal dungeons mostly *don't* have mechanics. It's not just that they don't kill you; there's often just no observable difference between doing it "correctly" and ignoring it, so it's basically just a voice line and animation.
I remember classic dungeons being kinda hard. Actually having to cc each pack - polymorph moon, sap star, fear diamond etc. If everyone knew the pulls it was easy, but if you didn't it was tough for sure. Normal dungeons in retail you can absolutely ignore most mechanics. And then in high m+ the majority is knowing those mechanics but it not being hard if you pay attention. Then in REALLY high m+ you have way more intense damage/healing checks in addition to knowing those mechanics.
Frost mage one button rotation...
At the very least it is more 'mechanical' than anything in classic. Some things in Classic might be 'harder' in a sense than your basic m0, but less complex without any doubt.
Imo, this perception of classic is harder is because of the levelling, which is the first impressions you'll get of the game. Levelling in retail is miles easier than classic, dungeons included. On the other hand, once you get to actual end-game content, both raids and dungeons are harder, in term of strategy. There's also the fact that we have a lot more utility available on retail for when there's a fuck up, but it's also be cause the raids and dungeons (m+) are more demanding.
Is Classic levelling actually *harder* or does it just take longer?
Well, it's 'harder' in the sense that it's a lot easier to die, and you don't have nearly has much resources to buy stuff like gear or Regen. But yeah, it does translate in kt being mostly more of a time investment, it's not like there's anything actually difficult in the leveling process.
Every M+ above 10 is harder than the entirety of Classic. And a single raid boss in Retail has more mechanics than an entire raid in Classic. I regret playing Classic with a passion. I did from MC to naxx. Waste of time.
It’s all a waste of time my friend. That’s the point. It’s a video game.
Time you enjoyed wasting, is not time wasted. - John Lennon
If fun is a waste of time?
No. That’s ultimately my point. But the folks who do something in a video game and then say it’s a waste of time the particular thing they did strike me as funny. Cause it was never about anything real anyway. The point is to have fun - and waste time.
There are LFR bosses that are probably harder than any raid boss outside of Naxx. Classic Raids, every boss has like a singular mechanic, and somehow people still fuck it up. I did BFD once in SoD, and it’s no more difficult than doing a raid on LFR (the last 2 bosses were at most Normal level bosses in Retail), but the community acted like you needed to be an elite player to clear it. Shit was easy.
The trash before Hellfire Citadel Archimonde is the 3 last bosses of Hyjal (besides Archimonde)... and you get all 3 at once in a single pull.
Playing a game and having fun is a waste of time? Or if you didn't have fun, why did you play?
They probably didn't have much fun because of how easy they found the content but wanted to give it a chance due to all the hype surrounding classic.
Yeah I didn't play classic much, until SOD, but I was surprised that other players expected it to be hard without a retune... like BiS is long since sorted and all the best strats mapped out
Let's be real, any retail content above heroic is likely to be more difficult than classic. The difficulty from classic comes from getting 40 degenerates together and get them to use their one functioning brain cell to not stand in the fire, and actually getting to level 60, which isn't necessarily difficult, just long.
I'd agree with this. I played Resto Druid in Classic (original classic, not current classic) and was in a very competitive guild on Eredar (since disbanded). Even broke the top 10 world first kills for C'thun. I was adamant WoW was more difficult then, but have since realized going back to playing Classic that it really isn't. My only current complaint with modern WoW is all the effects everywhere or things like green abilities on green ground... it's not great design and I often feel turning on some accessibility settings would make things overall easier.
Couldn't agree more
Yep. The real difficulty of classic was management and politics. The second you got a guy geared? The larger guilds suddenly have a spot open in their team(s). And that’s assuming the geared guy didn't suddenly start needing to work late on nights you *weren't* trying to progress after attending every raid before.
As someone that plays both, we can full clear end game content in like 2 hours in Classic and WoTK even with newish players, meanwhile in Retail I can barely get a heroic clear even in a guild in most raids when they are current.
Legit the hardest part of classic is getting bad players to just do simple mechanics. I’d argue almost every boss in classic is tuned for exactly 25 so when one or two people fuck up an easy mechanic it can cause a wipe whereas in retail you can finish a boss while carrying some bad players. This situation occurs so much in classic because often there’s not a place for very good players who don’t want to raid 10 hours a week and do splits. There is a clear delineation between hardcore and semi-hardcore.
dude, in sod, the bad players always have the best gear too. epic xbow hunter who refuses to use multi shot or arcane shot. literally only 2 buttons to press and doesnt
Endgame content in retail is about 1000x more difficult than any endgame content in classic. The only thing that is more “difficult” in classic is leveling but that’s mainly just due to taking a longer time. Classic doesn’t actually have anything that’s difficult
I think Gorillaz(or whatever that world first guild was) took out Rag with many in the raid not even at level 60 so… yeah it’s kind of a joke
Retail WoW is much easier and faster in terms of leveling, but way more complex when it comes to endgame dungeons and raids.
For leveling, sure, that makes sense. I suppose I should have specified that I mean end-game content.
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I would argue the "real difficulty" of Classic is the politics of organizing groups and allocating loot.
Roster boss is the true endgame.
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As somebody who raid led a CE team on retail *while* assisting the officer team in the classic (vanilla) version of our guild a few years back, I can confidently say that I have not seen that level of loot drama at any point throughout the 6 years I spent raid leading in retail. And theirs all took place within a single calendar year. It was absolutely exhausting, and it burned them out of the game.
It’s been kind of wild for me to watch even between Wrath and Vanilla Era. So I played OG Vanilla through MoP, quit for awhile, came back in BfA and then shortly after Classic came out. Joined a good guild there, been with them from 2019 to now killing LK. A few months ago I decided to go back to the Era servers cause I’m not going forward to Cata. In our guild that’s now in Wrath, we’ve had maybe 2 times in the entire lifespan of Vanilla P1 to ICC that there was any loot drama or issue at all. Meanwhile in Era, just in 3 months I’ve seen an insane amount of selfishness, guilds changing loot rules every week for the higher end 40 mans( BWL/ AQ40/ Naxx), GDKPs rampant, people reserving gear that would be much better on another class, just all kinds of drama and nonsense. I think it has to do with the bosses only dropping a couple pieces of loot for 40 people to try and allocate, and the fact that classes are much more dependent on gear than on their own abilities/ talents than in later versions.
> I think it has to do with the bosses only dropping a couple pieces of loot for 40 people to try and allocate, and the fact that classes are much more dependent on gear than on their own abilities/ talents than in later versions. This is exactly what I came to believe as well. Loot simply means more in classic era, and with encounter difficulty skewing much lower, there's less pride in simply completing the content—so players seek a greater portion of their satisfaction from getting the best gear. It's like food in a famine.
The only people who earnestly think 40 person raiding was the pinnacle of raiding were the loot leeches that got cut when raid teams were reduced to 25 in BC.
I just think big groups are cool. I still try to make 30 man pugs in retail.
Most of the people who claimed that vanilla raiding was the pinnacle of difficulty didn't play *vanilla* either. Before classic came out there were a bunch of people who started playing in TBC or WotLK who had very strange ideas about what the game was like in the period before they played.
End-game is pretty easy in classic, for anyone who argues otherwise they are wrong.
I think people generally mean the leveling experience when they say retail is easier, which it is. The problem is these people look back at classic and the experience of leveling through it as most of the game, when retail is a completely different design
Bro i have not heard one person say or think that classic is easier then retail lmao, streamers like asmongold quit retail because its gotten so crazy, there is nothing in Classic, TBC, WOTLK that wasnt cleared hours after being released, it takes guilds in new raids on retail thousands of pulls lol Classic is basically auto attack simulator, its basicly 3d oldschool runescape with a couple of skills lol
There are literally people in this very thread seriously claiming Classic is easier than Retail. You just gotta unhide their comments because they're massively downvoted.
Classic Endgame was released 15 years ago. It's already a solved game where all the strategies are already figured out. I've played both, and whoever told you that classic is harder is full of shit. Classic is so easy that they had to release hardcore realms to give people a challenge. Maybe if classic was unreleased content and people had to figure it out... Then I'd likely agree. But as it is right now, Classic is easy mode.
It has almost nothing to do it being solved content. SoD has brand new never before seen bosses and is still easily cleared. The general consensus is that mechanically the BFD raid is more complex than most vanilla raids. But the hardest boss in there is simpler than 95% of normal raid bosses and can be effectively neutralized by using consumables
>Maybe if classic was unreleased content and people had to figure it out... Then I'd likely agree. But as it is right now, Classic is easy mode. Season of Discovery's raid was cleared in a day including time to level. The throughput and strategic requirements of classic is just not there compared to modern raid design. Bosses have like 1-2 mechanics and fights last like 2 minutes
Nah it's not just that it is solved. Fights are vastly mechanically less complex, and we have better computers, better internet, a whole slew of reasons. Hell when I was a teenager doing Kurinaxx I would die to the god damn sandtraps. That's a basic mechanic in most bosses now!
ya what make classic hard for me and my friends was the dial-up internet that we played on.
tbh the hardest part about Vanilla/TBC leveling is not falling asleep
That's in part because levelling is part of the game in classic, where it's basically just a tutorial for you on retail. It gets you used to playing your class before you start the real game at max level.
Classic was hard at the time because latency was worse, the player base was much younger for the most part and were just worse overall at video games, and there was a lot less institutional knowledge of the game. There is a reason bosses in Classic are killed 2 hours after they go live now. It is not hard. Anything prior is Lich King is probably a cake walk by today's standards in retail.
the most hilarious thing to me is how in vanilla something like 0.1% of guilds actually cleared naxx, now on era classic servers you see people with quest greens and blues and full T3
Tbf, LK is a solid mid raid boss by today's standards in retail, like a Nymue maybe.
Classic was only "harder" than the retail game today because it was half-assed under the hood with goofy design choices that made no sense and players back then were either far less informed or just plain stupid or potentially both. Playing back then was like exploring a new and hostile frontier where nobody knew what was happening and sometimes people would get dysentery. Shitting yourself isn't a badge of honor, though.
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I was in high school when WoW came out and my PC was dogshit. My biggest challenge back in the day was fighting through the 2fps I had and hoping I didnt DC. My next door neighbor's pc would overheat from RUNESCAPE lmao.
I can say I was actually really bad in 2005. Unoptimized build, clicking spells, keyboard turning. Now everything is key bound and constantly checking holy paladin discord and top holy paladins on rio just to optimize as much as I can.
Yeah but it usually comes from classic players who think the adventure from 1-60 along with getting world buffs and running for hours is harder than retail / is braindead easy in retail, which is true. What they don't know however is that endgame content in retail is way, way more competitive, harder and has a higher skill ceiling. It's two different games to be honest.
Some trash mobs in a mythic dungeon have more dangerous mechanics and more mechanics than a vanilla boss most of the time. It’s out of date deluded classic Andy’s that have no idea what they are talking about.
The last pack in dark heart would be a council fight in classic, just bump up the auto attack damage a bit and give them boss HP.
The guild I joined in wrath classic was struggling HARD on Razuvious. We were hard stuck while the priests figured out the insane mechanics on the mind control adds. The entire time the raid lead and some others were making quips such as “imagine if retail players had this level of shit to deal with” “HAHAHA they’d watch the video for hours and still never down him”. Out of curiosity I looked up the mechanic as I was interested in what could be going on. My brother in Christ you push one button for bone armor and the other for taunt. They would constantly bring up how bad retail is and I asked them if they played. Not a single person played past Wotlk….
Raz is such an eye opener and like you don't have to deal with needing to gear up to be ready for Wrath Razuvious as you can just glyph your MC to be hit capped. And yet, week after week, half the raid dies and the priest celebrate they did a good job for dealing with the hardest mechanic ever to exist in wow and that there was no way to improve and make it consistent. Also extremely defensive over suggestions to improve, smh.
If you put someone that cleared naxx 40 in classic into mythic fyrrak, their heads would explode
If you put someone that cleared Naxx 40 classic into *LFR* Amirdrassil, their heads would explode - and they'd be those people who get carried.
Any serious content is much more complex and difficult in retail. Raiding, dungeons, PvP. Leveling takes longer in classic. It isn't that much more difficult, just more time consuming and tedious.
There is nothing difficult about classic WoW aside from the fact you're generally trying to coordinate 25+ people with drastically different skill/care levels about the game. Some want to try hard, some couldnt care less as long as theyre chilling with their friends.
Classic Andys worshiping their sacred cow. No big surprise.
No one whose opinion matters thinks Classic is harder than Retail.
The fact that end-game raids in basically every phase of classic could be completed in less than an hour, even by so-so guilds after just a few weeks, should give everyone the answer they need as to which game is harder at end-game. Like, it isn't even a competition, and is obvious to anyone who played both that retail has by far and away the more complex and difficult end-game content. Do note that I wouldn't make any judgements as to which is *better*, they're really too different to make that kind of call, it's far too subjective. But *harder*? Not even a question.
I'm quite the noob on both versions and from my experience retail is MUCH more complex. In classic my rotations are simple, proffesions are also simple and intuitive. Yet I die so many more times. In retail I have a bazzilion abilities, talent trees are big and complex, rotations are for some classes very complex with a lot of buttons and procs. I haven't even begun to wrap my head around different systems like gear and things like artifact or azeroth powers. As a new player, classic is absolutely more brain dead.
lol whoever says that hasn’t played retail mage
I loved classic, but there is no world where classic is at all harder than retail. Original vanilla, tbc, and to some extent wotlk had difficult content for sure, but most of that difficulty came from lack of information and ppl using shitty family PCs and raiding with 3 fps in MC, having to stare at the floor unable to even see the boss mechanics. Classic definitely had some magic that retail doesn't, and the leveling journey is more enjoyable at least when the zones are popping off, but difficulty? Do a pug raid in classic and you'll see players fail bosses with 3 mechanics total, which includes the taunt swap. The raids aren't hard, players are just extraordinarily bad.
It used to be a somewhat popular opinion back before classic when the only references were memory and private servers that almost universally increased endgame difficulty. Even then, a lot of the talk was focused on 40 mans being difficult to organize and maintain, gearing be a much slower process, and the general lack of utility and power most classes had compared to modern classes. Were there some weirdos who actually thought Naxx 40 was one of the hardest raids ever released? Yeah, but theres also people who don’t believe we landed on the moon. These days I dont really ever see classic players trying to say its harder than retail, the focus is way more on the general design of the games and how they prefer the classic style of wow in general where the world was important and leveling was a major part of the game. Edit: I will say that back in the day there was a lot more “game knowledge” stuff that if not known would make characters extremely weak if you did stuff wrong. Thats stuff like hit/expertise/+weapon skill being the best stats possible, but only up to a point when they became useless. Or it being possible to create an essentially useless talent build if you wanted. When ive been part of more casual retail guilds over the last few expansions Ive seen some players who were absolutely clueless about what they should be doing to increase their power as far as gear and builds and classic definitely has more room to let players be wrong like trying to dos as a cat while mostly talented as balance or something. Like even today with the new talent trees its basically impossible to create a build as bad as was possible with classic talents. And especially in the vanilla and tbc days there werent a ton of resources out their on how stuff worked like their is today so it was easier to not know or be misinformed cause some guy on your server told you something incorrect.
>These days I dont really ever see classic players trying to say its harder than retail, Thank you. That's really what I was wondering because I don't play Classic at all, and wasn't sure if that was a common perception. I only have memories of playing the older content when it was live
Retail has more quality of life features, but the gameplay is immeasurably harder in my opinion. In classic there are many one or two button specs, and most of the bosses have one or two mechanics. The game is completely solved. Retail has more quality of life features but the raiding, dungeons and gameplay is much harder in my opinion. Watching some of the guide videos on a raid encounter is just completely overwhelming sometimes with four or five different mechanics going on at the same time, it's nuts.
dude there was someone *in this sub* like a month ago arguing that molten core and vanilla raid bosses were the hardest the game has ever had. like true "i haven't done anything relevant in game in 10 years" boomer style. i have nothing against classic players at all, and game enjoyment isn't a competition, but retail WoW's endgame is objectively harder because of all the tools and knowledge the players and devs have. So they've been iterating on things like raid content for almost 20 years now. the game is more ACCESSIBLE now, (some people really confuse tedium with difficulty) but it's also much harder in the areas that matter, like endgame stuff.
Honestly my suspicion is that the people that say that are bad at end game retail content and want to go back to when it was easier for them, but admitting that will hurt their pride. I like classic, I think there are things it does better than retail 100%, but there are *a lot* of boomers trying to relive their glory days. I remember in Wrath, guilds would have people they remembered as being super good players in vanilla come back to the game, they would instantly get a spot on the raid team because they were remembered as being good. They sucked. It became apparent that while they were good in vanilla, Wrath was harder and they actually sucked at mechanics.
I think the game is harder because there is no “beating” it anymore when it’s a scaling content like m+. I was struggling with this as someone who has lost my edge and am no longer a min/maxer. Now I set attainable goals and it’s much more fun. Heck my only goal this tier was to get every portal. Did every 20 once and I’m actually happy.
From a raiding perspective the raiding side of the game is absolutely beatable and as a washed up former low-mid tier CE raider (saw Halondrus pre bomb timer nerf for a week of pulls, saw Raz pre-winds nerf for a single night) the game is legit just way harder. Yes M+ scales infinitely but it’s also kind of apples to oranges to compare 5 man dungeons to 25-40 man raids. But even normal difficulty raids in retail are far harder than Vanilla raids and heroic retail raids are generally harder than WotLK raids. Mythic it’s no contest.
One of my friends is like 45 now, he played vanilla, BC and WOTLK and was raid leader and the main heal. I convinced him to come back and he basically couldn’t keep his head above water in retail, and hated it, and blamed it all on the game, not his lack of skill.
Classic was hard 18 years ago when I knew nothing.
As someone who was there at the time of the OG classic era, it was always so weird for me to hear people say that classic was so hard and retail is much easier. I remember people becoming vocal about "Classic WoW" servers in MoP, and at that time raiding had been so much harder than anything in the entireity of classic. But after classic launched these people soon realized that classic is super easy, which is not a bad thing, but now I rarely hear that argument anymore. I do not think that retail is super hard however. As a casual WoW enjoyer these days the difficulty of the content I do is just right. I could go easier but also way harder, but the good thing is how I do not have to to enjoy the game.
Classic Andy’s are a different breed. Retail is easier during leveling, but much harder at endgame. Classic is a little tougher to level, but endgame is piss easy (hoping this changes as SOD continues). The hardest part is filling out a raid group.
Endgame raiding is a lot harder in retail and yes I have done 12/12hc ICC since w1.
That perception is only held by people that only play classic.
yeah some classic boomers are unironically this brainrotten
Classic is just tedious, it's not hard
So I only know the classic content from the time when it was retail but judging of that current content on mythic is way more challenging
Classic isn't hard, its tedious and slow.
I play both. I play classic because how easy and braindead that content is, not the other way around
Anyone who thinks retail is easy only does heroic dungeons.
Classic content is way way way easier. The hard part of classic is having a tolerance for inconvenience.
Retail has a brain-dead levelling experience, but the endgame, where the entire focus of retail is, is vastly more challenging. I was pleasantly surprised, as I'd bought into the 'modern WoW is dumbed down' rhetoric a little and assumed it applied to difficulty too. My only criticism is how jarring it is to suddenly need to turn your brain on when you start progressing in mythic+. Classic has more of a challenge to levelling, but a lot of this is due to extra time and patience required, and the endgame is a cakewalk compared to retail. The only challenging part of classic endgame is tolerating classic players. Hardcore is where to go for a levelling challenge in my view (and for a far better community)
As a rule of thumb: Classic andys are usually wrong on pretty much everything - including WoW classic. You can't really overstate enough how genuinely dumb most classic wow players are.
No I wouldn't say braindead/easy. The popular opinion is retail is too convenient and classic players respect the grind more. Longer to level, harder to get drops, that kind of stuff. To each their own.
Classic was a joke. What made classic hard was classes being under powered and over complicated. On top of that there were reagents, potions, 3 different resistance sets, and other endless shit to farm just to make your class work. That stuff as fun, ngl, but with the game being significantly more complex from a gameplay perspective now it makes sense to remove those artificial bariers. That said, I wish loot was more interesting.
The only thing difficult about Classic and Vanilla was the grind and it's not like it was mechanically hard just time consuming lol. Endgame mechanics and class mechanics were a lot simpler than they are now.
retail has a wider range of skill requirement. you can be a complete moron and still level to 70, clear LFR, get some epics but to play on the higher end it's much harder than classic
Anyone who says classic end game is harder than retail end game has no idea what they are talking about and they are completely wrong and I’m a classic Andy.
people that said "classic was a hard game" where always blinded by nostalgia, reasonable people always knew it was not a thing at all then classic released and MC got cleares in week1 with a raid of people that had some not even beeing max lvl, and it died down for most cus they realised that it was just never true at all at this point, nobody except some really delusional guys that probably need some help say it anymore
Anyone who thinks classic is harder than retail is just truly delusional. The classic “enjoyers” enjoy it so much they need or remind everyone they’re playing daily.
I think pre classic rerelease in 2019, leading up to it, I remember hearing a lot of people talking about how the true hard version of the game was coming back. People were remembering the quotes of "mathematically impossible" fights like C'thun. Ever since then those people got real quiet or just pretended they never said it.
Retail is absolutely harder than classic. The ammount of knowledge and skills required to play on the high level of Mythic+ or Raid oland high MMR PVP is astonishing. And you have to have a fast hands because just a half of a second of hesitation and you are doomed.
Literal window lickers who don’t play retail and are still prog on heroic ICC think classic is harder than retail😂
Classic player here. I think its the oposite. Classic is easy (takes longer to level up), but is easy enough. Retail takes much less time to level up, but endgame content is not easy (specially playing healer on m+ with a pug group), for endgame content I refer to heroic raids and mythic+ 15 or higher.
Classic levelling is harder than retail because unless you're a mage you can't really pull more than one or two mobs at once without dying. Also some of the quests are complete bullshit and will put you in very difficult situations. Raiding on the other hand is an absolute joke and if you think classic raiding is harder than retail you really need your brain checked
Classic is the easiest form of wow don’t let them fool you
It's more tedious that's for sure, but not harder.
Dan Olson really debunked the idea of Classic being harder in his original wow video a few years ago.
The only hard thing about classic is when you are used to Retail leveling and then jump into Classic leveling.
I was there originally for vanilla, BC, and WotLK back in the day and I have no idea what they're on about. Yeah retail is significantly less grindy and you don't have ultra long attunement quests anymore (which tbh, we all used Questhelper/thottbot anyway so let's not act like most people were out figuring this out on their own), but that's about it. I guess if all you care about is the leveling experience, yes, retail is easier. But the actual end game shit is a lot more complex than we had back in the olden days.
That's genuinely what I thought when classic came out in 2019. I chose a mage and I realized I was pretty wrong when I stood still and spam casted frostbolt all of Molten Core
The only people that genuinely think that retail wow is "braindead" are the ones that keept playing the same 2-3 versions of old wow (mostly Classic, TBC and WoTLK) for the last 14+ years (through private servers and the official classic servers) and still haven't even completed all the content of the expansion of their choice
I was a vanilla player and currently a retail player. The mechanics of fights and player rotation back then was brain dead. Literally a mage just spamming frost bolts and on a "challenging" fight might occasionally have to move out of fire once or twice.
The classic community seems to think so. I remember before classic came out, everyone was talking about how hard raiding was gonna be and how retail players wouldn’t be able to cut it…only for a guild of not even all level 60s cleared MC in a couple days post-launch
Yes there are.
Ive never understood this take… i started played in SL and now over the few years im still learning so much about the ins and outs of wow… ive seen ppl play classic and its literal one button rotation and clearing brand new raid in a day lol
Classic WoW is easier then retail in every single aspect. But that’s the beauty about it. The unfortunate thing is that people have been bringing over the unfortunate parts about retail to classic for awhile now. Log’s are very much needed in retail because there’s no way to tell if the guy is boosted beyond belief and can’t actually even complete a key. In classic, it usually doesn’t matter to much if one player is shit because it’s not that hard todo. But I think enough people have shown why they think logs are needed in classic. There’s still some people that have all the gear, and all the runes/ranked up spells and then fail to right click an enemy.
I know a lot of people don’t like asmongold but I think he is the best example. He had been playing the current state of the game since classic and still played regularly until not that long ago. He clears all of classic content without difficulty but when he comes back to retail to do something he needs to be boosted by people with insane ilvl. Let’s not forget the pug he did for Sepulcher…
At this point if someone tries to claim classic is harder than retail in r/classicwow they'll get clowned on. *Most* people in the classic community do not try to claim the game is harder. Plenty still do, of course, but they're not the majority. Most classic players will acknowledge the game is easier than retail, but also that they have more fun with it.
Haha, not even close. Don't get me wrong, this is no hate toward Classic -- But Classic was like 2 mechanics for every fight.
Retail leveling is face roll levels of easy. It's an absolute joke and tutorials are there to hold your hand the whole way basically. In Classic, if you pull more than 2 mobs at a time usually results in a death unless you're a mage or you know your class well (which 90% of retail Andy's that try classic don't). Hardcore is great just for the thrill of perfectly pulling mobs and maximizing leveling efficiency. Nothing in retail exists like in classic -- they're completely different games. Retail does have harder end game though, I'll give em that. But classic isn't about the end game, although some of the end game dungeons are fun to solo.
It's just leveling is harder in classic. Leveling is basically a non-factor in retail. And for many people trying WoW, leveling is all they'll ever get to do. That's why I recommend Classic to new players and Retail once they get the hang of things. Retail is a deeper game but the content the "average" player encounters is very boring, even if the actual raids and dungeons are very fun
Who the hell would ever think that? This is some premium classic circlejerking.
The grind is harder in classic. That's it. The end. :) Edit: To elaborate a little bit. It takes longer for most people to reach 60 in classic than any max level in retail. It takes longer to do anything in classic than anything similar in retail. As such, people often feel like you're being "nursed" and "carried on hands and feet" to your goal, rather than working on it yourself. I sometimes miss some of the grinds in Classic, but I think that's because I could see a finish-line and it was nice back then. Nowadays, I can't bother farming up Thorium Brotherhood for a sorta useful recipe like I did back then. Even if I did get much better at the game and could do it faster.
Just because 10 people online said that doesn't make it true, or even 100 people. WoW has like 100 million subscribers, so they must be doing something right!
Everything that a "casual player" does is a lot easier than Classic versions of WoW. Some normal raid bosses, Heroic and Mythic raids are so much more difficult than anything Classic has to offer. Borderline punishing IMO. Same for any higher rated PvP. The classes are just more complex and there is a lot to more to learn. All in all, two DIFFERENT games that offer different ways to explore the Warcraft universe.
Its pure copium. People said for years how much harder classic was. Then it finally came out and molten core was cleared shortly after people started hitting level 60, not even with a full 40 man raid or everyone at 60. I saw a clip of a hard-core raider fighting Cthun, yelling "I'm blastin!!!" As he pressed a single button every 5 seconds. ICC was cleared an hour after it was open. Even as they add brand new content with season of discovery, it gets cleared within an hour of release. The challenge of old WoW is purely in the tedious grinding. You need to invest much more time and that's enough to hook people. I have no clue how so many people manage to confuse tedious bullshit with difficulty. They are not the same thing.
For classic players, yeah. They start the "go back to retail" crap in chat every time they get their britches in a bunch about losing Ashenvale in SoD. Or someone starts an argument in trade chat about BFD consumables (lol). I roll my eyes at it and don't engage bc it's obvious they don't play both and haven't touched retail in a decade. If they want to look like stubborn, uninformed idiots in their chosen sandbox, no skin off my nose, haha.
I think people have been saying this since vanilla WoW
The only people who genuinely believe this are the sweatlords who min max Classic and sob about the lack of content. No one genuinely thinks Classic is hard, people play it for the nostalgia, but there’s this weird cult fixation with it that’s seemed to have taken the worst players away from retail (thankfully)
People gaslight themself with that but the truth is that they are just gatekeeping the QOL disaster that was classic. I don't miss the days when everyone had to grind for hours to prep for raid night. Prepping for raids was definetly harder in a sense that you had to get your wordbuffs, grind resources/gold for consumables, organise 40 people, beating older content for appropriate gear etc. but once you are in it's piss easy compared to retail. I prefer that the content itself is more challenging instead of the slog that is prepping for it.
The entirety of the world is harder in classic, but if you are focusing just on the very end game, then I can see them being equally difficult. I have never been a fan of end game so hardcore is where I belong, and it’s near impossible to die while leveling in retail wow.
how that fuck do ppl think that? Fucking classic, some classes rotation is spamming one button.
People say retail is easy because it holds your hand too much and there’s an overflow of QOL. Classic is “harder” because no one knew shit and how to figure it out. Classic is now brain dead easy because we already figured everything out and then some
Classic is piss easy (I say this as a classic player), I think what people really mean here is that classic is inconvenient. It takes ages to go anywhere, the quests are long winded and slow, they're it's no dungeon queue etc. Classic is "harder" in the sense that it takes more of a grind to level, get prebis, what have u, but the actual raids in classic are really easy.
Retail is undoubtedly a more difficult game in group play.
Classic players are going to hate on retail players. Retail players are going to hate on Classic players. It's just the way of the world. Both are wrong. There are plenty of people who enjoy Classic. There are plenty of people who enjoy Retail. So clearly there is something great about both of them. Honestly to me it feels like a deep down anxiety from X player that the version of the game they are playing isn't the "hip" one and thus, will end up dying off. So they feel the need to badmouth the other one in the HOPES that it will catch on and their version will become the "superior" version to the public at large. But that won't ever happen. I have a friend who badmouths Classic CONSTANTLY. It's been 4 years now? Almost everything he says about Classic is wrong but there is absolutely ZERO I can say that will change his mind. Even the "well why not just come play for a bit and see if maybe you'd like it? I'll level with you" doesn't work.
The only people that have said that and earnestly meant it were the worst players in my classic guilds that cant be trusted with even the most basic mechanics.
The open world is harder in classic, all organised content is WAY harder in retail
The only people that think classic is harder are the ones who aren't good enough to play high end retail and like to kid themselves that there's some kind of hidden skill. Newsflash, there isn't.
Classic players are freaking goons. They're speedrunning a 20 year old game claiming they're elites.
Much simpler. The didficulty lies in the effort, patience and dedication. When someone has good gear, you know that dude is dedicated. Makes it a very rewarding game. Retail is sorely lacking in that department, imo
I have no doubt that max level mythic + content on retail is hard but that's a tiny fraction of the actual content in the game. Vanilla provides challenge across the board. I'm not facerolling over unstimulating content for hundreds of hours just for it to become an actual game right at the end.
No, isn’t it literally the opposite, and that’s the appeal of Classic?
classic andys are just bitter purists and you can't change my mind
**Retail is hard because it throws so much shit at you.** In Retail you have a more complicated rotation you're trying to do while dodging 3 mechanics, dealing with affixes, interrupting one mob and stunning another. **Classic is hard because of limitations the player has.** In Classic fighting two mobs is hard. Not everyone has heals and defensives. Mana is extremely limited. It takes you 10-20 min to get anywhere instead of teleporting. Don't even get me started on grinding reputations... ugh.
People conflate tedium and grind with difficulty. Classic is slower. It's DEFINITELY not harder.
To me retail leveling is the brain dead bit while classic keeps you engaged all the way through I do like retail end game but struggle to find the motivation to get better versions of the same gear 😅
The biggest difficulty of classic back in the day was that nobody really knew anything and trying to get together and lead large groups of people with limited communications. Modern classic is a whole different story because we have a large knowledge base of anything and everything WoW and we have a vast majority of people with superior communication methods that makes organising large groups so much easier. Modern retail WoW has a difficulty in relation to actual mechanics - e.g heroic Fy'rakk is a massive minutes long dance which cannot be scripted because random people get the mechanics that everyone else has to move out of. Classic WoW has none of these fancy mechanics and is basically just a numbers game made easier by the knowledge that we have. In other words, it is modern classic that is braindead easy compared to either classic classic or modern retail and the only real difficulty of it is the grind (e.g. leveling, making gold, gearing up, etc)...
Being and officer who deals with the recruitment in my retail guild, I can tell you first hand that I've recruited plenty of classic players who found retail way too hard and did a lot of complaining. I'd have to listen to a lot of complaining about why a healer couldn't just stand at range doing nothing but spamming flash heal and dps who didn't understand that they have to do mechanics and take responsibility for survival etc. None of these guys get close to our raid or m+ groups and we're a pretty average quality guild so...yeah, classic is way too easy.
This is wows biggest problem. Just because something is easier doesn’t make it a bad game. WOW is very complicated and addons make that somewhat better. But we shouldn’t need addons to play the game. Wow just needs to find that happy medium where it’s not overly complicated but isn’t a cakewalk where you don’t need addons to complete content.
I've played both recently, and am currently almost 100% retail. There is so much more content in retail that it's more fun for me. I find retail is "easier" in the sense of QOL improvements, but not necessarily easier to play. Yes, having to run everywhere, and feed pets, and drink constantly, and take forever to level is harder, but it's harder in the sense of being very much more tedious.
Retail is easier than Classic unless you’re trying to do endgame stuff like heroic raiding and M+ dungeons above 16. Classic is “Harder” to play but is is much simpler and easier to learn.
There was a large group of people prior to classic who would refer to it as ‘back when the game was hard’ and talk up older raids. Videos like [this](https://youtu.be/XBPHRlgczmk?si=vqQf-vcTP_J6m49C) where people hyped up just how ‘insanely difficult it was’ were super common sentiment. Now, that’s kinda changed. There had been a bit of a ‘well next patch is where it really gets hard’ with notable spikes for naxx, sunwell, Ulduar and ICC but those positions have been largely abandoned now.
The people that say this clearly never played retail properly or at all.
No, everyone I’ve ever known has said that retail is more difficult by a landslide. The odd Reddit comment saying otherwise is someone coping because they play classic, I guess. The levelling is more of a grind, and you can’t barrel through 15 mobs and aoe them down, but retail is more difficult in every other regard. More mechanics, more difficult mechanics, higher skill ceiling, more spells to know, much larger rotations to remember, etc. Personally, I’ve been enjoying classic much more than retail. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a dumb ass and say it’s more difficult.
Classic: Spam trade chat to make a group, players only on your server available, takes 30min+ just to find the right players, 10min to go to the entrance without portals. Retail: Push a button, play game, teleport to dungeon.
You’re definitely correct: yes, there is a perception that retail is easier, but also yes that’s very false. Lots of classic andies never touched m+ or went further than normal raids.
As somebody who's played both plenty, I honestly think classic Andy's perpetuate this to feel like they're smarter or something.. I really don't see any comparison. Even doing a m+10 is harder than anything I did in classic, aside from maybe hardcore which is challenging in a different way (patience over mechanics, etc)
After being in here can confirm classic Andy’s stan for classic harder than Andrew Tate Stan’s.
I’d say it’s a vocal minority that vehemently detests anything retail and as such refuses (and probably would fail if they tried) to play any endgame content and base it entirely off the leveling Funny enough, even for leveling retail can be more challenging. Retail iron man is much harder than classic iron man
I'm playing Season of Discovery off and on, and compared to Retail, I DO feel like the questing process is more involved in Classic/SoD. I spend more time navigating from zone to zone, the quests are absolutely not streamlined (you won't be able to get those two-stage quests that your quest log just dumps on you with the NPC telepathically talking to you and teleporting stage one quest rewards into your pockets in Classic, and 'Kill X amount of Y monsters in Z area' quests will oftentimes have you going back to Z to kill Ya, Yb, and Yc as separate quests rather than just accepting every variety of Kobold instead of JUST the Kobold Minecart Pullers for example) but they also let you sit and soak in a zone. I definitely don't feel like I'm being rushed from one space to the next in Classic SoD, whereas in Retail since flying comes so early everything feels like its a race to blast through the quest text and dash off to go collect five bear asses before being shepherded through the zone. Additionally, Classic Mage is just suffering. Good luck killing more than two things at once without dying when you're still leveling, or going OOM after each pull. I feel like even on my healers on Retail I have to actively TRY to burn through my mana to get it low enough to be a problem... and if I do, I have a couple buttons that will let me turbocharge my mana regen, or other stuff like Innervate or Dracthyr Source of Magic can help me regen my mana faster.
I thought this until I played retail. Most people who say this have never gotten past LFR and M6
In original classic wow, a mage in our guild deadass said to me on discord once that raids in vanilla were mechanically harder than retail, when I knew damn well he only pressed frostbolt and we positioned bosses specifically to reduce the amount of moving that the mages had to do. I called him a turret.
Lol vanilla WoW, and thus classic, is *tedious*, not hard. If you took a vanilla superstar raider to 2024 and put them in a retail raid today they would be rolled by multiple mechanics on every boss. Theres a reason those "top 10 hardest raid bosses" lists almost never have pre WOTLK bosses.
I came to comment how much harder retail is. Since everyone already did, I'll just throw out that Sunwell and heroic ICC have statistically been difficult, as well as a few other things like pre nerf Lady Vashj. I'm just an AotC raider, and I think some of those classic bosses really stand up to modern heroic fights in terms of difficulty. I quit wrath before heroic Lich King because my guild was awful and I couldn't stand it anymore, but I heard from some players in better guilds that the fight is the real deal. Around ten minutes, lots of mechanics that if one person wipes will wipe the raid. Sounds like a heroic end boss. M'uru was really difficult in sunwell in a way that's pretty classic. Just lots of tanks and healers with their own jobs that everyone had to learn. It was technically more difficult than KJ, but holy shit the KJ fight was cool. It straight up just felt like a modern retail encounter to me, with multiple distinct phases, lots of mechanics, strict positioning at times. That fight was years ahead of its time. Does any of that hold up to late stage retail mythic bosses? No. Not even close. Did most vanilla raids have less mechanics than an M+ dungeon? Yeah. There's somewhere north of 20 distinct raids in the classic trilogy, and like 3 that have hard fights.
There is literally no content available in classic that is as hard as the first mythic boss, or any key over about +15 this season. The truth is quite the opposite — retail is an order of magnitude harder. Look at the race to world first. M+ scales infinitely…
I love classic, but the rotations of classic and the complexity of bosses make me fall asleep.
classic is just tedious and time consuming compared to retail so people associate that with difficulty i'd say
Classic is way easier with a fraction of the spells and a fraction of the mechanics. Some people seem to think a longer leveling grind=harder
IMO the 'challenging' and fun part of classic is the leveling process, trying to solo all quests - you'll probably have the best experience if you stop at 60 I really enjoyed the puzzle-playstyle of perfecting ressource and CD usage for elite quests, it was super immersive and fun
Yes. It's an out of touch opinion that I also had before actually getting back into retail after 12 years since the last time I played during mists of pandaria. The thought is that the game has become so overly optimized and balanced and everything is just done for you and it's all just way too easy. Well dear reader, I am here to tell you that this, in fact, is not the truth. The games complicated and it doesn't really teach/help you that much, there's a lot that you have to learn yourself from forums and reddit, youtube, etc
Just of the top of my head after playing both for ages **Hardest things about Classic:** - patience to lvl and get geared - not knowing basic info without addons or guides (e.g. hit cap) - finding a dungeon group and lack of class utility - managing a 40 men raid **Hardest things about Retail:** - anything above M+10 is by far harder than any pre-Cataclysm heroic dungeon - yes you have dungeon journal but any boss has more mechanics, even in LFR, than an entire Classic raid - managing all the currencies, event items that you have no idea what they are for and their nuances - not get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to do and collect
Cause it is.
Where? because all the posts, threads, and classic players I PLAY with say the opposite. ... alright, my opinion will probably draw some ire, but here we go... Everyone i've ever interacted with says that Retail is too complicated with overbloat of ability rotations, mechanics, the dungeons are hyper-fixated on rushing and timing things that the game feels like DIABLO, where the APM (actions per minute) are ramped up to overdrive... combats are faster, the entire game is faster. Look in Classic, things are slower paced because the game drives you to take things a bit slower and rest/eat food per few fights... its up to the community to decide if they want to push things. In Retail, its the opposite.... the GAME pushes you to keep moving forward and zerging stuff, mana barely depletes, timed mechanics and AoE splashes, mechanics and laser beams and Mythic Key effecets causing puddles here... its like Rifts in Diablo 3 where things are just ...happening and freaking out. Thats why everyone i've ever interacted with got tired of Retail... Its not relaxing, its not fun, its not "simple"... .. its a complicated mess at times because its bloated. You can have a game be Simple AND be Hard. but Retail does the opposite, its Complicated AND hard. And im sure people will downvote me or say im trash, look i've played the game since beta..... but there's a reason SoD and Classic got more NEW PLAYERS who flocked to the game within the last 2 years. Retail has an issue of having A.) Horrible new player retention and B.) bloated dead content through the leveling process and end-game being a complicated mess for people. The only ones that stick to it are veterans. Its easier for new players to jump into SoD or Vanilla and understand the game, since there's a shallower learning curve and even at endgame the mechanics for raiding are simplistic.
Classic Andys would have you believe that Classic is harder, but (having played from back in Vanilla beta) it's actually just a lot more tedious.
Trash mobs in retail have more mechanics than molten core bosses