A list of things you need to be prepared for on modern vanilla

[Deleted]

While I am not going to talk about those servers in detail, most people are probably more inclined to wait for the real deal now anyways (if they are interested in trying vanilla), there is some things I want to mention that are going to be huge deals.


The private server scene has an insane crowd of those vanilla hardcore players. People have gone ahead and maxed out the game to its limits over the years. Some of these people have multiple rank 14 chars on the same server. Or even on multiple servers.


Things that are true for the game back then, are not true now and some things on this list may legitimately upset you if you're looking forward to vanilla.



- The Devilsaur Mafia

Every server will have a group of people. Usually between 30 and 40 players, working together crossfaction over Discord. These people will monopolize the Devilsaur spawns in Un'goro. With live respawn timers, structured farming schedules for members of the mafia and a permanent duty call for other mafia members to login and gank/deny people who even try to get a devilsaur.

If you DO manage to tag a devilsaur, expect a mage from your own faction to spam polymorph in order to reset its HP until you die. This mafia will then accumulate all devilsaur leather of the server, having sole control over it.

Devilsaur Leggings and Gloves are pre-BiS for every physical DPS class and so they will sell it on a permanent price of 200-300 gold for a single item. You will have to pay up to 600 gold or more to get two blue items that are mandatory in the minmaxing environment of vanilla.




Ranking has become way more optimized
Just like with everything else, people have figured out the ranking system to the last aswell.

Optimal ranking includes:

- Avoiding other premades

- If you face another premade, premades have an unspoken agreement to only play until the first flag capture in WSG then concede to the winner

- Setting your hearthstone to Kargath and similiar zones then hearthstone during BG queues to gank level 50 players. Level 48+ and above awards the same amount of honor as killing a maxlevel player. And level 48-50s are fast kills so its highly efficient to farm people 10 level lower than you for ranking up until BG pops.

On the note of PvP


The vanilla metagame in PvP is HEAVILY reliant on consumables, gadgets and other things. Mandatory items you will NEED to have include:

- Skull of Impending doom for movespeed and to break all CC's
- Free Action Potions
- Anti Venoms
- Tidal Charm. A 3 second stun trinket from a lowlevel rare mob in Arathi. You can imagine how camped this NPC is.
- Engineering and engineering grenades


If you don't have all these kind of things, expect to get dumpstered by anyone half-decent who does. You should have so many consumables and gadgets for PvP that you have an entire inventory bag dedicated to them.



Minmaxing your character select screen

Properly using character slots you have remaining, means leveling warlocks to 35 with mutual mobtagging. Mobtagging means you will be able to hit level 35 in 2 or 3 days.

Level 35 allows you to utilize the daily cooldown of transmuting and salt refiner on LW. Ontop of providing your guild summons. So you could potentially have ~8x level 35 warlocks that transmute and refine 8 times per day, spread across Azeroth to summon your guild onto Worldbosses or to Raids.




On raiding

Once the raiding core is clearly established, you have to be online 1-2 hours before the raid happens and fix several things.

- You need to go to felwood and find a songflower to get the songflower buff.
- You need to go to Zandalar island to obtain the ZG buff
- 5 people from your guild need to clear a diremaul tribute run and then your entire guild gets invited one by one to get diremaul buffs
- You need to farm ekkos in Winterspring to get the Juju buffs
- Back to Orgrimmar, you now wait for someone to turn in (from another or your guild) his Onyxia head. Thats right, if you ever get it you are not allowed to just get your free epic. You need to wait until the next raid so everyone gets the dragonslayer buff. Same procedure with the warchief buff from UBRS/Onyxia attunement


When you have all these buffs, you group up with your guild in a safe zone then ride together as 40 people so you don't get ganked and lose the buffs on the way.







Goldfarming is also heavily optimized

While gold is very valueable in vanilla, after over 10 years people have found ways to make -insane- amounts of gold (like the devilsaur mafia). Some of them are so insane that they get nerfed by private server developers over breaking the economy.

- Pickpocketing runs in BRD

- Hunters/Mages farming plants in Diremaul, getting highend herbs faster than herbalists in huge amounts.

- Mages soloing up to 30-50 ZG trashmobs by themselves and then resetting the instance to go again.

- Petclasses and Druids soloing Maraudon princess to vendor the loot, reset the instance and go again.

- Parking herbalism alts on rare, extremly expensive black lotus spawn locations.





There are a lot more things but these are all I can think off atop of my head. If you wonder about some other aspects of the game, feel free to ask.

[kamuimac]

you forgot one thing - if you are not one of BiS class/spec forget about fiding any dungeon group ever

cant wait for the outcry from people who realise that they wasted 2 months of life to level up too that wont get invite anywhere ever .

and no its not exageration


i have 1 advice - people find out which classes are desired and which are not - dont make mistake to level wrong class else you wont ever do anything on vanilla servers - especially now with how people are obsessed with min maxing everything.

[RedTempest]

you forgot one thing - if you are not one of BiS class/spec forget about fiding any dungeon group ever

Now this argument is getting ridiculous.. We're talking about dungeons now? Tomorrow it's elite quests then?
No one will care if you're a shadow priest or if you want to tank as a prot pally or feral druid in a normal dungeon.

cant wait for the outcry from people who realise that they wasted 2 months of life to level up too that wont get invite anywhere ever .

Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but as I've said - hardly anyone is going to care whether or not you want to play a non-optimal specc in dungeons. Besides.. it's not like people won't be able to re-specc if they really do find it too difficult to get stuff done.

and no its not exageration

Yes, it certainly is.

i have 1 advice - people find out which classes are desired and which are not - dont make mistake to level wrong class else you wont ever do anything on vanilla servers - especially now with how people are obsessed with min maxing everything.

There will always be a niche for casual play - not every guild is going to be a hardcore raiding guild that speedruns through content like their lives depend on it.
I'd advice people to play whatever the hell they feel like and make it work.
Shadow priests can easily fit into raid groups because they support other casters quite a bit - but not 5 shadow priests at once.
Equip one pally with Nightfall and you can make a ret pally work without much of a hassle – just don’t expect to be on top of the dps meters.
Feral druids can be used as DPS of they make use of consumables enough or tanks (up to MC at least - and beyond with gear from AQ40). The list goes on and on.

[RedTempest]

you forgot one thing - if you are not one of BiS class/spec forget about fiding any dungeon group ever

Now this argument is getting ridiculous.. We're talking about dungeons now? Tomorrow it's elite quests then?
No one will care if you're a shadow priest or if you want to tank as a prot pally or feral druid in a normal dungeon.

cant wait for the outcry from people who realise that they wasted 2 months of life to level up too that wont get invite anywhere ever .

Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but as I've said - hardly anyone is going to care whether or not you want to play a non-optimal specc in dungeons. Besides.. it's not like people won't be able to re-specc if they really do find it too difficult to get stuff done.

and no its not exageration

Yes, it certainly is.

i have 1 advice - people find out which classes are desired and which are not - dont make mistake to level wrong class else you wont ever do anything on vanilla servers - especially now with how people are obsessed with min maxing everything.

There will always be a niche for casual play - not every guild is going to be a hardcore raiding guild that speedruns through content like their lives depend on it.
I'd advice people to play whatever the hell they feel like and make it work.
Shadow priests can easily fit into raid groups because they support other casters quite a bit - but not 5 shadow priests at once.
Equip one pally with Nightfall and you can make a ret pally work without much of a hassle – just don’t expect to be on top of the DPS meters.
Feral druids can be used as DPS if they make use of consumables enough or tanks (up to MC at least - and beyond with gear from AQ40). The list goes on and on.

// edited my previous post because of a spelling error and it disappeared (at least for me). Guess this is because I have too few posts on the forum yet, so please excuse me if this post should show up twice all of a sudden

[Dergiab]

I'd like to add that macros are severely limited in pure vanilla. To "unlock the potential" you need an addon and some scripting skills, and the macros work about 3/4 times.

[Thrax]

Ya hardcore players on private servers did this, so did retail vanilla hardcore players. Perhaps not the Devilsaur Mafia, but max buffs and PvP honor grind & gadgets was known among the hardcore. Just watch Laintime vanilla videos for a warrior tryhard PvP player.

[kamuimac]

There will always be a niche for casual play - not every guild is going to be a hardcore raiding guild that speedruns through content like their lives depend on it.
I'd advice people to play whatever the hell they feel like and make it work.

you know why vailla will fail ? exackly because of this belief that there will be place for "casual play "

there wont be - most of casuals wont hit level 60 3-4 months into it due ot how shit and slow leveling will be

and since there will be no lfd people will have to form their own groups - guess what will happen - people will be taking only bis dps spec/classes due to how few tanks and healers there will be . and guess what those few tanks/healers will do ? they will avoid groups with weak specs/ classes like a plague - same with weak healers and with weak tanks unable to hold agrro.

you can always say - but alts will tank/ heal - no they wont because guess what - next to nobody will level up alts to max level in first couple of months due to how time consuming it will be

people really have no clue what avaits them - because they are way to used to to changes that happend over the years.

i really really cant wait for shitstorm that is about to hit forums with the release of classic

and do you know why this is bound to happen ?

ill tell you - because in vanilla people had no clue - now people know - and now people will not accept playing with subpar spec/classeses because "im not gonna waste time"

[relaxok]

@Naralix:

Interesting list thanks. None of that stuff makes the game unplayable though. Also remember there will likely be many realms and all sorts of people playing, whereas private servers are mostly only hardcore players and people willing to get bogged down in that whole seedy underworld.

As for some class/spec being ignored, that was the case for top guilds back then as well. The sheer number of people that will be on these servers that don’t know about all that stuff will ensure there’s enough for everyone to do and enough groups to go around.

I think such things will be a much bigger issue a year or two after Classic release when the populations have dwindled.

My guess is if it’s EXTREMELY successful, they will release BC and WOTLK in a similar way and allow you to transfer your max level between them. I doubt it’ll be considered successful enough for that though.

[RedTempest]

you know why vailla will fail ? exackly because of this belief that there will be place for "casual play "

there wont be - most of casuals wont hit level 60 3-4 months into it due ot how shit and slow leveling will be

and since there will be no lfd people will have to form their own groups - guess what will happen - people will be taking only bis dps spec/classes due to how few tanks and healers there will be . and guess what those few tanks/healers will do ? they will avoid groups with weak specs/ classes like a plague - same with weak healers and with weak tanks unable to hold agrro.

you can always say - but alts will tank/ heal - no they wont because guess what - next to nobody will level up alts to max level in first couple of months due to how time consuming it will be

people really have no clue what avaits them - because they are way to used to to changes that happend over the years.

i really really cant wait for shitstorm that is about to hit forums with the release of classic

and do you know why this is bound to happen ?

ill tell you - because in vanilla people had no clue - now people know - and now people will not accept playing with subpar spec/classeses because "im not gonna waste time"

You are of course entitled to your opinion, however my experience with vanilla back when it was still officially a thing and during my years on private servers leads me to believe that you are wrong and that you underestimate the kind of social dynamic that vanilla gameplay breeds.
People develop bonds through leveling together and running dungeons rather easily in vanilla and unless you are a jerk to everyone you meet you’ll find dungeon groups without too much trouble even without playing an optimal class/specc combination. People that actively run dungeons will get to know you by your reputation.

I also fail to see how the leveling speed will hinder anything for more casual players.

Furthermore are quite a few people aware what exactly awaits them (either because they have realistic expectations or were on private servers in recent years) and some of those will go for non-optimal class/specc combinations anyways.

Only time will tell which one of us is right, but tell it will

[Altariaz]

you forgot one thing - if you are not one of BiS class/spec forget about fiding any dungeon group ever

cant wait for the outcry from people who realise that they wasted 2 months of life to level up too that wont get invite anywhere ever .

and no its not exageration


i have 1 advice - people find out which classes are desired and which are not - dont make mistake to level wrong class else you wont ever do anything on vanilla servers - especially now with how people are obsessed with min maxing everything.

This is terrible advice and completely counter to how Vanilla WoW worked.

[Belisaurio]

Good points, and seems logic that private servers have enough players to see exploits and use them in their own benefit, but at the same time, we need to know other facts:

1-Private servers use their own rules to try to solve this problems. In officials servers, you have a team working on that.
2-You don't pay to play private servers, only this "characteristic" open the door for all type of players. Having to pay (even if it's 5€/month) give you an impact on your population/community that somethimes solve/change some issues (less people with 24/7 free time, etc...).
3-In private servers, GM decide what's a bad behaviour for "their" servers; in oficial servers, you have a team that tracks everything: from bad behaviour to users abusing exploits (and in theory, this teams can solve the problems faster than private servers).


Not saying that all of your points are going to be fixed (we had alot of mafias in wow, like the fishing shows in STV, or AH thorium mafia early vanilla). But we need to know that Devs are reactive in doing their job, if something happens that they don't like, it has alot of points to be "fixed".

[draigo]

The Devilsaur maffia only happens in private server, and those prices are from private servers in which gold sellers have influenced the market.

Maybe a minority of Pvp premades have an agreement but most of them don´t, and only in private servers.

People do not give a fuck about what class you are playing, only hardcore guilds. Non hardcore guilds and random groups will accept you most of the times. There are videos in which you can see prot pallys tanking in raid, boomkins, etc.

"Minmaxing character slots" has always been a thing. Every expansion that have had crafting cooldowns had people who leveled a lot of characters and professions to have them all, what's the problem of that?

Goldfarming is always optimized, especially in vanilla. Again, what's the problem of that? A lot of pre-bis are BOE and mounts are expensive, people will always find the best method to farm gold.

[Citano]

The Devilsaur maffia only happens in private server, and those prices are from private servers in which gold sellers have influenced the market.

You really think there wont be a Devilsaur Mafia on WoW Classic, aswell as no gold sellers?
C'mon

Maybe a minority of Pvp premades have an agreement but most of them don´t, and only in private servers.

It was like that in the past aswell. Maybe not as frequent but it did happen.
Sure people won't be having multiple accounts for WoW Classic like on a private server, but back then people used IRC to communicate cross-faction and for sure there was agreements made there too or just premades on one side opting to skip fighting to get into a new game quicker.
That is because both retail Vanilla and on private servers, you had loose cannons who would play 24/7 with friends playing in shifts to farm honor and not care about honor caps. This to force the premades to play more to stay ahead

[Deleted]

The vast majority of people back in Vanilla WoW didn't care about any of that hardcore shit - ranking up in PvP or raiding (yes raiding was considered hardcore back then).
And they still won't. Hardcore for the hardcore and the rest of us will just enjoy the world and stare in awe.

[kamuimac]

This is terrible advice and completely counter to how Vanilla WoW worked.

it is also 2017 not 2004 if you didnt notice

vanilla worked because playerbase didnt know better - now they do know - you are talking about people who demand 930 for EN normal legendaries farm - what do you think will happen in vanilla servers if not "lfm if you ar one ofr trash class/spec dont bother to whisper" ?

- - - Updated - - -

People do not give a fuck about what class you are playing, only hardcore guilds. Non hardcore guilds and random groups will accept you most of the times. There are videos in which you can see prot pallys tanking in raid, boomkins, etc.
.

people dont pay atention ? we must be playing very different games i guess.

ofc people will go for bis comps like come on . i highly doubt you have any clue how vast difference of classes there will be if they dont tweak numbers. we are not talkig about 5-10% like on live - we are talking 30-50% in performance between classes - in some cases even more.

[Vofka]

you forgot one thing - if you are not one of BiS class/spec forget about fiding any dungeon group ever

cant wait for the outcry from people who realise that they wasted 2 months of life to level up too that wont get invite anywhere ever .

and no its not exageration


i have 1 advice - people find out which classes are desired and which are not - dont make mistake to level wrong class else you wont ever do anything on vanilla servers - especially now with how people are obsessed with min maxing everything.

Boy you are so wrong. No one gives a fuck in 5 mans about your spec, you do don't even need to be in healing or tanking spec to be able to heal/tank in 5 mans. There is no stupid shit like gearscore/itemlevel check or "Link ATOC or no inv". You can probably even do zg/aq20/mc.

Also good list, OP i would also add extreme levels of ganking on pvp realms - some ppl can be VERY dedicated in pissing you off.

[Deleted]

People do care about your class/specc.

But its not as crazy as people are saying.

You will be able to raid as shadowpriest or feral druid. Its just that in an entire 40 man raidgroup, they will only need 1 shadowpriest and 1 feral druid at most. So you need to be more attractive than some other player who wants to be feral/shadowpriest in a raid.

Also for 5 man dungeon it doesn't matter indeed. People are fine with protpalas/feral tanks in these cases and even moonkins or elemental shaman DPS.


Moonkin and Ele shamans become viable raiding speccs once you reach AQ40/T2.5 gearstage but you will not be priotized in items if you play a specc like this which makes gearing very hard.




Also something I forgot to mention is that world bosses are on complete lockdown too. The 3-4 topguilds usually having warlock alts on the spawn locations and have a big line of communication to instantly be around the minute a world boss spawns with several hundreds of players. Often killing it before anyone else is even able to inform people or make a group to intercept or contest.

[CptEgo]

The first thing you'll notice/remember when playing 'Classic' WoW, is that it was complete shit. Nothing worked, nothing was balanced.

[RedTempest]

People do care about your class/specc.
Also something I forgot to mention is that world bosses are on complete lockdown too. The 3-4 topguilds usually having warlock alts on the spawn locations and have a big line of communication to instantly be around the minute a world boss spawns with several hundreds of players. Often killing it before anyone else is even able to inform people or make a group to intercept or contest.

Might not necessarily be the case if there are several hardcore guilds on both factions. Only takes a little delay (enough for word to reach the trade channel) and the whole business can turn into a multiple hour long fight for the world boss easily.

No doubt the hardcore guilds will probably get most world boss kills though.