Reminders of what vanilla was like

[xcoatsyx]

Can't help but feel PVE content will be steamrolled now.

[Lollis]

Read whole OP..
things to add - Onyxian Scale Cloak....

Well you needed that cloak for BWL last boss Nefarian to even survive his first spell when he lands. Your 40man guild needed that cloak. Even it had kind of feeble fire resist, you couldnt add an +20 fire restist enchant, due to how ilvl of item vs level requied worked. It granted immunity to his Shadowflame (which basically gibbed your MT and then everyone else). You made it from Onyxian scales, wich dropped while skinning Onyxia, but to learn it, you (as the LW) had to turn the head to learn the recipe first! Then you add Cindercloth Cloak (which is made by tailors) and some Rune Threads. And then make it for the rest 39 people.

You didn't 100% need it on everyone because it could be bug avoided, but most guilds got it. The los bug didn't always work, so it was safer to get the cloak on as many people as possible.

[Soulsinger]

Fishing requires having a patience level of 11 on a 10-point scale.

Really? I always found fishing to be very relaxing, especially before *everyone* was in on it.

I made a ton of money diving for shellfish traps off the coast of Kalimdor near Shadowprey Village. You could sometimes find an amazing fishing pole in those, that sold for a tidy sum on the neutral AH.

[Dhrizzle]

Read whole OP..
things to add - Onyxian Scale Cloak....

Well you needed that cloak for BWL last boss Nefarian to even survive his first spell when he lands. Your 40man guild needed that cloak. Even it had kind of feeble fire resist, you couldnt add an +20 fire restist enchant, due to how ilvl of item vs level requied worked. It granted immunity to his Shadowflame (which basically gibbed your MT and then everyone else). You made it from Onyxian scales, wich dropped while skinning Onyxia, but to learn it, you (as the LW) had to turn the head to learn the recipe first! Then you add Cindercloth Cloak (which is made by tailors) and some Rune Threads. And then make it for the rest 39 people.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to get the Onyxian Scales didn't you need to loot Finkle's Skinner from The Beast in UBRS for a boost to your skinning skill?

[Deleted]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to get the Onyxian Scales didn't you need to loot Finkle's Skinner from The Beast in UBRS for a boost to your skinning skill?

you did need Finkle's Skinner to get onyxia's scale



also, something people either have forgotten or never knew is that if you stand behind the throne you don't get hit by the breath, so it's absolutely viable for a few people in your raid to not have the cloak for the fight

[Dhrizzle]

Okay the things I mostly remember are to do with questing (and a lot of it I learned in TBC when I leveled several alts.)

Killing things was harder. Even if you're of the opinion that hotkey based MMOs with abstract combat and simple mechanics can never be "difficult" there's no denying that mobs taking longer to kill and being far more dangerous to your character mean you at least need a stronger mental fortitude (or tolerance for boredom) to get through the grind, and often a lot more thought needed to go into each encounter to avoid excessive corpse runs.

In Vanilla and TBC "the Pull" was important to master in open-world and group content. Some areas (especially where Murlocs are involved) were like knots of mobs wandering and patroling around each other. You had to work out which mobs you could safely pull, where you could pull them to and when to reposition them. CC, snares, stuns and pets meant that every class would have different answers to each problem, even if some classes like the warrior had very few options other than hope for single pulls, and if you get more try to take down at least one to make it easier when you get back to your corpse.

Zones were trickier to complete. In Vanilla Blizz were heavily into the "Christmas Tree Effect," where you'd enter a new town or quest hub and your mini-map would light up with golden exclamation points. Whereas now you generally get a few quests in one area, then a few in another before heading to the next hub, in Vanilla you would get a huge glut of quests that take you all over the map, and when you hand them in you'll get another bunch that take you to all those places again. Each zone typically had two main hubs and maybe a couple of random quest givers crossing the full level range of the zone (around 10 levels until around level 30 or 40) so it was possible to end up with a dozen or so quests in your log that ranged from grey (too low, no XP) through green, yellow and orange up to red (you're gonna die if you try.)

In some zones this meant that going in blind could leave you constantly tracking back and forth, particularly bad in STV which was massive, ranged up to 40 (so no mounts) and, for the Alliance, the closest flight-path to a quest was often Darkshire, the town in the zone to the north. My first time through it was rough, but with subsequent characters I figured out how far to go in each chain before starting the next, and eventually a point where it was really good for leveling through.

You could also mess up a zone and make it virtually incompletable. My first time through Loch Modan I completely missed the gnoll quests in the south. As a result I found quests turning red that I was unable to tackle, and when I did find out about the gnolls they were all grey quests so I couldn't use them to catch up. In the end I ditched the dwarven areas and went down to Westfall, I don't think I ever quested through the Wetlands until WotLK when I took my main back to get the Loremaster achievement.

Occasionally you'd switch zone midway through before heading back. Stonetalon had a few chains that should be tackled when you're midway through Ashenvale, and Hillsbrad, Alterac and Arathi all kind of blend together if you're an Alliance players with Stromgarde keep acting as an open-world dungeon to finish it off.

Zones with level-appropriate dungeons could be very social. Tanaris and Westfall are the strongest examples of this. In both those zones it was very easy to find groups who were just starting the chains for the respective dungeons. Usually in Westfall this would end with a Deadmines run followed by the Stockades. A couple of times in Tanaris we went off to Hinterlands to get the hammer for the last ZF boss. Also if you played a class that could tank or heal you'd get constant whispers from groups. My druid leveled 40-50 almost exclusively in ZF with a hybrid Feral/Resto build that dumped all the solo-enhancing (cat DPS) talents to fulfill either role.

Characters needed more maintenence. Everyone needed food, casters needed some sort of drink, melee classes often liked to carry bandages. Repairs were needed a lot more. You had new spell levels to learn from your trainer every two levels, and sometimes you'd reach a tipping point where a respec became appropriate. Some casters needed reagents, Rogues had to buy ingredients, brew their own poisons and apply them to their weapons as well as improving their pickpocket and lockpicking skills. Hunters needed ammo (usually taking a whole bagslot,) appropriate food for their pet (happy pets did more damage, sad pets did less and might turn on the hunter) and a whole minigame where they had to go tame beasts to learn new ranks of pet abilities. Warlocks had to farm shards by channeling Drain Soul on a mob as it died, also after training new spells/levels they had to go to a vendor and scan through all the pet books to see which ones they should buy at that level.

Quest rewards mostly sucked. Which wasn't totally a bad thing as it meant there was a pretty decent economy for greens which added a level of depth, and crafting was a worthwhile endeavour from 1-60. In fact pretty much every leather/mail/plate character I leveled prior to Cataclysm wore gear made by my first batch of alts.

Your bags were constantly full of crap. As well as all the stuff you needed to function or level crafting Vanilla mobs dropped a much larger variety of vendor trash and potential AH fodder, if you had a massive bunch of quests it was usually a good idea to plan a route that looped you back to the town after 3 or 4 so you could empty your bags and set off again.

You travelled a lot more. As well as frequent trips back to town or moving to new zones for better XP you'd also make regular trips to the nearest city in order to buy/sell stuff on the AH, level trade skills and buy new spell ranks. If you were in the elf-lands miners had to train at Auberdine as there was no mining trainer on Teldrassil and Warlocks had to go back to the Eastern Kingdoms for new spells. Sometimes you could put off class training for a while if you knew there was nothing major to buy and wait until you had lots of stuff to level crafting or sell on the AH. Often there would be a class quest every 10 or so levels which could send you right across the world. The Druid's aquatic form quest sent them to Westfall whilst the lvl 20 Warlock Succubus quest sent you over to Ratchet, and I think it was the Felhound quest that sent you all the way to Southern Desolace. Sometimes zone or dungeon quests would start or send you to a very far away place. The Scarlet Monastery quest chain started in the South of Desolace, one of Darkshire's quest chains sent you up to Menthil or Southshore and Little Pamela in one of the Plaguelands sent you to Winterspring.

Gold mattered. With all the repair bills, gryphon costs, reagents, materials and gear you needed to spend gold on it frequently ran out. Sometimes taking the Deeprun tram was a sound financial decision or even a necessity. Unimportant spells could be left unlearned whilst funds were gathered or spent on more important things and even at level 60 players could be left without enough to fully repair their gear or get a taxi to where they wanted to go, and that's before you think about the major expenses of mounts at lvl 40 and 60.

[jstnw89]

Thanks for the post OP. Even more hype now.

Pretty much this

[Steelwill03]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Edit: All I remember right now is that you needed a hunter in UBRS to feign death kite the last boss over the bridge so you can kill his adds before he came back. I also remember several shamans winning my fire resist shield against my warrior when it was clearly a tank shield! Oh, and that gear only mattered for stats and not for the armor type - IE holy paladins in mix matched cloth, leather and mail.

[Deleted]

My worst memory is:
spamming "14/15 lfm UBRS, you NEED to have the key" for 1 hour straight.

My best memory:
Soulstone aggro reset as fury warrior to win DPS bets against the guild rogues (and netting a loss because repairs were expensiv)

No, you can have multiple curses on a boss. CoS buffs shadow damage (duh) and CoE buffs fire/frost damage if I remember correctly.

Before patch 1.7 there was a limit of 8 debuffs on bosses (was raised to 16 in 1.7). 4 of these debuffs were set:
Sunder armor
Hunters Mark
Thunderclap
Demo Shout
If your raid was lucky: Thunderfury was the fifth
If you were alliance: Judgement of wisdom was your sixt

That left 2-4 slots for FF, JoL, CoE, CoS, CoR and on caster bosses Curse of Tongues. Thats also the reason that a lot of "buffer speccs" (nightfall ret/enhancer) weren´t a thing in early classic raids.

[Deleted]

Blizzard stated their goal is to have a core of players that will stay in it, and believe me there will be a core of players that will keep playing it. It is a long road to 9/9 Tier 3.

no its not, people been playing private servers for 10 years, u think content will be hard for them? lol..

[garicasha]

no its not, people been playing private servers for 10 years, u think content will be hard for them? lol..

And that's not even a vanilla issue. Can you imagine how easy Tomb would be if they announced they were going to "re-release" it in 6 months? Every guild would have a raid comp of 3 guardian druids, resto/disc/resto/holy, 4 overpowered pre-nerf DPS warriors, 8 rogues and a warlock. All goblins...even the Alliance. :-P

Thanks for today's updates, will put them in now. And Steelwill, I'm going to start the OP with that quote :-)

And did Faerie Fire stack with Sunder Armor? And what about Curse of Weakness or whatever it was called and Improved Demoralizing Shout?

[TheWorkingTitle]

Do tell.
/10char

Classic max level enchants = 11 (with way more choices) Live max level enchants = 7 (and shoulders aren't even dps-related anymore)

Classic Talent Trees = 3 Individual trees with the ability to progress however you want, gaining 1 point per level Live Talent Options = Pigeon-holed into one spec abilities only, gaining 1 new ability or passive per 15 levels

Classic attributes/secondary stats = ~22 Live attributes/tertiary stats = 12

Classic Racial-only Class Abilities? Yes Live Racial-only Class Abilities? No

Buffs/Potions/Elixirs/Flasks/Oils, etc. of Classic (too many to count but it's obvious) >>>>> Live

Profession diversity that also affected combat Classic >>>>> Live

Gear versions (of the Bear, Eagle, etc., +Specific Spell type, +Specific Resistance, etc., etc.) Classic >>>>> Live

The list goes on

Classic Classes were more unique, Factions were more unique, Racial abilities were more unique, there were almost twice as many attributes/secondary stats that you could min/max, talent tree permutations of Classic put Live to SHAME, Classic had way more enchants and more combat-related enchants, Classic professions were far superior to Live in both use and combat-relevance, and on and on and on. Savvy?

[BloodyAngel12]

As a Holy Paladin, i only wore plate never needed cloth,mail or leather.

[demonex]

SNIP

So many choices ... everything was so useful and of worth, totally no cookie-cutters.
The option to suck is still here, just way more limited.

[garicasha]

--Class stacking via rolling alts was not viable
--No vellums
--No catchup mechanics
--People couldn't judge your gear (the way they can now) because itemization was so wonky. If someone had a dungeon or tier set you could tell they were experienced, but it was much harder to tell from gear if someone was bad.
--Out of combat pulse was only every 2 seconds, allowing gear switching and a few other exploits I'm sure
--The frost wand for Viscidus
--Fights that required changing tanks without taunt
--30% ranged and 10% stickiness on threat (still in game but no one cares)

[Silver Forte]

This does not come across as some sort of "warning" or "reminder"


It comes across as a scared fanboy, scared that people will leave the uninspired, shitty MMO behind and play it when it was good


Yeah no shit the game had a slower pace, and every mob demanded your attention. That is what people liked about the game. That it wasent a spammy, God of War like, beat em up that it is today. Press 1 button and you aoe down 4 mobs. Congrats.


Some of you are so salty its seeping through your posts. Enjoy your product, we got ours.

If you think WoW is going to lose even a tenth of its player base to shitty vanilla, you're delusional.

[Deleted]

Big thank you for all these memories

- Quest were really much more "basics" in their objective, scenario and production/staging
- As an alliance player going to scarlet monastery was awfull
- Dungeon quests werent at the beguining of the dungeon, they were outside and often after a quest chain, Uldaman was terrible for that
- The sunken temple war much more complex, with multiple lvl and a puzzle underground
- As a shaman you had to complete a quest chain for each of your totems
- You didnt earn gold/xp/stuff on pvp, reparation cost a lot, and the only epic you could expect was after a very long rep farming
- As a rogue it was really important to be engineer and get the tool that can rez people, it could save raids/dungeon even if it was like a 50% thing but...
- For the potions, being herb/alchemist was nearly an obligation for raiding
- Trolls and Gnomes didnt have their own starting zones, they started with orcs and dwarves
- Some crafts needed other professions skills, enchanter needed blacksmith for their staff
- It was common to one shot your opponant for some specs, like fire mage with pyro and shaman with wf
- Enhancement shaman used 2h weapon
- In my memory, at the very beguining, dungeons were for more than 5 players, i think 10 but generally less since like as you said, no one wanted to have a classe mate in the team
- In dungeon, dps had really a more polyvalent role: control, off tank, off heal, buff and debuff were really a thing and the dungeon difficuly was very different, some really needed 3 cc other an off heal etc... Priest and pala were very good in strat
- The vultros... was a 25 rare elite in a zone for the 10/15 players... doesnt look important exept when he spawn on you the first time you come in westfall
- I think most of the players didnt have the full speed mount and walking around all azeroth in 60% was well...
- There was trinkets to make your mount run faster, it was important at a time
- Sylvanas, Tyrande, Thrall, all had basic players models, Sylvanas had a night elf model, Andwin was a random kid
- No lvl scale in leveling pvp, and pvp bracket for 10 lvls
- In my memories, Ubrs boss impossible to kill without a hunter kitting him and feign death during the kill of his adds
- In my memories, non tier stuff were very ugly and since tier stuff was hard to earn, characters spent a long time being ugly, Tbc made a lot for this, before the transmog arrive
- I dont remember well but i think it was really more difficult to lvl the race reputations, i think there was no tabard at the time, you needed to give things to a npc

[xero5141]

Classic max level enchants = 11 (with way more choices) Live max level enchants = 7 (and shoulders aren't even dps-related anymore)

Classic Talent Trees = 3 Individual trees with the ability to progress however you want, gaining 1 point per level Live Talent Options = Pigeon-holed into one spec abilities only, gaining 1 new ability or passive per 15 levels

Classic attributes/secondary stats = ~22 Live attributes/tertiary stats = 12

Classic Racial-only Class Abilities? Yes Live Racial-only Class Abilities? No

Buffs/Potions/Elixirs/Flasks/Oils, etc. of Classic (too many to count but it's obvious) >>>>> Live

Profession diversity that also affected combat Classic >>>>> Live

Gear versions (of the Bear, Eagle, etc., +Specific Spell type, +Specific Resistance, etc., etc.) Classic >>>>> Live

The list goes on

Classic Classes were more unique, Factions were more unique, Racial abilities were more unique, there were almost twice as many attributes/secondary stats that you could min/max, talent tree permutations of Classic put Live to SHAME, Classic had way more enchants and more combat-related enchants, Classic professions were far superior to Live in both use and combat-relevance, and on and on and on. Savvy?

Yes, all of those things were available.

How many enchants could one spec use and maximize what they were doing?

How many talent paths were actually viable? One. If you didn't use that one, you were wrong and probably not invited to whatever you wanted to do.

There were more stats, but you were still shooting for BiS so why does that matter?

Racial abilities - you had a race that you basically had to be as each class or you were under-performing.

One type of flask, one type of potion that was viable.

Again, professions to maximize your performance and nothing else. If you were a tank you were BS/Ench or BS/JC period.

You already mentioned stats.

Like, come on. Now you have talent trees that genuinely afford you a choice in how you want to play. Everything else is trivial.

[therealbowser]

This was still the case in burning Crusade. When levelling as a Warrior or Paladin in BC you'd keep a reasonably current shield and 1-hander in your bags in case you needed to tank. As a ret pally when levelling I also kept about half a set of +healing Int gear in my bags for healing 5-mans, though usually I tanked them. It wasn't until actual BC 5-mans that being Prot spec made a huge difference. Given vanilla's talents the big difference would be survivability and having a better Righteous Fury in an actual tanking build.

At some point dual specs became affordable (I believe they were actually released in classic, though I could be mistaken... I recall them being ridiculously expensive when they were released and very few people used them), but up until that point players largely stuck to one spec as well as they could.

Unlike classic, in TBC specs started getting critical role specific abilities. You couldn't just wing it as a healing retribution paladin in 25 player raiding in that expansion, where as it was totally viable -- even recommendable, in certain places -- in classic.

5 man dungeons are another story, though. You could do a lot in those dungeons, even in the heroic difficulty which is nowhere near as dramatic as players make it out to be -- it was just a bit of a pain in the ass to gear up for, especially tanks (still despise the ludicrous defense cap to this day).

[Eyechewer]

- Baron in 45 minutes
- Rend, and how cool it was to do it with UBRS key equipped (Summoned Vaelastrasz as friendly dragon)
- Super rare shirts, Master builder's shirt from darkvire, sawbones shirt from the doctor in scholomance were some of the most rare and coveted items in the game
- That fishing boss in ZG that no one knew how to summon
- Cultist event in silithus, summoning bosses of increasing difficulties
- Community was a thing and everyone knew everyone. Something sorely lacking from the current game.
- "The Calling" raid quest in silithus every guild did for the nature resist pants
- The fire resist enchant "questline" in BRD that required a million mats.