Reminders of what vanilla was like

[Rupenbritz]

Rogues did not have Cloak of Shadows at all, this was TBC talent. (You said it was end of Sub tree but Premed was..)
Malygos was not a world boss, you mean Azuregos.

[RapBreon]

My god this was a long, but epic post.

I have such fond memories of The Barrens and my first ever run to Scarlet Monastery as Alliance.

As a mitigating factor talents and spec weren't as important as they are now. Many abilities were baseline and it was completely possible for shadow priests, ret pallies, balance druids, etc. to heal or tank a dungeon without respeccing. (Especially if you overgeared/were slightly higher level for it). The fact that hybrids had so many heals though changed PvP, although I personally don't know much about that.

Probably why I adored my Enhance Shammy so much.

[Deleted]

- Baron class run. Meaning a raid that had one player of every class.
- Tyr's Hand gold farming and pvp for control of the area.
- Out-of-combat ressing as a role. It was removed sometime early-mid, i think.
- Tubers, demonic runes and some other extra consumables.
- Clams didn't stack. Grinding clams for Golden Pearls was painful, but reward was somewhat good.
- Blizzard were as dense as today when it comes to understanding some game mechanics. Tseric (or possibly even Kalgan hisself) claimed that intellect is a dps stat for mages, as it allows them to cast more spells. At that time "+spell damage and healing" was not found on mage T1, and T2 possibly had a minuscule amount of it.

[Gramb]

to the OP, good summary of the good and bad things, for myself i played WoW after patch 3.0 i think the most for a good reason.
I am not hyped but will wait and see what we get.

[Daffan]

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

Very rare.. most if not all pre-bis was cloth for healing. e.g baron robes

[quez]

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

If it is a copy/paste version of classic PvE content will be crushed incredibly fast.

I've played on a couple of private vanilla servers, and usually the following happens:
The moment you have 10 level 60s (green lvl 40 quest gear doesn't matter) you'll do the q-chain for ubrs key and just farm that shit over and over again + some other dungeons. Meanwhile people level their professions and get pre-raid BiS stuff such as devilsaur, frostweave/shadoweave etc.. When you have 25-30ish members with decent gear you can steamroll through most of if not all of MC. If Dire Maul is available at launch you can pretty much go to BWL straight away (you still want to clear MC though).

[Revamp Man]

100% agree

not vanilla hate
just truth

[Florena]

No barber shops in vanilla so you better think carefully about your hairstyle!

[garicasha]

I completely re-organized the OP, at this point is it reasonable for me to start asking for sticky status?

[ringpriest]

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.

This, like a lot of the comments I've read here, is all based around the assumption that you're min-maxing for absolute best performance in a specific role, with the implication that you're hard-core raiding. That's not how the overwhelming majority of people played during classic.

With a little bit of intelligence, a competent and not overly gung-ho group (when you needed one), adequate (not best in slot, just level-appropriate and role-appropriate) gearing, and non-idiotic talent choices, you could do everything up to the start of raiding without worrying about min-maxxing. It was a big game - yes, raiding was prestigious and difficult and "the endgame", but there was plenty of game outside of that.

I saw a lot of different talent builds, and as long as you could do the basics of your class, no one worried overly much. What got people disinvited was healers that didn't heal, tanks with no shield or missing armor (or who didn't even try to get aggro), dps who pulled or didn't know how to use their cc abilities. The same was true for everything else you, and others bring up - the problems I remember were warriors in cloth, hunters who didn't grok aggro or pet control, players who couldn't keep an eye on the healer's mana bar, rogues who wouldn't stay with the group; that sort of thing.

Having a reputation for knowing how to play your class, and for not being a ninja or a flake was far more important than optimal spec, BiS gear, or having the perfect race/profession combo. (Although, yes, hunters and rogues who raided were expected to pick up engineering for the cables, because wipe recovery was vital - but like a lot of things, short of raiding it was nice, not essential.)

[garicasha]

Tanks with no shield

Oh God I remember people trying to do that.

[Azrile]

Which is something I can't wait to get back in WoW Classic. In a multiplayer game you need to have group members rely on each other—in good and in bad. And that means one person can screw up the whole group, but also that another person can save the group from a screwup (as a rogue I was always prepared to blind a mob that got loose and ran for the healer, for example).

I think you are romanticizing it. Yeah, that kinda stuff sounds great. But what I am talking about isn´t ´personal responsibility´ as in doing your class role or doing some heroic thing to prevent a wipe. What I am talking about is sitting in town waiting 2 hours to get a group for Strat, finally getting a group and then having someone not have potions, not have ammo, have gear break on the first trash mob and the group falling apart.

People are GREATLY underestimating how annoying it was to put together groups for 5 mans back in the day and how annoying it was to replace a player who left the group. It is only going to be worse now that we have such accurate and easy DPS meters. Back in the day, you had no way of knowing just had little dps that melee hunter was doing because he ran out of ammo.

I think travel and LFG are what will kill the classic server. There is nothing hard about doing them the old school way, it is just tedius, annoying and a huge waste of time that players won´t be able to tolerate.

[Sarevokcz]

I think you are romanticizing it. Yeah, that kinda stuff sounds great. But what I am talking about isn´t ´personal responsibility´ as in doing your class role or doing some heroic thing to prevent a wipe. What I am talking about is sitting in town waiting 2 hours to get a group for Strat, finally getting a group and then having someone not have potions, not have ammo, have gear break on the first trash mob and the group falling apart.

People are GREATLY underestimating how annoying it was to put together groups for 5 mans back in the day and how annoying it was to replace a player who left the group. It is only going to be worse now that we have such accurate and easy DPS meters. Back in the day, you had no way of knowing just had little dps that melee hunter was doing because he ran out of ammo.

I think travel and LFG are what will kill the classic server. There is nothing hard about doing them the old school way, it is just tedius, annoying and a huge waste of time that players won´t be able to tolerate.

yeah, this. I basically skipped all the dungeons except wailing caverns when i was leveling, since we could never get a whole group up just from zone chat (WC was the exception thanks to barrens...) and 95% of the time did 60lev dungeons with guildies only and resorting to pugs only when couple of us were doing the dungeon set upgrades, but I was still missing some pieces, so I had to farm them before we proceeded, 55 scholo runs for helmet and 53 stratholmes for legs, yeah.... which reminds me of the strat 45m run for the upgrades, we couldnt get a tank for a long time for it, since they didnt want to go there just restarting the dungeon if we fucked up, so eventually we decided fuck it and went with one enha and one ele shaman (me) as basically co-tanks and were coordinating trash together, while he swapped to shield and tanked bosses, where i was more of an offhealer than dps.

Good times. But I wouldnt want fo farm those dungeons for months just to get those set items again, Im not at university anymore.

[Azrile]

I'll also add, it'll force the classic crowd to put their money where their mouth is, and see if it just a very loud minority or if an actual demand exists.

I already know the answer to this. 95% of the people who love the idea of a classic server will say the version Blizzard decides to make is not the one they wanted. Mounts at 20, bigger bags, AH changes, flying, talents etc etc. 95% of the classicophils will say ´I would play it if only it had xxxxx´ and if Blizzard changes the xxxx, then just as many people will not play it for the opposite reason. Blizzard is going to have to make a lot of binary decisions and each one will alienate of lot of the ´I want a classic server´ crowd.

[Deleted]

I already know the answer to this. 95% of the people who love the idea of a classic server will say the version Blizzard decides to make is not the one they wanted. Mounts at 20, bigger bags, AH changes, flying, talents etc etc. 95% of the classicophils will say ´I would play it if only it had xxxxx´ and if Blizzard changes the xxxx, then just as many people will not play it for the opposite reason. Blizzard is going to have to make a lot of binary decisions and each one will alienate of lot of the ´I want a classic server´ crowd.

Ok, we need to call blizzard. This info could be a huge for them.

[Gramb]

I already know the answer to this. 95% of the people who love the idea of a classic server will say the version Blizzard decides to make is not the one they wanted. Mounts at 20, bigger bags, AH changes, flying, talents etc etc. 95% of the classicophils will say ´I would play it if only it had xxxxx´ and if Blizzard changes the xxxx, then just as many people will not play it for the opposite reason. Blizzard is going to have to make a lot of binary decisions and each one will alienate of lot of the ´I want a classic server´ crowd.

no no pscht i cant even hold back to smile, just wait and i bet after the classic servers go online you will see threads like, "Nerf Mount with level 40" or "My "insert class here" cant hit a mob and misses all the time. At release i need alot of Popcorn to enjoy the show of whine threads.

[glowpipe]

TL : DR Game was shit and hardly anyone gonna stick with it

[Zoneseek]

I already know the answer to this. 95% of the people who love the idea of a classic server will say the version Blizzard decides to make is not the one they wanted. Mounts at 20, bigger bags, AH changes, flying, talents etc etc. 95% of the classicophils will say ´I would play it if only it had xxxxx´ and if Blizzard changes the xxxx, then just as many people will not play it for the opposite reason. Blizzard is going to have to make a lot of binary decisions and each one will alienate of lot of the ´I want a classic server´ crowd.

I'm a classic supporter but I do agree with you. There will be absolutely no way to please everyone.

[pateuvasiliu]

What's up with all those threads parroting over and over how ''horrible'' Vanilla was?

Dude, if someone asked 10 years for Vanilla they already know what it's like. We don't need you to tell us if we should look forward to it or not.

[Redwyrm]

Can't wait for players to start dying underwater due to the return of faster breath meters

And getting dismounted if your mount hit a puddle deeper than your shins (that you couldn't jump across).