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24th March 2015, 11:41
Bisilicum
A history of raiding
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| Basically, you can divide raiding into different eras, or phases. These more or less correspond to the expansions that were around at the time.
The First Era: 40 man raiding It's already been said but 40 man raids pretty much required 15 people to actually know what they were doing and the rest of the raid was more or less carried. Bosses had very few mechanics. Almost everything was just tank and spank. Most fights allowed 90% of the raid to just stand and DPS. Present day LFR is more mechanically complex than Molten Core was. To give you an example, let's look at a very famous 40 man boss. Onyxia. She had 3 abilities frontal breath that hit tanks for low fire damage, a fear that could cause stupid people to aggro whelps, an aggro reducing knockback and a tail swipe that meant you couldn't stack behind her. And some adds that spawned intermittently during the final phase. At 70% she went into the air and you had to DPS her while killing adds until she was at 40%. She had no enrage and a group of 4 people were able to kill her in Tier 3 gear. She was a hard boss at the time because people couldn't do basic stuff like stand in the right place or watch their aggro. The Onyxia wipe video (moar dots) really does paint a very accurate picture of what 40 man raiding was like - a lot of very unskilled people zerging content, being carried by one or two people who actually could play their class and knew what to do. The hardest things about Vanilla raiding were not the raid dungeons themselves, but the actual mechanics of the game, and the barriers that were created by these. Your 40 man raid needed very specific class make ups, and a lot of specs were borderline or even completely useless (like ret paladins). This meant for a lot of people that if you wanted to raid, you had to play in a certain way, and this was very unappealing for a lot of people. Just getting 40 people to come and raid with you was hard, so your raid was pretty much just filled with warm bodies. Another barrier was the very linear progression path. You couldn't just ding level 60, do dungeons and LFR for some gear and jump into the latest tier of raiding, you had to start in Molten Core and work your way up. Unless you were in a guild that was prepared to carry you. Progress was very slow because gearing up 40 people with 2-3 drops per boss was a painstakingly long process. Normally what would happen was guilds would zerg their way through the first few bosses that did not have any DPS requirements, and then suddenly they hit a wall. Vaelstraz was a major gear check in BWL that most guilds could not pass. As well as this, many end bosses were poorly tested. C'Thun is currently the only boss to have never been killed before some kind of nerf. When it dropped, it was so bugged, it was impossible to defeat with the current gear level. After a hotfix, it dropped that week. Another thing was simply bad playing. Most people are much better players today than they were in vanilla because things like "moving out of fire" are common knowledge. Back then only the best players would be able to move out of fire. Most people played on horrible PCs, experienced insane lag, poor framerates and struggled to run both WoW and Vent on the same operating system. All in all, Vanilla's difficulty came from a largely broken game, not from hard content. TBC - the dawn of raiding Many consider TBC content to be the hardest in the history of WoW. Raid size was cut from 40 to 25. TBC for most part kept to the linear progression model - Karazhan > Gruul's Lair=Magtheridon's Lair > (Zul'Aman) > SSC > TK > Hyjal > Black Temple > Sunwell, and until 2.4, there was no bridging content to enable people to gear up quickly. Bosses had more mechanics, but plenty of bosses were just "stand still and DPS", even as late in the game as Hyjal and Tempest Keep. Fel Reaver for instance earned the name "loot Reaver" for that reason. Some fights had a tank swap mechanic, like Gurtogg Blood Boil in Black Temple, but almost all fights endgame could be solo tanked if your Main tank was good enough. TBC suffered from the same Vanilla problems of heavy class stacking (Warlocks/Hunters/Holy Paladins) but at least opened the door to allow most specs a viable place in a raiding environment. Wrath of the Lich King - two difficulties Many consider this the golden era. A lot of people will argue that raiding peaked in Wrath. I never played Wrath, so I don't know for sure. What I do know is that raiding became more flexible. 10 man was now a viable way to raid all of the raid content in the game, meaning that it was very easy for guilds to start raiding. A lot of raiders started raiding in Wrath, because it was so accessible. Wrath gave birth to some of the best raids in history - Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. Bosses were fun, innovative and for most part, mechanically difficult, especially at heroic level. The new feature of introducing a hardmode version, challenged top end guilds and rewarded better loot. ICC served as a trial run for the raiding model that would take form in Cataclysm, with 10 and 25 man normal and heroic difficulties. By Lich King, all classes and specs were raid viable, and you could more or less always bring the player and not the class. This was also the first time we saw the Ilvl system by way of Gearscore. Any time you see someone demanding ridiculous ilvl and "link achi" for normal BRF... blame Wrath for that. Catacysm and MoP - Heroic Raiding Cataclysm is where the raid scene pretty much adopted the "Heroic Raiding is best" view. Normal raids were no longer considered a part of the raiding metagame, because guilds only competed on Heroic content. Normal raids were pretty much just a stepping stone to heroic. That view transcended into MoP, although LFR was added as an additional stepping stone. People don't like it when I mention LFR, so I won't  At the end of MoP we got Flex raiding, which allows you to invite as many people as you want and the raid will scale to suit your raid size.
WoD - Flex raiding Flex raiding carried into WoD and became the basis for Normal and Heroic content. Even though Normal and Heroic play a significant part in the gearing process, Mythic content is where people compete. If your guild is raiding Mythic content, you are a Mythic raiding guild. I think Blizz have done an excellent job with it. Tuning in BRF is good - almost every fight requires a brain and cannot just be zerged. The raiding in WoD is probably the most challenging that it has ever been. You only need to look at the huge number of guilds in the top 100 in the world who still have not killed Mythic Blackhand, more than 6 weeks after he became available. By this time last tier, over 500 guilds had killed Heroic Garrosh, same with Lei Shen. A hell of a lot of guilds are still yet to kill Mythic Imperator, and he has been out for Months. Less than 5% of guilds have killed him. Probably because time spent learning Mythic Imperator is better spent learning Mythic BRF bosses, because the loot he drops is outshined by Heroic BRF gear, and the vast majority of 6/7 Mythic guilds are also 10/10 HC. Suffice to say Tier 17 will definitely go down in history as being one of the most challenging at top level. |
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