Reminders of what vanilla was like

[garicasha]

@ Pateu, Actually you might not be correct on that.

I, for example, was really excited for vanilla. Writing this 20-page document for the last week or two since Blizzcon only made me want to play it more and more.

Then, just yesterday, I watched the videos of what the actual raid gameplay was like, and I was thinking...OMG I forgot just how slow and boring the encounters were. Warlocks and mages literally just spam one button. There is no way in hell I am going to farm dreamfoil for hours to go stand in a raid to press one button.

I didn't spend twenty+ hours writing this document because I didn't love vanilla. But if all the personal hype I generated for myself doing research came crashing down after watching one video of gameplay, there are probably many, many players that also THINK they want vanilla but forgot what it was actually like.

(And I'm not knocking people that do enjoy classic; more power to them. But I think they represent a tiny, tiny portion of the modern player base.)

[minkage]

1GY in barrens plz! I enjoyed the literal 20 min corpse run back to RFK after a wipe.

[Deletedaccount1]

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.

Some people on here are insecure about the decline of retail and take out on people who they falsely perceive as potentially making it worse. Except most of them are not honest enough to admit that.

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@ Pateu, Actually you might not be correct on that.

I, for example, was really excited for vanilla. Writing this 20-page document for the last week or two since Blizzcon only made me want to play it more and more.

Hey man if you are interested, a vanilla private server streamer named Staysafe TV on Twitch and Youtube did a 2-3 hour analysis/rebuttal of your OP on his stream. There should still be a vod of it on Twitch. You can go find it if you are interested.

[mauserr]

So basically Vanilla was the epitome of cancer and weaponised autism. Legion suddenly seems like the best expansion there will be, with no competition to be ever made in the future compared to this...

The amount of people who genuinely enjoy that kind of shit is so miniscule it's almost ridiculous. The rest will quit after a month and whine on the forums how shit it is and how it needs to be brought to modern standard yada yada yada and come back to retail praising it even if they re-released Cataclysm exactly the same it was before.

[Brubear]

.....

I think the talent trees you shared were after the revamp as, iirc, Blessing of Kings was the 31 point protection talent. Part of the problem with pallies is they were completely overhauled between the end of beta and the launch of the game (if you have the Vanilla strategy guide it was written based off of beta so you can see just how drastically different they were), so that combined with age makes it hared to remember which version of the talent tree that is.. It's actually pretty funny to go through and read it every now and then because it reminds you just how crazy vanilla was (and how much the game has changed).

EDIT* Going through the strategy guide and I was wrong, BoK was the 31 point Ret talent, and Repentance was the 31 point Prot talent (at the end of beta, which I think that part carried forward). Consecration is listed as a 21 point Ret talent, which I don't remember if that carried forward to live or not (I know at one point it was a Holy talent, but honestly can't remember when).

[dbaum23]

Someone may have already said it, didn't read the whole thread. But professions also had different sub specs within them. Like blacksmiths had armor, weapons...etc. Everyone knows engineering had goblin/gnome. Alchemy had potion/elixir masters. Tailoring had shadow, etc. etc. I forget when they changed all this.

[Dhrizzle]

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.

There's a couple of things that could take the sting out of that a bit, both lifted from TBC. Firstly a non-automated match-making tool that lets you simply advertise who you are and what you're doing and more importantly adds you to a global LFG channel so anyone who fancies a dungeon run can use the channel instead of being tethered to a city and spamming up /2.

The other thing would be making the meeting stones into summoning stones. On the one hand it isn't Vanilla, which seems to be enough reason for people to reject an idea no matter its merits. On the other hand it's only offering the functionality we get anyway, a summoning stone would only have the same effect as a friendly warlock hanging around the dungeon 24/7. This means that warlocks feel a bit less special, but to be honest having the privilege of always having to go to a dungeon to waste our shards on lazy people was never that amazing.

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Someone may have already said it, didn't read the whole thread. But professions also had different sub specs within them. Like blacksmiths had armor, weapons...etc. Everyone knows engineering had goblin/gnome. Alchemy had potion/elixir masters. Tailoring had shadow, etc. etc. I forget when they changed all this.

I don't think Tailoring got a specialisation until TBC when it got Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire and Frozen Shadoweave (though unlike Blacksmithing it provided a bonus to that particular cloth, not exclusive patterns.)

[Vintersol]

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

Then please the classic lovers and leave the retailers alone. All shit that is suggested is in the retail version.

[psir]

@ Pateu, Actually you might not be correct on that.

I, for example, was really excited for vanilla. Writing this 20-page document for the last week or two since Blizzcon only made me want to play it more and more.

Then, just yesterday, I watched the videos of what the actual raid gameplay was like, and I was thinking...OMG I forgot just how slow and boring the encounters were. Warlocks and mages literally just spam one button. There is no way in hell I am going to farm dreamfoil for hours to go stand in a raid to press one button.

I didn't spend twenty+ hours writing this document because I didn't love vanilla. But if all the personal hype I generated for myself doing research came crashing down after watching one video of gameplay, there are probably many, many players that also THINK they want vanilla but forgot what it was actually like.

(And I'm not knocking people that do enjoy classic; more power to them. But I think they represent a tiny, tiny portion of the modern player base.)

You pretty much summed it up right there.

[garicasha]

Hey man if you are interested, a vanilla private server streamer named Staysafe TV on Twitch and Youtube did a 2-3 hour analysis/rebuttal of your OP on his stream. There should still be a vod of it on Twitch. You can go find it if you are interested.

I'm definitely interested, and watched his Nov 6 stream where he 5-manned UBRS.

He definitely has a lot of information that I had forgotten or didn't know in the first place. It's definitely amusing that people cleared Molten Core in 14 days from launch with no fire resist gear; it just goes to show how much of a difference practice makes. Although he even states in the video that having 1.12 helped quite a bit because each class had gotten their tuning pass by then.

I cannot find any specific references to this post, though, and there's just too much content to go through and listen to it all. Unless there's a tool that I can see where people linked to this post maybe. If you have the specific vid and timestamp I'd definitely listen to it.

[MrPaladinGuy]

Cast seal

Cast judgement

white dmg

Cast seal

Cast judgement

SoC bugged

relog

repeat 43553345345435 times.

[Daffan]

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).

Yup. If they release patch 1.12.1 they need to buff raids and bosses to be balanced with DM/ZG loot, new recipes, buffed raid loot tables and the revised talents. Don't care what any purists say, it's a shitshow on private servers. On servers with 1x rates, guilds could clear MC in 11 days from launch.

It basically boils down to a whole server waiting for Naxxramas to be developed lmao. I really liked Vanilla but this time I want it to last.

[garicasha]

Added a stats section which I plan to work on more in the coming week.

[judgementofantonidas]

do you retards actually think it's going to be an exact 1:1 copy of the original game, with all the glitches and lack of quality of life features? use your heads for a minute.

yes. or else it is not what you whined for.

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There will HAVE to be some QoL improvements/bug fixes from initial release.

no. actually there won't have to be. it will be whatever blizzard decides to give you

[idunnowatdo]

Wasnt there different costs to repair different types of armour? IE cloth was the cheapest to repair and plate was the most expensive to repair at a vendor.

[Powerogue]

Good lord this makes my list look like a sticky note.

"--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."

I remember Mauradon being the worst there. WHO'S IDEA WAS IT TO MAKE THREE SEPARATE WINGS THAT ALL LEAD TO THE SAME INSTANCE?! We got lost so dang much and it took all day and all night with one extremely dedicated group and our gear was red in durability by the time we finished the last boss.

"--Many dungeons were effectively alliance or horde only. Ragefire Chasm was in the bottom of Orgrimmar...not a good place for a level 10 Alliance toon. Stockades was in Stormwind, same thing for level 20 Horde toons. Deadmines was in Westfall and Wailing Caverns was in the Barrens, and both were roughly two zones of auto-run away from the opposing faction's nearest flight point. Scarlet Monastery, Razorfen Downs, and Razorfen Kraul were significantly easier to get to as Horde. Gnomeregan was much easier to get to as Alliance. "

I remember seeing hordies at Deadmines from time to time. Those guys were hardcore. They either died their way through STV or swam the ENTIRE length of the ocean just to get to that instance.

"--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 for spirit-based mana regeneration, crushing blows and using shield block to push them off the combat table, resistance calculations and breakpoints both offensive and defensive, and weapon skill."

If I remember correctly threat wasn't a visible percentage either. The way you knew you had too much threat was that the boss would turn around and step on you.

I never made it to raiding in vanilla, only 5 man dungeons, before TBC came out, so this has alerted me to a whole new level of pain I was blissfully ignorant of.

"--Certain specs were completely capable of one-shotting players, particularly enhancement shaman and fire mage"

I wondered for ages why I had a decent PvP rank and tabard despite sucking at PvP in every game I've ever played, but now I remember it was because I WAS A ROGUE. There are videos of us in vanilla killing people while buck naked because they just couldn't do anything. I'm pretty sure diminishing returns were added/buffed heavily at some point post-vanilla because back then I could just nail you down and kill you as long as you were mail or below. No skill required.

"There was no mutilate/envenom or Cloak of Shadows (Cloak came in BC)"

I remember hating DOTs SO MUCH!!! When you're a class with absolutely zero self-heals or dispells they prevented you from using bandages so you just had to hope you could out-heal the DOTs with your food you had on you. I had to have both bandages and food in large quantities all the time. On top of poisons, reagents for poisons, my mount, etc. my bag spaces were always full.

"Sap would make you drop stealth...right in front of the mobs you were trying to sap. Improved sap gave a 90% chance of this not happening."

So many deaths to that. One of my first skills learned as a rogue in dungeons was quickly sapping and SPRINTING back to the tank.

"--Loot wasn't tradeable. Running master looter was much more common, and if they accidentally gave the item to the wrong person it required a GM to fix."

My first dungeon experience was looting a ring that had agility and intellect on it. They yelled at me for it and I remember saying "I'll just trade it..." and they said "YOU CAN'T TRADE BOSS LOOT!!!" and kicked me.

"--The quests for dungeons were spread out all over, sometimes in multiple zones, and were frequently the ends of long chains. OTOH, the blues they rewarded were some of the best items available for many levels."

People fondly remember Darrowshire, but they don't typically remember the part where you had to make your way all the way from Eastern Plaguelands to Winterspring to meet with her lost sister.

"--Are disarm mechanics still in the game?"

The mechanic exists but our disarming abilities are gone. I rather miss having disarm as a rogue.

[Samiall]

This is amazing and brought so much love and pain back to me in equal measure.

[Heladys]

re: preferred boss debuffs.... I remember screaming at rogues in our MC and BWL raids for casting Expose Armor. It was considered a stronger debuff than Sunder Armor, so you couldn't cast it to build threat on the boss.

[garicasha]

re: preferred boss debuffs.... I remember screaming at rogues in our MC and BWL raids for casting Expose Armor. It was considered a stronger debuff than Sunder Armor, so you couldn't cast it to build threat on the boss.

Interesting you say that because I think that was a popular misconception at the time. I'm pretty sure the tank got the full value of a sunder armor cast whether or not it applied the debuff. Someone from a private server can probably set us straight.

[brigada]

This should be nominated for best post 2017