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WoW: Burning Crusade Attunements

Daante

Member
This is why TBC will always be the best for raiding for me, you actually had to put in the effort to get to where you wanted to be.

Polygonal_Sprite said:
I loved all the attunement stuff including having to unlock the heroic 5 man dungeons which were actually difficult and challenging. A far cry from the AOE spam Wrath 5 man heroics.

Exactly this and it cannot be overstated enough.

TBC was the peak experience for me even though i "only" came to first boss in Black Temple with my guild back then.
 

Locust

Member
Burning Crusade was easily the best time in WoW for me, best raids, best PvP, and the social aspect hadn't yet been killed by WotLK and dungeon finder. Most of the non-guildies I knew were those I met doing heroics in BC.

I don't remember this attumenent stuff being so bad first time around, but attuning new recruits was definitely annoying. Especially since you had to kill Kael with them.
 
This made me think of some other games that did this. Man, Everquest had some hardcore attunements. Plane of Time and the stuff for the 2 expansions after that was just brutal.
 

Anoregon

The flight plan I just filed with the agency list me, my men, Dr. Pavel here. But only one of you!
I think there's a pretty wide middle ground of enticing, worthwhile dungeon/raid attunements that exists between no attunements at all and the full-bore hardcore belligerence of TBC. The quest chains to do Kara and UBRS, for instance, are things I remember fondly. Multiplying that by 10 for the rest of the TBC raids not so much.
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
That moment when you're doing THAT boss in shadow labs.

He fears your tank into the middle of nowhere, then mind controls the rogue who one shots your healer.

Time for fun they said.
 
I think I'm more nostalgic for the years of my life where I had to raw amount of time to be able to really dedicate myself to attunements while still finding the journey enjoyable. I'm older now with more responsibilities, and the idea of doing these requirements and even rerunning the same raids over and over again now feels like it would be a second career.
 
Attunements were fuckin garbage. QoL improvements make Vanilla/BC pretty much unplayable, and its not like bosses aren't 20x harder now. They replaced the time spent into attunements with wiping 800 times on Kil'Jaedan.

Even the smaller Legion attunement questlines to unlock dungeons and raids suck. Get rid of those too.
 

NeoCross

Member
It might be nostalgia and the fact that TBC is my favorite xpac speaking, but I loved attunements back in the day. You actually feel you're working towards something, then to further put in some more work in the actual raids themselves.
 

johnhandy

Member
I remember having to heal Heroic Shattered Halls repeatedly to get guildies attuned for something relatively early in TBC. That was very painful when the guild only had 1 sufficiently geared tank and dps was low.
 

Meia

Member
Attunements were fuckin garbage. QoL improvements make Vanilla/BC pretty much unplayable, and its not like bosses aren't 20x harder now. They replaced the time spent into attunements with wiping 800 times on Kil'Jaedan.

Even the smaller Legion attunement questlines to unlock dungeons and raids suck. Get rid of those too.


Wiping 500 times on KJ is still light compared to most TBC era raiding. It took our guild 5 hours a night, 4 days a week for 5 weeks to kill Vashj, for example. :p


The only real improvement to the game from back then imo was what they did very early in TBC, by making elixirs and flasks not stack with each other. Farming for multiple flasks/elixirs per night was brutal when TBC launched. Requiring a guild to work together outside of raiding is what the game itself has failed at since those olden times. Don't even get me started on the continued dumbing down of the game itself either(no more passive mana regen in combat, no downranking of spells to stretch mana, no CC in dungeons ever, every pull boiling down to LOLaoe, etc etc etc).
 
Wiping 500 times on KJ is still light compared to most TBC era raiding. It took our guild 5 hours a night, 4 days a week for 5 weeks to kill Vashj, for example. :p


The only real improvement to the game from back then imo was what they did very early in TBC, by making elixirs and flasks not stack with each other. Farming for multiple flasks/elixirs per night was brutal when TBC launched. Requiring a guild to work together outside of raiding is what the game itself has failed at since those olden times. Don't even get me started on the continued dumbing down of the game itself either(no more passive mana regen in combat, no downranking of spells to stretch mana, no CC in dungeons ever, every pull boiling down to LOLaoe, etc etc etc).

You would've had a point in MoP and WoD when dungeons were in pretty dire straits and they never added any but the Mythic + system in Legion keeps people doing dungeons throughout the entire expansion and is one of the smartest design decisions they've ever made. Certain affixes require you to drastically change how you pull, when you use heroism, what classes to bring, talents to use, specs to use. You are also put on a timer with better rewards for scoring above the par time, which makes pulls more interesting. It requires more knowledge of not only the bosses and how the abilities scale up with difficulty but also the mobs within the dungeon can be just as dangerous as bosses on a few affix combinations.

Raids are a whole other thing. Raid mechanics have gotten so complex and crazy and the fights much longer and varied as they progress. Mythic Gul'dan is like 14-16 minutes long with like four drastically different phases, including the last which is only on Mythic and was never in PTR. Theres essentially no auto-attack or wanding periods anymore, something is always about to come out and fuck you if you don't pay attention.
 
One of the many things that I'm glad is gone.

Old WoW was magical, but a lot of it would suck today.

I don't get why people say that when it's obvious private legacy servers are flourishing.

I miss attunement days. Didn't nullify old content like nowadays. Sucks when you play Legion and every raid besides the current is obsolete. Blizzard is far too concerned with the every day person who logs in for an hour and wants to feel accomplished even though WoW survived and grew enormously through the days of endurance. Shit went downhill with 15 minute heroics in WotlK to 3.3 where even the buffer time of looking for a group was taken away. Even more baffling is they have zero ideas on how to fix this can of worms.
 

Kareha

Member
Memories.

H Shattered Halls and H Arcatraz must be one of the hardest dungeons ever created for WoW. Harbinger Skyriss was a major pain in the ass.
I don't remember being the attunements being that ridiculous, but when you look at the chart as it is, it's quite daunting.

The days when you had to reroll your entire class to be optimal (or should I say, viable) for raiding. Is that still a thing in WoW?

Heroic SH was a joke with a Prot Paladin, you just pulled entire rooms and H Arcatraz wasn't that hard, you just had to not be shit at the game and stand in crap.
 
I don't get why people say that when it's obvious private legacy servers are flourishing.

Don't gotta pay for those. Once its a real company charging money for that expectations change.

They would come up across multiple walls. First is the people who want QoL upgrades like looting multiple bodies at the same time, the collections tab for mounts so you don't have to hold them in your inventory versus the crazy purists who want the exact same thing as it originally was with no QoL improvements. Would people really take to the absurd amount of reagents needed to play a Warlock, Paladin or Rogue? Would they keep how awful it was to level most classes? The old character models? Bother not to fix anything because its in the spirit of the original? For everything people liked about Vanilla that they have reason to like the difficulty in getting mounts and epics or the far scaled down stats and money inflation theres like three things that would be baffling in a modern game of any type. Oh and the "spirit" of the original world is gone. You can never get that back.

Then would they just let the Vanilla server run forever? Players are better now. Would they just clear Naxxrammas in a far shorter amount of time? For people pushing Mythic content organizing 40 people wouldnt be much harder then 20 especially when the mechanics are so barebones compared to what they are used to. Then again, most Vanilla raids were just numbers checks that took forever to gear up to because bosses dropped an absolutely pathetic amount of loot so beating up a boss was just like using a calculator. Would you rollout raids and content like the original or let it all go out immediately? Would you let people get the Black Qiraji mount and then tie the account to the live game?

The expectations are wack. They could barely update the game during WoD and to keep interest would have to update Vanilla with new old things like Old School RuneScape does, which can demand that treatment because half their playerbase is there and their playerbase is like 1/10th of WoW's.
 

Kareha

Member
That moment when you're doing THAT boss in shadow labs.

He fears your tank into the middle of nowhere, then mind controls the rogue who one shots your healer.

Time for fun they said.

Quite simply the best dungeon boss of the entire xpac, I loved that fight on heroic.
 

Kareha

Member
I remember having to heal Heroic Shattered Halls repeatedly to get guildies attuned for something relatively early in TBC. That was very painful when the guild only had 1 sufficiently geared tank and dps was low.

Now imagine getting new raid recruits keyed for MH and BT via TK and SSC before they removed attunements, I fucking loved it though as I got to raid every night 6 days a week :)
 

Algebrah

Member
I started playing WoW with my wife and love the current state of the game. I bring up stuff like this when people long for the vanilla days to come back.
 
Don't gotta pay for those. Once its a real company charging money for that expectations change.

The people playing private have played retail do tying in legacy servers with retail's sub fee isn't an issue. Heck, a lot of people that want to play vanilla don't atm because your characterd aren't perm like they'd be on Blizzard servers.

There is a market and Blizzard themselves eveb acknowledged it.
 

Nokterian

Member
I don't miss attunements, gate ting stuff behind long boring quests with lots of things to do and your friends doing those dungeons and raids already? Fuck that i was glad they removed it so i could finally play all those raids.

Gate ting things don't work because just like map packs they split the community and that should not happen in a mmo.

Also Mythic Raiding these days is freaking hard..for Method to get world first with Kil'jaeden in tomb of sargeras.

You should read this interview on why from LFR,Normal,Heroic and Mythic are so different and having difficulty for everyone these days because it is a challenge to do no matter what you do.

Don't say it is easy..this is from the interview.

Let's get to the big (red) topic then. 654 wipes, a little under 12 days spent on him and it took 7 days for the next guild to down him.

https://www.method.gg/7-days-alone-at-the-top-kil-jaeden-killers

Also since people who stopped playing Mythic Dungeons take playing the dungeon to a whole new level, once a week 3 new affixes on mythic keystones. The higher the difficulty the more HP and damage mobs do but also bosses.

It goes for infinite replayability and it just works since you need to pay attention not only the mobs but also the different affixes doing different stuff.

Blizzard even does Mythic Dungeon Invitinatial something very new these people who won going to blizzcon to compete for a big prize pool but also the dungeons are set to level 17, ilevel 935 and artifact 965. For me it is already a challenge when i do +10, that shit is hard for 5 man but also fun to do it in less than 20 min or 45 min depends on the length of the dungeon.

You need to down bosses but also bring the bar to 100% to kill enemy forces or you won't get loot and a key upgrade.

So yeah i'm glad i never have to do attunements anymore..fuck that.
 

SargerusBR

I love Pokken!
I'm pretty certain you could just have someone open the gate to Karazhan for you. I don't recall needing a key for Serpentshrine or Tempest Keep, but my memory of that is a little hazy.

Serpentshrine you needed a key to deactivate the waterfall that was covering the raid entrace.
 
The people playing private have played retail do tying in legacy servers with retail's sub fee isn't an issue. Heck, a lot of people that want to play vanilla don't atm because your characterd aren't perm like they'd be on Blizzard servers.

There is a market and Blizzard themselves eveb acknowledged it.

Ok, so in this scenario where people level to 60 on a permanent character what do they do then? What about everything else I said?
 
I had to tank my entire guild's timed Shattered Halls run because the other tanks never logged on outside of raid time. I also had to tank it for a few of the tanks...

I liked attunements personally.
 
Ok, so in this scenario where people level to 60 on a permanent character what do they do then? What about everything else I said?
Everything else you said is meaningless. There's already an audience for the base game. That's all everyone knows. Hypotheticals and if they come to fruitition can be dealt with as a lot of QoL can easily be or already there with addons.

Also people raid or do whatever they want at 60... like people do right now.

FYI, Naxx 40 came out on a private server recently and 2 guilds downed it all in 1 day I believe. No one seemed to care.
 

Cleve

Member
Only parts that were bad were the rep grinds. Dungeons were fun

Heroic Shattered Halls was the hardest content in the game with non-raid gear groups.

It was pretty brutal getting those instances done for everyone in your raid when you needed a well geared tank, healer, and the right comps. I still have nightmares from my rogue about those Naga with sweeping strikes and a 360 cleave in coilfang.
 
i remember being in awe of the top raiders on my server when i'd see them in shattrath. maybe 1-2 people riding around on phoenix mounts. i never got to do any of the attunement stuff before the nerfs or even when it was super relevant, and i only got to beat Karazhan and Zul Aman about 2 weeks before Wrath released.
 

Poppy

Member
you can talk about how current raiding on legion is much better and skill based and i dont think anyone will disagree with you, its not like thats what this topic is about. i see barely anyone decrying the current state of actual wow raids. clearly the raids and scripting themselves are much more impressive and better mechanically

however you gotta keep in mind that the majority of the playerbase at the time of BC merely dreamed of raiding and it was a special thing to encounter. like i basically only raided gruul, kara and mag at all during that whole expansion because i am asocial as fuck and my friends only wanted to pvp so i mostly just pugged everything. therefore i do have fond memories of harder heroics, more lengthy processes for achieving keys and reputations, everything that would prepare you in theory to be able to raid one day. for a lot of people, that WAS the endgame.

thats mostly why i ever want to play legacy. i dont care about how backwards everything is compared to today, i just mostly want a chance to try again and actually push forward into raiding this time. maybe it sucks, but its not like me or 90% of the playerbase would know
 

Miletius

Member
you can talk about how current raiding on legion is much better and skill based and i dont think anyone will disagree with you, its not like thats what this topic is about. i see barely anyone decrying the current state of actual wow raids. clearly the raids and scripting themselves are much more impressive and better mechanically

however you gotta keep in mind that the majority of the playerbase at the time of BC merely dreamed of raiding and it was a special thing to encounter. like i basically only raided gruul, kara and mag at all during that whole expansion because i am asocial as fuck and my friends only wanted to pvp so i mostly just pugged everything. therefore i do have fond memories of harder heroics, more lengthy processes for achieving keys and reputations, everything that would prepare you in theory to be able to raid one day. for a lot of people, that WAS the endgame.

thats mostly why i ever want to play legacy. i dont care about how backwards everything is compared to today, i just mostly want a chance to try again and actually push forward into raiding this time. maybe it sucks, but its not like me or 90% of the playerbase would know

Definetly. From a mechanical standpoint, the new raids are much better and raids are much more accesible in general. I also agree that it's something that I might not have time for anymore, but it is something I'd like to see come back.

Part of creating a "living breathing world" at least for me is the idea that hey, we do have things that you can do that ties all these things that we are doing together. That's what these quest lines were about. They were the glue that tied these raids together, and told the story of TBC.

In theory, this was an endgame of sorts for people. The way you were supposed to do it (or at least, the way Blizz imagined you doing it) was getting your ass to cap, then running 5 man and 5 man heroics

Then, you'd find yourself a guild that's around "your level" --> Do Kara, and Gruul --> Do more of the quest --> Mag.... SSC... TK and beyond, all while having this quest line in order to gear newcomers in Heroics.

In reality, it didn't work so well, cause it created a ton of people who could never progres beyond Kara/ZA because they didn't have the numbers to raid. It sucked for a lot of people.

I still miss it though. Gates are obviously non-democratic and rewarded the most hardcore of the hardcore. But it's also something that encouraged connection to the world. I can't see Blizzard designing that kind of content anymore, the people who would actually see it ended up being too low. But, I do think that without that kind of content you lose some of the mysticism around the world -- there being things that you don't know and haven't seen yet, an epic questline your friend is doing and that you haven't done it.
 

Velcro Fly

Member
And then after this WotLK was largely open and you could gear yourself pretty quickly depending on your class and spec and people complained saying it was too easy.
 

Fjordson

Member
I don't get why people say that when it's obvious private legacy servers are flourishing.
Well the group you're talking about is smaller than retail WoW and plays for free. But I didn't mean to speak for everyone, there's unquestionably some people out there who continue to enjoy classic WoW.

I just think a decent amount of people who pine for old WoW would be unpleasantly surprised by it these days (again, not everyone, but some people). I mean there are things I miss dearly about classic WoW, but it's more about everything around the actual game. The game being fresh and largely undiscovered, being 16 with no responsibilities and being able to play for hours every day, having a ton of friends from school who played because it was the new hotness. It was a magical experience for things other than the game mechanics or systems.

All that being said, despite my personal disinterest, I actually hope they do official legacy servers eventually. Might as well give people the choice.
 
Don't gotta pay for those. Once its a real company charging money for that expectations change.

They would come up across multiple walls. First is the people who want QoL upgrades like looting multiple bodies at the same time, the collections tab for mounts so you don't have to hold them in your inventory versus the crazy purists who want the exact same thing as it originally was with no QoL improvements. Would people really take to the absurd amount of reagents needed to play a Warlock, Paladin or Rogue? Would they keep how awful it was to level most classes? The old character models? Bother not to fix anything because its in the spirit of the original? For everything people liked about Vanilla that they have reason to like the difficulty in getting mounts and epics or the far scaled down stats and money inflation theres like three things that would be baffling in a modern game of any type. Oh and the "spirit" of the original world is gone. You can never get that back.

Then would they just let the Vanilla server run forever? Players are better now. Would they just clear Naxxrammas in a far shorter amount of time? For people pushing Mythic content organizing 40 people wouldnt be much harder then 20 especially when the mechanics are so barebones compared to what they are used to. Then again, most Vanilla raids were just numbers checks that took forever to gear up to because bosses dropped an absolutely pathetic amount of loot so beating up a boss was just like using a calculator. Would you rollout raids and content like the original or let it all go out immediately? Would you let people get the Black Qiraji mount and then tie the account to the live game?

The expectations are wack. They could barely update the game during WoD and to keep interest would have to update Vanilla with new old things like Old School RuneScape does, which can demand that treatment because half their playerbase is there and their playerbase is like 1/10th of WoW's.

This is exactly why I have 0 interest in playing a legacy server. Yeah I had a lot of fun in Vanilla, but I'm not blinded by nostalgia. You mentioned some things but I'll throw in a few more. No achievements means I have no interest in a lot of the content. No mounts before 40 would drive me mad and I probably wouldn't be able to afford it anyways (I played a Pally back then so I got mine for free). There would be no heirlooms to make leveling easier and so much of the quest loot was badly optimized. There was a good number of zones that barely had anything in them before the pre-Cata revamp. Stonetalon and Azshara are two of my favorite zones now but they were basically wastelands before. Having to go back to a major town to learn new/improved skills was annoying, especially with 1 hour hearth cooldowns.
 

Ultratech

Member
H Shattered Halls....haha

Lots of memories good and bad from that place...

Huh, interesting. Never knew that.

Yup. Was how I got my Hand of A'dal Title years after the fact.

I still held on to the original Vials quest from BC, so when I came back in Cata, I was able to complete the rest of the questline.

Unfortunately, I got screwed over on Champion of the Naaru since I had removed one of the old Trial quests from my Quest Log, so while I had two of the old quests, the third wasn't and didn't count towards getting the Title.
 

Moatman

Member
This was why every expansion since BC has felt light on content to me, they had such a huge amount of endgame content at launch and it took time to get access. Between Mag, Gruul, and Kara you had a lot to keep lower skill guilds busy; higher level guilds had TK and SSC to work on with a goal of Hyjal. That is almost as much raid content as a full recent expansion+content patches.
 
2.0 BC attunements weren't all that bullshit when you realized that if you weren't at the point of being able to comfortably clear the prerequisite dungeons/raids you didn't really have any business in the dungeons/raids you were unlocking anyway. The main thing that was actually bullshit was the heroic key rep grind, though even that seems less bullshit in retrospect when you keep in mind that 2.0's heroic dungeons were more comparable to modern WoW's Mythic/Mythic+ dungeons than heroics.

Beyond that it was mostly just logistics- heroic dungeons had a 1:1:3 tank:healer:dps ratio while raids were more like 3:6:16, so tanks wound up running the same pretty-fucking-hard heroic dungeons repeatedly. Similarly, while 2.1 dropped SSC/TK attunements Hyjal/BT attunement required running T5 content again, and if you were in Hyjal/BT you probably didn't want to go back and clear SSC/TK just to get a new guy their vials. IIRC when we were progressing in BT/Hyjal in 2.3 we required or at least preferred applicants who at least had their Vashj vial.
 
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