Some things you didn't know about WoW...

[Dunks]

That legendary necklace that you mentioned brought back some memories. When server transfers were allowed Nerfed moved to Dethecus - US. I remember Noktyn kicking my butt so many times in WSG, (there were no cross server bg's at the time you could only fight people on your server) We ended up with quite a PVP rivalry with those guys.

[GT4]

Here's a link to most beta talent trees, I don't think it's been mentioned yet:
http://wowvault.ign.com/View.php?cat...ents.View.Beta
Some classes' talents have actually stayed rather similar while others were completely changed.

[fendrix]

Oh, one more thing about warriors, charge use to be able to be used in combat. However, the rage gain from it was though to be to over powered and the short cooldown more so, so they added in intercept for in combat charge.

[Benjamima]

Very nice read the videos were very interesting

[dulci5]

* AV was released after a while as the first "really real" BG

Wrong. AV was the second, WSG was the first

[Sakarti]

back in vanilla rogues poison damage actually increased with spell power and had stacks instead of duration.
Poisons were also made from poison profession and some abilities like blind and vanish required reagents.
Silithus in the beginning wasn't a clickable zone and had no loot drops.
WSG i think was the first bg and you had to actually go to the bg entrances and click to enter after a game was over or you would be locked out until new game.

[underdogba]

-Since the vanilla definition of "Hybrid Class" really meant "Hybrid Class", the itemization was quite strange. Paladins/druids/shamans had all stats on their gear, and for some reason rogues, warriors and some other classes had spirit or some useless stat for them on their gear.

Spirit increases your health regen out of combat (although apparently won't in cataclysm), so during levelup, it's not exactly totally useless for manaless classes, although on endgame gear it doesn't make much sense (except maybe other than a way to balance classes by dumping stats).

[Deleted]

You could not eat and drink at the same time - was patched in (not sure when)

[Krekko]

Some random stuff from vanilla/BC:
- Hunter Pets didn't have normalized stats in the very beginning and it took several patches to normalize their stats like resistances, damage, armor, health, etc. . Even in late vanilla there were still pets with different attack speeds (Broken Tooth/ZG Bats were the fastest) and "glitched pets" (e.g. some wolf from Duskwood doing shadow damage with all attacks).
- Rogue poisons had a fixed damage, fixed proc chance, a maximum amount of charges (~100) and half the duration. They also didn't stack with windfury totem or sharpening stones and there were many bosses until mid BC immune to poisons.
- Until WotLK windfury totem enhanced the main-hand weapons of everybody in the shaman's group to have a 20% chance to hit twice, not stacking with poisons, sharpening stones or the shaman's own weapon imbues. In BC this was nerfed to only proc from white hits and in WotLK it was scrapped for the 20% haste buff it grants now. Back before WotLK it was also on the same totem school as grace of air and, by swapping those totems once every ~8 seconds, you could grant your party both buffs.
- Back in vanilla (and halfway into BC) all extra attacks could proc themselves and each other. This includes sword specialization, windfury, windfury totem, hand of justice (a popular level 60 trinket granting a 2% chance for an extra hit) and several weapon procs.
- Back in vanilla there were also many more under- or overpowered procs which were changed in almost every patch. E.g. mace specialization was buffed from 5% to ~40% (for a 3.8 speed weapon) and then nerfed back to ~12% over the course of many patches. Many Warriors used it in combination with the knockback proc on the AV exalted weapon called The Unstoppable Force.
- In the very beginning of vanilla weapon damage for instant strikes wasn't normalized so the crafted Arcanite Reaper was among the strongest Warrior weapons while the Barman Shanker (a 2.0 speed dagger from BRD) was among the strongest Rogue weapons even including MC epics.
- Expertise was called weapon skill and increased the damage of your glancing hits against enemies higher than you until you reached a certain value. Because of that even rare level weapon skill items could be as strong or stronger than even T2 quality epics.
- Insignia of the Alliance/Horde had a 5 minutes cooldown and the effects it removed depended on the class. A Warlock e.g. couldn't remove stuns with his insignia.
- Shortly before release not only Paladins but also Warriors were hit by the nerf stick, here's a Warrior move from beta before Slam, Bloodthirst, etc. were changed/nerfed (Bloodthirst doubled your damage for one attack after killing an enemy and Slam had a lower base cast time and didn't reset the swing timer like it did in vanilla and BC): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6SieyEObrg
Remember: That's a Warrior in only green and rare items below 60 and every class was doing way less damage and healing than now.
- Talent trees in general had much less of a common theme. Classes capable of healing almost always healed in raids and only went into other trees to pick up raid buffs (BoK was a 31 points Ret talent). "Hybrid damage" was, besides that of Warriors, almost non-existant and Warriors were the only class used as main tank. Druids could reach insane amounts of armor and HP but I cannot remember why they weren't used as tanks. Maybe it was threat because the feral tree really sucked and even in Feral gear you usually went into the Restoration tree.
- In vanilla there were many tricks to level insanely fast as certain classes. They were mostly fixed in mid vanilla. E.g. I leveled my Mage ~5 times as fast as usual by AoEing mobs in the beginning of Dire Maul (which by the way was also patched in later, in 1.3.0) and resetting the instance over and over again.

Cannot really remember most beta stuff but I remembered pretty much everything in the OP.

With all due respect, this is a little bit more "Patch notey" then the main post. The main post is a lot of "easter eggs" or hidden gems as you will and less just plain ol' changes.

[Adlian]

At the beginning of The Buring Crusade rogue and warrior's Mace Specc talent was giving chance to stun the target using Mace weapon. The stun had no ICD.

At that poing the rogues was playing pvp combat and they was able to keep their target stunned till its dead. > alot of complaining followed and this talent was replaced with the current one granting ARP very quickly.

On the other hand warriors version of that talent was unchanged till the end of TBC. Using Stormherald it was fun to watch RNG stun comming from everywhere but with the Wotlk this talent was changed too and that was the end of Stunlock warriors.

[GT4]

With all due respect, this is a little bit more "Patch notey" then the main post. The main post is a lot of "easter eggs" or hidden gems as you will and less just plain ol' changes.

It's the same sort of things as in the end of the main post. Everything I mentioned would be quite ridiculous now. However, I agree, the OP shouldn't have added the stuff in the end and rather stayed at fancy changes.

[Moonthunder]

Gogo melee priest!

[freezion]

sadly, enough, i've been playing wow so long i have experienced all of this shit. and the spirit on gear as a warrior? well simply, we had a talent back then that allowed 25% of the spirits Hp regen, to regen while in combat
but wow were a mess in the beginning.

[Moonthunder]

At the beginning of The Buring Crusade rogue and warrior's Mace Specc talent was giving chance to stun the target using Mace weapon. The stun had no ICD.

At that poing the rogues was playing pvp combat and they was able to keep their target stunned till its dead. > alot of complaining followed and this talent was replaced with the current one granting ARP very quickly.

On the other hand warriors version of that talent was unchanged till the end of TBC. Using Stormherald it was fun to watch RNG stun comming from everywhere but with the Wotlk this talent was changed too and that was the end of Stunlock warriors.

Boomkins used to have a talent called Celestial Focus which gave starfire a 3/6/9% chance to stun for 3 seconds. They removed it and now it gives 3% spell haste. Meh, nerf us into the ground in pvp more why don't ya blizz!

[Agoonga]

Can someone read this to me?

[freezion]

-Survival talents for hunters was the "melee" tree and they had a lacerate ability which dealt less than 100 damage at lvl 60.

that's not true at all, the tooltip says it didnt do alot of damage, but it scaled INCREDIBLY well with your attackpower.

[Quincey]

Nice list - a few things i didn't know
But it was ace to go 'Oh yeah i remember that!'

As for the shaman Windfury proccing off each other, i remeber one of our guild shamans taking around 80% life from Good'ol Rend (He WAS a raid boss back then, back off!)

[Krekko]

Sure hop on my lap and lets have story time!

[GT4]

that's not true at all, the tooltip says it didnt do alot of damage, but it scaled INCREDIBLY well with your attackpower.

If I remember correctly, it didn't scale at all. Had a Hunter back then and Survival only became useful once they redesigned it and added the 15% agility talent.
However, besides doing laughable damage, Arcane Shot scaled with SP back then and Blizzard had the retarded idea to include SP on ZG and T2.5 sets which made them significantly worse than other items at the same level.

[underdogba]

sadly, enough, i've been playing wow so long i have experienced all of this shit. and the spirit on gear as a warrior? well simply, we had a talent back then that allowed 25% of the spirits Hp regen, to regen while in combat
but wow were a mess in the beginning.

I had totally suspected such a thing existed at some point, either talented or baseline. That's very interesting to have it confirmed.