From a Vanilla Player: The reason why I think WoW lost its glory.

[Deleted]

Also at the time, a lot of the Blizzard money was put in to Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and Titan, so the quality of the product start to decline a bit.

No, this is bullshit, all Blizzard game are TOP quality, compared with everything else on market. I cannot say one took more attention that other. Blizzard have become a "standard" in quality. Don't make a confusion here, don't start to point at bugs, that's something else. I am talking about content (artwork/music/etc).

[potis]

I love how people talk about Vanilla when its obvious you never played it, or didnt realize how things worked.

You should be glad LFG/LFR/LF anything exists.

This isnt bragging or insulting, this is how players worked back in the day:

If you werent part of the 2-5-10 big guilds on the server back in Vanilla/TBC you were considered irrelevant.

I remember every single group in Vanilla i always had players from the same 2-5 guilds, never any other guild cause i didnt want "bads" or to "wipe" or call it whatever.

I remember transfering servers to Stormscale for TBC and the same thing happened, no one ever invited a random for a heroic run the first 2-3 months of TBC unless they were part of 3, maybe 4 guilds, the rest were irrelevant.

I never once recall "Taking 2 hours to find a group" as many people cry on here, i never took more than 5 mins in all 4 years of Vanilla/TBC to form a group.

I only remember -once- on the first weeks of the server opening, "The Maelstrom-EU" cause there werent many at 60 yet, we needed to wait a few hours for them to log on to be able to do dungeons, but this way May 2005, on a brand newly released server.

LFG is a good thing, a majorly good thing for the average WoW player and server.

[Dug]

LFG is essentially what spamming trade with "LF Tank Kara" was back in the day except now it has its own section in the UI. Why people think it's different is confusing tbh

[Deleted]

No, this is bullshit, all Blizzard game are TOP quality, compared with everything else on market. I cannot say one took more attention that other. Blizzard have become a "standard" in quality. Don't make a confusion here, don't start to point at bugs, that's something else. I am talking about content (artwork/music/etc).

I said A BIT not A LOT. I know WoW and other Blizzard games in quality standard of production, work and stuff is really big. Only i said that in 09/10 Blizzard have to move part of the money of WoW to other 3 products, thats all, and the quality decline a BIT.

LFG is essentially what spamming trade with "LF Tank Kara" was back in the day except now it has its own section in the UI. Why people think it's different is confusing tbh

Is different cause now u don't have to communicate to nobody to do that, back in the day with the chat spaming you need to actually talk to people. The end point is the same cause you run the dungeon, but how you do it is totally different.

[Jibjub]

I've always put it down to cross realms.

WoW was awesome when your server was a community and you only interacted with each other. As more and more cross realm elements were added we lost the community and community is what makes MMOs good.

I agree with this.

[Polygons]

I'm glad they keep changing things, it's unrealistic to think it will ever go back to the way it was in vanilla. Change is exciting and it is what draws me back into the game.

[potis]

LFG is essentially what spamming trade with "LF Tank Kara" was back in the day except now it has its own section in the UI. Why people think it's different is confusing tbh

As i mentioned in my post, many people are in this magical delusion of skill when it comes to this game along with "server community".

They dont understand that their amazing time they had in TBC wiping and having fun as they call it, taking 2 hours to finish a heroic, when the average "bad group" takes barely 1 hour, and the good group would rush it in less than 15mins.

They dont understand they were part of "why would i ever invite anyone outside of the good guilds?" and so on.

Did they have fun? Yes they did, but try telling -ANY OF THEM- to take 2 hours inside a heroic nowadays, after taking 2 hours to find a group.

Most people are just wearing rose tinted glasses, lost in the memories of particular moments that remembering the big picture.

[Dug]

Is different cause now u don't have to communicate to nobody to do that, back in the day with the chat spaming you need to actually talk to people. The end point is the same cause you run the dungeon, but how you do it is totally different.

I guess? I never talked that much to the peoples groups I wanted to join back in Trade spam days. I said what I was, my role, the gear I had and waited for a response (invite). Once in the dungeon is when socializing happens, not that much in the invite process. Even with this new system you have the ability to whisper the leader of the group if you really want to talk before you join.

But there's no amount of talking that'll save you if the leader just doesn't want your class in the group.

[Deleted]

Obviously the game is not gonna be back on how it was back in they day cause it change so much in 12 years, and the WoW players today are not gonna accept the change cause is a different game.

But, Blizzard in his infinetly wisdom and greatness can implement for veteran players the old game to play, and also this old players can play retail at the same time, cause at the end of the day, we are all WoW players ^^

[Compstance]

Obviously the game is not gonna be back on how it was back in they day cause it change so much in 12 years, and the WoW players today are not gonna accept the change cause is a different game.

But, Blizzard in his infinetly wisdom and greatness can implement for veteran players the old game to play, and also this old players can play retail at the same time, cause at the end of the day, we are all WoW players ^^

Legion is the best WoW has ever been, IMHO. I started playing in Vanilla, and I played every expansion since. Never has the game felt so complete as it does now. Legion feels, to me, like the way WoW should have always been. Sure, it lost its luster for a bit, but now it shines brighter than ever.

[Deleted]

Legion is the best expansion FOR YOU, other people have other opinions.

[Compstance]

Legion is the best expansion FOR YOU, other people have other opinions.

Yes, that is what I said. Thank you for reiterating.

[Zoreyai]

Been saying this since they introduced the stupid xrealms.

They don't need to remove it, they could just open some servers that don't have any xrealm features.

I'd transfer in a heartbeat personally.

[Sturmbringe]

I have been reading the posts here, and I decided to post because I can't stand so much BS thrown about by clueless people.

There is no such thing as being a unique snowflake in an MMO, at least not in WoW. And it NEVER was this way.

You did NOT have the opportunity to significantly differentiate your characters from others of your class. Going as far as saying you'd be "unique on your realm" is downright hilarious, really.

The year is 2005. I own a Northwood Pentium 4 Single Core based laptop with a 64MB RAM AGP GPU and 1 GB DDR RAM@333 MHz.

I remember getting into Ironforge for the first time clad in greys and whites and chancing upon a female Night-Elf Hunter with Tier 1 and Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers.

Don't tell me that there were no "unique snowflakes" in WoW Vanilla. What happened in WoW Vanilla was, you had perhaps 75% of the server running about in green gear and weapons specced in all sorts of weird talents, and some people even running about with their talents un-spent, and about 25% of the playerbase doing either exclusively Organized PvP (Premades) or exclusively Raids, or both.

Everytime people saw that Tauren Warrior with Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, the only one in the server with that weapon, there was a special snowflake.

Everytime people saw that Paladin with Sulfuras, Hand Of Ragnaros, the only Paladin on the server with this weapon, you had a special snowflake.

Everytime people saw a Raider wearing a complete Tier Set, something that was an achievement that took six months weekly raiding, there you had a special snowflake.

WoW:Vanilla was all about special snowflakes. Your Character was not like a Robot coming out of mass production with the same armor and weapons as in Retail WoW, but was truly unique. One felt unique and either a hero or a villain, something coming from D&D, exactly as it should have been.

You had cookie cutter builds and everyone would spec into those, depending on what you played you had a few points you could've put in some damage reduction or in a PvP talent if you wanted, and THAT WAS IT. Anything else was sub-optimal, there wasn't anything "creative" to do with the talent tree, you could either spec correctly, or you could spec wrong and be shit. There was no such thing as "out of the box".

I played Vanilla, and in reality next to nobody except that 25% of people in the server who raided or PvP'ed had any idea about cookie-cutter specs.

In fact, many people went about with their talents unspent, others were not even level 60 by the end of the expansion, and others simply talented into whatever stroke their fancy, thus tri-spec or specs that really did not make sense at all.

There was only Thottbott, Elitist Jerks and Alakhazam for the hardcore, and that was it. People really had no clue what was going on.

If anything, you have more choice with the talents now, a lot of classes have more than 1 viable choice per tier, sometimes it depends on what you're fighting. Guess what, this means you put MORE thought into your talent choices than you did with the old, antiquated system.

In reality, in Vanilla all specs were viable. There was the levelling tree, there was the PvP tree, and there was the DPS/Healing/ or Tanking Tree.

People whine because they could not spec Retardin and get taken to raids, although in actual fact we raided with two Retardins. One had Sulfuras, hand of Ragnaros, and the other one had Nightfall.

We also raided with one Shadow Priest, one Balance Druid and one Feral Druid, contrary to what most people would tell you.

People who never played Vanilla don't have a clue. You had so many people that a few Retardins more or less did not matter. Similarly Horde side, there were Enhancement Shamans raiding with Nightfall.

Epics are simple a colour code. It literally doesn't mean anything whatsoever, get over the colours, please.

Actually, back in Vanilla if you were clad in full epic gear, as noted above with the full Tier 1 geared people, you had a following and admirers. People would whisper you in capital cities telling you how cool you looked like and that they wanted to be like you.

I am just making note of my actual experiences from playing Vanilla back in 2005/2006.

The game is harder than it was in Vanilla. End. Of. Story. If you think it's not, you just don't remember or you were really young and everything seems harder then. SO many specs in Vanilla would have 1-2 button rotations. Warlocks would Shadow Bolt spam, Retri Paladins (if anyone even took them to raids...) would just wait on Seal of Command to proc while AAing. Hunters could bind their entire rotation to the mouse wheel and just scroll to win. The only thing harder about raiding back then were the logistics involved in getting 40 people together, if you were not a GM or an officer, the game back then was the easiest it's ever been.

This shows how much of a bad player you are aka "scrub" in modern parlance.

You would not get kicked out from a raid guild back in Vanilla simply because there were lots of people like you, i.e. people who have never heard of Mucow or Elitist Jerks and thus had no clue of how to play their character.

In Vanilla, raiding Hunters had to install an addon that added a custom Auto-Shot bar and had to perform perfect rotations in order not to "clip their auto-shots".

In addition to optimally using aimed shot and multi-shot, one also had to manage auto-shots so as to avoid "clipping" them, i.e. prevent the occurrence of a completely overwritten auto-shot by either multi-shot or aimed-shot thus butchering one's DPS. Hunters were in fact one of the few classes who had a rotation, perhaps the hardest one, and doing as you suggested above would greatly reduce your DPS and earn you the title of "Huntarded".

Further, Hunters also had to kite, where they would also used the following abilities:

1. Concussive Shot.
2. DistractinG Shot (This ability has been removed)
3/4: Feign Death/Trap
5/6: Frost Trap or Explosive Trap
7. Disengage (This ability was changed in later versions of the game).

If Hunters failed in kiting, they wiped the raid.

This is just an example, but it shows the completely inadequate understanding of WoW Vanilla most MMO Champion posters have simply because they have never played Vanilla or they just were 10 years old at the time.

Even J. Allen Brack himself made hilarious mistakes when he played WoW Vanilla in Nostalrius in the same party with Tom Chilton who, as he told us, really laughed his ass off. I won't go into details.

Chilton is perhaps one of the very few people who really know wtf they are talking about still back in Blizzard.

Artifact weapons are great. You have post max level progression for your character in a way other than pure gear, there are plenty of skins for you to choose from, and at the end of the day, when you're actually playing the game you're not staring at your character anyway.

Artifact weapons, as implemented, are not great. They are parts of a Communist welfare system and all they do is completely remove any value these weapons might have had in the minds of fans once upon the time.

Finally, people need to stop conflating "This takes really long and is tedious" with "This is really difficult". Something that takes very long is not necessarily difficult. You know what is difficult ? On the other hand, you had Vanilla where BRD was "hard" because it took 2 fucking hours to do and you'd have to replace leavers, meanwhile you were spamming your 2-3 abilities on like no more than 4 mobs at a time who mostly just auto attacked your tank and cast a spell like once in ages, zzzz.

You fail in logic. If it was not difficult, it wouldn't have taken you long to achieve or complete it.
========================================================================================== ======================

This discussion is a waste of time, mainly because it fails to achieve anything. People who have never played Vanilla or were children at the time mostly continue to keep talking out of their arse referring to how they think Vanilla was and the argument goes on and on and on.

[Dug]

IThis discussion is a waste of time, mainly because it fails to achieve anything. People who have never played Vanilla or were children at the time mostly continue to keep talking out of their arse referring to how they think Vanilla was and the argument goes on and on and on.

What does them being a child have to do with their opinion of the video game? Vanilla WoW was not fkn rocket science even for my 12 year old brain so sorry but this bullshit ain't gonna fly here.

[Awsyme]

Anytime I hear people talking about how complicated Vanilla was all I think of is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4olVJj1wbqI at 4:40. (I grant you the fight at 8:45 is amazing however)

Vanilla wasn't hard - it was new. Most of the raid mechanics that existed back then wouldn't make it into an instance nowadays. (Mobs must die at the same time! one of you needs to run out of the group to avoid exploding and killing the raid!!!!). What made them hard was a player base who'd never done anything like this before coupled with a punishingly small loot table that slowed down progression massively. In MC each boss bar raggy dropped 2 epics for a 40 man team. Which meant most of the 'vanilla hard' bosses were just a dps check. As soon as the raid group finally got enough people equipped they could plow through most of the bosses like a knife through butter. It wasn't that you somehow became amazing - it was that your tanks and dps were equipped enough to handle Vaelastrasz the Corrupt you beat him. If not? Your raid wiped.

As for outside content - again, most instances were hard purely because of overwhelming packs of mobs. It wasn't a skill check in most cases, it was things like having 8 mobs at a time, bad aoe and constantly respawning packs behind you which made druids unviable as instance healers because they didn't have a general resurrect (for some insane reason).

Fact is, encounters now are a lot more intricate. Most bosses have involved mechanics, different phases and, as said before, most players haven't touched mythic raiding or the higher levels of mythic+.

I do understand some complaints (I think the loss of unique server identity was a shame) but 'dumbed down mechanics' is not one of them.

[Devia]

Hey now, sometimes you had to use lesser ranks to conserve mana.

Which is funny because that wasn't the way Blizzard intended players to do things, so that's why they got rid of it in...WotLK maybe?

- - - Updated - - -

Players Logic:
BC: TOO HARD BLIZZ NURF IT
Wotlk: TOO EZ BLIZZ GG
Cata: TOO HARD BLIZZ NURF IT
MoP: TO MANY DAILIES BLIZZ STAHP
WoD: NOTHING TO DO BUT AFK IN GARRISON
Legion: TO MUCH DAILY REP GRIND AND ARTIFACT GRIND STAHP BLIZZ

Everyone wonders why this game is how it is.. Only ones to blame is all the people who QQ on forums(here and official) instead of just enjoying the game for what it is, and its honestly not what people make it out to be.

This is so true. What people don't realize is Blizzard has MILLIONS of people giving them feedback. They are never, ever, EVER always going to please everyone, and the game evolves and changes over time. People change over time too. When I played WoW 11+ years ago, I was a different person, different expectations, more time, etc. I have played on numerous private servers over the years too, and while I enjoyed vanilla more than Cata, MoP or WoD, I will honestly say that a lot of it was the nostalgia factor. There are definitely a lot of things I miss, but if the game was still the same as it was 12 years ago it would be dead. The game changes, and so do people. If you don't enjoy it anymore, then don't play it. I didn't enjoy it for 3 xpacs, so I quit. I enjoy Legion, so I'm playing again. It's pretty simple really.

[lazzy]

From a Vanilla player.

You're living in the past. Get over it.

The game turned into what the Majority of the Player base wanted.

[Sabever]

I have been reading the posts here, and I decided to post because I can't stand so much BS thrown about by clueless people.



The year is 2005. I own a Northwood Pentium 4 Single Core based laptop with a 64MB RAM AGP GPU and 1 GB DDR RAM@333 MHz.

I remember getting into Ironforge for the first time clad in greys and whites and chancing upon a female Night-Elf Hunter with Tier 1 and Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers.

Don't tell me that there were no "unique snowflakes" in WoW Vanilla. What happened in WoW Vanilla was, you had perhaps 75% of the server running about in green gear and weapons specced in all sorts of weird talents, and some people even running about with their talents un-spent, and about 25% of the playerbase doing either exclusively Organized PvP (Premades) or exclusively Raids, or both.

Everytime people saw that Tauren Warrior with Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, the only one in the server with that weapon, there was a special snowflake.

Everytime people saw that Paladin with Sulfuras, Hand Of Ragnaros, the only Paladin on the server with this weapon, you had a special snowflake.

Everytime people saw a Raider wearing a complete Tier Set, something that was an achievement that took six months weekly raiding, there you had a special snowflake.

WoW:Vanilla was all about special snowflakes. Your Character was not like a Robot coming out of mass production with the same armor and weapons as in Retail WoW, but was truly unique. One felt unique and either a hero or a villain, something coming from D&D, exactly as it should have been.



I played Vanilla, and in reality next to nobody except that 25% of people in the server who raided or PvP'ed had any idea about cookie-cutter specs.

In fact, many people went about with their talents unspent, others were not even level 60 by the end of the expansion, and others simply talented into whatever stroke their fancy, thus tri-spec or specs that really did not make sense at all.

There was only Thottbott, Elitist Jerks and Alakhazam for the hardcore, and that was it. People really had no clue what was going on.



In reality, in Vanilla all specs were viable. There was the levelling tree, there was the PvP tree, and there was the DPS/Healing/ or Tanking Tree.

People whine because they could not spec Retardin and get taken to raids, although in actual fact we raided with two Retardins. One had Sulfuras, hand of Ragnaros, and the other one had Nightfall.

We also raided with one Shadow Priest, one Balance Druid and one Feral Druid, contrary to what most people would tell you.

People who never played Vanilla don't have a clue. You had so many people that a few Retardins more or less did not matter. Similarly Horde side, there were Enhancement Shamans raiding with Nightfall.



Actually, back in Vanilla if you were clad in full epic gear, as noted above with the full Tier 1 geared people, you had a following and admirers. People would whisper you in capital cities telling you how cool you looked like and that they wanted to be like you.

I am just making note of my actual experiences from playing Vanilla back in 2005/2006.



This shows how much of a bad player you are aka "scrub" in modern parlance.

You would not get kicked out from a raid guild back in Vanilla simply because there were lots of people like you, i.e. people who have never heard of Mucow or Elitist Jerks and thus had no clue of how to play their character.

In Vanilla, raiding Hunters had to install an addon that added a custom Auto-Shot bar and had to perform perfect rotations in order not to "clip their auto-shots".

In addition to optimally using aimed shot and multi-shot, one also had to manage auto-shots so as to avoid "clipping" them, i.e. prevent the occurrence of a completely overwritten auto-shot by either multi-shot or aimed-shot thus butchering one's DPS. Hunters were in fact one of the few classes who had a rotation, perhaps the hardest one, and doing as you suggested above would greatly reduce your DPS and earn you the title of "Huntarded".

Further, Hunters also had to kite, where they would also used the following abilities:

1. Concussive Shot.
2. DistractinG Shot (This ability has been removed)
3/4: Feign Death/Trap
5/6: Frost Trap or Explosive Trap
7. Disengage (This ability was changed in later versions of the game).

If Hunters failed in kiting, they wiped the raid.

This is just an example, but it shows the completely inadequate understanding of WoW Vanilla most MMO Champion posters have simply because they have never played Vanilla or they just were 10 years old at the time.

Even J. Allen Brack himself made hilarious mistakes when he played WoW Vanilla in Nostalrius in the same party with Tom Chilton who, as he told us, really laughed his ass off. I won't go into details.

Chilton is perhaps one of the very few people who really know wtf they are talking about still back in Blizzard.



Artifact weapons, as implemented, are not great. They are parts of a Communist welfare system and all they do is completely remove any value these weapons might have had in the minds of fans once upon the time.



You fail in logic. If it was not difficult, it wouldn't have taken you long to achieve or complete it.
========================================================================================== ======================

This discussion is a waste of time, mainly because it fails to achieve anything. People who have never played Vanilla or were children at the time mostly continue to keep talking out of their arse referring to how they think Vanilla was and the argument goes on and on and on.

Very well said and spot on. The difficulty in vanilla was something modern WoW players dont know anything about. Your example regarding kiting is perfect. Here is another. As a warlock I used to have to fear a mob in a dungeon without agroing the rest of the dungeon. Back then fear made the mob run around like crazy, not stand in place and cower like it does now. You used to have to toggle CoA and CoW on the focus target when he got to close to other dungeon mobs. CoW would cause the fear to break. So as a lock sometimes you would cc two mobs with the same fear rotations so that the tank only had so many mobs crushing him. It was an art. You could not zerg a dungeon like you can now.

- - - Updated - - -

Anytime I hear people talking about how complicated Vanilla was all I think of is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4olVJj1wbqI at 4:40. (I grant you the fight at 8:45 is amazing however)

Vanilla wasn't hard - it was new. Most of the raid mechanics that existed back then wouldn't make it into an instance nowadays. (Mobs must die at the same time! one of you needs to run out of the group to avoid exploding and killing the raid!!!!). What made them hard was a player base who'd never done anything like this before coupled with a punishingly small loot table that slowed down progression massively. In MC each boss bar raggy dropped 2 epics for a 40 man team. Which meant most of the 'vanilla hard' bosses were just a dps check. As soon as the raid group finally got enough people equipped they could plow through most of the bosses like a knife through butter. It wasn't that you somehow became amazing - it was that your tanks and dps were equipped enough to handle Vaelastrasz the Corrupt you beat him. If not? Your raid wiped.

As for outside content - again, most instances were hard purely because of overwhelming packs of mobs. It wasn't a skill check in most cases, it was things like having 8 mobs at a time, bad aoe and constantly respawning packs behind you which made druids unviable as instance healers because they didn't have a general resurrect (for some insane reason).

Fact is, encounters now are a lot more intricate. Most bosses have involved mechanics, different phases and, as said before, most players haven't touched mythic raiding or the higher levels of mythic+.

I do understand some complaints (I think the loss of unique server identity was a shame) but 'dumbed down mechanics' is not one of them.

So you are using a video without combat text t osee what other macros were being used to prove that wow was easy? That rogue was pretty well geared. Rogues were also one of the stronger pvp classes at max level and he caught the hunter sitting which was a huge advantage. Either way, this video does little to prove your point. Two buttons used or twelve buttons, you cannot determine anything regarding skill of either player from that video.

[Deleted]

From a Vanilla player.

You're living in the past. Get over it.

The game turned into what the Majority of the Player base wanted.

Then why less people play if the majority want that?