The "I'm so old, I remember when WoW had.." thread

[Minikin]

I remember when we had chubby ogres and Tauren had Plainsrunning.

What other fond or odd memories do you have about the course of this game's history? Share them here!

Hunter Pet happiness

Druid seal quest with the murloc swarm still gives me nightmares

Warrior weapon quest chains

Running past undercity as alliance on a PvP server to get to SM

[jellmoo]

Traveling to the other side of the world to learn aquatic form, and drowning 47 times during the quest.

Blood Elves not able to be Warriors.

Dwarves having treasure finding as an ability.

Son of Arugal being the most terrifying thing ever.

Rolling a Dwarf Priest because your crew needed Fear Ward.

[Redwyrm]

Spell Levels ----> Mana Management ------> OoM ------> Stacking Mana Regen/MP5

Physically having to go to the dungeon to queue/enter

Water dismounting you

[Nzx]

I'm so old I remember when WoW had interesting and engaging itemisation system that wasn't just a 'gear score' and required actual gear optimisation to be efficient

Lmao this is the best thing about these kind of threads. People making up shit in their heads to make themselves better than you because they've played longer AND they don't even like the current game simultaneously. It's like hipster coffee fans who exclusively drink coffee that has been ingested and shat out by multiple animals and comes from a "single origin" telling you how much better their coffee is compared to your flat white.

On topic: sitting in a tree in Barrens for hours waiting for a lion with a unique skin to spawn and hoping to tame it. Getting Broken Tooth because it had a 1.0 attack speed and was therefore the best at fighting casters in PVP due to uncapped spell pushback. Running all the way to Westfall with another level ~40 guy to gank people in Sentinel Hill, then kiting a level 60 paladin across the entire zone using Viper Sting to drain his mana and eventually killing him through sheer attrition (and probably an entire quiver of arrows). Good times.

Oh and also, standing around outside a game store in a closed mall with my dad waiting for midnight to come around so I could buy Burning Crusade, then getting home and realising the day-one patch would take all night to download. It was interesting seeing the people in my small town who also played and cared enough to go to the midnight launch, too.

[druchii5]

When Hillsbrad Foothills was a legit PvP battleground before instanced Battlegrounds even existed.

When druids couldn't use Polearm weapons.

[lionofwar87]

Been announced

[Demsi]

Weapon skills
OG class quests (loved verigan's fist)
Night elf mohawk
Druid forms had mana cost

[BeepBoo]

Seals
Exorcism/turn undead that worked on undead PCs

[Despicable]

When i had to fill my bag to the brim with stupid soulshards and do overly long questlines for my mounts, but atleast it was free riding skill

Was it really free?

[oldgeezer]

I remember farming whipper root tubers from Felwood. And collecting water from the Hydraxians. Christ, I remember the first time I saw a lvl 40 undead rogue ride a horse through Goldshire.

(and I''ll add that I think the modern game is way better than that ancient garbage)

[Zergin8r]

When i had to fill my bag to the brim with stupid soulshards and do overly long questlines for my mounts, but atleast it was free riding skill

Cost of mats + time made the epic mount more than just getting riding.

[Itori]

I remember having a rep on my server as a good healer and got whispered everyday to come heal for other peoples raids, I remember being a bitch and traveling over to westfall on my rogue and waiting until the messenger was about to complete then killing him and vanishing and watching as 10+ 60's/70's showing up to kill me and i'd do it in front o them and watch them scatter around looking for me, but never did. I remember when people were ignorant to a majority of the game and i could summon an infernal in goldshire and people would think it was some event and try to kill it only to get wrecked by its fire, and whenever it got low i would enslave, heal, and repeat.

[McNeil]

The game was so young that you didn't have a ''things used to be better'' mentality as you didn't have any expansions to look back at. Even during TBC you rarely had people wanting Classic back. Now the game has changed so much over the years that the appeal for Classic grew so much and is now considered a completely different game.

You barely had any good guides to look up how to do quests and such. You had Thottbot which was a very basic program and lacked a lot of features and information, but it was still the most mainstream source to look up how to do quests. Then you had Allakhazam which put a lot more effort and eventually became the Wowhead we know today.

People had no good way to learn boss fights from guides so they just had to pull and learn the mechanics themselves. Thats mainly why Classic boss mechanics were fairly simple and lacking, imagine having no guides or addons in todays raids...

Blizzard had a completely different mentality on how to develop the game. There were no ''influencers'' and people very rarely visited the forums to give feedback, so the devs actually had to play the game themselves and interact with the community on how to make changes for the game. Now its a lot more about the numbers and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.

Raiding felt a lot more exclusive. You had to go through an entire journey just to get raid ready: level all the way to max, run a lot of dungeons to gear up, farm mats, get attunements, find a proper guild and raiding group, and then you can finally get to raid. Now you can just press the LFR button and voila.

Exploration was actually a thing. The original world had a lot of closed off zones that you couldn't enter. Just to name a few: Mount Hyjal, Shatterspear Village, Caverns of Time, the islands south of Tanaris, western Tirisfal Glades (is now Whispering Woods), old Quel'Thalas, behind the Greymane wall, and ofcourse the Karazhan Crypts.

When WoW was young I always got excited to see WC3 characters return. Not everyone got proper treatment sadly.

[munkeyinorbit]

I'm so old I remember when WoW had interesting and engaging itemisation system that wasn't just a 'gear score' and required actual gear optimisation to be efficient

So you remember wow from a month ago? Gratz. I remember losing XP for dying.

- - - Updated - - -

When people pretended there was a community because it would take 4 hours in chat to put together a group for a dungeon; only to waste half your Saturday off from work putting together a group, going to the dungeon and having a person "Oh I forgot I have to eat dinner" then leaving the group. Then you got to go back to town for another hour to look for a replacement. There was no better sense of friendship and community than spending hours sitting in Ironforge looking to put together a group instead of playing the game.

Now when I want to play the game, I get to actually play the game, with minimal time wasted forming a group, instead of spamming the same message in chat over and over for literally hours. F-you blizz, for destroying "the community".

Is that the same community that "black listed" people who ninjaed the guild bank only to have people piss themselves with greed trying to buy the items that were ninjaed?

[Nerovar]

I'm so old, I remember when WoW had a PvP community.

[Zergy]

I remember when gearing up Retribution for raiding required you to do arena.

[swisscheese]

When the statue of liberty used to be off the coast of southern STV.

[BicycleMafioso]

I am so old that I remember when the Demolisher was called the Catapult, giving name to the infamous Gruntapult.

For Wow specific things, I am old enough to remember:
GMs actually interacting with he world through the game rather than a web-client, joining in on the fun.
We raided ZG opening night with 21 people, because we had a GM randomly join us mid-first boss and throw snowballs at us, whilst wearing full warrior t1 gear and Ashbringer(!) but not a single off-piece (trinket, cloak, neck, ring) because he was “too lazy to spawn them”. That Ashbringer screenshot then floated around on the Internet for a bit (but was not the first screenshot of an in-game ashbringer iirc)

Feign Death-drinking.

Feeding your pet, else it “ran away”. (did this actually happen to anyone?)

Summoning your infernal to kill Goldshire.

Having to enslave your Infernal.

Playing roulette/gambling with gold at stake for your Ritual of Doom.

The smiley face under Karazhan.

Hearthstone in Ironforge.

Waiting in Ironforge on your horde rogue and killing hearthers.

Before joined Flightpaths, waiting at the flight masters with your Rogue to kill people before they could fly away again.

Before Battlemasters in the cities, the video of the Priest MCing the Alterac Valley NPCs (Alterac Mind Control Massacre) with the weird but catchy Finnish music.

“Warlocks are mushrooms”

No weapon speed normalisation making weird level 30 weapons best in slot, and weapon swaps built in in macros so you would only swap to Barman Shanker for Backstab and immediately back to your highest DPS weapon.

The short time where you could Ambush with a sword and one-shot people for real.

Not having your mount until level 44 because ammo and pet food.

Key ring/bag! (and before it, too).

Trying to get to he AQ opening, and the boat ended up in Winterspring or Stonetalon Mountain or something.
When you finally got there, you got disconnected and ended up in Swamp of Sorrows when you logged back in.

When 2210 rating was enough to reach Gladiator in s1, and my Priest had to leave for hospital and we just stopped at 2170 without resuming.

Dragonspine Trophy.

Seal of Blood.


EDIT:

Three pet slots as a Hunter.

Taming ZG bat solo because it was so frikkin fast it outran people on epic mounts, with a 1.0 attack speed

The Wolf from Duskwood that dealt Magic Damage even when you tamed him, which destroyed plate as BM

[Kehego]

Ehhh, no this was never true in the launch, in beta, cant vouch, never played.

You got dishonorable kills for ganking lowbies and low level npcs though, which didnt really have a consequence except to say your kind of a jerk who doesnt care too much for ranking up your honor level.

you never got dishonorable kills for killing player characters

[MrKnubbles]

Not sure if anyone said it yet, but the key ring.

I loved collecting keys and making the keyring bigger. I had a 32 slot keyring!