LF People who raided in Vanilla

[Morbownz]

In Dec 2005 I started playing, I was just in my 20s and I had no interest in the game, I was being constantly asked to create a character on my brothers account and then one day I finally did, and that was it. I had no idea what the game was about and I don't remember caring that much at the time, all I knew was that I was experiencing something completely unique.
I knew there was teenagers playing the game, some as young as 13 and some were actually quite good players too, wow attracted the nerdy kids remember.
The thing that made raiding hard was the lack of knowledge and lack of internet resources. You'd join a guild and a better player would educate you on things he'd picked up from someone else. Think of this, a lock had a great number of DoTs, but a boss had 16 debuff slot limit. A Druids maximum rank heal would cost so much mana that he'd run out quick if he spammed it, to be efficient he had to work out his mana regen and adjust his rank of heals to suit that. None of this is intuitive, the hardcore minded players worked this kind of stuff out because they knew the game had this kind of depth to it. You could join a 5 man and the difference between a good tank and an average tank was like night and day, same with most classes especially where CC was vital (Scarlet Strat).
I am not sure about 7 year old kids completing Naxx but I knew that young poeple played WoW and raided, whether or not they got far is another story.

[Rodzyna]

I've raided back then, in Vanilla. I've joined the game in the year 2006, when i was 13 years old.

I will focus more on the real life aspect, 'cause most people described mechanics very well, and repeating everything over and over is just pointless.
The game was less linear ( no real tips on how to do certain stuff ) and it was just YOU and the world. You felt like explorer, learning everything. You had no fancy tools and environment felt big and fresh. I was excited to see Warcraft III from the different perspective.

There was just a slight language barrier. I'm from Poland and English is not my native language, but at the age of 13 I've been on the B1/B2 level, since you start learning it from the age of 4 in here. The quest's log was easy enough to understand (you had no indicators on the world's map and similar conveniences). When i had no idea what to do, i've been using the popular Thottbot.

When it comes to my parents - a year earlier i've been playing Battlefield 2142 in one of the best E-sports teams in my country. Neither my dad nor mum had anything against me staying late from time to time. I had very good marks in the school and I was much better than some of my classmates, so they weren't really worried about my performance. My subscription, which is higher than in the UK/USA or other parts of Europe (i pay 40 PLN/month, which makes it much bigger percent of your paycheck in comparison to average payment than in aforementioned countries), was being paid by them. All in all, it's just about 2 PLN a day, and it makes roughly 0.50 Euro/day. The game was and IS pretty cheap.

[Mikael123]

I am 29 today and played a druid in vanilla. I was mostly dps'ing, but I don't know if my dps was good or bad since I didn't use a dps meter back then. I remember we had to wait for the warrior tank to get a head start, otherwise we would overaggro him. I also got to tank a bit in AQ40 and AQ20, but warriors were generally the only viable tanks.
I have good memories of vanilla raiding. Especially ZG and BWL which were much more fun than MC.
I don't know if we had any 7-10 year old raiders in the guild, but the people who spoke on teamspeak (or perhaps it was something else) I assumed to be around my own age.

[r3d3mpt10n]

I played a Fury warrior in Vanilla, i remember getting my first taste of a raid at level 58, being taken along to a Molten Core raid with my guild, as we didnt have the full numbers, so they just pulled me and a priest who were levelling together to get the group a bit more full.

I also remember ZG being my first level 60 raid, and actually getting one or two bits from the raid, eventhough i wasnt entitled to it, but the other people who could use the items, already had them.

Vanilla was fun IMO, although raids for that time were alot harder, purely because it was difficult to get 40 people together doing what was needed in the higher tiers... I dont necessarily think they were tuned as hard, as some bosses were certainly doable with less than the raid limit.

Also, i was kinda annoyed when they lowered the mount restrictions, as i already had the epic riding, bought at level 60 on two characters, my Warrior/Mage... it took me ages to grind the gold for those -.-

[bmjclark]

I was 10 when i started playing WoW, 11 and a half or so i guess when i started raiding MC and onyxia's lair with a guild. My first raid with my guild they actually fell apart and one of the officers took about 80% of the members (minus the guild master and like 8 officers) and reformed the guild with a different name. I don't remember too much about raiding except for when we were killing onyxia the guild leader (main tank) had horrible horrible threat issues and one of our hunters pulled aggro auto attacking with a melee weapon and got half the raid breathed on and the other half tail whipped lol. Other then that, i just remember how much i hated the supression room and spending ages trying to kill the demons for the rhokdalar and lokdalar quest (spelling on that).

I do however remember at least half our raid doing next to nothing the entire time and we cleared most of bwl and a few bosses in aq40.

[antelope591]

I raided all through vanilla was in college same as the majority of my guild. Some older guys also but not many younger. From my perspective being in a hardcore guild (US horde second to clear Naxx 40) raiding was a bit more relaxed back then. I mean it was still hardcore. We raided 5-6 days a week for 4-5 hours a day but that was during progression. Nothing compared to the 24/7 type raiding top 10 guilds do nowadays. There were no alts....you had your main and that was it since gearing was much harder. You also still had some sub par raiders even at the top level Id say 5-10 or so ppl were basicallly just there to fill spots. Obviously this number was even higher for less progressed guilds. The biggest difference though was the difference in pre raid preparation. For a Loatheb pull u would get onyxia buff, nef buff AND ZG buff on top of all the flasks and pots u had to farm....a lot of fkn prep time. And if u wiped to something stupid thats an hour+ flushed down the toilet.

[Deleted]

I was like 24 or so in vanilla. I raided naxx at the top level (I believe we got like world second on loatheb or so and many single digit kills anyways). Hardcore raiding back then was frankly awful. I was a tank so I had my tanking gear, fire res gear, shadow res gear, nature res gear, frost res gear, dps gear. For example nature res gear was obtained from world bosses (oh boy what fun griefing fests those were), maraudon etc. Fire res gear required you going to brd etc. Anyways it sucked.

-You had 40 people in raids. Obviously you needed more because people didn't have 100% attendance. So organization/recruiting overhead was pretty big.

-Raid bosses usually dropped like 2-3 loots and there was no justice/valor gear or equivalents. It was quite hard to gear up back then, so if for example your geared main tank quit it was a huge blow to the guild

-Class mechanics sucked ass, taunts would regularly miss or get resisted, you had no threat meters but threat actually mattered. You also had to do tank rotations on like Huhuran before taunt actually gave you top threat which was tricky sometimes. (Basically back then taunt gave you the same threat as top guy and made boss attack you for the few seconds, but to actually get the aggro you had to go over the previous tanks threat by 10% which wasn't easy late in the fight).

-Farming consumables was insane. Just getting shadow res pots for loatheb required hours of farming every week. I guarantee that basically everyone of our raid members bought gold from chinese farmers because basically nobody could farm all the stuff needed for raids. You'd have flask, some pots, weapon oil, protection pots etc. There was very little limitations so at the top you used just about everything. Heck, you even killed onyxia on alts so you could get the buff for increased dps.

-You only had single spec, so as a healer or tank you had to pay 2x50g each time you wanted to farm (100g was decent amount then). Also repair bills were relatively high.

-Raid wise the mechanics were fairly simplistic but class mechanics were really bad back then compared to now. Maexxna for example could basically only be tried once per 30 mins because shield wall had 30 min cooldown and without it you couldn't survive the stun period. Players could only have single copy of a hot on them. What about the 10+ other healers? Fuck you. Bosses could only have 8 debuffs on them (raised to 16 after Vaelastrasz bomb debuff was cheesed by 8 priests mind visioning it off). So your dps would like to use some dots? Well too fucking bad, nope.

Think I'll stop my rant here We were just talking about this with a friend and it really grinds my gear when people talk about like Vanilla was somehow so awesome that we should go back. For the time it was great but now most people wouldn't last a month there.

[IKT]

I was like 24 or so in vanilla. I raided naxx at the top level (I believe we got like world second on loatheb or so and many single digit kills anyways). Hardcore raiding back then was frankly awful. I was a tank so I had my tanking gear, fire res gear, shadow res gear, nature res gear, frost res gear, dps gear. For example nature res gear was obtained from world bosses (oh boy what fun griefing fests those were), maraudon etc. Fire res gear required you going to brd etc. Anyways it sucked.

-You had 40 people in raids. Obviously you needed more because people didn't have 100% attendance. So organization/recruiting overhead was pretty big.

-Raid bosses usually dropped like 2-3 loots and there was no justice/valor gear or equivalents. It was quite hard to gear up back then, so if for example your geared main tank quit it was a huge blow to the guild

-Class mechanics sucked ass, taunts would regularly miss or get resisted, you had no threat meters but threat actually mattered. You also had to do tank rotations on like Huhuran before taunt actually gave you top threat which was tricky sometimes. (Basically back then taunt gave you the same threat as top guy and made boss attack you for the few seconds, but to actually get the aggro you had to go over the previous tanks threat by 10% which wasn't easy late in the fight).

-Farming consumables was insane. Just getting shadow res pots for loatheb required hours of farming every week. I guarantee that basically everyone of our raid members bought gold from chinese farmers because basically nobody could farm all the stuff needed for raids. You'd have flask, some pots, weapon oil, protection pots etc. There was very little limitations so at the top you used just about everything. Heck, you even killed onyxia on alts so you could get the buff for increased dps.

-You only had single spec, so as a healer or tank you had to pay 2x50g each time you wanted to farm (100g was decent amount then). Also repair bills were relatively high.

-Raid wise the mechanics were fairly simplistic but class mechanics were really bad back then compared to now. Maexxna for example could basically only be tried once per 30 mins because shield wall had 30 min cooldown and without it you couldn't survive the stun period. Players could only have single copy of a hot on them. What about the 10+ other healers? Fuck you. Bosses could only have 8 debuffs on them (raised to 16 after Vaelastrasz bomb debuff was cheesed by 8 priests mind visioning it off). So your dps would like to use some dots? Well too fucking bad, nope.

Think I'll stop my rant here We were just talking about this with a friend and it really grinds my gear when people talk about like Vanilla was somehow so awesome that we should go back. For the time it was great but now most people wouldn't last a month there.

I clicked my spells, had no idea about stats, had no idea about talents, had no idea about gear, no idea about anything, and I got to kill ragnaros and completed my tier 1, good times.

[catablitz]

I do not remember anyone younger than 15 raiding before late vanilla. Unless you count kids that were brought once per month to try and get some mc bosses down while people were missing. Okay, that went out wrong. Kids are people too.

[Jonsse]

I raided in Vanilla. I'm 31 now.

Back story:

I started my WoW career when beta was opened. I had played Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 previously, but I had heard of wow only slightly. Wasn't even knowledgeable that an MMO was being developed. I only saw one in game video of an Orc running in the woods, that was my extend of knowledge of wow. Only later learned of the parallels the special map of Warcraft 3 and the upcoming MMO had. Then again I spent the entire 2004 in the Army as accustomed in Finland for all males over 18. Not much time to read up the latest in gaming.

My friend got me in to the game. We made beta characters together and leveled to around 24 before the open beta ended. I played a rogue, he made a Hunter. After that I bought the game as it was released. I was on a trip to London with my mother when the EU release date came. Thus was a few days behind my friend who already had a character made and played for a bit. He chose a Druid, I chose a Hunter. We both got to level 60 after a copious amount of time spent leveling. It wasn't fast, specially since you didn't know anything about the world. He started raiding shortly after he was 60, maybe even before. A druid was hot commodity in vanilla raiding, a hunter was not. The guild I was in formed a raid group for Molten Core with a couple of other guilds one day. I was with them for their first Onyxia kill, Lucifron kill and Magmatar kill, I was even in charge of pulling one of the lucifron adds to the tank. Then after being away for the weekend they had formed a new raiding team, to which I was not welcome to. Hunters weren't very sought after and all hunter spots were full. This was on Silvermoon Alliance. I rerolled a rogue on another server, an RP one and leveled it to 60. The guild never got up to raiding so I eventually abandoned the rogue. There was room for a hunter back on Silvermoon with the raid group mentioned previously so my Vanilla raiding officially started. They had killed Sulfuron by that time. I remained with them all the way up to Twin Emperors in Ahn'Qiraj after which the guild quickly disbanded, C'thun trash ftw. After that I joined a Finish guild and have been raiding with them on and off ever since, and am still continuing raiding with them in Warlords in a mythic difficulty roster on a Mage.


That's the back story, let's get down to Vanilla Raiding.

The first boss of Molten Core: The two Molten Giants at the door. I'm not kidding, those things probably wiped more raids than all the bosses in Molten Core combined... Nevermind.

So vanilla raiding was mostly just about how utterly insignificant you were in a 40 man roster, unless you were a priest or one of the 3-5 tanks, you didn't matter. Molten Core was basically designed to be started with maybe 15 people that roughly knew how to play at a reasonable level and brought the right classes(warriors as tanks, priests as heals, paladins as decurse/buff, mages and rogues as dps, warlocks for soul stones/summon, druids for innervate and maybe a hunter for pulling). The rest could be any number of warm bodies that might press a button occasionally and you could pretty much kill every boss there with that roster except maybe Majordomo and Ragnaros. Onyxia needed a few more, but she wasn't that hard either in retrospect. (She was an awesome fight in Vanilla. I have so many fond memories of being there the first time.) So to answer your question if a 7 year old could raid in vanilla? Sure they could. I probably raided with a couple of 7 year-olds myself without knowing. At the start there were barely any tools to measure performance so an individual could basically just /follow through a night of raiding and no-one would be the wiser.


Game was "Better" in Vanilla

This I find kind of silly myself. The argument is often quite absurd and out of context. How I see WoW develop over time is more of a constant improvement and innovation. New ideas come from the brilliant minds at Blizzard that make improvements to the game. Some of them are good, they stick and become standards for WoW. Some of them are useless and are never used again. Some of them are terrible. Sadly sometimes the terrible things come back because for some reason the lesson wasn't learned the first time. Sometimes the good ones are forgotten and we don't know why.

What makes a game great, any game great, is the people you play with. I have very fond memories of vanilla. I would love to have the ability to revisit Upper Blackrock Spire with my priest or paladin in blue gear and 15 people. Or fight against Ragnaros in Molten Core for the first time. Or defeat Nerfarian atop Blackwing Lair with my 40 "friends", 5 of which I actually talk to in game and rest are as good as strangers. Or heal my ass of trying to keep the Glaive elemental tank alive on the Illidan fight(He never saw the beam in time). But that game was not a better game than what World of Warcraft is now. And no-one can ever go back there no matter how hard they try.


The game was Hard back then

Another silly one. How I see it, as being an adult the entire time WoW has been out, is that some aspects of WoW were harder in Vanilla and some aspects were easier. General playing in vanilla was more tedious than hard. Leveling took ages. Professions were horrible grinds (they still are, but back then they were even worse because resources took longer to collect) Classes were much easier to play, they were very simple back then. There were no complex rotations or spell interactions. Most was just "press a button to do damage". Tanking was more difficult because threat was a major issue, but there wasn't much tools for tanks to use so bad tanks kept threat almost as well as good ones. Healers could literally out threat tanks with aoe healing(I pulled agro on Vael a couple of times on my priest with CoH. Breath on raid - ooops my bad).

In general the game was just much more grindy back then, tedious grinding. Doing or getting pretty much anything took a lot more time than what it takes now. Dungeons took longer. Raid bosses took longer to kill. Even getting a group to do a quest could take ages. There were attunement quests for Onyxia and UBRS that could take weeks to complete. There's no grind in WoW anymore. People say doing dailies for rep or dungeons for valor is grinding, but it's just time gated. Mostly everything is just instant gratification. Not necessarily a bad thing mind you.


That's it, went on a little tangent there. It's fun to talk about those old times I had so much fun with.

I like the current WoW, it's a much better game than what it was 10 years ago. The things I miss the most is the atmosphere of the game. Like Ironforge full of people and lagging so bad you end up in the pit between the bank on AH if you press W while facing the wrong way. It's really hard to quantify what made Vanilla wow better or worse. It just felt like a lot of fun, but so did TBC, and Wrath, and Cataclysm, and Mists.

[Perkunas]

Blackwing Lair and we're having trouble on Razorgore The Untamed. As Alliance he was harder for us than Horde because we lacked Shaman so the advantage that Frostshock and Earthbind totem gave kiting his adds wasn't possible. We're spending an entire night wiping on the bastard even though we've killed him the last two weeks in a row within a few tries. Tired of the frustration one of the Paladins in our Pally Chat channel says something about how he's heard we can cheese the fight and basically avoid all the adds spawning in the first place. A video had recently popped up on Google Video that had an Alliance guild have one of their Paladins use Divine Intervention on Razorgore while he was mind-controlled. Once MC'd all of Razorgore's adds would despawn and after 5 minutes we could kill him without popping any of his eggs or dealing with that entire terrible phase. One person in our group had the balls to just do this without discussing it in guild chat or raid chat. As a veteran he didn't even have any concerns about being kicked for exploiting a bug even though we'd heard rumors of guilds getting suspended for doing it.

The pull eventually happens and Vod, the Paladin who didn't give a fuck, instantly DI's Razorgore and half the raid has no idea what happened. They see Vod dead, Razorgore in a little bubble, and no adds. The main tank begins to lose his shit within seconds. Now, I don't know if any of you have been chewed out by a rabid French Canadian with a poor grasp of English on a vent server who's wiped on what was considered a farm boss for 2 hours, but let me tell you it wasn't pretty. The MT went bananas multiple "tabarnaks" "calices" were flying everywhere. You'd have sworn the Boston Bruins had dug up the body of Maurice Richard, tossed a Bruins jersey on his corpse and put him in a Lenin-esque container in front of the Garden. He demanded we wipe the raid because he wouldn't cheat and risk being banned and when we didn't take his threats and yelling seriously he Gquit and we had to swear to never try it again. We spent the better part of that night trying to convince our MT to rejoin our guild and trying to figure out what some of these crazy French words meant. After that week we never had trouble on Razorgore again oddly enough.

We were all pretty much 16 or older. I myself was 21 at the time of MC/BWL progression.

[Ettan]

I was 15/16 ish.
Cleared zg, mc bwl.
Worked for awhile on aq but could never quite get cthun.
Naxx, whipefest (from the first thrash pull) but eventually managed patch + spider wing.

[Erihs]

I got into WoW during the EU closed beta because my older brother had gotten a beta invite, so I played a bit on his account. I was 13 at the time (23 now). I had turned 14 by the time EU got its release, and bought the game at launch. I think I joined a raiding guild some time late 2005, and ended up clearing up to C'thun in AQ40 and only did Anub in Naxx.
I know for a fact that I was the youngest player in my raid teams during the entirety of Vanilla and TBC, with the average age probably being around 20.

I'm having a hard time now actually judging the difficulty of the encounters back then. I know I thought them all to be difficult and exciting, but I also know for a fact that I was a terrible player in the first part of vanilla. I went for the armor with the highest armor value while leveling instead of looking at stats, and it wasn't until at least half-way into BWL that I realized I ought to be using Aimed Shot instead of Arcane Shot in my rotation.

[Djuntas]

I was 13 when I started playing wow. Due to friends (same age, other class inn school mostly) I had raiding pretty much as soon as I hit 60.

Vanilla was amasing cause off the atmosphere, the true "wow...this is wow?!" kind off fealing. Yes looking back Moltencore, and many raids until naxx40 or AQ40 we're pretty average, but so we're us the players...I played like a fucking donkey back then, compared to just say end off WOTLK, and now days its much better to. I proboaly clicked 75% off spell's, keyboard turned abit etc...no wasd movement for sure.

Vanilla was especially good for me, cause I was inn an amasing guild the hole way....I would pay money to just raid with them all again...

I cleared twins couple off times, and we attempted Huhuran, but never Cthun. And I didn't get to far inn naxx40, spiderwing + noth and instructor. We had alot off issues at times, but I loved it the hole way.

[Daffan]

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!

I have almost the exact same situation as you, same age and all.

I did A LOT of damn ZG and AQ20, MC, BWL and little AQ40 and i trialed for a Naxxramas guild before BC and did a few bosses.

Some people say Vanilla/BC/Early WOTLK is Nostalgia talking, It's not really a case of nostalgia for me

Its the fact that

Every week i had a raid to go to, and it was good for me. I was a tier behind or so in BC even, but i had fun. When people did SSC/TK i was doing Some T4/T5 mix and i found it enjoyable - contrast to now. I came late to MOP and never got to do t14/t15 cause of "skip mechanics" - that's wasted content right there.... such a shame and really dampens the experience for me these expansions.

MSV and ToT is new for me , and i bet 75% of people never even killed them. LFR doesn't count and thats why i never experienced them, cause its so bad on LFR and since you can skip right into SoO, the other raids are redundant.

[glowpipe]

I was 18-19 when i started raiding. Started molten core about the same time as BWL came out. My guild was mainly 17+. But we had one that was 11. Oh the horror!

People saying they raided MC from the start and are now 17. Was most likely lying.

[moremana]

Well, Im a little older, I was 36 at the time, but my son played with us in our guild he was 12 at the time. He was actually our top dps. Vanilla wasn't better, Vanilla was hard, yes, and that made things more meaningful when you obtained them. Vanilla was so unbalanced compared to the way it was in TBC and WoTLK.

[volrath50]

I got WoW for my 18th birthday (in 2005), and started raiding a few months afterwards. However, I then introduced WoW to all my brothers, all of whom are younger than me. My one brother started playing when he was 15 and started raiding at 16. In classic, he was known as the guild baby, my classic guild being mostly guys in their 20s and 30s. During TBC I got my then 13 and 10 year old brothers to start playing, although never really raided. It's actually funny to think my one brother has been playing for six or seven years, and is still younger than I was when I started playing.

In TBC I remember raiding Black Temple with a guild who had a really young main tank. I think he was 12 or 13. Initially I thought it was a bit weird, but he was a really good tank and did fine.

[Anshinritsumai]

26 now, but I was 16 when I got into the beta in July 2004.

Played a mage in beta and vanilla.

I was never a hard core raider, but I did MC enough to get every piece of Arcanist except the shoulders. I was trying to get that and the Azuresong Mageblade. I stopped raiding in favor for PvP/BGs when the honor system finally landed in the 2 patches before BWL and ZG came out. I raided 20man ZG with a guild of friends; won the Swift Zulian Tiger ("epic" mount, 100% speed), even though I didn't have the riding skill for it at the time. One of my guild members lamented over vent - "I wish I had a Mercedes without a license." Ever since then, I've been primarily a PvP-oriented player, while still being open to being a backup DPS for raids. Ended up being backup DPS in AQ20, AQ40, and BWL. Never experienced original 40man Onyxia or Naxxramas though; was in the process of getting my attunement for Naxx but then TBC launched, and by the time I was attuned for Ony, no one raided her anymore.

Game wasn't "hard" as much as it was severely time consuming back then. Leveling took ages, quests took ages, getting anywhere on your mount took ages, trying to get the gold to buy anything took ages, professions took ages (mostly because getting the resources took far longer than they do now, 3-5 clicks per mining node, etc). We didn't have the resources we have now; MMO-Champion, WoWHead, and all those other amazing resources didn't exist in the beginning. Sure, we had Thottbot, but it wasn't anywhere near the resources we have now. Addons were almost non-existent until about half-way through Vanilla, and even then it was pretty much just one set of mods that anyone ever used; CTMod and CT_RaidAssist.

It took me about 2 solid months to reach 60 on my mage, and I never had "epic" (100%) mount speed until Burning Crusade came out. Took weeks to obtain the Onyxia necklace for attunement; and I did this on both Horde and Alliance, so I know how much more BS the Horde went through to get theirs than Alliance. So much running back and forth. Also spent weeks in Scholo and Strath grinding rep for Argent Dawn for Naxx attunement, also only to have TBC come out before I could finish.

After TBC launched, my raiding went strictly casual; backup DPS whenever friends needed it, but it was far from a weekly job.
Burning Crusade - Kara, Gruul, Mag, SSC, TK, Hyjal, and Sunwell.
Wrath of the Lich King - VoA, TotC, and TotGC.
Cataclysm - Firelands

In MoP, I ended up going into LFR for MSV, HoF, and ToES; with random pugs for Sha of Anger, Nalak, Oondasta.


Overall, it was definitely far more time consuming than hard, which is just annoying and frustrating, thus lending itself to the aspect of being "hard." While I'm one of those people that would love to have the nostalgia of vanilla again; the game is definitely better now than it was back then. If anything, we just want that feeling of discovery again, the feeling of not knowing where anything is, and having to figure it all out on our own again without the ability to go to some site or use an addon to tell us what to do.

[aziras]

I was early 20s when WoW came about and I started playing. I had just finished university and was job-hunting, so I had plenty of time.
The guild I was in had mostly adults in the raid group, with a few (less than 5) teenagers (16-18'ish), and no really young ones.
Main difference compared to now was that most of the WoW players had migrated from other MMOs. At least that was the case for early vanilla. It was what you could call "nerds" without insulting anyone. Roleplaying was actually a thing, to the point where powergamers were not that common. Most players played vanilla like a fantasy sandbox, interacting with others when possibly, but not really taking it as a mandatory part of the game.

The other day when I finished my warlock's purpose (started him only for two reasons, 1) try a Goblin, and 2) try the green fire quest), I concluded that it is the currently most accurate single-player way to try something like vanilla raiding. It is in no way hard... assuming you know what you are doing. It can also be outgeared quite significantly, although for a good player, it is not hard with crap gear either.
This is a very accurate representation of what vanilla raiding was. It was not hard (only the keeping 40 people consistently showing for raids part of it). But you got punished for mistakes pretty hard, especially if made by healers or tanks. It was also very easy to outgear the earlier tiers. Making them very trivial.

Our raids had a lot of tactics chat. Back then boss strategies were not as abundant. The top guilds typically only posted kill shots and not videos (10 years is a long time in terms of digital technology). So it could take months for the best strategies to become well known. By which time, most semi-serious guilds already came up with their own ways to deal with the encounters. These days the tactics and videos are out before the bosses because people refine their strategies in beta/PTR.

Another big thing was the pigeon holing of classes into raid roles. Each class had 3 specs, but only really one raid-role. Either due to gear or due to raid composition requirements. You had terms like "plate rogues" (for dps warriors), "buff bots" (paladins) and the coveted dwarf priests (who could always get a raid spot no matter how bad their gear was - all they had to do was to know how to cast one spell on the tank whenever it came off cooldown).
Loot was also more scarce, and with a 40man raid having to share 2 drops/boss, lots of drama ensured.
Most guilds had DKP systems in place - one more flawed than the next.
Plus you had ninja-looters big-time. For quite some time, the masterlooter function was so buggy that most guilds raided with FFA to avoid bugging loot. Which you can probably imagine tempted a raider here and there. 40 players all trusting each other enough to raid endgame with FFA would be completely unheard of today, except for the most tight guilds. Even then, most of them run with group loot because it is easier to just pass/roll on the loot.

The corpseruns were epic. To the point that AQ let you ride your mount there. It was not uncommon for the more casual guilds to spend 10 minutes recovering from a wipe and rebuffing. And then most raids had trash respawns.

Or maybe most importantly. Many raid nights for the non-hardcore guilds ended with a raid that was unfinished. For most guilds it took two nights to clear MC. The 1-night MC clear actually marked a milestone in guild progression (and often required a fair bit of BWL loot to push the DPS up).

It was also pretty rare to have raiding alts. So you raided once or twice each week. Unless it was progression content right at tier release, in which case you probably raided daily, spending 2-3 hours/day farming gold for repair bills.

PS: I noticed that during WotLK the first "kids of gamers" started coming along. They were probably there earlier, but not that many gamers had 10yo+ kids in 2004.