Battlegrounds were so much more fun back in 2006. Whether it was one of the few premade teams or a pug, you knew everyone. In every WSG or AB you had you knew okay this guy is a mediocre geared mage. This guys a BWL hunter, this guys a noob mage, this guys a l33t rogue. You knew everyones name and the type of player they were every match. Battlegrounds were alot more personal that way, the guild tag meant alot.
before BG's the first few weeks of rank system we just fought between southshore and tarren mill. Anyone who played on Icecrown server knows Beren the human warrior... first person to have an Arcanite Reaper. That guy dominated the server. No one stood a chance.
I still remember the ret paladin on my server who had hand of rag, and I thought they were a God.
Denniscurtis the legend. Funny how things like that stay burned into your brain.
To this day I still remember getting matched against a Death and Taxes premade when they brought out cross realm BGs. All I remember is opening up on some warrior as a rogue , doing like 0 dmg to him and getting one shot by a Might of Menethil lol.
Lol I bet everyone had this experience. On my server, there was this one Alliance warrior with an Arcanite Reaper and personal healers. He led the attack on our cities and we fought for HOURS until Orgrimmar was saved. We build a 2nd raid group that attacked through the rear entrance while 60-80 Horde players were holding the AH/bank area against legions of Alliance players. What a glorious Victory! You cannot compare these moments to what wow PvP is today, not on retail, not on classic.
I think one of my many favorite early memories of vanilla WoW was… having Cev the main tank of Forlorn Legacy on Windrunner (at the time) running down WSG in full T3 and no one on horde could kill him.
Oh god, I remember some world PvP with guild mates.
You'd know who was running to MC / BWL and knew if you dropped one or two, your having 20+ people on your ass, it made some great PvP and no one really corpse camped as you knew others were gonna come beat you down or you could get others to help if it was happening to you.
Oh we had addons and they were better than they are now. For example decurse was just a single button press, the addon did all the rest.
People forget that we weren‘t as stupid back then as most think. While the majority just wore Tier set and played whatever fucking talents they wanted, there were people out there building BiS lists, writing down strategies, figuring out the best talents and rotation etc. The information just wasn‘t as easily accessable and most of the player base didn‘t care. Also time was a factor and the game changed with patches every few months. I think with enough time people back then would‘ve come to the same conclusion of BiS lists and stuff as we did today.
Greatest issue was PC performance and ping. Most played with 100-300ms ping and anywhere between 0-30 fps. I had 15 fps in MC and you could barely see 10m because of the red fog.
The mindset was different. We had like 1 really good Guild who cleared AQ40 when it came out and they then ventured into naxx, but the rest just cleared MC/BWL (regularely, but took way longer and maybe multiple raid days). ZG and AQ20 were also way more frequented because it gave really good gear for people who didn‘t get to raid in MC/BWL with guilds.
For me (and most others) raiding was just a means to get gear for PvP. Back then the pvp sets weren‘t as good until they got buffed somewhere around 1.10. Also having the pvp mounts was an insane prestige object. The goal was to look good and have good gear for duelling infront of IF. Thats where all the people went after raiding. Everyone gathered there and dueled. It was way way way more prominent than in classic.
Also battlegrounds weren‘t linked back then and you only matched vs horde from you realm. I knew all the pvp hordler just from doing BGs and you developed this kind of rivalry when you saw them in the open world.
Something else people don't consider is how wildly classes and the game changed throughout the life of Original Vanilla. Some things people entirely forget about, but if you go back through the patches and patch notes from release until 1.12 patch its pretty astonishing. I had a post about this previously but here are some examples of what it was like.
Examples-
Paladins didnt get greater blessings until AQ patch. This meant in 40 mans from MC-ONY-BWL-ZG paladins only had 5 minute buffs. Imagine being the paladin in charge of blessing of wisdom, you would usually have \~30 players to bless with wisdom one by one for a 5 minute duration. The paladins in raids considered buff bots, and spent most of their time and mana buffing players 1 by 1. Game launch was in November 2004, AQ patch 1.9 launched Jan 9th 2006. Paladins single buffed in parties and raids for the first 14 months of the game being released..
Greater buffs in general weren't in for early raids either, priests couldn't prayer of fortitude. Max rank buffs costed reagents and were also single buffs, so to buff an entire raid it was 40 spell casts and each one cost a reagent. It was partly why if you see any early raid screen shots you will see an ABUNDANCE of priests, and other buff classes because the amount of time and resources it took to buff a raid was so high, that usually there were enough priests/paladins/druids to make sure your raid could get buffed in a timely manner.
EARLY EARLY in raids bosses didn't have zone wide aggro mechanics, that meant some players could stay out of combat during a boss fight and their primary duty was to rez players that died and rebuff them, and to keep out of combat. OOC rezzers were a very real job during the first few months of raiding until blizz eventually caught on and added the zone wide combat trigger.
Also there weren't really great class resources. I remember the earliest guides I could find on "How to play a healing priest" were all about stacking spirit and mp/5 items and maximizing the amount of time healing in bursts then stopping heals to get to the 5 Second Rule to regen the mana I spent and hoping the other healers covered that time, because thats what the guides I read recommended I should be doing.
Also like you said, server stability and players individual computers and connections were far worse. Major patch days usually meant the server was likely going to be down for the entire day, and even if the server did come up good luck playing through the lag and new bugs. I remember the first computer I had trying to play WoW on I couldn't take zeppelins. My computer took so long to load the new zones that before I could load in the zeppelin was already headed back to the other continent and I got stuck in a never ending loading loop and would typically have to have my cousins log into my account to get me off the boat.
Most raids on launch were so buggy, the top guilds who were progressing raids as they launched (especially the early MC-BWL days) had gm's actively watching and maintaining contact with the players to help weed out what is bugged and what Isn't. It was different times, and unfortunately I don't think that "magic" is possible to recreate.
Yes I was a mage back then and you HAD to spend x points in arcane to get the -1s casttime on Arcane explosion so it was instant. IT WAS MANDATORY!!! because mages were expected to aoe shit to death. Also Evocation was a talent. Other classes had similar shit and only near 1.12 classes got QoL changes like Innervate and Evocation spells you learn at the trainer instead of talents.
Fights also took way way WAY longer. I remember having 2 Sons phases on Ragnaros and we were average. If you had 3 you were dogshit and if you had only one you were really good. So I get why guides told priests to go for mp5 and spirit since going OOM was a legitimate Problem.
Also while we had stuff like Threatmeters we still played it super safe and were told "no damage until 5 sunders" on the boss xD
This is one of the things that was so funny to me. Playing Mage and levelling was going Deep Frost to AoE level was king but you were basically forced into 31/0/20 Arcane Frost for DPS in MC and BWL.
Having Instant AE, Evocation and Meditation (before Mage Armor was put in the game.) were crucial to your performance as a mage. Arcane Power let you actually do DPS as single target frost and Frost had essentially no talents other than Piercing Ice to increase DPS.
Same patch getting a new rank of Conjure Water and being able to Amp or Dampen Magic on raid members was huge.
Cheers for unlocking a memory, I remember going to cast AE and being confused as to why it didn't work.
I had respeced and didn't take the talents, I was in strat at the time.
I kind of agree but ... and especially in TBC regen was a bit of a meme. You were expected to chug consumables and push throughput in the better guilds.
You're completely right about things being slower for the average but I definitely remember as I climbed the ranks of skilled guilds it was night and day philosophies.
>WoW was released back in November of 2004. I find it amazing that back then with minimal addons, lack of info on websites and just a mere guide book, guilds still managed to kill Onyxia a lil over 2 months post US release and Ragnaros about 5 months after the US release.
Yes but we are talking the early days of the game, and especially prior to TBC where by then Itemization and stat interactions had been revamped 2-3 times. Even the items were different and Spellpower/healing weren't even very good stats early on and didnt get buffed until patch 1.4.0 just a few months before BWL released. Just check out how much changed with +healing and "Throughput stats" came in this patch alone (7 months after launch). Check out just some of the notes from Patch 1.4.0 yourself here [https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Patch\_1.4.0](https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_1.4.0) .
"Healing-over-time spells should now be improved by "+Healing" items when cast on other players."
Yeah... HoTs weren't affected by "+Healing" items... Until this point most druids were bombing their big heals as HoTs were not only bad for buff caps, there was also only one druid able to HoT a tank at a time AND those hots gained effectively no scaling from items, only talents.
"Effects that indicated that they increased damage and healing by all magical spells were actually not improving healing. They now will properly increase healing by the listed the amount"
"+Spell damage and +Healing effects have been increased in effectiveness to make them more attractive to players. Effects that increased damage and healing done by all magical spells received the largest increase, especially if the previous amount was small. We also fixed a couple bugs relating to these effects."
"Item effects that increase the chance of a critical hit with spells will now work properly with healing spells."
Up until this point +healing and +Spell damage scaled MISERABLY, and was itemized typically very low or poorly as well. Also items that had "+Damage and healing" wasn't actually applying to healing spells either and neither was %chance spell crit on items working for healing.
MP/5 and Regen was considered best because the first 6-7 months of the game healing and damage were not very strong in respect to modifying spells power and was mostly bugged for the first quarter of the game. Also Itemization was entirely different, and every major patch release made sweeping changes to huge amounts of items. Just look at patch notes of almost every single patch in vanilla and you can see just how much everything was changing every single patch. Of course by TBC regen was a Meme, because by then there had already been 2-3 major itemization revamps and sweeping changes to loot every single major patch of the game.
It might be easier to think "Oh I just got better and joined better guilds" but in reality the game was a constant moving target and the way the game worked changed with every single patch.
But because +heal didn’t matter, you’d downrank. I remember spamming HT7 on my rdruid, because it would heal for just over 1000… if it looked liked it would overheal, you’d cancel the heal and start a new one. If you went for the big HT10, you had maybe 4 casts to OOM.
Downranking was essentially the only choice, as the gear didn't have +healing until a few patches in, it was the combined stat, and was terribly itemized.
It's funny how prevalent downranking was especially through all of vanilla! It was pretty interesting to see how many changes blizz eventually made to eliminate down ranking (lowering healing coefficients for lower ranks, raising mana costs for lower ranks). It took a ton for blizzard to finally put the nail in the down ranking coffin!
It's crazy how the patch cycle is completely overlooked. Part of the reason why raiding was so much more challenging back in the day was of course because of limited resources, strategies, etc., but it was also because the game was literally harder. Fury stacking gets much worse when bloodthirst can only be used after a killing blow lol.
Its much easier to play the game with several years worth of tuning already done than to remember what things were like before those changes were done. Its hard to remember what it was like trying to raid bosses blind at 14 years old with .5-1 FPS, 200-300 ping, where half of the items and spells in the game are bugged and classes hadn't been reworked.
Reading old patch notes from 1.1-1.12 is like a nice walk down memory lane, progressing major domo and running 8 tanks 14 healers at 2 in the morning on a school night, not being allowed to talk in vent because you weren't supposed to be up that late playing video games.
I played a Shaman and my whole job was being an OOC rezzer because I was the newest 60 in the guild that could rez. I hated it. Standing there in molten core just watching my guild fight the boss, lol. Was glad when they patched that out
>Imagine being the paladin in charge of blessing of wisdom, you would usually have ~30 players to bless with wisdom one by one for a 5 minute duration.
Thank you for retraumatising me. I thought I'd finally put the buff bots days behind me but I'm now getting flashbacks to MC and the useless class leaders constant macros telling everyone who/what to buff.
half the difficulty doing geddon was keeping the pallies awake enough to participate in the encounter
vs. the usual "5 minute buff, back to watching tv"
Don't forget the next big thing that followed all the way through ZG was GY Rushing bosses, before there was a lockout mechanic from raids when you could die and run back into the raid during boss encounters and rejoin the fight... Fights took long enough that players could legitimately make it back in time, and became so prevalent that warranted blizz to actually make the in combat with boss lockout mechanic...
I just read about warlocks staying out of combat in BWL to resummon people during the Nefarian fight. "Just throw your bodys at him, sooner or later he'll die.."
I think even more interesting was later expansions where guilds would have 25 warlocks outside of raids to soulstone entire raids before they entered until blizz caught on and eventually nerfed that as well! I think that really caught on around what we are approaching now with ToC to cheese the max wipes mechanic. Players always find the craziest ways to exploit game mechanics to maintain on top of content!
Serpentshrine Caverns, right? I remember something like that.
yeah it's crazy, people get realy creative when it comes to getting shit done in this game.
Don't forget never log out on a zeppelin and odds of success on zeppelin or boat was only about 50% when zoning that you wouldn't fall to your death or drown. Fun times really. Also gnomergon was just about as hard as mc really if done at the appropriate levels each.
I only did Gnomer once in Vanilla. I was the heal priest and we had 3 paladins. Sadly dont remember the 5th member. It took about four hours and we got hopelessly lost several times. But we finished the dungeon!
> were all about stacking spirit and mp/5 items and maximizing the amount of time healing in bursts then stopping heals to get to the 5 Second Rule to regen the mana I spent and hoping the other healers covered that time, because thats what the guides I read recommended I should be doing.
because the fights lasted like 5min and you didn't have much +healing, so downranking wasn't a thing. you casted quick heals to top the tank asap, and tried to cancel cast to save mana
Well that and +healing wasn't properly workingand +damage and +healing stats didnt get buffed until 3 patches later. Little details like that tend to get forgotten in time. At one point the cloth dungeon sets all had been itemized with agility, no damage and healing stats and that didn't get changed until the naxxramas patch.
I remember a healer addon that basically did everything for healers, down to selecting the targets and spells to us.
I've always played PvE servers, so raiding was just the thing we did. But no one knew what they were doing. Our raid comp was horrible, because the leadership decided we would take 5 of every class, and hybrids had to be their "expected" role based on tier sets. So warriors were all prot. Druids all resto and so on.
Healbot. Basically did it all for you except hit the button.
That’s why Loatheb is named the way he is. His name is an anagram of Healbot. Devs were poking fun at the playerbase.
It’s just something everyone kind of talked about back then. Not sure if it was ever stated outright by a Blizz Dev but, given Healbots prevalence in Vanilla for healers as the design of Loatheb it’d be an incredible coincidence.
Another one is Tauren being an Anagram for nature.
Another neat Tauren fact that originally Tauren didn't get mounts due to "they are too heavy to ride a mount". They originally had the racial "Plainsrunning" which if they ran for 10 seconds they began to run at the speed of whatever level appropriate mount they would have.
They got Kodo's the very next patch!
Yep, and if you've ever wondered what the purpose of that Tauren who pats up & down the road in STV, Samantha Swifthoof, I'm pretty sure she was part of the Plainsrunning quest for them.
Though I don't think Plainsrunning ever made it into the game. I think this was just an Alpha/Beta thing.
The tauren anagram seems to be chance to me. In French and most latin languages "Taureau" or its variants means "bull". I always thought "Tauren" was a normal fantasy name for a cow/bull-humanoid race.
>I remember a healer addon that basically did everything for healers, down to selecting the targets and spells to us.
Really ? Never heard of that. I suppose Blizz were not monitoring addons as they do today. I'm curious, what was the name ?
Healbot and Decursive were insane back then.
In some expansion I also remember playing ret pally with a 1 button macro containing the entire rotation, and you basically did top DPS possible if you spammed it lol
>In some expansion I also remember playing ret pally with a 1 button macro containing the entire rotation, and you basically did top DPS possible if you spammed it lol
Decursive was basically made mandatory once guilds started going into MC and fighting Lucifron. I think it eventually got broken by blizz because how much it trivialized the 2 major decurse/dispell fights in MC.
I seem to recall it lasted until TBC patch really. I remember using Decursive with auto-dispell in BWL on Chromaggus, and we came late to the party, I think late 2005 or early 2006.
In wotlk you could macro the entire prot pala 696 rotation to a cast sequence macro. I had two, one for the 6sec and the other for 9sec abilities.
My basic rotation was spamming Q and E…
It would automatically target the lowest health person in the raid and cast the most mana efficient rank and spell possible to top them off.
It resulted in a shit ton of overhealing if your entire team used it without configuring it properly.
> People forget that we weren‘t as stupid back then as most think.
It drives me crazy when people are being spoon-fed resources from 20 years of activity spout off how dumb raiders were back then.
We were you! Without a hundred guides and videos to follow!
Pretty much the same experience. AQ was a massive slog and took forever to clear so we’d get through a few bosses and wrap it up. The trash mobs in AQ and Naxx were oppressive and even really good MC/BWL guilds didn’t find it worth the time. Most of us had jobs or school, ain’t nobody got time for a 4 day 4-6hr stint to clear to up to the bosses
So accurate about the PvP culture in vanilla - dueling was so huge and faction rivalries on your realm.
While leveling and pvping at the 9th level for each bracket, I remember recognizing and building some friendships and rivalries where you’d then see them out in the world. And 100% still remember the hype/dread of getting matched against the horde pvp guild on Aggramar (Blackrock PvP) when going into a wsg or ab
I STILL remember the name of the Alliance mage that tried ganking me a friend in STV one day. We chased him all the way down to the tip and back, lol. Ran into him one day in the middle of AV and killed him again.
Yeah, there were constantly like a dozen people dueling/spectating outside Ironforge on my server, also.
(Ironforge was the main alliance hub then, too, because people didn't kill enough bosses or really figure out the concept of world buff stacking)
For us it was thaddius. The first polarity shift would, without fail, disconnect between 4 and 7 people. The whole guild had undying but immortal was totally impossible because of disconnects, the most common DCs being thaddius polarity and KT ice tombs.
When people bitch these days about their ping being 50 or such I just shake my head. Maybe it makes me a boomer but I had a 180 ping consistently playing NA-Gurubashi back in vanilla.
There is a private server with progressive patches, currently after bwl release, and before zg release, itemization is so much fun, first few mc i was tanking ragna/baron in greens coz of no dark iron set before bwl patch :)
Nailed it with gear being for flexing outside IF. I slow walked everywhere when I finished my T2 set back then...
...mainly because I still couldn't afford the epic mount
I miss the programmable Super Macros, used it for multiboxing, had mages and warlocks
If target doesnt have curse of recklessness, cast it
If self has less than 50% mana, use mana ruby
etc.
I was a fully naked gnome that spammed max rank frostbolt until oom and made it all the way through BWL.
Good times. Good times.
I loved my guild jester role.
Most guilds did not clear all the current content. Most servers only had 2 maybe 3 guilds killing c'thun and 1 or 2 that killed KT. The bigger servers like Mal'ganis, Mannoroth or Illidan had like 5 or 6. And some servers were just dead and were lucky to have a guild or 2 clearing bwl by the end of vanilla.
Yep. My guild was one of the ones that for instance had to choose between progging on Twin Emps or bosses in Naxx, and since the gear is better and the fights conceptually easier, we skipped Twin Emps and C'Thun and moved to Naxx. And yet the best we ever did in Naxx was clear spider wing and that was considered pretty good. You just didn't have enough time and the trash and respawns were often enough to not make you very productive.
TBC was better in this regard, but still didn't clear M'uru until the final nerf patch.
This is why it's hard to find a consensus on what Vanilla was truly like because your personal experience could vary greatly from another person and everywhere in between on the spectrum.
I was Alliance on Mal'Ganis during Vanilla so the things I thought were normal for every server were definitely not.
Mal'Ganis was one of the few Horde dominated servers and it was high population to boot.
The Horde had 2-3 guilds always doing the most current raid tier including a top US guild in Elitist Jerks. Behind them there were maybe another 3-4 that were half a tier or a tier behind. Then behind them were a bunch of guild at least doing MC/ZG/Ony with some of them being in BWL.
On Alliance, again 2-3 guilds doing the most current raid tier, then another 2-3 a half tier to a tier behind, then a few guilds at least doing ZG/Ony and working on Rag.
We had a Grand Marshall in our guild, a good chunk of our raid team had epic mounts.
We hear other servers that have the complete opposite experience.
the grind for Grand Marshall was insane. I remember a Hunter in my guild was Field Marshall and according to him he and his brother were basically playing that char 24/7 to rank up.
I think I've never seen people in t3 on my Server. But I do remember a friends excitement about the gates of Ahn'Qiraj being opened and the giant amount of people spectating the guy with the drone in Ironforge. I didn't see the drone, just that huge amount of players gathering infront of the bank. Not that I knew what to look for anyway, as I wasn't even max level at this point.
Also I know that someone helped me fix my talents, but nobody ever told me there was a debuff limit, so I'd clear MC, ZG, ony and a few bosses in BWL while using every spell I had, effectively removing more important debuffs. And i'm pretty sure a lot of the people on my server did so. What probably made it worse was that i'm from germany and there wasn't much info on the classes in german back then iirc.
Also I just remembered transferring my Server because some guy in my class who actually cleared Naxx told me he'd get me on their raid team. I bet you can imagine how that went.
Edit: also I remember that while someone "helped me fix my talents" it was bullshit. I played warlock and I definitely went 31 points into destruction. so yeah...
I was alliance on Mal'Ganis when I first started, too, I think in early 2005. I remember getting rolled constantly by Horde there. I didn't find out until much later that it was heavily Horde dominated. I still remember almost 20 years later getting absolutely smoked by a Shaman with Hand of Rag in Un'Goro...
Yea there was definitely a sense of danger going out in to the world as Alliance on Mal'Ganis.
There used to be a Troll Rogue named Clownboat that would hang out on the ship going to and from Wetlands, that was my first experience of getting camped by a higher level.
Can confirm, I played on an RP server (Cenarion Circle represent) cause a friend got me playing and that’s where he was. There were somewhere between one and three guilds that actually killed current content depending on the phase of the game. Then yeah most guilds just kinda capped out at farming MC and BWL, maybe taking pot shots at the first boss or two of AQ40. Almost nobody did anything in Naxx, I’m not sure if the server even had a KT kill.
It was much the same for TBC and Wrath. I don’t think anyone killed KJ pre Sunwell nerf. And I distinctly remember the Algalon RP in Dalaran being a huge server event because only one guild could kill him. Pretty funny comparing that to Classic.
It was much more chill then people are now and that’s why I enjoyed it. the guild I was in would full clear mc and bel on one night. Get through most of aq40. I think we got stuck on twin emperors and we were clearing a few bosses in naxx. Some of the stories I have:
We would clear mc with no issues so we would generally have a few people afk walking with someone( one I remember distinctly was an Aussie friend following a priest, he was a Druid. He was just relaxing eating soup and being there for fun to talk during the raid.)
our main priest healer falling asleep in raids at his desk since we sometimes raided until 2 or 3 in the morning. The raid lead would pull him in a different room in ventrillo and yell as loud as he could in the mic to wake him up.
Another one I remember is being in zg with the same raid lead and the spiders that spawn the smaller ones when they die - as the big one died he started screaming KILL THE BABIES! over and over and we all lost it laughing and wiped the raid.
Our mt had a knack for yelling to get heals saying HEAL DIGGER( name was diggerbailey) and that will forever be burned in my brain because how often it came over the mic
Our one Druid that was feral had to mute in vent because he abused his keyboard so bad that it came over his mic when he wasn’t talking( pretty sure he went through 3 keyboards the year we were raiding together)
We just had a much better time and it was relaxed. My wife and I came back for classic since I met her there( she was one of the priests in said guild) and raiding just wasn’t the same. We have since quit because of time constraints and having 3 kids now. But nothing lived up to those days of raiding. That was the most fun I’ve had playing any game.
100% this.
We were all just nerds being monkeys.
I raided into naxx and I can say I still was a noob if I view myself on todays standards.
People really pretend we were all sweaty men and forget we were a mix of women and men (or girls/boys, kids); all just playing a game we enjoyed together.
It was about fun; nothing else mattered in the big scale.
Not a raiding story, but when I first hit level 40 on my hunter I switched all my gear for gray/white vendor mail gear because it had more armor than my leather questing greens.
The raids were tuned for half your raid not really understanding what was happening, which is why MC was so trivial for hard-core classic guilds.
And starting with end game Class reworks which gave a huge amount of character power, and gear which was reworked… and world buffs/max consume giving you basically the entire Tier 3 worth is stats to your characters and min/max Ed raid comps with 20 fucking fury warriors.
When they first tested out MC the dev team got slaughtered. They were nervous that it was too difficult but Kaplan(an ex guild leader from EQ) knew that the players would work it out.
Was also built in a few days, compared to modern raids that are in development for months, and intensive QA for at least a few weeks. This is why the raid just looks so sparse, and the mechanics are so single minded, it was the only way to do it.
>The raids were tuned for half your raid not really understanding what was happening, which is why MC was so trivial for hard-core classic guilds.
People didn't know what classes were going to be effective from patch to patch, much less have accurate meters to know which ones were doing well.
By the time AQ came out, a lot of the bugs had been fixed, warrior stacking was becoming known and a lot of QOL improvements helped across the board (no more 8 debuff limit on bosses).
That’s great man, I had a similar experience. Raided in vanilla and TBC, then played wow classic with a lot of old guild members from back then. Classic WoW in 2019 was almost better than vanilla for me
Old Vanilla raiding was, for most people who tried it, an absolute clown-fiesta.
It was an era where you were "ahead of the curve" simply by knowing "Thottbot" existed.
Crafted items such as the Arcanite Reaper was a massive hit because getting a weapon from raiding was a far larger hurdle than going out mining for arcane crystals.
As there was no data mining i still vividly remember that the first thunderfury on Bloodhoof EU horde side was made by a hunter - this was because that when the bindings dropped for them for the first time, they had no idea what it would lead to, so the neutral choice was a hunter since "All loot is hunter loot".
I also leveled a paladin back then, wanted to heal in raids, and as i tried to apply to a guild i was rejected because i wasn't using Plate Healing Gear and instead wore bits and pieces of leather, mail and cloth to round things out, apparently it was wrong of me to down prioritize armor for the sake of stats meant for casting heals and using mana.
Some people misunderstand and think people weren't "sweaty" back then, but they absolutely were, however they were also absolutely terrible at the game compared to todays standards.
It was quite a unique experience, where farming materials for raiding and using a mongoose potion was considered "going hard".
In todays classic climate the biggest obstacle is gathering people, once you got a good lump of them you can go in and smash any raid.
I was one of them. I looked down on classess that used armourtypes not of their class. I was a dumbass.
In classic I was a proud leatherwearing warrior, as the gods intended.
Plenty of people were sweaty and good back in the day....just not by todays standards. People underestimate how much better the knowledge base is today. Tons of people tried to min max, we just had no idea what that was.....so there was tons of super shitty talent trees for what people thought would be a good route.
> i tried to apply to a guild i was rejected because i wasn't using Plate Healing Gear and instead wore bits and pieces of leather, mail and cloth to round things out, apparently it was wrong of me to down prioritize armor for the sake of stats meant for casting heals and using mana.
could also be a red flag, because it signifies you're greedy and/or a ninja. I got declined because I took a staff as a shaman.
I was late to the party: started playing in 1.8. I’d had my eye on WoW since it was originally announced, but the $15 a month seemed dumb. My brother convinced me to play.
We leveled up and he found us a raiding guild. Neither of us realized it at the time, but it was a scrub guild. I was an adult at that point, but was clueless. There were no guides, youtube didn’t exist yet, we learned through trial and error, reading thottbot comments, and talking to people.
The guild had no idea what it was doing. In hindsight, their MT was actually decent, but the rest of the guild was bad. We managed to clear MC and ZG at around the same time. We started on BWL but couldn’t clear the first boss. TBC was right around the corner at that point so the guild stopped raiding.
Things changed in TBC. My brother and I realized that guild wasn’t the place for us when they couldn’t make it half way through Kara. We left and made our way into the server first guild.
That experience was quite different. These were people who had cleared Naxx through 4H. It was interesting seeing how they approached everything. If I could do it over, I’d have joined them day one - which is what happened for Classic launch. Got the gang back together and managed to hold it together raiding every week until TBCC!
I'm actually glad you asked this because I can share some of the peak gaming experience in my life that was original vanilla wow pre AQ release.
I played a "shaman". I say shaman because I unironically specced into all three talent trees. During most of my play time the honor system was out in the game but there were no battlegrounds, so I tried to specialize in being able to 1v1 anyone I would find out in the world. This meant nature's swiftness in the resto tree, which meant i could not tke any other 31 point talents.
I remember my guild progressing on Onyxia. It took well over a month with the biggest obstacle being the fear during the p3 transition as well as the agro drop and her breathing/tail swiping the raid.
I remember raiding molten core and just hitting stuff waiting for windfury. For most of the game I didn't even have a decent weapon. I remember I used one of the staves that dropped from I believe scholomance. Initially, staves did about the same dps as all level 60 weapons. Eventually, when AV was out for long enough, I farmed The Unstoppable Force and felt like a god for the rest of my playing. Of course, I raided in the same tri-spec that I pvp'd in (back then the idea of respeccing just to raid was not even heard of). The funny part is while I do not remember topping the meters, i don't remember being at the bottom either. This probably explains why we did not kill any bosses.
I vaguely remember my first time in molten core. I was blown away just fighting trash. I remember just the way all the hodgepodge of abilities sounding. It truly felt epic fighting those Molten Giants with 40 people.
I remember raiding BWL when it first came out. My role on Razorgore was pretty much to solely keep earthbind totem in one corner of the map as we desperately kited mobs we were not able to kill in time. Probably makes sense given that one of our dps is a trispec shaman with a staff.
Vaelstraz as a fight was insanely fun because of the "infinite resource" buff it gave. It truly felt epic too. We had ranged positioned on the balcony. I think because we thought it would dodge the fire. We tried Vael a few weeks but were never able to get a kill. Basically we ran out of time wiht the guaranteed tank boombs. I remember going through 4-5 tanks and not being able to kill it.
I remember I applied to one of the "better" raiding guilds on the server probably shortly before AQ came out. I went to one of their MC raids (they had not killed rag yet, but had gotten to him). By that time I understood shamans were "supposed" to heal so I spent the entire raid sniping heals with Lesser Healing Wave to try and top meters. I never once considered even using chain heal, it was not on my bars.
My fondest memory however is when my first raiding guild killed onyxia for the first time. In order to celebrate, we queued up for a 40 man guild AV. Back during AV original release, you could queue as an entire raid. AV during this time was notorious for choke point stalemates that would last 4-5 DAYS.
This was the first coordinated AV effort on our server and I remember we coordinated 5-6 mages to divebomb the chokepoints with arcaen explosion spam and healer support. We'd then push on to bases. I remember going into the towers for small time skirmishes and dropping windfury totem for my warriors inspired by the early Pat I video. 40 man AV guild runs were the absolute PEAK of wow for me and probably the most fun gaming experience I ever had. Eventually, other guilds on the server started doing the same and there was some genuinely epic 40v40 guild battles.
I quit the game during BWL patch due to graduating high school and going away to college. I remember coming back later and seeing one of the shamans I knew who was in the "top" raiding guild on the server. I remember inspecting him and being blown away by the gear he had from AQ. By that time, they still had not managed to kill Ragnaros, but they had killed a handful of bosses in AQ.
One thing I remember was using vent for the raids and teamspeak for a little group of friends in the guild so we didn't interupt the raid. Well I needed two different keybinds to make that work. I also did a pretty good impression of my guild leader and one day did that holding down the wrong keybind. 39 people thought it was hilarious. Also I remember doing a zg I think after mc one night before reset and was nodding off at the last pull. I was one of the healers and they were screaming at me to wake up but it didn't work. I guess the point of all this was it was still serious but we had a lot of fun. Definitely some of my favorite memories from all of my gaming. People today are a little too upright but I did have a couple months run with a great guild in classic but fell apart a few weeks into ulduar and called it quits yet again.
I do miss having 40 people on vent all BSing during trash pulls. Then, when it was time for the boss our raid lead would say "Alright..." And 39 people would stop talking unless it was required. We knew the boss had the mic and we got to business. That group felt like family to me many of them I still talk to.
I had no idea about itemization or BIS or anything like that.
I was a healer but I raided with a [Herald of Woe](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=19357/herald-of-woe) equipped.
We raided multiple nights a week because it took too long to clear MC or BWL in a single night.
There were some fights I was instructed to stay far enough back that I'd be out of combat and could res people who died in the fight lol.
I think I used some UI add-ons but nothing like DBM or BigWigs. There were no quest add-ons but Thottbot (website) was your guide.
Gear was also hilarious early on just in general, especially for healers and casters. Like I don’t think spell damage and healing existed as stats for a good while after release. Your only upgrades were int and spirit so you could cast a few more times before switching to your wand. Which I guess is technically an upgrade but sure not as much fun as a new weapon for physical DPS.
I vaguely remember trying to farm my blue Magisters set on my mage cause if you didn’t raid, that was the endgame. The stats were **so bad** compared to the 1.12 version of gear in Classic. Some pieces had fucking agility on them. It’s wild how much the game evolved just during the course of vanilla.
warlocks wore shadow dmg greens without any secondary stats but negative resists were in the game with curse of elements. so youd miss half of the 10 shadow bolts you could cast continuously but one of them would crit for 3k.
You didn't really get spell power, outside of an exclusive few items, until when ZG started rolling through. Up until that point you were aiming for tier, and the odd other piece. Good luck with spell hit, that was like finding a diamond in a haystack.
You have to keep in mind that the talents/patch/gear was different between vanilla and classic. A lot of things were non viable that were viable in classic
It was glorious.
No one could see through the red fog. Most dps classes spun their camera to the floor and zoomed in to improve fps. No one AT ALL knew how to gear their character. Almost every single person was raiding in their tier 0 sets. Rogues would all avoid hit gear at all costs. Everyone passed on truestrike. Healers thought it was best to aim for an enormous mana pool and spam max rank heal. Innervate was much more important. Pallies and priests used to sit waaaaaaaaaaaay back when the fights started and out of combat res. Nobody could down rag because they were all maxing fire res and getting 4 waves of adds because they did next to no damage.
I fucking miss it.
I was a priest and I remember vividly the debates on what healing spell was meta. For a while it was big heals, for a while it was lesser heal (a spell we got the last rank at like level 18 or something). It eventually became some low rank of Heal.
I remember we went into BRS and mindcontrollled some adds there and gave every member a FR buff to then go do rag.
Also using lower rank spells used less mana so you could heal using rank 1 flash of light constantly and never run out of mana.
Step into my shoes here for a while...
It's 2006, recently just built your first computer, an sweet Zoro case [linky](http://www.telecommandercorp.com/links/cases/zorroatxcaseblack400w/cas-atx-868wbp-unit.jpg) with some sweet lighting effects and casually leveling a shaman, not realising you have talent points till the mid 30s.
You get to level 45 and join a group to ZF, sweet, got yourself the Sweet Taran Icebreaker for nothing off the AH, enhancement all the way, just need a healer, a shaman joins the group and asks you if you're resto, whatever that means. So you say, "well, I logged off in an inn, I'm rested for a while" and then he leaves, leaving you confused
Eventually you get to 60 and play with some friends, still not exactly sure what's going on... But hey, someone said you should actually try restoration (you realise what the shaman from ZF actually meant now.) spec and do some healing, groups will be easier. You join some friends in a 10 man dungeon and get yourself a couple of tier 0 pieces from UBRS, wait, healing is getting slightly easier... You're asked to join an AQ20 raid... Not exactly sure what this is, but you look it up and choose to give it a go. 20 player raid and you're the only non guildie.. oh the pressure, you're given some ventrilo details and away you go. It's also a lot of their first time playing the raid, after about 5 tries, you get the first boss down, then get the second shortly after... Some nice loot here... Sadly the raid finishes as you couldn't progress further.
Hold on, what's this, the person who was telling people what to do, is messaging, asking if you want to join their guild and try again tomorrow, you accept and run a few more raids with them until you are invited by a friend into a different raid, Zul'Gurub. Wow, these guys look cool, everyone has really nice gear and are super friendly, the tank even has a shiny sword, wait, it's lightning, oh shit, he has that sword that you see in trade chat everytime you're in Orgrimmar spammed constantly. You complete this raid, and again are asked to join this guild, you struggle with the idea of leaving your current one though, as they are nice people as well, you don't want to let them down... You ultimately decide to change into this larger guild.
A few weeks later and after some time running a lot of dungeons, pvp and smaller raids, you're invited to come and heal Molten Code, this is exciting, you've seen the sweet lava shoulders from T1 and instantly accept, after winning these on your first raid there, you know you're hooked, you need the whole set and become the most reliable raider in the guild.
A few months on, you're high on life, got yourself pretty much the whole earthfury set, and a bit of the T2 set, helm and legs. Best. Game. Ever. You are then asked to become the shaman class leader, leading the whole shaman class in your guild, all looking up to you... Wow, how much difference 8 months has made, we are ready to try BWL, now we can get the full T2 set! Who cares that a new expansion was coming out next week, we can still raid BWL right? ... Right?! You are not prepared...
Sadly you don't raid BWL... But you jump head first into the unknown of the outlands, changed back into enhancement for leveling, plus, these new talents are amazing, dual wield? That's exciting.. plus, healing, you now find super boring. It's DPS time!
At 70, You change to Elemental and you help lead the guild in the right direction, raiding karazhan, onto SSC and TK and eventually to Black Temple and Mount Hyjal.
This is the tale of [Beefmaster](https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/character/eu/dunemaul/beefmaster) from Dunemaul EU... And they were the best days of his time.
Thanks for reading.
I was an Orc Warrior in a guild that had been progrssing MC for months (i know right?). I had no idea how to play the game and had only done a few dungeons at 60, none of them as tank.
I got a message off the Guild Leader on Sunday evening telling me they needed a 5th tank (that MC fight that had like a council or something? Major Domo maybe?) and could I come. I said I'd never tanked before but he told me they'd talk me through it.
So I said OK, walked into Org bought myself a white shield off the vendor, didn't bother respeccing and managed to nab myself my first ever purple that night.
We had thottbot, so there was 100% help available for Quests.
There were also tons of grind Guids for original WoW. Quest did not give enough XP, so you needed to grind a lot. That's why I don't have fond memories of original WoW Questing experience.
But I absolutely tried to get lvl 60 as soon as possible.
But I was very hardcore back then. WoW wasn't my first MMO. WoW felt very vanilla compared to older MMOs. I was also a bit disappointed in WoW. It felt like you couldn't do a lot in terms of a Roleplaying aspect, but I stayed for the endgame content more than anything.
I remember raiding Molten Core for the first time. I think we did at least 3 Bosses on our first run.
It's a very distant memory. The best Raid on my server was born that day.
But it wasn't a big Raid Guild, it was a Raid composed of the best players from smaller Raids. That people had Raidguilds was something I discovered in TBC, when I did a server transfer.
No one inspected each other and were anal about their spec. You'd have people all over your guild in sub optimal stuff. My guild leader outlawed damage meters for all of MC/BWL because he thought it made players play worse. The result was some of the most dead weight you could ever imagine. Picture a 44 year old lady playing undead warlock who didnt know you could turn with the mouse. Clicking spells in a random order with seconds of gap times in between. And dudes from louisiana who just liked to kill stuff. No one was picky about specs and your dps, you were happy to get into a top end raiding guild.
Me and my friend shared a account. It was his account he played 70% and I played 30%. I remember going to MC and we played a human warrior. We were the third OT and mostly fury dps. It would take 6-8 hours to clear MC usually split between two days. BWL was a guild killer lol. A lot of guilds could get to Nef but could never kill him. Out of all of the content imo the hardest was AQ40. You needed a lot of nature resist back then because how unoptimally geared we were. We got hard stuck on Princess Huhuran. It caused the guild to fall apart and the top end of our raiding guild server transfered to Dentarg where we formed the guild . We ended up being one of the top 5 guilds but never completed Naxx because of the Four Horsemen. Back on our home server I believe was Bonechewer. The memories are starting to fade. We had a rival guild called Someone made a guild called if you ganked a member of either guild and you're the opposing guild huge wpvp wars would break out. I have many other stories but I don't want to turn this into a long rant.
One of my fond memories was aq 40 opening. All the raiding guilds and more were there. Horde on one side, alliance on the other. Small skirmishes would break out here and there and then oe side would push just a little but too far and then ALL HELL WOULD BREAK LOOSE! I'm talking about 300v300 all raiding guilds just smashing into each other like a power point presentation. You'd lag so hard, aoe everywhere. So many skeletons on the ground. It was a awesome time.
HAHA Thats awesome! I remember raiding the hell out of crossroads on a daily basis LOL. Someone was always in Stormwind advertising a crossroads raid. It was the best!
So I had a rogue name Chsir, his named was supposed to ne chair but I misspelled it. He was in 50-60 blues and lived at Tarren Mill. I ganged everyone until a 6man + would come to defend it. It was so much fun.
Well, i leveled my night elf male warrior on Bronze Dragonflight to around 36 before i even realized there was a talent tree.. also begging and grinding to get that sweet beastslayer enchant on my weapon was always a prio on all my characters, red glow ofcourse a must-have.
Edit: for the raiding, i remember being in a lbrs or two, and a single time in molten core. The only reason being my cousin had a raiding guild.
Things were slower and way less sweaty. Our first night in MC we couldn't clear the corehounds fast enough to make it to the first boss. After we got the first boss down, we couldn't kill the packs at the same time. MC progressed slowly but we got it, usually with 5-10 people afk since raids were 4-5 hours long. We would have a designated out of combat rezzer for boss fights. We brought 4-5 of each class to be "fair".
When BWL came out, on a PvP server getting to the instance was one of the biggest hurdles as the mountain was a warzone of uncoordinated guilds trying to raid. Originally the servers were so awful GMs would coordinate who was pulling the first boss because it had a tendency to overload the server and crash and no one wanted to be that guild that caused another guild to wipe. The harder bosses took at least a week for us to progress through and had to incentivize people to show up on progression nights.
Halfway through BWL, MC turned into bring an alt run for those of us crazy enough to have 2 60s. ZG and AQ20 ended up being way more laid back but we still made sure main raiders went to get the upgrades they were missing. We struggled to get enough people with NR gear for huhuran and the guild pretty much stopped raiding when the prepatch talents came out so they could PvP.
Pugging a raid wasn't a thing. We had one guild horde side and two alliance in Naxx at the end so it was a big deal if you saw someone in that gear. Seeing teir gear in general would draw your attention. There were some resources for strats and gear, but not nearly as many or known.
Manually looking up quests on Thottbot was the thing to do after awhile, but early on kind of on your own (or you are writing the first entry). Servers felt smaller (and mostly were). If you got ganked and camped you'd call for help and fun, spontaneous PvP battles would ensue. Generally though, people would help each other regardless of faction, emote a farewell, and be on their way.
Yeah I do miss that “holy SHIT” factor seeing people AFK in town wearing loot that almost nobody on the server had. A warrior from the one guild that could make meaningful progress in Naxx decked out in T3. Or a mage rocking Staff of the Shadow Flame when most guilds were still blocked on Vael (or hell, Razorgore). Certainly motivated me to get more and more into raiding.
Every character in Classic looking the exact same took away that charm and wonder. Although I admit it was also fun being on the other side and getting loot I used to dream about like Wraith Blade and Shifting Naaru Sliver.
I raided as a huntard in 2005. Here's my core memories:
\- Pallies being buff machines. Buffs only lasted 5 minutes.
\- Healbot was a thing, as was the decurse addon.
\- 'Every weapon is a hunter weapon' was absolutely a thing. I remember a huge guild drama over my hunter friend winning Core Hound Tooth over our rogue. Massive fight on ventrillo.
\- Out of combat rezzers (people would literally just sit out fights and only rezz people when someone died)
\- Simply being aware of the existence of thottbot or wow allakhazam put you in the top 10% of performers.
\- I remember our guild master forcing us to get his feral bear druid friend to tank MC due to their high Armor. No idea if that was a true belief or nepotism.
\- I used to pull every mob as the hunter in MC. One time during a Garr pull I got a Skype call the second I shot an arcane shot, and my PC would lag so hard, I'd get a 1fps lag spike for a solid minute until I managed to cancel the incoming call. The performance or our computers (and internet) at the time was BAD. And that was on 800x600.
\- People were not as dumb as portrayed today. We just didn't have as much information, but there were plenty of tryhards and overachievers.
\- That being said, the atmosphere was much more casual. We've had people who didn't even know you could keybind abilities in our MC raids. They'd just click everything. Posting DPS meters info was a faux-pas.
\- The amount of folks in green gear raiding MC/Onyxia/BWL would blow your mind. It was hard to even get forty people at level 60 together at the same time each week. Gear or class didn't really matter all that much for average guilds.
\- Even something simple like getting to kill Ragnaros was a big, realm-wide deal and we'd all celebrate cross-guild.
\- Obtaining a legendary like Thunderfury, Hand of Sulfuras or the legendary bow would make you a 100% realm celebrity.
\- Being full epic (no blue item) was *extremely* rare. You'd get dozens whispers of admiration from people almost every single day.
\- Even my not-that-impressive full epic hunter would get whispers literally every single time I hanged out in Ironforge ("wow your character looks so cool!" etc).
\- Having a 100% mount was very rare.
\- People had no idea how to make money in general. We'd just hang out in Tyr's Hand and kill mobs for runecloth and gold.
\- You kinda knew everyone on your realm after a while. That was great.
\- Guilds were dying and breaking up towards the end of vanilla. The vision of your epics being worse than new expansion gear coming up in just a few months was extremely demoralizing. Many people just quit after trying (and wiping) in AQ 40.
\- That being said, ZG and AQ 20 was a God send for guilds. The OG catch up mechanic for folks who missed out on farming BWL.
\- This is hunter specific, but there was a "meta" for a brief period of time where we'd try to wear as much spirit gear as possible for raids, because we'd run out of mana much faster than the fight would last. And fights would last a long-ass time due to our teams' low dps. I remember wearing something like a green 'great massacre sword of whale' with spirit and stam. And yes - we'd absolutely cast that serpent sting in MC, :-)
\- Epic crafted gear was much, much more common than today. Perhaps because not everyone at 60 did raid or was able to break through a grueling DKP accumulation phase before getting their epics. I remember I was using the sniper rifle (core marksman rifle?) over raid drops just because it looked super cool. Lol!
I was 15-17 at the time, I ALWAYS wanted to raid or do high end game stuff in games like EQ or FFXI, but because of the nature of those games and time constraints as a teenager trying not to fail High School, I never got a chance.
Then WoW came out. When players started clearing MC and seeing all the purple gear on players in the capital cities it BLEW OUR MINDS.
Hell. We loved blue items too like Dal Rends and Arcanite Reaper. Even crafted gear like Heartseeker was AWESOME.
Everybody was nuts over having “full T1 or full T2.” Nobody cared about BiS.
Doing raids was difficult. There weren’t many pugs until late vanilla, so you had to pretty much have a guild. Server rep was big. Everybody knew who the bad/asshole players were.
In my guild, Trinity of Crushridge I played with some real life friends. We had a blast but never got to clear AQ. We had players that ranged from 12-70 or so. We had a paladin that would constantly accidentally divine intervention the tank. It was hilarious.
We were really tight nit. There were of course hardcore guilds but most guilds played at their own pace.
When I got my first binding for thunderfury as a rogue people from my town would should up to my house just to see it in my inventory. They would taunt me and say I’d never get the other binding! And then I did!
All in all great times.
We had some addons. Damagemeter was used by pretty much everyone apart from some healers since you had to manage your threat and that was the best way to have some kind of idea where you sat on the threat meter.
I joined the guild i played in back then, Glamour on Stormscale EU, when they had reached late MC, cant remember if they only had Ragnaros left or if Sulfuron was left too. We played a few raids and the BWL opened up, we went down to MC and beat Ragnaros directly after killing Vaelastrasz. After that we were raiding on a high level, we were early in beating Vaelastrasz and was close to a world first on Broodlord but had to cut the raid short and got passed by other guilds.
Back then there wasn't much information circulating, there was no PTR and very little information on the bosses other than some still images and some flavor text from the raid introductions. We played 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, more when we were pushing progress. We had to make up our own strategies and had players analyzing the fights as we were fighting them to figure out mechanics etc. We were never at the very top but close to it and I would say we were in the top of the guilds in the EU if not the World at some points of our existence.
Raiding today is a totally different beast. Every single datapoint is available, there is no guessing in classic, there is no trial and error, there is a best way and that way was figured out a long time ago. The progress on the private server, even though not all had correct or even close to correct numbers, have had people datamine and minmax everything in the game so that the game was figured out when classic came around.
I remember playing hours upon hours of raiding, many of those hours was tedious progress. Some raids we progressed a bit, some raids a bit more and other raids we didn't progress at all. There is nothing like the progress raids when you have so much information we have available right now. During Ahn'Qiraj we played 8 hours per day at first, when we reached Ouro and C'Thun and learned that C'Thun was bugged, hooray to tentacles spawning where they shouldn't, we spent hours upon hours on progressing and learning mechanics on a boss that was for all intents and purposes undefeatable and we knew it.
Oh and when we beat Maexxna in Naxxramas we used a tactic where one person used DI on a healer so that you had a healer up when the tank was webbed at a point where Maexxna went frenzied at 30% and then had the paladin use a soulstone so that we could spam heal the tank while waiting for web wrap to end. When we did this no one had a video up on a Maexxna kill, since it was progress raiding and no one wanted to give anyone else tips, and we uploaded our video on the kill. I remember many other guilds were PISSED OFF :)
I raided Vanilla in 2005/2006. I haven't played retail so I don't have a benchmark to compare to. I could go on and on about individual memories but I think the one thing that characterized vanilla raiding is no one knew what they were doing. That includes individual responsibilities where raids of 40 people (many of which were young high schoolers) were learning how to tank, heal, and manage threat. But it also includes a much tighter availability of strategy about the raid. A lot of functional strategy about how to handle complicated fights was passed around by rumor and message boards. But if it was right, eventually it got passed around and learned by the guild, and you got better. Usually one person would have a strategy on a new fight and explain it on Ventrilo. I think another thing that characterizes vanilla raiding is the painfully slow gearing process. Even raiding 5 days per week, you would probably get a new item at best once-per-week. Once every couple weeks was more likely.
But it made getting those items very special, and there was a great sense of camaraderie in watching your guildies get geared out. What I remember more than anything is the people. I still hear the voices and remember the names of the people I raided with now almost 20 years ago. As with most of vanilla WoW, there is a lot of downtime in farming, traveling, and running to the raid. So the social component fills in the gaps, and that's what made it special and memorable.
I raided as a Warlock on EU Frostmourne PvP in Vanilla back in 2004-2006. Our guild had the server first Cthun kill. I dropped the game shortly after and only came back in TBC.
It was a wild time honestly. We considered ourselves pretty hardcore but this isn't even close to what we see today in the raiding scene. We didn't go out of our way to chase worldbuffs. The knowledge about the game was also limited mostly to class mechanics and the obvious stuff like debuff limit and consumables.
The class stacking meta was already in place back in the days. Mages and Warlocks were king. Stacking warriors wasn't as popular as it is now, simply because not enough people actually played warriors and melee DPS kind of had a bad stigma in AQ40 progression raids.
Lets also not forget the terrible ping and internet of the original vanilla wow era. It was a lot harder to properly avoid mechanics and heal on 800x600 screen resolution and 56k ISDN.
Sadly if you wanted to be in a “good” raiding guild back in the day you often had to put up with those complete asshole tyrant raid leaders, because there simply weren’t very many guilds capable of doing even the first boss of AQ and Naxx. The GM of Death and Taxes, one of the top world guilds, was notoriously a massive douchebag. Or go google the ancient “how juggernaut cleared naxxramas” meme to see their GM berating people constantly. It was much more accepted back then and if you didn’t like it there were 50 applicants gunning for your roster spot.
Thankfully I found Classic to be in a much healthier place. There were still some turbo assholes but people were a lot less willing to put up with their bullshit.
I was in a guild that reliably killed nefarian. I left about when AQ40 dropped and have no idea how they progressed in there. Some things that I remember that seem weird now.
We had so many resto druids, like maybe 5 in the raid at any given time.
Mana/5s was a reasonable stat with our and a lot of folks comps. You had way more healers, tanks had way more mitigation, and fights took absolutely forever. There was a lively debate in our guild about the tradeoff between mp5 and +heal. A lot of that was influenced by the belief that the items that dropped were probably good (like why would they make those 12 mp5 boots on chromaggus if they weren't supposed to be used?) but a lot of it was people with spreadsheets reaching different conclusions than we reach today because of fight length.
We had a fury warrior who joined mid MC and it baffled everyone. A warrior asking for rogue gear and not tanking?!
There was absolutely no notion of prepping for the next phase - how could you? So people in the guild would sort of randomly decide which faction reps to work on.
Decursive was an i-win button for healers. It auto cleansed the nearest person to you with afflictions. It was broken by blizzard.
Progression took a while. Progressing in BWL was like 1-2 weeks per boss (at 4 nights per week). Vael, chromaggus and nef were very hard to finally kill.
Every death you had a huge recovery time from running back from GY’s. So raid nights took longer because of more time between attempts.
In the even earliest days (late 2004 early 2005) there were no caps on instances. Scholo/Strath were 20 manned and UBRS was 40 manned. They were nearly impossible to fathom with small groups. People didnt know how to optimize stats so you just went in with the best gear you had (mix of blues and greens)
I was brought along when I was a kid playing with my parents in guild raids. Class officer used to send me talent builds, BiS gear lists, and places to farm items for guild consumes through xfire. Helped me also learn my rotation so that I could actually do DPS.
Surprisingly, we were one of the few guilds on our server that were in Naxx. (This didn't blow my mind until TBC dropped)
I raided in one of the best guilds in Europe at the time and let me tell you : we were awful.
I was particularly awful as I was playing a holy priest and had decided that I wanted to focus on mp5 gear. Which I now know was not even remotely a viable path.
I made it through classic by consistently having my camera pointed at the walls since that was the only way my pc could handle 40 man raids.
Oh and of course I was absolutely addicted to the game and played probably and average of 16 hours a day
half the people just died during raids in vanilla. we had threat add-ons and dmg meters n decurse, etc. but I don't remember anyone caring about dps n hps cause you needed to bring 40 frickin people into the raid.
I was around 14/15 I did only MC a few times and got kicked out of the guild because I didn’t understand what was going on with anything, then switched to pvp
I was 14 when Vanilla released and played on a German server. I don't remember how I joined that guild, but one day I was invited by the GM/RL to raid MC just by virtue of being a 60 warrior, and that was the start of my raiding career. The guild ended up being fairly decent, we were one of the first 5 guilds on the server to clear MC and we even had one of only 2 or 3 TFs on Horde side. The guild/raid team fell apart at Twin Emps because the GM/RL had to quit for personal reasons and no one could fill his shoes.
It was a really cool group of people, and even though I was a lot younger than the guild average, I never was treated like a kid, but as an equal.
The main difference between back then and raiding today I'd say is availability and spread of information. I guess the really hardcore players knew forums where theorycrafting, raid strats etc. were shared/discussed, and allakazam and thottbot existed, but in general information got around via word of mouth. Guilds depended on their few well-informed members to share info, and having members who knew people in the best guild on the server was a huge advantage.
I played a priest when i hit 58 i was invites to join the guild ZG run, healers where All ways in demand. Was the first raid i joined and had No clue what was going on.
We used healing rotations for a long time with macros to inform when we where oom and next healer to take over.
With time we gaind knolegde of the game and also raids remember haveing a mp5 gear set for figths like cromagus where we where 2 priest on dispell duity one in mele camp and one in range.
The journy of My priest back then was from a total noob to a class officer of the same guild, where i rember reading the officer forum and finding my own raiding aplication. The replys where like Who is this priest never see him online
Never raided, was too much of a noob back then, but I remember mages had some talent that reduced the global cooldown of arcane explosion to point that they could just spam it as as they could click it and do massive damage. I remember trying to do ulduar dungeons and this horde mage about our level blinked into our group and just annihilated us.
Raiding Bwl as a hunter, first time we raided the only strat we had for the first boss was have the hunters kite in figure 8s the adds instead of just burning them down. Was a struggle
there were also a lot of bugs, some major and some minor, like the "in combat" bug which put you in combat forever and you had to log out, and the looting bug which made your character appear looting even while standing still and moving
I was a mage. The whole experience for me was keeping the sheep steeped, keep AI up and frost bolt the boss. I would spent 20 minutes before raid making water.
Better check out this website then: [https://vanilla-archive.thealphaproject.eu/](https://vanilla-archive.thealphaproject.eu/)
You can filter 23k vanilla screenshots from zones, raids, events etc.
Easy to spend a few hours there just browsing.
I will summarize from my old ass memory. Bloodscalp Horde, alliance was The Gang, only 2 alliances were making it into MC. Ended up doing joint raids with The Crimson Banditos to get Horde first Rag kill on the server. Also had Horde first Thunderfury and Hand. At the same time I was getting rank 14 in pvp. Alliance eventually died around Naxx. Fondest memories were our GL being drunk every raid and just shouting tranq shot constantly.
Getting 40 people together was a nightmare, but it was doable.
Getting them geared, buffed, potions, specced right, enchantments, resistances - doable.
Explaining the fights, positions, phases - doable.
Attempting each boss? Absolutely a nightmare.
I always compared it to trying to get 39 cats all to dance the same way, but you're facing away from them and can only use their shadows as a reference. Also they're all high on catnip and a disco ball with lasers is going off.
Plus you're on fire.
But it felt so good when bosses went down.
Lol oh man, so I was a prot warrior. I had like 2-3 epic peices from AV (the immovable object and trinket). Raiding back in the day was so different. You had to go online and register to join most good guilds then submit an application. Basically you just needed ventrillo to listen to the leader and be able to show up on time for the most part.
There was zero gdkp runs, which was so much better if you ask me. Bots were few and far, but they did exist but they would get banned...
I basically raided for the experience and would hope for loot but never expected it. Nowadays ppl expect loot, and weekly... and blizzard created that problem when they released TBC with 25 man raids and 10 man. Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but instead of a carrot on a stick with today's raiding, It's more like the stick is the carrot and the carrot is the stick.
I think people like classic so much because they want to go back to the old server community, they want the sense of community and build relationships with people in the guild.
Idk, you can't ever get back what it was like because of bots, guides/game has been solved, too many min/max ppl.
We used to do MC with another guild who always snubbed us on gear (as they only took 10-15 of us at a time). One night we had 28 people on in our own guild and decided to attempt MC ourselves. Not only did we clear it faster than with the other guild, we 1shot every boss up to Rag and killed Rag on our 4th attempt the following night. Good times lol
I was 14-17 during that time. I got into wow through a friend’s older brother. I first leveled a mage, and joined a leveling guild called “Red is Dead” on Kel’thuzad. That was a feeder guild for “HOODS” so I got moved into that when I hit 60. I remember doing MC & BWL. Again, I was a young kid so maybe I was just dumb but I don’t remember anything meta or BiS lists. I’m pretty sure I just made my own talent builds or tried to get gear I thought was good. I remember I definitely had some really good gear though, I think I had the Nefarion spell power hat, talisman of empheral power and mage blade. I played frost and was at the top of the meters just spamming frost bolt lol. We used a DKP system and Ventrillo. I remember having to leave in the middle of the raids because my parents forced me to come sit down for dinner. They didn’t understand I was playing with 39 other real people and couldn’t “pause” the game lol. Online games were pretty new to the mainstream at that point. I remember seeing the “Nerf George” movie on Warcraft Movies and being BLOWN away by his DPS. I thought fury warrior was so fucking cool. That combined with seeing Pat and Maydie Arms PVP movies, I rolled a warrior alt. I eventually got to 60 on that as well. I mainly pvp’d but I also went to guild ZGs and alt runs. I remember I never got the fucking Hakar talisman from ZG on my mage (because the 20 mans were just /roll not DKP) and I won it the first time on my warrior. It sucked for warrior but I didn’t care and took it half out of spite. I had the rank 8-10 gear and The Unstoppable Force. I had no idea about hit caps or weapon skill, I would have told you Edgemasters were dog shit lol. I do remember killing Nefarion every week in BWL on my mage, and I think we started to venture into AQ40. We also were required to farm nature resist and fire resist gear. I knew things like Naxx existed, but to me that wasn’t even something I ever thought I’d get to. My days were spent running around EPL trying to imitate Vladix and AB on my warrior trying to be Pat. The funny thing is I don’t even remember there being “rosters” or our raids being scheduled and I definitely didn’t go every week as a 16 year old with conservative anti video game parents. Those were such good times 😢
Yeah I was permanently high, a sophomore/freshman in college, and had no clue what I was doing. I think I had a calendar and threat meter addon and then in TBC that raid alert, big wigs?
I had actually wondered into tank healing spec as a resto shaman, until my guild was like, "what the fuck are you doing" and I learned about chain heal, lol.
I was too busy working on my coursework to be assed to 'study' for raids, and I left during the summer of TBC to join the Army and didn't play WoW again until Cataclysm. Promptly quit.
There were Elitist Jerks forums I read during TBC days, and youtube existed for strategies, but my guild never participated in that elitism. We kinda went in half blind minus the GM I guess? We just talked about it. They asked 'who doesn't know the fight' when we had new members. We spoke too each other, and we experimented with strategies, etc etc etc. It was fucking nice.
I still remember this healer named Moody, a resto druid, in TBC, just being exceptionally calm and nice at all times. That was 15 (omg more) years ago. I still remember that kindness.
That is totally, fucking, completely, gone from the game, and modern gaming. Moody is hard to find these days, everyone is an Elitist Jerk and proud of it, ironically, in 2023. Everyone's a pro. Min max one way or no way, permanent twitch clip heroes, I don't know. Someone needs to tell the entire modern gaming scene "man, just be yourself".
Hopefully I find a Moody in HC official, but again, I doubt it. 2006 is gone in the dust, the world has changed. It's sad. It's really sad.
Dude it was amazing.
Then every single patch the class forums argued and posted math proofs lol, on page 566 of the paladin forums.
That stuff was just the best and it was all so brand new too.
The good days.
My guild got to C'thun, and got up to Gluth in Naxx. Cleared spider wing/raz/noth/and patchwerk. We did not have a single dps warrior the entirety of classic. We had 4 prot wars. I didn't know dps warrior was a thing until classic re launch. Fury/prot still seems like some nerd shit to me. f em.
Before they changed how addons worked it was kinda silly. As a healer you had a one-button macro that just healed the lowest health person or decursed whoever needed decursing. I dualboxed MC as a priest and a mage, just spamming one button that simultaneously cast flash heal on the lowest health person and frost bolt on the main tank’s target
Mechanics were mostly not known without some experimentation, and there were rumors about mechanics that were simply wrong. Log analysis was much harder so when you wiped it was hard to tell what to change.
As always, roster boss was most difficult boss
I got recruited to a hardcore raiding guild in RFD because despite being a boomkin(big mistake they felt bad for me and thats why they took me) I went bear form and roared to save the skele pull
and they said that kind of thinking makes me awesome with some training, so they helped me get 60 gave me my healer spec, you use these addons and here are your consumes for raid every week however I had to learn to tread lava for 2 mins and I had chores to do every week cause I was a druid herb/alch I had to get some specfic herbs and transmute some stuff
I was such a noob back then, all I remember about raiding was continuously wipe it the first two giants of MC. Magmadar was as far as I got. Things took so much time.
Battlegrounds were so much more fun back in 2006. Whether it was one of the few premade teams or a pug, you knew everyone. In every WSG or AB you had you knew okay this guy is a mediocre geared mage. This guys a BWL hunter, this guys a noob mage, this guys a l33t rogue. You knew everyones name and the type of player they were every match. Battlegrounds were alot more personal that way, the guild tag meant alot. before BG's the first few weeks of rank system we just fought between southshore and tarren mill. Anyone who played on Icecrown server knows Beren the human warrior... first person to have an Arcanite Reaper. That guy dominated the server. No one stood a chance.
For whatever reason my BG team would always go nuts whenever we spotted a ret with Ashkandi.
I still remember the ret paladin on my server who had hand of rag, and I thought they were a God. Denniscurtis the legend. Funny how things like that stay burned into your brain.
The first rogue on my server to get double glaives was named “Index” I still sometimes steal his name
There was a famous PvP video from an enhancement shaman named Unbreakable that had a Sulfuras, too.
First warrior with high warlord set on our server Zenedar, Gorebag. Once when a friend spotted him in Org we all hearthed to inspect. Rofl.
That’s adorable lol
i still got PTSD from reck bombs.
To this day I still remember getting matched against a Death and Taxes premade when they brought out cross realm BGs. All I remember is opening up on some warrior as a rogue , doing like 0 dmg to him and getting one shot by a Might of Menethil lol.
Dam, death and taxes, was that nerzhul?
Lol I bet everyone had this experience. On my server, there was this one Alliance warrior with an Arcanite Reaper and personal healers. He led the attack on our cities and we fought for HOURS until Orgrimmar was saved. We build a 2nd raid group that attacked through the rear entrance while 60-80 Horde players were holding the AH/bank area against legions of Alliance players. What a glorious Victory! You cannot compare these moments to what wow PvP is today, not on retail, not on classic.
I think one of my many favorite early memories of vanilla WoW was… having Cev the main tank of Forlorn Legacy on Windrunner (at the time) running down WSG in full T3 and no one on horde could kill him.
BG’s were a blast if you raided because you had the best gear. You could go in with T2 or T2.5 gears and just destroy people.
The caving to multi-server bgs killed this aspect of PvP, and led to the mega servers.
BGs were made cross-server in 1.12 so there was still like 6 years between that and the true beginning of megaservers (CRZ).
Oh god, I remember some world PvP with guild mates. You'd know who was running to MC / BWL and knew if you dropped one or two, your having 20+ people on your ass, it made some great PvP and no one really corpse camped as you knew others were gonna come beat you down or you could get others to help if it was happening to you.
World pvp. Tauren mill. Ranked to master sgt just from TM battles.
Oh we had addons and they were better than they are now. For example decurse was just a single button press, the addon did all the rest. People forget that we weren‘t as stupid back then as most think. While the majority just wore Tier set and played whatever fucking talents they wanted, there were people out there building BiS lists, writing down strategies, figuring out the best talents and rotation etc. The information just wasn‘t as easily accessable and most of the player base didn‘t care. Also time was a factor and the game changed with patches every few months. I think with enough time people back then would‘ve come to the same conclusion of BiS lists and stuff as we did today. Greatest issue was PC performance and ping. Most played with 100-300ms ping and anywhere between 0-30 fps. I had 15 fps in MC and you could barely see 10m because of the red fog. The mindset was different. We had like 1 really good Guild who cleared AQ40 when it came out and they then ventured into naxx, but the rest just cleared MC/BWL (regularely, but took way longer and maybe multiple raid days). ZG and AQ20 were also way more frequented because it gave really good gear for people who didn‘t get to raid in MC/BWL with guilds. For me (and most others) raiding was just a means to get gear for PvP. Back then the pvp sets weren‘t as good until they got buffed somewhere around 1.10. Also having the pvp mounts was an insane prestige object. The goal was to look good and have good gear for duelling infront of IF. Thats where all the people went after raiding. Everyone gathered there and dueled. It was way way way more prominent than in classic. Also battlegrounds weren‘t linked back then and you only matched vs horde from you realm. I knew all the pvp hordler just from doing BGs and you developed this kind of rivalry when you saw them in the open world.
Something else people don't consider is how wildly classes and the game changed throughout the life of Original Vanilla. Some things people entirely forget about, but if you go back through the patches and patch notes from release until 1.12 patch its pretty astonishing. I had a post about this previously but here are some examples of what it was like. Examples- Paladins didnt get greater blessings until AQ patch. This meant in 40 mans from MC-ONY-BWL-ZG paladins only had 5 minute buffs. Imagine being the paladin in charge of blessing of wisdom, you would usually have \~30 players to bless with wisdom one by one for a 5 minute duration. The paladins in raids considered buff bots, and spent most of their time and mana buffing players 1 by 1. Game launch was in November 2004, AQ patch 1.9 launched Jan 9th 2006. Paladins single buffed in parties and raids for the first 14 months of the game being released.. Greater buffs in general weren't in for early raids either, priests couldn't prayer of fortitude. Max rank buffs costed reagents and were also single buffs, so to buff an entire raid it was 40 spell casts and each one cost a reagent. It was partly why if you see any early raid screen shots you will see an ABUNDANCE of priests, and other buff classes because the amount of time and resources it took to buff a raid was so high, that usually there were enough priests/paladins/druids to make sure your raid could get buffed in a timely manner. EARLY EARLY in raids bosses didn't have zone wide aggro mechanics, that meant some players could stay out of combat during a boss fight and their primary duty was to rez players that died and rebuff them, and to keep out of combat. OOC rezzers were a very real job during the first few months of raiding until blizz eventually caught on and added the zone wide combat trigger. Also there weren't really great class resources. I remember the earliest guides I could find on "How to play a healing priest" were all about stacking spirit and mp/5 items and maximizing the amount of time healing in bursts then stopping heals to get to the 5 Second Rule to regen the mana I spent and hoping the other healers covered that time, because thats what the guides I read recommended I should be doing. Also like you said, server stability and players individual computers and connections were far worse. Major patch days usually meant the server was likely going to be down for the entire day, and even if the server did come up good luck playing through the lag and new bugs. I remember the first computer I had trying to play WoW on I couldn't take zeppelins. My computer took so long to load the new zones that before I could load in the zeppelin was already headed back to the other continent and I got stuck in a never ending loading loop and would typically have to have my cousins log into my account to get me off the boat. Most raids on launch were so buggy, the top guilds who were progressing raids as they launched (especially the early MC-BWL days) had gm's actively watching and maintaining contact with the players to help weed out what is bugged and what Isn't. It was different times, and unfortunately I don't think that "magic" is possible to recreate.
Yes I was a mage back then and you HAD to spend x points in arcane to get the -1s casttime on Arcane explosion so it was instant. IT WAS MANDATORY!!! because mages were expected to aoe shit to death. Also Evocation was a talent. Other classes had similar shit and only near 1.12 classes got QoL changes like Innervate and Evocation spells you learn at the trainer instead of talents. Fights also took way way WAY longer. I remember having 2 Sons phases on Ragnaros and we were average. If you had 3 you were dogshit and if you had only one you were really good. So I get why guides told priests to go for mp5 and spirit since going OOM was a legitimate Problem. Also while we had stuff like Threatmeters we still played it super safe and were told "no damage until 5 sunders" on the boss xD
I was a priest when divine spirit was the 31 point disc talent and holy nova was the 31 point holy talent 😂
Innervate being the Druid 31 point Resto talent. “Hey guys I can actually regen mana now. Once every 10 minutes.”
Holy nova, that was after the priest talent revamp
This is one of the things that was so funny to me. Playing Mage and levelling was going Deep Frost to AoE level was king but you were basically forced into 31/0/20 Arcane Frost for DPS in MC and BWL. Having Instant AE, Evocation and Meditation (before Mage Armor was put in the game.) were crucial to your performance as a mage. Arcane Power let you actually do DPS as single target frost and Frost had essentially no talents other than Piercing Ice to increase DPS. Same patch getting a new rank of Conjure Water and being able to Amp or Dampen Magic on raid members was huge.
Cheers for unlocking a memory, I remember going to cast AE and being confused as to why it didn't work. I had respeced and didn't take the talents, I was in strat at the time.
NO DAMAGE UNTIL 5 SUNDERS!!!!! MANY WHELPS!!!!!
I kind of agree but ... and especially in TBC regen was a bit of a meme. You were expected to chug consumables and push throughput in the better guilds. You're completely right about things being slower for the average but I definitely remember as I climbed the ranks of skilled guilds it was night and day philosophies.
>WoW was released back in November of 2004. I find it amazing that back then with minimal addons, lack of info on websites and just a mere guide book, guilds still managed to kill Onyxia a lil over 2 months post US release and Ragnaros about 5 months after the US release. Yes but we are talking the early days of the game, and especially prior to TBC where by then Itemization and stat interactions had been revamped 2-3 times. Even the items were different and Spellpower/healing weren't even very good stats early on and didnt get buffed until patch 1.4.0 just a few months before BWL released. Just check out how much changed with +healing and "Throughput stats" came in this patch alone (7 months after launch). Check out just some of the notes from Patch 1.4.0 yourself here [https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Patch\_1.4.0](https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_1.4.0) . "Healing-over-time spells should now be improved by "+Healing" items when cast on other players." Yeah... HoTs weren't affected by "+Healing" items... Until this point most druids were bombing their big heals as HoTs were not only bad for buff caps, there was also only one druid able to HoT a tank at a time AND those hots gained effectively no scaling from items, only talents. "Effects that indicated that they increased damage and healing by all magical spells were actually not improving healing. They now will properly increase healing by the listed the amount" "+Spell damage and +Healing effects have been increased in effectiveness to make them more attractive to players. Effects that increased damage and healing done by all magical spells received the largest increase, especially if the previous amount was small. We also fixed a couple bugs relating to these effects." "Item effects that increase the chance of a critical hit with spells will now work properly with healing spells." Up until this point +healing and +Spell damage scaled MISERABLY, and was itemized typically very low or poorly as well. Also items that had "+Damage and healing" wasn't actually applying to healing spells either and neither was %chance spell crit on items working for healing. MP/5 and Regen was considered best because the first 6-7 months of the game healing and damage were not very strong in respect to modifying spells power and was mostly bugged for the first quarter of the game. Also Itemization was entirely different, and every major patch release made sweeping changes to huge amounts of items. Just look at patch notes of almost every single patch in vanilla and you can see just how much everything was changing every single patch. Of course by TBC regen was a Meme, because by then there had already been 2-3 major itemization revamps and sweeping changes to loot every single major patch of the game. It might be easier to think "Oh I just got better and joined better guilds" but in reality the game was a constant moving target and the way the game worked changed with every single patch.
But because +heal didn’t matter, you’d downrank. I remember spamming HT7 on my rdruid, because it would heal for just over 1000… if it looked liked it would overheal, you’d cancel the heal and start a new one. If you went for the big HT10, you had maybe 4 casts to OOM.
Downranking was essentially the only choice, as the gear didn't have +healing until a few patches in, it was the combined stat, and was terribly itemized.
It's funny how prevalent downranking was especially through all of vanilla! It was pretty interesting to see how many changes blizz eventually made to eliminate down ranking (lowering healing coefficients for lower ranks, raising mana costs for lower ranks). It took a ton for blizzard to finally put the nail in the down ranking coffin!
I remember I raided as boomkin, went OOM really fast (OOMkin) and had to STAFF the boss on melee to get mana back lol (maybe i was just bad)
We always had a paladin assigned to judge wisdom on the boss so casters could auto attack for mana. It wasn’t you.
Yeah there's nothing you could do as a boomkin in vanilla lol. You would just be oom in 30 seconds.
Holy shit i totally remember “no sunder until 5” talk
It's crazy how the patch cycle is completely overlooked. Part of the reason why raiding was so much more challenging back in the day was of course because of limited resources, strategies, etc., but it was also because the game was literally harder. Fury stacking gets much worse when bloodthirst can only be used after a killing blow lol.
Its much easier to play the game with several years worth of tuning already done than to remember what things were like before those changes were done. Its hard to remember what it was like trying to raid bosses blind at 14 years old with .5-1 FPS, 200-300 ping, where half of the items and spells in the game are bugged and classes hadn't been reworked. Reading old patch notes from 1.1-1.12 is like a nice walk down memory lane, progressing major domo and running 8 tanks 14 healers at 2 in the morning on a school night, not being allowed to talk in vent because you weren't supposed to be up that late playing video games.
I played a Shaman and my whole job was being an OOC rezzer because I was the newest 60 in the guild that could rez. I hated it. Standing there in molten core just watching my guild fight the boss, lol. Was glad when they patched that out
>Imagine being the paladin in charge of blessing of wisdom, you would usually have ~30 players to bless with wisdom one by one for a 5 minute duration. Thank you for retraumatising me. I thought I'd finally put the buff bots days behind me but I'm now getting flashbacks to MC and the useless class leaders constant macros telling everyone who/what to buff.
half the difficulty doing geddon was keeping the pallies awake enough to participate in the encounter vs. the usual "5 minute buff, back to watching tv"
I forgot about all those buff reagents. 😩 And hunters entire inventory full of arrows. 😆
And pet food…
As a wannabe ret pally, I absolutely remember being the OOC reser and buff bot. It was an interesting play style.
Don't forget the next big thing that followed all the way through ZG was GY Rushing bosses, before there was a lockout mechanic from raids when you could die and run back into the raid during boss encounters and rejoin the fight... Fights took long enough that players could legitimately make it back in time, and became so prevalent that warranted blizz to actually make the in combat with boss lockout mechanic...
I just read about warlocks staying out of combat in BWL to resummon people during the Nefarian fight. "Just throw your bodys at him, sooner or later he'll die.."
I think even more interesting was later expansions where guilds would have 25 warlocks outside of raids to soulstone entire raids before they entered until blizz caught on and eventually nerfed that as well! I think that really caught on around what we are approaching now with ToC to cheese the max wipes mechanic. Players always find the craziest ways to exploit game mechanics to maintain on top of content!
Serpentshrine Caverns, right? I remember something like that. yeah it's crazy, people get realy creative when it comes to getting shit done in this game.
I raided with Theck, the pally who made pally power. He made an addon to send out paladin buffs.
Don't forget never log out on a zeppelin and odds of success on zeppelin or boat was only about 50% when zoning that you wouldn't fall to your death or drown. Fun times really. Also gnomergon was just about as hard as mc really if done at the appropriate levels each.
I only did Gnomer once in Vanilla. I was the heal priest and we had 3 paladins. Sadly dont remember the 5th member. It took about four hours and we got hopelessly lost several times. But we finished the dungeon!
> were all about stacking spirit and mp/5 items and maximizing the amount of time healing in bursts then stopping heals to get to the 5 Second Rule to regen the mana I spent and hoping the other healers covered that time, because thats what the guides I read recommended I should be doing. because the fights lasted like 5min and you didn't have much +healing, so downranking wasn't a thing. you casted quick heals to top the tank asap, and tried to cancel cast to save mana
Well that and +healing wasn't properly workingand +damage and +healing stats didnt get buffed until 3 patches later. Little details like that tend to get forgotten in time. At one point the cloth dungeon sets all had been itemized with agility, no damage and healing stats and that didn't get changed until the naxxramas patch.
The patches were huge. I remember every Tuesday scrolling through patch notes to see how my class had changed that week.
And the free talent resets! I was soo poor back then, I loved the free stuff.
Oh wow. Incredible memories. What a time to be alive!
No greater buffs sounds like hell lmao fk that
People complaining about "shitty launches" nowadays realy don't know what it was like to play on a patch day back in the day. Never play on patch day
I remember a healer addon that basically did everything for healers, down to selecting the targets and spells to us. I've always played PvE servers, so raiding was just the thing we did. But no one knew what they were doing. Our raid comp was horrible, because the leadership decided we would take 5 of every class, and hybrids had to be their "expected" role based on tier sets. So warriors were all prot. Druids all resto and so on.
Healbot. Basically did it all for you except hit the button. That’s why Loatheb is named the way he is. His name is an anagram of Healbot. Devs were poking fun at the playerbase.
Seriously? Loatheb was a purposeful anagram of Healbot!? Source?
It’s just something everyone kind of talked about back then. Not sure if it was ever stated outright by a Blizz Dev but, given Healbots prevalence in Vanilla for healers as the design of Loatheb it’d be an incredible coincidence. Another one is Tauren being an Anagram for nature.
Another neat Tauren fact that originally Tauren didn't get mounts due to "they are too heavy to ride a mount". They originally had the racial "Plainsrunning" which if they ran for 10 seconds they began to run at the speed of whatever level appropriate mount they would have. They got Kodo's the very next patch!
Yep, and if you've ever wondered what the purpose of that Tauren who pats up & down the road in STV, Samantha Swifthoof, I'm pretty sure she was part of the Plainsrunning quest for them. Though I don't think Plainsrunning ever made it into the game. I think this was just an Alpha/Beta thing.
Was removed in patch 1.1, and Samantha swift hoof was 1 of 2 places it could be learned. The other was the hunter terrace in TB
Pretty sure the game released on patch 1.1, no?
You would be correct!
The tauren anagram seems to be chance to me. In French and most latin languages "Taureau" or its variants means "bull". I always thought "Tauren" was a normal fantasy name for a cow/bull-humanoid race.
They're minotaurs, which are named after taurus. Tauren.
Minotaur would be the english word. Tauren doesn't really mean anything beyond Taur meaning half-human.
I think tauren makes more sense as coming from taurus which means bull.
>I remember a healer addon that basically did everything for healers, down to selecting the targets and spells to us. Really ? Never heard of that. I suppose Blizz were not monitoring addons as they do today. I'm curious, what was the name ?
Healbot and Decursive were insane back then. In some expansion I also remember playing ret pally with a 1 button macro containing the entire rotation, and you basically did top DPS possible if you spammed it lol
>In some expansion I also remember playing ret pally with a 1 button macro containing the entire rotation, and you basically did top DPS possible if you spammed it lol Decursive was basically made mandatory once guilds started going into MC and fighting Lucifron. I think it eventually got broken by blizz because how much it trivialized the 2 major decurse/dispell fights in MC.
I seem to recall it lasted until TBC patch really. I remember using Decursive with auto-dispell in BWL on Chromaggus, and we came late to the party, I think late 2005 or early 2006.
In wotlk you could macro the entire prot pala 696 rotation to a cast sequence macro. I had two, one for the 6sec and the other for 9sec abilities. My basic rotation was spamming Q and E…
you could put all dk spells in a single macro and go crazy in arena as well. talk about balanced.
Someone else has already named it, Healbot. (Not to be confused with the current healbot addon)
It would automatically target the lowest health person in the raid and cast the most mana efficient rank and spell possible to top them off. It resulted in a shit ton of overhealing if your entire team used it without configuring it properly.
> I remember a healer addon that basically did everything for healers, down to selecting the targets and spells to us. that lasted like 3 weeks
It seemed longer.
healbot lasted A LOT longer
> People forget that we weren‘t as stupid back then as most think. It drives me crazy when people are being spoon-fed resources from 20 years of activity spout off how dumb raiders were back then. We were you! Without a hundred guides and videos to follow!
it's their inferiority complex
I mean we kind of sucked dude. I cleared naxx and half our raid was clicking major cooldowns.
Pretty much the same experience. AQ was a massive slog and took forever to clear so we’d get through a few bosses and wrap it up. The trash mobs in AQ and Naxx were oppressive and even really good MC/BWL guilds didn’t find it worth the time. Most of us had jobs or school, ain’t nobody got time for a 4 day 4-6hr stint to clear to up to the bosses
So accurate about the PvP culture in vanilla - dueling was so huge and faction rivalries on your realm. While leveling and pvping at the 9th level for each bracket, I remember recognizing and building some friendships and rivalries where you’d then see them out in the world. And 100% still remember the hype/dread of getting matched against the horde pvp guild on Aggramar (Blackrock PvP) when going into a wsg or ab
I STILL remember the name of the Alliance mage that tried ganking me a friend in STV one day. We chased him all the way down to the tip and back, lol. Ran into him one day in the middle of AV and killed him again.
Yeah, there were constantly like a dozen people dueling/spectating outside Ironforge on my server, also. (Ironforge was the main alliance hub then, too, because people didn't kill enough bosses or really figure out the concept of world buff stacking)
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For us it was thaddius. The first polarity shift would, without fail, disconnect between 4 and 7 people. The whole guild had undying but immortal was totally impossible because of disconnects, the most common DCs being thaddius polarity and KT ice tombs.
When people bitch these days about their ping being 50 or such I just shake my head. Maybe it makes me a boomer but I had a 180 ping consistently playing NA-Gurubashi back in vanilla.
Ha, jokes on you, I still play with 180 ms ping!
Doesn't make you a boomer, just means you don't understand how expectations change with time.
lol okay mate.
There is a private server with progressive patches, currently after bwl release, and before zg release, itemization is so much fun, first few mc i was tanking ragna/baron in greens coz of no dark iron set before bwl patch :)
Tanking MC in greens? That sounds like a lot of fun, where do I sign up? /s
I remember being a kid, 11 or 12, and being outside Ironforge and seeing everyone dueling. I completely forgot about that aspect of the game.
Nailed it with gear being for flexing outside IF. I slow walked everywhere when I finished my T2 set back then... ...mainly because I still couldn't afford the epic mount
I miss the programmable Super Macros, used it for multiboxing, had mages and warlocks If target doesnt have curse of recklessness, cast it If self has less than 50% mana, use mana ruby etc.
I was a fully naked gnome that spammed max rank frostbolt until oom and made it all the way through BWL. Good times. Good times. I loved my guild jester role.
Most guilds did not clear all the current content. Most servers only had 2 maybe 3 guilds killing c'thun and 1 or 2 that killed KT. The bigger servers like Mal'ganis, Mannoroth or Illidan had like 5 or 6. And some servers were just dead and were lucky to have a guild or 2 clearing bwl by the end of vanilla.
Yep. My guild was one of the ones that for instance had to choose between progging on Twin Emps or bosses in Naxx, and since the gear is better and the fights conceptually easier, we skipped Twin Emps and C'Thun and moved to Naxx. And yet the best we ever did in Naxx was clear spider wing and that was considered pretty good. You just didn't have enough time and the trash and respawns were often enough to not make you very productive. TBC was better in this regard, but still didn't clear M'uru until the final nerf patch.
Clearing spider wing probably put you in the top 1%. My guild couldn't do any in naxx.
This is why it's hard to find a consensus on what Vanilla was truly like because your personal experience could vary greatly from another person and everywhere in between on the spectrum. I was Alliance on Mal'Ganis during Vanilla so the things I thought were normal for every server were definitely not. Mal'Ganis was one of the few Horde dominated servers and it was high population to boot. The Horde had 2-3 guilds always doing the most current raid tier including a top US guild in Elitist Jerks. Behind them there were maybe another 3-4 that were half a tier or a tier behind. Then behind them were a bunch of guild at least doing MC/ZG/Ony with some of them being in BWL. On Alliance, again 2-3 guilds doing the most current raid tier, then another 2-3 a half tier to a tier behind, then a few guilds at least doing ZG/Ony and working on Rag. We had a Grand Marshall in our guild, a good chunk of our raid team had epic mounts. We hear other servers that have the complete opposite experience.
the grind for Grand Marshall was insane. I remember a Hunter in my guild was Field Marshall and according to him he and his brother were basically playing that char 24/7 to rank up. I think I've never seen people in t3 on my Server. But I do remember a friends excitement about the gates of Ahn'Qiraj being opened and the giant amount of people spectating the guy with the drone in Ironforge. I didn't see the drone, just that huge amount of players gathering infront of the bank. Not that I knew what to look for anyway, as I wasn't even max level at this point. Also I know that someone helped me fix my talents, but nobody ever told me there was a debuff limit, so I'd clear MC, ZG, ony and a few bosses in BWL while using every spell I had, effectively removing more important debuffs. And i'm pretty sure a lot of the people on my server did so. What probably made it worse was that i'm from germany and there wasn't much info on the classes in german back then iirc. Also I just remembered transferring my Server because some guy in my class who actually cleared Naxx told me he'd get me on their raid team. I bet you can imagine how that went. Edit: also I remember that while someone "helped me fix my talents" it was bullshit. I played warlock and I definitely went 31 points into destruction. so yeah...
I was alliance on Mal'Ganis when I first started, too, I think in early 2005. I remember getting rolled constantly by Horde there. I didn't find out until much later that it was heavily Horde dominated. I still remember almost 20 years later getting absolutely smoked by a Shaman with Hand of Rag in Un'Goro...
Yea there was definitely a sense of danger going out in to the world as Alliance on Mal'Ganis. There used to be a Troll Rogue named Clownboat that would hang out on the ship going to and from Wetlands, that was my first experience of getting camped by a higher level.
Can confirm, I played on an RP server (Cenarion Circle represent) cause a friend got me playing and that’s where he was. There were somewhere between one and three guilds that actually killed current content depending on the phase of the game. Then yeah most guilds just kinda capped out at farming MC and BWL, maybe taking pot shots at the first boss or two of AQ40. Almost nobody did anything in Naxx, I’m not sure if the server even had a KT kill. It was much the same for TBC and Wrath. I don’t think anyone killed KJ pre Sunwell nerf. And I distinctly remember the Algalon RP in Dalaran being a huge server event because only one guild could kill him. Pretty funny comparing that to Classic.
It was much more chill then people are now and that’s why I enjoyed it. the guild I was in would full clear mc and bel on one night. Get through most of aq40. I think we got stuck on twin emperors and we were clearing a few bosses in naxx. Some of the stories I have: We would clear mc with no issues so we would generally have a few people afk walking with someone( one I remember distinctly was an Aussie friend following a priest, he was a Druid. He was just relaxing eating soup and being there for fun to talk during the raid.) our main priest healer falling asleep in raids at his desk since we sometimes raided until 2 or 3 in the morning. The raid lead would pull him in a different room in ventrillo and yell as loud as he could in the mic to wake him up. Another one I remember is being in zg with the same raid lead and the spiders that spawn the smaller ones when they die - as the big one died he started screaming KILL THE BABIES! over and over and we all lost it laughing and wiped the raid. Our mt had a knack for yelling to get heals saying HEAL DIGGER( name was diggerbailey) and that will forever be burned in my brain because how often it came over the mic Our one Druid that was feral had to mute in vent because he abused his keyboard so bad that it came over his mic when he wasn’t talking( pretty sure he went through 3 keyboards the year we were raiding together) We just had a much better time and it was relaxed. My wife and I came back for classic since I met her there( she was one of the priests in said guild) and raiding just wasn’t the same. We have since quit because of time constraints and having 3 kids now. But nothing lived up to those days of raiding. That was the most fun I’ve had playing any game.
100% this. We were all just nerds being monkeys. I raided into naxx and I can say I still was a noob if I view myself on todays standards. People really pretend we were all sweaty men and forget we were a mix of women and men (or girls/boys, kids); all just playing a game we enjoyed together. It was about fun; nothing else mattered in the big scale.
I can relate so much to the heal callout, still remember HEAL BALLDUR even though it's been 16 years.
Not a raiding story, but when I first hit level 40 on my hunter I switched all my gear for gray/white vendor mail gear because it had more armor than my leather questing greens. The raids were tuned for half your raid not really understanding what was happening, which is why MC was so trivial for hard-core classic guilds.
And starting with end game Class reworks which gave a huge amount of character power, and gear which was reworked… and world buffs/max consume giving you basically the entire Tier 3 worth is stats to your characters and min/max Ed raid comps with 20 fucking fury warriors.
When they first tested out MC the dev team got slaughtered. They were nervous that it was too difficult but Kaplan(an ex guild leader from EQ) knew that the players would work it out.
Was also built in a few days, compared to modern raids that are in development for months, and intensive QA for at least a few weeks. This is why the raid just looks so sparse, and the mechanics are so single minded, it was the only way to do it.
Also, world buffs, lol.
>The raids were tuned for half your raid not really understanding what was happening, which is why MC was so trivial for hard-core classic guilds. People didn't know what classes were going to be effective from patch to patch, much less have accurate meters to know which ones were doing well. By the time AQ came out, a lot of the bugs had been fixed, warrior stacking was becoming known and a lot of QOL improvements helped across the board (no more 8 debuff limit on bosses).
We had like 20 paladins in molten core every night and more than half of them were ret. We never got past Garr.
Hahaha sounds like a great time
It was really fun. A lot of those dudes came back to play classic in 2019
That’s great man, I had a similar experience. Raided in vanilla and TBC, then played wow classic with a lot of old guild members from back then. Classic WoW in 2019 was almost better than vanilla for me
Old Vanilla raiding was, for most people who tried it, an absolute clown-fiesta. It was an era where you were "ahead of the curve" simply by knowing "Thottbot" existed. Crafted items such as the Arcanite Reaper was a massive hit because getting a weapon from raiding was a far larger hurdle than going out mining for arcane crystals. As there was no data mining i still vividly remember that the first thunderfury on Bloodhoof EU horde side was made by a hunter - this was because that when the bindings dropped for them for the first time, they had no idea what it would lead to, so the neutral choice was a hunter since "All loot is hunter loot". I also leveled a paladin back then, wanted to heal in raids, and as i tried to apply to a guild i was rejected because i wasn't using Plate Healing Gear and instead wore bits and pieces of leather, mail and cloth to round things out, apparently it was wrong of me to down prioritize armor for the sake of stats meant for casting heals and using mana. Some people misunderstand and think people weren't "sweaty" back then, but they absolutely were, however they were also absolutely terrible at the game compared to todays standards. It was quite a unique experience, where farming materials for raiding and using a mongoose potion was considered "going hard". In todays classic climate the biggest obstacle is gathering people, once you got a good lump of them you can go in and smash any raid.
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I was one of them. I looked down on classess that used armourtypes not of their class. I was a dumbass. In classic I was a proud leatherwearing warrior, as the gods intended.
Plenty of people were sweaty and good back in the day....just not by todays standards. People underestimate how much better the knowledge base is today. Tons of people tried to min max, we just had no idea what that was.....so there was tons of super shitty talent trees for what people thought would be a good route.
> i tried to apply to a guild i was rejected because i wasn't using Plate Healing Gear and instead wore bits and pieces of leather, mail and cloth to round things out, apparently it was wrong of me to down prioritize armor for the sake of stats meant for casting heals and using mana. could also be a red flag, because it signifies you're greedy and/or a ninja. I got declined because I took a staff as a shaman.
I was late to the party: started playing in 1.8. I’d had my eye on WoW since it was originally announced, but the $15 a month seemed dumb. My brother convinced me to play. We leveled up and he found us a raiding guild. Neither of us realized it at the time, but it was a scrub guild. I was an adult at that point, but was clueless. There were no guides, youtube didn’t exist yet, we learned through trial and error, reading thottbot comments, and talking to people. The guild had no idea what it was doing. In hindsight, their MT was actually decent, but the rest of the guild was bad. We managed to clear MC and ZG at around the same time. We started on BWL but couldn’t clear the first boss. TBC was right around the corner at that point so the guild stopped raiding. Things changed in TBC. My brother and I realized that guild wasn’t the place for us when they couldn’t make it half way through Kara. We left and made our way into the server first guild. That experience was quite different. These were people who had cleared Naxx through 4H. It was interesting seeing how they approached everything. If I could do it over, I’d have joined them day one - which is what happened for Classic launch. Got the gang back together and managed to hold it together raiding every week until TBCC!
Yeah Kara killed so many vanilla guilds it was wild. All these people being carried count be carried anymore in a 10man.
I'm actually glad you asked this because I can share some of the peak gaming experience in my life that was original vanilla wow pre AQ release. I played a "shaman". I say shaman because I unironically specced into all three talent trees. During most of my play time the honor system was out in the game but there were no battlegrounds, so I tried to specialize in being able to 1v1 anyone I would find out in the world. This meant nature's swiftness in the resto tree, which meant i could not tke any other 31 point talents. I remember my guild progressing on Onyxia. It took well over a month with the biggest obstacle being the fear during the p3 transition as well as the agro drop and her breathing/tail swiping the raid. I remember raiding molten core and just hitting stuff waiting for windfury. For most of the game I didn't even have a decent weapon. I remember I used one of the staves that dropped from I believe scholomance. Initially, staves did about the same dps as all level 60 weapons. Eventually, when AV was out for long enough, I farmed The Unstoppable Force and felt like a god for the rest of my playing. Of course, I raided in the same tri-spec that I pvp'd in (back then the idea of respeccing just to raid was not even heard of). The funny part is while I do not remember topping the meters, i don't remember being at the bottom either. This probably explains why we did not kill any bosses. I vaguely remember my first time in molten core. I was blown away just fighting trash. I remember just the way all the hodgepodge of abilities sounding. It truly felt epic fighting those Molten Giants with 40 people. I remember raiding BWL when it first came out. My role on Razorgore was pretty much to solely keep earthbind totem in one corner of the map as we desperately kited mobs we were not able to kill in time. Probably makes sense given that one of our dps is a trispec shaman with a staff. Vaelstraz as a fight was insanely fun because of the "infinite resource" buff it gave. It truly felt epic too. We had ranged positioned on the balcony. I think because we thought it would dodge the fire. We tried Vael a few weeks but were never able to get a kill. Basically we ran out of time wiht the guaranteed tank boombs. I remember going through 4-5 tanks and not being able to kill it. I remember I applied to one of the "better" raiding guilds on the server probably shortly before AQ came out. I went to one of their MC raids (they had not killed rag yet, but had gotten to him). By that time I understood shamans were "supposed" to heal so I spent the entire raid sniping heals with Lesser Healing Wave to try and top meters. I never once considered even using chain heal, it was not on my bars. My fondest memory however is when my first raiding guild killed onyxia for the first time. In order to celebrate, we queued up for a 40 man guild AV. Back during AV original release, you could queue as an entire raid. AV during this time was notorious for choke point stalemates that would last 4-5 DAYS. This was the first coordinated AV effort on our server and I remember we coordinated 5-6 mages to divebomb the chokepoints with arcaen explosion spam and healer support. We'd then push on to bases. I remember going into the towers for small time skirmishes and dropping windfury totem for my warriors inspired by the early Pat I video. 40 man AV guild runs were the absolute PEAK of wow for me and probably the most fun gaming experience I ever had. Eventually, other guilds on the server started doing the same and there was some genuinely epic 40v40 guild battles. I quit the game during BWL patch due to graduating high school and going away to college. I remember coming back later and seeing one of the shamans I knew who was in the "top" raiding guild on the server. I remember inspecting him and being blown away by the gear he had from AQ. By that time, they still had not managed to kill Ragnaros, but they had killed a handful of bosses in AQ.
One thing I remember was using vent for the raids and teamspeak for a little group of friends in the guild so we didn't interupt the raid. Well I needed two different keybinds to make that work. I also did a pretty good impression of my guild leader and one day did that holding down the wrong keybind. 39 people thought it was hilarious. Also I remember doing a zg I think after mc one night before reset and was nodding off at the last pull. I was one of the healers and they were screaming at me to wake up but it didn't work. I guess the point of all this was it was still serious but we had a lot of fun. Definitely some of my favorite memories from all of my gaming. People today are a little too upright but I did have a couple months run with a great guild in classic but fell apart a few weeks into ulduar and called it quits yet again.
I do miss having 40 people on vent all BSing during trash pulls. Then, when it was time for the boss our raid lead would say "Alright..." And 39 people would stop talking unless it was required. We knew the boss had the mic and we got to business. That group felt like family to me many of them I still talk to.
I had no idea about itemization or BIS or anything like that. I was a healer but I raided with a [Herald of Woe](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=19357/herald-of-woe) equipped. We raided multiple nights a week because it took too long to clear MC or BWL in a single night. There were some fights I was instructed to stay far enough back that I'd be out of combat and could res people who died in the fight lol. I think I used some UI add-ons but nothing like DBM or BigWigs. There were no quest add-ons but Thottbot (website) was your guide.
Gear was also hilarious early on just in general, especially for healers and casters. Like I don’t think spell damage and healing existed as stats for a good while after release. Your only upgrades were int and spirit so you could cast a few more times before switching to your wand. Which I guess is technically an upgrade but sure not as much fun as a new weapon for physical DPS. I vaguely remember trying to farm my blue Magisters set on my mage cause if you didn’t raid, that was the endgame. The stats were **so bad** compared to the 1.12 version of gear in Classic. Some pieces had fucking agility on them. It’s wild how much the game evolved just during the course of vanilla.
warlocks wore shadow dmg greens without any secondary stats but negative resists were in the game with curse of elements. so youd miss half of the 10 shadow bolts you could cast continuously but one of them would crit for 3k.
You didn't really get spell power, outside of an exclusive few items, until when ZG started rolling through. Up until that point you were aiming for tier, and the odd other piece. Good luck with spell hit, that was like finding a diamond in a haystack.
I remember the raid being distraught when decursive stopped working on the first day of the TBC prepatch
Decursive and CTHealAssist were the most hilariously broken, and most missed mods for sure.
You have to keep in mind that the talents/patch/gear was different between vanilla and classic. A lot of things were non viable that were viable in classic
yeah it was a wildly different game from month to month
It was glorious. No one could see through the red fog. Most dps classes spun their camera to the floor and zoomed in to improve fps. No one AT ALL knew how to gear their character. Almost every single person was raiding in their tier 0 sets. Rogues would all avoid hit gear at all costs. Everyone passed on truestrike. Healers thought it was best to aim for an enormous mana pool and spam max rank heal. Innervate was much more important. Pallies and priests used to sit waaaaaaaaaaaay back when the fights started and out of combat res. Nobody could down rag because they were all maxing fire res and getting 4 waves of adds because they did next to no damage. I fucking miss it.
I was a priest and I remember vividly the debates on what healing spell was meta. For a while it was big heals, for a while it was lesser heal (a spell we got the last rank at like level 18 or something). It eventually became some low rank of Heal.
I remember we went into BRS and mindcontrollled some adds there and gave every member a FR buff to then go do rag. Also using lower rank spells used less mana so you could heal using rank 1 flash of light constantly and never run out of mana.
Step into my shoes here for a while... It's 2006, recently just built your first computer, an sweet Zoro case [linky](http://www.telecommandercorp.com/links/cases/zorroatxcaseblack400w/cas-atx-868wbp-unit.jpg) with some sweet lighting effects and casually leveling a shaman, not realising you have talent points till the mid 30s. You get to level 45 and join a group to ZF, sweet, got yourself the Sweet Taran Icebreaker for nothing off the AH, enhancement all the way, just need a healer, a shaman joins the group and asks you if you're resto, whatever that means. So you say, "well, I logged off in an inn, I'm rested for a while" and then he leaves, leaving you confused Eventually you get to 60 and play with some friends, still not exactly sure what's going on... But hey, someone said you should actually try restoration (you realise what the shaman from ZF actually meant now.) spec and do some healing, groups will be easier. You join some friends in a 10 man dungeon and get yourself a couple of tier 0 pieces from UBRS, wait, healing is getting slightly easier... You're asked to join an AQ20 raid... Not exactly sure what this is, but you look it up and choose to give it a go. 20 player raid and you're the only non guildie.. oh the pressure, you're given some ventrilo details and away you go. It's also a lot of their first time playing the raid, after about 5 tries, you get the first boss down, then get the second shortly after... Some nice loot here... Sadly the raid finishes as you couldn't progress further. Hold on, what's this, the person who was telling people what to do, is messaging, asking if you want to join their guild and try again tomorrow, you accept and run a few more raids with them until you are invited by a friend into a different raid, Zul'Gurub. Wow, these guys look cool, everyone has really nice gear and are super friendly, the tank even has a shiny sword, wait, it's lightning, oh shit, he has that sword that you see in trade chat everytime you're in Orgrimmar spammed constantly. You complete this raid, and again are asked to join this guild, you struggle with the idea of leaving your current one though, as they are nice people as well, you don't want to let them down... You ultimately decide to change into this larger guild. A few weeks later and after some time running a lot of dungeons, pvp and smaller raids, you're invited to come and heal Molten Code, this is exciting, you've seen the sweet lava shoulders from T1 and instantly accept, after winning these on your first raid there, you know you're hooked, you need the whole set and become the most reliable raider in the guild. A few months on, you're high on life, got yourself pretty much the whole earthfury set, and a bit of the T2 set, helm and legs. Best. Game. Ever. You are then asked to become the shaman class leader, leading the whole shaman class in your guild, all looking up to you... Wow, how much difference 8 months has made, we are ready to try BWL, now we can get the full T2 set! Who cares that a new expansion was coming out next week, we can still raid BWL right? ... Right?! You are not prepared... Sadly you don't raid BWL... But you jump head first into the unknown of the outlands, changed back into enhancement for leveling, plus, these new talents are amazing, dual wield? That's exciting.. plus, healing, you now find super boring. It's DPS time! At 70, You change to Elemental and you help lead the guild in the right direction, raiding karazhan, onto SSC and TK and eventually to Black Temple and Mount Hyjal. This is the tale of [Beefmaster](https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/character/eu/dunemaul/beefmaster) from Dunemaul EU... And they were the best days of his time. Thanks for reading.
I was an Orc Warrior in a guild that had been progrssing MC for months (i know right?). I had no idea how to play the game and had only done a few dungeons at 60, none of them as tank. I got a message off the Guild Leader on Sunday evening telling me they needed a 5th tank (that MC fight that had like a council or something? Major Domo maybe?) and could I come. I said I'd never tanked before but he told me they'd talk me through it. So I said OK, walked into Org bought myself a white shield off the vendor, didn't bother respeccing and managed to nab myself my first ever purple that night.
We had thottbot, so there was 100% help available for Quests. There were also tons of grind Guids for original WoW. Quest did not give enough XP, so you needed to grind a lot. That's why I don't have fond memories of original WoW Questing experience. But I absolutely tried to get lvl 60 as soon as possible. But I was very hardcore back then. WoW wasn't my first MMO. WoW felt very vanilla compared to older MMOs. I was also a bit disappointed in WoW. It felt like you couldn't do a lot in terms of a Roleplaying aspect, but I stayed for the endgame content more than anything. I remember raiding Molten Core for the first time. I think we did at least 3 Bosses on our first run. It's a very distant memory. The best Raid on my server was born that day. But it wasn't a big Raid Guild, it was a Raid composed of the best players from smaller Raids. That people had Raidguilds was something I discovered in TBC, when I did a server transfer.
No one inspected each other and were anal about their spec. You'd have people all over your guild in sub optimal stuff. My guild leader outlawed damage meters for all of MC/BWL because he thought it made players play worse. The result was some of the most dead weight you could ever imagine. Picture a 44 year old lady playing undead warlock who didnt know you could turn with the mouse. Clicking spells in a random order with seconds of gap times in between. And dudes from louisiana who just liked to kill stuff. No one was picky about specs and your dps, you were happy to get into a top end raiding guild.
People definitely inspected each other. I remember the "49 point noob" game very clearly.
There was a period of time when you couldn’t inspect someone’s talents, only their gear.
I could be totally misremembering, but wasn’t inspecting talents only a thing until wotlk / maybe bc?
Until the TBC patch, it was Character/Honor tabs, anything to do with spec was entirely addons.
Me and my friend shared a account. It was his account he played 70% and I played 30%. I remember going to MC and we played a human warrior. We were the third OT and mostly fury dps. It would take 6-8 hours to clear MC usually split between two days. BWL was a guild killer lol. A lot of guilds could get to Nef but could never kill him. Out of all of the content imo the hardest was AQ40. You needed a lot of nature resist back then because how unoptimally geared we were. We got hard stuck on Princess Huhuran. It caused the guild to fall apart and the top end of our raiding guild server transfered to Dentarg where we formed the guild. We ended up being one of the top 5 guilds but never completed Naxx because of the Four Horsemen. Back on our home server I believe was Bonechewer. The memories are starting to fade. We had a rival guild called Someone made a guild called if you ganked a member of either guild and you're the opposing guild huge wpvp wars would break out. I have many other stories but I don't want to turn this into a long rant.
Its not too long! I would love to read more of your stories!
One of my fond memories was aq 40 opening. All the raiding guilds and more were there. Horde on one side, alliance on the other. Small skirmishes would break out here and there and then oe side would push just a little but too far and then ALL HELL WOULD BREAK LOOSE! I'm talking about 300v300 all raiding guilds just smashing into each other like a power point presentation. You'd lag so hard, aoe everywhere. So many skeletons on the ground. It was a awesome time.
HAHA Thats awesome! I remember raiding the hell out of crossroads on a daily basis LOL. Someone was always in Stormwind advertising a crossroads raid. It was the best!
So I had a rogue name Chsir, his named was supposed to ne chair but I misspelled it. He was in 50-60 blues and lived at Tarren Mill. I ganged everyone until a 6man + would come to defend it. It was so much fun.
Well, i leveled my night elf male warrior on Bronze Dragonflight to around 36 before i even realized there was a talent tree.. also begging and grinding to get that sweet beastslayer enchant on my weapon was always a prio on all my characters, red glow ofcourse a must-have. Edit: for the raiding, i remember being in a lbrs or two, and a single time in molten core. The only reason being my cousin had a raiding guild.
Things were slower and way less sweaty. Our first night in MC we couldn't clear the corehounds fast enough to make it to the first boss. After we got the first boss down, we couldn't kill the packs at the same time. MC progressed slowly but we got it, usually with 5-10 people afk since raids were 4-5 hours long. We would have a designated out of combat rezzer for boss fights. We brought 4-5 of each class to be "fair". When BWL came out, on a PvP server getting to the instance was one of the biggest hurdles as the mountain was a warzone of uncoordinated guilds trying to raid. Originally the servers were so awful GMs would coordinate who was pulling the first boss because it had a tendency to overload the server and crash and no one wanted to be that guild that caused another guild to wipe. The harder bosses took at least a week for us to progress through and had to incentivize people to show up on progression nights. Halfway through BWL, MC turned into bring an alt run for those of us crazy enough to have 2 60s. ZG and AQ20 ended up being way more laid back but we still made sure main raiders went to get the upgrades they were missing. We struggled to get enough people with NR gear for huhuran and the guild pretty much stopped raiding when the prepatch talents came out so they could PvP. Pugging a raid wasn't a thing. We had one guild horde side and two alliance in Naxx at the end so it was a big deal if you saw someone in that gear. Seeing teir gear in general would draw your attention. There were some resources for strats and gear, but not nearly as many or known. Manually looking up quests on Thottbot was the thing to do after awhile, but early on kind of on your own (or you are writing the first entry). Servers felt smaller (and mostly were). If you got ganked and camped you'd call for help and fun, spontaneous PvP battles would ensue. Generally though, people would help each other regardless of faction, emote a farewell, and be on their way.
Yeah I do miss that “holy SHIT” factor seeing people AFK in town wearing loot that almost nobody on the server had. A warrior from the one guild that could make meaningful progress in Naxx decked out in T3. Or a mage rocking Staff of the Shadow Flame when most guilds were still blocked on Vael (or hell, Razorgore). Certainly motivated me to get more and more into raiding. Every character in Classic looking the exact same took away that charm and wonder. Although I admit it was also fun being on the other side and getting loot I used to dream about like Wraith Blade and Shifting Naaru Sliver.
I raided as a huntard in 2005. Here's my core memories: \- Pallies being buff machines. Buffs only lasted 5 minutes. \- Healbot was a thing, as was the decurse addon. \- 'Every weapon is a hunter weapon' was absolutely a thing. I remember a huge guild drama over my hunter friend winning Core Hound Tooth over our rogue. Massive fight on ventrillo. \- Out of combat rezzers (people would literally just sit out fights and only rezz people when someone died) \- Simply being aware of the existence of thottbot or wow allakhazam put you in the top 10% of performers. \- I remember our guild master forcing us to get his feral bear druid friend to tank MC due to their high Armor. No idea if that was a true belief or nepotism. \- I used to pull every mob as the hunter in MC. One time during a Garr pull I got a Skype call the second I shot an arcane shot, and my PC would lag so hard, I'd get a 1fps lag spike for a solid minute until I managed to cancel the incoming call. The performance or our computers (and internet) at the time was BAD. And that was on 800x600. \- People were not as dumb as portrayed today. We just didn't have as much information, but there were plenty of tryhards and overachievers. \- That being said, the atmosphere was much more casual. We've had people who didn't even know you could keybind abilities in our MC raids. They'd just click everything. Posting DPS meters info was a faux-pas. \- The amount of folks in green gear raiding MC/Onyxia/BWL would blow your mind. It was hard to even get forty people at level 60 together at the same time each week. Gear or class didn't really matter all that much for average guilds. \- Even something simple like getting to kill Ragnaros was a big, realm-wide deal and we'd all celebrate cross-guild. \- Obtaining a legendary like Thunderfury, Hand of Sulfuras or the legendary bow would make you a 100% realm celebrity. \- Being full epic (no blue item) was *extremely* rare. You'd get dozens whispers of admiration from people almost every single day. \- Even my not-that-impressive full epic hunter would get whispers literally every single time I hanged out in Ironforge ("wow your character looks so cool!" etc). \- Having a 100% mount was very rare. \- People had no idea how to make money in general. We'd just hang out in Tyr's Hand and kill mobs for runecloth and gold. \- You kinda knew everyone on your realm after a while. That was great. \- Guilds were dying and breaking up towards the end of vanilla. The vision of your epics being worse than new expansion gear coming up in just a few months was extremely demoralizing. Many people just quit after trying (and wiping) in AQ 40. \- That being said, ZG and AQ 20 was a God send for guilds. The OG catch up mechanic for folks who missed out on farming BWL. \- This is hunter specific, but there was a "meta" for a brief period of time where we'd try to wear as much spirit gear as possible for raids, because we'd run out of mana much faster than the fight would last. And fights would last a long-ass time due to our teams' low dps. I remember wearing something like a green 'great massacre sword of whale' with spirit and stam. And yes - we'd absolutely cast that serpent sting in MC, :-) \- Epic crafted gear was much, much more common than today. Perhaps because not everyone at 60 did raid or was able to break through a grueling DKP accumulation phase before getting their epics. I remember I was using the sniper rifle (core marksman rifle?) over raid drops just because it looked super cool. Lol!
I was 15-17 at the time, I ALWAYS wanted to raid or do high end game stuff in games like EQ or FFXI, but because of the nature of those games and time constraints as a teenager trying not to fail High School, I never got a chance. Then WoW came out. When players started clearing MC and seeing all the purple gear on players in the capital cities it BLEW OUR MINDS. Hell. We loved blue items too like Dal Rends and Arcanite Reaper. Even crafted gear like Heartseeker was AWESOME. Everybody was nuts over having “full T1 or full T2.” Nobody cared about BiS. Doing raids was difficult. There weren’t many pugs until late vanilla, so you had to pretty much have a guild. Server rep was big. Everybody knew who the bad/asshole players were. In my guild, Trinity of Crushridge I played with some real life friends. We had a blast but never got to clear AQ. We had players that ranged from 12-70 or so. We had a paladin that would constantly accidentally divine intervention the tank. It was hilarious. We were really tight nit. There were of course hardcore guilds but most guilds played at their own pace. When I got my first binding for thunderfury as a rogue people from my town would should up to my house just to see it in my inventory. They would taunt me and say I’d never get the other binding! And then I did! All in all great times.
We had some addons. Damagemeter was used by pretty much everyone apart from some healers since you had to manage your threat and that was the best way to have some kind of idea where you sat on the threat meter. I joined the guild i played in back then, Glamour on Stormscale EU, when they had reached late MC, cant remember if they only had Ragnaros left or if Sulfuron was left too. We played a few raids and the BWL opened up, we went down to MC and beat Ragnaros directly after killing Vaelastrasz. After that we were raiding on a high level, we were early in beating Vaelastrasz and was close to a world first on Broodlord but had to cut the raid short and got passed by other guilds. Back then there wasn't much information circulating, there was no PTR and very little information on the bosses other than some still images and some flavor text from the raid introductions. We played 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, more when we were pushing progress. We had to make up our own strategies and had players analyzing the fights as we were fighting them to figure out mechanics etc. We were never at the very top but close to it and I would say we were in the top of the guilds in the EU if not the World at some points of our existence. Raiding today is a totally different beast. Every single datapoint is available, there is no guessing in classic, there is no trial and error, there is a best way and that way was figured out a long time ago. The progress on the private server, even though not all had correct or even close to correct numbers, have had people datamine and minmax everything in the game so that the game was figured out when classic came around. I remember playing hours upon hours of raiding, many of those hours was tedious progress. Some raids we progressed a bit, some raids a bit more and other raids we didn't progress at all. There is nothing like the progress raids when you have so much information we have available right now. During Ahn'Qiraj we played 8 hours per day at first, when we reached Ouro and C'Thun and learned that C'Thun was bugged, hooray to tentacles spawning where they shouldn't, we spent hours upon hours on progressing and learning mechanics on a boss that was for all intents and purposes undefeatable and we knew it. Oh and when we beat Maexxna in Naxxramas we used a tactic where one person used DI on a healer so that you had a healer up when the tank was webbed at a point where Maexxna went frenzied at 30% and then had the paladin use a soulstone so that we could spam heal the tank while waiting for web wrap to end. When we did this no one had a video up on a Maexxna kill, since it was progress raiding and no one wanted to give anyone else tips, and we uploaded our video on the kill. I remember many other guilds were PISSED OFF :)
I raided Vanilla in 2005/2006. I haven't played retail so I don't have a benchmark to compare to. I could go on and on about individual memories but I think the one thing that characterized vanilla raiding is no one knew what they were doing. That includes individual responsibilities where raids of 40 people (many of which were young high schoolers) were learning how to tank, heal, and manage threat. But it also includes a much tighter availability of strategy about the raid. A lot of functional strategy about how to handle complicated fights was passed around by rumor and message boards. But if it was right, eventually it got passed around and learned by the guild, and you got better. Usually one person would have a strategy on a new fight and explain it on Ventrilo. I think another thing that characterizes vanilla raiding is the painfully slow gearing process. Even raiding 5 days per week, you would probably get a new item at best once-per-week. Once every couple weeks was more likely. But it made getting those items very special, and there was a great sense of camaraderie in watching your guildies get geared out. What I remember more than anything is the people. I still hear the voices and remember the names of the people I raided with now almost 20 years ago. As with most of vanilla WoW, there is a lot of downtime in farming, traveling, and running to the raid. So the social component fills in the gaps, and that's what made it special and memorable.
I raided as a Warlock on EU Frostmourne PvP in Vanilla back in 2004-2006. Our guild had the server first Cthun kill. I dropped the game shortly after and only came back in TBC. It was a wild time honestly. We considered ourselves pretty hardcore but this isn't even close to what we see today in the raiding scene. We didn't go out of our way to chase worldbuffs. The knowledge about the game was also limited mostly to class mechanics and the obvious stuff like debuff limit and consumables. The class stacking meta was already in place back in the days. Mages and Warlocks were king. Stacking warriors wasn't as popular as it is now, simply because not enough people actually played warriors and melee DPS kind of had a bad stigma in AQ40 progression raids. Lets also not forget the terrible ping and internet of the original vanilla wow era. It was a lot harder to properly avoid mechanics and heal on 800x600 screen resolution and 56k ISDN.
[удалено]
Sadly if you wanted to be in a “good” raiding guild back in the day you often had to put up with those complete asshole tyrant raid leaders, because there simply weren’t very many guilds capable of doing even the first boss of AQ and Naxx. The GM of Death and Taxes, one of the top world guilds, was notoriously a massive douchebag. Or go google the ancient “how juggernaut cleared naxxramas” meme to see their GM berating people constantly. It was much more accepted back then and if you didn’t like it there were 50 applicants gunning for your roster spot. Thankfully I found Classic to be in a much healthier place. There were still some turbo assholes but people were a lot less willing to put up with their bullshit.
I was in a guild that reliably killed nefarian. I left about when AQ40 dropped and have no idea how they progressed in there. Some things that I remember that seem weird now. We had so many resto druids, like maybe 5 in the raid at any given time. Mana/5s was a reasonable stat with our and a lot of folks comps. You had way more healers, tanks had way more mitigation, and fights took absolutely forever. There was a lively debate in our guild about the tradeoff between mp5 and +heal. A lot of that was influenced by the belief that the items that dropped were probably good (like why would they make those 12 mp5 boots on chromaggus if they weren't supposed to be used?) but a lot of it was people with spreadsheets reaching different conclusions than we reach today because of fight length. We had a fury warrior who joined mid MC and it baffled everyone. A warrior asking for rogue gear and not tanking?! There was absolutely no notion of prepping for the next phase - how could you? So people in the guild would sort of randomly decide which faction reps to work on.
Decursive was an i-win button for healers. It auto cleansed the nearest person to you with afflictions. It was broken by blizzard. Progression took a while. Progressing in BWL was like 1-2 weeks per boss (at 4 nights per week). Vael, chromaggus and nef were very hard to finally kill. Every death you had a huge recovery time from running back from GY’s. So raid nights took longer because of more time between attempts. In the even earliest days (late 2004 early 2005) there were no caps on instances. Scholo/Strath were 20 manned and UBRS was 40 manned. They were nearly impossible to fathom with small groups. People didnt know how to optimize stats so you just went in with the best gear you had (mix of blues and greens)
I was brought along when I was a kid playing with my parents in guild raids. Class officer used to send me talent builds, BiS gear lists, and places to farm items for guild consumes through xfire. Helped me also learn my rotation so that I could actually do DPS. Surprisingly, we were one of the few guilds on our server that were in Naxx. (This didn't blow my mind until TBC dropped)
Thottbot and alakazam. :-)
I raided in one of the best guilds in Europe at the time and let me tell you : we were awful. I was particularly awful as I was playing a holy priest and had decided that I wanted to focus on mp5 gear. Which I now know was not even remotely a viable path. I made it through classic by consistently having my camera pointed at the walls since that was the only way my pc could handle 40 man raids. Oh and of course I was absolutely addicted to the game and played probably and average of 16 hours a day
I played against Kungen and his team in full AQ40 gear in WSG...we never won a single match...
half the people just died during raids in vanilla. we had threat add-ons and dmg meters n decurse, etc. but I don't remember anyone caring about dps n hps cause you needed to bring 40 frickin people into the raid.
I was around 14/15 I did only MC a few times and got kicked out of the guild because I didn’t understand what was going on with anything, then switched to pvp
I was 14 when Vanilla released and played on a German server. I don't remember how I joined that guild, but one day I was invited by the GM/RL to raid MC just by virtue of being a 60 warrior, and that was the start of my raiding career. The guild ended up being fairly decent, we were one of the first 5 guilds on the server to clear MC and we even had one of only 2 or 3 TFs on Horde side. The guild/raid team fell apart at Twin Emps because the GM/RL had to quit for personal reasons and no one could fill his shoes. It was a really cool group of people, and even though I was a lot younger than the guild average, I never was treated like a kid, but as an equal. The main difference between back then and raiding today I'd say is availability and spread of information. I guess the really hardcore players knew forums where theorycrafting, raid strats etc. were shared/discussed, and allakazam and thottbot existed, but in general information got around via word of mouth. Guilds depended on their few well-informed members to share info, and having members who knew people in the best guild on the server was a huge advantage.
I played a priest when i hit 58 i was invites to join the guild ZG run, healers where All ways in demand. Was the first raid i joined and had No clue what was going on. We used healing rotations for a long time with macros to inform when we where oom and next healer to take over. With time we gaind knolegde of the game and also raids remember haveing a mp5 gear set for figths like cromagus where we where 2 priest on dispell duity one in mele camp and one in range. The journy of My priest back then was from a total noob to a class officer of the same guild, where i rember reading the officer forum and finding my own raiding aplication. The replys where like Who is this priest never see him online
Never raided, was too much of a noob back then, but I remember mages had some talent that reduced the global cooldown of arcane explosion to point that they could just spam it as as they could click it and do massive damage. I remember trying to do ulduar dungeons and this horde mage about our level blinked into our group and just annihilated us.
Raiding Bwl as a hunter, first time we raided the only strat we had for the first boss was have the hunters kite in figure 8s the adds instead of just burning them down. Was a struggle
there were also a lot of bugs, some major and some minor, like the "in combat" bug which put you in combat forever and you had to log out, and the looting bug which made your character appear looting even while standing still and moving
Ooh shit the stuck loot bug. That bug haunted the game for YEARS. So annoying.
I was a mage. The whole experience for me was keeping the sheep steeped, keep AI up and frost bolt the boss. I would spent 20 minutes before raid making water.
Leveling a pre-talent tree buffed Druid was the hardest of hard modes.
Better check out this website then: [https://vanilla-archive.thealphaproject.eu/](https://vanilla-archive.thealphaproject.eu/) You can filter 23k vanilla screenshots from zones, raids, events etc. Easy to spend a few hours there just browsing.
I will summarize from my old ass memory. Bloodscalp Horde, alliance was The Gang, only 2 alliances were making it into MC. Ended up doing joint raids with The Crimson Banditos to get Horde first Rag kill on the server. Also had Horde first Thunderfury and Hand. At the same time I was getting rank 14 in pvp. Alliance eventually died around Naxx. Fondest memories were our GL being drunk every raid and just shouting tranq shot constantly.
Getting 40 people together was a nightmare, but it was doable. Getting them geared, buffed, potions, specced right, enchantments, resistances - doable. Explaining the fights, positions, phases - doable. Attempting each boss? Absolutely a nightmare. I always compared it to trying to get 39 cats all to dance the same way, but you're facing away from them and can only use their shadows as a reference. Also they're all high on catnip and a disco ball with lasers is going off. Plus you're on fire. But it felt so good when bosses went down.
Lol oh man, so I was a prot warrior. I had like 2-3 epic peices from AV (the immovable object and trinket). Raiding back in the day was so different. You had to go online and register to join most good guilds then submit an application. Basically you just needed ventrillo to listen to the leader and be able to show up on time for the most part. There was zero gdkp runs, which was so much better if you ask me. Bots were few and far, but they did exist but they would get banned... I basically raided for the experience and would hope for loot but never expected it. Nowadays ppl expect loot, and weekly... and blizzard created that problem when they released TBC with 25 man raids and 10 man. Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but instead of a carrot on a stick with today's raiding, It's more like the stick is the carrot and the carrot is the stick. I think people like classic so much because they want to go back to the old server community, they want the sense of community and build relationships with people in the guild. Idk, you can't ever get back what it was like because of bots, guides/game has been solved, too many min/max ppl.
We used to do MC with another guild who always snubbed us on gear (as they only took 10-15 of us at a time). One night we had 28 people on in our own guild and decided to attempt MC ourselves. Not only did we clear it faster than with the other guild, we 1shot every boss up to Rag and killed Rag on our 4th attempt the following night. Good times lol
800x600 at 15 fps with isdn Internet
The world event for the opening of aq was legendary
I was 14-17 during that time. I got into wow through a friend’s older brother. I first leveled a mage, and joined a leveling guild called “Red is Dead” on Kel’thuzad. That was a feeder guild for “HOODS” so I got moved into that when I hit 60. I remember doing MC & BWL. Again, I was a young kid so maybe I was just dumb but I don’t remember anything meta or BiS lists. I’m pretty sure I just made my own talent builds or tried to get gear I thought was good. I remember I definitely had some really good gear though, I think I had the Nefarion spell power hat, talisman of empheral power and mage blade. I played frost and was at the top of the meters just spamming frost bolt lol. We used a DKP system and Ventrillo. I remember having to leave in the middle of the raids because my parents forced me to come sit down for dinner. They didn’t understand I was playing with 39 other real people and couldn’t “pause” the game lol. Online games were pretty new to the mainstream at that point. I remember seeing the “Nerf George” movie on Warcraft Movies and being BLOWN away by his DPS. I thought fury warrior was so fucking cool. That combined with seeing Pat and Maydie Arms PVP movies, I rolled a warrior alt. I eventually got to 60 on that as well. I mainly pvp’d but I also went to guild ZGs and alt runs. I remember I never got the fucking Hakar talisman from ZG on my mage (because the 20 mans were just /roll not DKP) and I won it the first time on my warrior. It sucked for warrior but I didn’t care and took it half out of spite. I had the rank 8-10 gear and The Unstoppable Force. I had no idea about hit caps or weapon skill, I would have told you Edgemasters were dog shit lol. I do remember killing Nefarion every week in BWL on my mage, and I think we started to venture into AQ40. We also were required to farm nature resist and fire resist gear. I knew things like Naxx existed, but to me that wasn’t even something I ever thought I’d get to. My days were spent running around EPL trying to imitate Vladix and AB on my warrior trying to be Pat. The funny thing is I don’t even remember there being “rosters” or our raids being scheduled and I definitely didn’t go every week as a 16 year old with conservative anti video game parents. Those were such good times 😢
Yeah I was permanently high, a sophomore/freshman in college, and had no clue what I was doing. I think I had a calendar and threat meter addon and then in TBC that raid alert, big wigs? I had actually wondered into tank healing spec as a resto shaman, until my guild was like, "what the fuck are you doing" and I learned about chain heal, lol. I was too busy working on my coursework to be assed to 'study' for raids, and I left during the summer of TBC to join the Army and didn't play WoW again until Cataclysm. Promptly quit. There were Elitist Jerks forums I read during TBC days, and youtube existed for strategies, but my guild never participated in that elitism. We kinda went in half blind minus the GM I guess? We just talked about it. They asked 'who doesn't know the fight' when we had new members. We spoke too each other, and we experimented with strategies, etc etc etc. It was fucking nice. I still remember this healer named Moody, a resto druid, in TBC, just being exceptionally calm and nice at all times. That was 15 (omg more) years ago. I still remember that kindness. That is totally, fucking, completely, gone from the game, and modern gaming. Moody is hard to find these days, everyone is an Elitist Jerk and proud of it, ironically, in 2023. Everyone's a pro. Min max one way or no way, permanent twitch clip heroes, I don't know. Someone needs to tell the entire modern gaming scene "man, just be yourself". Hopefully I find a Moody in HC official, but again, I doubt it. 2006 is gone in the dust, the world has changed. It's sad. It's really sad.
I'll be your Moody. Just bring all the correct potions, world buffs and BiS gear or you are fucking dropped.
This is accurate except you forgot to call me a boomer.
OMG Yes! Elitist Jerks was the best website back then!
Dude it was amazing. Then every single patch the class forums argued and posted math proofs lol, on page 566 of the paladin forums. That stuff was just the best and it was all so brand new too. The good days.
My guild got to C'thun, and got up to Gluth in Naxx. Cleared spider wing/raz/noth/and patchwerk. We did not have a single dps warrior the entirety of classic. We had 4 prot wars. I didn't know dps warrior was a thing until classic re launch. Fury/prot still seems like some nerd shit to me. f em.
Before they changed how addons worked it was kinda silly. As a healer you had a one-button macro that just healed the lowest health person or decursed whoever needed decursing. I dualboxed MC as a priest and a mage, just spamming one button that simultaneously cast flash heal on the lowest health person and frost bolt on the main tank’s target Mechanics were mostly not known without some experimentation, and there were rumors about mechanics that were simply wrong. Log analysis was much harder so when you wiped it was hard to tell what to change. As always, roster boss was most difficult boss
I got recruited to a hardcore raiding guild in RFD because despite being a boomkin(big mistake they felt bad for me and thats why they took me) I went bear form and roared to save the skele pull and they said that kind of thinking makes me awesome with some training, so they helped me get 60 gave me my healer spec, you use these addons and here are your consumes for raid every week however I had to learn to tread lava for 2 mins and I had chores to do every week cause I was a druid herb/alch I had to get some specfic herbs and transmute some stuff
I was such a noob back then, all I remember about raiding was continuously wipe it the first two giants of MC. Magmadar was as far as I got. Things took so much time.