I never made it past BWL and AQ20 back in Vanilla so I'm pretty interested in knowing as well.

Average Guilds will clear AQ40 and Naxx in the first week for sure, if not the second but this is assuming the guild has been doing the past raids.
The latter raids require the previous raid gear to excel or even compete. Naxx may take longer to clear because the fact that its the biggest raid in Classic with idk 16-18 bosses something like that? 4 wings and each wing with 3 or 4 bosses plus the last 2 bosses when you clear all the wings.

The thing with ZG is, alot of us, if not most of us, walked in with full MC/BWL gear and a good amount of BWL gear too.
Basically we out geared it, which made it even more easier.

One thing I noticed as a dps is if I pull in MC it usually means I die if the tank cant get him back or healers cant heal through it.
But in BWL almost every boss has a raid wipe mechanic if someone really messes up and pulls at the wrong time or the boss accidentally breathes fire on the raid. What i am saying is MC is stupidly easy and BWL ups the difficulty if your not paying attention, its easy but mistakes can cost you.
Which brings me to AQ40 and Naxx, as an average guild the first couple of times will be difficult because its your first time ever in there or your rusty because its been 15 years since you have been in there. The bosses need coordination and focus from the raid to down all the bosses especially naxx.
Reading guides are one thing but executing the boss kill (doing it) is another.

The biggest reasons why in 2020 guilds even average guilds will clear AQ40 and Naxx alot earlier and easier than in Vanilla is the knowledge we have on the game. People now a days even casuals know there class much better, know their rotation, which spec to use, we are just plain better. Older and wiser with guides for everything, how to and when to do this, where to go and which buffs, potions, stats are better for our class. Also having addons to tell you what to do or where to go...in vanilla I didnt have any add ons at all, no threat, no dps, no Boss (addon) meters, i was using stock blizz UI and settings. And yes there were people and guilds that were elitist but it was far less than we do now. Not saying we are elitist but I learned more about vanilla WoW in Classic Wow than I did 15 years ago even when I was in a guild that did and had everything that wow had to offer except clearing Naxx.

Another big reason is when AQ40 was released it was not on version 1.12, so we are going into like we did with MC/BWL/ZG on the latest patch with all the buffs and itemization meant for end of vanilla content, right before TBC.

My take is AQ40 will be a cake walk for most guilds, whether they down all the bosses in the first night or the first week or second.
Plus most guilds and even guilds that have been downing BWL since weeks 1-3 will have alot more gear than i did in vanilla. I am almost 8/8 T2 on my warlock and have most BiS items for my class that will help ease the pain when we go into AQ40.

I remember a few bosses besides C'Thun being hard and took us awhile to down them, but this was when we didnt know the strategy or best way to kill the bosses like we do now. Twin Emps, Huhuran, and the trash before C'Thun gave us the most difficult time in AQ40 in vanilla. In naxx our guild only cleared half the bosses before TBC was released. Naxx has a few gear checks and guild checks (as in work together and not fuck it up bosses). Naxx will most defiantly be the hardest out of the 2, to clear mostly because they require alot more coordination than the other raids. You need all 40 to pull there weight in the raid (speaking casual guilds) compared to MC. MC and some extent BWL, you could have people not performing well or making mistakes and still clear those raids.

Sorry i rambled and was everywhere in my reply but just typing everything i am thinking and adding things when i remember other things.

All in all, I believe that most guilds will breeze through AQ40 and Naxx, maybe it takes the average or even the very casual guilds an extra week but i believe in two weeks the guilds that try to conquer the two raids will clear them. And this is assuming that the guild isnt starting with AQ40 because you do need BWL/MC/ZG gear to do well.

I know there will be some setbacks and C'thun is one of those dances that earned legendary amounts of infamy, but leading up to him, what are we looking at in terms of learning curves and execution curves?

Only briefly touched this.

Like i said the first check in AQ40 for average guilds will be Huhuran because its a gear check.
Either you need to have amazing hps, dps and threat on tanks to down her or you need to stack nature resist.
The boss is fairly easy at the beginning but at around 20% i believe, she goes berserk mode and does a shit ton of aoe nature damage.
That if you dont kill her soon its too much to overcome. Basically saving your arcane power/ trinkets to burn her down. We would get her low then make sure we are all topped off and burst damage abilities ready, then trigger her berserk phase to burn her down.

The next check is defiantly Twn Emps, they need to be spread out because once they get close enough to each other they heal back up to full.
One of the hard parts is you need a shadow resist geared warlock to tank one of them and a warrior the other, but they teleport so you need to be picked up before they run to the other side of the room. They shared health pool so they die together. I guess the hard part is controlling them when they teleport and avoiding the bugs in the room. The bugs in the room are like garrs adds except they dont blow you across the room, but do a ton of damage when they explode. I remember as a healer aggroing them with healing and they would hit me hard on cloth so need to control them when you aggro the bugs.

The last one besides C'Thun that we all know was the trash leading to C'Thun.
The trash was really hard back then, i remember because they hit really really hard and they cant be CCed or only be feared.
Trying to remember...and there was like 6 or 7 mobs per pull that all had different and powerful abilities.
And there were like 8 or so packs roaming around that all need to be cleared...I remember when we were in progression it was so painful those packs.
It was like pulling 2 packs of the ZG packs leading to hakkar with no CC...like i said my memory is hazy on this.
I just remember the trash was the worst we have even experienced anywhere even in Naxx.

I wonder how many guilds are going to be able to skip nature resist entirely on huhuran and just blast DPS. We're prepping for it to be a rough fight just so we don't get caught with our pants down, but I do wonder if we're pumping enough DPS to just melt her without worrying about the poison volley.

It will also be interesting to see what the effect of 1.12 talents have with raids that came out closer to patch 1.12.

Anybody else stockpiling mats to last their raid team through AQ and Naxx? We put together a spreadsheet of materials to gather as a group and we're just about topped off and ready.

Will it be tough? Hopefully, but I'll believe it when I see it. Raid content so far way immeasurably underwhelming, something's telling me aq will also be steamrolled by most guilds in the first few weeks.

We're slowly getting feedback from players in AQ ptr and they are eliminating mechanics just because of the shear amount of dps.

We're slowly getting feedback from players in AQ ptr and they are eliminating mechanics just because of the shear amount of dps.

Not surprised.

We're slowly getting feedback from players in AQ ptr and they are eliminating mechanics just because of the shear amount of dps.

That's what happened with ZG. I did some basic prepping to lead our first raid into ZG, and it turned out that we didn't have to know anything headed in there. Just smash on people since we're all fully BWL geared by now.

But ZG and AQ20 are both catchup raids designed for players with worse gear than BWL. AQ40 is not available on the PTR.

As easy as BWL is, and even though I'm one item away from fully geared out now, I still enjoy BWL raids. At least for the tanks in BWL, there are things we have to do or the raid can get wiped. Taunt swapping, picking up the adds in technician packs, working on keeping the big dudes from getting into the raid. It's not hard, but there is definitely organization needed to keep things working smoothly in there, which is different from MC which pretty much just required not ass pulling everything at once. I am expecting this to continue into AQ40, where the bosses will probably still die pretty quickly, but I am looking forward to more required coordination between players and people paying attention for success. And if that continues, then I will enjoy it and be happy. My enjoyment from the game comes from being engaged with my team and seeing the group function as a single cohesive unit.

I am expecting this to continue into AQ40

Yes it will continue with AQ40, I think there are a couple bosses that are tank and spank or dont need much coordination but the majority of them do.
C'thun, Ouro, Huhu (maybe not with crazy dps), Twin Emps, Trio Bugs (Actually was difficult and annoying with RNG), and some trash mobs were tough.

I think the first boss, fankris and the cleave boss are not that bad and Visc is just having the proper frost damage to freeze him (He was only hard because no one knew what to do).

I sure hope so man. It doesn't bother me if bosses are going down quickly, or that most guilds are able to clear. As long as the majority of the raid isn't simple tank & spank and requires coordination and people paying attention, then I'm going to have fun.

AQ40 will be alot more difficult than BWL. Don't expect it too be cleared by everyone in the first weeks; it will be the first Raid that will have bosses you never kill.

While most people look at boss mechanics and hp numbers and compare them to their latest BWL parses and think it will be null sweat, hardcore players are mad because they could not get to test AQ40 on PTR.

Why though? They want hands on data on trash mob density and skills because AQ40 got very hard trash compared to BWL. In BWL most of the HP you have to move down is on trash mobs, so killing trash faster and smoother becomes the number one goal for fast clears once you got the bosses down in a decent time.

Also Cthun: fight will be long and difficult, don't expect to get there worldbuffed - it might even be that you never get him on farm because you cant kill him weekly.

Can't say much about Naxx, back in vanilla it was harder than today because we had less knowledge, bad itemisation and internet. On pservers I was disappointed to notice that Naxx is mostly a gear check, encounter mechanics aren't that hard to learn, they just throw mad numbers at you. On the other hand it's much easier to keep your worldbuffs if you start with the right wings, as except for spider wing trash wasn't so bad.

So as it was in my vanilla guild, it might happen that you eventually focus your attention to clearing Naxx because Cthun and the trash before him is just too much work for the rewards.

That's what happened with ZG. I did some basic prepping to lead our first raid into ZG, and it turned out that we didn't have to know anything headed in there. Just smash on people since we're all fully BWL geared by now.

Naturally, this AQ facerolling was expected.

Having played on Private servers for +6 years i've encountered varying AQ difficulties, Blizz went the absolute easiest version of AQ possible.

I wanna see 'mathematically impossible' C'thun.

I bet it was actually very possible.

Huh. Someone in my guild told me they weren't adding AQ40 to the PTR at all! This is refreshing to know we might get some numbers beforehand.

Huh. Someone in my guild told me they weren't adding AQ40 to the PTR at all! This is refreshing to know we might get some numbers beforehand.

AQ40 isn't going to be released on the PTR. AQ20 is up there now, but blizz says they won't put the big AQ on it. We won't see AQ40 until it goes live for realsies on the regular servers.