Reminders of what vanilla was like

[BloodyAngel12]

Updated the post even more...man there is just so many things they've changed in 13 years.

Nowadays there's basically 6 kinds of loot:
--Plate
--Mail
--Leather
--Cloth
--Necks and rings
--4 kinds of trinkets: tanking/healing/melee dps/caster dps

Back then there was:
--Plate for tanking (prot, prot)
--Plate for DPS (ret, fury, arms)
--Mail for caster DPS (elemental)
--Mail for healing (resto sham)
--Mail for melee DPS (hunter, enhancement sham)
--Leather for healing (resto)
--Leather for caster DPS (moonkin)
--Leather for melee DPS (rogue, feral)
--Cloth for healing (priest)
--Cloth for caster DPS (shadow, mage, warlock)
--4 kinds of trinkets: tanking/healing/melee dps/caster dps
--Caster DPS swords & off-handers, maybe axes for shamans?
--Healer maces & off-handers
--Caster staves which I think might have been +damage and +healing, I forget
--Stat-stick agility staves
--Wands
--Melee DPS 1H swords / 2H swords / daggers / 1H maces / 2H maces / 1H axes / 2H axes

You forgot healer plate and shields.

[Triptych]

<very long list of classic features> snipped

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, OP!

I've always been mildly enthusiastic about a return to those glory days, but reading your post really hammered home just how much I loved the original game. This announcement by Blizzard is the best thing they've ever revealed at a Blizzcon.

Got me thinking about some rogue stuff :

- Not only did you have all your weapon skills to level, you also had to level your Lockpicking and your Poisons. The footlockers scattered around the western parts of Wetlands are where I recall doing a lot of early leveling. And Poisons could be skilled up with a combination of vendor-bought reagents, plus herbs like Fadeleaf (for Vanishing Powder).
- Many of the skills weren't just learned at your trainer, you had to complete short quest chains. I'm fairly sure there was a lockpicking quest at the mill above Lakeridge, and possibly a poison one at the tower south-east of Sentinel Hill.
- Just "being a rogue" wasn't enough to use all of the abilities to their highest potential. Only characters who had taken the time to level up their craft, could do things like unlock the gate between Loch Modan and Searing Gorge, or the Shadowforge Lock in BRD, or the Service Entrance to Stratholme.
- You didn't have an inexhaustible supply of Throwing Weapons. I think you could equip a stack of 50 in your gear slot, but you'd have to re-stock at a vendor whenever you went through town. Reaching a high enough level to use the better grades of Thrown Weapon, was quite a milestone!

[Lollis]

Spirit on cloth, kill me.

[Azrile]

Psure flasks weren’t really a thing because elixir combos were better and cheaper. Also, potions were on a 5 min cd or something like that. You still really only used HS, HP, Resists or Mana Potions...

That defeats the point of a Classic server. That’d be considered more TBC than anything as the entirety of the game changed in a major way from that patch between QoL stuff, fixing up classes, raids, etc... TBC =/= Vanilla. o.O

There is NO WAY they will release a ´at Vanilla release´ server. Some of the stuff was just crazy bad designs like having the AH´s separate. I still think people are looking at the good stuff and forgetting the bad stuff. No meeting stones and often difficult runs to dungeons.. and then you lose a member halfway through and you are screwed, or a hunter runs out of ammo and has to melee the last half.

I love the idea of the game being locked at Naxx 1.0 and level 60, but people are in for a rude awakening when it comes to how many QoL changes Blizzard made to keep other players from annoying you by being stupid.... very few people who play WOW now are going to be able to tolerate 5-mans. You also have to remember that the guilds who were beating the later raids were farming consumables like crazy. There was no cd on health and mana potions so endgame raiders needed stacks and stacks of them. I also think if they do the original talent trees, people are going to be shocked with how off DPS and Healing was between specs... for goodness sake as a moonkin, in order to restore mana the mechanism was to melee! People complain now about specs being off on certain boss fights by 3%. Wait until they see most specs doing 50% dps as other specs... and with modern DPS tools, you are going to have 1 ranged dps and 1 melee dps spec be required for raiding and the meters will show how inferior everything else is.

[Lollis]

--Spell penetration (might have been a BC thing)

Nope, was in Vanilla too. Was only useful for PvP though.

--The stats were Strength/Agility/Intellect, Spirit, armor, MP5, spell hit, +damage spell, +healing spell, attack power, melee hit, weapon skill (what became expertise, reduced chance to get dodged/parried), dodge, block, parry, and ... the stat you needed 5% of to be uncrittable for tanks.

Defense, and it needed more than 5%. Something like 440 defense made a tank theoretically uncrittable by bosses (level 63)

You also had crushing blows to deal with, which IIRC relied almost completely on dodge/block/parry.

[Azrile]

People were nice and the community was good. I doubt that'll be a feature of these new servers though.

The very first 5 man I ever did was BFD as a moonkin. There was almost no leather INT blues in the entire game.. in BFD on the last boss there was a leather belt with INT. I lost the roll against a rogue who said correctly that INT means you get faster skill gains during weapon attacks....

[Lollis]

The very first 5 man I ever did was BFD as a moonkin. There was almost no leather INT blues in the entire game.. in BFD on the last boss there was a leather belt with INT. I lost the roll against a rogue who said correctly that INT means you get faster skill gains during weapon attacks....

Should have told him to get a mage to throw arcane intellect on him and kill rats in deeprun tram.

[Equoowe]

#4: There were no server transfers

Vanilla had server transfers just not at the start.

[Mormolyce]

It's not being "negative" to remember Vanilla as it was. Surely people need some prep before experiencing Classic WoW.

I don't know the stats but I daresay the majority of the WoW playerbase did not start in Vanilla and thus doesn't know these things. I myself started in Wrath...

- - - Updated - - -

There is NO WAY they will release a ´at Vanilla release´ server. Some of the stuff was just crazy bad designs like having the AH´s separate. I still think people are looking at the good stuff and forgetting the bad stuff. No meeting stones and often difficult runs to dungeons.. and then you lose a member halfway through and you are screwed, or a hunter runs out of ammo and has to melee the last half.

Even when I was playing in Wrath with a level 60 locked character trying to do dungeons was agony. You finally get 5, then wait for them to fly over because nobody was at the stone, then you realise your healer DCed and isn't coming back, never mind back to trade chat to advertise some more...

[garicasha]

I think Int actually did increase skill gains. I remember having an int set for that.
Blasted lands void mobs was the place to do that until they fixed it though.

I think you needed 5.6% defense to not be crit. Crushing blows were pushed off the combat table by shield block.

Thottbot

Server transfers were only extremely rarely offered for very very high pop servers to one low pop server—you had two options, stay or go to the pre-determined server.

[Blezius]

They still didn't state whether they're gonna advance content to BC, Wotlk, etc ..

[Deleted]

I was in a Naxx raiding guild with a 16 hr/week schedule, but I have to say that I at least did very little farming as a healer. When we did AQ40 nature resist gear was provided to us, I just showed up in Huhuran's room and an officer dumped some nature res gear on me.

I just used the gold I naturally made while playing to stock up on mana pots and flasks, I think flasks were sometimes provided to us as well. It wasn't a super hardcore guild (which is funny considering the % of people that actually did Naxx) so most of us weren't min-maxing really hard. We also didn't finish before TBC came out, we only cleared Spider and Abomination Wing and Noth/Razuvious in Plague/Military, so 9/15. Still think we were only like 1 of like 2 or 3 guilds on our server that cleared anything in there.

[Lollis]

I think Int actually did increase skill gains. I remember having an int set for that.
Blasted lands void mobs was the place to do that until they fixed it though.

Yes it did. Many people used to farm deeprun tram rats because they were more convenient for alliance than having to go over to those allstarj mobs, and they respawned really fast anyway.

[Moggie]

There is NO WAY they will release a ´at Vanilla release´ server. Some of the stuff was just crazy bad designs like having the AH´s separate. I still think people are looking at the good stuff and forgetting the bad stuff. No meeting stones and often difficult runs to dungeons.. and then you lose a member halfway through and you are screwed, or a hunter runs out of ammo and has to melee the last half.

I love the idea of the game being locked at Naxx 1.0 and level 60, but people are in for a rude awakening when it comes to how many QoL changes Blizzard made to keep other players from annoying you by being stupid.... very few people who play WOW now are going to be able to tolerate 5-mans. You also have to remember that the guilds who were beating the later raids were farming consumables like crazy. There was no cd on health and mana potions so endgame raiders needed stacks and stacks of them. I also think if they do the original talent trees, people are going to be shocked with how off DPS and Healing was between specs... for goodness sake as a moonkin, in order to restore mana the mechanism was to melee! People complain now about specs being off on certain boss fights by 3%. Wait until they see most specs doing 50% dps as other specs... and with modern DPS tools, you are going to have 1 ranged dps and 1 melee dps spec be required for raiding and the meters will show how inferior everything else is.

Well, there's zero probabilities they'd release a Classic server that was, in fact, a TBC server if they started at TBC pre-patch. That pre-patch changed the entire game completely. If that's what people want, then they need to learn that Vanilla/Classic is not the same as TBC. Hell, many would argue Vanilla ended when that pre-patch went Live. I still remember logging in for it and boom, my Warlock was doing actual real dps like a Mage or Rogue... fun times.

The game does not need to be balanced, they do not need to add QoL stuff, they won't buff xp gains or make offspecs useful in raids. They shouldn't be balancing based on modern WoW logics. Besides obvious exploits and bugs, You want a Classic server, but in the end it seems like you really don't. So many requests for implementing Live WoW into a game from 13 years ago. That would, and I don't say this lightly, obliterate the whole point and Vanilla. (could you imagine having boomkins, spriests, various buffs from classes vs. any single raid boss at the time? Or even in PvP? It'd be free pass to nowhere fast). Not to mention, you turn the knob on one class(es) design and you completely change everything from PvP, Questing, Raids, Dungeons... completely changed for what? Didn't like having to melee a boss as a caster if oom or, as in BWL said boss is immune to spells or a particularly class of spells (Shadow, Holy, Fire, etc)? Deal with it.

People talk the good talk about how wonderful or great it was back then. Myself and the majority of players who actually did play would say otherwise. Sure it had it's positives, like most expansions since but coming from EQ or Ultima like MMOs, it was a natural thing to do endless hours upon hours types of grinds and raids. Which was also it's downside. it took hours doing simple things.

And I especially enjoy how somebody always keeps bringing up how uber Warlocks were then. They suuucked. Everybody in the game knew that (people should look up why Warlocks used "We ride single file to hide our numbers" as their slogan and what lead to T3 design). They were purely used to buff Mages and Rogues. Pets were useless in raids (none had resist to raid mechanics like they do now, including hunters or scaled with stats). They summoned people, farmed and filled bags with soul shards. SS was on a 60 min or 30 min cd and wasn't a brez. Sure, we tanked twin emps because we stacked HP (everything else was useless for Warlocks due to zero scaling with stats) and the facts between Searing Pain and SB, Warlocks could crank out some of the best threat in the game. Other than that, you had your SM/Ruin spec (no demo, no aff) and you definitely could not take the shadow debuff talent to buff your SB. Used to be able to Sac/Rez your pet as an engineer until Blizz said NO and took that away. You brought Warlocks in for Garr especially to Banish the tiny rocks and that was your sole job for the fight. As somebody said, there were 3 ranks of Imp. HS. Assuming you somehow and for some reason had 3 locks in the raid, you had each one take ranks 1, 2, or 3. Enjoy Detect Invis and summoning peep everywhere after you spend an hour farming shards to do just that then repeating during breaks and such. =P

[Niffo]

Even tough it may be classic WoW I am really sure they are going to implant some QoL services to make it appealing. Don't get me wrong. I loved vanilla but there are so many things that I hated during vanilla. Def gonna play it though!

[Belisaurio]

I think you needed 5.6% defense to not be crit. Crushing blows were pushed off the combat table by shield block.

I didn't tank in vanilla, but I remember our main tank talking about the "awesome" 440 def. skill cap.
The reason behind that was that the Bosses's weapon skill (weapon skill and mob's level was the main stats for their crits) could be countered by your defens. After 440, you were inmue to crits (the boss had 0% to crit you).

That's why the 440 was a magical number, and all tanks needed to cap that ASAP. More def wasn't needed but helped with other stats that weren't capped, like dodge or parry.

[Deleted]

Will we get the WOW Vanilla forums and thottbot.com? Nothing beats that

[chezwickcheese]

So in summary it will be back to what made wow a proper mmorpg. Challenging and time consuming, the way it should have always been. I for one welcome our glitchy, unbalanced and tedious vanilla server and can't wait for week long Alterac Valley!

[artam]

Will we get the WOW Vanilla forums and thottbot.com? Nothing beats that

thottbot.com or Riot!

[Rósa]

Hunters, having to train your pets the next rank of growl, bite, by taming a mob that had them, if they became unhappy the ran off, so had to feed them. Used to take 30 minutes to run from Ironforge to Scarlet Monastery. Getting to level 40 and not having enough gold to buy a mount lol. Having to raise your unarmed skill as well. Sometimes running out of arrows in a middle of a fight. At level 6 dieing constantly in the Kobald caves in Goldshire as they re-spawned so quickly and you would always aggro more than 2. Fun times, Can't wait to play it again xD