So my wife dug up some Vaniila gameplay video she had made way back at launch

[hrugner]

Also I'm sure that anyone that leveled a paladin in Vanilla hated it.

Newp, it was hella fun.

[Deleted]

I remember i made a Warrior and got crushed by normal mobs in the outdoors, they wouldn't let me rest to eat & heal. BAM dead! At lvl 20 i was like.. ugh.. i need to get me heals.. so i rolled a pally

[Mormolyce]

I think they added the quest helper in late Wrath? I remember questing without it, when the NPC would tell you to go west but the mobs you needed were actually east lol.

People used to use websites and addons for it back then.

[RoKPaNda]

Newp, it was hella fun.

Maybe if you did it near the end of vanilla it was fun. Or if you never leveled another class before that it was fun. I understand that everyone's definition of fun is a little bit different but paladin leveling was pretty much the dullest thing I ever experienced in vanilla WoW. Perhaps they made it more enjoyable closer to BC.

Back then you'd have to work hard just to get a single epic, it could take a month or more of work. Now you can get a full set of epics with a few hours of max level lol. Back then raiding was a serious thing, you had to play your class well and the game was open ended, as the toughest stuff was beaten by only a little bit of the playerbase. Now you can /afk thru raiding and you can see all of the content with a few days after hitting 90. Back then PvP was taken more seriously, if you afk'ed you could get banned, and reporting someone to a gm worked. Nowadays you can afk and get a full set of good gear out of it lol.

In Vanilla, yes it took forever and a day to get epics. In burning crusade and beyond they were handed out like candy on Halloween. You've always been able to AFK through raiding, we carried at least 5 people in our 40 mans. Content being beaten by only a little of the playerbase was horrible design. Now the hardest content is still only beaten by a very very small % of the playerbase, but everyone else actually gets to see the content and have some form of character progression from it. This way is better.

People did take PvP more seriously however, and that's one area where I will agree with you, PvP was better in Vanilla WoW / Early BC. PvP now is horrible.

[Mazaxist]

WOW used to be about exploring new places, finding new mobs to kill, there were dangerous places where you could get 1shotted, etc.

new wow model - level as soon as you can, ignore all lore, ignore fun exploring new contect. just jump on flying mount and level ASAP. when at max level spam trade for arena....


Sure they made some a lot of imporvements over years but wow used to be more fun, if you deny it then i guess you are either a NEW player that never played vanilla or you are arena player.

[Nihth]

Also I'm sure that anyone that leveled a paladin in Vanilla hated it.

What no why? :P Even leveled as holy cloth ^^
The most disappointing thing about paladins though was that they were no where near similar to the D2 Zeal + Fanaticism pally :P

[Varabently]

It's just nostalgia unfortunately. I remember having to jump on flight paths to go long distances, retraining skills when you changed your spec, having to farm tons of fire resist or whatever gear so you could do raids. Having to get 15 people to do a dungeon that dropped blues was fun right? I remember running scholomance 29 times for my shadowcraft helmet. Super fun!

There were a lot of great things back then and the game was certainly much different, but it's come a long way.

[RickJamesLich]

Oh man, I'm too lazy to do the multi quote thing.... maybe just this one time lol

Agreed. I remember levelling my JC profession just to be able to make a nice necklace in WotLK.

Ahhh, wotlk, not exactly my "back in the day" lol. I'm referring to way back, when engineering had trinkets that could spell reflect casts, blacksmithing gave you a belt that could make you immune to fear effects, living action potions, tailoring nets, alchemist stones + pots = bad ass combo, rocket boots xtreme, the arcanite reaper (anyone remember that thing?), crafting sets awesome sets that you'd actually use for more than a day, goblin land mines in WSG twink brackets, all that kind of stuff.

You didn't have to work; you had to play a lot, but I get your meaning. I agree that I had to grind out lots of heroic dungeons before getting a full set of starter epics.

If you mean "you had to work because you were playing" that would apply by today's standards, just to clarify, you typically had to play better to get rewards back then. There was RNG of course, but getting a full set of epics back then would take a long... long time. Now you can get that on day one at 90.

This is where I don't agree. You had to show up consistently and gear appropriately, but playing your class well was much easier back in the day than it is now. Classes that relied on procs were the exception, not the rule. Most classes could (and often did) macro their rotations into one or two buttons. Blizzard deliberately changed up rotations to explicitly prohibit this. There were also some weird mechanics that were completely counter-intuitive but made all the difference in the world. The key to good shadow priest DPS, for example, was waiting to max mind flay stacks before applying DoTs because each tick went off whatever your stacks were at the time the DoT was initially applied. Even DoTs that automatically refreshed didn't update to the current stack count. How the heck was anyone supposed to figure that one out without carefully analyzing logs and/or reading a guide written by someone who had done so?

You bring up some very good points here, but I wasn't referring to dps rotations, more so for things like failing on mechanics. Letting a bomb off in the raid for example on Baron Geddon would usually be fatal... not saying we always need Naxxramas or Sunwell difficulty, but on the flip side, we don't need a game where mechanics don't matter unless you are doing hard modes.

You could always AFK through raiding content if you found a group who was skilled and/or nice enough to carry you through it. I know this is supposed to be a dig at LFR, but have you actually tried to AFK through it recently? It's not as easy as you might think.

Man I wrote a guide on afk'ing thru LFR literally, no joke and posted it on the wow forums for the first tier of Pandaria. I did it quite a bit during the ToT tier as well, not sure if things have changed that much during Siege, I only did LFR a handful of times but purposely dying on a fight at the start and getting rewarded for it... just seems like an awful thing to have in the game. Why did I do it? Because the fights were really boring, but I wanted to gear up my alts lol. To be frank, the groups I did this stuff with weren't even that good most of the time. Most of the time I actually thought it was more fun trying to be creative with afk'ing than actually doing the fights.

Nowadays if you AFK the game automatically boots you out of the battleground. Also, lots of the PvP gear is locked behind ratings, so unless someone is carrying you through rated battlegrounds and/or arenas you're not going to AFK your way to a full set of good gear. I don't know where you got that impression.

.
[/QUOTE]

Haven't played in a few months, I know the gear wasn't locked behind ratings, even the "elite" gear was purchasable without ratings - did this recently change or something? As for afk'ing thru battle grounds, again, was this changed in a recent patch? I had to beg with my teammates to try to vote kick bots, to the point where sometimes I'd have to try to trick people into booting them.

- - - Updated - - -

In Vanilla, yes it took forever and a day to get epics. In burning crusade and beyond they were handed out like candy on Halloween. You've always been able to AFK through raiding, we carried at least 5 people in our 40 mans. Content being beaten by only a little of the playerbase was horrible design. Now the hardest content is still only beaten by a very very small % of the playerbase, but everyone else actually gets to see the content and have some form of character progression from it. This way is better.

People did take PvP more seriously however, and that's one area where I will agree with you, PvP was better in Vanilla WoW / Early BC. PvP now is horrible.

In BC the epic thing didn't really get bad until Sunwell.... before then, you'd still have to grind out and do a few runs if you wanted a heroic from a 5 man, or craft it, or get the badges. Once Sunwell came out, you'd get epics on your first run lol. I've been playign since launch, never saw a guild that would just randomly let people afk and get gear lol. LFR I see that all of the time though, I think you and me both know there's a big difference here.

Content being beatable by a small amount of people meant that most players never ran out of stuff to do.... as opposed to now where you see it all after 3 or 4 days... which IMO is worse. Worse still, then you just see the same content over again on 3 more difficulty levels.

[Buu]

The game was great back then... in the PAST. It won't be good now if it would have be the same. But yeah, I really like those memories when I visit old zones.

Finally another person with TIME perspective.

[Shreddersyn224]

if vanilla and tbc were so bad then why release transmog i bet tons of people ran to transmog their gear if it was so nostalgia they wouldnt do thoose sort of things cuz all the gear from tbc like glaives were just some shit nostalgia weapon i mean lets move on we dont want to look at the past yea right what a contradiction

[Deleted]

It's just nostalgia unfortunately.

No it's not. WoW was a different game in vanilla. If you actually read the topic people have already explained why.

[RickJamesLich]

No it's not. WoW was a different game in vanilla. If you actually read the topic people have already explained why.

This pretty much, I know some will say "you just enjoyed the game more because of nostaligia" or whatever, but the game is completely different now. Back then the fun came from taking on big challenges, socializing with a ton of people on the server, world pvp existing - game play problems like bland rotations get a pass in a lot of players book's just because the other stuff is more fun. Now on the flip side, the game is catered to anti social guys (in an MMO, go figure), most of the game is so easy to the point where it's almost impossible to die unless you jsut run around and pull 20 mobs, and you can afk and get rewards. Nostalgia isn't the difference lol... it's pretty much everything else.

[arcaneshot]

if vanilla and tbc were so bad then why release transmog i bet tons of people ran to transmog their gear if it was so nostalgia they wouldnt do thoose sort of things cuz all the gear from tbc like glaives were just some shit nostalgia weapon i mean lets move on we dont want to look at the past yea right what a contradiction

You realize you can't transmog the glaives?

[Mormolyce]

No it's not. WoW was a different game in vanilla.

A much, much worse one.

But it was great at the time.

[RickJamesLich]

A much, much worse one.

But it was great at the time.

How is stuff like afk'ing and getting rewarded for it really a better game? Or the lack of socialization? or a lot of other things lol. We get that rotations are better now.... dual spec was a good idea, raiding in general has improved, but on the flip side 5 mans have been neutered, along with questing, certain aspects of pvp... I could go on lol

[Zafire]

Also I'm sure that anyone that leveled a paladin in Vanilla hated it.

Nope. Actually, Vanilla was the only point in time I actually loved leveling a Paladin.

I wanted to tank, but everyone said Paladins can't tank. I ended up going Holy because (to me) it looked like the best solo survival spec. I had MMO experience from Final Fantasy XI, so the talents I was reading made sense to me.

I would tank on my Holy Paladin and amaze the crap out of people. Granted, it required coordination, but it worked. Judgement of Crusader+Consecration = LOLDAMAGE. I ran out of mana after two pulls, but I only needed to drink for less than 10 seconds to get it back.

I could kill mobs 3-7 levels higher than me with absolute ease.

I could heal in tank gear just fine, which I did several times. It was really easy with the force-crit talent.

Leveling was fun, especially after I got Holy Shock (More damage buttons). I also remember leveling in Desolace and being able to Excorcism everything. I got this quest there for the Sword of Serenity and that's when I started my journey to conquer SM.

Actually, low/mid level Holy Paladin was probably the most OP class in the game. Consecration did ridiculous damage with Judgement of the Crusader (absolutely ridiculous damage), and only Holy could get consecration until later levels. Prot/ret didn't have access to it until 50s. It had the best healing of any Paladin spec for obvious reasons, it could keep its mana high for a very long time, and it could wear plate armor which actually mattered back then. So if I wore tank armor as a Holy Paladin I was a great DPS, great tank, and great healer, in one class/spec.

Anyway, this probably stopped at 50 (That's when I quit and when back to FFXI), but I admit my experience on Vanilla WoW was fun.

[Deleted]

Come on now yall! We all know vanilla WoW was terrible and nothing good was in it. Just a stupid dumb game for elitists who want to be special snowflakes. You're looking at this with rose tinted goggles my friend. It was just a terrible terrible time in gaming. Despite the few people that played it back then it was only because they didn't know any better. They just thought it was good but it really wasn't at all. If you want to see the pinnacle of gaming look no further than patch 5.4 of todays WoW! We got siege of ORGRIMMAR! We got the Timeless Isle too. What more could you want? Don't even get me started on how raiding was back then. Was just so easy mode and boring. I mean 5 people could carry the other 35 through everything including ez Naxx. You know why people thought Naxx 2.0 was easy? Because it was! It was the same as Naxx 1.0 for the most part. Nothing big changed from vanilla Naxx to WotLK Naxx so if you thought vanilla Naxx was hard, but WotLK Naxx easy that just means rose tinted goggles. And PVP? Ha it was so dumb and imbalanced back then. Nothing was balanced at all. Today it's just perfectly balanced which is why PVP has never been more popular. If you think otherwise, well... Rose tinted goggles my friend thats all I can say because it's all that needs to be said. Vanilla and TBC sucked. WotLK was okay, and Cata was good. MoP however is the best expansion and to deny that would be rose tinted goggles again. Just saying.

Yup you are right in two points
Unbalanced PvP and 5ppl carring other 35 in raid(that was because these 5ppl get the top gear first)
What i missing is the huge events look now raid pops and get cleared after 1-2 weeks Heroic in 3-4 weeks after.Garosh is the final boss and yet the fight with him is just fragment compared to epicness on fights with Nefarian, Illidian, Kil`jaeden, Arthas, Ragnaros and any kind of old gods hell even DS last fight is way much better compared to fight with any of the last bosses in MoP

[Fungalstorm]

That feel when you realize no game will ever make you feel like WoW did when you first played it

[Armourboy]

Nope. Actually, Vanilla was the only point in time I actually loved leveling a Paladin.

I wanted to tank, but everyone said Paladins can't tank. I ended up going Holy because (to me) it looked like the best solo survival spec. I had MMO experience from Final Fantasy XI, so the talents I was reading made sense to me.

I would tank on my Holy Paladin and amaze the crap out of people. Granted, it required coordination, but it worked. Judgement of Crusader+Consecration = LOLDAMAGE. I ran out of mana after two pulls, but I only needed to drink for less than 10 seconds to get it back.

I could kill mobs 3-7 levels higher than me with absolute ease.

I could heal in tank gear just fine, which I did several times. It was really easy with the force-crit talent.

Leveling was fun, especially after I got Holy Shock (More damage buttons). I also remember leveling in Desolace and being able to Excorcism everything. I got this quest there for the Sword of Serenity and that's when I started my journey to conquer SM.

Actually, low/mid level Holy Paladin was probably the most OP class in the game. Consecration did ridiculous damage with Judgement of the Crusader (absolutely ridiculous damage), and only Holy could get consecration until later levels. Prot/ret didn't have access to it until 50s. It had the best healing of any Paladin spec for obvious reasons, it could keep its mana high for a very long time, and it could wear plate armor which actually mattered back then. So if I wore tank armor as a Holy Paladin I was a great DPS, great tank, and great healer, in one class/spec.

Anyway, this probably stopped at 50 (That's when I quit and when back to FFXI), but I admit my experience on Vanilla WoW was fun.

Depends on when you leveled it as far as Consecration goes, they moved it around several times during the talent overhauls for Paladin. I think originally it was a deeper Holy talent but I think by the time I really got into it it was closer to the top of the Ret tree.

I was glad after it was all said and done that I leveled Paladin first, I didn't know just how bad it was. The one thing it had going for it is that you could solo lots of stuff that other classes couldn't ( or at least do it sooner) because of all of the CD's. Like most classes back then it had its moments of glory as well. I can remember the early 40's it went from just pressing judgement and going AFK for 10 minutes to finally blowing stuff up fairly easy. It also became pretty good in PvP during the 40's bracket.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that did the Holy tanking in Vanilla. It didn't work great being we didn't have a taunt ( thats what I used Holy Shock for actually) but in anything with Undead it was a complete blast to play that way, well other than the stops to drink. I usually was brought in the 5 slot in my groups back then because of judgements, the buffs, and the fact that DPS and healers could push the limit of threat much easier with BoP and Salvation. I would also off tank any mobs that couldn't be CC'd. Probably enjoyed playing Paladin as a support class back then than at any time sense. I miss when Hybrids were really hybrids.

Also being on a PvP server playing a Paladin was great fun. I was a Rogue killing machine and if someone jumped you you could just bubble/hearth and laugh at them. Granted I don't miss the bags full of reagents but otherwise it was great fun once you reached a certain point. The class overall was a mess for Vanilla, but what it did do well it did really well and a well played Paladin could make a run go so much smoother.

[Zafire]

Depends on when you leveled it as far as Consecration goes, they moved it around several times during the talent overhauls for Paladin. I think originally it was a deeper Holy talent but I think by the time I really got into it it was closer to the top of the Ret tree.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that did the Holy tanking in Vanilla. It didn't work great being we didn't have a taunt ( thats what I used Holy Shock for actually) but in anything with Undead it was a complete blast to play that way, well other than the stops to drink. I usually was brought in the 5 slot in my groups back then because of judgements, the buffs, and the fact that DPS and healers could push the limit of threat much easier with BoP and Salvation. I would also off tank any mobs that couldn't be CC'd. Probably enjoyed playing Paladin as a support class back then than at any time sense. I miss when Hybrids were really hybrids.

You didn't need to. You marked something with skull, used Judgement of the Crusader on it, and popped Consecration. Consecration would do like 20dmg/sec, but Judgement of the Crusader made it do like 80dmg/sec. It was absolutely ridiculous how much damage it did. Maybe it got nerfed or something. I only played for about a month.

Oldschool Crusader judgement http://db.valkyrie-wow.com/?spell=20303

I agree on the second point. I played a hybrid to be a hybrid, not be better at something than someone designed specifically for it. It was a design philosophy I respected.