Nostalrius Begins - Quality wow vanilla realm (1.12)

Hello to you Nostalrius. I've been wanting to play the same game that I played back in 2005-'06 for a while now, unfortunately the game is ever-changing whether one likes it or not and for me this game ended up as something completely different from what I signed up for.

After having invested an substantial amount of time looking into private servers trying to emulate the classic version I found one recurring problem: most of the content is 1.12.1. The developers are always sane enough to limit the available dungeons and raids but the rest of the content is still 1.12.1. We're stuck in this awkward transition period between classic and Burning Crusade, where you are meant to explore Naxxramas and giddy up for new adventures in the new expansion(TBC).

With all that said, I think it would have been interesting to see more of the early mechanics and content, because that's how it was during a significant part of vanilla, here are some of my suggestions:

• Revert the dungeon nerf
  
  

  Patch 1.10: Along with the new Armor Sets, the high-level 5-10 man dungeons have received some changes regarding loot. Many items have been improved in quality and use. In addition, several epic items, such as Headmaster's Charge and the Runeblade of Baron Rivendare, have had their drop rates significantly increased. In order to preserve the challenge of these dungeons, they have had their instance caps lowered. Stratholme, Scholomance, and Blackrock Depths now allow a maximum of five players inside, and Blackrock Spire allows a maximum of ten.

  
  In patch 1.10.0 Stratholme, Scholomance and Blackrock Depths had their instance caps decreased to 5 from 10. There had also been noteworthy nerfs to the dungeons: such as increased respawn-timer(high wipe-penalty) and changes to specific creatures stats and abilities. UBRS had some spawns removed and capped at 10 down from 15.
  
  Proposed Solution: Change the cap back to 10, re-implement the wipe penalty and buff the inhabiting creatures that were nerfed throughout the various patches. The goal is allow players to re-experience the classic dungeons how they worked throughout most of the game(prior to new expansions).

• Reverting various item buffs
  
  

  Patch 1.4: +Spell damage and +Healing effects have been increased in effectiveness to make them more attractive to players. Effects that increased damage and healing done by all magical spells received the largest increase, especially if the previous amount was small. We also fixed a couple bugs relating to these effects.
  

  
  

  Patch 1.10: The following item sets have had their statistics, effects, and set bonuses updated:
  Arcanist, Netherwind, Prophecy, Transcendence, Felheart, Nemesis, Cenarion, Stormrage Raiment, Nightslayer, Bloodfang, Giantstalker, Dragonstalker, Earthfury, Ten Storms, Might, Wrath, Lawbringer, Judgement

  
  

  Patch 1.10: Many items in Blackrock Depths, Stratholme, Scholomance, and Blackrock Spire have been re-evaluated and adjusted to make them more appealing. In addition several new items have been added to all of these instances.

  
  Proposed Solution: I was reluctant to add this since it would be complicated to address, however if there's information available regarding these changes then reverting them could greatly help with bringing back some of the PvE challenge. Especially for casters who are very overpowered early game in 1.12.1 private servers compared to during 1.3-1.5 on retail.
  
  
  
• Reverting raid dungeon nerfs
  
  Some of the raid bosses and especially 20-man raids have recieved some various nerfs. 40-man nerfs has been minor for the most part, but 20-man nerfs has been quite dramatic. Below is some examples to give an idea about the types of nerfs there have been:
  
  

  Patch 1.8:

  • Reduced the damage of the Mad Servant's fireball
  • Reduced the number of Mad Voidwalkers that are summoned from the death of a Mad Servant from three to two.
  • High Priestess Mar'li will now despawn her summoned spiders when she returns from combat.
  • Slowed the rate at which High Priestess Arlokk's panthers spawn

  
  Proposed Solution: Lift most non-bug-related change, so the content could be experienced as it was on retail, for better or worse.

At last I would like to bring up one problem that is harder to address; throughout classic there dozens of major revamps of all the classes and their talent trees, so goes for for a lot of the endgame items early on. While I understand that you may never be able to address all of these changes and for some of them, such as the class revamps, it might have been for the better.

The problem is that it trivializes the difficulty greatly, comparing the damage output from a Molten Core raid on a 1.12 private server to a raid group from retail back in 1.4 or 1.5 is quite staggering. People will probably brush their shoulders and say that they're simply much better players, but looking at the raw output from the players it's quite clear that their output is drastically different from what it was back then. I don't know how you can perfectly offset this except from averaging the disproportion between 1.4 and 1.12 and then compensate by modifying creature statistics to add up for it, but I'm sure that would offend certain players as well.

Not sure why I'm so worked up over this, since I didn't have any plans to play hardcore, but I guess I speak for more than myself when I say that I want to experience vanilla how it was meant to be played and I hope some of you developers behind this project will be able to address some of the major concerns. Cheers.
P.S. It would help you stand out.

No unnerfed AV in this list?
1.8
A great avalanche has closed off both the eastern and western segments of Alterac Valley. This has displaced the Syndicate, the Wildpaw Gnolls, and many of the Winterax Trolls.
Many NPCs removed and all NPCs have had their power reduced by 15-30%.
1.10
Korrak the Bloodrager and his band of trolls have packed up their bags and left Alterac Valley for greener pastures.
1.11
Most of the NPC guard units have been removed.
Creatures that remain in Alterac Valley have had their hit points reduced.

Drain wrote:No unnerfed AV in this list?
1.8
A great avalanche has closed off both the eastern and western segments of Alterac Valley. This has displaced the Syndicate, the Wildpaw Gnolls, and many of the Winterax Trolls.
Many NPCs removed and all NPCs have had their power reduced by 15-30%.
1.10
Korrak the Bloodrager and his band of trolls have packed up their bags and left Alterac Valley for greener pastures.
1.11
Most of the NPC guard units have been removed.
Creatures that remain in Alterac Valley have had their hit points reduced.

I could add more points if I did some more digging, but hopefully there are more here who feels the same sentiment and could help me out.

AV is a very good point, which is sad that I managed to forget. Not only because it would be nice for many to explore the earlier versions, but I think many would agree that a lot of the changes added later on made AV less about a long tactical game and more into a rush-fest.

The thing is, is it possible to find all the stats, datas at each patch ?

It is already hard to be 100% blizzlike towards 1.12.1 stats, mechanics, etc because we don't have the tools to verify them, I think it would be harder to find them for previous patches

The Mario Kart race to the finish BS didn't really start until BC. BC is when they raped and pillaged that BG, condemning it for all time as they would never unnerf it to its former glory(despite many requests over the years). But before BC even came out, AV was already getting nerfs, which started its down that spiral. It was originally a glorious place, full of things to do with battles and stalemates that could go on for days, if not weeks. It was then stripped to bare bones and turned into a race where each side avoids the other as much as possible, just aiming to end the match as fast as possible, win or lose, not caring which nor wanting to really fight each other.

Drain wrote:The Mario Kart race to the finish BS didn't really start until BC. BC is when they raped and pillaged that BG, condemning it for all time as they would never unnerf it to its former glory(despite many requests over the years). But before BC even came out, AV was already getting nerfs, which started its down that spiral. It was originally a glorious place, full of things to do with battles and stalemates that could go on for days, if not weeks. It was then stripped to bare bones and turned into a race where each side avoids the other as much as possible, just aiming to end the match as fast as possible, win or lose, not caring which nor wanting to really fight each other.

I can't say much more than that I agree with what you're saying, but I would also like to add that there were some significant nerfs to the PvE aspect of Alterac Valley in 1.8 ("NPC difficulty has been scaled down. All NPCs have had their power reduced by 15-30%.") and I think another interesting point that could attract a dozen of curious players would be to re-implement the Korrak the Bloodrager encounter.

Sélenne wrote:The thing is, is it possible to find all the stats, datas at each patch ?

It is already hard to be 100% blizzlike towards 1.12.1 stats, mechanics, etc because we don't have the tools to verify them, I think it would be harder to find them for previous patches

It's going to be really difficult, it will require a great amount of research aside from just observing and reading data from retail. But if I am going to believe the claims this project makes then I have faith that this is something they can accomplish.

Regarding the 1.12.1 statement; I think that also is one of the bigger problems with most classic servers, it comes with a handful of problems, especially for the earlier content. I strongly believe that the first server able to address the problems introduced by that issue will have a major selling point going for it.

Letalis wrote:
-Development Time - All development requires funds. Does the Project have enough funding to take on additional, what was most likely already discussed and deemed unworthy, work?

The way the make it sound like they're done with the development and are just waiting for a sufficient player base to launch suggests they may have the capacity to address some of these issues. I disagree with your statement about funding, a lot of open-source projects are free and made by passion, I think that goes for Nostalrius as well, the only part needing funds is hosting the server, which is not a part of this equation.

Letalis wrote:
-Player Skill - You worded it wrong when you said "People will probably brush their shoulders and say that they're simply much better players[...]". The wrong part here is "People" - It should have said "An overwhelming majority of people". And there is a difference there. The majority of the players today understand that the game is not a Pandoras Box, there is no mystery. We don't play by what we "think is" we play by what "is". And there is a difference there. One that, that statement implies: Today we use the game as a tool and use that tool to it's absolute limits. While what the class itself can do is, undoubtedly, very limited in Vanilla, there is plenty a player can do to improve his performance: Better knowledge of tactics, better reflexes, better management, better buff stacking, smarter hotkeys, actual use of keybinds and macros and last but not least - smart consumable use. I agree that there is a mathematical difference between the patches and performance, I won't deny that, however; The complexity of this is unsolvable because developers, regardless their efforts, could never truly tailor the game to our performance today, it wasn't meant to do that. You cannot attribute a certain amount of performance to skill and the rest to static numbers. That split, regardless how carefully made, will be wrong each single time.

This paragraph was a little hard to understand. What I am saying is that players yield a much larger output and that I believe a lot of them falsely attribute this to thinking they as players are significantly better than those who played this game 8-10 years ago. The hypothesis is a simple one: the players nowadays sucks as much as the player from a decade ago. Increased access to knowledge doesn't justify the disparity between performance and the evidence for this is in the numbers, comparing the output gives a very clear outlook of just how terribly overpowered we are for the current content.

The consequence I fear we're looking at from this is that we will be able to progress raids in a matter of hours instead of days, same goes for the concept of progressing bosses, they won't pose much difficulty or incentive to carefully execute tactics because our safety margin is enormous.

Letalis wrote:
-Obvious Market - There is a market for this out there. The "Core Craft of Vanilla"-type of thing. But this server was never marketed as such. This was simply supposed to be 1.12.1 Blizzlike. That's a vague description. Leaves you with a lot of possible if's, why's, perhaps', maybe's etc. The bottom line of this is; This work is of tremendous proportions, if to balanced correctly. Before you perform such an epic task, you always find yourself wondering; "Is this necessary?", the obvious answer the Staff will come up with being, "No."

I would have agreed with you if the server didn't have genuine competition.

Anyways, thanks for the lengthy response.

Hi,

I think the ideas of sshroud are good.

Out of your three ideas, one of them was already taken into account during beta and another is actually quite easy to implement. Third one seems to be, sadly, VERY time consumming and almost impossible to apply properly, as Letalis stated ; but it's also unnecessary as it would make the game easier - see below.


Reverting raid dungeons nerfs :
As long as it was possible, the raids were scripted during beta without taking into account the various nerfs that followed.

Whenever the developpers had the choice, they scripted something in its version that favored the players the less. It means most, if not all, of the "documented" nerfs (the ones in the patchnotes) were never scripted on Nostalrius.
And when research had to be done on some creatures stats, some spell damage etc. through videos from that time etc., when the sources were divergent or something, they always tried to maintain a pre-nerf scripting.

Of course, keep in mind that most of the nerfs are quite hard to evaluate ("reduced the rate", "increased the damage" etc. in the patchnotes), so it required actual forums / videos.

During beta, if anyone posted something like "Hi, in this raid, this trash has appoximately XX HP and hits for YY. According to [insert truthworthy and dated source], these numbers should be ...", they were most of the time happy to change it to make the game a little harder. Sometim they would decide not to change it if it resulted in a reduced difficulty.

It doesn't mean the scripts are necessarily exactly as the used to be in early vanilla, but the staff put a lot of efforts in doing so.



Reverting various item buffs :
As far as I know, it was never done during beta. But I'm 100% with you, it would be very easy to change at least the class sets + the items in the 55-60 5-man back to what they used to be. And then give them back their 1.12 stats when BWL is cleared / AQ40 is cleared or whatever.

Of course it requires to find the old stats, but I'm pretty sure they could be found somehow.




Reverting the dungeons nerfs :

Well, just like for the raids, developpers, whenever they lacked sources to script something or knowledge of the exact damage range/hit points of a mob or something, used tried to put them a little above what is should have been (again, nothing can be 100% sure ofc).

Regarding the player limit of Scholomance, Stratholme or BRS, I don't think the changes should be done, as actually the lowering of their caps was to make them HARDER.

This increase in difficulty was to counterweight the buff of some items (lots of loots that were greens were upgraded to blues, and some were added). So if you keep the post 1.10 level caps and if the staff can manage to nerf the items nonetheless, it would be quite nice as it would actually make the whole thing harder / less rewarding (well, with other things we have, like 1.12 talents, it wouldn't be sufficient, but still, it would be quite nice).

(Not to mention finding good sources for the old damage output of the packs, the location of the patrolls, the events etc. would be nearly impossible)

Thanks for the great and elaborate reply, it's highly appreciated. I am glad to hear the dev. team has taken some measures.