I'm not usually someone to pay attention to world first boss kills and such, though Method has been in the news a lot for making an increasingly large song and dance about them in WoW's most recent raid tiers. However, I can't deny that I was kind of curious how quickly people would "beat" WoW Classic once it was released.
The first person to reach level 60 did so less than four days after Classic's launch - which was slightly faster than I would have expected (I was thinking it would be a bit closer to a week), but not hugely surprising. It's telling that the person to achieve this feat, a streamer called Jokerd, did so with a mage on whom he spent all his time AoE-grinding mobs.
That just goes to show again that XP gains in Classic were not balanced around doing quests - you were still supposed to kill mobs above everything else, and the quests were just there to give context to your actions and guide people from one zone to the next as they levelled up.
What was surprising to me was that the world first Ragnaros kill came only two days later, achieved by a former private server guild called APES. I had expected that one to take several days longer, not because of the boss fights being in any way difficult, but mostly because of the Hydraxian Waterlords reputation grind required to douse the runes in Molten Core.
Apparently you can "funnel" rep to specific people though? I'm not sure how it works, but I read that this is what they did, so that a lot of people's work could boost a dedicated "rune douser" up more quickly than the rest of the group. I guess they learnt some tricks in all their years of playing on private servers.
The most shocking revelation though was that half the raid group wasn't even level 60 yet when they got their kill, and only the main tank wore anything resembling decent gear. I would have expected the bosses' damage output to be harsh enough to make this sort of group composition unfeasible, but apparently it's just a matter of bringing enough healers: their particular group setup included 12 of them, or 30% of the raid group.
As a guildie pointed out, none of these early bosses have enrage timers, so as long as you have enough heals to keep people alive you can pretty much keep going for as long as you want. When APES also scored the world first Classic Onyxia kill shortly afterwards, they didn't even go in with a full raid. Then a whole bunch of people died early on, and they finished her off with only twelve characters left alive.
Again, I'm not surprised that these bosses didn't require much in terms of tactics or strategy to be killed successfully; I always thought that was fairly obvious. I was somewhat taken aback by how little it took in terms of gear and individual preparation though, which does make me wonder whether this will have a knock-on effect on how raiding will work in Classic.
I have no doubt that many guilds were all primed to go into this with quite a degree of seriousness, requiring people to acquire pre-raid best-in-slot gear, getting it all enchanted and bringing in stacks of consumables. Now I can't help but wonder though if the average player will be willing to put up with such stringent requirements when APES have shown just how little it actually takes to kill these bosses. I'm curious to see how that will pan out over time.
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Stars Reach My Destination
1 hour ago
It's no mystery to me that they plowed through MC content. We've had 15 years to optimize that raid. Back in "the day" people just didn't know what they were doing initially. They pretty much have it dialed in now.
ReplyDeleteWhat's his face getting to 60 quickly is likewise understandable. He probably has this video bookmarked - it was tremendously handy back when I was leveling Frost, and it's date pretty much says it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqKjds4LqQU
I lol'd when I heard it was a Frost mage.
I think it will start being 'difficult', or, rather tedious is once Ahn'Qiraj opens. Farming the nature resist gear is going to take some time. Naxxramas may have some actual gear checks, as well. Patchwerk will likely kill a number of tanks until people get enough gear. That said, needing eight reasonably geared tanks for the Four Horsemen will likely take an average guild some time. Those that did Naxx in Vanilla or on private servers will likely have everything already mapped out.
ReplyDeleteI don't think any of the fights will be mechanically difficult, it will just be gearing up the appropriate roles for the bosses.
I believe that this is going to be more the exception rather than the rule. The private server group had a quite a bit of a leg up on the progression guilds that hang around in "retail" WoW because they knew all of the tricks to vanilla that the other guilds would have had to relearn. AQ40 will be more difficult, that's true, but I presume there's tricks to this out there that these guilds are ready for.
ReplyDeleteAlso, now that they've done it, now what? Roll an alt? Put the game on farm? It's not like there's a guarantee that after AQ40 is complete --and the three months of updates are finished-- that Classic is going to get anything else in terms of updates.
So while this is impressive, and yes, there was quite a bit of debate on Myzrael over the first person to 60 making use of layers at the end to get over the top, this reminds me of the old poster I'd see in university dorms: "He who dies with the most toys wins". Yeah, but you're still dead.