The little things about Vanilla [Fun]

[kennyisnotdead]

Rogue Tea, Flask of the Titans, Resistance gear for raiding but using it for pvp when you wanted to demoralize someone. How about actual talent trees... Officer only quarters based on your pvp rank. Dear I say 40 mans raids. tier sets with no artwork, T2. 15 mans,10,mans and then 20 man. Class skill books in AQ20. Real loot ninja's. Chinese gold farmers with bad engrish in trade. Tiers hand gold farming to pay for raid repairs.

[Halifax]

It wasnt.
Then why WoW had alot more players than Ragnarok? especially by the time the first expansion came out.

Because it was a blizzard game with a massive hype machine behind it.

Vanilla was alot better than current wow in many ways. First of all, people didnt just afk in cities, if people were found in cities they were either chatting with friends or waiting for their raid time to start (or AH game).

Most of other times people were out in the world doing quests, farming gold, farming materials, doing dungeons, doing world pvp and battlegrounds (the entrances to BGs were not in the main cities) and so forth.

As a healer, I afk'd in cities all the time waiting for raids to start. If I felt like farming something, I had to use a friends account because killing something as a healer class was awful, and I would have to spend hours farming to get the respec money back if I wanted to go shadow.

In vanilla we had 2 distinctive paths to take, either pvp to get honor to get better pvp rank at the end of the week or find dungeon groups and go do dungeons to get loot for raiding/or raid and help friends or guildies or randoms in their dungeons if you have better gear or you are higher level...atm people just queue for dungeon and get all the help they need. Not fun anymore.

Everything we had to work for are now brought to players on a silverplate.

This might be the only nice thing about Vanilla as I look back with the Rose-tinted glasses, however, if the current game were like this, I would quit right away. I was in a server #1 guild back then, so I had the advantage of getting epic-geared very quickly, and I felt bad for those would couldn't raid like I did. There was a lot of amazing players on my server that would never see a purple piece of gear because they couldn't make the demanding schedule that was needed to raid back then. When I was playing in Vanilla, I was in 100% epics and working on AQ/Naxx. And I wished it was easier for new players to get gear.

Now-a-days, I would be that player. I'm no longer the university undergrad with too much time on my hands that I was back then, and I would guess from the people that I play with, that most of the core WoW players from back then are similar to me, with demanding full time jobs and family responsibilities that we were free from back in the Vanilla/BC days. And we're still the core player base, so Blizzard has to cater to us.


Also from a gameplay standpoint, Vanilla was absolute shit. It just happened to be less shit than other MMOs that were available at the time. I will sum up my job as a holy priest in the Twin Emperors encounter, which was considered a difficult fight at the time:

1. Stand back about 25-30 yards.
2. Press Heal(Rank 2)
3. Power Word: Shield Tank after unbalancing strike.

There is no 4. Heal(Rank 2) was so mana efficient that I never had to press anything else. I was considered my guild's top healer.

If we were all time warped back to vanilla right now with the WoW skills we have now, and given about 2 weeks to adjust to how the game works, anyone is is doing heroic mode content could smash the hardest vanilla content effortlessly. I dug up some old videos that I took from my Naxx raiding days, and HOLY SHIT I WAS BAD. I can't believe how bad I was. I was clicking skills, keyboard backpedaling, healing really slow, overall doing shit that would have me classified as a shit player these days. And I was the healing leader for my guild, which got as far as 4 horsemen. Vanilla was fucking easy.


Pretty much thing that Vanilla had over the current game is that you were forced to be more social. That said, I am still as social in the game now as I was back then because I choose to be. You can choose to be as well if you want to. Just find the right people to play with.

[kennyisnotdead]

December 2004, WoW servers went down for 4 days straight and they reimbursed our accounts for the downtime. Couldnt imagine what people would do if that happened today.

[Kagonos]

I can actually recall a few times that they extended subscription times due to servers being offline. I remember queue times on servers of over an hour.... World drop epics were frickin' amazing! I'll never forget my first one ever, off one of the lasher mobs in Un'Goro, it was the Robes of Insight. I was so excited when they dropped! Now? it's like "meh" when an epic drops.

[reckoner04]

You could do a moonwalk by strafing and moving your camera in a certain way (I miss that!).

Battlegrounds had queues of over 1h if you were on the wrong faction on your server.

It took you several weeks/months to get pre-raid gear (i.e. 5man blues) if you didn't have a good group ready (you probably didn't because tanks and healers were fucking rare).

[frigoffrick]

December 2004, WoW servers went down for 4 days straight and they reimbursed our accounts for the downtime. Couldnt imagine what people would do if that happened today.

Haha, my server (Hyjal) went down for a week, they gave us 2 months free time.

Fire resist gear, Nature resist gear, Frost resist gear, Ony scale cloaks. Was nice if you had a guild that supplied you with this stuff, sucked if you didn't.

Farming gromsblood (the herb) constantly... for... umm, some type of potion that tanks used. I did it a lot for my guild, and got rewarded with the ony 18 slot bag every time.

And yes to who ever said scholo, strath as 10 mans and UBRS as 15 man. Those were the days.

[reckoner04]

And yes to who ever said scholo, strath as 10 mans and UBRS as 15 man. Those were the days.

I farmed stratholme so damn often to get my priest T0 pants, and when they finally dropped, a mage won them! I never got them.

Edit: Healers had to drink a lot during dungeons.

[frigoffrick]

I farmed stratholme so damn often to get my priest T0 pants, and when they finally dropped, a mage won them! I never got them.

Haha, I farmed scholo for the shaman helm. Never got it either.

[BHD]

Ooh, I just remembered something that was incredibly inconvenient. Not sure when this was changed but.. you could only make races of 1 faction on a PvP server. So if you made a dwarf you couldn't make any horde races on that server unless you deleted that dwarf, or any other alliance characters. Changing that made me about as excited as when you didn't get dismounted in water anymore!

[Kagonos]

Ooh, I just remembered something that was incredibly inconvenient. Not sure when this was changed but.. you could only make races of 1 faction on a PvP server. So if you made a dwarf you couldn't make any horde races on that server unless you deleted that dwarf, or any other alliance characters. Changing that made me about as excited as when you didn't get dismounted in water anymore!

This was in Cataclysm, I believe... Or very near the end of Wrath? There's a reason I have a Horde server and an Alliance server, each one filled with level 85 toons (which was the max at the time that I was power leveling alts.)

[Deleted]

guys, listen, I'll tell you now once and for all, why Vanilla offered "the best" WoW experience ever:

"Players didn't know shit and everything was new! Databases like WoWhead or WoWDB DID NOT EXIST (or weren't popular at all)."

- Rinnegan 2013

[kennyisnotdead]

OK I found it the best part of vanilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU Leeeeeeerrrroooy, the most famous pally ever.

Next best thing ever http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 Rick Roll lol

[Aquamonkey]

OK I found it the best part of vanilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU Leeeeeeerrrroooy, the most famous pally ever.

I hated that video so much. Anyone who played WoW knew it was complete BS, but so many people thought it was real.

[BHD]

This was in Cataclysm, I believe... Or very near the end of Wrath? There's a reason I have a Horde server and an Alliance server, each one filled with level 85 toons (which was the max at the time that I was power leveling alts.)

Oh, you actually began to play on two servers to play both factions? I jumped around on my dwarves/gnomes while secretly wishing I was Forsaken :/ I did try the horde races on another server but I never really dedicated myself to anything but going through a couple of zones and explore.

Not sure if it was just a rumor, but I heard that once upon a time you could transfer RP -> PvP realms, but not PvP -> RP, or if it was the other way around. I fail to see any logic behind such a restriction.

[kennyisnotdead]

Onyxia raid leader freaking out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04 50 dkp minus!!


Guild raiding videos! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rl-PSopceY My Vanilla guild on durotan. Crazy to see we can now solo these places in 10min, what would have taken all night in some cases.

Nef's 30min reset timer... C'Thun impossible to kill :P

[fangless]

guys, listen, I'll tell you now once and for all, why Vanilla offered "the best" WoW experience ever:

"Players didn't know shit and everything was new! Databases like WoWhead or WoWDB DID NOT EXIST (or weren't popular at all)."

- Rinnegan 2013

Thottbot, man, it was around at the beginning o_O

[Dvaldin]

Yeah. Thumbs up for class specific quests. Some of those were really epic doing a quest to learn specific skills/spells. If you weren't around for them, you missed out.
Class quests were great for your character's story and development. Having everything automatically given takes something away from the interrelation between you and your toon.

[Kagonos]

Oh, you actually began to play on two servers to play both factions? I jumped around on my dwarves/gnomes while secretly wishing I was Forsaken :/ I did try the horde races on another server but I never really dedicated myself to anything but going through a couple of zones and explore.

Not sure if it was just a rumor, but I heard that once upon a time you could transfer RP -> PvP realms, but not PvP -> RP, or if it was the other way around. I fail to see any logic behind such a restriction.

True. But not just RP, you couldn't go PVE server to PVP. PVP could go to PVE, but there was a thought that you could gain a ton of advantages on a PVE server because there was no one to fuck with you at all. World PVP was a legit thing and corpse camping (griefing, whatever you wanna call it) was NORMAL. There was legitimate hatred between the factions on a server. There were well known adversaries on servers, certain guys were known to be in certain zones and if you went there, you were always afraid of getting ganked by that one guy or that guy and his buddies. It made things like farming, etc MUCH harder. Now, you can make a toon same server and talk shit if someone's messing with you. It's nothing like today.

Also, that Leroy Jenkins video is stupid and staged, but I LOVE the Onyxia raid leader. THROW MOAR DOTS! MOAR DOTS! (Athene MIGHT be the most famous pally, not Leroy Jenkins, if he ever existed...)

[Khime]

This was in Cataclysm, I believe... Or very near the end of Wrath? There's a reason I have a Horde server and an Alliance server, each one filled with level 85 toons (which was the max at the time that I was power leveling alts.)

This change went in during patch 3.2 (Call of the Crusade) in preparation for the faction change service Blizzard was setting up.

[Deleted]

Ret pala and reckoning stacking.