Reminders of what vanilla was like

[Kalisandra]

Many guilds were still clearing AQ40 when it came out, which annoyed everyone. We were still doing for the gear and T3 was announced which made AQ stuff out dated. A lot of my guild just got raid fatigue from all progression and farming.

On top of that, 4H required eight geared tanks (i.e. Warriors), and it takes a lot of time and effort to gear or poach that many half-competent tanks. It was also tuned tight enough that everyone in the raid had to actually know what they were doing (though if you'd gotten through AQ40 as a raid you'd have that). Naxx wasn't mechanically hard, but it was logistically.

[Vaelorian]

I used this spec for raids/dungeons: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#sVxhbgsxxMZEb0z. But honestly I remember a tree where you would be required to spec into the last retribution talent only to obtain KINGS. The tree that I showed in the link was imo the last tree.

[Drpizka]

It is simple.

You are not obliged to play classic.

Let others who really want it, to play it.

[Charge me Doctor]

Gems? Remember the Green Hills of Stranglethorn? Talk about a long time to complete.

Do all camp quests, go to AH buy missing pages, sell double pages. No-effort quest

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Another one: you can say "hello" to those, err... sociable crocolisks in the Wetlands. I died quite a few times as a level 16 Night Elf Druid trying to go to Westfall for my aquatic form quest... Yes, because the boat in Auberdine was going to Menethil Harbour instead of Stormwind, which had no harbour anyway. So, if, as a Night Elf, you needed to go to the AH in Ironforge before lvl 24, you had to die.

Or get a portal off a mage, or /w a warlock in SW...

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You do know that Evocation was a talent until 1.11 right?

Good job at spotting PS player

No, there was no mages but arcane before 1.11, because mana was a bitch. Or your raid was fine with mage dumping all his mana in first minute of a fight and afk for another minute to regen it

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I know it was a talent first yes, my main rl friend played a mage, he was really happy when it changed. Still he played Frost before and after, i've mostly played in recent years on the 1.12 client so i guess that clouds the mind to some extent. But i mainly remember seeing Frost mages and barely no Arcane unless they were PvPing.

You played frost only for leveling and farming, but in dungeons and raids you was forced to take arcane. Evocation and arcane explosion was too much to pass.
After talent rework everything changed and people started playing fire to abuse ignite stacking

[Boxilot]

Another one: you can say "hello" to those, err... sociable crocolisks in the Wetlands. I died quite a few times as a level 16 Night Elf Druid trying to go to Westfall for my aquatic form quest... Yes, because the boat in Auberdine was going to Menethil Harbour instead of Stormwind, which had no harbour anyway. So, if, as a Night Elf, you needed to go to the AH in Ironforge before lvl 24, you had to die. Either between the mandibles of a crocolisk, running down the road in Wetlands, then maybe hacked by a Dragon Maw orc in Algaz, then you could safely go through Loch Modan and Dun Morogh to finally reach Ironforge. Without forgetting to pay a visit to the flight master of each town, of course. Or you could die in some spot south of Menethil Harbour. If you were south enough, you would spawn at a graveyard near Ironforge, where you could rez and get resurrection sickness. Yay!

Oh yeah those crockolisks xD I remember my friend and I as baby nelves ran screaming through the Wetlands (literally) until we met a party of higher levels (dunno what they were up to) but they escorted us safely to Ironforge. Later we went back to do the same for other baby nelves.

[Deleted]

Pros and cons made vanilla what it was and that's what I want to play!

[Charge me Doctor]

A talent that only required putting 11 points into the Arcane tree...

Mages raided as frost in MC. Fire in later raids.

There was no reason to go frost deep in MC, you still spammed frostbolt in arcane for almost same damage but for cheaper and could throw much more of them. Iirc, you grabbed frost spells cost reduction in frost and dumped everything into arcane

[Mic_128]

There were at least 29 different kinds of weapons: Caster DPS 1H Swords, caster DPS off-hands & shields, Caster healing 1H maces, Caster healing off-hands and shields, Caster staves, 1H strength swords/maces/axes, 2H strength swords/maces/axes/polearms, 1H agility swords/maces/axes/daggers, 2H agility maces/axes/polearms/staves, prot shields, strength bows/crossbows/guns (warriors used them as stat sticks), agility bows/crossbows/guns (hunters main weapon, stat sticks for rogues).

There were also 'throwing weapons' which Warriors/Rogues used, mostly for pulling. Paladins had to face-pull on the rare occasions someone was Prot, or by geting the Linken's Boomerang from a questline in Un'goro.

Class-specific things:

Druid:

Did not have moonkin form I don't think.

They didn't. Their original max-level talent was Hurricane, a rather weak channeled AoE spell.

[Stormcall]

Yep. All these players who wax nostalgic about it are gonna play for about a week, then realize what an utter bore it actually is when compared to, well, any modern MMO. It was great for it's day, cause it was new, and people didn't have experience with anything better.

For comparison, a Model T Ford was fucking amazing in 1910. But trying driving one today. Sure, it might seem cool at first, it would be a lot different than modern cars, be fun to drive around, and all is great...until it actually sinks in how slow you travel, how much maintenance it is gonna require, how little gas mileage it gets, etc. Suddenly, you're gonna be jumping back to that Escort or Camry or whatever other modern car you normally drive.

[Sastank]

I had a very hard time leveling in Vanilla. I leveled both a prot warrior and then a troll rogue. Warrior was slow because well game was new, I was a tank, I died pulling too much, lot of corpse runs. Ran to FPs to have for later. I was also in my last ~year of school at the time being 15 when it was out.

My rogue took forever because I just ganked people lol. Yeah I was one of those people.

After getting 60, farming for gold for my mount was also terrible. I farmed mobs in Tanaris for gold/cloth. Don't ask. Idk why I chose to do that either. Plaguelands were way probably way better in hind sight.

[Deleted]

Vanilla was amazing at its time of release.

Trying to re-release a 10 year old game with MANY flaws, bugs and weird tuning is a mistake. I hope they dont pool too much money and effort into this because this will be a minority playing.

Im not saying Legion is perfect either but I played the game since beta and trust me, the majority of you that hear stories of how great the game was will be in for a big surprise.

It's funny that you guys keep saying that, while maybe 90% of these players voting for classic is still up to now playing on a private classic server. Seriously don't act as if we are only talking about 10 years back, i logged out of my classic server last week.

[Sastank]

Are classes going to be able to do the tank, heal, dps that they can know in 5 mans or raids? If not why make anything other than a warrrior to tank, priest/druid to heal, and hunter/rogue/mage/lock for dps. No DH, DK, Monks? And just the base vanilla races? No alliance shaman? No Horde pallies?

Another person who "wants Vanilla" but not actually Vanilla or what? Lol.

[Solitare-sp]

There's really no point sugar coating it. WoW was a grind, everything about the game was pretty slow paced.

Thats not ultimately a bad thing. There's value in slowing it all down, as you can make goals to work towards. It was much more a RPG game in Vanilla. you could spend a day just having fun but doing little or have something to do.

[bowchikabow]

You forgot about horde guilds purchasing alliance priest Mind controls so that paladins could buff their tanks with BoK or BoM.

I played a rogue and holy priest. You are partially wrong about the rogue raid spec btw.. up until Naxx the proper build was sealfate/prep (assassination/subtlety). And your goal, pre-raid.. Was to get your hands on the ever elusive Barman's Shanker. High-damage, slow weapon speed.. so it hit like a mac-truck. Weapon speed mattered until it was normalized just before TBC came out. poisons were their own damage source, and did not contribute to other abilities. There was no mutilate/envenom. You had to have a slow, High top end damage dagger in your main-hand, and a super fast dagger in your off-hand (UBRS dropped fel striker, which was BiS off-hand outside of MC. Was 1.4sec and had a proc that caused your next 3 attacks to be guaranteed critical strikes. Also.. for rogues.. THERE WAS NO CLOAK OF SHADOW'S until TBC pre-patch. It was the penultimate talent at the bottom of Subtlety.

Oh.. did you remember to mention that hunter's had DEAD ZONES where they couldn't raptor strike cause not in melee range, and couldn't shoot cause not far enough at range? lol

Warrior off-tanks had a standard spec, it was called Mortal Strike/Defiance. It was literally arms spec, and then remaining points into prot for the defiance talent for threat. Also, Stance Dancing was a huge thing from Vanilla til end of TBC.

You would be kicked out of a raid as holy priest if you were caught smiting the boss instead of healing the tank.

Damage normalization? Didn't exist in Vanilla. A warrior took far less damage from a rogue than a warlock.

Having to farm Maraudon for nature resist gear for AQ-40 fights like Princess Huhuron.

Also, most people may not remember that for rogues to get MC attunement.. Most times this involved a group of 5 rogues going into BRD and stealth running past mobs and bosses.. Dropping down off the bridge, getting to the island.. bandaging, potion popping. wait for everyones hp to cap. Then swim to next island and hope no one dies. Then, you have to sap and precision pull 5 groups of mobs or sprint passed them, blind nearest mob, and loot the core fragment before running through the MC portal. Fun times.

Elixir of the mongoose was the 5 most expensive raid consumable.. ever. coveted by rogues, rare recipe. rare to see on the AH. You literally had to "know a guy". And after you farmed the materials.. you still paid double digit gold for their time crafting. There was no chance for extra procs. 1 craft, each time. Also.. on a related topic. Elemental Sharpening Stones. half the blacksmiths had it, but they didnt advertise it, and seldom was it in bulk on AH. I played on Magtheridon server.. population capped.. never more than 1 page on the AH.

I will keep thinking and listing things I remember.

[Prawnapple]

Edit: To anyone that did not play vanilla, the most important things:
#1: Every class had one viable spec for raiding. (There were some exceptions.) For all hybrids, it was healing (and for priests holy specifically). For warriors it was tanking, and for DPS, it was whatever spec did no DoTs (there was a 16 debuff limit on all bosses). Items for other roles didn't exist.

Wrong. Top dps in naxx was dps warriors

[Marc7]

Class-specific things:
Warriors:
Were the only viable tanks
DPS warriors had to tank some of the time
According to some posters, were OP DPS (and one of the few specs that was viable without tier bonuses).
Protection spec was a huge reduction in DPS. Back then tanks did not contribute meaningful DPS.
Had stances and many reasons to switch between them in PvP
Had 30 min cooldowns: Shield wall, recklessness, and I forget the arms one

Druids could tank dungeons fine and would too (prot pallies too, but bears were much better because their threat generation wasn't shit), as it was hard to find tanks. Still, rolling a druid if you want to go tank would be a dumb, dumb idea. Warrior DPS was good, but exceptionally gear dependent.

Druid:
Resto was the only common raiding spec
Resto did not have an out-of-combat rezz, which was problematic for healing 5-mans.
Resto did have battle rez on a 30-minute cooldown, the only class that did.
Had 3 specs: Feral was for both bear and cat.
Could not equip a ranged weapon
In feral forms, weapons did not contribute to DPS or increase attack power in any way.
Were OP for running the flag in low-level Warsong Gulch.
Did not have moonkin form I don't think. They definitely didn't have tree form yet either.
Had hibernate for beasts and dragonkin

They added quite a few weapons late in vanilla that specifically added melee damage for druid forms. Also, the talent changes they did in vanilla added moonkin form to the game. (TBC pre-patch added tree of life, so I guess that doesn't count) Before this patch druids as a whole were kind of really bad, but the rebalancing (during classic) made all their 3 specs kinda viable, but with only resto having real benefits for a raid (although boomies and cats, of which I think cats were worse) both brought a decent and unique aura, and both had combat ress, and both had innervate after the changes. Before that innervate had been the final (?) talent of restoration tree, and the MOST valuable reason to bring a druid to a raid.

Priest:
Holy was the only viable raiding spec
Disc bubbles interfered with rage generation
Had one race-specific ability, which varied a great deal in power. Undead had a powerful DoT and dwarves had Fear Ward, which was extremely useful on a number of raid encounters.
Could get Anathema/Benediction from Majordomo Executus, requiring completion of a very difficult questline.

In later raid tiers most guilds brought 1 shadow priest as DPS to keep up the OP +shadow damage debuff shadow weaving. They did mediocre damage but added a lot to the warlocks. Shadow was also absolutely beastly in PvP (tho the raiding shadow and PvP shadow specs were completely different from each other). Most guilds had at least 1 of their priests go disc, not for the bubbles (though bubbles were good for raid healing), but for the spirit buff and for power infusion. Holy's deep end talents were shit, always. At first it was holy nova (lol) and with rebalancing they gave holy Lightwell, which nobody knew how to use, as it was a thing anyone could go click and get a powerful HoT on them. And ofc DPS just didn't, so it was useless mostly.

[Nachtigal]

Why is everyone trying to prevent us from playing vanilla servers, as if they're worried they're going to lose other people to play with on the live servers... Strange because when it comes to that usually the response is "lol ok bye"

[Soeroah]

I don't intend to play classic servers, but they should make it as close to classic as possible. No QoL changes. People wanted the vanilla experience, give it to them in all its horrendous oldness.

[MMKing]

- Black lotus, required for 2 hour flasks that persist death are on a strict shared zone cool down and in a random location. The cool down would range from 50-70 minutes (not 100% certain on re-spawn timer) from being picked, and they would only exist in 5 zones. Provided they are picked up as soon as possible, there can only be 20.5 to 28.8 black lotus on each server every 24 hours.

- Hunters don't initiate auto shoot by right clicking mobs

- Pet abilities had to be gathered by taming beasts that posses them. Taming a beast that knows bite rank 2, allows the hunter to teach bite rank 2 to other pets eligible to learn it but who does not currently have the ability. There existed an ability that told you if a beast knew an ability however.

- Past level 20 or so, mobs become incredibly dangerous. Blizzard was out to kill you, and it was reflected by the fact that mobs often had stuns, roots, enrages, slows etc. The Kurzen medicine men in STV at lvl 32-33 comes to mind. Which heals directly for 700-800, and place a healing over time for 315 / 15 seconds. Out of a health pool of 1050-1100. They also heal other mobs and if you pull two, they will heal each other until they run out of mana.

[Deleted]

So don't play it.

If you hate all that shit, just don't play it.

<<< obvious sarcasm>>>
you don't understand they have to play.
or they're wasting they're sub, it's why we have LFR now.
so people can "see" content.