People didn't pug vanilla raids because the gear requirement was too high. The barrier to entry was enormous. You had to be attuned, which was a time-consuming pain in the rear. You couldn't just pick up random people in blues to do MC. Itemization was terrible that early in the game and thus the DPS and healing checks were very, very tight. Without spending weeks farming the earlier bosses, you wouldn't have much chance against Rag. Additionally, you had to farm resist gear for several vanilla fights (further slowing things down) and many specs were just flat-out completely useless (fire mages, forcing mages to run frost, which just killed their DPS, and destro locks, though at the time destro couldn't touch SM/Ruin). This was before the days of easy respeccing and running dual specs.
Flash forward to when BWL, ZG and the AQ raids added far better itemized gear, with gobs of spell damage and spell healing, attack power, MP5, etc. Guess what? MC became utter faceroll. My guild, when working on C'thun, would throw together a random cross-guild pug and go plow through MC without breaking a sweat to farm mats for peoples' silly legendaries.
Vanilla raids were not mechanically more difficult. They were logistically more difficult. You needed more gear, more people, more consumables, more resistance bullshit. The mechanics themselves were vastly simpler.
FFXI is a good example of this as well, actually an even better one. Most bosses in pre-Abyssea FFXI had no mechanics at all. They were simple tank-and-spank bosses, or groups of Elite Mooks. Even one of the absolute most difficult fights from the Zilart expansion, Ark Angels, was mechanicless. You just had five enemies with incredibly powerful abilities to manage. But you had no mechanics. They just had to be tanked and killed in the most expedient order. It was only "hard" because the gear requirements were enormous, far more than the average level-cap player could manage.
When ToAU came out and PLDs could sub blue mage for Cocoon, Ark Angels' difficulty pretty much disappeared. The "difficulty" of the fight was a gear check--the tank damage was so absurdly high that the healers and damage-dealers had to have extremely high throughput to kill the enemies before the healers ran out of MP, whereupon the tank would die, then everyone else would die. A PLD/BLU using Cocoon could reduce the damage down so much that the fight became almost trivial in comparison, assuming your party was well-geared.
Older MMOs are not mechanically more difficult. They're only logistically more difficult. More people, more gear, more time spent (many of XI's bosses took well over an hour of continuous combat to kill simply because they had hilariously bloated HP pools). This doesn't mean all new MMOs have insanely complex boss mechanics. FFXIV and TERA did not; both games rely on punishing "oneshot" mechanics that must be actively avoided by all players in order to clear the encounter. But to say that old MMOs are more challenging and skill-based than modern MMOs is disingenuous at best.
They were harder, but that was Fake Difficulty. That was The Computer is a Cheating Bastard. It wasn't something you could overcome through practice; it was something you could only overcome through making your numbers higher... spending more time grinding.
Flash forward to when BWL, ZG and the AQ raids added far better itemized gear, with gobs of spell damage and spell healing, attack power, MP5, etc. Guess what? MC became utter faceroll. My guild, when working on C'thun, would throw together a random cross-guild pug and go plow through MC without breaking a sweat to farm mats for peoples' silly legendaries.
Vanilla raids were not mechanically more difficult. They were logistically more difficult. You needed more gear, more people, more consumables, more resistance bullshit. The mechanics themselves were vastly simpler.
FFXI is a good example of this as well, actually an even better one. Most bosses in pre-Abyssea FFXI had no mechanics at all. They were simple tank-and-spank bosses, or groups of Elite Mooks. Even one of the absolute most difficult fights from the Zilart expansion, Ark Angels, was mechanicless. You just had five enemies with incredibly powerful abilities to manage. But you had no mechanics. They just had to be tanked and killed in the most expedient order. It was only "hard" because the gear requirements were enormous, far more than the average level-cap player could manage.
When ToAU came out and PLDs could sub blue mage for Cocoon, Ark Angels' difficulty pretty much disappeared. The "difficulty" of the fight was a gear check--the tank damage was so absurdly high that the healers and damage-dealers had to have extremely high throughput to kill the enemies before the healers ran out of MP, whereupon the tank would die, then everyone else would die. A PLD/BLU using Cocoon could reduce the damage down so much that the fight became almost trivial in comparison, assuming your party was well-geared.
Older MMOs are not mechanically more difficult. They're only logistically more difficult. More people, more gear, more time spent (many of XI's bosses took well over an hour of continuous combat to kill simply because they had hilariously bloated HP pools). This doesn't mean all new MMOs have insanely complex boss mechanics. FFXIV and TERA did not; both games rely on punishing "oneshot" mechanics that must be actively avoided by all players in order to clear the encounter. But to say that old MMOs are more challenging and skill-based than modern MMOs is disingenuous at best.
They were harder, but that was Fake Difficulty. That was The Computer is a Cheating Bastard. It wasn't something you could overcome through practice; it was something you could only overcome through making your numbers higher... spending more time grinding.
attractive enmity device
