Reminders of what vanilla was like

[joi-]

It never ceases to amaze me how anti-classic this community is. It's like some of you can't get over the fact that people enjoy different things in games. For instance, I dropped raiding mythic in retail in favour of playing on a private server to experience atleast a shade of vanilla again, and now after more than 100 days of /played on different vanilla private servers I don't regret a single second. And I'm anxiously waiting for Blizzards classic. When it clicks, it clicks, retail can be fun and all but it's just a bit "meh".

[volescue]

I honestly don't get why people love classic so much. Sure, it was great back then because it was the best at the time, but I'd never go back. The rep grinds were so bad that to this day, I still hate grinding reps even though it's a billion times easier than it used to be, among a billion other issues I have with how the game was.

You know what I actually do miss, though? My guilds. If I could get all those people back together, I wouldn't care if I'm playing literally the worst game in the universe. It would make the experience amazing for me.

And that is one of the problems with the state of the game. You aren't rewarded for or required to actually talk to anyone not in your guild
or even in your guild outside of raid night. In real life I would say 99% of everyone's friends have come from being forced into a situation where you have to interact with them regularly such as school or work. Very few people make connections with people by walking up to them on the street and start talking. That would probably be jarring and off-putting for a lot of people.

My friends list grew organically as I leveled because I would actually see and repeatedly help people throughout multiple zones or add them for future dungeon runs. Now you are lucky to see a random person twice in your entire time playing. WoW has severely degraded the MMO experience to the detriment of the game.

[Mic_128]

Why is everyone trying to prevent us from playing vanilla servers, as if they're worried they're going to lose other people to play with on the live servers

It's more because it's going to take developers away from current WoW for something that's likely not going to be a big money-earner.

It never ceases to amaze me how anti-classic this community is.

All that's being listed here are facts. If you think they're making Vanilla not look great, there's probably a reason for that.

I dropped raiding mythic in retail in favour of playing on a private server to experience atleast a shade of vanilla again, and now after more than 100 days of /played on different vanilla private servers I don't regret a single second.

I guarantee a lot of those have had gold/exp changes to make it more enjoyable.

Another thing: Mounts and pets. Pets took up a bag space for each one, along with mounts. Also, mount training was cheaper than the mounts themselves. Mount training might have been 50g (A big amount) while an actual mount would cost a couple of hundred gold. Generally you bought a single mount, rather than lot's of different colours because of the expense. It was changed towards the end of Vanilla so the mount training cost the larger sum and mounts were cheaper.

[Charge me Doctor]

That defeats the point of a Classic server. That’d be considered more TBC than anything as the entirety of the game changed in a major way from that patch between QoL stuff, fixing up classes, raids, etc... TBC =/= Vanilla. o.O

I've been saying that we are playing, basically an easy-mode TBC prepatch on one popular private server nostpenguius and got a lot of hate for that

[JohnRoads]

The greater paladin blessings lasted 15 min and they were cast on classes not groups.

[Shinrael]

Okay, I get the why people hate on the Vanilla fans. I myself will always stick with the newest stuff (BfA in this case), but what I don't get is, why can't people understand that there actually are people who do enjoy Vanilla/TBC/WotLK even now, when there are supposedly better options? I have played on private servers, leveled 1-80 a 1x server, did dungeons and raided there. I had lots of fun. No nostalgia, no pink-shade glasses involved. Just fun. I stopped playing there when the said server got shut down. In fact these 9 years during which I was always waiting for a chance to play retail (which I finally have now, after being a devoted WoW fan for 11 years), I was always playing blizzlike WotLK servers. And I didn't get bored of it. It was no nostalgia (yes, I have that now, but back then it was "current content" for me, and despite that I was enjoying it).

And btw, I do plan to play a little bit on the Vanilla server (well I would much rather prefer a TBC or WotLK one, but still) because of nostalgia and at some point I will stop playing it, but that would simply be because I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to play the most recent expansion with all those new and shiny armor/weapon/mount models and so on, not because I would get bored of Vanilla. TBH, I love leveling, especially pre-Cataclysm days. I can level new characters over and over and over again and not get bored of it for... years xD (true story).

[joi-]

All that's being listed here are facts. If you think they're making Vanilla not look great, there's probably a reason for that.

It's not the contents of the original post... But rather the responses and hostility some posters have towards classic servers even existing, was I unclear or are your trying to misunderstand me?

Besides, not all of them are factually 100% correct, for instance fury warriors are one of the best dps classes in the game yet the OP mentions warriors being exclusively tanks.

[Deleted]

vanilla was fun because everything was new back then. now everything is documented and you can find pre-raid and every single raid bis item lists and what you need and all. it's a joke now and everything will get cleared super fast like it does on private servers. leveling takes longer but certainly not 2-3 months like people say

[Arrashi]

Reading all of that actually made me hyped. And before i didn't even cared about classic being reimplemented.

[Drunkenvalley]

It really baffles me to see so many people being so thoroughly malicious about something they don't have to touch. If you're not interested in vanilla, why are you here complaining about others that do...?

You're not investors in Blizzard Corp. You're just random jackasses on the internet. I don't really see why so many people are so invested in talking shit about something that, ultimately, is a relatively low risk for Blizzard to try.

[SilverCoin]

It really baffles me to see so many people being so thoroughly malicious about something they don't have to touch. If you're not interested in vanilla, why are you here complaining about others that do...?

You're not investors in Blizzard Corp. You're just random jackasses on the internet. I don't really see why so many people are so invested in talking shit about something that, ultimately, is a relatively low risk for Blizzard to try.

For the same reason people complaining and bitching over Legion or upcoming BfA or as a whole "Retail" even if they don´t have to play it.... people need to bitch it seems...

[Deleted]

The issue is we all remember different things about Vanilla, because we all (those of us that did) played at different times and have different moments of the game.
Some people are remembering the very start where it was difficult to level to 60, some remember leveling towards the end where it wasn't anywhere near as tedious.
Same with class balance etc., lots of shit happened throughout the 2 years Vanilla lasted. Maybe you were mostly fond of the pre TBC balance patch? Then you tend to remember that as "Vanilla".

[Ielenia]

but what I don't get is, why can't people understand that there actually are people who do enjoy Vanilla/TBC/WotLK even now, when there are supposedly better options? I have played on private servers, leveled 1-80 a 1x server, did dungeons and raided there. I had lots of fun.

No one "doesn't understand" that others have more fun playing on classic servers. You like what you like. What most people were against (at least I am) were bad argumentation that came from a lot (if not most) of the people who wanted classic WoW. Arguments like "just use Nost code, Blizz" or "making classic is easy and cheap, a few guys did it on their home PCs", etc. There are also those who believe that establishing Classic servers is kind of like a shot on Blizzard's own foot, as they'll basically be competing against themselves, here. Sure, there were those "extremists", but those existed on both sides.

[therealbowser]

Edit: To anyone that did not play vanilla, the most important things:
#1: Every class had one viable spec for raiding. (There were some exceptions.) For all hybrids, it was healing (and for priests holy specifically). For warriors it was tanking, and for DPS, it was whatever spec did no DoTs (there was a 16 debuff limit on all bosses). Items for other roles didn't exist.

#3: The gold cost of switching specs was pretty prohibitive. Also, +healing and +damage items were separate so even really geared healers had to farm materials in holy spec doing very little damage.

#4: There were no server transfers, and even some fairly populated servers had no raiding guilds capable of doing AQ40 and especially Naxx. But if a raid guild with times that worked for you wasn't available, you either didn't raid or you sunk another 200-300 hours leveling a toon on another server. Meet someone in real-life you wanted to play with? Same thing. I would be very surprised if the retro servers don't allow server transfers, as many, many people probably quit the game because of issues like this.

I don't feel like reading the whole thread right now but I am going to make some corrections to this quick once over here.

1. Flat out wrong. For some classes, this is true, especially early on. For other classes, this is blatantly false. Fury warriors and protection warriors were both entirely viable. But there's a more important part to this, covered later.

3. They didn't respond to the prohibitive cost in this way, necessarily See below.

4. Actually before the release of the Burning Crusade, server transfers were made available. There were players who abused it to get Scarab Lord achievements, in fact.

The thing you seem to have forgotten is that spec didn't matter much in classic. It's a set of abilities that gave a boost. There were cases where abilities were important, but for the most part, any spec could perform any role, and players mixed and matched to be better at a given role than they would have been putting 31 points into a spec (holy shock paladins and reckoning bomb paladins are excellent examples; neither are retribution spec and both did more damage than a pure retribution spec did).

For instance, until innervate was made baseline, this was basically druids in a nutshell for molten core:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4NbR6ZP4IM
Druids when restoration just for innervate, and their actual talent choices didn't really matter beyond that. Sure, there are ideal setups but in most cases, the raids are easy enough that it didn't matter. I remember being told by the most successful raiding guild on my server that they didn't care what a player's spec was as long as they performed the role needed in a raid. In the later days of classic most of these abilities were either made baseline, or made to be easily accessible, completely eliminating the need to spec specific ways.

Likewise, shadow priest healers for 5 man dungeons were extremely common in classic WoW. And totally viable. They didn't deal damage in dungeons while healing, they just had shadow spec so that after the dungeon was over, they could grind effectively. Having a genuine healing specced healer for leveling dungeons was a luxury and largely did not happen -- or matter -- that often. Etc and so forth.

Very few 5 man warrior tanks used protection spec, either, they just threw on a shield and called it a day. Good times!

Interesting post, I just don't have time to sit down and read it all right now. So this might be covered already, I just wanted to mention it.

[Deleted]

Wonderful write-up!
I'm almost getting PTSD, even while reading it through rose-tinted glasses.

Oh, and I'm still running my vanilla mage as frost because of reasons! Remember when Winter's Chill was implemented? Imba! Only for your group though. The frost mage group in the raid, and then there was the spriest+4 lock-group.

[BelziBhaal]

Hunter:
Were all named Légölâs

No they weren't because back then blizzard actually enforced their naming policies and alt code fucksticks were thankfully very rare. Unlike today, where every unimaginative moron who is too stupid to come up with an original name has some alt code filled piece of shit.

I look forward to the day when every one of these fuckers is purged from existence.

[Santti]

No they weren't because back then blizzard actually enforced their naming policies and alt code fucksticks were thankfully very rare. Unlike today, where every unimaginative moron who is too stupid to come up with an original name has some alt code filled piece of shit.

I look forward to the day when every one of these fuckers is purged from existence.

There were plenty of Legolases, although I recall seeing more during TBC than in Vanilla.

[Dergiab]

2500 people were a High population server. Just a reminder.

[Izilar]

My guild cleared Naxx 40 too. But my new guild got a bunch of top 5 world kills in Legion...all while playing on naked characters, one-handed, while doing our taxes with the other hand. It's so much easier now by comparison.

/thread

Except I am not making stuff up.

http://www.lootftw.com/archive.php

https://www.youtube.com/user/LootFTW...f_id=0&sort=dd

Plenty of old videos for you to enjoy.

[shifu]

I can not fucking wait for this. Cant wait for the WORLD OF WARCRAFT to feel like a WORLD ONCE MORE!

I can understand peoples arguments for and against it! However i think if anything you have two outcomes. If people hate it, it will make people appreciate and love the current version of WoW. If people love it, It will make people happy they are playing a game they once loved and will continue to love and bring back all that nostalgia.

I personally cant wait to see if i can corner the market with enchants like i once did. Or the war effort i thought was an amazing team effort of both alliance and horde. Or getting my ass rocked by a rogue and calling my guild out to rekt him. haha i cant wait for the good and the bad of a classic server. And will reserve judgment till i can experience it first hand.