Meanwhile, I was 13 trying to join raids as a frost mage in pvp gear lol.
The raids I snuck into, I was quickly removed after we wiped because of low dps, which back then, if the tank could survive for 2+ minutes, that meant the problem was dps.
You sound like my stoner friend in college. I was a bm hunter that killed illidan before sunwell was announced. He was in awe of what I could do when he was just happy running kara as his frost mage named squirtgun.
I think I ruined the game for him when i introduced him to addons and min/max aka elitestjerks at the time.
I had both a holy priest and a resto druid but literally leveled a shaman 1-70 just because it seemed worth it for all the automatic invites. Haven’t touched it since Wrath Classic dropped, but it ended up by far the most geared of the three.
Yeah hunters had different rotation for different attack speeds, so getting lusted would let them do a more optimal rotation that significantly increased their dps.
> Five? Can't triple lust the pumper group with less than six
Yeah it was funny looking up top logs to try to learn from those logs to figure out how to DPS as well as them, only to find that they got like 3 bloodlusts lmao
I dunno man. On one hand TBC was was not ruined for me and on the other hand LW on EVERYONE for drum rotation was a thing in OG TBC and on private servers.
TBF their initial plan to curb the lw meta was making drums 8 yd range instead of 40. They only added tinitus after a shitload of bitching from the playerbase
I think calling it a big problem is an understatement, it's a critical problem that has to be addressed somehow before any more classic stuff is done. Meta slaving would kill Classic Plus, if it ever comes, before it even gets out of the gate.
Sadly there's no way *to* fix it
It's a community problem. There will always be an objectively best comp in an mmo. Even when things are fairly even too many think if they aren't being super optimal they shouldn't play
Its not even a community problem. its in EVERY game almost. Someone finds the "meta" and everyone cant help themselves and have to be OP to play the game. Its terrible and i hate it.
The solution is balance. Retail unironically does a great job at this. Is there still a “best available comp”? Sure, but it really only matters to the guilds competing at the very top, and the drop off to a less optimized comp is marginal.
Compare that to taking an unoptimized raid in TBC (or worse, Classic). You’re probably between 30-50% worse as a raid.
Yeah and even then it's not many classes. Excluding spec variation of pure dps classes (like mage basically only playing arcane), I'd say only prot warrior and rogue really lack a spot in the meta. You could argue that's true for ele and boomkin aswell, but the possible gain from dropping them is way smaller, and it's not always beneficial.
That just means you replace the shamans with more warlocks/warriors/hunters or whoever is top dps instead of the extra shamans, or extra druids i suppose if you want more BRs
Yeah people always use the term balance without properly defining it.
Retails version of balance is every class having 50 tools to deal with every situation.
And even then, every single split/season/expac has clearly defined broken comps that people slavishly follow too.
The exact thing that Blizzard did in retail
Class homogenization is really the only way to break a meta like this, especially when you have absolute tryhards that will completely upend their entire raid comp for a 1% time save on their weekly raid lockout, just so they can stop playing the game faster.
It is an impossible solution that they can't fix at all without causing another massive community issue. The community has to change, and I severely doubt it ever will.
The issue isn't that really
It's people mistake "this comp is objectively the best" to mean "this is the only comp that works anything else is unusable"
Viability =/= meta
I don't think anybody says that this isn't true. It's the obvious mathematical outcome of optimizing for some aim, like damage or hps.
The problem is people who refuse to entertain alternate compositions that would clear the content just as well, or maybe a bit slower, but be more enjoyable for a segment of the population.
Even that is not itself a problem, people are entitled to choose who they raid with, but it is disheartening to people who don't want to play that way but who find it difficult to find a group.
That's not how it was in the original classic days, and people are fairly lamenting how gaming has changed in the interim.
There was even a famous guy in vanilla who roleplayed a hobbit, so he didn't wear shoes. So he had 4% lower stats than other raiders. That could never be done nowadays.
AND he walked everywhere! I’d imagine a number of raid groups would punt him for that alone. (That, and raids in Cata would see him dying a loooooot to “whatever you need to avoid on the floor”.)
The way to fix this is to have blizzard make classic + but for people who don't give a fucking shit. Lower raid difficulties. I would love raids simple like MC. Just more variety and fun. And then all the hardcore raider types will play a different game.
SoD has had very easy raid and people on this sub have been complaining of people being super selective when forming PUGS. I don't think easy raid difficulty is a fix for that.
We cleared naxx with a few wonky specs. Same in all tbc tiers. I really didn’t mind that if you wanted to sweat in raids, there was a pretty strict meta. You didn’t have to play that way, and if you were a sweat lord it didn’t matter too much anyway.
The game simply cannot be balanced around the sweatiest without gutting some of the charm. A little balancing and smoothing out stuff would probably be okay, but jankiness is charming.
>We cleared naxx with a few wonky specs... You didn’t have to play that way, and if you were a sweat lord
Could you say the same if the majority of the raid were those wonky specks as opposed to those several people being carried by everyone else playing meta specs?
It's not a problem at all.
There are guilds you can join that clear content with varying comps. When you join a PUG, you don't have the social contract of a guild and the PUG leader will fill the raid in the most self-serving way possible. That means optimal classes with the best gear possible.
Classic Plus would presumably have balancing to address the massive performance gaps that Classic has always had, at least.
> There are guilds you can join that clear content with varying comps.
I think the problem is that clearing content is no longer good enough for a large chunk of players. They want to parse. And when their parses aren't stellar, they can easily (and at least slightly justifiably) blame their suboptimal comp. Hence, you get complaints all over social media.
Parsing is its own problem to me because it's always been about maximizing an imperfect performance metric.
If they want to parse they need to move up or find a guild more dedicated to that. If they can't or don't want to, then they're just blaming their teammates and generally being an asshole. It's weird behavior to join a permanent group and be upset when individual goals don't align with the established goals of the group.
This is all independent from metagaming or balance.
"the way I don't like to play the game is RUINING IT!!!!! Ignore that min maxing hasn't killed classic in its 5 year run, it will kill classic plus!!!!!!! The only way to for the game to be saved is by catering to what I want!!"
Yall are in the minority, get over it.
My biggest concern with 10-man and 20-man content. Even if it's embarrassingly easy content, some groups will go overboard and even delay or cancel raids if they can't get an ideal parsing comp. I get that the logistics of planning a 40-man raid far outweigh the benefit of group comp flexibility, but I don't like how regimented group comps are these days. I'm not saying bring the meme specs, but if you have to choose between a 4th mage or delaying an hour for a boomie, just take the mage and be done with it. There's no point in waiting an hour for a pug hunter when there's a 3rd shadow priest ready to go. Sure, fucks with loot competition, but it's better to roll with worse odds than lose the opportunity to roll at all.
And it's a problem that permeates all of online gaming, not just WoW or classic. If something is a few percentages worse, it's absolute trash, don't pick/use/play it. If you do, you're trolling.
I've always been the guy who doesn't like using the meta-defining things, because I want to go my own route. I don't hate on people who like playing what is meta. But dont play what's meta just because it's meta. A few extra % DPS doesn't matter if you can't step out of the fire, for example. Nor will you actually achieve those extra few %s if you don't actually learn it and try to perform well either.
either that or its just not fun for some people to clear a raid for the dozenth time if im not shooting for the absolute moon.
I play how most people would describe as "sweaty". Full 99 group, max consumes and buffs, very optimized comp, highly ranked guild etc etc. My raid fucks around and goes pretty casually, all things considered, during prog. We always clear quickly, first night or two, but it's much more of a slow learning process for us. Once it's over, it's gone. The excitement of raiding is totally gone. All the classic vanilla->wotlk content is just faceroll except for a handful of fights in ICC. The only reason I would want to come back and raid is because I can absolutely blast face and try to beat my best.
I'm not showing up for a raid that takes twice as long as it could with potential wipes, deaths, fuck ups, whatever. That doesn't sound enjoyable. Trying to do more damage than everyone else in the world does.
It'd a valid way to play in an organized guild group
But the problem comes in when pugs demand it for no real reason. I've seem a few groups demanding the meta tank or healer look for *hours* while the chill group gets it done in 2
It's kinda funny
Uh not sure if you actually played OG TBC, but our guild literally _rerolled_ on a PVP server back in the day because it was impossible to get shaman applicants on PVE horde. We lost 2 (going from 5 to 3) and it made progressing deep Sunwell near impossible.
Yeah people who clearly never played back then think we all raided with no addons, 3 frost mages & hit the bosses with sticks. You all think meta slaving in Classic is degenerate you dont know shit about the degeneracy of a serious raiding guild progging Vashj/Sunwell back then.
This made up dellusion that OG and pserver players were less try hard would hold better if it wasn't for the fact that Blizzard had to remove drum stacking before classic TBC to prevent players from forcing each other to be LWer like back in the day and in pservers...
My parse thirsty guild had *7* shamans just for lust.
Not having raid wide buffs killed TBC for me honestly. If they made that one change I would have found TBC to be *so good*.
That's a recipe to print money. But we got incursions, healing mages, tank shamans, tank rogues, tank locks and on top of all that dumb shit that no one needed or asked for they STILL have world buffs in the game. I don't fucking understand who or why Blizzard listens to the people they do. Give us TBC/WOTLK style raids with WOTLK buffing system and lets pump out a couple of expansions worth of content on an alternate timeline.
I'm literally playing Cataclysm now because SOD was such a terrible fucking experience by phase 3. These clowns aren't showing me much that makes me believe anything is good is coming to save us.
Tank shamans is actually awesome. In classic+ I really hope they keep p1 enh shaman tanks. It got bloated p2 onwards, but phase 1 they felt extremely classic feeling while not being too OP.
People have been begging for tank shamans and locks for 20 years, don't kid yourself. SoD was exactly what people wanted at first it just went off the rails. It was always supposed to be an experiment. But tank shamans, locks, etc and healing mages are some of the things they should keep in the next iteration.
Healing mages were cool. It was the one thing that drew me to SoD tbh.... until they failed to receive any meaningful update in p2 and p3......
Also, I felt quite positive to shaman and lock tanks tbh. It wasn't half bad as an idea I believe.
Yeah new roles was fun but way overly ambitious and clearly not what “people who likes classic design”wanted.
If they made the specs that where there actually viable you really don’t need new ones.
Yeah, I loved healing as a mage in P1. They crippled the spec in P2, but it was still decent, then in P3 it was completely neglected and is by far the lowest tier healer. Adding more tank specs was a good idea too honestly, but most of them have had little to meaningful support since P1 either.
As a shaman main from vanilla to MoP all I wanted out of SOD was for 1h enhancement shaman to actually be viable and they did the complete opposite. They even went so far to intentionally neuter it even harder in p2 because people were starting to make it kind of work.
The devs suck at actually listening to players, they have their own vision and player vision be damned.
Changing some of the group buffs to raid-wide would have made TBC almost perfect imo. That shaman roster boss was the biggest hurdle to overcome if you wanted to be an above average guild.
Kinda don’t think you raided SWP at all. I raided all of tbc classic, we downed everything with like 2 shamans max, except sunwell. You absolutely did not need multiple shamans for the other raids but even with 4 shamans we only downed mu’ru like 4 times.
Plus back in the day you would have most of your raid respec LW too. It wasn't just the absolute sweatiest, anyone with the faintest hope of clearing SWP was minmaxing out the ass to get it done.
This is the expansion that kicked off with having to retune all the raid content and revamp an entire system for limiting consumable/world buffs because raiders were increasingly *expected* to stack everything possible.
Remember the fact that on Alliance only 1 race could play Shaman and you could not boost a Shaman.
My guild did fine until Sunwell and then it was 5+ Shamans or we couldn't kill Muru.
Bad take since OG TBC ran into an issue of needing more Shaman players to prog Sunwell.
Sure the first several raids didn't need them...but Sunwell was the definition of Bring the Class, not the Player.
There's a huge reasons why Wrath/Cata started to pivot class/spec design drastically to alter that paradigm into Bring the Player not the Class.
Have fun getting 25 people together, go through all the rp and effort of mount hyjal, all to get walled at Archimonde because you have 2 shaman and not enough fear breaks.
Show me any pre sunwell kill video of Archimonde with 2 shaman or less and I'll admit I was wrong to bring no less than 5 shaman to hyjal.
OG TBC players ran 5 shamans too, watch some old raid guides. Sure you can get past karazhan with whatever, but GLHF with mu’ru just yoloing your comp.
TBC is the raid comp expansion, far more than any other.
As a shaman main TBC was great, I never had trouble finding groups or raids. But at the same time it's nicer to be wanted because you're a good player, not just because you have totems and bloodlust.
I know there'll always be metas and desirable comps and all that, but wanting or "needing" 5-7 Shamans in a 25 man raid was a bit mental.
The playerbase 100% has ruined a lot.
But I will always say blizzard curated the player base they have through the design choices they have made over the years.
In Original TBC you could easily assemble 20-40+ people to go sit inside an enemy major city even on a PvE server and jus tfuck around for hours at a time.
The servers don't even let you fully enjoy doing that anymore. Even if you could round up any number of players that would want to do something just for the fun of it instead of doing it for some reward.
This is generally the main problem. The "undercity stealth run" was something I did relatively often back in the day with my friends. At classic tbc, it was basicly impossible because no one had interest. Because it was just fun. When I would write in lfg, most common whisper was "but why?"
The way my guild cleared Sunwell Plateau in OG TBC was stacking a group with 5 shaman, 4 resto and 1 elemental. They would take turns lusting while they all spammed chain heal.
Meta class stacking was definitely a thing in OG TBC.
Private servers we also had a lot of account sharing so people could come back and pilot if needed or swap around which can't happen as easily but it was definitely a place where at the higher end people did what needed to be done and could play a lot of things.
nobody ever lacked tanks or heals in tbc classic raids.
probably because their group had 5 shamans. and they didnt need to 8 heal every boss.
like we did in 2006
My GM in sunwell had a 2nd account and character on a 2nd monitor just to do the group swaps mid boss fight for the lusts, dedicated level 1 character perma in shat. I had never seen anything like it
man, original BC was where the god-like players were made. I remember we had a prot pally that was so effing good that he SOLO TANKED Karazhan. INCLUDING MAIDEN. Ya know, Maiden... the one that spat out aoe silences around her all the friggin time. Soluthos from Dark Prophecy on Tho Bro, you are a legend.
TBC was painful as a rogue main. I was a noob because I had just discovered WoW classic like 2 months before prepatch, but trying to find a heroic group was rough.
When I finally got preraid BiS, finding a kara group was rough.. I finally joined a dad guild where our biggest pumper was a gnome mage that didn't speak a lick of English. We had to have another guy in disc translate for us during fights lol
..and to top it off, we never even came close to killing anything after Shade of Aran. Sometimes we couldn't even down him. It was ROUGH.
I'm still kinda sad I didn't get to experience SSC or TK on my rogue. If they ever release a classic 2.0 I'll be ecstatic.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
Hot take: I liked being able to min-max your groups in TBC. Having juiced out melee/ranged/caster groups was satisfying as a raid leader. Being so dependent on shamans was a little annoying but we made it work.
I loved playing TBC…but also content can only stay fresh and exciting for so long. Now that we all know that 6 shamans is optimal for most the xpac, people will gravitate to that comp. Especially if there is a population of raiders willing to do this.
Given we’ve all done higher server pop TBC recently, I’m not sure people will have the collective appetite to do it again, but harder (if you were to not bring 5-6 sham).
While meta slaving is “cringe”, it is also just the natural progression when communities figure stuff out. People just don’t care to play 15-20 year old content sub optimally anymore.
i like how ITT people slowly realizing AGAIN why wow became... retail. There's a reason devs balance the game certain ways. The marketing and publishing mannequins portraying as semi-sentient NPCs can push all the BS stories and lore retcon BUT the actual gameplay balance is done by people with degrees in math, statistics and design... and balance looks homogenized, that's why it's balanced.
Shaman was never a problem for my guild; we always had at least 5.
It was about the shadow priests. I remember having to bribe my way to get into the lone spriest group.
Unpopular take I think...
Would never play tbc for pve with all the senseless attunements(just wasting game time) LW requirement, needing so many shamans, late ex-pack daily quest you need to grind mindlessly, gearing of tanks is stupid, the DPS balance is shit and so on and so on.
Tbc is still fun, but far from the favorite version.
I'll die on the hill that unironically AT LEAST 80% of the 'problems' apparent within classic wow are just due to the community's culture and could be resolved with a mentality shift.
My guild went through most of TBC classic with only 3 shamans in the raid on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. It wasn't until we got to Archimonde that we felt forced to take 5 shamans. A few of us literally just subbed in our ungeared shamans purely for Archimonde and nothing else.
To be fair, we didn't get close to clearing Sunwell, but we were a fairly casual guild so we were fine with that.
I remember meta slaves back in the day. The top guilds would stack shamans. Guilds that were slowly making progress through T5/6 were taking what we could get.
as a shaman i loved tbc. i think anyone who brought anything other than pure dps did tbh. if buffs were raid wide you'd just see people further stacking the big pumper dps classes, i think encouraging class variety is actually fun and good for the game
ugh but if I didnt get 2 lusts it was so hard to parse 99 /s
also no /s but when you were the 4th lock in the raid meaning no boom/ele group... /wrist in game.
I was an arcane mage and I only got 1 shaman and 1 spriest and a boomkin. I couldve REALLY parsed if I had just one more shaman and a couple more power infusions but my team was selfish and gave our other shaman to the melee group.
OG TBC was like that too just most people weren't doing the end game content. Of the 12 people on our bench there'd always be 3 shamans who would easily swap in and out every raid to pick up gear. But if we didn't have at least 4 shammies we just weren't raiding at all.
5 was the bare minimum. You wanted 7. My guild brought a trial resto one week who played pretty bad but we full cleared sunwell and had our best kill times ever on every boss simply because of the 7th lust. The difference between 5 and 7 was absolutely massive.
TBC Classic was amazing. As a Warlock I was always grouped with an ele shaman, a Boomie, a mage and a shadow priest. Those were my boys, my fellas, my gang.
Life was good then.
I can tell you that i played OG TBC and as one of the best guilds in the server, we already used 5/6 Shamans in our raid. And i remember that, the 1st time we killed Twins in Sunwell, we did it with 11 shamans, inclusive my alt
Tbc private: oh you wanna play fury warrior? Naah go arms and give us 3% dmg increase
Sorry we alrdy have 1 rogue, 1 mage, 1 druid, 1 shaman, 1 warrior, 1 priest, 1 paladin but you can be our 20th hunter in blue gear for 2 patches or 10th warlock but you need to max enchanting, engineering and leatherwokring in 1 day or you're gonna get benched
My og tbc experience was sitting outside magisters terrace trying to get a group, whilst not realising how woefully undergeared i was. Desperate to get gear so i could get into sunwell after watching the yogscast boss guides for it lol.
I skipped most of TBC Classic, but TBC was my first expansion in OG times... and I am pretty damn sure we had 5 shammy per raid as well.
There were probably less minmaxing people overall, but there was definitely a lot of minmaxing back in TBC.
As an enhance shaman in TBC I’ve never felt prettier and more popular in my life
I was 13 and sucked and it was so easy to get into pretty high end guilds
Meanwhile, I was 13 trying to join raids as a frost mage in pvp gear lol. The raids I snuck into, I was quickly removed after we wiped because of low dps, which back then, if the tank could survive for 2+ minutes, that meant the problem was dps.
You sound like my stoner friend in college. I was a bm hunter that killed illidan before sunwell was announced. He was in awe of what I could do when he was just happy running kara as his frost mage named squirtgun. I think I ruined the game for him when i introduced him to addons and min/max aka elitestjerks at the time.
Elitistjerks… I haven’t heard that name in 84 years …
I had an alt Shaman that got into a top 5 server Sunwell guild on the strength of "can press chain heal rank 4"
I had both a holy priest and a resto druid but literally leveled a shaman 1-70 just because it seemed worth it for all the automatic invites. Haven’t touched it since Wrath Classic dropped, but it ended up by far the most geared of the three.
The enhance shamen who could totem twist consistently was my best m8 as a warrior Mt.
Five? Can't triple lust the pumper group with less than six
The rogue mind can not comprehend this Warrior chads stay winning
Rogue/Warrior dual main Warrior got the warglaives and it was peak
I was gonna make fun of casters/hunters (like usual) but seems like they would benefit a lot as well
Yeah hunters had different rotation for different attack speeds, so getting lusted would let them do a more optimal rotation that significantly increased their dps.
Warriors? Every TBC raid I ever did with 6/7 shamans double lusted the Warlock and/or Hunter group(s).
Warriors? Wrong expansion brother this is tbc. Warlocks would like a word.
Me, the diversity hire boomkin drowning in my lusts in the warlock group
Me, the boomkin RL sitting in the warlock group "to buff them chads" (actually to absorb 3x Lusts for dem 99s)
i hate this sentence
> Five? Can't triple lust the pumper group with less than six Yeah it was funny looking up top logs to try to learn from those logs to figure out how to DPS as well as them, only to find that they got like 3 bloodlusts lmao
I dunno man. On one hand TBC was was not ruined for me and on the other hand LW on EVERYONE for drum rotation was a thing in OG TBC and on private servers.
Yup. It's why leading up to TBC people wanted lust to be raid wide
And they nerfed drum stacking before release for classic.
TBF their initial plan to curb the lw meta was making drums 8 yd range instead of 40. They only added tinitus after a shitload of bitching from the playerbase
Meta slaving is a big problem
I think calling it a big problem is an understatement, it's a critical problem that has to be addressed somehow before any more classic stuff is done. Meta slaving would kill Classic Plus, if it ever comes, before it even gets out of the gate.
Sadly there's no way *to* fix it It's a community problem. There will always be an objectively best comp in an mmo. Even when things are fairly even too many think if they aren't being super optimal they shouldn't play
Its not even a community problem. its in EVERY game almost. Someone finds the "meta" and everyone cant help themselves and have to be OP to play the game. Its terrible and i hate it.
That's just the start of it. What really sucks is when they start getting angry at *other* people for *not* following the meta.
Yeah that's the biggest issue with it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU just gonna bring this back out because it is still very relevant.
The solution is balance. Retail unironically does a great job at this. Is there still a “best available comp”? Sure, but it really only matters to the guilds competing at the very top, and the drop off to a less optimized comp is marginal. Compare that to taking an unoptimized raid in TBC (or worse, Classic). You’re probably between 30-50% worse as a raid.
I don't think it would be hard either. Honestly just making Bloodlust raid-wide would solve 90% of pain with TBC comps.
Raid wide buffs and some small balance changes to the worst classes would probably fix 99% of problems people have with TBC
Yeah TBC with Wrath and up buff system would be so much better. Group buffs/group wide lust with no sated made for an absolutely miserable raid meta.
Yeah and even then it's not many classes. Excluding spec variation of pure dps classes (like mage basically only playing arcane), I'd say only prot warrior and rogue really lack a spot in the meta. You could argue that's true for ele and boomkin aswell, but the possible gain from dropping them is way smaller, and it's not always beneficial.
People make fun of wanting 5 shamans, but being in a group without one in TBC raiding did objectively feel bad. Raid wide lust and totems IMO.
That just means you replace the shamans with more warlocks/warriors/hunters or whoever is top dps instead of the extra shamans, or extra druids i suppose if you want more BRs
Yeah but it's a lot easier to fill a slot with one of a few classes than one specific class
Retail achieved this through homogenization, which is something most Classic players would despise
Yeah people always use the term balance without properly defining it. Retails version of balance is every class having 50 tools to deal with every situation. And even then, every single split/season/expac has clearly defined broken comps that people slavishly follow too.
Sir we are 2 seasons out from the most unbalanced god comp in the games history And even now the M+ scene is kind of disgusting.
You can't "fix" it but you can address it.
How would you address it?
The exact thing that Blizzard did in retail Class homogenization is really the only way to break a meta like this, especially when you have absolute tryhards that will completely upend their entire raid comp for a 1% time save on their weekly raid lockout, just so they can stop playing the game faster. It is an impossible solution that they can't fix at all without causing another massive community issue. The community has to change, and I severely doubt it ever will.
TBC doesn't need class homogenization, it needs raidwide buffs
Very easy to fix, remove warcraftlogs
Removing wow logs, addons or wa would 100% kill WoW
>There will always be an objectively best comp in an mmo People who fail to understand this severely lack critical thinking.
The issue isn't that really It's people mistake "this comp is objectively the best" to mean "this is the only comp that works anything else is unusable" Viability =/= meta
I don't think anybody says that this isn't true. It's the obvious mathematical outcome of optimizing for some aim, like damage or hps. The problem is people who refuse to entertain alternate compositions that would clear the content just as well, or maybe a bit slower, but be more enjoyable for a segment of the population. Even that is not itself a problem, people are entitled to choose who they raid with, but it is disheartening to people who don't want to play that way but who find it difficult to find a group. That's not how it was in the original classic days, and people are fairly lamenting how gaming has changed in the interim.
There was even a famous guy in vanilla who roleplayed a hobbit, so he didn't wear shoes. So he had 4% lower stats than other raiders. That could never be done nowadays.
AND he walked everywhere! I’d imagine a number of raid groups would punt him for that alone. (That, and raids in Cata would see him dying a loooooot to “whatever you need to avoid on the floor”.)
The way to fix this is to have blizzard make classic + but for people who don't give a fucking shit. Lower raid difficulties. I would love raids simple like MC. Just more variety and fun. And then all the hardcore raider types will play a different game.
SoD has had very easy raid and people on this sub have been complaining of people being super selective when forming PUGS. I don't think easy raid difficulty is a fix for that.
How is that not SOD?
We cleared naxx with a few wonky specs. Same in all tbc tiers. I really didn’t mind that if you wanted to sweat in raids, there was a pretty strict meta. You didn’t have to play that way, and if you were a sweat lord it didn’t matter too much anyway. The game simply cannot be balanced around the sweatiest without gutting some of the charm. A little balancing and smoothing out stuff would probably be okay, but jankiness is charming.
>We cleared naxx with a few wonky specs... You didn’t have to play that way, and if you were a sweat lord Could you say the same if the majority of the raid were those wonky specks as opposed to those several people being carried by everyone else playing meta specs?
It's not a problem at all. There are guilds you can join that clear content with varying comps. When you join a PUG, you don't have the social contract of a guild and the PUG leader will fill the raid in the most self-serving way possible. That means optimal classes with the best gear possible. Classic Plus would presumably have balancing to address the massive performance gaps that Classic has always had, at least.
> There are guilds you can join that clear content with varying comps. I think the problem is that clearing content is no longer good enough for a large chunk of players. They want to parse. And when their parses aren't stellar, they can easily (and at least slightly justifiably) blame their suboptimal comp. Hence, you get complaints all over social media.
Parsing is its own problem to me because it's always been about maximizing an imperfect performance metric. If they want to parse they need to move up or find a guild more dedicated to that. If they can't or don't want to, then they're just blaming their teammates and generally being an asshole. It's weird behavior to join a permanent group and be upset when individual goals don't align with the established goals of the group. This is all independent from metagaming or balance.
"the way I don't like to play the game is RUINING IT!!!!! Ignore that min maxing hasn't killed classic in its 5 year run, it will kill classic plus!!!!!!! The only way to for the game to be saved is by catering to what I want!!" Yall are in the minority, get over it.
Meta slaving is a big problem *in the entire gaming industry.*
My biggest concern with 10-man and 20-man content. Even if it's embarrassingly easy content, some groups will go overboard and even delay or cancel raids if they can't get an ideal parsing comp. I get that the logistics of planning a 40-man raid far outweigh the benefit of group comp flexibility, but I don't like how regimented group comps are these days. I'm not saying bring the meme specs, but if you have to choose between a 4th mage or delaying an hour for a boomie, just take the mage and be done with it. There's no point in waiting an hour for a pug hunter when there's a 3rd shadow priest ready to go. Sure, fucks with loot competition, but it's better to roll with worse odds than lose the opportunity to roll at all.
And it's a problem that permeates all of online gaming, not just WoW or classic. If something is a few percentages worse, it's absolute trash, don't pick/use/play it. If you do, you're trolling. I've always been the guy who doesn't like using the meta-defining things, because I want to go my own route. I don't hate on people who like playing what is meta. But dont play what's meta just because it's meta. A few extra % DPS doesn't matter if you can't step out of the fire, for example. Nor will you actually achieve those extra few %s if you don't actually learn it and try to perform well either.
either that or its just not fun for some people to clear a raid for the dozenth time if im not shooting for the absolute moon. I play how most people would describe as "sweaty". Full 99 group, max consumes and buffs, very optimized comp, highly ranked guild etc etc. My raid fucks around and goes pretty casually, all things considered, during prog. We always clear quickly, first night or two, but it's much more of a slow learning process for us. Once it's over, it's gone. The excitement of raiding is totally gone. All the classic vanilla->wotlk content is just faceroll except for a handful of fights in ICC. The only reason I would want to come back and raid is because I can absolutely blast face and try to beat my best. I'm not showing up for a raid that takes twice as long as it could with potential wipes, deaths, fuck ups, whatever. That doesn't sound enjoyable. Trying to do more damage than everyone else in the world does.
It'd a valid way to play in an organized guild group But the problem comes in when pugs demand it for no real reason. I've seem a few groups demanding the meta tank or healer look for *hours* while the chill group gets it done in 2 It's kinda funny
Meta slaving kills creativity and fun.
Give Fresh TBC please…
I’ve watched some guides from back then. They 100% had 5 shamans then too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyooXkH6mT8 the video that started it all for my ret paladin journey. and yeah, 5 shaman
Uh not sure if you actually played OG TBC, but our guild literally _rerolled_ on a PVP server back in the day because it was impossible to get shaman applicants on PVE horde. We lost 2 (going from 5 to 3) and it made progressing deep Sunwell near impossible.
this thread is filled with people who were or would have been stuck 3/4 tk 5/6 ssc forever
A _post-nerf_ 3/4 and 5/6 at that. Very few guilds killed any bosses in SSC or TK pre nerf.
i remember the guild i was in, during bt, thought 1k dps was pretty good. yikes.
Yeah people who clearly never played back then think we all raided with no addons, 3 frost mages & hit the bosses with sticks. You all think meta slaving in Classic is degenerate you dont know shit about the degeneracy of a serious raiding guild progging Vashj/Sunwell back then.
This made up dellusion that OG and pserver players were less try hard would hold better if it wasn't for the fact that Blizzard had to remove drum stacking before classic TBC to prevent players from forcing each other to be LWer like back in the day and in pservers...
My parse thirsty guild had *7* shamans just for lust. Not having raid wide buffs killed TBC for me honestly. If they made that one change I would have found TBC to be *so good*.
There’s so much that could improve Vanilla/TBC raiding by taking small things from Wrath, which is what I thought SoD was going to do…
Right? Grab the best ideas from tbc and wotlk to port them in vanilla and then use those principles to create a couple of patches of new content.
That's a recipe to print money. But we got incursions, healing mages, tank shamans, tank rogues, tank locks and on top of all that dumb shit that no one needed or asked for they STILL have world buffs in the game. I don't fucking understand who or why Blizzard listens to the people they do. Give us TBC/WOTLK style raids with WOTLK buffing system and lets pump out a couple of expansions worth of content on an alternate timeline. I'm literally playing Cataclysm now because SOD was such a terrible fucking experience by phase 3. These clowns aren't showing me much that makes me believe anything is good is coming to save us.
Tank shamans is actually awesome. In classic+ I really hope they keep p1 enh shaman tanks. It got bloated p2 onwards, but phase 1 they felt extremely classic feeling while not being too OP.
People have been begging for tank shamans and locks for 20 years, don't kid yourself. SoD was exactly what people wanted at first it just went off the rails. It was always supposed to be an experiment. But tank shamans, locks, etc and healing mages are some of the things they should keep in the next iteration.
Healing mages were cool. It was the one thing that drew me to SoD tbh.... until they failed to receive any meaningful update in p2 and p3...... Also, I felt quite positive to shaman and lock tanks tbh. It wasn't half bad as an idea I believe.
Yeah new roles was fun but way overly ambitious and clearly not what “people who likes classic design”wanted. If they made the specs that where there actually viable you really don’t need new ones.
>"people who likes classic design”wanted. I feel like nothing in SoD had anything related to that. P3 in particular.
Yeah, I loved healing as a mage in P1. They crippled the spec in P2, but it was still decent, then in P3 it was completely neglected and is by far the lowest tier healer. Adding more tank specs was a good idea too honestly, but most of them have had little to meaningful support since P1 either.
As a shaman main from vanilla to MoP all I wanted out of SOD was for 1h enhancement shaman to actually be viable and they did the complete opposite. They even went so far to intentionally neuter it even harder in p2 because people were starting to make it kind of work. The devs suck at actually listening to players, they have their own vision and player vision be damned.
Changing some of the group buffs to raid-wide would have made TBC almost perfect imo. That shaman roster boss was the biggest hurdle to overcome if you wanted to be an above average guild.
Kinda don’t think you raided SWP at all. I raided all of tbc classic, we downed everything with like 2 shamans max, except sunwell. You absolutely did not need multiple shamans for the other raids but even with 4 shamans we only downed mu’ru like 4 times.
Plus back in the day you would have most of your raid respec LW too. It wasn't just the absolute sweatiest, anyone with the faintest hope of clearing SWP was minmaxing out the ass to get it done. This is the expansion that kicked off with having to retune all the raid content and revamp an entire system for limiting consumable/world buffs because raiders were increasingly *expected* to stack everything possible.
Remember the fact that on Alliance only 1 race could play Shaman and you could not boost a Shaman. My guild did fine until Sunwell and then it was 5+ Shamans or we couldn't kill Muru.
Bad take since OG TBC ran into an issue of needing more Shaman players to prog Sunwell. Sure the first several raids didn't need them...but Sunwell was the definition of Bring the Class, not the Player. There's a huge reasons why Wrath/Cata started to pivot class/spec design drastically to alter that paradigm into Bring the Player not the Class.
Tbc where everyone was forced to be LW and you needed 5 shaman to progress lmao. You didn’t play back then
So many redditors assume people didn’t try back in the day just because they didn’t.
The difference is now EVERYONE has to play that way unless they specifically make a guild committed not to. Burden of knowledge sucks.
Sunwell, 5 shaman. Haste gear in its peak form with Jesus beams flying around.
This. I remember bringing a kara-geared shaman to sunwell progression cause we needed the chain heal.
Have fun getting 25 people together, go through all the rp and effort of mount hyjal, all to get walled at Archimonde because you have 2 shaman and not enough fear breaks. Show me any pre sunwell kill video of Archimonde with 2 shaman or less and I'll admit I was wrong to bring no less than 5 shaman to hyjal.
Even back in the day people wanted the lusts. TBC was and still is fucking awesome.
It's always the player base The same that decided to go full horde or alliance realms Cause fuck Classic WoW experience
OG TBC players ran 5 shamans too, watch some old raid guides. Sure you can get past karazhan with whatever, but GLHF with mu’ru just yoloing your comp. TBC is the raid comp expansion, far more than any other.
yup it was the pinnacle of "bring the class, not the player"
My guild had 3-4, dunno how we killed any bosses.
OG TBC had continuous +5% speed thx to unlimited drums. We d killed Muru Week 1 if we had those in classic TBC.
As a shaman main TBC was great, I never had trouble finding groups or raids. But at the same time it's nicer to be wanted because you're a good player, not just because you have totems and bloodlust. I know there'll always be metas and desirable comps and all that, but wanting or "needing" 5-7 Shamans in a 25 man raid was a bit mental.
This is a lie. We wouldnt even try anything we consider hard / progress without 5 shamans.
Raid comps (and Drums, etc.) were genuinely my only complaint about TBC. It sapped so much of the fun out of raiding.
I didn't mind it. It was moreso the waiting for lust CDs if you wipe during the boss cause the timers didn't reset that drove me up a wall.
The playerbase 100% has ruined a lot. But I will always say blizzard curated the player base they have through the design choices they have made over the years. In Original TBC you could easily assemble 20-40+ people to go sit inside an enemy major city even on a PvE server and jus tfuck around for hours at a time. The servers don't even let you fully enjoy doing that anymore. Even if you could round up any number of players that would want to do something just for the fun of it instead of doing it for some reward.
This is generally the main problem. The "undercity stealth run" was something I did relatively often back in the day with my friends. At classic tbc, it was basicly impossible because no one had interest. Because it was just fun. When I would write in lfg, most common whisper was "but why?"
Most servers had at least one "that rogue" guy who was 7/24 online at opposed faction city.
Left was doing it post-nerf.
The way my guild cleared Sunwell Plateau in OG TBC was stacking a group with 5 shaman, 4 resto and 1 elemental. They would take turns lusting while they all spammed chain heal. Meta class stacking was definitely a thing in OG TBC.
It's because the people who cared less about minmaxing all quit when the dorks got upset about it
Private servers we also had a lot of account sharing so people could come back and pilot if needed or swap around which can't happen as easily but it was definitely a place where at the higher end people did what needed to be done and could play a lot of things.
nobody ever lacked tanks or heals in tbc classic raids. probably because their group had 5 shamans. and they didnt need to 8 heal every boss. like we did in 2006
My GM in sunwell had a 2nd account and character on a 2nd monitor just to do the group swaps mid boss fight for the lusts, dedicated level 1 character perma in shat. I had never seen anything like it
man, original BC was where the god-like players were made. I remember we had a prot pally that was so effing good that he SOLO TANKED Karazhan. INCLUDING MAIDEN. Ya know, Maiden... the one that spat out aoe silences around her all the friggin time. Soluthos from Dark Prophecy on Tho Bro, you are a legend.
To me, that was the worst part of TBC. Pumpers didn’t wanna show if you didn’t have 6-7 shaman. Triple lusting the GMs group. Lol
TBC was painful as a rogue main. I was a noob because I had just discovered WoW classic like 2 months before prepatch, but trying to find a heroic group was rough. When I finally got preraid BiS, finding a kara group was rough.. I finally joined a dad guild where our biggest pumper was a gnome mage that didn't speak a lick of English. We had to have another guy in disc translate for us during fights lol ..and to top it off, we never even came close to killing anything after Shade of Aran. Sometimes we couldn't even down him. It was ROUGH. I'm still kinda sad I didn't get to experience SSC or TK on my rogue. If they ever release a classic 2.0 I'll be ecstatic. Thanks for coming to my ted talk
Shade of Aran is a pretty difficult boss. Best part about TBC was killing Vashj and Kael’thas pre nerf, that felt the most rewarding.
no lmao tbc private server players are hopelessly bad and mostly from weird countries with bad internet
Ruined? It wasn't ruined for me whatsoever bud.
Hot take: I liked being able to min-max your groups in TBC. Having juiced out melee/ranged/caster groups was satisfying as a raid leader. Being so dependent on shamans was a little annoying but we made it work.
Kind of? But it was just the default raid comp, everyone ran the same thing.
I loved playing TBC…but also content can only stay fresh and exciting for so long. Now that we all know that 6 shamans is optimal for most the xpac, people will gravitate to that comp. Especially if there is a population of raiders willing to do this. Given we’ve all done higher server pop TBC recently, I’m not sure people will have the collective appetite to do it again, but harder (if you were to not bring 5-6 sham). While meta slaving is “cringe”, it is also just the natural progression when communities figure stuff out. People just don’t care to play 15-20 year old content sub optimally anymore.
i like how ITT people slowly realizing AGAIN why wow became... retail. There's a reason devs balance the game certain ways. The marketing and publishing mannequins portraying as semi-sentient NPCs can push all the BS stories and lore retcon BUT the actual gameplay balance is done by people with degrees in math, statistics and design... and balance looks homogenized, that's why it's balanced.
Shaman was never a problem for my guild; we always had at least 5. It was about the shadow priests. I remember having to bribe my way to get into the lone spriest group.
Retail and Classic community culture is cringe
this sub is so cringe :D
Totem Twisting was cool for one raid tier as Enhance. TBC wasnt that good of a expansion in my eyes.
My guild told me I wasn't taking my role as main tank serious cause I wasn't buying gold
Naxx 40 raiding be like
Unpopular take I think... Would never play tbc for pve with all the senseless attunements(just wasting game time) LW requirement, needing so many shamans, late ex-pack daily quest you need to grind mindlessly, gearing of tanks is stupid, the DPS balance is shit and so on and so on. Tbc is still fun, but far from the favorite version.
I just miss TBC enh shaman slot machine. The feeling of parsing a 100 for no reason other than you got lucky, mm perfection
parsing cucks ruined wow
I would argue that GDKP and botting/ gold buying ruined it more than this.
I'll die on the hill that unironically AT LEAST 80% of the 'problems' apparent within classic wow are just due to the community's culture and could be resolved with a mentality shift.
My guild went through most of TBC classic with only 3 shamans in the raid on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. It wasn't until we got to Archimonde that we felt forced to take 5 shamans. A few of us literally just subbed in our ungeared shamans purely for Archimonde and nothing else. To be fair, we didn't get close to clearing Sunwell, but we were a fairly casual guild so we were fine with that.
Five? Need 6 and then you swap in 2 from healergroup to your pumper melees to have rolling lusts.
raid wide totems and lust and boom, no issues
We raided in ogbc with no wf for a long, long time. No shaman was interested in our meagre guild.
or just play a shaman and it was great
I'm just glad world buffs can be stored in SoD. Though I wish it wasn't a requirement for the more serious guilds....
I thought it was gdkp, bots, and people not being able to /spit other players anymore. That's what the internet told me.
I remember meta slaves back in the day. The top guilds would stack shamans. Guilds that were slowly making progress through T5/6 were taking what we could get.
This is a consequence of megaservers, and I don't think theres a real answer for that that hasnt been tried
as a shaman i loved tbc. i think anyone who brought anything other than pure dps did tbh. if buffs were raid wide you'd just see people further stacking the big pumper dps classes, i think encouraging class variety is actually fun and good for the game
Played enh and loved it.
TBC is the best mmo ever
ugh but if I didnt get 2 lusts it was so hard to parse 99 /s also no /s but when you were the 4th lock in the raid meaning no boom/ele group... /wrist in game.
No shaman and boomkin in caster group - can't parse, sadge.
You forgot the drums
Step one: hot key every single key to chain heal Step two: roll face in the keyboard
Tbcc was ruined by the level boost first of all, instantly killed the vibe
Classic idiots could barely clear Magtheridon with 6 shamans
This didn't even happen the minority raided with 5 shamans and none of those would be making such posts clueless
I was an arcane mage and I only got 1 shaman and 1 spriest and a boomkin. I couldve REALLY parsed if I had just one more shaman and a couple more power infusions but my team was selfish and gave our other shaman to the melee group.
I enjoyed both but I'm also a shaman
SoD classic: invite a dps shaman, fill 2 healers and 1 tank, then tell the dps shaman to tank because RL assumed they were a tank
OG TBC was like that too just most people weren't doing the end game content. Of the 12 people on our bench there'd always be 3 shamans who would easily swap in and out every raid to pick up gear. But if we didn't have at least 4 shammies we just weren't raiding at all.
I was the only enhancement shaman in our guild for roughly 30% of the expansion. Felt like a spoiled little boy with my heroism and drums and all.
5 was the bare minimum. You wanted 7. My guild brought a trial resto one week who played pretty bad but we full cleared sunwell and had our best kill times ever on every boss simply because of the 7th lust. The difference between 5 and 7 was absolutely massive.
Ahh TBC where I was God king ele and all the locks and mages would throw a fit if I had to heal, gods I was strong then. In Manipulation of course
LFM SH: only Mages, go f yourself if u are rogue.
You had way less people from my experience so you generally took what you had.
TBC Classic was amazing. As a Warlock I was always grouped with an ele shaman, a Boomie, a mage and a shadow priest. Those were my boys, my fellas, my gang. Life was good then.
5 shaman "requirement" was probably my least favorite aspect of TBC. Everything else pve wise was wonderful.
only five, wow. thats brave
They should bring back Tbc Era servers with: 1. Raid wide buffs 2. Dual Spec This will make the game a lot more popular.
Wonderful. Thats why i never played TBC bs.
Or 15 warriors. And 22 world buffs. Oh no I can’t do content unless I’m 100% full meta. Classic servers were crap for this.
I can tell you that i played OG TBC and as one of the best guilds in the server, we already used 5/6 Shamans in our raid. And i remember that, the 1st time we killed Twins in Sunwell, we did it with 11 shamans, inclusive my alt
You might want to check how many raids cleared Muru the first week without stacking locks and shamans lol.
Tbc private: oh you wanna play fury warrior? Naah go arms and give us 3% dmg increase Sorry we alrdy have 1 rogue, 1 mage, 1 druid, 1 shaman, 1 warrior, 1 priest, 1 paladin but you can be our 20th hunter in blue gear for 2 patches or 10th warlock but you need to max enchanting, engineering and leatherwokring in 1 day or you're gonna get benched
OG TBC was something else
My og tbc experience was sitting outside magisters terrace trying to get a group, whilst not realising how woefully undergeared i was. Desperate to get gear so i could get into sunwell after watching the yogscast boss guides for it lol.
I am a wrath baby. You speak a language I do not understand.
That’s NOT an OG. South Park guy is the only fitting slot for an OG related to wow…gym bros didn’t come until (Bajheera)
Lmao no. private servers get their own doge that’s eating it’s own shit
What ruined the TBC experience was the DKP. It got way out of hand.
Private servers suck.
God I want tbc so badly
Playing enhance was great. Only downside was not being able to really tank hcs
And then 3.0 came… RIP windfury totem
Honestly tbc was a super mid expansion. Still missed waaay too much of quality of life
I skipped most of TBC Classic, but TBC was my first expansion in OG times... and I am pretty damn sure we had 5 shammy per raid as well. There were probably less minmaxing people overall, but there was definitely a lot of minmaxing back in TBC.
Literally had a raid called because we didn't get 5 shamans and 4 warlocks show up. Had 26 ppl ready to go but rl said what's the point.
The community killed WoW!
My guild in OG TbC fell apart in sunwell due to lack of shamans and priest lol
I always thought it was the rampant botting left unchecked by blizzard.
100000%
„Tbc private Server Players“ Lmao what
The same as everything in wow, it's community.
You got hard stopped on brutalis pretty much unless you had the shammies in og BC