Originally Posted by
garicasha
A reminder of the way things were in vanilla:
--DPS was much much much lower than it is now. If geared in normal questing greens you only wanted to fight one mob at a time, and it took about twenty seconds to kill a mob. A mage fighting one mob would probably use three-quarters of his mana. Rogues could kill things faster, but needed to bandage or eat after every other mob. Aggroing a second mob came with a significant risk of dying and unless the first was almost dead, you probably wanted to run away, reset them both, and try again. And at max level you still had to fight a lot because there was no flight.
Paladin DPS was particularly dreadful and leveling was basically “aggro one mob, go AFK while I auto-attack it to death.” Up to the higher levels all they could do was judge once every ten seconds and then heal themselves when they got low.
--Gold was a million times more valuable than it is now. If you collected and sold every single gray item that dropped and spent little else, you would have enough gold to train your abilities. There were no dailies, the amount of gold leaving the economy due to repair bills/training/mounts was much larger compared to how much gold was entering the economy from mob drops and quest rewards. This meant that farming gold for raiding repair bills was a significant chore.
--There was no flight.
--Green items were also worth much more to leveling players than they are now. But because gold was so valuable the deposit amount was a serious factor, particularly on the weapons. You could easily lose money on a decent weapon you put in the AH at a reasonable price if you were unlucky and no one bought it.
--Leveling was exponentially slower than it is now. I used to think I was kicking butt if I got to level 24 in 24 hours /played. My first level 60 had 14 days /played when he dinged, and that was primarily questing all the time; I didn't do much PvP or anything that wasn't increasing my level. Also note that this was on a PvE server so I could level unharrassed. By Wrath of the Lich King I could get to level 80 in about 3 days /played with the same playstyle.
This also was the reason that Barrens chat became so epic. Every orc, troll, and tauren on the server would spend fifteen+ hours in what was one of the largest zones in the game. And they all needed to know where Mankrik's wife was.
--Running dungeons was a huge pain. There was no good way to find people who wanted to go, everyone had to walk there manually, and for most dungeons (even early ones like Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, and Blackfathom Deeps) the entrance was both difficult to find and not accessible to someone who arrived late; the whole group needed to clear to the entrance.
It was also for these reasons that certain dungeons were hardly ever run at all, such as Razorfen Kraul, Razorfen Downs, and Dire Maul.
--Once you got to level 60 the dungeons were even more difficult. Blackrock Depths, although my favorite dungeon, was the most complicated and maze-like dungeon the game ever had. And you also had to have a key that you somehow had to know that the starting quest for was to die and talk to a dead dwarf you could only see as a spirit. Stratholme was the most difficult to pull of any dungeon. There were lots of rapidly-flying gargoyle patrols, and as stated above, DPS was so low that getting an extra group of mobs was certain death. Lower Blackrock Spire, if you took the full 15 people, wasn't too bad but just took forever. Upper Blackrock Spire was extremely difficult to get the key for, and some of the mobs hit so hard that less organized groups had serious problems, especially if they didn't have adequate druids or hunters to hibernate/trap the dragonkin. Scholomance was probably the easiest both to find and clear; a PUG could probably form, travel, and clear it in two-and-a-half hours. This also assumes that the single nightly Alterac Valley match didn't pop and that half the group left for it mid-dungeon.
--Epics simply weren't available outside of raiding. The end bosses of the 10/15-man dungeons each had a 1% chance to drop a weapon, making them extremely rare. Also due to their rarity you'd have to roll against everyone else in the group because no one else had them either. Nexus Crystals, the enchanting material from disenchanting epics, were nearly priceless. Because epics were so hard to get and also because 20 or 40 people in a raid had to pass on them to be disenchanted, I think the 1% chance from disenchanting a blue was the primary source of them. There were a few craftable epics that required tons of materials that were on a multi-day cooldown to make, such as mooncloth, cured rugged hides, and arcanite.
--Reputation grinds were absurd. They didn't reward much anyway, so it wasn't as big a deal, but I'm pretty sure I ran Stratholme and Scholomance a hundred million bajillion times and got to “honored” with the Argent Dawn.
--I didn't PvP much, but I think it's worth summarizing a thread I read entitled, “How to Get High Warlord/Grand Marshal”. The basic idea was that a month before you wanted the top PvP title (and with it the right to buy the gear for gold), you would come home from work every day and do battlegrounds continuously from the time you got home until 2 a.m., and obviously playing as much as possible on weekends. Then after three weeks of this you would be close enough that you would take a week's vacation off work and play continuously for the entire week in hopes that you would be the top one or two players on your faction in honor that week, earning you the title. These titles were among the most difficult things to ever acquire in Warcraft and its why Blizzard has never re-released them. Oh and as a random thought, Alterac Valley matches could take over twelve hours; there were no “reinforcements”.
--Priests had race-specific spells, and dwarf priests were in high demand because “Fear Ward” could prevent the main tank from being feared and accidentally turning Onyxia or Magmadar towards the raid and likely causing a wipe. The raid and dungeon forums were a constant stream of tears about shamans vs paladins; poison and disease cleansing totems and tremor totem made some fights much easier for the Horde, whereas fear ward and blessing of salvation made other fights much easier for the Alliance.
--There were four 40-man raids and two 20-man ones: Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxramas, and Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. “Casual” guilds could have some success in MC, BWL, ZG, and AQ20. AQ40 and Naxxramas were solely in the domain of hardcore raiding guilds and I won't talk too much about them.
--Raiding required attunement, which was a quest that had to be completed before you could even zone into the raid. Technically Molten Core was at the bottom of Blackrock Depths, but to travel there directly from the outside you had to complete a quest that required clearing all of BRD to the Molten Core door. Same thing for Blackwing Lair; it was technically inside of Blackrock Spire and you needed to kill the final boss of BRS to be able to go directly to the raid from the outside. Naxxramas I'm not even going to talk about, because if you were raiding at that level you were playing WoW a minimum of twenty hours a week, and probably closer to fifty. Attunement for Onyxia was also pure misery; the first time I did it on my priest it took six+ hours just for the 5-man run of LBRS.
--Once you started raiding, the following were de facto rules:
Warriors had to tank at least some of the time, and if they were a main tank also had to protection. This meant like a 75% reduction in their DPS, which made farming a huge chore. Back then the mentality was that tanks should only create threat, not do DPS.
Mages had to be arcane. Fire didn't work in Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and frost didn't have evocate.
All priests, druids, paladins, and shamans were holy or resto. Because there were eight classes and raids were balanced around 5 of each class, the only way to get the required 15 healers was to make everyone who could heal do so. Gear for the off-specs wasn't even available anyway, because +healing and +damage were two different stats at the time.
--Coming prepared was much more of a chore. Priests, paladins, mages, hunters, and warlocks needed to bring tons of candles/symbols/dust/arrows/shards to the raid, and it was much more difficult to grab more mid-raid if you forgot them. Gold for repairs was much more time-consuming to farm. You could drink a potion every two minutes back then, regardless of dropping combat, and the fights were balanced around the expectation that you were. Potions were much harder to come by, and you can burn through a lot of potions if you're drinking one every two minutes for a four-hour raid. Also bags were at most 16 slots, although 14-slotters were much more affordable.
--40-man raid bosses dropped 3 pieces of loot each. Even under the rosy assumption that the exact same 40 raiders showed up each week and cleared Molten Core completely, normal statistical variation could mean three to four months of raiding without getting a piece of loot. Competition for the weapon drops was particularly fierce because everyone knew it would reduce their farming time significantly.
--Killing Ragnaros (final boss of Molten Core) and several other bosses required tons of fire-resist gear, but even at the maximum fire resist of 310 you still weren't guaranteed any reduction in damage done due to the rather silly way the damage was calculated at the time. If your main tank decided to quit the guild or the game you likely lost several months worth of effort in gearing him.
--Successfully raiding meant having an in-depth knowledge of a number of abstract concepts that weren't explained in-game anywhere. These included threat, the five-second rule, crushing blows and using shield block to push them off the combat table, resistance calculations and breakpoints both offensive and defensive, and weapon skill.
--The raids themselves, and the trash mobs in particular, were much more difficult. The design for the raids was still based on an early 2000s notion that all raiders were basement-dwelling trolls with significant Ultima Online or Everquest experience. The core hounds in Molten Core took three or four minutes to kill and were on a seventeen minute respawn timer until Magmadar was killed. It also took practice to learn where they spawned and due to their fear mechanics it was also very likely that one of the forty people forced to run in a random direction would aggro another mob and wipe the raid. Also, skinning the core hounds was extremely valuable but could only be done if the one person whose loot it was randomly took the gray items off the body. One of my raid leaders nearly gave himself an aneurism screaming, “Loot the hound!!!” Lots of the trash mobs were immune to taunt, and in practice the main tank losing threat meant a wipe. Doubly so because once the main tank stopped being hit he couldn't generate any rage to get the mob back.
--If the raid wiped you had to try to recover in place because of the extremely short respawn timers on the trash. Unfortunately, warlocks have always been the least-played class and it wasn't uncommon for a soulstone not to be up when you needed it. Warlocks also had to farm tons of soul shards before a raid because there was no way to recover them if you were say, wiping on a boss repeatedly. They also had to store them all in their bags. If you couldn't recover in place, all forty raiders had to run the entire length of Searing Gorge (for MC/BWL) just to get back to the entrance, and then probably five minutes through the dungeon itself. A wipe on trash could realistically take 15 minutes to recover from: 3 minutes for the trash mob to actually kill everyone, 2 minutes of waiting for a safe time to rez, 5 minutes of rezzing everyone (group resurrects didn't exist), 2 minutes of buffing everyone once they were alive, and an obligatory 3 minutes waiting for the people who went to the bathroom during any of the previous steps.
--The hunter ability “Tranquilizing Shot”, which was needed for the second boss of Molten Core, Magmadar, could only be learned from a drop off the first boss of Molten Core, Lucifron. Although hardcore guilds could go without, more casual guilds needed several of these to kill Magmadar the first time, which works out to a month of killing the first boss before bagging the second. (And don't forget, during that month you would earn 9 epics divided between 40 people.) Skipping Magmadar wasn't realistic because the third boss, Gehennas, was standing in the middle of the patrol routes of two core hounds that were on a seventeen-minute respawn timer until Magmadar was killed.
So I think the above gives a pretty good picture of what WoW was like. But for those of you reading who did play in Vanilla, a few other things to reminisce about:
--Hogger
--Position in Queue: 1,023
--Getting loot-locked on every resource node the first week
--All of the elite non-instance zones that you had to get groups for, like Stromgarde in Arathi, Stonewatch Keep in Redridge, and the Ruins of Alterac in Alterac Mountains
--Deadmines for some reason being level 13 at the entrance, with Van Cleef being level 24
--World Bosses (Green dragons, Malygos, Kazzak)
--Stranglethorn Vale being a constant chatter with people trading pages and trying to find/kill Bangalash
--The Ahn'Qiraj War Effort and banging the gong
--No server transfers
--Tier 1 shoulders looking so ridiculous (hunter = lampshades, paladin = bananas, druid = tree)
--Everyone having a tier 2 helmet from Onyxia because they weren't that hard to get but they were impossible to replace
--Twin Emperors breaking guilds
--4 Horsemen requiring warrior-poaching
--Hardcore guilds having to clear Molten Core every week for legendaries and tier 2 pants
--Leeroy Jenkins & the Rookery
--The dude who got Baron Geddon's debuff on his pet, dismissed it, and re-summoned it in the AH and killed everyone
--Hakkar Blood Plague infecting everyone (which actually got very serious treatment from the CDC as a case study on how real-life infectious diseases are transmitted)
--Farming dreamfoil in endless circles, particularly Un'Goro Crater
--The trash to C'Thun being the hardest boss in the game
--On-next-swing attacks and Carpal Tunnel
--Prot warriors needing to press shield block every six seconds to prevent crushing blows and basically macroing it to everything
--The recipe for the highest level of conjured water was a drop, not trainable
--That rare mob in Arathi Highlands that dropped a stun trinket
--Sharpening stones and mana oils
--Wand spec
--Shadow resist potions / Scarlet Monastery Graveyard for Loatheb
--Flasks lasting two hours and required 100 million resources
--Anything worthwhile was crafted from the once-every-four-days items like Mooncloth, enchanted leather, etc.
--Random legendary drops from MC that could make a big difference in progression
--Eternal complaining about hand of salvation / poison-cleansing totem
--Bloodlust on a per-group level
--Swapping groups mid-fight
--Dungeon keys (Scholomance, UBRS, Zul'Furrak mallet, Shadowforge Key)
--Quel'serrar
In conclusion, LFR isn't so bad.
- - - Updated - - -
I didn't raid hardcore back at the time, but is it safe to say Naxx guilds had a 16-hour-a-week raid schedule, and that every hour of raiding was roughly 1-2 hours of farming for prep?
Yet another Timewalking loot post ( As directed by GM)
Opened timewalking Cache before hotfix
Boosting payments.
Did Blizzard just hotfix an ilvl requirement onto Awakened LFR?
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