It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The most important things if you did not play vanilla:
--DPS was much lower relative to mob health than it is now. Most toons were wearing greens and only wanted to fight one mob at a time. It took about twenty seconds to kill a mob. A mage fighting one mob would probably use three-quarters of his mana, and a rogue would be near death at the end. Then the mage would have to drink or the rogue would have to bandage. Aggroing a second mob came with a significant risk of dying. And at max level you still had to fight a lot because there was no flight.
-
Actually this is bit of a legend because as people started learn their class well and accumulate more gear towards the end of vanilla, open world mobs became quite trivial. In raids, dps wasn't really that low in vanilla, it was just that gear-barrier to entry into raids were much lower and there was no hard enrage timer so raids with much lower overall dps could attempt and kill raid bosses (and people usually have more memories of those first raids they did). When people had current content gear, the raids were actually extremely fast similar to current content today. If people had on-par gear requirement to the LFG groups of today, all raids would last an hour or 2 with the exception of Naxx. Just to put it in perspective: the first time we raided MC as a 40 man group in all blues(I think we had literally zero epics except for a few random world drops and 1-2 end dungeon epics), it took us 3 hours to clear to lucifron and then magmadar, at the end of the raid, we were exhausted from clear trash and just downing 2 bosses and called it a day until tomorrow and started again on 3rd boss. Fast forward a year or so, we would go to do onxyia, get our 2 hour buffs from orgrimmar, speed through MC and then clear BWL (if we didn't mess up and wipe anywhere) in a single 5 hour long raid night.
Fun fact, the one boss that my guild never, ever wiped in the entirely of vanilla content was golemagg, one shotted on the first time we attempted it and every time after.
--Reputation grinds were absurd. They didn't reward much so it wasn't as big a deal, but even getting to honored with the Argent Dawn took many, many runs (bosses dropped an item that gave 50 rep...so one person in 10 would get 50 rep every time the group killed a boss).
- Almost everyone in my guild who was in the naxx team already had revered or exalted level rep with argent dawn just because it was one of the most popular factions in the game with quite an iconic location and zone. It was also one of the easier factions to gain rep with compared to crazy reps like shendalar
and the slow genocide kill grind of timber maw hold
--Mobs in many places were much closer to together and many ran away from you at about 10% health. Pulling dungeons was like undoing a complicated knot with a ten-minute penalty for every failure.
Devs were quite aware of how hard the mobs were to kill initially. Outside in the open world, mobs were actually quite spread from each other and usually never agreed anyone if you stayed on the main roads (especially in a zone for your level or below). During raids and dungeons, close packs were never a problem except for the beginning of the dungeon because experience groups always stayed waaaay back and let a hunter or a warrior and healer to bring back the mobs to a safe space.
--There were some aspects of the game that were enormously fun if you were on the "winning" team and enormously annoying if you were on the "losing" team. Raids of capital cities was one of these things. They were fairly common despite not having an in-game reward, but in terms of server stability they were a mess. Orgrimmar / Ironforge were pretty laggy to begin with because of the solo Auction House, then 40-100 players of the opposing faction would suddenly crash the front door and all hell would break loose. It was iconic and a blast if you wanted to participate, but if you were just trying to do auctions / bank stuff / leave it was a nightmare. If the raid killed the flight master you had to walk to the next nearest city or wait for it to respawn. The opposing raid could kill the auctioneers, the bankers, the flight master. Players with bad internet connections had little chance of staying connected. Even players with decent ones were prone to being randomly DCed.
Getting DCed on capital raids were a real problem for sure! But it was a lot less of a chaos and a lot more of a serious organization then you would think. People would organize 2 raids one for defense and one for killing the faction leader. One raid would defend the entrance to the boss room while the other one took out the boss. The longer you stayed in a faction capital, the riskier it got that the other faction would form a counter raid to crush you and it is a much bigger problem if you wiped in the opposing capital because of the long corpse run and being alone when you ressed and corpse camped. Usually people took the most direct route to the enemy faction leader, killed it, and bailed quickly. There were also "dishonorable" kills if anyone in your raid killed a non aggressive NPC which was a stain your your honorable kill record forever and could affect your ranking for the week which people tried to avoid especially hardcore PVPers.
Another fun fact - SAURFANG was extremely OP in early vanilla and had a prominent position at the entrance of ORG. Unsuspecting ally raids wiped on him even before they could reach Thrall, he could cleave groups down in 1 hit, which gave birth to the Chuck Norris/Saurfang jokes back in the day.
--Epics simply weren't available outside of raiding. The end bosses of the 10/15-man dungeons each had a 1% chance to drop a weapon, making them extremely rare. Also due to their rarity you'd have to roll against everyone else in the group because no one else had them either. Nexus Crystals, the enchanting material from disenchanting epics, were nearly priceless. Because epics were so hard to get and also because 20 or 40 people in a raid had to pass on them to be disenchanted, I think the 1% chance from disenchanting a blue was the primary source of them. There were a few craftable epics that required tons of materials that were on a multi-day cooldown to make, such as mooncloth, cured rugged hides, and arcanite.
- This is a "lone wolf" mentality which didn't really exist back in vanilla. You would either be in a large guild or be left behind just because of how hard it was to collect necessary materials for literally everything + quests and attunements that required the help of the group. I remember running BRD and BRS almost everyday helping newbies in the guild to get attuned to raids and key runs for people who didnt have keys to certain dungeons. We would disenchant unwanted raid gear and distribute it among the raid or sell BOEs and mats and spread to gold among the group. The community play really wasn't optional back then, would be extremely hard to get things done alone.
--I saw from this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-vthkgMT-8 that I think in the very very beginning that a 40-man raid boss dropped ONE epic item. By the time I killed Lucifron, though, I'm pretty sure it was up to 2 tier pieces and 1 non-tier piece, as in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rSNIxos60U -
I don't remember ever having only 1 piece per boss, the lowest I remember is 2 but I could be mistaken. I do remember MC bosses having both tier 1 and tier 2 gear in their loot tables and the tier 2 gear being butt ugly before it was updated and put in BWL. Early raiding in MC gave a big head start to some guilds because they had a bunch of tier 2 gear before BWL
--Not all items had stamina, and if they did it counted against their stat budget for other stats
- As far as I remember, all raid epics had stamina, and pvp epics had a higher stamina in the budget portion as well. One reason Warriors were so shit dps in the beginning was that their raid sets had no dps bonus + secondary stats designed around avoidance as well a higher % of budget on their set pieces going to stamina cause it was designed for tanks.
--Because the stats were so different back then many specs had gear specifically for them. Tank gear was completely different from DPS gear. Healing gear was completely different from DPS gear. Prot warrior basically had its own gear, all healing specs basically had their own gear, rogues had their gear but hunters could also use it. Enhancement and Elemental had their own gear. 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). For certain classes (combat rogue, arms warrior) it mattered if a weapon was a sword or mace because the talents for different weapon types were completely different. (I'm hamming this up a bit, but it was kind of a mess.)
- I was a shaman main in vanilla, so speaking from the "Hybrid" perspective, actually for the most part we didn't need to carry multiple sets of gear for different specs but we had to carry multiple tiers on us for different roles. Tier 1 was perfect for healing but some of the budget in tier 2 went to healing so experienced raiders preferred some tier 1 pieces instead through out BWL as well. Tier 2.5 from AQ was an extremely hybrid mess with STR/Agi/Int all over the pieces so it was prefered choice of both elemental and enhancement hybrid dpsers.
--People couldn't judge a player's 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.
We didn't judge people's gear because to be able to raid you needed a guild, so if people was applying to the guild early in vanilla, you couldn't expect them to have gear. It was the paradoxical job ads for asking 5 year experience on entry level position 
but we judged people's commitment such as which attunements they had, their professions, consumables, and later on, a few specific things such as if they were exalted with AV? back then AV exalted rewards were extremely strong because it was the only way to access epic weapons outside raids and really costly crafted items (or high warlord) such as an offhand that had the highest mp5 on it until Vael in BWL so most healers would spam AV until they had it.
--5/10/15 man dungeons dropped "dungeon tier" items, however there was no guarantee that they would drop items for a class actually in the party. So there was a pretty reasonable chance that a group could spend 75-180 minutes clearing a dungeon and then loot that could only be worn by a specific class that they didn't have would drop. (There were no tokens.) This also made PUGging a nightmare because people didn't want to join a group that already had people of their class because they really didn't want to have to roll against anyone should the items they need drop.
- This gave birth to the "class runs" in my server and some others in which there was only 1 or 2 of each class allowed on each run and usually ran over and over with the same group.
--There were only eight max-level dungeons for the two years and three months that vanilla lasted. (UBRS, LBRS, Strat Live, Strat Dead, Scholo, DM East, North, and West) BRD was a level 58-59 dungeon, but didn't drop the dungeon tier sets everyone wanted.
- Attunements, preparation, filling the groups in /2 chat, the whole 1-2 hours it would take to clear actually made it feel like there was always something to do. I never felt like there wasn't enough of a variety in dungeons. Also, this wasn't like an expansion with a "theme", there were undead dungeons, human dungeons, beast dungeons, orc/dragon dungeons etc..
Changes to Raids and their Design:
--Because there were no difficulty levels, Molten Core and Onyxia were normal, Blackwing Lair was heroic, and Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ40) and Naxxramas were mythic. The two 20-man raids were Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ20), and they were roughly heroic level. Casual guilds were stuck running MC, ZG, AQ20, and Onyxia for two years.
- I feel like by the end of vanilla, almost every guild that raids were clearing BWL as well but AQ40 and naxx were serious business. The only "raid" I ever pugged in 3 years was AQ20
A 40-man raid team required a 50-60 man roster.
It was common for us to have 50-100 people online at night times in the guild and there would be ton of people waiting at Kargath to be called into raid. It wasn't safe to wait outside the dungeon/raid cause pvp..
--Once you started raiding, the following were de facto rules:
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.
- For current content raids, some things were quite important like getting the tide totem in shaman resto tree. but we had good coordination among the shamans in the guild as well, some had stronger totems from enhance tree, and some head strong healing totems etc.. There wasn't 1 spec fits it all for the role builds like today.
Hybrids were quite strong in pvp for sure, especially as an enhancement shaman, I could dip into both elemental and resto talent tree without sacrificing any damage and have strong shock/lighting bolt for the distance, healing spells, slows, interrupts, totems and gamebreaking WF proc. In theory, an enhancement shaman could 1 shot a raid boss in vanilla because WF proc had a chance to proc from the free instant hit you got from the proc (sorry for the riddle). So you could get into a continuous loop of WFing until the boss was dead.. I think I 1 would 1 shot every class at least once in a night of spamming BGs.
--Coming prepared was much more of a chore. -
People don't realize when they say that the raid mechanics in vanilla were sooo easy compared to today that he "raids" were not the afternoon you spent inside a long. Preparation mattered a LOT. Attunements, recipes, patterns, gearing up the tank, getting resistance gear, at the end of the weeks/months of work when you finally killed a boss and got it on farm, it felt like a real achievement.
--Having a balanced healing makeup in raids was crucial because only certain classes could dispel certain things and if a raid was lop-sided one boss might be trivial while another would be impossible.
- Not just healer composition, some bosses would be impossible without enough hunters/druids, some without locks, some with mages etc.. You needed a good amount of everything but you had 40 slots to fill so usually it wasn't a problem. Lucifron, Magmadar, Garr, majordomo, razor gore, trap room are just some examples of bosses that needed one class or another.
--The hunter ability “Tranquilizing Shot”, which was needed for the second boss of Molten Core, Magmadar, could only be learned from a drop off the first boss of Molten Core, Lucifron. Although hardcore guilds could go without, more casual guilds needed several of these to kill Magmadar the first time, which works out to a month of killing the first boss before bagging the second. (And don't forget, during that month you would earn 9 epics divided between 40 people.) Skipping Magmadar wasn't realistic because the third boss, Gehennas, was standing in the middle of the patrol routes of two core hounds that were on a seventeen-minute respawn timer until Magmadar was killed.
Keep in mind you also needed to kill him to dose the flame behind him to be able to summon raggy(which actually needed someone with necessary rep and item) + he was one of the easier bosses to kill that dropped raid tier so skipping him would be insane even if it didn't stop the core hound spawns. + skinning him was important but I wasn't the guild skinner/crafter and I can't remember why
--Because the difference in ilvl from one tier to another wasn't as great, farming of the old raids never really stopped. Especially because Thunderfury, one of two legendaries from Molten Core, was BiS for rogues all the way to the end of Naxx. This was one of several reasons hardcore guilds had extremely lengthy raid schedules.
Ahhh, you were fooled by the greedy rogues in your guild my friend!! Thunderfury was a strictly warrior/tank weapon, and there were a multiple reasons for it:
- It was extremely fast weapon that helped with rage generation and threat.
- It had a special proc that had a big aoe threat modifier attached to it and it also didn't stack and took the slot of thunder clap. Warriors in vanilla couldn't even use thunder clap in defensive spec so they had to switch spec to cast it to slow the boss. It was a massive relief and ease on rotation if a warrior was tanking with thunder fury that applied the debuff.
- The aoe threat was so strong that if a dps was using it in raids, it could pull anything that the main tank wasn't focusing on to itself which was a big problem. Many rogues who fooled their guild into giving them the bindings were restricted from using it in raids the problem is.. the aoe threat was so strong and it broke CCs so they couldn't use it in dungeons either.. Rogues and hunters only walked around with it for bragging rights in capital cities or for PVP which was a massive waste compared to a tank with it. + There were better dps weapons as early as BWL so it was basically wasted on even if they managed to use it in raids.
- The aoe threat and tanking support was so strong that warriors who had it, used it all the way up in next expansions raids at lvl 70 up into BT when more viable options came up and the aoe threat was nerfed in the previous patch.
PvP Changes
--Alterac Valley matches could take over twelve hours; there were no “reinforcements”.
https://i.redd.it/cl2k95o1ulwz.png
- We had one legendary AV run that took all weekend and wasn't finished by the time server reset. I wish I had SSes still 
--I didn't PvP much, but I think it's worth summarizing a thread I read entitled, “How to Get High Warlord/Grand Marshal”. The basic idea was that a month before a player wanted the top PvP title (and with it the right to buy the gear for gold), they would come home from work every day and do battlegrounds continuously from the time they got home until 2 a.m., as well as play as much as possible on the weekends. Then after three weeks of this they'd be close enough to take a week's vacation off work and play continuously for the entire week in hopes that they would be the top player of the faction in honor that week, earning the title. These titles were among the most difficult things to ever acquire in Warcraft and its why Blizzard has never re-released them.
-
Actually I did pvp grind in my servers premade for many many months and only made it as far as rank 11 My server was medium to high pop so it was probably even worse in some others. It took the high warlord friend of mine 3 weeks of NONSTOP grinding to just go from warlord to high warlord. So I would say its a bit longer then your estimate 
.. You needed to share account to have others farm for you at night, it was a group effort to get to high warlord.
--I've heard that there was more of a rock / paper / scissors relationship between classes. I think rogues in particular could stun lock casters until death, and mages might have been able to kite warriors forever.
- It was more the lack of diminishing returns, rogues if they were good/lucky could stunlock anyone to death, mage could kite forever in 1v1, locks could spam fear forever etc. The problem was everyone was a lot more squishy and there wasn't much of any self healing for pure dps classes so you only need to close the gap for a few secs to kill mage/rogue, especially a warrior with overpower against a rogue was brutal.
--Certain specs were completely capable of one-shotting players, particularly enhancement shaman and fire mage
- As an enhancement shaman, I can confirm, the one shots in pvp were brutal, especially with sulfuras or the 2h from aq40.
Druid:
Resto did have battle rez on a 30-minute cooldown, the only class that did
- Fun fact, druids were actually not going to have any resurrection spell what so ever, and the BR was originally designed for shamans. It was quickly moved over to druids last minute before launch because they realized it would be too unbalanced to not give to alliance as well. Sorry can't find the dev interview that said it right now
Melee:
--Had to be incredibly careful to be behind the boss, because when an attack was parried it reduced the time to the next auto-attack by 50%.
This remained a problem through Burning Crusade, where I believe melee could pretty easily cause Archimonde to gib the tank by having their attacks parried.
-it was actually a lot worse then that, almost every boss had frontal cleave, or frontal aoe such as flame breath so anyone standing in front of the boss was toast. Many bosses had knock back so tanks learned to turn the boss and put their back to a wall. A lot of the raid positioning is learnt the hard way for newbie RPGers.. Dragons were even worse, they had a aoe breath, cleave, tail swipe, and possibly wing buffet! so no where was safe. You had to stand in the back corner between the wing and the tail as the only safe dps spot.
--Some specs were really wonky. Ret paladins had almost no buttons to press and basically just AFK'd while auto-attacking mobs to death. -
there was a famous paladins are for porn video on youtube about this in vanilla and it was really a big hit.
--When the game shipped raid bosses didn't put everyone in combat on pull. This meant there were healers whose job it was to stand 80 yards back and rez people that died. Eventually a zone-wide pulse went out every two seconds, but it was still possible for engineer rogues to vanish and shock a player back to life mid-combat. Anything else that could be done out of combat, like switch gear, was also possible.
- I shamefully admit that I had to do my part as OOC ressers for a week or two as well :P
--Tier 1 shoulders looking so ridiculous (hunter = lampshades, paladin = bananas, druid = tree)
--Everyone wearing a tier 2 helmet from Onyxia because they weren't that hard to get but they were impossible to replace.
--Random legendary drops from MC that could make a big difference in progression
- there were two legs in there, one was only aimed at the tank and required a ton of mats to make + usually took months to even have the 2 bindings on the same guy to make and other one was a drop from ragnaros + a weapon which required at least 8 near full clears to even have enough mats to make it. Don't think those 2 made a big difference in progression. Since no "pure" dps spec actually was able to use sulfuras, usually shamans got it and owned pvp with it.
--What were the 16 debuffs that were preferred on the boss?
1. Sunder Armor
2. Thunderclap
3. Improved Demoralizing Shout
4. Hunter's Mark
5. Thunderfury
6. Alliance: Judgement of Wisdom
7. Curse of Elements
Hemorrhage?, Shadow priest +shadow damage?, Curse of Elements? Curse of Weakness/Tongues? The tank's deep wounds?
- I agree with most on the list, except for deep wounds. Tanks that wasted a debuff slot with deep wounds were actually extremely ridiculed cause it did like no damage and very little threat.
Things I personally liked:
--The AQ40 gong-ringing was the most epic time ever. They never did anything like it since because it caused so many server crashes, however. -
I loved the whole preparation for AQ40 as well, but the reason they didn't do a similar event against wasn't the crashes. It was because an extremely high population of players felt robbed of the glory. It was weeks/months of preparation and server wide effort to open the gates but, it was a limited time event that lasted like 12 hours if I remember right, and if you didnt log during that time, you missed everything. So a large population of players complained that they worked for months to not even be able to attend the actual opening of the gates which was a major letdown.
--The number one thing I couldn't wait for BC for was so I could stop looking at Tier 2 helmets EVERYWHERE. I swear 75% of level 60 players were wearing a Tier 2 helmet all the time.
- whats with the tier 2 helm hate :P I was one of the first shamans on the server to have the helm and after the revamp, people were drooling over it. I even got random /whisper congrats and cheers when I was in org with it. Sure towards the end of vanilla it was very common but it was extremely popular in both stats and looks.
--If anyone could write up what Southshore / Tarren Mill was like I'd appreciate it. -
southshore/tarren mill was basically an open world BG. When wow was first launched, there were NO BGs!! So people who hit 60 and wanted to pvp had nothing to do except world pvp. Horde players had a direct flight to tarren mill from UC and south shore had a flight from stormwind if I remember correctly so it was an extremely popular spot for 60s to meet up and dish it out in open world. It became more famous through forum talks and bragging.
Alternative to this on Kalimdor was horde raiding ashenvale and allies raiding barrens. Ton of 60s clashed between ashen vale and barrens continuously.
--I didn't raid hardcore back at the time, but is it safe to say Naxx guilds had a 16-hour-a-week raid schedule, and that every hour of raiding was roughly 1-2 hours of farming for prep? Note that the current requirements on private servers full of people that have been practicing Naxx for years and years are significantly different than they used to be when everything was new.
- It depended on how organized your guild was, I never had to do any preparation before raids as a shaman, we had dedicated people farming consumables and distributing them. Also, as we got more things on farm, we got access to more things to sell on AH and the guild bank grew large enough to support our repairs and consumables.
Things to add:
--Onyxia Scale Cloaks -
this was basically a recipe you got as a lw after killing onxyia if I remember correctly. The cloak itself was really easy to make, it required a green cloak pattern + a scale of onxyia to make and every kill usually gave around 3. You really REALLY needed this cloak on everyone for Nefarian but you could avoid it for the most part on dragons in BWL on your dps and needed it for tanks and healers.
--Links to Leeroy video, geddon bomb, hakkar plague, moar dots
--Explanation of reckoning bomb -
Reckoning was a pally ability that gave himself a stacking buff that increased damage on the next hit every time it was critically hit. Originally this buff was stacking indefinitely so basically you could have an extremely high stack of reckoning and one shot anything. And of course people abused it and went on 1 shooting raid bosses and posting videos of it. It was quickly nerfed after that.
--Zone flow / quests requiring transcontinental travel
--An explanation of how the raid bosses themselves were so much easier but the logistics of a 40-man raid were so much harder
--Links to ads for computers in 2004
--A list of other games popular in 2004
--Write up the attunement quests for onyxia -
There is actually a detailed explanation of this quest on wowhead right now.
--Green dragon organization
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