LF People who raided in Vanilla

[Deleted]

As the title says, I am interested in hearing people's stories who raided in Vanilla. Throughout the years I've met numerous people ingame who've told me they played and raided in vanilla. Which is fine, but I am baffled when they tell me their age: as young as 17. This means they'd have been 7 when Molten Core was current content.

Another point that occurs to me, is how people sometimes say "Vanilla was so much better in every aspect and it was actually hard". Would this be because people played at such a young age? It's mindboggling to me how people whose native language is not English, could understand what was even going on or what they were supposed to do.

I started playing this game for the very first time in December 2008, made a nelf druid, got completely lost what to do at level 32 and quit. Picked it up again in summer of 2009, where I was RaF'd and rushed through old content. I raided casually in ICC (basically a spot-filler when no one else was available and little dps was better than none). I didn't start seriously raiding heroics until Siege of Orgrimmar and am in my early 20's today.

If you have raided during Vanilla and even TBC, approx how old were you? How old were your fellow raiders? Do you think it's legit that 7-10 year-old children would've been playing an MMORPG that requires a monthly subscription fee, and even team up with 39 other players to defeat bosses? I don't know about others, but 10 years ago we just made the switch from dial-up (paying per second) to ADSL. My PC was utter crap, let alone playing videogames (because honestly, Neopets is not really a videogame).

[TRENCHCRAFT]

I was roughly 13-14 when I began raiding Molten Core back in like 2005.

Molten Core was fucking boring as shit and looking back on it, I really don't know what kept me going with it. I thought it was amazing the first couple of times because there were so many other people (we raided it with anywhere from 20 to 35 people, I don't think once in Vanilla did we ever have 40 people in the group for long before some of them randomly logged off/went afk/left/etc, even in fucking Naxxramas)

Black Wing Lair and Onyxia's Lair were much cooler, and I really loved the AQ raids.

I can't recall too many funny stories off the top of my head, just that I remember in Naxx, at least half the raid always died on the very first 'dance floor' phase on Heigan, every single fucking time. We never killed him without at least 60% of the people dead.

[Cien]

I turned 20 this august, and I played since vanilla!

(If you don't believe me check my armory, I has a certain staff most priests covet :P) Makes me get the giggles when I remember how young I was getting this

I raided some of MC, I remember ALOT of ZG and I did AQ20. At the time I was very young so I was never part of some "ultra hard core jamazing core group! but I was in a few decent guilds, courtesy of my older brother (yay Laggerspine, I mean Daggerspine) :P
From what I remember and did experience, was very hands on and demanding, lots of coordination and the slightest mistake created wipes, lots of trouble on High Priest Jeklik and the tiger boss too ^^


TBC was more up my street, I was older, I was able to raid more, I did Kara, Gruul, Maggy, SSC, TK, a minority of BT and Sunwell. Didn't raid so much "end" content, again young age is a limiting factor in top guilds and were never trustworthy of young un's, but I did experience some bosses through pugs when it was "current".
From what I remember, I thoroughly enjoyed raiding every raid day, had loads of fun, the people were amazing and I progressed. These days I find I absolutley detest raids, its boring, its uncoordinated, the people have lax attitudes and attendance and punctuality is just not the same anymore

I miss vanilla and tbc times, truly the highlight of WoW!

[agli]

I was GM of a guild and I was 19, our youngest player was 11 years of age and he was a Mage called Magneto, eventually his brother played (warrior) and then his dad joined the guild on his warlock, good times. Fantastic times.

raiding was 'harder' back then because trying to organize 40 people to go through 3-6 hours of Molten Core in an evening was awful, yet it was rewarding, you needed to grind Reputation with thorium brotherhood to get Fire Resist gear for most of the classes, On Garr you had to assign 8 hunters and 8 warlocks targets to banish, On Shazzrah you had to kite her back to Garr's room and lay out your raid in a circle just to avoid debuffs and dispels.

What I personally miss from that error of raiding is the reward for the time invested, I was happy to lead people through raids for their tier, I can remember bringing in a level 60 friend on his Shaman to MC, he didn't have the best of gear but by the time he left the raid he had a full Earth Fury set which was nice for him.

So to sum up
Yes 10 years is fine.

[stripesrus]

I was 18 years old when I started WoW in 2005. My first guild had 5 other active people (we became quite good friends). One was 31, two were 21, the Guild Leader was 13 and another was 12 or 13 as well. In my raiding guild, which I joined in 2005, the guild leader was 19, while the average age of raiders was around 22-23. There was a 36 year old person, who was our hunter's class leader.

[madmanx]

I raided in Vanilla, started in late 2004/early 2005 and did MC (a lot! Fuck those pants of Rag!), BWL and AQ 20/40 (40 was never completed at proper level...can't remember exactly how far we got). I never did 60 Naxx.

People who say Vanilla was better are either lying about playing then or are deranged and can safely be ignored.

I do like the fact that we had insane dps specs that were unplayable outside of a raid though. Bring back those! Combat daggers for example would rip shit up but without a tank it was probably the gimpest dps spec in game. Absolutely no pvp balancing issues what so ever as it is unplayable for pvp.

[zorkuus]

I was in my early 20's when I started playing in about mid vanilla. Most of my guildies were in their late teens. I don't recall anyone being 7 or even close to that.

[Goat7]

As the title says, I am interested in hearing people's stories who raided in Vanilla. Throughout the years I've met numerous people ingame who've told me they played and raided in vanilla. Which is fine, but I am baffled when they tell me their age: as young as 17. This means they'd have been 7 when Molten Core was current content.

Another point that occurs to me, is how people sometimes say "Vanilla was so much better in every aspect and it was actually hard". Would this be because people played at such a young age? It's mindboggling to me how people whose native language is not English, could understand what was even going on or what they were supposed to do.

I started playing this game for the very first time in December 2008, made a nelf druid, got completely lost what to do at level 32 and quit. Picked it up again in summer of 2009, where I was RaF'd and rushed through old content. I raided casually in ICC (basically a spot-filler when no one else was available and little dps was better than none). I didn't start seriously raiding heroics until Siege of Orgrimmar and am in my early 20's today.

If you have raided during Vanilla and even TBC, approx how old were you? How old were your fellow raiders? Do you think it's legit that 7-10 year-old children would've been playing an MMORPG that requires a monthly subscription fee, and even team up with 39 other players to defeat bosses? I don't know about others, but 10 years ago we just made the switch from dial-up (paying per second) to ADSL. My PC was utter crap, let alone playing videogames (because honestly, Neopets is not really a videogame).

I have been playing WoW since beta before launch. I raided everything and got a warrior to rank 11 in pvp. I was 20 yrs old when I started playing WoW. Everyone I raided with was between the ages of 20-40. I highly doubt anyone 7-10 yrs old raided anything in Vanilla. If they did they were not successful.

We raided MC, BWL, AQ40, Naxx40. We raided Mon-Thurs from 6pm-10or11pm est. Before and/or after raids you needed to spend more time farming materials/pots/resistance gears/ etc.. Highly doubt anyone that young spent that much time doing the things needed to raid back then.

Younger ppl didn't really play the game back then. I didn't know many anyway. To raid back then you needed to be a very dedicated gamer and you had to have a good internet connection which was harder to get back then. 40 man raids were hardcore, on most fights if 1 person died you would just auto wipe to not waste time cuz you wur not likely to beat the encounter without everyone. You earned DKP to get loot and sometimes you would go months without getting anything. For example I raided with a Rogue. Our raid group had 8 Rogues. So if u spent DKP on a item, gonna be a log time before u get another 1. Most players in todays WoW community couldn't handle Vanilla, todays community simply wouldn't be able to handle it.

[Deleted]

I was GM of a guild and I was 19, our youngest player was 11 years of age and he was a Mage called Magneto, eventually his brother played (warrior) and then his dad joined the guild on his warlock, good times. Fantastic times.

raiding was 'harder' back then because trying to organize 40 people to go through 3-6 hours of Molten Core in an evening was awful, yet it was rewarding, you needed to grind Reputation with thorium brotherhood to get Fire Resist gear for most of the classes, On Garr you had to assign 8 hunters and 8 warlocks targets to banish, On Shazzrah you had to kite her back to Garr's room and lay out your raid in a circle just to avoid debuffs and dispels.

What I personally miss from that error of raiding is the reward for the time invested, I was happy to lead people through raids for their tier, I can remember bringing in a level 60 friend on his Shaman to MC, he didn't have the best of gear but by the time he left the raid he had a full Earth Fury set which was nice for him.

So to sum up
Yes 10 years is fine.

This raises new questions in my head, when did your guild raid? When I was in elementary school I had to be in bed by 8pm. I doubt that's an uncommon time for children this age. And by whom/how was the sub paid?

[Bathory]

I raided hardcore in vanilla when I was 19. I just turned 29 last week. We had a few younger players in our guild (12-14), but everyone was around the same age. High school/early college.


I think, and I could be wrong, that the game wasn't much harder, but the players were newer. Everything was. There weren't mods for everything. There were no boss fights to compare to (Oh this boss is just a "insert boss name here" clone). Everyone was still stumbling along until we found something that worked.

[Denkou]

I was about 13-14 years old when I raided in vanilla. My guild had a pretty broad age range, from people in their teens to full-time professionals in their 40s. One of our leaders/officers was a college professor of about 42 or so.

[Deleted]

I think I was 16 or 17 when we started raiding. I remember a majority were students and we had a bunch of adults too. We actually didn't have many people below 15 in our guild.

I was part of the first people on Horde side who set foot in MC. It was organised by the soon to become best Horde raiding guild. They didn't have the numbers yet themselves so it was a joint venture with around 3 or 4 guilds. My guild had a little bit less than 10 join if memory serves me right. I still remember how we wiped many times on the first 2 Molten Giants, it was chaos, lol. Nobody had a clue what was going on but after maybe even 1 or 2 hours we started dealing with trash pretty ok-ish I guess. We wiped pretty bad on those fire elementals that keep splitting up. I remember how hilarious it was seeing so many tiny elementals! You have to remember there were no guides, practically no add-ons so you went in completely blind. People getting knockbacked into the lava, back then it killed you in seconds.

Anyway, after a while the main guild had enough players so we got booted. I had saved up a bunch of DKP so I was already equipped with 2 or 3 Might pieces. When ZG got released we had the numbers to start raiding ourselves. We were very succesful in ZG, first guild to kill Hakkar without any MC bosses dead, me and a few others had a bit of loot from MC though.

Recruits came in and we could run MC ourselves. Me and another warrior were the main tanks and I stayed protection till I quit in Naxx. Nothing will ever beat the feeling of finally downing Ragnaros the first time. We had an exceptional raid leader who was a major part of our success. Nefarian is to this date one of the most fun encounters I ever tanked, the teamwork with the other 5 (iirc) tanks was amazing. So many adds and you had to communicate so well with all your other tanks, something that isn't present anymore as much lately. Most fun encounters for me to tank were Nefarian, Mimiron hardmode, Yogg Saron and any boss fight that required stance dancing like Magmadar or the majority of dragon bosses.

I also lost the /roll 1-2 against our other tank for a binding for Thunderfury, up to this day I still have only one binding...

During AQ40 we surpassed the second Horde guild in progress and became the second best Horde guild and I think 4th best on the realm. Back then it had a lot of meaning, and the bonding with people is what I enjoyed the most in this game. Lots of communication and teamwork and just banging my head against bosses is what I enjoyed. When you look back now it's very funny to see how easy the bosses were. The game is maybe being dumbed down, but some of the new raiding bosses are so technical.

Anyway, I quit during Naxx. I was the first on our realm to hit exalted with the Argent Dawn so I had free entry (I was a big rep farmer). But after a while the game just gets boring. Anyway, nobody is probably going to read this, but if you have questions, feel free to ask.

I played on Turalyon EU btw.

[Deleted]

I did and I was 16 years old when MC was current content.

Some of the major foreign language clients (german in my case) were already available at launch, so you could perfectly use those. The translations however used to be very bad and some of the quest logs simply contained wrong information or instructions.
But that shouldn't have had any impact on raiding as there was no dungeon journal available anyway. Bosses were pretty simple in terms of mechanics and you basically just pulled them and found out everything yourself, which wasn't more than 1 or 2 simple mechanics in most cases. So no problem with being very young and not understanding english language or having bad translations ingame.

HOWEVER having very young kids in your raid was something that most guilds wanted to avoid, since those players were often "problematic". They could have their mums entering the room in the middle of the raid, forcing them to go to bed, resulting in the kid crying and screaming at his mom, entertaining everyone on teamspeak and things like that. So I guess it is somewhat unlikely to have been raiding at the age of 7, because you would barely find a raid group that would take you. But that's nothing specific for vanilla or tbc, isn't it?

My fellow raiders were 16 - 20 years approx. You just had to be able to raid without your parents interfering or you being a little annoying crybaby. Language barriers or too complex encounters however didn't pose a barrier back then, as it was pretty simple anyway. Most encounters in molten core were just tank and spank, while dealing with ONE additional mechanic that could be described in one sentence.

[PChaosWM]

I started playing WoW in July of 2005 when I was about a month away from turning 17-years-old. I didn't hit the level cap until February or March of the following year (f*** you AP English).

People romanticize the experience of Vanilla WoW raiding, and while it was fun I think that raiding has significantly improved over the years (with a few exceptions). First off, it was difficult for people to get a full group of MC together (unless you were in a giant guild with several hard-core players). Some of the earlier guilds I ran with had to team up with another guild (sometimes two) just to get a full group together. After the leadership was done fighting over who would fill what role they had to take time to explain to the newbies on what they were supposed to be doing. When a piece of loot drops it would either be handed out by a corrupt loot council or by a DKP system that took weeks of raiding to benefit from.

It wasn't all that bad though. The scale of 40-man raids was challenging but it felt so epic. Now, that could be because the experience was much more fresh for those of us who never played a MMORPG before, or it could be just because of the massive size of the groups, but either way it was an experience like no other. Overall, I'd say that my experiences were positive. The guilds I ended up in used DKP but most of the members were pretty fair and would sometimes pass on loot so it could go to someone who needed it more. I doubt WoW will ever truly be able to re-capture the feeling of 40-man raids, but I don't really blame them for it.

[Lilija]

I was around 23 when I've started playing WoW. Each guild I have joined I've ended up as a class leader so eventually I've coofunded a guild of my own which was raiding till mid SWP (server died and we had to disband in order to keep raiding =/ ). I've done ZG, MC, BWL, AQ20, AQ40 till Twins (patch 2.0 hit when we reached Twins and noone wanted to keep raiding then so I've made a longer break till TBC was out). Never done Vanilla Naxx but that's mostly because it took some time to find suitable people to raid with (my earlier guilds failed due to some dramas and I had to start all over again).

Gameplay in Vanilla? I was mostly a healer. As a resto druid I mostly stood around pressing HT rank4 once in a while (well, pressed it more, however, most of those casts I cancelled if I would overheal too much). Was it hard? Not at all. The moment you knew the tactic to the boss it was dead. Up untill AQ40 boss exectution was a joke if you knew what you were doing. And you only needed about 15 thinking people in a 40 man raid that would carry the rest. It has changed in AQ40 which started to involve more and more people in your raid group.

Vanilla was all about time you put into the game. People knew little and had little skill and bosses were still dying. If you think about the boss mechanics there weren't really many things to watch out for. Mostly you just stood still and pressed buttons. Sometimes you had to move a bit. There were hardly any bosses that required anything more. There weren't many enrage timers either so the dps didn't matter that much (the reason hybrid dpser were not concidere wasn't because they were bad but because they were the only classes that could heal and most people didn't want to heal :P )

I sometimes wonder why some people say how Vanilla was better. I remember it with all it flaws. Dunno, maybe age does matter as many people were kids or teenagers when they started playing WoW. I was already an adult and don't really find anything better in Vanilla. In fact I value each expantion for all the improvements they brought seeing each of them better (even if only slightly) than the previous one.

[JunkHead]

I raided a little bit in Vanilla. I did ZG, and a few bosses in MC near the end there. I started the game 2 weeks after release though. I was about 25 when i started playing.

[mercutiouk]

As the title says, I am interested in hearing people's stories who raided in Vanilla. Throughout the years I've met numerous people ingame who've told me they played and raided in vanilla. Which is fine, but I am baffled when they tell me their age: as young as 17. This means they'd have been 7 when Molten Core was current content.

Another point that occurs to me, is how people sometimes say "Vanilla was so much better in every aspect and it was actually hard". Would this be because people played at such a young age? It's mindboggling to me how people whose native language is not English, could understand what was even going on or what they were supposed to do.

I started playing this game for the very first time in December 2008, made a nelf druid, got completely lost what to do at level 32 and quit. Picked it up again in summer of 2009, where I was RaF'd and rushed through old content. I raided casually in ICC (basically a spot-filler when no one else was available and little dps was better than none). I didn't start seriously raiding heroics until Siege of Orgrimmar and am in my early 20's today.

If you have raided during Vanilla and even TBC, approx how old were you? How old were your fellow raiders? Do you think it's legit that 7-10 year-old children would've been playing an MMORPG that requires a monthly subscription fee, and even team up with 39 other players to defeat bosses? I don't know about others, but 10 years ago we just made the switch from dial-up (paying per second) to ADSL. My PC was utter crap, let alone playing videogames (because honestly, Neopets is not really a videogame).

Raided most of Molten Core.
Was 24 when wow first came out. I'd say a lot of the folks around that time were early 20's a couple of older guys and a few a bit younger. I don't remember there being that many... kids (not being overly dismissive but in my eyes...) around at the time. I saw a few younger players in TBC and quite a lot of younger players in Wrath.

Early on I think it was mostly the more geeky end of gamers who were into wow, the ones who'd been playing warcraft "before it was cool" (NOT a hipster). Gaming started getting more and more mainstream throughout the "noughties" (2000 to 2009) so more folks were getting into it and bringing younger family members/friends into it as they went.

A good bit of the difficulty in vanilla was the rough edges, gear was poorly optimised and resources for learning what was good for which class/role were a lot rarer (wowhead didn't become a thing at least in popularity until quite a bit into TBC from memory) so it was harder to assess how you were in relation to other people etc and improve.

Bosses were (almost) certainly simpler though. They often had a much harsher gear check (based on some form of damage resistance gear, gear with only fire resist and a couple of crappy stats was highly prized) again, harder because of the gating on gear.

The game is MUCH more accessible now, it's probably harder on a mechanics point of view but gear acquisition is much simpler and the resources to improve ones playstyle are definitely far better.

Hope that gives a fairly balanced viewpoint. Now.. older (easy to work out, I'll leave it unstated though) and have moved away from WoW though still do a (fair) bit of gaming and find the volume of folks on this site make it a decent place to pop in occasionally

[theostrichsays]

I remember we had a fair turn over rate of younger players, I remember more early teens then pre-teens. The 7-12 year olds we did have typically were playing on someone else's account, and were not there in a raiding sense (someone had to lvl their dads alts and gather mats).
But our turn over was due to new guildies being expected to provide a larger share of gatherables and consumables, and that stuff not being an enjoyable experience.

[Deleted]

I turned 18 back in april and I played during vanilla. I raided once before heading into Gruul's lair and that was when I had to cover my brothers character during Onyxia. I had no clue what I was doing and even forgot to bring the cloak. Worst part is I was supposd to main tank and I had no clue how or when to move the boss. I raided (decently even) through all of Karazhan, the single boss raids and Zul'aman. It was mostly just me asking my brother if I could tag along in their raid and because I was a shaman people usually wanted the buffs.

[mercutiouk]

I have been playing WoW since beta before launch. I raided everything and got a warrior to rank 11 in pvp. I was 20 yrs old when I started playing WoW. Everyone I raided with was between the ages of 20-40. I highly doubt anyone 7-10 yrs old raided anything in Vanilla. If they did they were not successful.

We raided MC, BWL, AQ40, Naxx40. We raided Mon-Thurs from 6pm-10or11pm est. Before and/or after raids you needed to spend more time farming materials/pots/resistance gears/ etc.. Highly doubt anyone that young spent that much time doing the things needed to raid back then.

Younger ppl didn't really play the game back then. I didn't know many anyway. To raid back then you needed to be a very dedicated gamer and you had to have a good internet connection which was harder to get back then. 40 man raids were hardcore, on most fights if 1 person died you would just auto wipe to not waste time cuz you wur not likely to beat the encounter without everyone. You earned DKP to get loot and sometimes you would go months without getting anything. For example I raided with a Rogue. Our raid group had 8 Rogues. So if u spent DKP on a item, gonna be a log time before u get another 1. Most players in todays WoW community couldn't handle Vanilla, todays community simply wouldn't be able to handle it.

It MIGHT have been possible for 10 year olds to raid WoW on dads credit card if their parents weren't really doing an amazing job (kids that age SHOULD be in bed earlier, no doubt) so "loving them with money" kinda thing. They probably wouldn't have been all that productive but in 40 man MC the odd guy slacking/stood miles away from the raid team could happen, the odd person could screw up and it wouldn't wipe the raid so... maaaaaaybe.