Reminders of what vanilla was like

[Shadowsgrace]

ah the beauty of vanilla! i wanted to roll a spellcaster and since i like shadow as an element and found spells like mind control to sound pretty neat i just did it

then i learned that my spec was not viable in any way for PvE and that disc was non-viable too so if i ever wanted to get an invite i'd had to respec to holy...

in TBC things got better, people wanted me to give mana regen to the healers and to buff lock's damage output while my own was laughable without any AoE ability and with hardly any form of scaling with secondary stats lagging and lagging behind 'real dps classes' till the rock bottom of Hyjal,BT and Sunwell... lovely times, i eagerly wait for classic realms to relive the joy! /s

Hey, Naxx required Shadow Priests for Instructor Razuvious. On the other hand, I remember my first Ony pull.... I was a Fire mage, 1st cast "Immune" and I had to scramble to pull Frostbolt out of my spell book. >.<

[Dembai]

You seem pretty knowledgeable about rogues but...didn't agility increase attack power? Weren't rogues #2 in dps on Patchwerk second to fury warriors, therefore their gear must have scaled more than you're making it sound like it did.

And your post above is accurate, but I was talking about the chances that CCs would break randomly if a player didn't have capped spell hit. I added that to a new section. I also added a reference to your post on page 35. And what blossom are you talking about?

I also added that taunt was a spell to the warrior section, and that it would randomly fail just because of RNG.

Also added that there were no achievements (dunno how that slipped through), that there was no armory, there was no way to verify player experience besides gear or quizzing them, and that because there were no mounts in 20-29 and 30-39 battlegrounds druids were OP.

Also my avatar just ticked over to 7-year member today!

Only on patchwerk, and that was due to speed. But over time, a fury warrior with a VERY fast dagger offhand could literally cast execute every second during the last parts of fights and they were necessary in fights where HEALTH was a concern. Warriors naturally took less damage, which made them much better at living through fights with less resist gear.

I was permabenched. It wasn't fun.

Rogues were HEALING?

Yes. Now, I took it REALLY seriously, but the real issue in our raid was that we really had a LOT of melee (lots of Warriors AND rogues), so we would either have to stand there to not get conflagged/arcane explosioned, OR we could bandaid. And really, bandaiding helped a TON. It let all our healers wand or cast spells. So after I think our rogue lead started doing it for fun, we all started to compete.

I'm surprised that more raids DIDN'T do it.

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You seem pretty knowledgeable about rogues but...didn't agility increase attack power? Weren't rogues #2 in dps on Patchwerk second to fury warriors, therefore their gear must have scaled more than you're making it sound like it did.

And your post above is accurate, but I was talking about the chances that CCs would break randomly if a player didn't have capped spell hit. I added that to a new section. I also added a reference to your post on page 35. And what blossom are you talking about?

I also added that taunt was a spell to the warrior section, and that it would randomly fail just because of RNG.

Also added that there were no achievements (dunno how that slipped through), that there was no armory, there was no way to verify player experience besides gear or quizzing them, and that because there were no mounts in 20-29 and 30-39 battlegrounds druids were OP.

Also my avatar just ticked over to 7-year member today!

There were no guild banks either, just saying. Someone would have an account of "bank alts" that would be the WHOLE BANK for the guild. And yes, that would get stolen constantly.

1. Patchwerk - was totally a rogue fight. It was the LAST one though. And that had everything to do with Fury warriors having a bit more health and execute being on a 1 second cooldown with infinate rage due to fast offhand speeds. Eventually, pushing through the last 20% of a boss became more important than sustained DPS, and fury warriors could push higher numbers overall. Likewise, we often had our Fury warriors on Patchwerk anyway, because you could stance dance into defensive during the cleave and be the third offtank for cleaves. Rogues couldn't even evasion out of it, because it would hit the next person in line.

2. Not for melee, thank GOD. Rogue abilities WERE NOT SPELLS back then, so you could be fully silenced and still do everything. We could fight in BAT COSTUMES and often did for fun. (that costume silences you) So as long as you were above the hit cap, it would ALWAYS hit (from behind). That's why the stunlock was so terrible, because you could 100-0 someone while they could do nothing. Eventually DR was introduced in 1.10 or 1.11 to the point where you couldn't stunlock anymore, because after the third stun, they'd be immune.

3. Yes taunt was a spell. HAH WARRIORS!

4. Blossom is "Fire Blossom", it's from the trash in Baron Geddon's room. The spell is http://www.wowhead.com/spell=19637/fire-blossom

[Orby]

Hunter:
Used mana (and carried and drank mana pots, and I think wore one or two items of intellect gear)
Were all named Légölâs (edit: special characters weren't allowed until later, it was xxLegolaasxx for a while)
Had 2 stable slots
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Broken_Tooth
Had a minimum range for ranged attack. It was larger than melee range, so there was a dead zone where hunters could not attack players in PvP, which everyone tried to exploit.
(?) Was marksman the only viable spec?
Had to feed their pets
Had to carry ammo. For a 3-hour raid, this was a significant burden given the small bag space available at the time.
Quivers buffed their attack speed. (Quivers took a bag slot.)
Got the Tome of Tranquilizing Shot ability from Lucifron in Molten Core. This was an important ability to dispel enrages on several bosses, including Magmadar, the second boss of MC. Hunters were the only class that could perform this task.
Had a special bow from Majordomo Executus that required completing a very difficult quest
Didn't initiate auto shoot by right clicking mobs
Pet abilities had to be gathered by taming beasts that posses them. Taming a beast that knew bite rank 2, allowed the hunter to teach bite rank 2 to other pets eligible to learn it. Beast Lore told you what abilities pets had.
Pets did not automatically go up to the hunter's level when tamed. If a player was 60 and tamed a rare pet or wanted a new animal type, the pet started at its original level and had to be leveled up separately.
The Survival 31 point talent was "Lacerate" which did less damage than a Serpent Sting cast by a level 26 hunter. This was fixed in 1.7. It was arguably the most underpowered end-tree talent the game ever had, and an example of how unbalanced things were until each class had their tuning pass.
Several of the abilities hunters had back then are still in, such as traps, aimed shot, multi-shot, volley, and arcane shot. Marksman hunters actually still have a similar feel to what they used to be. There was no camouflage, self-heal, or

Hunter is the class I will be revisiting in Classic as I remember having one in vanilla but only as a twink and just did BG's with it. as BG's back then didn't yield honor. I didn't make it an official alt until TBC launched. My main was a mage for which Iw as raiding with back then but I regret not getting my hunter tot he same level.

Most of those reasons you list are why I loved hunters, actually taking care of your pet was one of the appeals, and one for the reason why I used to call Hunters Tamagotshi's back then. I do miss the feel of being an actual hunter , not an 'Archer' which is basically what current WoW hunters have become. Hunter was about surviving, so you had your gun or bow, you had your traps, you had you close range weapons for melee when enemies got into your dead zone (as unaffected as they were), but there was the sense that you were a hunter.

[Erous]

Yes. Now, I took it REALLY seriously, but the real issue in our raid was that we really had a LOT of melee (lots of Warriors AND rogues), so we would either have to stand there to not get conflagged/arcane explosioned, OR we could bandaid. And really, bandaiding helped a TON. It let all our healers wand or cast spells. So after I think our rogue lead started doing it for fun, we all started to compete.

Don't sell this as being the norm. This is lunacy. I killed razergore 39485969704859607 times and never, ever, never ever never had this as a strategy. I don't disagree that bandaiding was helpful, because it was, but rogues as healers is absolutely ridiculous. Next to fury warriors they were DPSamazing. Any strat that involved rogues healing would've gimped the entire raid.

[epLe]

Shazz was extremely melee unfriendly, but having rogues on healing duty is abit excessive.
Major Arcane Protection Potions and some priest bubbles, and you should be able to carefully dps more than bandaging would heal easily.

For Patchwerk, it wasnt really a rogue vs warr fight at all, but it was one of the few melee friendly fights in there.
So a typical melee heavy horde group (WF totems) would have those classes high on the meters there.
But for alliance raids it was a totally different story, Fire mages was untouchable on top thanks to ignite, then locks, hunters and rogues fighting for spots behind em.

[Deleted]

I just read the first part of it and im sure the ppl that he mentions were just new to mmorpgs. Back in the day we came with a complete Guild from Lineage 2 and ofc everyone knew what a f****** Tank was.

[Broken Fox]

I just read the first part of it and im sure the ppl that he mentions were just new to mmorpgs. Back in the day we came with a complete Guild from Lineage 2 and ofc everyone knew what a f****** Tank was.

The majority of the Vanilla player base were new to MMOs

[He-man]

I started playing wow when there was only about 400,000 subs 2months after launch I leveled my first character to 34 or some thing. then I took a brake for a year to finish high school and started a new character (because they didn't have transfers yet) and leveled from 1-60 pretty fast and got to 60 around the time silithus was released.

the only other MMOs I played was just in the starting zones and random exploration I played abit of runescape, archeron online and planetside my main experience for wow was probably that I played Morrowind abit.

In the year that I took off wow (most of 2005) I spent alot of time researching the game watching PVP videos and understanding the rogue class better so I was ready when I came back.

my guild wasn't the best joined in 2006 we hadn't killed rag yet but could kill onixya . with me and my close school buddies in the guild about 8 of us we basically lead the guild thru MC and NAXX and managed to kill nef then we started both AQ40 and NAxx at the same time but we where so behind on gear and the guild was pretty terrible that we never really had a chance.

but yer 2006 the year I raided was amazing it was the best gaming time of my life and while it was a huge time investment it was totally worth it looking back and its what makes me so excited for classic servers.

when TBC came out I was pretty mixed feelings. it was upsetting to replace all the gear I had spent a entire year getting (I had full T2) but I was excited about the lore and was pretty optimal in how I played the game. I stayed up for like 25+ hours at TBC launch and was actually at one point the fastest leveler on the server but I remember going to sleep and waking up and having a very different attitude towards TBC I sorta gave up I don't know how to explain it.. I still leveled up pretty fast and had prepped for the expansion with the ability to craft best weapons and stuff my guild really sucked in TBC thou I honestly cant remember what we did I think abit of vash abit of grull and stuff and I think we killed grull but I cant remember. basically when the guild started falling apart and it was clear most of the people in my guild didn't really have the commitment me and my friends have we split off I stoped raiding and I maybe stayed sub to TBC for 4-5months but eventually stopped playing.

only one of my friends was a hardcore raider in TBC he seemed to have fun joined a better guild and I think killed every boss or maybe most of sunwell. I stayed in contact with him and the raiding stuff it seemed interesting more mechanics and stuff but still didn't have that hardcore feel of classic people seemed to get gear more and faster but maybe that's not true not sure. my other friend who was a hunter wanted to play my rogue in pvp arena mainly I think so he started playing my character for maybe a year or so I eventually got it back with heaps of gear and tried to play for abit towards the end of TBC did the sunwell quests etc and yer then played WOTLK got to max level in WOTLK and was totally burned out not interested in the content and quit again.

I think my experience is pretty typical of most wow palyers if you look at the playerbase numbers my experience pretty much lines up exactly with the sub counts with them leveling off in wotlk and then droping after.

idknow I wish wow was better. I wish it went back to 40mans I wish you had to farm more and there was more interesting pots and items and things to make pvp and pve more interesting but when ever I look at it now every thing seems normalized and overly balanced and focused on a smooth experience rather than a hardcore one.

but yer when you look at it I really only played wow hardcore for a year and then maybe another year of random leveling and catching up to expansions and being disillusioned I just couldn't get motivated to get on the tread mill again.

but yer I think most people will play classic for about 2 years and you guys might laugh at that and say its possible to clear all the content in afue months or some thing but that's not most people that's really pro people most people will want to slowly get the gear and then progress etc and that would take a 40man guild about 2 years.

[Dembai]

Don't sell this as being the norm. This is lunacy. I killed razergore 39485969704859607 times and never, ever, never ever never had this as a strategy. I don't disagree that bandaiding was helpful, because it was, but rogues as healers is absolutely ridiculous. Next to fury warriors they were DPSamazing. Any strat that involved rogues healing would've gimped the entire raid.

We had issues with conflags doing too much damage to the tanks. The two tanks would spin him 180 between each other, in order to be at max distance and not conflag each other. The rogues, if they could even stand between them, still had a chance to wander too close to the tanks and damage them. Because his damage to the raid was on a timer, we found that with just a few healers, we could have the melee bandaid instead of taking damage and possibly wiping us, that while the fight was a little slower it was more consistant. Again, part of this was that our guild had a LOT of melee.

He didn't have an enrage timer, and we didn't have to change up our speed on him because we could do the suppression room without stopping (again, too many rogues, lol, we could just walk through it). It's probable that we could have had a better strat for him once we got some better gear, but it was fun by that point. XD

[ifrah]

Likewise, we often had our Fury warriors on Patchwerk anyway, because you could stance dance into defensive during the cleave and be the third offtank for cleaves. Rogues couldn't even evasion out of it, because it would hit the next person in line.

The what? Your raid had enough actual tanks anyway for the hateful strike soaking, should you plan to progress anywhere in the instance in the first place. Stance dancing all the time (rage down to 25 tops) would do wonders for their dps as it was cast around ~1,5s or so interval. Full dps geared fury warrior, not quite sure would that even soak the strike without getting squished (don't know if things changed enough after farming ~full BiS, in which case the whole argument is pointless). Should the fury warrior be taking the hateful strike to begin with, either you had offtank(s) dead or healers so badly behind that poop was going to hit the fan anyway.

Even the given fury warriors would have been able to successfully soak the strikes, it still makes no sense whatsoever. Hampering their dps excessively, having to chug consumables for stamina instead of dps, being useless burden for healers (or the rogues running with bandages, huh?). Just does not add up in any way. At the last percent enrage melee dps (may have) got on the hateful duties after the OTs shield walls were expired and the boss was still up. Then usually the fury warriors just got squished, and rogues played combined evasion Russian roulette until either the boss bit the dust or it was time for another go.

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Hey, Naxx required Shadow Priests for Instructor Razuvious. On the other hand, I remember my first Ony pull.... I was a Fire mage, 1st cast "Immune" and I had to scramble to pull Frostbolt out of my spell book. >.<

Or you could just farm whatever number of spell hit gear you could and then cross fingers that the baseline (was it 1%) miss rate won't shaft you. Lovely encounter overall.

[Chaelexi]

Vanilla: Things that vanilla was:
1) No Story Fluidity: There would be stories that start and lead nowhere, there were stories that sent you half way around the world to talk to someone to come all the way back when you found out they were dead, lost, or useless.
2) Poor quest design: it was go kill 15 of..... or go collect 10..... which meant killing 40..... Tonnes of courier quests that had no reason for you to go somewhere(did not lead you to your next quest zone) as they would send you back to where you were to finish questing there.
3) Gaps in leveling experience: you could finish all zones and not be high enough to move on to next zone
4) Dungeons that for better or worse were a maze that if you lost a member for whatever reason you were not finishing the dungeon or waiting 30 minutes for someone to go back to IF/Org/SW to find someone and by then the party died.
5) boring rotations, shadowbolt, shadowbolt, guess what shadowbolt again......mage frostbolt, frostbolt, and another frostbolt..........warrior spam heroic strike, hit whatever other dps button there was heroic strike or bloodthirst........tank warrior, keep thunder clap(if needed), demo shout and 5 sunders up. Extra rage use guess what Heroic strike
6) single mechanic fights: almost every fight in Vanilla was easy and most fights were a one trick pony and if it had a second mechanic it was wing buffet......, it was dodge....... or get enough resistances to soak........ or kill the adds....... Especially now with the current addons and general player skill it will be a joke.

- - - Updated - - -

Don't sell this as being the norm. This is lunacy. I killed razergore 39485969704859607 times and never, ever, never ever never had this as a strategy. I don't disagree that bandaiding was helpful, because it was, but rogues as healers is absolutely ridiculous. Next to fury warriors they were DPSamazing. Any strat that involved rogues healing would've gimped the entire raid.

Once the eggs are dead you could kill him with 5 people...... There was a bug/exploit where you could drop the control and pick it up with 2 people where he would keep would not refill on health but the targets would leave. as long as there was 2 tanks, a healer and 2 dps you could dps the last 5% with everyone hearthed out......and then only 5 people got the raid lockout.

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Hey, Naxx required Shadow Priests for Instructor Razuvious. On the other hand, I remember my first Ony pull.... I was a Fire mage, 1st cast "Immune" and I had to scramble to pull Frostbolt out of my spell book. >.<

YOu did not need shadow priests for this, regular healing priests worked fine with some hit gear. Shadow priests were never needed as they just took up debuff slots that were better used elsewhere.

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Yes. Now, I took it REALLY seriously, but the real issue in our raid was that we really had a LOT of melee (lots of Warriors AND rogues), so we would either have to stand there to not get conflagged/arcane explosioned, OR we could bandaid. And really, bandaiding helped a TON. It let all our healers wand or cast spells. So after I think our rogue lead started doing it for fun, we all started to compete.

I'm surprised that more raids DIDN'T do it.

How about the bug when bow use on rogues and warriors did not have a GCD. They could outdps everyone by spamming bow. Put it on your mouse wheel and scroll. It would shoot as fast as you could scroll. And during that fight it was only early that you had to worry about the damage he did. Once you had T1 it was a joke.

[khalltusk]

Shazz was extremely melee unfriendly, but having rogues on healing duty is abit excessive.
Major Arcane Protection Potions and some priest bubbles, and you should be able to carefully dps more than bandaging would heal easily.

For Patchwerk, it wasnt really a rogue vs warr fight at all, but it was one of the few melee friendly fights in there.
So a typical melee heavy horde group (WF totems) would have those classes high on the meters there.
But for alliance raids it was a totally different story, Fire mages was untouchable on top thanks to ignite, then locks, hunters and rogues fighting for spots behind em.

Our guild had the shitty rogues and warriors (who always died otherwise) use their ranged weapons. Ghetto hunters on Shaz in MC.

[Chaelexi]

Our guild had the shitty rogues and warriors (who always died otherwise) use their ranged weapons. Ghetto hunters on Shaz in MC.

The best tank for Shaz was a Demo Lock. Searing pain spam could out threat a warrior tank in no time and she would return quick.

[garicasha]

I think the biggest error in Vanilla was not properly informing the players during the process if picking a character what each spec really "meant" at end game. If you read the different spec description all you got was "formidable hand to hand combatant", "excells at empowering allies", "powerfull spell caster", etc; when in thruth some of those specs where really "pvp only spec", "just for leveling spec", "real end game viable spec" and/or "you-are-only-hear-to-press-a-button-when-we-tell-you-to spec".

I think this wont be an issue for classic though. People will be going into vanilla with a wealth of information thats far greater than it was back in vanilla.

So much this.

The one that especially gets me is paladins. Diablo 2 was still a huge game at WoW launch, and Hammerdins were unstoppable killing machines at the time. I think many people rolled one expecting them to be similar in WoW, not a class you afk auto-attack mobs to death on.

[khalltusk]

The best tank for Shaz was a Demo Lock. Searing pain spam could out threat a warrior tank in no time and she would return quick.

Don't think our guild ever tried that. This was one of the fights I enjoyed as I could lightning bolt spam! not much else to heal when the melee are not busy dying.

[garicasha]

In the very very beginning, did flasks last through death? And when were they turned from 1 flask for 2 hours to 2 flasks for 1 hour?

Also, what exactly did the world buffs come from, what did they buff, and did they last through death?

[Spyro-]

Question for the Vanilla experts: How viable is to multibox leveling 5 different classes at the same time? I'm thinking to do that in Classic. How many hours would it take?

[garicasha]

PvP or PvE server?

[Deleted]

Question for the Vanilla experts: How viable is to multibox leveling 5 different classes at the same time? I'm thinking to do that in Classic. How many hours would it take?

On every private server I've played on multiboxing is a perma bannable offence.

[ifrah]

In the very very beginning, did flasks last through death? And when were they turned from 1 flask for 2 hours to 2 flasks for 1 hour?

Also, what exactly did the world buffs come from, what did they buff, and did they last through death?

At least since I've been involved with "flasked raiding" (MT flasked in some BWL boss(es) before AQ was open, they lasted for 2 hours and persisted through death. Fishing the stonescale eels was as joyful as you can think of. Like farming the million herbs for the same flasks and everything else. The 1hr duration is quite new change, as I think all flasks were 2hrs thru TBC and WotLK as well.

World buffs were acquired from returning the quests that you got from slaying Onyxia which gave "Rallying cry of the dragonslayer" after returning the Onyxia's head to SW/Org. And Hakkar (in ZG) which gave "Spirit of Zandalar" when returning the heart of Hakkar to the Zandalari isle in STV. These buffs were lost upon death, and I don't remember any more if the currently listed stat boosts in wowhead or such are in line (apart from some scalings) with the original ones. Getting all the raid to the aforementioned locations (esp. STV), buffing up, returning to the instance and hoping that this is now The attempt, stakes were high.
Out of any buffs/consumables only flasks and weapon oils/grinding stones lasted through death.