Why Vanilla WoW?

[Deleted]

I started in TBC but didn't bought expansion until later so I was stuck in vanilla for some time ('til I hit lvl 60 that is). What I liked back then is that everything was unknown to me and it was a huge game to explore. I didn't bother with raiding back then so I took my time to do every quest in every zone and dungeon and get into the lore of the world. I really enjoyed that huge quest chains that took you to the other side of the world and back, hard group quests [5], getting that blue item and so on.

The really enjoayable part was being low level and do dungeons, then get gear from dungeons and finally being able to complete some quests solo.

I don't like revamped Azeroth (aka post Cata era) because most of the zones lost that special something they had and were made much worse and boring, not to mention some of my favourite quests were removed or just streamlined.

However I do enjoy Legion although I don't play it in that way anymore because it's not what the game is about nowdays. Now it's just rush to max level and do raids/m+.

If I roll on a private server I'd just do all that again, like playing single-player rpg and explore everything in it but with the group of people. That's probably most people miss from the game today and you cannot capture it anymore and it's pointless to try.

Oh yeah...Barrens Chat!

[Deleted]

-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.
Yeah i for one think it was a great change to make all specs viable.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
The amount of classes hardly determines wether it was a good game or not.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
This is a bad thing?
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
what do you mean that you whould lose half the population? Are you planning on forcing all current players of legion to play vanilla wow?
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
The amount of polygons used rarely matters to me at least. And wow havent developed much when it comes to completly new graphic features. No waves in the ocean, no treees swaying in the wind. No blood or any other wounding effects. No storms or other cooler weather effects, only static rain. No clouds moving in the sky. Not much new wildlife to enhance the experience such as singing birds or treeclimbing monkeys. Not much added when it comes to bodylanguage or muscle movement. very little destructable objects. Your clothes doesnt get dirty/wet/bloody ever.. nor do any plate ingame reflect sunlight and the shadows cast by the sun for that matter doesnt seem to move nor is our nights particularly dark.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
You do realize a good portion of players prefer "long and grindy" over fast and smooth. Think of it this way, if wow legion is a highway to get to your destination, vanilla wow is a hike in the wood. But wich one of them is really most entertaining? I for one whould pick the hike. Its about the journey, not the destination.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
Again, the more effort you put into something, the more rewarding it will feel. Did you feel happy and awesome when you got your artifact in Legion? I sure as hell didnt.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
Again No-flyign is something many players prefer since once you get flying, the world becomes very small all of a sudden.
-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...
Another thing contributing to the world feeling more massive and overwhelming.
-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.
Oh an adventure taking me across the entire world to destinations unkown, fuck that wheres my ferarri?
-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.
I agree that some elements of questing has become better, but i feel like in the recent 4 expansion it has been ruined by the overwelmingly high pace leaving you with barely any recolection of any induvidual Q. As for voiceover, i love it and wish we had more of it in vanilla wow. But what made vanilla wow Questing so great was that everything had time to leave an impression on you since you didnt just zerg everything down in a second.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
I find that the endgame havent changed much trhou the expansions, raiding is and remains the dominant endgame content
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
Locations are important, it lends authicenty to the whole battleground. Its no longer some random place to fight.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
No offence but this is in most cases a noob argument since depending on who you listen to every class was op... warlocks was op, mages was op, shamans was op, warriors was op, rogues was op...
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
Are you saying that lfr/lfd is something that makes legion better than vanilla?
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.
So you prefer lfr over organized raiding in a guild? I can probobly speak for everyone who enjoys vanilla wow that we are of the exact opposite opinion :P

PvP was unbalanced in a sense that not every specc was viable...

[Cæli]

Do you play Legion on lowest graphics settings?

no but Legion zones are like 15% of the total game

[Isadora]

There is more world by far than there was in Vanilla - so factually, your opinion is irrelevant.

Your score, very / wrong.

I hope you're being dense on purpose, if not, I'm kind of worried about you.

To explain what he probably meant instead of "LUL, WE HAVE MORE REGIONS NOW, SO THERE'S MORE WORLD, HOW DUMB ARE YOU #420BLAZEIT", let me break it down for you:

The "world" isn't so much just how much space there is, but how it feels like an actual place. Back in Vanilla (and no, I don't want to go back to classic wow and I don't care at all whether they put some servers up or not, but anyway, this needs explaining) Azeroth felt more "real", if that makes any sense. A lot of the quality of life improvements improved gameplay over the years, but it hurt the feel for the world.

A simple example: LFG-tool. In Vanilla, doing a dungeon was an adventure from start to finish. You had to find people to do this with and while physically, you had nothing to do with the persons behind the screens, in the virtual world they existed on your server. If you actually knew where they were, you could go and find them doing quests while waiting for the group to fill up. They weren't 4 people from a server from Russia that you have never seen before and will never see again, they probably were guys you met before while leveling, while questing, while pvping. You could relate to them, at least somewhat.
Then you actually had to travel to the dungeon. You got a feel for how long it took to ride there and you'd experience what the world looks like going there. It wasn't a popup followed by a loading screen and BAM, you're in vault build by the wardens or in a prison built for Odyn. You actually had to go there.

Then there were all these quests you actually had to do to unlock certain dungeons. These quests might have been tedious and long and somewhat boring, but while doing it, you traveled around the world, you met other players, you discovered regions you probably hadn't seen before. You probably had to fight players on the opposing factions at one point and it created a memory of that time where you just wanted to finish a quest, but then it escalated in a full blown pvp battle that lasted for hours.

It's stuff like that which leads to the feeling of "more or less world".

[Revi]

Nostalgia.

Then there's nostalgia.
And of course, nostalgia.
Nostalgia.
Have I mentioned nostalgia yet?

And finally, nostalgia.

This is so stupid. The game was more popular back then than it is now. Yes, it was new and the market was different - but to pretend everything was worse is just ridiculous.

It'd be like me saying all music today is better than all music in the 80's, and if you think differently it's just nostalgia. It's stupid.

[Accendor]

-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.

Back in Vanilla that didn't really concern people because everything was doable even with this imbalances. Also: Warriors were good as DPS classes, paladins could also heal and were used as out of combat rezzers in Raids (you might find that boring, but let's be honest: It's just a task as everything else) etc.

-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.

And that wasn't really a problem and while I even play all three of them to some extend, it would not be a problem if they were not there.

-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.

And this is always considered a good thing, it's called faction identity.

-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.

As a alliance player I couldn't care less. On the other hand everytime pandaren come up every second one starts to hate on them and also goblins suck, so so you can see that most of the players were fine with 4 classes. I am not saying that is my opinion, I am just answering to your argument.

-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.

Graphics have nothing to do with gameplay most of the time, so this argument is invalid.

-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.

Again, this is usually considered a good thing. The rush fest that is modern wow is one of the main reasons many old seasoned players stopped playing the game. There is no feeling of accomplishment when anything is doable in 30 minutes and the adventure feeling is completely lost.

-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.

1. Everything that is "time consuming" is something to do, so that is good.
2. Making some things hard to get (either through difficulty or time investment) makes it exclusive, which is considered a good thing

-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.

The world was small in comparison, so flying was not really needed. Also there weren't mountain cliffs every 3 meters.

-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...

You usually leveled 1 or maybe 2 chars and continued playing them. The goal was not to reach level 60 as fast as possible, the goal was to explore the world and a mount was not needed for that at the beginning.

-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.

You only had to use thotbot if you were unable to understand the written english language. Of course you are right, the storytelling and most of the quests are way better today, but this are two different points you make.

-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.

There are also today not many quests with VA and again, while it is cool, it is not really needed. Yeah, there are cool cutscenes, you are right about that. But the quest variety has not really changed since then, so no real difference (except a few of course).

-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)

That was not a problem because even when you were level 60 you needed so much stuff from the dungeons that you could just run them all the time. And again, you were not doing 10 dungeons in one evening, you were usually doing one or maybe two. PVP was also completely different, because Alterac Valley was just epic and took hours (or even days), you knew all the players on your server and to get a high pvp rank you had to spend a lot of time.

-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.

This was changed after a while in classic, you could queue from the main capitals then.

-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.

You call it unbalanced (which is correct), other people call it fun. Todays PVP is overly complicated (your class works completely different than in PVE), streamlined and unrewarding. If I had to chose I would go with classic PVP all the time.

-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.

Yeah, sometimes group building took a while, but actually you were not waiting, you were actively trying to build your group. So this is not idling, it is social interaction. And then again, you would think twice before leaving a group in progress because it took so long to find one. Also you would have a hard time finding a new group next time, because you were probably blacklisted. Today you just hop in queues (or LFD, which is basically not that different from a queue) with anonymous people and are able to leave M+ just for the lolz without punishment. I would go with vanilla all the time, but a server specific LFD tool would also be ok.

-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.

Again, that is also considered a good thing.

[Deleted]

Sorry, but Vanilla raiding was absolutely awful. Molten Core in particular was the most garbage raid of all time and nothing that came after was all that much better. Yes, I'm including Naxx 1.0 in that list. Want to progress? Hope you have 8 warriors with T3 or gtfo.

[Deleted]

that's really the thread right there. Talked shit constantly in chat in vanilla, no one wanted anything to do with you

bullshit, I talked a whole lot of shit. Still never had an issue finding a grp for anything.
Holy priest btw.

[Pua]

1. Still feels like an actual world .... 0

I think Legion has done a very impressive job of putting the "World" back in World of Warcraft. I don't necessarily attribute that to a lack of flight (though it could possibly contribute; depends on who you are), but more to the way world content has been completely revitalised with the World Quest system and the way professions, in particular, play into that.

The fact that quest zones scale means that nothing becomes too trivial, and each individual zone plays into the entirety of both it, and the wider story, extremely well.

Sadly, that wasn't the case in Warlords of Draenor where the level-cap world was dramatically dropped, queues replaced any sense of adventure, and trade materials were sent to your inbox.

2. Server communities were just as bad back then, just in a different way. Elitists ran the show ... 0

Server communities were dramatically different prior to the advent of LFG. Whether you consider that good or bad is up to each individual person, of course, but arguing that server communities weren't impacted by cross-realming and increased anonymity would be an argument that nobody should, or even would, take very seriously at all.

3. Feeling rewarded by things, I got an awesome reward last night in Legion ... 0

The reward mechanism was dramatically different. Nowadays, the game tells you what rewards to expect and specifically how to get them; the vanilla experience did neither. There's also an argument about "Rewards Vs Rewarding", but that's perhaps too large a topic (and potentially too abstract) for this particular thread.

The whole concept of epic gear and acquiring it is arguably the example to cite here.

4. Class identity was definitely better in Vanilla, also the ability to have way more combinations of spec ... 1

I struggle with this, actually. The real problem I've found with "class identity" is that a lot of players, particularly veterans, have an idea of what their class is... And the designers' view may not mesh with that. There is also a real problem with class design on the whole, something that plays into this problem and exasperates it. Fury, for example, is a good vision when I play it; but that doesn't cover up the endemic design problems that the spec has, problems that have existed for a long time now.

Of course, let's also not forget that the delta between "class" and "spec" identity is something that hasn't been done especially well, either.

5. PvP was indeed more fun, so much fun that even I did it ... 1

PvP built up to its peak in Wrath, and has been on a downward spiral since then.

IMHO it needs an entire rethink.

Why I want vanilla servers - so i can spend half an hour going and revisiting my favourite town (Auberdine) in an undamaged state. That's it - won't be back

I want vanilla servers because the game was built very differently back then, and with a very different philosophy in mind. The design goals have changed hugely, and I also find it strange that one of the best games every made doesn't officially exist any more in its original form.

[Deztru]

You can't really blame/shame others for liking what you might not, that's just dumb.

[TheVaryag]

Of all the expansions to compare to <insert current expansion to complain about here>, why is vanilla WoW the one many people argue are the best? I can kind of relate to WotLK/BC even though there is still vastly much more to do now than back then, but vanilla onestly was a sad attempt of a game compared to Legion. Maybe it was cool back in its time, but when I look back, I see a game that:

-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...
-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.
-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.

I mean I could go on all day and the only benefits I see are from nostalgia goggles and can never be fixed outside of a completely new game:

-The game is new, so everything is interesting and unknown.
-People first playnig the game were much younger, so things are of course going to be more "magical" to younger kids. I myself was like 12-13 at first.

Honestly that's all I can even think of, after staring at my screen for 5minutes. Outside of nostalgia, vanilla is just objectively the worse "expansion" (yea, it's not an expansion, w/e). I'm legitimately curious to hear what anyone has to say that was nice about vanilla as opposed to now. Oh, and try not to say things that blizzard has tried reintroducing recently and it tanked horribly because nobody liked it.

Okay well first, Vanilla Isn't an expansion, It's the beginning of the game, hence vanilla.

-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.... i call that a positive by the way. I still call bloodlust/Heroic/Timewarp just bloodlust... that's what It was since the beginning and It will stay that way.
-The classes are always unballanced, don't claim Vanila was the most unbalanced, and hybrid classes were a thing, just because those classes weren't the top 10 DPS, or had 400k million DPS or whatever doesn't make them unviable, just by your post you seem like a giant numbers guy, mythic raider even perhaps.
-The races were fine, horde was fine without elves honestly, we don't need elves.
-Graphics are still bad, they've barely Improved 1/3 of the graphics of the game In the past 12 years
-Grinding is still a thing, tell me a reason to grind to Exalted for any of the broken isle reputations other then useless proffesion plans that are useless anyway?
-No flying Is good! Filthy casuals and their flying
-I got my first mount on a paladin, at level 40, that felt amazing, and It still made you go around, explore, and not just by-pass most of the content before level 40, that was okay.. although could've been like level 30 at least, the mid-point I'll say that.
-Clunky, long and fun quests that sent you around the globe... how are you not seeing that as positive? It's good to be sent around the zones, reminded of them, go through them again, feel like you're travelling the world, to EARN your reward, as bad as the rewards back then, never used an addon for that, still had fun. Hell I never used any UI mods, or PvP mods, or even a bot program, still had fun and If you need those to have fun on WoW, you shouldn't play.
-I'll agree with no voice acting, but that's cause they didn't wanna spend too much money on something that might not work out, and they fixed that overtime so that's good.
-Max level content Isn't just raiding and dungeoning, that's how they streamlined and made max level content to be, to me It was always exploring, questing, and I even had an additional max level content, or just any level content, and that was Roleplaying, yes that was a huge part of my enjoyment of the game and still Is, to make stories around my characters, to experience the game and the lore as a character within that universe, to progress and grow my character over time... to this day, I have my paladin married, with two kids, as an Argent Champion, now a Silver Hand Champion fighting the demons, and he's still like 32 years old.. and started off as 20 years old... that was a long and fun experience - there's value in RPing most people don't see, ofcourse RPing isn't for everyone and It's twice as time consuming.
-I agree with the walking to BG entrances, that sucked.
-PvP was unbalanced, also true... TBC made It relatively better, and wrath even more... although fuck holy paladins In TBC, Jesus.. or rogues.
-Waiting around the cities to get a group from the LFG Channel, while took a while, was a fun part of a dungeon experience, you gathered people that would potentially become your friends In a tough and long journey, and many of those people I am still friends with to this day... I'm sure you barely remember whose name or class you even met In your last heroic run or even Mythic run.
-Guilds while helped, weren't mandatory but did help the community experience definitely, you could still do dungeons randomly, but If you did want to progress In the game, you did need a guild... agreed.

Overall, Vanila had flaws, every expansion had flaws, but they had GREAT ideas, that they just didn't realize well enough In my honest opinion, and that's now made WoW worse after Wrath.




Anyway, I'd want to just go through Vanila/TBC/Wrath myself, but I'd rather get like a good combination of TBC and Wrath as an expansion myself, with the balance, class and abilities, and quests and such, the rest Is just nostalgia.. Vanila was the 2nd worst "Era" not Expansion, "Era" of the game, 1st being WoD right now. But It was amazing either way..

You can't say that vanila was so bad, It has great things, you roamed around the whole world, explored everything, every little nuck and cranny... no expansion has come to compare to the size and scope of when Vanilla launched. We had two giant continents to roam, plenty of plenty of zones. And only 3-4 expansions worth of zones, are the same size that Vanilla zones are.

Now, If we had an expansion like -that-, with so many zones, so many places, mysteries to explore over a long period of time... I'd adore that. A new planet we've never seen or heared of before? A new race for both of our factions? Yes. A lot of new lore, mystery and nuonce like Vanila was at launch, going from zone to zone, going from killing boars, to killing cultists, to destroying the Undead Scourge of the Plaguelands and helping the Argent Dawn restore the place. And still going back to the Barrens to find Mankrik's wife.

So yes, It's Nostalgia... but nostalgia has a reason. Not just because "It's old, I loved It, I remember It was great so I want to experience It" People know, at the back of their head It was amazing for a reason, and they don't even know the reasons most of the times, you just know you liked It.

I'm still positive If they bring back legacy servers, people will want to play It. And there will be more subs than there Is on the live real wow servers... which Isn't surprising, as there are barely 4 mil players active, and more and more are leaving as they see Legion's flaws.

[Teri]

Vanilla wow was new, and had many changes/additions in it's lifetime.

The internet wasn't as big as now, boss tactics were a lot of personal discovery early on.

Big difference between how the internet was in 2004 vs 2007 vs now.

No websites/dungeon journals to know a boss loot tables until later on.

Raiding dungeons like Scholomance (drop group to loot the barov scrolls) was something very early on.

Farming your blue class sets was a game in itself, competition was real with other classes and droprates were super RNG.

Needing people with specific keys for dungeons made them known on the server.

It's impossible to reproduce the true vanilla feelings as 1.1 is vastly different from 1.12.

Still every time I fly through some old zones with the music there's a nostalgia feeling of how those zones were dangerous, had areas with elite mobs, took a while to level through.

Overleveling zones wasn't really a thing if you chose a leveling path.

Sure I keep reading "there wasn't enough quests to max level" , well I never encountered this as a huge problem and I played vanilla closed beta.

If you stayed in zones a bit longer and did some green quests and dungeons that wasn't a huge issue.

Do I want a vanilla server? Don't know, but knowing all the items/tactics and such wouldn't be new and exciting at all, as well as a day 1 patch 1.12 version wouldnt be the same.

[Sanguinerd]

There is more world by far than there was in Vanilla - so factually, your opinion is irrelevant.

Your score, very / wrong.

Do you enjoy being an insufferable twat or does it just come natural?

If anyones opinion is irrelevant is the one who points at others and claims theirs is.

[Raetary]

we have a megathread for this.....

[AeneasBK]

It'd be like me saying all music today is better than all music in the 80's, and if you think differently it's just nostalgia. It's stupid.

Arctic Monkeys debut album sold faster than any Beatles album. It's nothing to do with accessability of music or economic state of the population or number fo people buying music. It's because tjhe ARctic Monkeys are better than the Beatles. Clearly.

[Avar ize]

I wish these nostalgic whiners would get their official vanilla servers just to realize how boring and shitty it is.

most of these "nostalgic whiners" as you put it, played on nostralius and loved it, so.. you know, you are wrong

[Deleted]

@azarak You forgot the good stuff

-Item rarity was a thing. Getting a blue item feels like getting a nowadays epic. And an epic feels like a legendary.
-No LFR
-No LFG
-Exclusivity of raiding
-No transmogs
-Server Reputation
-Mana Management
-Aggro Management
-Difficulty in leveling
-World filled with people while leveling = epic leveling experience where u make a lot of friends along the way

[Zka]

You mean like the thousands of players playing on unofficial legacy servers not realizing how boring and shitty it is?

You mean out of 100M+ who have tried wow at some point only a few thousands are playing legacy? Does not seem like a huge demand to me.

[Deleted]

You mean out of 100M+ who have tried wow at some point only a few thousands are playing legacy? Does not seem like a huge demand to me.

A few thousand? In one server maybe. There are thousands of legacy servers spread around the world.
You believe if Blizzard released Vanilla servers it would have less than 1million players?

I highly doubt it.

[iky43210]

A few thousand? In one server maybe. There are thousands of legacy servers spread around the world.
You believe if Blizzard released Vanilla servers it would have less than 1million players?

I highly doubt it.

Thousands lol. Dozens at most