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  1. #1

    A Vanilla Raider's View on the Development of World of Warcraft

    A Vanilla Raider's View on the Development of World of Warcraft

    I've noticed quite a few people complaining about the quality of the game, and wishing that we'd turn more toward BC or Vanilla, and oftentimes even reminiscing about how good the game was. However, it's very likely that the players playing currently were rather young back then. This seems almost entirely irrelevant, but a vast majority of the experiences they draw themselves on are more about how new they were to the game, and less about "gaming" it.

    I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 11. My first character was a Hunter, on Aerie Peak. I remember logging in the first time, being so damned confused by everything, and so amazed by the world. Everything was so fresh and new, and all the content was engaging and enjoyable. I ran around in Robes as a hunter because I liked how they looked, and I had to beg to get gold for my regular speed mount. However, over time, I became a rather competent raider. I was a bit of a shut in, and lacked a large social circle, so World of Warcraft functioned as an escape for me. As a result, I was able to dedicate an (unhealthy) amount of time to becoming a better WoW player. Eventually, it developed to the point where I was able to perform aptly enough to raid with a coalition of guilds on my server in Molten Core.

    Vanilla

    People are really quick to jump on how "amazing" Vanilla was. I hate to burst your bubble, but I remember it rather clearly. Classes were disgustingly imbalanced. If you played a Balance Druid, you were undesirable. You didn't even have Moonkin form at the time. If you were a Shadow Priest, you had RACE BOUND ABILITIES. In fact, all of these were remedied in patch 1.8.0, the patch the World Dragons began spawning around the green portals. Patch 1.8 was released in October of 2005. Blackwing Lair opened July of 2005, in patch 1.6.0. I want to emphasize how big of a gap this is to not have spells we would now consider vital to our toolkits now. Things like having to turn in quests after you completed a battleground, having to turn in the marks you'd receive from the battleground, or having to fly to the actual physical location of the battleground itself to queue (Pre patch 1.6) all made for disgustingly monotonous tasks if you had any intentions of Pvping in a mostly broken system. Raiding itself was a cluster. Cramming 40 people into a vent and trying to coordinate them was near impossible, and with all the talking that inevitably happened, we actually ended up putting the tanks and healers in one channel on vent, and everyone else in the other. That was-- when we used vent. Otherwise, most of us got really familiar with the other 4 members of our parties. The boss mechanics were silly, to the point where they're actually difficult to solo today as a result. (Don't have a decurse? Haha, you're fucked in Molten Core. Not to mention the adds before the Corehound boss. Oh god.) I think I spent most of my time MC/BWL raiding days applying Serpent Sting to things as a hunter.

    Tl;Dr: Vanilla super broken, why would you want to play?

    Burning Crusade

    Admittedly, I didn't play for much of Burning Crusade. As a result, my knowledge is limited. However, I do know that many of the bugs in Vanilla WoW, as well as a good bit of the class imbalance, was fixed during Burning Crusade. Fixing an inherently broken game should not constitute a "good expansion". Someone had the audacity to state that "Burning Crusade was the most balanced PvP expansion". Really? The top 100 teams in ladder were Resto Druid or Disc Priest and Rogue or Warrior. Many classes were still entirely useless, just because these classes were so far outshining others in their roles. Stormherald Warriors and Glaive rogues dominated the top tier, while Resto Druids and Discipline Priests were so far ahead of the other casters that few else were even considered viable. On the positive side, Burning Crusade implemented a lot of the systems we still use today as Raiders. Currency systems were first introduced in BC in regards to raiding, and it was generally well received. (We still have them today.)

    Tl;Dr: Fixed vanilla, still pretty imbalanced for pvp. Good implementation of systems we still use today.

    Wrath of the Lich King

    My most active expansion. I played a Death Knight during the introduction of Wrath of the Lich King, but switched to my Restoration Druid near the end. My view of WotLK is that it was a poor expansion in general, but a few things shined. One was the rise of 3's arenas. Rogue Mage Priest dominated, but other compositions became viable. Death Knights were disgustingly overpowered, but quickly fixed (And even a little overnerfed at the time.) The Naxxramas remake was a rehash of the Naxx 40 encounter, which bothered me a lot, having raided Naxx 40. It lacked the "draw" of raiding, since I'd spent so much time in the instance in the first place. 0/10 for rehashing Naxx. Anyway, the mini raids were silly. Sartharion was a poorly designed encounter, and served more as a Nalak/Sha of Anger/Celestials loot dispenser rather than an actual encounter. (In fact, that's probably what it was. 10/10 for making me realize that Sartharion was one of the first successful loot catchups. There had been some before this, but none were widely killed.) Anywho, Ulduar comes along. I consider Ulduar one of the best raids. It introduced so many new mechanics, with Vehicles, the creative use of Hardmode activations, etc. It was such a well designed and well balanced raid, and reflects now what Blizzard looks to design in World of Warcraft raids. Engaging content that is not only challenging on the highest tier, but entertaining enough for the casual tier. Trial of the Crusader followed Ulduar and was a total failure on Blizzard's part. It was probably a necessary failure, as they tried to develop an instance without trash like a lot of people were asking for, but the attempts mechanism in the encounter, paired with the lack of actual interesting boss mechanics, as well as the stale playing field, made it a total failure of a raid. Anub'Arak was still kind of a cool fight though. I've gone on too long about this expansion, so I'll cover ICC in a quick statement. Gating mechanisms were dumb, and as a <US100 Raider, they were easily the poorest decision made regarding an otherwise mediocre instance. LK fight was pretty cool though.

    Tl;Dr: Balance at last! A few major mistakes made this a poor expansion for a lot of people, but still all and all, not a bad expansion.

    Cataclysm

    Cataclysm is a lot of people's least favorite expansions. I was admittedly not very active in arenas, so I cannot speak to that degree. However, my RBG team was a ragtag group of people thrown together at the last minute, and I'd give anything to have them back and playing together. *Wipes tears* Anywho. I thoroughly enjoyed Cataclysm. The healing was disgustingly difficult, and I enjoyed struggling through it on my Resto Druid. I actually gave up and went Feral for quite awhile, but was very poor at Feral, and ended up going back Resto once I was 90. A few things I hated were the disgusting amount of rep grinding I had to do, as well as the fact that I had to discover the entrance to every dungeon. Huge pain in the ass. (Is that still a thing, by the way?) I thought the raiding encounters were decent. Heroic Magmaw and Omnomnom Defense Council were engaging fights, and the only two I really remember. I think I wiped a lot to H Maloriak as well. H Ascendant Council was a huge progress bar for a lot of guilds, and I think killing it was my biggest accomplishment. Our kill video is still out there somewhere, even. I quit when Firelands dropped, so I know nothing beyond this. However, I've heard that Firelands was one of the worst raids in WoW. (I think I killed Shaddox actually. He was a boss in there right? The hunter dude? I killed spider bitch too. Wow, that was a long time ago. We finally got into the raid when we were done crashing because so many people were there, and no one actually wanted to do the raid.) Anyway, if we assume Fire Lands was as bad as people say it was, and Dragon Soul was as mediocre and awful to be stuck on for a number of months as people say it was, then the bottom line is, Cataclysm was a necessary expansion due to the fact that leveling an alt character was painful. It helped to streamline the game, and make it more enjoyable to play casually. Many of the zone revamps were visually astounding, and just like the model update, if it didn't happen, people would be asking for it down the road.

    Tl;Dr: Totally necessary expansion, even if you think it's bad from whatever perspective. Kept the game from dieing probably.

    Mists of Pandaria

    I've played on and off in Pandaria. I have all of my Cutting Edge titles however, and raided with some big-name guilds during ToT and H HoF/ToES progression. MSV was a rather uninteresting raid, and served as a walkover to gear accomplished raiders, while being easy enough for casual raiders to feel challenged and entertained by. Heart of Fear introduced a few cool game mechanics, and the boss fights were engaging enough that they were worth doing. Nothing incredible came out of the first tier of MoP however. Throne of Thunder, on the other hand. I happen to have a few realm first kills in Throne of Thunder. I played a Mistweaver monk during ToT. I felt incredibly gimped by the shift in playstyle, but ultimately, my healing was rather unaffected. I quit after killing Heroic Council in a spurt of rage that Monk was a dumb class, and I didn't feel like leveling my Druid however. So I moved on with my life, coming back a decent while later. I actually started playing again about 3-4 months ago. PvP feels satisfying, but not engaging. The new battlegrounds are neat, but not incredible. However, what really shines, I believe, is Siege of Orgrimmar. I consider this one of the best raids in the game to date. The encounters are incredibly varied, and no two are similar. (Unless you're a ranged dps, then fuck you Iron Juggernaut and Malkorok.) I've had the pleasure of finding a guild that examined my extensive list of high end raiding guilds, and as a result, was able to gear up relatively quickly. However, when I initially started playing, I found it to be quite a challenge to find groups for Flex. Many required an item level of 540, which didn't make sense to me, considering if you were wearing exclusively flex-gear, you'd have an average item level of 540. Either way, performed well enough to be kept around in my current guild. MoP has had its ups and downs, but the two exceptional raid tiers (ToT and SoO) mixed with the fairly good PvP seasons mean MoP is one of the most well rounded expansions in the game, from an objective perspective. As an offhand comment, since I can't really fit this in anywhere, Garrosh is the worst encounter. It introduces no interesting game mechanics for an end game boss, and serves simply as a "RUN HERE AT THIS TIME" fight. Incredible let down in my opinion. Regardless, good expansion.

    Tl;Dr: MoP shines in the fact that it's consistently been good for the last two tiers. The first tier was unspectacular, but tolerable.
    Last edited by Exinium; 2014-04-22 at 07:54 AM.

  2. #2
    tl;dr gaming is about fun not necessarily balance.
    Last edited by cFortyfive; 2014-04-22 at 08:34 AM.

  3. #3
    Deleted
    tl;dr opinions

    butyeahvanilllawasbroken

  4. #4
    So you're enjoying World of Queuecraft? I honestly miss having to fly to instances. It took 3 minutes, and I got to see all the cool shit going on under me.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Exinium View Post
    [B]I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 11. My first character was a Hunter
    well thats your problem right there And most likely the reason you didnt enjoy vanilla very much :P I know from experience that most good guilds had age requirement (and for a good reason in most cases). and without a guild there wasnt much intresting to do on max lvl in vanilla once u had ur blue set.

    vanilla was awesome if u were in a serious guild and played at a hardcore lvl and thats what most nostalgic ppl remember.

  6. #6
    Deleted
    Miss all the randomness Classic World of Warcraft had.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Noxanonymous View Post
    So you're enjoying World of Queuecraft? I honestly miss having to fly to instances. It took 3 minutes, and I got to see all the cool shit going on under me.
    ... 3 minutes? Dear god, going on a MC/BWL/UBRS raid took ages, the flight from either Undercity or Grom'gol was atrocious. Sure, it was fun the first 5 times, but - just like the actual raid - it wore out quite quick.

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Aphrel View Post
    well thats your problem right there And most likely the reason you didnt enjoy vanilla very much :P I know from experience that most good guilds had age requirement (and for a good reason in most cases). and without a guild there wasnt much intresting to do on max lvl in vanilla once u had ur blue set.

    vanilla was awesome if u were in a serious guild and played at a hardcore lvl and thats what most nostalgic ppl remember.
    Eventually, it developed to the point where I was able to perform aptly enough to raid with a coalition of guilds on my server in Molten Core.
    Well this is awkward.

    Quote Originally Posted by Noxanonymous View Post
    So you're enjoying World of Queuecraft? I honestly miss having to fly to instances. It took 3 minutes, and I got to see all the cool shit going on under me.
    That wonderful, living world! (Even though you can still fly around while you're waiting for queue. Even though there were less subscribers back then than now. Even though this was before Cataclysm, and the standard for zone design was sub par. Even though flying to the Blackrock instances couldn't take a more boring path from SW.)

    Quote Originally Posted by Venziir View Post
    ... 3 minutes? Dear god, going on a MC/BWL/UBRS raid took ages, the flight from either Undercity or Grom'gol was atrocious. Sure, it was fun the first 5 times, but - just like the actual raid - it wore out quite quick.
    I've spent an unfortunate amount of time running back to across the Searing Gorge (? Or was it Burning Steppes?) as a ghost. It's a good deal of time in my life I'll never get back.
    Last edited by Exinium; 2014-04-22 at 11:37 AM.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by cFortyfive View Post
    tl;dr gaming is about fun not necessarily balance.
    When the broken thing works in your favor it's great. Yeah

    Why should we care about other people at all. I want the windfury oneshot mechanic back in PvP!

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubbl3 View Post
    When the broken thing works in your favor it's great. Yeah

    Why should we care about other people at all. I want the windfury oneshot mechanic back in PvP!
    For the uninitiated, Windfury procs could proc off themselves, leading to a never ending chain of instant weapon attacks. Really cool, really fun if you're the Shaman.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Exinium View Post
    For the uninitiated, Windfury procs could proc off themselves, leading to a never ending chain of instant weapon attacks. Really cool, really fun if you're the Shaman.
    With HoJ too sick amount of procs could form. Good days. Broken as shit though and pure RNG.

    I think MoP so far was great from a presentation and story telling perspective. They got it bang on. Raid mechanics seemed solid enough, just wish we would see more dungeons.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    With HoJ too sick amount of procs could form. Good days. Broken as shit though and pure RNG.

    I think MoP so far was great from a presentation and story telling perspective. They got it bang on. Raid mechanics seemed solid enough, just wish we would see more dungeons.
    Dungeons scaled well. Initially in the tier, they were difficult enough that they required attention. However, for those who now simply use them to grind gold/Justice points to gear alts, they serve their purpose well. I was never a big fan of dungeons, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Exinium View Post
    Dungeons scaled well. Initially in the tier, they were difficult enough that they required attention. However, for those who now simply use them to grind gold/Justice points to gear alts, they serve their purpose well. I was never a big fan of dungeons, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
    They were great (Gate of setting sun has one of the best themes/presentations of any dungeon I have done). Just wish we had more dungeons in general to choose from. I did enjoy all but Shado pan hated that one.

  14. #14
    Why write "vanilla raider" in the title and then talk about nothing but pvp and class balance?
    Ecce homo ergo elk

  15. #15
    I raided, extensively, in vanilla.
    I too could post "A Vanilla Raider's View on the Development of World of Warcraft" and it would differ greatly to yours.

    It doesn't matter what you, me or anyone else says - it's going to be subjective, it's going to reflect on our own personal experiences etc, positive or negative. Some people preferred a different phase of the game to now/other expansions, some didn't. Nobody is right or wrong, it's just their personal opinion.

    I did run around in certain robes just because they were pretty, though. Transmog has brought that part of the fun back.
    Originally Posted by Tseric
    When you can understand how a group of belligerent and angry posters can drive away people from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of misery and spin-doctoring, then perhaps, you can understand the decisions I make.

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Twoflower View Post
    Why write "vanilla raider" in the title and then talk about nothing but pvp and class balance?
    Eh, sorry. I got a little hung up on PvP because it's been a big point of contention for so long. Raiding has stayed relatively the same, going through distinct but similar itterations throughout the years. Yeah-- 40 man raiding was different than what we have now, but in principle it remains the same-- tanks healers DPS. (With the augmentation of Support hybrids in Vanilla.)

    In regards to the raiding, MC was disgusting. The trash respawned far too fast if you didn't kill the boss in time, meaning you'd deal with quite a few trash respawns before you got to a certain boss. Like I said in the OP, 40 man raiding simply didn't lend itself well to World of Warcraft at the time. Fights were less about personal responsibility and more about group-coordination. You could do 10 dps and no one would notice, but if you stood in the wrong spot once, everyone would notice. (Oh-- by the way, there weren't any floor mechanics in MC like we know now. So you could literally sit your ass down and turret whatever you needed to be attacking at the time. That said, there were some fights that benefited from positional awareness.) Threat was poor, so there were portions of the fight DPS would literally have to stop or slow, or they risked pulling threat off of the tank and ensuring a group wipe. Tanks themselves did substellar damage, and were given the difficult task of deciding whether they wanted threat or survivability, because they couldn't have both. It sucked playing a squishy tank. Yeah-- you held the boss just fine, better than most tanks, but you got hit like a truck, and all the healers knew it. There was no middleground, really. In regards to healing, the rank convolution made healing a pain in the ass, and the development of Healbot was very different than as we know it today, properly picking the correct rank of spell to cast based on the context of healing you'd be doing. It overcluttered all actions, and made action bars themselves more confusing and difficult to setup than anything. Sure, it brought some degree of difficulty to a healer, but only in giving them more buttons to press. I mean-- it's cool to pretend we'd like to have healers that have to decide exactly how much mana they spend at every turn, but in reality, this is undesirable. Blizzard is going the right way in healing in trying to simplify the choices we make: Either we get a low throughput or long casttime, efficient heal, or we get a high throughput, low cast time, mana hog heal. This existed back then as well, but it existed for literally every spell a healer could cast throughout the ranks. The poor convoluted design added difficulty only in the fact that it was difficult to understand.

    Quote Originally Posted by Peyj View Post
    I raided, extensively, in vanilla.
    I too could post "A Vanilla Raider's View on the Development of World of Warcraft" and it would differ greatly to yours.

    It doesn't matter what you, me or anyone else says - it's going to be subjective, it's going to reflect on our own personal experiences etc, positive or negative. Some people preferred a different phase of the game to now/other expansions, some didn't. Nobody is right or wrong, it's just their personal opinion.

    I did run around in certain robes just because they were pretty, though. Transmog has brought that part of the fun back.
    I'm not so sure. I mean-- there's benefits to Vanilla, but objectively, the game was absolutely broken, and using Vanilla as a standard, MoP is mechanically magnitudes better.

  17. #17
    So the summary here is:

    "Vanilla was such a terrible gaming experience, I decided to stick around and play it anyhow"

    Sounds reasonable.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    So the summary here is:

    "Vanilla was such a terrible gaming experience, I decided to stick around and play it anyhow"

    Sounds reasonable.
    It wasn't terrible, just bug filled and inherently broken. You're confusing objective analysis with personal assessment. I had a lot of fun in Vanilla WoW too, and the game was incredible for me, a young boy, to immerse myself in. However, it doesn't change the fact that it WAS broken.

    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    ...and you can totally still recruit people in a city and fly to the dungeon. That option was never removed. Just saying if you dislike World of Queuecraft.
    People still do this. With something near 9 90's, I've started to recognize habitual Flex raiders. A lot of people say that when the queue system was added, you lost esteem that your name brought. (I was a decently well known Druid near the end of Vanilla.)

  19. #19
    I don't get why you're bringing up class balance when the classes weren't meant to be the same. That's using a lack of context in your argument. Every class had a place - unfortunately not every spec, but every class did and they were fairly unique for it.

    On top of that, you make out travelling to the BG place to be some huge deal and marks problematic. They made the whole experience much more immersive IMO, and it's a shame they decided to remove them.
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    which is kind of like saying "of COURSE you can't see the unicorns, unicorns are invisible, silly."

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Raiju View Post
    I don't get why you're bringing up class balance when the classes weren't meant to be the same. That's using a lack of context in your argument. Every class had a place - unfortunately not every spec, but every class did and they were fairly unique for it.

    On top of that, you make out travelling to the BG place to be some huge deal and marks problematic. They made the whole experience much more immersive IMO, and it's a shame they decided to remove them.
    Class balance and class homogenization are not tied together, contrary to popular belief. It's possible to make a fairly unique spec remain balanced in regards to all other specs in the game and still not be the "same". A frost Mage is magnitudes different from something like a combat Rogue. I'm not arguing that classes haven't been homogenized, because I believe they have. However, the fact that all specs are now viable outweighs the fact that a player could be royally fucked if they decided they enjoyed a spec that wasn't considered viable.

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