Reminders of what vanilla was like

[Wiedzemir]

If you are playing classic, you are playing retail, you are paying for it Just saying So stop using this stupid term.

Yet everyone knows what that means in the context. Languages aren't set in stone, words get new meaning. Many words have multiple meanings that depend on the context.

[Natylyaz]

If so negative etc then do not play it. Play on retail and play BFA.

And what about the people who want the philosophy, the lore and the Azeroth of 2004 with refined mechanics and features?

- - - Updated - - -

Yes, these are all fine by me. Note that these apply mainly to raiding, which is a small part of the game (in which the majority doesn't take part). Some other specs are better for PvE, or soloing, or grinding, or 5-mans. I understand some people dislike this design, which is perfectly reasonable and they can play retail—it's a "bad design" for you, but not for me because we enjoy different designs.
.

The goal of their design philosophy was : a fire mage deals a lot of damage, a holy priest heals very well, a paladin brings benedictions and heals less well, an owl regenerates mana and deals little damage. Which is very different than today, and a matter of preference.

However, it is not part of the philosophy to make the outdoor life of healers and tanks miserable for solo, unless they spend a lot of gold and time to change their talents => this is poor design and lack of experience and lack of time to properly tune all classes so that they are each decent at something according to their philosophy.

[bash the fash]

No sir. There are statistics from vanilla showing that the majority of players NEVER even made it to 60. Most played casually, rolling alts, running dungeons with their friends, etc. Getting to 60 was a pretty huge accomplishment back in the day. Hence, the large number of videos on youtube where players filmed their reactions when they hit that final "Ding". A lot of players considered that the end of the game.

I think a lot of people don't remember this. Kinda like no one seems to remember that like 1% of the population raided Naxx past Spider Wing.

Your conclusion - that people were 'playing casually' or 'rolling alts' - do you have evidence for that, or are you just BSing? Because I sure didn't know anyone who never hit 60 on any character that didn't just quit altogether.

If you're claiming most characters didn't get to 60, I'm willing to believe that, but it's because people had a 60 main and a bunch of alts, and leveling alts to max level was a chore and basically a waste of time because then you'd have to re-grind all the gear and things necessary to raid or PVP at a high level. So yeah, I had lots of lowbie alts that never saw 60, but that doesn't mean I never got to 60, or was 'playing casually'.

[Deleted]

I love this OP! Nice work!

[blankfaced]

No sir. There are statistics from vanilla showing that the majority of players NEVER even made it to 60. Most played casually, rolling alts, running dungeons with their friends, etc. Getting to 60 was a pretty huge accomplishment back in the day. Hence, the large number of videos on youtube where players filmed their reactions when they hit that final "Ding". A lot of players considered that the end of the game.

I think a lot of people don't remember this. Kinda like no one seems to remember that like 1% of the population raided Naxx past Spider Wing.

If someone like me can mindlessly make it to 60 grinding garbage in Silithus, it's not an accomplishment, no matter how you slice it.

[Nomads]

If someone like me can mindlessly make it to 60 grinding garbage in Silithus, it's not an accomplishment, no matter how you slice it.

Why not? There are a lot of players that took 2 or 3 years to ding 60. Their videos are all over YouTube. Just because you had more time on your hands doesnt mean its less of an accomplishment.

If you were in Silithus, you were probably playing patch 1.9 for AQ anyways. Thats pretty late vanilla by all counts.

[Deleted]

thx for reminding me (ur effort is rlly appreciated, thx again) y i did quit vanilla ret lvl 35 for Neocron: Beyond The Dome Of York, cuz

--At max level there wasn't much to do if you weren't raiding. Once you farmed your dungeon set (which took tons and tons of hours) all you could pretty much do was PvP or run the same 5-6 dungeons for the 11 billionth time.

nothing has changed ever since, but time investment? Grinding 11b M+, Mythic, PvP? (letz not debate on legs, TFs etc, as they r just more redundant versions of Vanilla loot table).
thats what i like on Accessibilty, its just accessible for non SM-oriented characters.

vanilla gameplay felt (2 me) like being processed by Hannibal Lecter.

[Squiggit]

OP's section on itemization missed some of the best parts. Like flat stats on certain items making them significantly more valuable then their item level would suggest. Pre-normalization rogues farming the crap out of a level 55 dungeon because a blue dagger from there ended up being more valuable than raid epics. Gloves from the first raid being BiS for an entire xpac because of glancing blow mechanics. Other cool things.

Or how about spell power not existing at all when the game launched so spellcasters had virtually no gear scaling.

To me that is good design.

Yeah, nothing quite says good design like grinding all the way to 60 on your favorite class only to find out that you're literally designed to be terrible in the endgame and if you want to actually do what the game pretended you should be able to do better roll a new alt and grind all the way back to 60.

[Nomads]

OP's section on itemization missed some of the best parts. Like flat stats on certain items making them significantly more valuable then their item level would suggest. Pre-normalization rogues farming the crap out of a level 55 dungeon because a blue dagger from there ended up being more valuable than raid epics. Gloves from the first raid being BiS for an entire xpac because of glancing blow mechanics. Other cool things.

Or how about spell power not existing at all when the game launched so spellcasters had virtually no gear scaling.



Yeah, nothing quite says good design like grinding all the way to 60 on your favorite class only to find out that you're literally designed to be terrible in the endgame and if you want to actually do what the game pretended you should be able to do better roll a new alt and grind all the way back to 60.

Lol exaggerate much? There was no class not viable at 60. Progression guilds in all raids had members of every class is every raid. Period. No one had to reroll at 60 because their class "wasnt good."

How far did you raid in Vanilla? What are your qualifications to make such absurd claims? I was part of the 1% who cleared 90% of Naxx 40, and I say you're full of shit.

[Squiggit]

What are your qualifications to make such absurd claims? I was part of the 1% who cleared 90% of Naxx 40, and I say you're full of shit.

Well you can say that all you want I guess, but it doesn't change the reality of the situatoin that raid balance in Vanilla was utterly garbage. If you were tricked into thinking a warlock could actually deal damage or your bear druid could really tank things, tough luck. Maybe you could find a token raid spot so you can throw up a curse (oh and spend hours pre-raid farming soulstones for candy, enjoy that!) or as an innverate bot, but are you really going to pretend that's a good experience at all?

If you really did raid Naxx I have absolutely no clue where you're going off pretending there was any sort of raid balance given the obscene amount of warrior stacking you could get away with in that raid. Or how hunters were worthless except on fights that literally forced you to bring one.

[Chaelexi]

.......

Also, I've put about 20-30 hours into this document AFTER I originally posted it, including a massive re-write after the comments had reached 20 pages, so if any of the comments below don't make sense that might be why.

Shit you are wrong on your giant pile of fake news
--Flight (besides flight paths, which dismounted you at each stop) - 1.10 made linked flight paths
Jumping while mounted - you could jump on a horse
--Cataclysm zones - Hyjal and Uldum were there, wall jumping could get you in to it
--Bank access - available in any of the goblin towns
--Auction Houses outside of Ironforge, Orgrimmar, or Gadgetzan - available in any of the goblin towns
--Server transfers - Available in Vanilla I did it
--Discord - Vent and Teamspek existed and were used by raid guild, it is just an evolution of it

--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. - mages both frost and arcane can AOE farm easy, locks and shadow priests it was easy to dot kite, druids and paladins could "tank farm lots"




--Weapons each had their own skill, and the cap was raised by 5 each time you leveled. So if you had leveled using 1H-swords and then got a 1H-mace, you would have to level that skill before you could do full damage. This wasn't terribly difficult but could be tedious. Getting that very last skill point took a long time due to the way the gains were calculated. - you could level all your weapons to 300 in a couple hours in Blastedlands on the mobs that went immune and stopped attacking, it was not engaging game play like vanilla people like to think


--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. - There were lots of out of "raid" epics, the crafted robes from Tailoring, PVP epics, BOE epics and crafted epics from rep(Fire resist ones). The enchanting mats from epics were not priceless, MC was pugable or farmed in under 75 minutes once BWL gear was in the picture and will become that way quickly again. Contrary to popular belief the skill of players now is higher than it was in Vanilla. Look at any sport that has been around for any period of time. The longer it is around the better the players have become, we now know how to train, in this new "vanilla" there will be Simcraft(there was in vanilla but it was class based and on spreadsheets), Logs, DBM style mods and and a bunch of other mods that are in current wow.

--Not all items had stamina, and if they did it counted against their stat budget for other stats - once you got raid gear everything had stam(except trinkets)

--Here is what the balance druid pre-raid BiS list looked like. Note how there isn't a single piece of leather caster gear in there, half the items don't have stamina, another half have item budget wasted on spirit, and most of the items are a lower ilvl (but I can't see what it exactly it was because only required character level was displayed back then.)https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=36334 - Balance druid raiding......LOL nobody who was actually trying to progress played balance, it was worse DPS than lock and did not provide a curse that increased damage

--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. - it was easy to, did they have raid gear.....yes or no. Dungeon sets were trap for casters for actual raiding you actually wanted all the off pieces with +damage/+healing and +mp5 on them.

--The stats were Strength/Agility/Intellect, Spirit, armor, MP5, +damage spell, +healing spell, attack power, melee hit, spell hit, spell crit, melee crit, weapon skill, dodge, block, parry, and defense. - Missing HP5 and Stam...... Wow for taking hours to write this you must have forgot to do research

--CC was way, way more important even though the game didn't have lucky charm icons yet. Mages were good because polymorph worked well and could be re-applied in an emergency. Priests were also good because they had both Mind Control and Shackle Undead. - There were already addons that assisted with this, target marking that is

--A 40-man raid team required a 50-60 man roster. - The best raiding guild in the world ran condensed rosters with players that could be swing. Deus Vox for example had a strict no more that 45 players in guild rule through Vanilla.

--Raiding required attunement, which was a quest that had to be completed before players could even zone into the raid. Literally the green swirly portals to enter the raid were located at the bottom of a five-man dungeon. For Molten Core it was Blackrock Depths, and for Blackwing Lair it was (Upper) Blackrock Spire. However there were quests that allowed access from the outside. - MC attunement was sellable and we did it regularly. Have 3 people Lava jump to the

--Green items were worth much more than they are now. Weapons in particular; although the AH deposit was a significant portion of the possible sale price so players really wanted to make sure they sold. - Green items are worth more now then then, Except maybe of Fire.Nature Resist everything else was pennies on the dollar

--Gold could be farmed at roughly 50 gold per hour - Play Warlock go to Diremaul and farm books. I made close to 300-400 gold an hour. Play Rogue/Hunter and farm Mauradon Chests - 100-200 g and hour. Once you have around 1-2k you could play the AH to the point of controlling a commodity(say herbs for melee pots or elementals for resist pots). Was capped on gold on 2 chars going into BC

--The design of the end-game dungeons was really epic; unfortunately it came at a huge cost to ease-of-use. Blackrock Spire is roughly six or seven floors and wound around and twisted back on itself in clever ways. However, clever meant "brilliant when a player understood it" and "immensely frustrating if they didn't". Its multi-level design made the minimap useless. But the feeling when crossing the bridge from The Beast to General Drakkisath, a player could get when looking down ~200 yards and see the mobs patrolling the floor of Lower Blackrock Spire was unforgettable. Because the dungeons were so huge they took two hours+ to complete (in decent pugs), and because it was really hard to summon in replacement players for people that AFK'd or disconnected, the time commitment could just go up from there. I believe BRS in total had 25 or more bosses in it. - BRS had 14 bosses, once again research...... The top half of UBRS could be run in 30-45 minutes easy.

--DPS was not balanced as close as it is now. Here's a pic from a Curse Patchwerk vid, some classes are doing about half as much as others.https://ibb.co/fsOR7b Feel free to analyze that or post other screenshots, because I'm missing all the context (i.e. gear) of that kill. - End game raiding was not balance for DPS at all. Optimal raid makeup for Naxx (alliance side) was 8 warriors(2 full prot, 6 fury/prot), 4 holy/disc priests, 9 mages(all fire), 9 rogues, 2warlocks(for COE and COR), 2 Druids (resto), 4 Pali(Mixed specs to get all blessing but they all healed since throughput was not overly effected by spec) and 2 hunters(pull bitches, tranq shot).

-Class stacking via rolling alts was not viable due to the time requirements to level a new toon. - Time to level a toon if you had guildies helping was 1.5-2 days played the majority of that time was spent getting to 35, once you were 35 you could tap level to 60 in 4-5 hours out side on BRD/BRS on the elite trash. Alts were a thing and alt/split runs happened then too. In Deus Vox we would alt run through BWL and sell carries/loot to pugs.

--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. - In a group of split guild we killed the first 3 bosses in MC the first week we went in. It was all about having Dwarf Priests for Fear ward.


--The time commitment it took to complete AQ40 and Naxx were insane. A big part of this was that the lockouts couldn't be extended. But because previous tiers still had items people needed, they still had to be farmed each week. And as the requirements for consumable items kept going up the supply kept going down. I think guilds that cleared Naxx were looking at a minimum of a 16-hour raid week, which probably involved clearing at least half of Molten Core, one day full-clearing AQ40, one day farming Naxx, and then maybe 1-2 days of progression. (Naxx was at least separated into three wings, but AQ40 was not.) - Issue with AQ40 is that the last boss was left unkillable fore 4 months or more. The first week it opened on a server there was frequently guilds who would kill up the Huhu(minus Visc). And then turn to farming world bosses and Mara for Nature resist for 20 players(the melee, tanks and some ranged) the people who were going to soak the enrage. As a lock I was able to get enough resist with almost no farming. Once you got passed Huhu it was another week or 2 on twins and then to farming those bosses for a couple months because the last 2 bosses were unkillable in their current form. Once Naxx came out most guilds stopped farming AQ40/BWL regularly because AQ40 was out long enough that you had farmed most of the good gear from there and it had no legendaries in it. You could clear MC and BWL in 3 hours once you had Naxx gear.

--Alterac Valley matches could take over twelve hours; there were no “reinforcements”. https://i.redd.it/cl2k95o1ulwz.png - when it first launched yes but it was changed and figured out that an AV could be done as the rush technique that is still used today.

--I have secondhand info that warlocks were kind of OP for PvP, possibly due to how few classes could remove their damage, plus the ways they could both mitigate damage and drain mana and health. - Demo locks could lose 1v1, Destro could one shot people with a trinket popped and negative resists and Fear was an amazing PVP CC because it could have a player run out of the fight completely.


Warriors:
Were the only viable tanks
DPS warriors had to tank some of the time
In Naxx-level gear became OP DPS (and one of the few specs that was viable without tier bonuses). (The problem with warriors being underpowered in low gear and overpowered in good gear was a problem for many expansions due to the way rage generation worked.) - It was AQ40 that gave them the hit gear to go Fury and it was all over then,
Fury dual-wielded one-handed weapons - There was 2H fury in Vanilla, especially on Horde with Windfury

Paladins:
Holy was the only common raiding spec - You would bring one pali of every spec to get the Blessings from each tree but they all healed because the bonuses you got from holy were minimal for healing throughput

Druid:
Did not have moonkin form I don't think. They definitely didn't have tree form yet either. - Introduced in 1.8, once again research

Rogue: Was top 3 dps, Thunderfury went to tanks first, the bonus threat trivialized some threat fights

Priest:
Holy was the only viable raiding spec - You would have one Disc priest for Spirit buff and PI was OP for a firemage in Naxx

Warlock:
--Soulstones did not function as a battle rez back then. But it did allow popping out-of-combat. - they were a battle res but they had to be placed on the target before they died, usually placed on the tank.
--Soul shards were items that were stored in bags. Many abilities required them, but the only way to get them was to be casting drain soul on an enemy as it died. This meant for raid progression there was no way of getting them mid-raid, so it was important to farm them before raid. This had to be done on mobs that weren't gray to the player, so it was level 49+. - Soul Burn returned a shard if it killed the target
--Banish was very useful on Garr in Molten Core, and was the only ability that could control elementals. - Hunter trap did too

MISSED - The only raid curses used were COE, COR, COS in that order
Missed Allakhazam

--Mail didn't open all at once - Addons did this for you

--What were the 16 debuffs that were preferred on the boss?
Sunders, Demo Shout, ThunderFury, CoE, CoR(depending on fight), Judgement of Wisdom, Ignite, 2x Corruption, Hunter's Mark, Thunder Clap, rest would end up being rogue poison or Deep wounds
There were no shadow priests

--If anyone could write up what Southshore / Tarren Mill was like I'd appreciate it. It was a close flight from IF and accessable from Org and the flight paths were close to each other which made it an optimal place for PVP to happen. It was not always going on until the released PVP ranks but no battlegrounds to PVP in. Once this happened it turned into a neverending battle with push and push back but you would not usually go into town because flightmasters would end a push quickly.

[Deleted]

However, it is not part of the philosophy to make the outdoor life of healers and tanks miserable for solo, unless they spend a lot of gold and time to change their talents => this is poor design and lack of experience and lack of time to properly tune all classes so that they are each decent at something according to their philosophy.

Tanks and healers are group roles, so there should be no expectation of being able to do solo content effectively. As a design philosophy I like it—it makes the players specialize and collaborate. I find designs where everyone can do everything equally well completely boring and uninteresting.

[Surfd]

I have never read so much BS together in one post.

I have done every singe raid in the game except Naxx 40 as a Hunter, and I have never had to feign and drink in the middle of a boss fight. I can't be arsed with the rest of your ignorant BS tbh.

Sorry, but I am going to have to call bullshit on that. I raided nearly all of Vanilla as a Mage with one of the top Horde guilds on Tichondrious, and the hunters almost always took a stack or two of water into any remotely long boss fight, ENTIRELY because they were literally the only mana based class that could drop combat on demand every time feign came off cooldown to drink. If you were doing a fight like Ragnaros when it was current content, and could take upwards of 15 minutes or longer to kill, being able to dump your entire mana bar for as much damage as possible, and then feign and drink it all back in a handful of seconds more than made up for any damage you might have lost while drinking.

If you never feigned to drink, you were probably doing rather sub par damage compared to what you could have been doing.

[Sturmbringe]

Sorry, but I am going to have to call bullshit on that. I raided nearly all of Vanilla as a Mage with one of the top Horde guilds on Tichondrious, and the hunters almost always took a stack or two of water into any remotely long boss fight, ENTIRELY because they were literally the only mana based class that could drop combat on demand every time feign came off cooldown to drink. If you were doing a fight like Ragnaros when it was current content, and could take upwards of 15 minutes or longer to kill, being able to dump your entire mana bar for as much damage as possible, and then feign and drink it all back in a handful of seconds more than made up for any damage you might have lost while drinking.

If you never feigned to drink, you were probably doing rather sub par damage compared to what you could have been doing.

Yeah, I never ran out of mana as a Hunter. You wanna know why?

1. Because it never took us 15 minutes to kill Ragnaros.

2. Because I used Demon Runes.

3. Because I used Mana Pots.

What you describe is a worst case scenario that never happened.

[Deleted]

tl:dr

stay mad retail babby

[garicasha]

--Flight (besides flight paths, which dismounted you at each stop) - 1.10 made linked flight paths
fixed
--Cataclysm zones - Hyjal and Uldum were there, wall jumping could get you in to it
...they weren't zones,

--Bank access - available in any of the goblin towns
fixed
--Auction Houses outside of Ironforge, Orgrimmar, or Gadgetzan - available in any of the goblin towns
I swear Booty Bay and Everlook didn't have them. Where were they?

--Server transfers - Available in Vanilla I did it
These were only the Blizzard allowed ones though, correct? From one overpop realm to a low pop one?

--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. - it was easy to, did they have raid gear.....yes or no. Dungeon sets were trap for casters for actual raiding you actually wanted all the off pieces with +damage/+healing and +mp5 on them.
Dungeon sets being a trap is precisely what I'm talking about, a player needed fairly detailed knowledge to know that sort of thing. And I'm talking more in the context of pugging Stratholme

--The stats were Strength/Agility/Intellect, Spirit, armor, MP5, +damage spell, +healing spell, attack power, melee hit, spell hit, spell crit, melee crit, weapon skill, dodge, block, parry, and defense. - Missing HP5 and Stam...... Wow for taking hours to write this you must have forgot to do research
lol it's a post on mmo-champ about a 13-year-old video game, not a master's thesis

--CC was way, way more important even though the game didn't have lucky charm icons yet. Mages were good because polymorph worked well and could be re-applied in an emergency. Priests were also good because they had both Mind Control and Shackle Undead. - There were already addons that assisted with this, target marking that is
added CTRA reference

--A 40-man raid team required a 50-60 man roster. - The best raiding guild in the world ran condensed rosters with players that could be swing. Deus Vox for example had a strict no more that 45 players in guild rule through Vanilla.
What the top 1% did is not what I'm trying to describe, except for Naxx I guess because they were the only ones in there

--Gold could be farmed at roughly 50 gold per hour - Play Warlock go to Diremaul and farm books. I made close to 300-400 gold an hour. Play Rogue/Hunter and farm Mauradon Chests - 100-200 g and hour. Once you have around 1-2k you could play the AH to the point of controlling a commodity(say herbs for melee pots or elementals for resist pots). Was capped on gold on 2 chars going into BC
I don't remember this myself, but there have been other posters that stated 50-100 / hour was pretty reasonable

--The design of the end-game dungeons was really epic; unfortunately it came at a huge cost to ease-of-use. Blackrock Spire is roughly six or seven floors and wound around and twisted back on itself in clever ways. However, clever meant "brilliant when a player understood it" and "immensely frustrating if they didn't". Its multi-level design made the minimap useless. But the feeling when crossing the bridge from The Beast to General Drakkisath, a player could get when looking down ~200 yards and see the mobs patrolling the floor of Lower Blackrock Spire was unforgettable. Because the dungeons were so huge they took two hours+ to complete (in decent pugs), and because it was really hard to summon in replacement players for people that AFK'd or disconnected, the time commitment could just go up from there. I believe BRS in total had 25 or more bosses in it. - BRS had 14 bosses, once again research...... The top half of UBRS could be run in 30-45 minutes easy.
fixed boss count, and yes UBRS definitely eventually didn't take that long to finish

--DPS was not balanced as close as it is now. Here's a pic from a Curse Patchwerk vid, some classes are doing about half as much as others.https://ibb.co/fsOR7b Feel free to analyze that or post other screenshots, because I'm missing all the context (i.e. gear) of that kill. - End game raiding was not balance for DPS at all. Optimal raid makeup for Naxx (alliance side) was 8 warriors(2 full prot, 6 fury/prot), 4 holy/disc priests, 9 mages(all fire), 9 rogues, 2warlocks(for COE and COR), 2 Druids (resto), 4 Pali(Mixed specs to get all blessing but they all healed since throughput was not overly effected by spec) and 2 hunters(pull bitches, tranq shot).
Interesting, I added this

-Class stacking via rolling alts was not viable due to the time requirements to level a new toon. - Time to level a toon if you had guildies helping was 1.5-2 days played the majority of that time was spent getting to 35, once you were 35 you could tap level to 60 in 4-5 hours out side on BRD/BRS on the elite trash. Alts were a thing and alt/split runs happened then too. In Deus Vox we would alt run through BWL and sell carries/loot to pugs.
I don't feel this was the norm, but I added that powerleveling was possible

--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. - In a group of split guild we killed the first 3 bosses in MC the first week we went in. It was all about having Dwarf Priests for Fear ward.
I'm sure this is possible but was not the norm for a typical player

--The time commitment it took to complete AQ40 and Naxx were insane. A big part of this was that the lockouts couldn't be extended. But because previous tiers still had items people needed, they still had to be farmed each week. And as the requirements for consumable items kept going up the supply kept going down. I think guilds that cleared Naxx were looking at a minimum of a 16-hour raid week, which probably involved clearing at least half of Molten Core, one day full-clearing AQ40, one day farming Naxx, and then maybe 1-2 days of progression. (Naxx was at least separated into three wings, but AQ40 was not.) - Issue with AQ40 is that the last boss was left unkillable fore 4 months or more. The first week it opened on a server there was frequently guilds who would kill up the Huhu(minus Visc). And then turn to farming world bosses and Mara for Nature resist for 20 players(the melee, tanks and some ranged) the people who were going to soak the enrage. As a lock I was able to get enough resist with almost no farming. Once you got passed Huhu it was another week or 2 on twins and then to farming those bosses for a couple months because the last 2 bosses were unkillable in their current form. Once Naxx came out most guilds stopped farming AQ40/BWL regularly because AQ40 was out long enough that you had farmed most of the good gear from there and it had no legendaries in it. You could clear MC and BWL in 3 hours once you had Naxx gear.
So few people had Naxx gear

--I have secondhand info that warlocks were kind of OP for PvP, possibly due to how few classes could remove their damage, plus the ways they could both mitigate damage and drain mana and health. - Demo locks could lose 1v1, Destro could one shot people with a trinket popped and negative resists and Fear was an amazing PVP CC because it could have a player run out of the fight completely.
added

Warriors:
Were the only viable tanks
DPS warriors had to tank some of the time
In Naxx-level gear became OP DPS (and one of the few specs that was viable without tier bonuses). (The problem with warriors being underpowered in low gear and overpowered in good gear was a problem for many expansions due to the way rage generation worked.) - It was AQ40 that gave them the hit gear to go Fury and it was all over then,
Fury dual-wielded one-handed weapons - There was 2H fury in Vanilla, especially on Horde with Windfury
fixed, I just meant they didn't have colossus grip or whatever it's called

Paladins:
Holy was the only common raiding spec - You would bring one pali of every spec to get the Blessings from each tree but they all healed because the bonuses you got from holy were minimal for healing throughput

Druid:
Did not have moonkin form I don't think. They definitely didn't have tree form yet either. - Introduced in 1.8, once again research
once again lol it's not a thesis

Rogue: Was top 3 dps, Thunderfury went to tanks first, the bonus threat trivialized some threat fights

Priest:
Holy was the only viable raiding spec - You would have one Disc priest for Spirit buff and PI was OP for a firemage in Naxx

Warlock:
--Soulstones did not function as a battle rez back then. But it did allow popping out-of-combat. - they were a battle res but they had to be placed on the target before they died, usually placed on the tank.
--Soul shards were items that were stored in bags. Many abilities required them, but the only way to get them was to be casting drain soul on an enemy as it died. This meant for raid progression there was no way of getting them mid-raid, so it was important to farm them before raid. This had to be done on mobs that weren't gray to the player, so it was level 49+. - Soul Burn returned a shard if it killed the target
--Banish was very useful on Garr in Molten Core, and was the only ability that could control elementals. - Hunter trap did too

You're obviously very knowledgeable about the game but I think you underestimate just how different your experience was from a typical player.

[Holian]

...I will never understand why people still, over 12 years later, have the misconception that shadow priests were bad in PvE, flippin 15% shadow damage for all your warlocks and that sweet sweet vampiric embrace healing on Loatheb, they were amazing.

Sure you only brought one, and couldn't until ZG was released because of debuff slot limitations, but after that they were essential.

[epLe]

For alliance no, then it was all about the mage dps and buffing that (coe).

On Horde, things were abit different thanks to stacking WF in as many melee groups as possible.
This made rogues and warriors shine more on that side.

We continued also to clear AQ weekly after we cleared Naxx.
-Mostly due to completing a new Ateish required killing C'thun again.

[Lollis]

--Cataclysm zones - Hyjal and Uldum were there, wall jumping could get you in to it

False.

Hyjal existed, but Uldum certainly didn't. The only thing about Uldum that existed before the Cataclysm was the wall. By wall jumping you could get to a cliff face, but there was only water behind it.

Hyjal by comparison did have land and even an instance portal.

[garicasha]

It's funny, after 31 pages of comments there's still major things I need to add.

For example, I didn't describe the lockout system at all. That had huge implications for Molten Core, ZG, and basically made PUGging more impossible than it already was.