What was the appeal of Vanilla dungeons?

[Clockwork Pinkie]

They were terrible and still are terrible. Fuck any dungeon between 30-58.

[Korgoth]

You got gear which allowed you rape the face of everyone else in the game outside of instances, which was pretty fun.

[Straamibuu]

Urgh appeal?
1. Waiting for ages to find a group.
2. Trying to gather them to head to the dungeon (especially after the stones appeared and no-one wanted to be the one to go there).
3. Stopping multiple times to replace random drop outs (having to go outside / to a city).
4. Loot dropping and fights over it as hunters took everything, rogues wanted cloth etc etc
5. Trying to get people to Mara when it took ages / was so far from anything.
6. Barely ever doing Dire Maul for the same reason.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

2. Trying to gather them to head to the dungeon (especially after the stones appeared and no-one wanted to be the one to go there).
.

Alliance running SFK, fucking shit the memories. 2 hours to form a group, 30+ minutes to finally get two people there just to have the tank or healer say "sorry guys gotta go".

[Annarion]

You weren't in a cool enough guild to wipe in MC, so that was all there was. There was literally nothing else in the game until BGs came out. It was dark days, friends.

[crakerjack]

I raided vanilla and it's not more special than TBC was. The reason why more hardcore based people enjoyed the game back then was because to deck your character out in epics required a lot of hard work and grinding. Most of us who played RPG's are used to grinding and know how good of a feeling it is when you finish grinding and are able to get what you want. When I got my first epic, it really felt like an epic. When I finally decked my character out in full epics, I thought I was a god. Currently the game is too easy and epic should be called welfare.

[Porra]

Gear also wasnt handed out like it is today. People would run these dungeons and they would keep the gear for a long, long time. Its not just nostalgia, the entire game had a different attitude back then, it wasn "gimme, gimme, gimme".

[Seefer]

Definitely the large and labyrinthine style to them. I think they had deeper and more interesting lore too.

Every dungeon was an adventure of its own, and unlike modern LFD dungeons everyone in the group wanted to be there; they had specifically chosen to run this dungeon and were commtted to it.

Modern dungeons really have more in common with scenarios than true vanilla dungeons. The LFD system and quick run mentality makes them feel pretty hollow, the only goal for most people being quick xp and points.

100% what this person said.........every bit.

[lunchbox2042]

They were sort of like mini raids back in the day. Long labyrinths with lots of bosses.

[Azrile]

As the topic says, what was it about vanilla dungeons that kept them in so fond memories?

And before you say nostalgia, I don't have the same feelings for TBC or WotLK and those were a really long time ago aswell, I won't even mention Cata.
Is it that they each kinda had a soul of their own? They were long, majestic, filled with characters.

Take Blackrock Depths as an example, that place was huge. Or Maraudon, my person favourite for the most beautiful dungeon of all time. Or maybe Sunken Temple. To this day I'm not 100% sure I ever completely explored it. I won't even mention the horrors of Stratholme or Scholomance.

Why can't we have nice things like these anymore. Everything lacks that mystery factor that kept me going for so long, and no, it's not the websites, etc.
I never check the dungeons on new expansions i visit for the first time on website, I always allow myself to be surprised. But it's just not working, and hasn't since a long time.

The problem with this type of topic is that there are two completely different types of players. There are players with a strong guild and group of friends, and then there are players who are mainly solo, or casually in a guild.

Long dungeons

Group 1 - They are long, interesting and challenging dungeons the way most people thought of D&D type dungeons, fantasy books etc. The idea of setting away 2-3 hours with a group of friends is an amazing experience... just like those all night D&D sessions

Group 2 - Hours and hours of spamming in /trade to find a group. The annoyance of having a player drop group before you even got to the dungeon. The annoyance of repeatedly, literally dozens of times over the course of a year having a player drop group for some random reason, either they didn´t realize how long the dungeon would take, they got the item they wanted, or just real life issues interrupted them from being able to finish a 2 hour dungeon. The most annoying part is that if someone did drop group, you had to go all the way back to a city to find a replacement, which often resulted in another player dropping group etc etc. Even with friends who have a commitment to each other, it is difficult to clear some of those dungeons without at least one person having issues.

My personal problem was that even if you were in Group1, and always in Group2, I just always had this cloud hanging over my head thinking ´ok, at what point is someone going to bail, and once again I will spend 90 minutes only to end up 30 minutes short of finally seeing the end boss.

But man, when you had Group1, and you cleared an endboss, it was the best time in the world. The problem is those were just verrrrrrrry rare... and most importantly, they were almost never done ´at level. Which mean the rewards were mostly useless when you finally did down the end boss.

I would love if Blizzard would design personal dungeons like that. Something a DPS or tank even could sink their teeth into for a couple hours. DDO ( dungeon and dragons online) does this very well. The dungeons scale roughly with how many people are in the group.. so if you did a heroic dungeon with 5 people, it would be fairly easy like a WOW heroic, but if you did it solo, it would be possible, but more difficult. There are insane dungeons in DDO where you can spend 3-4 hours exploring, either solo or grouped.

[Yig]

I've never heard anything good about vanilla dungeons other than nostalgic memories, it was new and fresh, a lot of stories and memories for people, but in terms of content/design/loot/bosses/mechanics, the actual gameplay, never seen people say anything specifically good.

Seriously, never.

If you want to really break it down like this, there was one thing awesome about the 5 mans of vanilla, your class had it's own tier pieces spread out in every dungeon. I think I killed the Baron 40 times for my valor leggings. I hate that i deleted those things for space, even with heirlooms today, I miss the boots and the gloves and I miss the upgrade quest you could do.

In a way MOP has Dungeon sets, they just have random names and random stats for everyone to mix and match.
I wanted the black set of plate, but it had Tank stats. So I ended up running with friends who weren't plate tanks and slowly got to collect the black tank set to transmog. I'm one of those courteous people who won't roll on offspec items if someone needs it for their main spec we're actively using, a relic of when servers had their own customary looting rules. So it took me a while.


The DPS plate was "Mandarin" orange. (and it looks awesome with this PVP belt i think with a custom geoset)
But if you know where to find the Pandaren treasure spawn, this sword compliments the set well, along with this pvp belt.

If you wanted a weapon from 5 mans that matched this set, this was really the only weapon.

The helm tot his set looks like something from American Gladiators, well, most helms in this game look silly to me. I think we need more classic Warcraft helms overall in this game. Evoking the Imperial Plate but with more dynamic form than the buckets we have. It's more complicated than that, but meh.


That's something I miss a lot from Vanilla and 5 man dungeons, all the named sets, even green quality, it was fully named and numerous. Overlord's plate, Stormwind Plate, Deathbone, Valor, Might, Wrath, Glorious, and it never EVER made sense to wear a matching set because you would gimp youself statwise if you did. The game made no sense like that.

When i first started WOW one of the most addictive things to me as I went from Aldrassil, to Dolanaar, to Darnassus, to Auberdine, was finding the mail armor vendor selling white quality armor. I did't know the different then. And the first thing I would do is farm money to buy a matching set for each new quest hub I advanced through the story to. It's a very addictive recipe I liked the way they brought back in MOP with things like this.



But most now it's a bunch of randomly named artifacts you need to check WOWhead to find matching models for.
You lost that sense of "my set".

So if there's one thing you can see isn't just nostalgia, perhaps that's valuable to you?

[PrairieChicken]

I didn't play Vanilla but I think vanilla dungeons are the best (in atmosphere/immersion)

[Tenjen]

it was an epic experience but full of hours of wasted time and would fail or fall apart more than half the time. Most people I played with hadn't even seen the end of many of these dungeons.

SO yeah looking back it was a great experience. I happened to have guildies willing to make the push. Almost every run had atleast 1 or 2 guys amazed at seeing the last boss of this dungeon and just how far they stretched. But getting little rewards for that much work for that much time and frustration and rate of failure/disbandment...well..

Most people don't have that sort of free time. And with Wow's shifting demographic, that's even truer now.

While there are disadvantages to mass consumption, atleast the level it is handled at now lets more people experience the game.

[Glurp]

They were new and revolutionary in an MMO. There's really nothing great about them at this point in time.

[AeneasBK]

Non linear. Much wider range of levels within (so first "section" would be 1-2 lvls lower than the next section).

Nostalgia

[Nazmina]

The design of old dungeons made them feel more real, most dungeons now feel like linear hallways with depth painted on, I still enjoy exploring the vast winding diverse blackrock depth instance, always felt like a city.

[Ikkarus]

The dungeons of Vanilla wasn't something to do many times every day for points, It wasn't that trivial, the loot itself was important. Of course the difficulty were exagerated because of the time you should spend, but honestly, I like this concept. I prefer to do a two or three harder and big dungeons in a week for a better reward than 15 small ones..

They could create some "Mythic Dungeons", bigger and harder outside the LFD so you could choose to do them with your friends, it would be an alternative way to equip yourself or cap the points without making the use of the Dungeon Finder, and since these dungeons would be more challenging the reward should be bigger. I believe it would be nice.

[Starbrand]

i remember trying to farm for my dungeon sets on my toons. could not for the life of me complete any sets (shadowcraft, valor, feralheart, etc). another thing i remember was the accountability of a servers population in order to even complete any sort of dungeon. aka, no lfg system implemented. You would have to spam /3 for "LFG 20man UBRS" or "LFM BRD, must be available 2hrs+". And if it was a dead server, you would try and spam /2 trade, and get yelled at for using the wrong channel. my most favorite part was being the "punted" for that corehound in UBRS. and ALWAYS needed a hunter to kite for last boss. and those locked doors and when rogues needed max lockpicking!

good times, good times.

[madethisfor1post]

There was little else to do beside that and raiding.

[Feel The Power]

I have zero fond memories of them really. Running hours long dungeons for a year over and over endlessly just to never get a piece of armor I needed. Sure, some looked fantastic, were absolutely immense, and you can tell a ton of effort went into them. But, the effort of having to take up to hours just to put a group together, someone most likely dropping out before even getting to the dungeon (this happened even if it was guild runs) and then having to go back to a city to spam again for god knows how long for another group member...and then hoping nobody quit during the dungeon and having to go back to a city to spam...it was just too much after a while.