When I was playing title was demoted when your rank decayed.
I believe it was changed in 2.0.1 before TBC.
Feral4Life since 2005
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Rank7-10 can be done casually, still with pvp>pve and the gear is pretty much legit
Rank 14 requires account sharing/pvp mafia-cartel proof : i helped in account sharing for a R14 friend during highschool
I will obtain GM / HW on one character and I will solo it.
Mhhh wait maybe the issue is regarding how we perceive "casual" I mean you can get to rank 10 (7 for sure) playing really little like 2-4h per day doing BG a lot and with some kind of premade ( quite easier now thx to discord )
Also it is 1.12 and I don't recall which patch but made things way better, still grindy, something about how the DR on CP or something.
If you perceive Casual like " 10 hours per week " we'll probably 10 is out of reach but 6-7 ( where the 2pc blue set kicks in ) is doable if you PvP more than PvE
No account sharing. I was still in high school back then. I skipped school a lot basically to get rank 14. Played like 16 hours per day. Was on Lightbringer server. And no, I did not end up being a high school dropout either (though at the time I skipped school so much that some people might have thought I was going to be. xD)
Raided after. I got into a good raiding guild. A lot of people who hit rank 14 quit after, which didn't make it worthwhile for them, but because I got a ticket to a good guild at the time, it was worth it for me. I don't think I would have gotten into said guild if I didn't have rank 14, to be honest. Saved me some DKP too, because I already had some good gear. Didn't need to be geared from ground zero.
I remember we accepted a R14 Rogue with such "free ticket" into our raiding (we were no1 on Server and doing well world-wide as well, we cleared Naxx proper as well) during AQ (shortly after it went live). I think its reroll PvE for R14 or just quit in the end from overburning.
Interesting fact, we did boost our MT to R14 (no acc share) during Naxx times as well lol, it didnt take that long as well, but I guess times were bit different.
You are both correct, originally if you lost your rank, you also lost the ability to USE it aswell, not just buy it, this was changed quickly for obvious reasons.
Allowing people to buy the new updated gear with their lifetime highest rank was also a thing, but abit later.
Vanilla had lots of weird stuff like this, for example if you were an enhancement shaman, and got your 2h axes up to 300... and then respecced, you lost your skill and had to re-grind it... every, single, time.
But back to the topic, loosing the ability to use your rank gear if you lost the required rank was absolutely a thing in the early days of the honor system.
I know one guy who went to R13 solo, dwarf Ret who took things slow but he got there after 7 or 8 months of constantly farming AV. For R14 he joined a group were i helped out a few times bcs. aq 40 / naxx gear.
Its was hilarous when the ret announces "I will make that mage my bitch" and see's it through the whole game ^^
Yeah, I think we got something like 12/15 Naxx in the end (got up to Four Horsemen), which means we did not clear Naxx but still impressive regardless. There was only one other guild on the server who did clear it, but never checked with them. Could I have gotten in the best guild with just r14? I don't know. Maybe. Perhaps it would have been a bonus, but maybe they wanted to see raid experience as well. The other guild was the first to scout me in an AQ20 run and asked me to apply.
I never tried to app to the top guild on the server, because I was happy in the other guild. Barely ever wiped in MC, BWL, Onyxia and the like, and pretty much breezed through it all, since we had it on farm status. And did ZG runs twice a week too, where many members brought alts to gear them up, and some mains for the ZG enchants and rep if they still needed. I think I spent more time in ZG than any other raid instance in vanilla probably, because it had a lockout of only half a week and only a 20-man requirement, which made it easier to organize.
The ZG raids for our guild was much less formal, and that is where you really made friends, because it was a more close-knit group of people. And it never became irrelevant for us at least, because there were always people needing those enchants. Kara I guess would be the TBC version of ZG, but it did lose relevance later since it did not provide an equivalent of those enchants. Missing those enchants meant your character was not the best it could be. Plain and simple
I got Rank13 once and Rank11 Twice in Vanilla and I won't got for 13/14 again. It was the worst grind of my life and I was on a super small Realm.