With Phase 6, WoW Classic’s Azeroth heroes can venture into the 40-player instance of Naxxramas for the first time to take on the lich Kel’Thuzad and his nightmarish minions. In vanilla WoW, very few players were able to complete the raid challenges in the Eastern Plaguelands. How hard will Naxxramas be in Classic? We’ll make a prediction.
Many WoW players are currently wondering if the postponement of WoW: Shadowlands will affect Blizzard’s release plans for Classic. The only thing that is clear is that the contents of Phase 6 have already been played on the public test server in preparation. And if the developers are reasonably close to the vanilla patch story, as they have been so far, then the Scourge invasion or the full version of the update should be in the house sometime in December.
The big highlight of Phase 6 is of course Naxxramas, the final raid challenge of the vanilla re-release. Before the launch of The Burning Crusade, only a fraction of all players were able to defeat the 15 bosses in the Eastern Plaguelands raid instance. Exactly how many is unknown. In recent years, the Reddit community has been trying to compile as complete a list as possible of guilds that have succeeded in Naxxramas. So far, there are only 136 names on this list.
The difficulty of the Naxxramas remake in Wrath of the Lich King was not nearly as crisp. Not surprisingly, after all, the renewed foray into the flying Lich fortress served as an introductory adventure. Things only got difficult in the Northrend version when another PvP game was celebrated in Wintergrasp and you couldn’t do the “Heigan dance” or the “chirpy transfer at Thaddius” because of lag.
Similar to Blackwing Cave and Temple of Ahn’Qiraj, I’d like to make a prediction again: How difficult will Naxxramas be in Classic?
Why was Naxxramas so difficult in vanilla WoW?
If you look at the top 10 bosses in WoW history that have resisted the World First Kill the longest, there is only one boss from Naxxramas, the Four Horsemen (ranked 7th, World First Kill on August 25 – 56 days after defeating Gothik the Harvester). It took a total of 90 days to defeat the final boss Kel’Thuzad for the first time after the release of patch 1.11 (by the EU guild Nihilum). There were several reasons why so few guilds were able to repeat this feat.
Reason No. 1: Preparation
Unlike today in WoW (buy it now) Classic, for a long time people didn’t know exactly what requirements they had to meet in order to successfully raid Naxxramas, and Naxxramas wasn’t a raid you could “just” go to.
In order to enter the raid for free, you had to have a high reputation with Argent Dawn. If the reputation has not reached the maximum, it will be expensive. You can’t enter the instance with “Friendly” or worse.
For the fight against Saphiron, all players need equipment with frost resistance, though the frozen runes for building the best parts must be laboriously farmed in Naxxramas.
For the fight against the four horsemen you need eight well-equipped tanks. In the best case, the warriors already have four parts of the Tier 3 set to increase Taunt’s hit chance. Nat Pagle’s broken coil from Zul’Gurub’s Gahz’ranka is also helpful here.
Reason – No. 2: The design of the bosses
The bosses in Naxxramas were balanced for the first time across the board with a view to the available consumables and world buffs – see also the assessment of Ion Hazzikostas from 2006 . Raids that didn’t want to go through all that preparatory effort (and also didn’t have the best clothes from the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj yet (which was true for most raid groups of the time)) had corresponding problems in Naxxramas, the DpS and meet HPS requirements.
In addition, from the point of view of the time, the mechanics were sometimes even trickier than those of the previous raids. With Razuvious, priests are suddenly supposed to fill up with mind control and with Heigan, the raid has to be in the right place in the area at the right moment to avoid the deadly poison eruptions spraying out of the ground. However, precise movement maneuvers are a thing if you take into account the PC systems of many players from back then. When fighting Thaddius, players kept blowing up half the raid due to lag.
The highlight of the vanilla era – in terms of coordination, agreements and “keeping track” – is represented by the four riders: four bosses that have to be tanked in different corners, while the raid is divided into different groups and rotates between several positions so that the stacking marks of the death knights do not reach a life-threatening level … many players at the time were simply overwhelmed.
Reason – No. 3 : The upcoming TBC launch
Many raid groups from back then were not ready for the release of patch 1.11 to start right away in Naxxramas. Because of reason number 1 and because they were still busy with the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj or partly even with the older raid instances. In addition, players were slowly but surely approaching the TBC release on January 15, 2007.
Due to the high level of difficulty of Naxxramas and the upcoming launch of the first expansion, more and more players gradually said goodbye to recharge their batteries for Outland. It was becoming increasingly difficult to motivate enough players for the raid evenings. This was partly caught with guild alliances, partly guilds stopped their raid operations for the last few weeks and months. My theory: Had the TBC launch not been on the horizon, more guilds would certainly have been biting through Naxxramas by the end of 2006.
Naxxramas in Classic – the patch 1.12 version
Unlike previous Classic raid challenges, the difficulty level of Naxxramas is only slightly affected by the patch 1.12 state, which serves as the basis for the vanilla reboot from day one. Say:
The current Classic status of skills, talents and item values ​​roughly corresponds to the status of the Naxxramas release in vanilla WoW.
With the patches 1.11.1 to 1.12.2 there were no weakening of the bosses and only small, not worth mentioning hotfixes for Naxxramas.
At the same time, there are factors that have made the previous classic raids noticeably easier for us and that will certainly also play a role in Naxxramas:
When Naxxramas is available on the WoW Classic servers, most raid groups will have been farming the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj for months – they can fully focus on the new challenge from day 1.
We are more experienced, know more about the game, the internet is faster, the PCs are better and we know the boss strategies, from today’s point of view we don’t expect too difficult mechanics. In addition, many guilds have been preparing for the raid for some time.
The average raider in Classic is significantly better equipped than was the case with the average raider in vanilla WoW with patch 1.11.
The mentality of today’s players, as well as the resulting world buff meta, will only help in Naxxramas to meet the DpS and HpS requirements loosely flaky.
Highly ambitious guilds will very likely play through the raid several times on their own private servers in the near future in order to gain an advantage for the World First race.
If we put all this together, Kel’Thuzad might not survive the first night of the Naxxramas opening. In BWL there was the first Nefarian kill after 42 minutes. In fact, in AQ40, it only took 38 minutes to win over C’Thun for the first time. The latter time was only possible because the progress guilds only pulled the three optional bosses and Huhuran to C’Thun – the fastest guilds in the first ID needed a little over two hours for the entire run.
A little over two hours – that’s also a mark I think is likely for Classic Kel’Thuzad’s World First Kill. After all, in Naxxramas you have to clean all four wings before you can mess with Sapphiron and the Lich. By the way, the current speed run record on private servers is held by the SALAD BAKERS guild with one hour and eight minutes. There, however, players already have access to plenty of Naxxramas loot. The Classic version will not pose any major problems for hardcore raids – even without full Frost Resistance gear.
And how hard will average guilds find it in Naxxramas? In business administration, one or the other guild had problems with certain bosses in the first week or two. There are even raid groups in the temple that do not have all bosses on farm status, although Ahn’Qiraj has been open on their server for months. One does not have to be a prophet to predict that these groups will have some troubles in Naxxramas.
Similar to AQ40, I expect the level of difficulty to vary greatly. Boss phases with adds are super easy in Classic so far – see C’Thun or the first phase at Nefarian. This will also be the case in Naxxramas I’m sure and there are some add fights or stages there. Also, I don’t think Patchwerk’s DpS requirements will be a big problem, or that the ultimately simple mechanics of Thaddius or Heigan will be a big problem with current PC systems.
Personally, I have the most respect for the four riders, where many raids will certainly need several attempts until the strategy works. And before Saphiron: The average raid there will need high frost resistance values, just like the average raid at Firemaw uses fire resistance and at Huhuran and Viscidus nature resistance to lay down the respective bosses safely. It’s just that frost resistance isn’t so easy to farm in advance. Depending on how many Frozen Runes can be collected in the four wings, it could take several IDs before most raids will defeat Kel’Thuzad.
What is WoW Classic?
World of Warcraft Classic is a true recreation of the original WoW as you know it from 2006. All parts of the game – from combat mechanics and talent trees to character models and zones – have been recreated, contributing to the authentic experience.
Getting Started
All players with an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time on their accounts have access toWoW Classic at no additional cost.
- Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
- Select World of Warcraft Classic from the Version menu. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second Account drop-down list. In this column, select the active account you want to play with.
- Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
- Click the Play button when the installation is complete.
You will need to select the realm you want to play on from several different realm types. Make sure you choose the same realm as your friends – in World of Warcraft Classic, you can only group with characters that are on the same realm as you!
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