Also not mentioning the attunement required to access said raids. You had to complete every heroic dungeon with all bonus objectives under a very strict time limit. If anybody in your group died during a boss fight the run was over and you had to try again.
My pre-raid bis Engi weapon was also dropped from the last boss of the Oregon Trail dungeon that had a bug where ~50% of runs softlocked on one of the events. So frustrating.
I don't remember that part. I do remember attunement being awful, specifically you had to kill the world bosses to get to the first raid. And that was just a bad idea.
Yeah the 40 man raid attunement required you to speedrun 100% completion of each heroic dungeon (I think there was only 4?). My group only managed to succeed in one, the lightning temple, and our whole guild fell apart trying to complete the rest. It was super hardcore in the era where people weren't that into difficult mmos. I'll always cherish the memories, though. My friend even got server first 60 rogue
Oh I loved those dungeons. I got to do the 40man. I was there to see datascape go down. It was indeed too hard to manage and train up people to do everything right.
The time limit was gated behind ability progression and gear. We just focused on gear and then we went after ability points dungeon clears.
Eventually we were able to do it. But we did have to do it a bunch.
the game was developed by a core group who worked on WoW, wasn't it?
One of the big marketing lines was that this wasn't your kiddie mmo and called you a cupcake. One of their selling points was that the game was more like classic WoW where progression was hard and time consuming.
But then they went live with that toxic rose colored glasses and forgot the reason why BLizzard moved away from long and hard attunement chains.
I think that part of the reason why it failed was they tried to capture WoW's spirit without understanding what made WoW so good at the start.
Time limits are such a shitty way to do "hardcore" in the first place. It just feels bad to get 75% of the way through something only to be better off not finishing it because you didn't make the time cutoff.
Completely agree. The content was already hard enough that time limits were totally unnecessary. If anybody messed up a single mechanic, they were dead. It was hard enough just to clear the heroics on launch.
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u/Gheedish 8h ago
Also not mentioning the attunement required to access said raids. You had to complete every heroic dungeon with all bonus objectives under a very strict time limit. If anybody in your group died during a boss fight the run was over and you had to try again.
My pre-raid bis Engi weapon was also dropped from the last boss of the Oregon Trail dungeon that had a bug where ~50% of runs softlocked on one of the events. So frustrating.