Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
And there's the contrast: XIV has no difficulty levels beyond the normals. It's less of a steamroll than WoW's normals (minus the occasional over-/better-tuned Timewalking while leveling), but there's no other options.
Except it does now. There are both Criterion and Criterion Savage.

This is partly true. But WoW dungeons from vanilla and TBC required CC, strategy good group composition and tanks would only pull a pack at a time. Sometimes you would even have to pull strategically or risk aggroing another pack which would result in a wipe.

And classic dungeons like Blackrock Depths and Maraudon could take hours to complete fully.
I think this is another "sign of the times" thing. Everyone was a lot newer at MMO's and dungeons back then. Theorycrafting was much less common, there were less abilities, less variety. Put simply, we as a playerbase were novices who sucked compared to now. Look at what happened when WoW "Classic" first released. People didn't play it "like they did" back in the Classic days. They played it with the current player mentality, experience, min-maxing, and skill. People also had time back then. Your typical gamer in the BRD/Mara days was a teenager or college kid with plenty of time on his hands. Fast forward to today, and those same human beings remain the primary MMO demographic...except now they have families, full-time careers, and nowhere near the ability to spend hours putting together a group to do one dungeon. The "newness" has worn off, and our lives are more complex. I think a lot of folks around here remember those days fondly but can't accept that time has moved on.