EoE. Naxx and OS Buffed/Nerfed

[Milkshake123]

Are there any Lordaeron veterans that have progressed through Naxx, EoE and OS when Lordaeron was launched that could tell how nerfed the content is compared to 2014/2015? I remember that Naxx was almost impossible to do for the average guild and that in order to progress you needed a pool of like 35-40 people to rotate in and out depending on the fight. Any insight on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

[Milkshake123]

Bump for the new server prep.

[Robbertes]

I remember that for Nax 10 you needed the gear from Nax 25 to actually have a chance. And for Nax 25 you needed good setup and some progression. Patchwerk, Gothik, Maexx, Loatheb and Sapph(u needed all to have frost res gear) were quite hard. For EoE you had to stack the buffs from the orbs and nuke the boss right before p2, or he might enrage otherwise. OS 10 +3 drakes was impossible and OS 25+3 was very very hard

[Rafear]

The Raids won't have the difficulty of launch Lordaeron, they will have current Lordaeron. So is not very usefull to know how it was at launch since it was much much harder than Frostmourne is going to be.

[Milkshake123]

The Raids won't have the difficulty of launch Lordaeron, they will have current Lordaeron. So is not very usefull to know how it was at launch since it was much much harder than Frostmourne is going to be.

That is the thing I want to know, how nerfed is it compared to Lordaeron launch values, because I see people on the forums talking about the immortal titles and what-not, if it is anything close to the old values they will be in for a ride of a life time. I don't even know if people are aware how hard the content was, that only Murmur cleared OS+3 10 man, if i am not mistake, on the ally side. That Naxx progress for a semi-hardcore guild took full pre BiS on all 25 people and a couple of restarts at very least, etc. I just hope it's gonna be as hard as it was, great memes were born out of it.

[Milkshake123]

I remember that for Nax 10 you needed the gear from Nax 25 to actually have a chance. And for Nax 25 you needed good setup and some progression. Patchwerk, Gothik, Maexx, Loatheb and Sapph(u needed all to have frost res gear) were quite hard. For EoE you had to stack the buffs from the orbs and nuke the boss right before p2, or he might enrage otherwise. OS 10 +3 drakes was impossible and OS 25+3 was very very hard

Yeah, I remember it to be the same, hope it's gonna be that way this time around as well.

[rpgfan10208]

I believe the stupidly overturned PvE was the main reason why this realm started dying.
If they want us, Icecrown players, to come to FM they better chill with the "challenging" content, because none wants that. And if people realize that they can't comfortably farm end-game we'll have another dead realm in no time.

INB4 "hurr durr, Lord has a queue", yeah that's because of the flu and people quitting classic - it was true after all: they thought they wanted it, but they didn't, lmao.

[Gruum]

I haven't raided on Lordaeron in a long time, so I can't make the comparison between current state of t7 raids and what they were like on launch. However, I did clear all of the content back when the server opened, so I guess I can share thoughts on difficulty of the content from a perspective of someone who was in one of those 'tryhard' guilds (my guild in particular got 5 or 6? server first kills in naxx, can't remember exactly and more notably server first os with all 3 drakes up and a bunch of 1st hardmode kills later on in ulduar. feel free to look up some vids from paradox/infamous on yt if you really care).

Was the content overtuned? Yes. If you compare it to original t7 raids from retail, the content was definitely overtuned. Was it impossible? Definitely not, but I guess it depends on who you ask. If you look at the comment above mine, you'll probably realize why many people thought of raids as damn near impossible to clear. People will rather breeze through endgame content rather than face any challenges/difficulties because they're afraid they might have to admit to themselves they're not good enough.

The problem lays in the mentality of your average private server player. Now I don't wanna bash anyone who thought the content was way too difficult nor do I want to degrade those who weren't able to clear it. However, most people are either too lazy/not willing or simply not capable of overcoming anything that poses a slight challenge. Given that largest % of warmane's population is coming from a server (icecrown) where people have played 'non-buffed' raids at the last tier of gear for almost a decade now, not counting the database/character wipe back in 2015, it is easy to understand why so many complained about difficulty of naxx/eoe/os despite the staff of warmane themselves stating many times that content is intentionally overtuned and that server is not meant for just any player out there. Most of people barely learned how to play the game by merely reading through some forum guides on classes and watching boss guides on yt or some other place and then without a single thought of their own, like a bunch of parrots, simply tried to copy everything they "learned" to a server where some of the things they read/saw simply weren't applicable. Now, instead of being a little creative and trying to figure out how to deal with challenges that those raids posed for them, a lot of people sorta gave up and flocked to forums to complain that stuff's too hard cause their Tankspot guide wasn't very useful. In other words, they'd rather blame anything/anyone else for their inability to play a decade old game than work on improving themselves.

Content was more difficult in a sense that you couldn't just go into naxx straight after hitting 80 and expect to get anywhere, like you used to be able to back on retail. Content was just difficult enough to where you had to put some effort into improving your character gear wise, by farming hc dungeons and getting you preraid bis, leveling up professions for extra stats, getting reputation up with all the necessary factions, getting all the flasks and pots, appropriate resistance gear and so on. Most people in my guild farmed HC version of every single wrath dungeon every single day until emblems became obsolete for their character's gear progression. People would pay thousands of gold for epic gems that were available only through daily fishing quest reward bags etc. Was all this absolutely necessary? If you wanted to be among the 1st of those who got to clear everything yes, otherwise not really. Thing is, you still had to put effort into it. Whether you went ham and played all day every day to be #1 on the server or just wanted to clear content in any amount of time, you still had to farm all the things necessary, because the content was difficult enough where you wouldn't get anywhere by getting in and clearing a boss or two and then doing nothing for a week and waiting for reset to get extra few pieces of gear from those same couple bosses.

I should mention that while some bosses were extremely overtuned while working (mechanics-wise) exactly as they should be, there were some bugs/glitches that made a couple things here and there slightly easier. For example, our server first patchwerk kill in naxx25 was , the boss being overtuned as he was, doable by abusing a glitch where the boss happened to have no taunt DR (hence no taunt immunity) and we were able to juggle taunt him through the enrage phase. Was fixed just a couple days later and by next reset we had gotten just enough gear to be able to get him down properly. Thing is, bugs like this existed on a lot of bosses, however there were also those bugs that made handling certain mechanics more difficult beyond just the boss hp/dmg numbers being bumped thru the roof by warmane. I'll give you another example, from our server first sarth+3. On retail you were able to just zerg down the boss with hero/lust, however as you can see in video below you simply weren't able to do that on lordaeron at any point during t7 tier. The boss had 29mil hp, compared to retail's 9m (i think?) and we had to use an entirely different strategy. Took about 40 or so pulls to actually down this garbage boss, just figuring out the best positioning etc. Like splitting healers in different positions so that no matter where the lava waves spawn there's always a couple heals spamming the MT the entire fight and rotating defensive cds on MT the entire fight, otherwise tank would just die (you can see this at around 2m30s mark in the video). The 10 man version of +3 was imo a bit of a joke compared to this.


Note: the video is not my perspective, I was playing rdruid

As for achievements like immortal/undying, they were doable with just t7 gear. You just needed to be more careful and go overkill on using defensive cds in situations where you'd think you don't really have to. In other words, just play like a *****. Our guild attempted immortal once before ulduar came out. Cleared 12 bosses with no deaths, then on the last boss and probably the least dangerous boss (thaddius) before heading to sapph and kt some ****** decided it'd be funny to death grip the boss in phase 2 so we failed the achievement. It's definitely doable even with overtuned raids, unless you have someone messing around on purpose :)

Personally, if I were to play on frostmourne, I'd want content to be just as it was on lordaeron launch. I just think it's more fun if you have to come up with some of your own tactics, raid comps etc. rather than just doing everything the exact same way you did back on retail wrath. Hell, I wouldn't mind if increased difficulty went past just big numbers in terms of boss dmg and hp, and they tweaked some mechanics to work differently than they did originally.

Anyway, I know this post might be a tad bit too long (feelsquarantinedman), but hopefully it shed some light on stuff you wanted to know. If you have any extra questions, I'll prob check this post sometime later again.

[Rafear]

They said it should be fine for a casual player if the gear they have is appropriate and they know tactics, so I doubt it'll be that hard, but won't be walk in the park like icecrown is for sure.

[Milkshake123]

@Gruum My dude,

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said. My only hope is that it is as hard as it was back in 2015 and that the guilds like Paradox-->Mnemonic-->Infamous, Bizzno, Hiraeth, Murmur, Memoriez, etc, form once again. The point about people not being willing to learn and improve might be the best one to be hones, because I have had first hand experience with it. I had the same mind set as the lad above you has, where I was very frustrated that I was doing poorly in the raids even tho I had watched all the hunter class videos, tank spot and what not, but it didn't help at all, to make things worst all the high end guilds uploaded the raid logs onto the WORLD LOGS site and so did my guild, therefore everyone could see how bad I actually was compared to other hunters. I almost quit the game over it, I literally felt ashamed, and it almost made me hate gaming all together, because for the 1st time I was in the company of much better players and had to admit to myself that i sucked ***. Few shame filled raids passed and I had decided to seek help from the top tier hunters and beg for their knowledge. I started by getting addons they recommended, practiced moving and auto shooting, perfected rotations, but above all else, they explained to me how to think about the game, that every fight is different, how to adjust, how to get the ''game sense'', think outside of the box. Once I got the hang of things it was easy cruising honestly, I was topping DPS meters in my guild easily, started theory crafting on my own and improving on the things I've learned from the champs. I wanted to apply to Mnemonic at the time and wanted to compete with the rest of the Hardcore click, but it was not meant to be, had formed a lot of great friendships in Tranquil and what not, so it was just not fair to them to leave the guild right before Ulduar. Rest was history as they say, all in all it was an amazing journey honestly and it was mostly due to the buffed content I assume, it pushes you hard to improve and shrink the ego most of us have.

By the way, huge shout-out to the hunter gurus Weedlordgoku, Danaik, Aedir, Ariuz, Xavic, etc, can't remember all the names.

To sum things up, hard content is really important and it can make the game a whole lot more fun and engaging, and as silly as it might sound, it can give you a profound humbling experience that can help you in the real life setting just as well.

PS: Hope to see you on the 15th Gruum!

[Islingr]

From my understanding the "nerfs" to content have also come due to class fixes - if several abilities used to be 10% too OP and several mechanics "buggy", when they're fixed, you can't expect boomies to do 40k dps anymore on some insane prepot pre-trink burst. Thus content needed to get scaled down to still make it doable even with the current state of the best of the best every individual class/spec can do, not just the original state at Lordaeron launch (e.g. following the class and prepot trink fixes, LoD had to be nerfed somewhat last year, to let guilds kill it again without already being BiS)

[t4d3y]

Thank you for this post... does anyone know if there will be a Lordaeron guild forming on the new server? I'd very much like to tryhard on this new race and try for realm firsts.. especially since even on today's Lordaeron, players have an advantage in doing most of the bosses (especailly ToGC and ICC), knowing what to expect and how to deal with them.

[Milkshake123]

@t4d3y I checked the Frostmourne recruitment tread a couple of times and it seems no hardcore guilds are recruiting as of yet. It might be too early, due to the server being announced just 4 days ago. We need time for the word of a new server to spread.

[Gruum]

I don't personally know of any of the old tryhard players/guilds that are returning for Frostmourne release, as of yet at least. Doesn't necessarily have to mean there are none. Like you said the server has been announced just a few days ago, so it may be too soon to speak. However since the launch is only a couple weeks after the very first announcement of the server, I highly doubt you'll see any of the old lordaeron progression guilds. It's simply too short of a notice to gather all the players, as it's been years since lordaeron launched and since last tier progression ended. Majority of the good guilds on all of warmane aren't playing any longer, so even if some decided to make a return it would definitely not be in the same capacity, cause again - it's been years.

This doesn't mean that there won't be any good players or guilds, just because you may not see many of the old names. I'm sure there's more than a few new good players/guilds, who weren't around for lordaeron launch but will be playing and looking to make a name for themselves. Therefore, you're gonna see new decent guilds with big goals being formed. Who knows, maybe some good guilds from other private servers (wrath or even other expansions) decide on a fresh start with launch of Frostmourne.

My main concern in regards as to why you'll probably not see that many of the super hardcore and competitive players showing any interest in any serious progression on frostmourne is that it's already been announced that raids will be significantly less difficult than at lordaeron's launch (this = less challenge, which is something that no tryhard wants to hear) and more importantly, implementation of the gear shop. Availability of gear for real cash (coins) will undoubtedly bring into question the integrity of competition (if there will be any lol). It's not even a matter of "if". So the only question which remains to be answered is to what degree will competition be impacted by this.

This below is just an educated guess, but shop WILL be there.

My *assumption* is that gear will always be one tier below the currently available content with the exception of t7 I guess unless they do no shop until release of t8, meaning that once naxx/eoe/os for example have been cleared by multiple guild, after a couple resets (basically once the server first race is over and all the guilds that were looking to be competitive have finished their progression) the gear will appear on the shop. The problem with that is how it will impact t8 progression. Even if no ulduar gear, whatsoever, is available on shop until there's few guilds that have done yogg+0 (which will take a while most prob), just the fact that you can deck out a character in full bis t7 gear at any moment would ruin competition for anyone. Being able to just bring in any bis t7 store bought character into your progression raid to perfect the setup for any given boss sounds broken as hell.

"oh our casters didn't get lucky with trinket drops during t7? np we'll just hit the shop and buy all the bis stuff we didn't get lucky drops for"
"not all our melee dps got their bis 226ilvl weapons from KT 25man? pull up the coin shop!"
"crap, we're normally running only 2-3 warlocks in our regular raid setup and only have a couple on bench, but it's time to progress yogg. how much time do we need to double the amount of warlocks ready for progression?"
guild X: "AT THE VERY BEST a couple resets of running multiple groups through both 10 and 25 versions of every t7 raid as well as ulduar"
guild Y: "a couple thousand bucks?? :DDD"

You get the point... Being able to do the above will nullify whatever effort and time guild X may put into running multiple different groups with mains/alts per week to gear up their roster as to prepare for next tier progression, if guild Y can be just as prepared in terms of gear without having to put in any effort at all.