Yeah, I remember pugs failing the Baron run all the time, haha. I think I ran that place and Scholo at least 100,000,000 times. I remember tribute runs in DM being super hard for most pugs too.
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Try to explain to me WoW vanilla
- Thread starter MrMatt555
- Start date
Yeah, I remember pugs failing the Baron run all the time, haha. I think I ran that place and Scholo at least 100,000,000 times. I remember tribute runs in DM being super hard for most pugs too.
cow druid
I think we left ENP and joined AOF shortly after Zul'Gurub was released. I know I got my guild invite after we did server first Hakkar.
Holy shit mu, organize your bags
Also best thing about bb forums were bloodboiler and his troll-o-matic.
"Exxorcist, don't click that, it's not actually a very beautiful woman" after like the third time that guy got hacked.
"Kalecgos that way --->"
Even the way the server stood up for our trolls against other servers.
Burning blade will forever be the best, even if our hamster powering the server kept dying.
The thing is, hard can be more than mechanics complexity. Classes were more limited, connections were worse, UI's weren't as fancy, PC weren't as fast, there were not gear-catch up mechanics in place, you had a reduced player pool. Those things added to the difficulty of the game. The game required a lot (a lot) more preparation and down times then too. That added to the difficulty. You get your DM, Onyxia/Nefatian, that +crit flower buff just to get ganked on your way to the instance... that added to the difficulty. Trash mobs were time consuming and some times harder than bosses, and respawned constantly, that added to the difficulty. Consumables were required and expensive, that also added to the difficulty.
There's more to difficulty than simply boss mechanics complexities.
at no point in the long history of World of Warcraft did that character have bags that were not a complete mess
They did add greater bkessings that covered entire classes and lasted 10 maybe 15 min.
TheContact
Member
Yea there were no diminishing returns on CCs in vanilla (i forget when they patched it) but there was a time when WoW was world of roguecraft because they could stunlock you until you died and you had no way to get out of it. I remember as a priest getting royally fucked by them. Also warriors with hamstring because once they were on you you were basically fucked unless someone peeled them off of you. We had the pvp trinket but they could just re apply and priests had no way to get distance.
BriareosGAF
Member
I've played all the content since friends & family up until a few months ago and I wish I had a more firm opinion on whether this caused raid tactic weaponization or not--e.g. once DBM is deployed events have to be designed with it in mind to avoid trivializing. Obviously things are more mechanically complex now, but do we think it's in response ot DBM? Was quest design altered in response to Thottbot? The way in which mods have been folded into the basic/default UI has been an interesting thing to watch of course, the basics of Thott aids are now just part of the quest system.
Every now and then I'll get patched and DBM will be disabled and its fun to run an event you've already done a half dozen times and get by without any of the warnings, etc. I wonder if they would ever entertain "pure mode" runs with no mods for achievements.
I still have no idea how to communicate with my GAF D2 clan, and no one in any strike or other event has ever used a mic but me as far as I can tell. Thank you Sony for the free platinum headset you gave me at DevCon
.Doing 50 pushups before pressing a button does not make it harder than not doing 50 pushups and pressing harder buttons. It just mean s you wasted more time doing 50 pushups.
Similarly, whether you want to actually believe what you just posted or not, the fact that it 'took longer' is still not any measure of difficulty anyone in their right mind gives a shit about. The simple fact is that you could have 80% of your raid be braindead beyond a few simple mechanics, as long as they were geared and could do those one or two things correctly, which even on Kel'thuzad amounted to interrupt rotation (the hardest job), shackling the adds (priests) or correctly tanking the other non-shackleable adds. Literally trivial mechanics by today's standards. I get that you want to romanticize vanilla, and there were absolutely hard things in the game back then, but when you come and try to say that somehow the bosses themselves were actually harder, you're just spewing out ignorance and it makes itself painfully obvious to anyone that has actually done content the entire time
I've played all the content since friends & family up until a few months ago and I wish I had a more firm opinion on whether this caused raid tactic weaponization or not--e.g. once DBM is deployed events have to be designed with it in mind to avoid trivializing. Obviously things are more mechanically complex now, but do we think it's in response ot DBM? Was quest design altered in response to Thottbot? The way in which mods have been folded into the basic/default UI has been an interesting thing to watch of course, the basics of Thott aids are now just part of the quest system.
Every now and then I'll get patched and DBM will be disabled and its fun to run an event you've already done a half dozen times and get by without any of the warnings, etc. I wonder if they would ever entertain "pure mode" runs with no mods for achievements.
I still have no idea how to communicate with my GAF D2 clan, and no one in any strike or other event has ever used a mic but me as far as I can tell. Thank you Sony for the free platinum headset you gave me at DevCon
I mean, there were timers in Vanilla too, but either way they've become much better at not obfuscating mechanics within the base game, you actually can do most things just fine without a boss mod these days, because they tend to make mechanics harder to actually perform around, rather than making the challenge simply being knowing that it's coming or knowing that a thing is happening at all. For example the base game will tell you flat out if something dangerous is happening. Blizz has done a good job of disabling the aspects of boss mods that trivialize things too much too. The mod creators are smart as hell and sometimes beat them to the punch, but it always improves moving forward. Archimonde last expansion got them to kill player positional data, for instance. Star Augur this expansion got them to change how nameplate functionality worked during raid combat, etc.
BurningNad
Member
Yeah memories! Probably wouldn't enjoy it nowadays but it was definitely something that can never be replaced.
Bonechewer Alliance ftw!
Bonechewer Alliance ftw!
SillyEskimo
Member
After 5 yrs of EQ1, reading descriptions of how "hard" WoW raids are is hilarious. Try 100 person raids with no voice chat just for starters lol. Every difficulty in WoW was multiplied by 10 in EQ1.
This was so beautiful :'-(
Vanilla wow was so great...
Server first full tier 3 felt pretty epic
Ehh, I love EQ1 and it was definitely hard in all the ways people like to act that vanilla wow was hard, but the bosses themselves were not complex or challenging in the same way wow raids were (beyond Molten Core, which was a joke aside from Ragnaros in terms of mechanics). The problem with EQ is that the game itself is a little too old school so it had trouble adapting to getting hard mechanically beyond doing stuff like simon says or just more CC more insane combinations of rampaging or whatever else, etc.
Went back to the last progression server at launch, still a ton of fun. I would go back to actual vanilla EQ long before I went back to Vanilla wow.
RedSparrows
Member
As a raid-focused Holy priest, being ganked was a matter of 'yo, I'mma get a beer, brb when you killed me.'
HackTheSlash
Member
WIndfury Shamans in the beginning were nuts. I think it was a bug? But Windfury used to even proc on itself allowing endless hits on people. For a bit of time they dominated PVP
This track is the one that affects me the most, mainly because it was the first music track I ever heard when entering the world and I spent so much fucking time there.
Just listening to it now...the feels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alWTyJr1Gro
RedSparrows
Member
I raise you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gli5allDOa8
or probably my fav just because it was the alien south of Kalimdor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1qEZ7uw0iw
I remember the 1-2 hour wait for Battlegrounds when it was only from the server you were on. My daughter was 11 and we played together she was a Paladin and went into BGs not really understanding all the mechanics but would still do really really well as Pally were a bit OP. My guild would spend an entire Saturday afternoon running the 40 man raid in Molten Core, glad they cut back the instance length in the future expansions.
Didn't play a lot of WoW (never leveled beyond 30), but glad to have experienced WoW Beta as well as the launch.
Some good memories:
Was in the human starting town Goldshire (where most players were below level 10).
A group of level 50 Horde players invaded Goldshire and killed everyone, while summoning Infernos. Everyone couldn't do shit, until came a delegation of level 60 players ON MOUNTS, and kicked the Horde players asses back to Barrens.
That was a fucking cool scene.
My PUG couldn't clear Vancleef despite after several tries, until came a player who apparently specializes in that dungeon and he led our group of victory, giving good instructions.
Some good memories:
Was in the human starting town Goldshire (where most players were below level 10).
A group of level 50 Horde players invaded Goldshire and killed everyone, while summoning Infernos. Everyone couldn't do shit, until came a delegation of level 60 players ON MOUNTS, and kicked the Horde players asses back to Barrens.
That was a fucking cool scene.
My PUG couldn't clear Vancleef despite after several tries, until came a player who apparently specializes in that dungeon and he led our group of victory, giving good instructions.
I don't know, doesn't have the same effect on me, mainly because I didn't spend any time in Stranglethorn, well i visited the harbor but didn't do any questing.
Not until expansions later.
People did and do give a shit about it though. That 4HM took 7 weeks to kill without nerfs and Kil'Jaedan took 5 days is a large part of what keeps 4HM such a legendary fight in memory. There were all sorts of reasons for this despite 4HM not being as mechanically difficult as later raids, but those reasons were just as valid and important to what made WoW magical in the first place. Assuming that mechanical complexity is all anyone should care about is antithetical to the spirit of MMOs, where even bad players can contribute to a raid by at least putting in the time. It's how we got to this absurd two-speed WoW experience where you either play the game on easy mode or choose to play on hard mode for the sake of bragging rights in server communities that no longer exist.
The secret to early WoW is precisely that it wasn't that hard, but it sure felt hard (Side note: this is the key to the Souls series success as well). Classic WoW struck a fine balance between mechanical complexity and the logistical challenges of early EQ. As time went on Blizzard altogether abandoned the latter in service of the former, and with it went a meaningful sense of progression. This makes sense as Blizzard caters to an aging fanbase, but we can at least break down why WoW no longer feels like a world anymore, and why raiding no longer inspires the same feelings of accomplishment.
RedSparrows
Member
So many groups would go 'OMG DROOD TANK NO WAI' then leave.
As the healer I'd always be up for it. Anything to probe at the rigid design
I wish I could remember, but it escapes me. I searched google, but they seem to have disbanded so they don't show up on any of the stat trackers these days. I remember they had a sister guild on the horde side as well. If I saw it, I'd probably remember, but I'm drawing a blank.
edit: I think it just came to me. Azeroth's Grace was the name, I believe.
Polygonal_Sprite
Gold Member
So someone made a mod to make the garrison table missions look like something? otherwise you're just wrong. Either way, it's literally just a thing you log in, spend 2 seconds doing, and then go on your way to collect whatever your dudes bring back later. And that's literally the only thing you could even possibly be referencing besides someone making a mod that just animates random things for no reason.
The number of wow drama stories I could tell from the vanilla-tbc days could fill an entire thread, but the deaths of people you 'know' without really knowing are always the hardest.
My guild in vanilla/TBC/Wrath had a really bad string of all of this stuff, and it still makes me sad to think about, despite barely knowing these people beyond pixels in a game.
In Vanilla we had one of our best priests die in some stupid college frat party by falling off of a roof or trying to jump into a pool or something while he was blackout drunk
In TBC one of our tanks apparently lost custody of his kids because of something he perceived as ihs wife using the kids to get back at him, and he shot himself and his kids
One of our hunters went to Brazil for a family wedding and was killed by a drunk driver (and his brother who was in the guild was the one that had to tell us).
I knew people that got married, divorced, cheated on each other, married other people's exes etc all within wow (and other MMOs, but at this point mostly wow).
As sad as all of this stuff can be to think about, it's mostly telling of how powerful the connections you make with people on the internet can be, and how fleeting it all is as well. Appreciate those you call friends, everyone.
Crazy stories!
On another topic it's such a shame that so many of the Vanilla / TBC WoW PVE / PVP videos are such terrible quality. It's especially jarring knowing just a couple of years later HD recording would become the norm :'(
RedSparrows
Member
I saw the video of our first Nef kill a few years back. It is almost utterly incomprehensible.
drotahorror
Member
This is pretty much it yeah. I loved TBC, but vanilla was on another level. The community was so tight on your server, both alliance and horde. Pure hatred and friendship. Come TBC, you just needed a server so you could play the game. The only community that mattered was your guild if you raided. In TBC, the most exciting world shit was the things that went down at Elemental Plateau I think it was called. Lots of PVP and good action there. Of course, flying mounts would eventually ruin anything.
I remember dueling on top of the those floating rocks in Nagrand to the death with other factions since you would have to spirit rez because there was no way to get your body back. Both Vanilla and TBC were good, but TBC was the beginning of the downfall.
That reminds me of the Gamespot review of WoW, you cant read anything thats on screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEIwYKWShjM
So many groups would go 'OMG DROOD TANK NO WAI' then leave.
As the healer I'd always be up for it. Anything to probe at the rigid design
I was an infamous tank druid back then as well. The only thing keeping me from tanking all raid content was Blizzard's love of giving bosses fear effects. That and Naxx40 warrior gear was actually optimized for tanking and they didn't add an equivalent tank druid set (it was still random pieces from PVP, AQ, etc). Still tanked Patchwerk.
Bear druids were underestimated by everyone, their aggro generation was actually broken due to the way Maul scaled. I remember one time I died a few minutes in on an untauntable boss with a tank swap...I think Hakkar? And after a battle rez I easily pulled aggro off the very geared warrior tank. I heard stories that some people used druids on Thaddius because their aggro generation scaled with the damage buff to crazy levels, but we never tried it ourselves.
Can't describe how good it felt when they finally made druid tanks 100% viable. Although early BC was more like 300% broken. I did more damage than the rest of the raid combined in Kara when tanking, lol.
flatearthpandas
Member
My fondest memories of vanilla:
Stealthing into Stormwind
Leaping off Thunder Bluff and surviving
Jumping into the lava of the mountain where BRS and MC were and swimming to safety to escape ganks
Falling asleep during raids and never getting in trouble for it for some reason
Barrens chat
Going to war in South shore
10-manning Strat and Scholo and still managing to fuck up
C'thun
Undercity
Attacking starter zones and trucking level ones into attacking you so they would flag and die by the legion
Ultimately liked BC more.
Quit around the time Ulduar released and never looked back
Stealthing into Stormwind
Leaping off Thunder Bluff and surviving
Jumping into the lava of the mountain where BRS and MC were and swimming to safety to escape ganks
Falling asleep during raids and never getting in trouble for it for some reason
Barrens chat
Going to war in South shore
10-manning Strat and Scholo and still managing to fuck up
C'thun
Undercity
Attacking starter zones and trucking level ones into attacking you so they would flag and die by the legion
Ultimately liked BC more.
Quit around the time Ulduar released and never looked back
Suddenly feel compellted to throw in my own two cents about Vanilla...
I played on the Vashj (EU) server since it opened, which I think was around March or April 2005. Part of the reason WoW was so special in general was that it was my first ever MMO, so while I later learned that grizzled EQ vets or whatever looked down on what they perceived to be a pretty watered-down experience, I was busy having my mind blown at every conceivable moment. I remember my expectations being something like Baldur's Gate style RPG gameplay (this sounds very naive now, I know) with a Warcraft III aesthetic. I wasn't expecting the sheer size of the game and had to learn the hard way about the holy trinity of tanking, DPS and healing (I had picked a Tauren Druid, so like almost every Druid ever I ended up being a healer, at least to begin with).
But what made Vanilla special in particular (and especially being a native of Vashj) was the following points:
1. The world PvP. Doubtless this thread (I ain't read it all, shame on me) is already full of stories about Southshore vs. Tarren Mill, but that really was a big deal back then. Pretty much every night was Hillsbrad Fight Night and it was always excitement. Even more fun was when it was quiet and it was your own ganking expeditions to the other town that kicked the whole thing off!
2. This was pre cross-server, so your reputation mattered. We also has a cross-faction IRC channel set up where we would chat with the "enemy" and even arrange World PvP throwdowns with each other, and once Battlegrounds were introduced, the regular BGers became so well-known that we'd often exchange some banter with each other during rounds of Warsong Gulch. I remember once during an Arathi Basin game that I got bopped by a Rogue and moments later in the chat he wrote "OMG!! I actually killed <My character's name!> to which someone else replied "How, was he afk?" Despite dying I never felt so chuffed about discovering I had reputation like that, although I was often active on IRC (and in PvP). On top of that the Vashj community even had its own radio station, originally set up by a guy whose handle I think was Feralfaith, and eventually there was a rotation of maybe 8 or so DJs who would take your requests (an msn account was also made for Vashj FM so you could send mp3s over messenger, should the DJ not have the track). Even now I associate bands I first heard of on that radio, like Enter Shikari or Dredg, with the early years on Vashj.
3. Even after battlegrounds came in, Vashj was one of the few servers with more Horde than Alliance, so the queue times were astronomical on the Horde side (on other servers I believe the opposite was true), so those going for PvP ranking (and I was one of them) would often spend the minutes or even hours between battlegrounds ganking people in the Eastern Plaguelands. Alterac Valley was a whole different ball game - games would go on for literally hours in an unending stalemate, the most extreme example being me going to bed after playing in AV for a good few hours, only to log in the next day, get into AV again and discover from IRC that it was the exact same game.
All this just combined with how vanilla was - a rough around the edges wild west sort of experience where everyone, player and developer, was still feeling out how everything was going to go. I'm sure lots of other people will reminisce about the raids, but I was never in a position to do any - I was in a small guild that felt like a family to me and we never got nearly big enough to do 40-man raids - the only time we saw the inside of any was when players from the more prominent guilds arranged occasional community runs to help others see at least the inside of Onyxia or Molten Core.
As time went by and cross-server and Looking For Dungeon came along, of course, a lot of the community spirit fell away. I know a lot of criticism from modern WoW is about how it's too easy, but for me it's how the QoL improvements eroded the social aspect that eventually made me walk away.
At the same time I've no interest in vanilla servers or anything like that - I enjoyed my time in Vanilla WoW (and beyond, tbh) and it will always be one of my most cherished gaming memories, but it was also a product of being in a particular phase of my life (young, studying, not much money) and the people I met on the server that made it what it was. You can't bottle that lightning twice.
EDIT 2: OK done now!
I played on the Vashj (EU) server since it opened, which I think was around March or April 2005. Part of the reason WoW was so special in general was that it was my first ever MMO, so while I later learned that grizzled EQ vets or whatever looked down on what they perceived to be a pretty watered-down experience, I was busy having my mind blown at every conceivable moment. I remember my expectations being something like Baldur's Gate style RPG gameplay (this sounds very naive now, I know) with a Warcraft III aesthetic. I wasn't expecting the sheer size of the game and had to learn the hard way about the holy trinity of tanking, DPS and healing (I had picked a Tauren Druid, so like almost every Druid ever I ended up being a healer, at least to begin with).
But what made Vanilla special in particular (and especially being a native of Vashj) was the following points:
1. The world PvP. Doubtless this thread (I ain't read it all, shame on me) is already full of stories about Southshore vs. Tarren Mill, but that really was a big deal back then. Pretty much every night was Hillsbrad Fight Night and it was always excitement. Even more fun was when it was quiet and it was your own ganking expeditions to the other town that kicked the whole thing off!
2. This was pre cross-server, so your reputation mattered. We also has a cross-faction IRC channel set up where we would chat with the "enemy" and even arrange World PvP throwdowns with each other, and once Battlegrounds were introduced, the regular BGers became so well-known that we'd often exchange some banter with each other during rounds of Warsong Gulch. I remember once during an Arathi Basin game that I got bopped by a Rogue and moments later in the chat he wrote "OMG!! I actually killed <My character's name!> to which someone else replied "How, was he afk?" Despite dying I never felt so chuffed about discovering I had reputation like that, although I was often active on IRC (and in PvP). On top of that the Vashj community even had its own radio station, originally set up by a guy whose handle I think was Feralfaith, and eventually there was a rotation of maybe 8 or so DJs who would take your requests (an msn account was also made for Vashj FM so you could send mp3s over messenger, should the DJ not have the track). Even now I associate bands I first heard of on that radio, like Enter Shikari or Dredg, with the early years on Vashj.
3. Even after battlegrounds came in, Vashj was one of the few servers with more Horde than Alliance, so the queue times were astronomical on the Horde side (on other servers I believe the opposite was true), so those going for PvP ranking (and I was one of them) would often spend the minutes or even hours between battlegrounds ganking people in the Eastern Plaguelands. Alterac Valley was a whole different ball game - games would go on for literally hours in an unending stalemate, the most extreme example being me going to bed after playing in AV for a good few hours, only to log in the next day, get into AV again and discover from IRC that it was the exact same game.
All this just combined with how vanilla was - a rough around the edges wild west sort of experience where everyone, player and developer, was still feeling out how everything was going to go. I'm sure lots of other people will reminisce about the raids, but I was never in a position to do any - I was in a small guild that felt like a family to me and we never got nearly big enough to do 40-man raids - the only time we saw the inside of any was when players from the more prominent guilds arranged occasional community runs to help others see at least the inside of Onyxia or Molten Core.
As time went by and cross-server and Looking For Dungeon came along, of course, a lot of the community spirit fell away. I know a lot of criticism from modern WoW is about how it's too easy, but for me it's how the QoL improvements eroded the social aspect that eventually made me walk away.
At the same time I've no interest in vanilla servers or anything like that - I enjoyed my time in Vanilla WoW (and beyond, tbh) and it will always be one of my most cherished gaming memories, but it was also a product of being in a particular phase of my life (young, studying, not much money) and the people I met on the server that made it what it was. You can't bottle that lightning twice.
EDIT 2: OK done now!
In Vanilla we had one of our best priests die in some stupid college frat party by falling off of a roof or trying to jump into a pool or something while he was blackout drunk
In TBC one of our tanks apparently lost custody of his kids because of something he perceived as ihs wife using the kids to get back at him, and he shot himself and his kids
One of our hunters went to Brazil for a family wedding and was killed by a drunk driver (and his brother who was in the guild was the one that had to tell us).
I knew people that got married, divorced, cheated on each other, married other people's exes etc all within wow (and other MMOs, but at this point mostly wow).
These stories are the best/worst.
-Guy and his wife horde side were arrested for child abuse because they let one of their kids basically starve to death while they played WoW instead.
-The first public "WoW" couple on my server got married and divorced over the span of like 4 months. He cheated on her through the entirety of the relationship and gave her an STD.
-A guy I'd occasionally run stuff with but mostly talked to on IRC got a job at Blizzard and hooked me up with friends and family alpha access to WotLK. I made a suggestion in the in game feedback tool that they should have a penguin-morph, which ultimately was patched in so I would like to think I was responsible for that.
-That same guy got a brain tumor which ultimately killed him
-A different guy on the IRC server who I'd see in game a bunch one day just didn't wake up. Died in his sleep from a birth defect.
-
That guy was on our server, was a total tool, and half of the words he typed were"pvp meng".
This was so true. I remember having to type up so much ahead of time to copy and paste to lead raids, it was a crazy.
I was one of the first to play WoW in the Friends and Family Beta, it was still in a huge state of flux. I remember Blizzard had a old Ironforge, i guess they didn't like and built a new one on top of it. It was just released into the Beta and remember falling into the old one. Wish I had mapped that one out.
So many groups would go 'OMG DROOD TANK NO WAI' then leave.
As the healer I'd always be up for it. Anything to probe at the rigid design
I tanked instances as Shaman.
Yeah people dying in WoW was common. I met several people who played because they had terminal illnesses and needed something to fill the time. That horrible feeling of getting a whisper of "Hey this is so-and-so's brother/sister/parent, they left a note asking me to log in and tell you when they passed."
The creation and destruction of relationships was also common, or people having to quit because they had a kid.
The creation and destruction of relationships was also common, or people having to quit because they had a kid.
RedSparrows
Member
We had a channel for a select few guildies, which acted as a useful pressure valve for guild drama. One day a kid logs on and starts yammering that he got his gf pregnant aged 17. Shit got real very fast.
Temeculan3000
Member
I remember that you could tame elite & rare mobs as Hunter pets and they actually had better stats & resistances than a non elite mob. I remember helping my buddy tame an elite/rare spider in a cave in Duskwood IIRC, had to cheese it with my Paladin bubble somehow... I forget exactly because it was too difficult to tame solo.
Anyway, it made for a much stronger pet than you could normally get and it would retain better resistances even as you leveled it.
Then they got rid of that and made any pet you tamed revert to the basic type.
I remember world PVP giving the game a great sense of being in a real world. The lame thing was people constantly running back to South Shore so that the level 60 guards would aggro, if they ever got in trouble. I think it would have been a little better without the guards, or if the guards had a much longer respawn time.
PVP in the beta was awesome, a bunch of level 15-20s actually raiding enemy territory and PVPing. Nothing lame like sticking near the town guards and stuff, people pushed forward to get as far into enemy territory as they could. Had a great time trying to raid Teldrassil with a bunch of horde, hiding in the woods and ganking low level night elves in Darkshore etc..
Leveling in Stranglethorn Vale involved getting ganked all the time by higher level players.
Anyway, it made for a much stronger pet than you could normally get and it would retain better resistances even as you leveled it.
Then they got rid of that and made any pet you tamed revert to the basic type.
I remember world PVP giving the game a great sense of being in a real world. The lame thing was people constantly running back to South Shore so that the level 60 guards would aggro, if they ever got in trouble. I think it would have been a little better without the guards, or if the guards had a much longer respawn time.
PVP in the beta was awesome, a bunch of level 15-20s actually raiding enemy territory and PVPing. Nothing lame like sticking near the town guards and stuff, people pushed forward to get as far into enemy territory as they could. Had a great time trying to raid Teldrassil with a bunch of horde, hiding in the woods and ganking low level night elves in Darkshore etc..
Leveling in Stranglethorn Vale involved getting ganked all the time by higher level players.
PeskyToaster
Member
Never played Vanilla but I was there throughout BC. Fun times.
Coriolanus
Banned
I tanked instances as Shaman.
i kept a bear pet around just as a last ditch effort to tank random trash in dungeons
Worked pretty well, aside from terrible aggro generation.
Fabthegnome
Member
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Last edited:
BriareosGAF
Member
i kept a bear pet around just as a last ditch effort to tank random trash in dungeons
Worked pretty well, aside from terrible aggro generation.
For some reason this reminded me of "goddamnit <hunter>, turn your pet off in Maraudon, you're pulling everything ffs".
Inyourprime
Member
Never played vanilla WoW but I understand that strong sense of community these games had back then. I still remember some names I talked shit with in Edgeville and in the Dwarven Mines.
Hari Seldon
Member
So many great memories in this thread. I'll add 2:
I remember raiding prior to the widespread use of voice coms. It was glorious! Our guild had everyone organized into chat channels. I remember rogue chat being hyper competitive for loot, but when I played on my druid, druid chat was just a rollicking party lol. There was so much downtime in shit like MC that you really got to spend time getting to know total strangers.
The second memory was world PvP. There is nothing in gaming quite like assembling a posse of real life buddies and going out to start a fight and cause chaos. A lot of the times 5 of us would start ganking lowbies in the Barrens and it would turn into a massive multiple guild brawl lol.
I sometimes wish that someone would have combined the great smooth leveling experience of WoW with the epic player driven economy of SWG. Maybe de-emphasize raids as the extreme end game activity and emphasize player driven cities and events. I think it would make for a great game that encourages social interaction rather than the ultimately pointless acquiring of loot that burns people out and turns off players like me from returning to the game. I am completely over loot.
I remember raiding prior to the widespread use of voice coms. It was glorious! Our guild had everyone organized into chat channels. I remember rogue chat being hyper competitive for loot, but when I played on my druid, druid chat was just a rollicking party lol. There was so much downtime in shit like MC that you really got to spend time getting to know total strangers.
The second memory was world PvP. There is nothing in gaming quite like assembling a posse of real life buddies and going out to start a fight and cause chaos. A lot of the times 5 of us would start ganking lowbies in the Barrens and it would turn into a massive multiple guild brawl lol.
I sometimes wish that someone would have combined the great smooth leveling experience of WoW with the epic player driven economy of SWG. Maybe de-emphasize raids as the extreme end game activity and emphasize player driven cities and events. I think it would make for a great game that encourages social interaction rather than the ultimately pointless acquiring of loot that burns people out and turns off players like me from returning to the game. I am completely over loot.
I was in one of the top CS 1.6 clans in the UK and we all switched over to playing WoW for a good few months. The word magical wouldn't be an exaggeration to the describe those first days. Everything from the world, the music, the exploration and sheer scale of it was unlike anything I'd experienced before.
I remember the first time I saw some Horde in an Alliance zone and everyone was in chat talking about it and trying to hunt them down. It felt like they were real bad guys, and just seeing them watching from the forest was legitimately spooky.
Crossing between zones was one of my favorite aspects, it felt like uncovering a new uncharted land filled with new scenery and secrets to discover.
I was lucky enough to join a guild with some really cool people who had their own teamspeak server. I wasn't very social but logging on and listening to them all banter with each other while playing was a real highlight for me during those days. Shoutout to The Fuzz guild, wherever they may be now!
I ended up selling my level 60 rogue for the equivalent of $300. The game became a real addiction and I just wasn't social enough to get the most out of the end game (same problem I have with Destiny now). I did at one point come back and was the Main Tank for a raiding guild, but it wasn't the same as those first days and weeks in the game. Like I said, magical is probably the best word to describe that experience.
I remember the first time I saw some Horde in an Alliance zone and everyone was in chat talking about it and trying to hunt them down. It felt like they were real bad guys, and just seeing them watching from the forest was legitimately spooky.
Crossing between zones was one of my favorite aspects, it felt like uncovering a new uncharted land filled with new scenery and secrets to discover.
I was lucky enough to join a guild with some really cool people who had their own teamspeak server. I wasn't very social but logging on and listening to them all banter with each other while playing was a real highlight for me during those days. Shoutout to The Fuzz guild, wherever they may be now!
I ended up selling my level 60 rogue for the equivalent of $300. The game became a real addiction and I just wasn't social enough to get the most out of the end game (same problem I have with Destiny now). I did at one point come back and was the Main Tank for a raiding guild, but it wasn't the same as those first days and weeks in the game. Like I said, magical is probably the best word to describe that experience.
KO Traveling Hobo
Member
I was definitely in before ZG.
I was in my little no-name guild Team Hazard with a few IRL friends and a couple others we met along the way, until I joined Destined(not Manifest Destiny), which was a latecomer PvE guild. We weren't the best, but we did kill C'thun.
edit: actually, I think Destined was named something else when I joined? I can't remember anymore, but I feel like it was.
I remember when we invaded the RP forums. Looking back, I feel bad for the RPers, but at the time it was hilarious.
And then there was Socreges with his latflares.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
This will never stop happening. It will always be a "rebuttal" to that observation.
Always.