What was the appeal of Vanilla dungeons?

[mercutiouk]

They were bigger, had more of a story, more varied encounters, generally weren't so linear.

Compare anything with BRD for instance. That instance is ENORMOUS, has masses of different encounters and is dripping from pretty much everywhere with lore and character. It would easily be raid content if they made something of that scale again.

And yeah, running across WPL/EPL and crossing the border into Silverpine on the way up there trying to dodge horde. Was amazing

[Akka]

Pretty much this. They where interesting at first then they just became annoying and boring.

Unlike WotLK dungeons which were boring from the very first time.

Guess I still prefer the old design then.

[Zafire]

There was almost always a few quests you could get for any dungeon. I remember that Scarlet Monastery quest that started in Southshore, took you to Desolace, had you kill a metric ton of Undead (Think it was 30), then took you to Scarlet Monastery. The quest gave a vivid description of what the Scarlet Crusaders were, what they believed, etc. I still have the Sword of Serenity on my first paladin character.

I never would have went to Desolace, been interested in Scarlet Monastery, or got a crazy good weapon for level 38 if I never talked to that NPC in southshore. It gave me a REASON to go somewhere else, and I was happy I did, because I really liked Desolace questing on my Paladin. I could Exorcism everything. I just happened to talk to this NPC by complete chance, too, it wasn't a chain that led me there. Very easy to miss.

I also remember a lot of quests for BRD that I never got to do. I never hit 60 on my first character. The leveling experience in Vanilla was definitely top notch, and I miss getting immersed into the story and wanting to complete dungeons because of that. I haven't liked PVE in a very long time.

[Flaks]

BRD is awesome but imagine running your daily heroics and getting a 4 hour crawl through BRD instead.

It'd be great if they made a massive dungeon like that outside of the traditional heroic VP grind though, just for fun.

I really don't understand why this still hasn't happened. I loved Halls of Origination but I sure as hell would never want to do it with randoms in which the tank or healer would keep dropping out because they hated the place.

I will say though that I personally never ever liked BRD. That place just felt all around tedious. HoO was a "long" dungeon done well.

[Paulosio]

You actually explored them rather than running down a 1 way corrider with a few random mobs in your way..

Some of them such as Sunken temple were actually annoying for this reason though... You'd often end up running round in circles if you didn't have someone guiding the group.

[Okacz]

I understand peoples love to BRD since I also loved the "mystery" and "labirynth" dungeons. My all time favourite being probably old Sunken Temple, which is reduced to 1/3 now. That's dungeon crawling at its finest, I remember grups going for additional bosses not for loot, exp or quest, but just good old fun. Even knowing that it cuts away another hour from our life, we just enjoyed the exploration and challenge.

BRD is the only example (my humble opinion) where this went one step too far. While I generally liked the prison area, with the amazing arena action, lolgiant out of nowhere and the Fiery Weapon enchant guy, the instance was getting tedious right after you crossed the bridge. After this point it became long, boring and suprisingly linear, with places like Guzzler or the area before Emperor designed just to fuck with you and make you do the lenghty corpse run. While the first portion was the same fun I've had during ST, the latter is just bad.

[Deleted]

They felt like real, explorable places rather than a corridor with some enemies in it for you to kill. Going into a dungeon like wailing caverns, blackrock depths or sunken temple for the first time was an adventure, a real mystery, since you weren't always sure what you'd run into, or even that you'd see the end, since they were faily challenging. They simply looked more appealing, too.

I want proper dungeon crawling back.

[LazarusLong]

They are still Vanilla dungeons, as I already stated in the follow up post. And if you need level 60 ones:

Yeah.. NO. The only "lore" for all this bosses was a single quest "go kill them". No lore in leading zones whatsoever. You haven't seen them or heard about them when questing.

[Hoffafiles]

You felt epic in a way, just to be running them. It felt like more of an adventure, especially getting into a 40 man raid, it just took up most of the day. Then of course there were the (almost) never ending AVs, but that is another story altogether...

[Ausr]

Eh, the only dungeons that were any fun were Strath Baron and UBRS.

Baron for the never god damn dropping mount + wipes that I always pulled with my guild.

UBRS for the god damn long delayed dropping twin swords...

[The Flavour Cat]

Well I ran many of the Classic dungeons in TBC, which is when I joined. Some of the dungeons really did my head in with the convoluted structure of the place and the twists and turns. Luckily I was alone so I could take my time navigating the damn places. With Maraudon, I spent ages just trying to find the instance portal (same with The Deadmines). It was a bit rewarding finally getting into the Deadmines, as the piratical setting was fun to run around. Same with the other DM-Dire Maul was saved by the interesting ruined High Elven architecture (even if Pusillin was annoying to no end!).
I think the only dungeons that were some sort of fun to run around despite being a little hard to navigate were Gnomeregan (fun coming back to that place and the outside area pre-Shattering for the event) and BRD.

[Deleted]

The reason I remember Vanilla dungeons is mainly because of the time I invested in them. To do a dungeon I had to look up what dropped, when I found a dungeon boss that dropped a piece of loot I wanted I had to look for a group, which could take up to an hour. Then run to the dungeon, wait for people to get there and spend another hour or so in the dungeon. Also the dungeons felt new and really hard back then.

I never joined a group for a random dungeon just for the hell of it, if you went for a dungeon you wanted something from it. Often you had certain bosses you needed, you could get groups for specific bosses, and not complete dungeon runs.

[goblingirl]

Okay well... I can nostalgia with the best of them, been playing since closed beta in early 2004.

Some of the Classic dungeons were great. Some of them were terrible. But even the terrible ones have been mashed and mangled so much (to make leveling faster) that generally speaking, they no longer resemble what they were in Classic, to varying degrees.

I was a hunter for a good portion of classic so my job was to "pull" dungeons (pull mobs at range back to the group, let the warrior taunt, feign death). So a lot of my personal nostalgia for Classic Dungeons (and raids, MC was pulled the same way back in the day) is for a role that I really enjoyed playing that was removed from the game long ago.

As for the dungeon content... Of the "end game" dungeons, the ones I truly loved were Dead side Stratholme, UBRS, and Scholomance (in that order).

Dead side Strat was my very favorite. It FELT so dungeony, full of darkness and fire and undead. And there was so very much lore behind it, Alliance side, what with us coming fresh into WoW from WC3 and the Lordaeron storyline. With a good tank partner I could chain pull it for an hour of awesome fun.

Some of the end game dungeons were also scaled for larger groups originally. Back then, you took a 15 man party into UBRS, for example.

None of the "dungeons" for the last few expansions have felt like true, traditional dungeon crawls. They just feel like a few mini bosses tossed into a few rooms to keep you busy for 15 or 20 minutes.

[Totle]

Smaller rooms made you feel larger and more important. Plus it felt more realistic, like you were fighting an enemy that you actually had a believable chance to beat, rather than swatting and something's toes and feeling awesome because numbers told you so.

[goblingirl]

Smaller rooms made you feel larger and more important. Plus it felt more realistic, like you were fighting an enemy that you actually had a believable chance to beat, rather than swatting and something's toes and feeling awesome because numbers told you so.

I'm with you on this one, too. I'm not sure when Blizzard decided that every dungeon boss needed to be a minimum of 3x taller than a night elf. The only "huge" bosses in Classic were justifiably so due to their creature type (like the Princess Theradras, or Ghazrooki). Baron Rivendare was normal-sized to players, just as he should have been.

Even in BC, dungeon bosses only slightly outsized players. In LK they started creeping up in size and have been getting larger/taller ever since, it seems like.