Vanilla WoW before 1.12.1

[Ethereal]

I still have nightmares about female trolls.

:no:

Unpopular opinion here but I kind of wish they still looked like that - more ferocious and primal as they're supposed to be depicted as. The current female trolls look like a different race altogether compared to the males.

 

[krutopatkin]

Unpopular opinion here but I kind of wish they still looked like that - more ferocious and primal as they're supposed to be depicted as. The current female trolls look like a different race altogether compared to the males.

Well the second part isn't rare in the Warcraft universe, just look at Nagas.

 

[Karbonkel]

...

... you just triggered some major feels with that write up.

Read it while listening to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFNbTdLfBwQ , might've made it worse too... Please write some more of that please

 

[Testosterown]

AV was full of NPC's and all kind of scripted stuff I never got fully hang of it before Blizzard ruined it, but it was nonetheless epic. Also the matches took forever.

Forever is not even nearly the right term. I entered a new Alterac Valley at 8 o'clock and left it at 1 o'clock in the morning. When I came back online at 7 o'clock p.m. I joined the same battleground, meanwhile running for 23 hours. :biggrin:

 

[Szabinger]

I was really disappointed how my Drillborer Disk became "glowing item #5856178", which Blizzard only took to more ridiculous extremes each expansion.

Ohh man I was so disappointed that my awesome rotating shield turned into a glowing circle.

 

[Fact]

Ok another set. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here lol. Some perhaps belong to general nostalgia area instead of pre 1.12 patches. I don't want to cheat and look at patch notes for new material.

One of the things which has struck me was the brief period between honor release and BG release. PvP was in its golden age then. Even though I love the first AV, I think WoW would've been two times better in PvP servers if there wouldn't been any BG's ever. Gotta say the World PvP wasn't that much organized before the honor patch either... Proves we can't do anything without some reward. :tongue:

No fishing schools. No STV fishing contest.

If your guild downed Lucifron in your first MC run, you were pro.

Early raids melee afk'd through Shazzrath and Geddon encounters.

Flight masters, especially the Gadgetzan ones, were ganking hot-spots. There wasn't any honor penalty slaying just arrived players and the masters didn't aggro too.

I personally liked how extremely luck based unfair the loot system was. We were always cursing the Warlock/Druid tier loot. Players complained a lot about the random loots and Blizzard listened. Then Blizzard experimented with tokens in ZG and went full ****** with them from AQ onwards. You know how you give a finger, and they take the whole hand... Now we have welfare epics for doing nothing.

Every other complaint post in the forums were about RNG. It was a curse word.

Most popular spam: The Ashbringer...

There were farming bots and gold sellers everywhere. And they didn't get banned for a long time. Then Blizzard went with 'Night of the Long Knives' method and did mass bannings.

Deadwind Pass, Winterspring lake, Azshara, were particularly favoured by bots. If it was leveling bot in the right range, the south tip of Tanaris.

You could get in the auctioneer side of the Org AH if you jumped to the boxes inside the AH and from there to the bulging wall near the roof and then just run along the wall to the auctioneers. Then Blizz added invisible wall there.

If you were stupid enough to level your Bloodsail rep, you couldn't get the Goblin factions back from hated any way. Also someone posted in forums he had Cenarion Circle as hated, and he couldn't improve it, and Blizz did something to allow rep grind from there. Because it was unthinkable why someone would choose to have CC faction at war. I could be wrong with both cases, my memory is hazy.

People used to do lotteries with either the lottery master doing a /random x roll based on how many people were participating with each one assigned a number, or people just did /random 100 and the highest won. Blizzard banned this practice. You could image what happened when SJW's heard about gambling in a children's game.

There was no need or greed in the roll frame. It was only roll or pass. Every time from the shittiest green malachite to BoP stuff, players would write either "n" or "g" to the chat and then roll or pass accordingly after everyone voiced their n/g. It took long for the habit to die.

The elemental invasions were added in some patch. It was a pretty huge thing considering how much the economy revolves around essences.

I think Blizz also added later the alchemist transmutation recipe of heart of fire --> elemental fire.

The griefing you could do with snowballs...

The Hakkar adds DoT debuffs would cause WoW wide pandemics when warlocks and hunters summoned their diseased pets in major cities. People and NPC's would infect each other with the debuff and die. Only to respawn and catch it again. It didn't last long, Blizz fixed it, but nevertheless it was really fun because you would feel so unsafe and couldn't do basic functions like you were in some failed state. It also got media attention.

The discussion about how horde would need a pretty race and alliance ugly. It only added to the flames when belfs were announced. The day horde died. :crying: Undeads got lots of flak before but suddenly they didn't seem such a bad horde race.

It was possible to travel to GM island as a level 1 priest. You would heal and mana regen through the fatigue faster than it would kill you.

There was no threat meter addons.

There was no chat bubbles.

In early WoW the only way to get instant quest text was through addons. Also there wasn't mini map dots for quest givers you could return completed quests. I might remember wrong.

Trolls used to have a joke on the subject of killing dwarves, and Blizzard removed it. Dunno if it was during Vanilla, said it anyway!

If you wiped in BFD you were going to encounter perhaps the longest corpse run in the game. The graveyard was fairly near the instance by vanilla standards, technically in Darkshore I think, but there was a mountain range between the points and you had to take a huge detour.

Camp Taurajo didn't had FP. Yeah...

The Revantusk village in the Hinterlands was added later to the game. That's why the quest rewards there are much better than you would encounter in an average quest hub.

We were so stupid we thought the "King something" devilsaur in Un'Goro was some special raid boss akin to Kazzak or Azuregos. Searching through the databases wasn't a no-brainer activity in the early WoW.

Yeah Silithus was different. Also the unexplored bottom half of the map always bugged me. :sad:

Prepaid game time cards came in regular size dvd cases.

AQ war effort was a fantastic time for us selfish black market traders to make money.

Some shaman realized he could solo rogues with lightning shield and released videos. Something was nerfed fast.

You could get to prototype Outlands by blinking through the Deadmines portal. Dunno if it was still in or added in 1.12. I never had a mage so only watched videos of it. BTW Youtube wasn't a thing, nor even streaming videos that much. Most clips were in some large WoW video site which I'm sure is still up and running.

Nerf George. Dual wielding warriors were nearly as rare as female dwarves before that. You used 2 hander even in a fury spec.

Some other popular clips from the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEPx6nbbwz8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reTyW92PLq4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqPQ4SNmx2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6kLYNzmmz8
Also "Arcanite reaper hooooo!"

 

[Drakedog]

I loved reading that "Fact". Thanks

 

[Szabinger]

I don't even know where to start Fact. Thank you so much for that.

 

[Testosterown]

Haha already forgot about the Instant Quest Text shit, always made me insane.

 

[dragonbane]

Thanks for the post, Fact.

 

[Cube]

Good read, Fact

 

[Drakedog]

WoW E3 2003 trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXwVZi4sctY
Another pre beta trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d09Fca_IpkA

 

[Fact]

Thanks all for the warm words. :smile: Ok during an exhausting work week I've thought a few (many) more. These are the last from me I promise.

Dungeon loots were updated at some point. Lots of greens were turned to blues. RFC used to not have blue drops, for instance. The shield from the WC turtle boss was white non-bop.

No-one knew about the escort part at the end of WC.

Someone would always fail the jump in WC.

Respawns in instances. They were on pretty tight rate too. And it wasn't just a mob here and there, it was whole packs. If you wiped after half way there likely had been respawns already. So many demoralized groups quitting... Don't remember seeing respawn fuckers in instances yet in private realms, good riddance.

The regular mobs in elemental invasions would keep spawning as long the big elite was alive. So sometimes players took the effort to protect the guy for long term profit.

By far the best way to level weapon skills was staying after the tribute and auto-attack the neutral ogre ghosts who wouldn't die or fight back.

You knew by name anyone on the server who had a rare mount or legendary or Teebu's. I would also imagine someone who had full Eskhandar's, but good luck finding one. You would know guilds MT's or pro-PvP players. Actually you just knew people outside your guild because the servers were closed environments.

Realm forums came in later.

Epics were disenchanted into large brilliant shards.

Nothing brought the factions peacefully together more than farming the consumables in Felwood. There wasn't limit how many people could loot the flowers as long you did it in the same time frame. Someone always had the chat counting addon and it didn't matter if it was opposite faction gibberish, everyone knew it by heart.

Mobs could be kited indefinitely. They didn't even bug at the 1k needles elevator.

Most likely happened in 1.12 or later but I have a fair memory some people rolled new chars, made a raiding guild, gathered the best blue gear and cleared Naxx in only blues. I actually tried to google this but couldn't find anything, so take this with a grain of salt.

Trolls used to have even worse racials.

Shaman had one point passive hp regeneration talent at the resto tree. It was about as useful as the troll regeneration. They would stack but even then it wouldn't amount to anything.

There weren't any air totems to use most of the times in caster groups. Then Blizz came with the tranquil air totem.

The really pro and crazy enough shaman would spam between wf and agility totems for maximum dps in the melee group. The wf buff would last for a few seconds after the totem was replaced.

Prot warriors were rare. Even the first kill guilds in my realm didn't use prot MT's. Most tanks (and some full time dps warriors) played 31/5/15 or some derivative of that.

But then again people were more liberal with specs. If you were a healer class you were expected to heal by default, but no one really asked or remembered where you put your points. I for example raided a good chunk of MC as a prot warrior dps.

There was some rage normalization patch which changed the warrior mechanic with lots of discussion around it. I've forgot how it affected us. I think I remember lots of frustration from our DPS warriors because it affected the rage you get from big hits, but on the other hand I was perhaps happy as a tank.

There used to be only druid raids at least on Onyxia and MC in my realm.

There wasn't greater blessings and the lesser ones lasted only 2 minutes or so.

Some dude took the trouble to gather information on the gear which would make you look like Gamon.

Gold sellers would write urls with corpses.

There was a rumour you could fish up the legendary weapon Ashbringer. And when Naxx came and there was the epic version, turn it somehow to legendary.

C'Thun for a long time was deliberately made unwinnable by Blizzard. After the nerf and killing there was a huge shitstorm between US and EU about how EU had the advantage of time zones. Nihilum and Kungen in particular became WoW superstars after the affair.

There was a story how some Swedish Nihilum player was committed to involuntary psychiatric treatment for his WoW addiction.

Some guild got banned in AQ because they were skipping boss or trash with model editing the instance layout.

Not much in private realms but in retail people were crazy and competitive about the rare spawn dragon in the Blasted Lands with scout alts and all.

Last pope to die was during vanilla. I remember this because I was catching blackmouths in Ashenvale when they announced Palpatine as the successor. :yes:

More T2 loot used to drop in MC.

There was a guy who multiboxed 40 accounts.

Horde would frequent the Stockade to farm wool for the war effort.

There was an exploit where you could float in mid-air. It involved some macro which would make you jump and logout at the same time. The character would then sit in mid-air and start the logging out countdown. You could repeat this to get higher.

Don't know if it was more a realm thing but there were loads of lagspikes and offline time. Blizzard handed free days like candy.

Moonkins pet name was oomkins, not boomkins.

Tauren 5% hp racial was a source of great controversy around the tank discussions.

It was common for people to put items on AH for under the vendor price.

At some point the rolling culture changed in level 60 instances to everyone passing the greeded BoP's, except the dedicated disenchanter. At the end of the run we would split the shards and roll for leftovers. Something I've yet to see in the vanilla private realm scene.

Those tips in the loading screens were added later. Damn consolitis!

The belf NPC's in Azshara and Stonetalon and wherever they might've been, didn't had the belf models we know of. I've completely forgotten what they looked like.

Garr and Geddon were contest for mages who could ice block the highest.

WoW came in 4 cd's. Checked my cabinet, WotLK was the first to come in dvd.

Thottbot was the database number one. Allakhazam came second. I and the people I remember used Allakhazam only for the nifty average AH prices for items.

You couldn't join as a party to BG's. You could try to queue and click the join at the same time, but usually it left few guys out. We used as a guild to do especially AB this way. AV was really fun too and we usually got over half or two thirds of the slots.

There weren't BG masters, you had to travel to the BG portal location. It was common to duel near the portal and more common to get harassed by opposite rogues in said locations. Or in the case of AB hunt and kite Fozruk.

You bought the BG rewards with those marks.

Guild Wars was to be the first supposed WoW killer.

Darkmoon Faire was later addition.

Many drops which are now white, like bat eyes, were grey even after DMF had been around. You just had to know these useful vendor craps.

Wands didn't had auto cast?

There was a method to mind control mob in LBRS to gain a fire resist buff. It was one of those facts most knew about and guides remembered about it. But the logistics of the feat as you might imagine was too much so I don't know anyone who would seriously use it for raiding.

There weren't dishonorable kills. No civilians.

There wasn't dressing room feature. At least on AH.

You could really annoy people by hotkeying the orphan whistle and spam it

Ogres were the top choice for a new horde race. Most used reason being they already had an dancing animation, so it only made sense.

Warriors could ramp up rage before fight by right-clicking a mob and using bloodrage. Rage wouldn't diminish as long as you were on your attack stance. Keep doing as long you and your party has patience for cooldowns.

You couldn't fly straight from A to B. If there were points between them you had to fly to each stop along the line manually and creep that way to you destination. No afk sandwiches or showers!

None of this private realm global chat silliness. Or even linked trade channel chat in cities. If you were looking for group to dungeons, you would go to capital and actually use the LFG channel. And whispers. So many whispers...

People joined AV to fish.

The only sources for dark iron ore were the nodes inside BRD and MC.

Those dark iron residues, savage fronds, etc. for LHC people were added closer to Naxx. So most of the vanilla we were happier with more inv space.

RP-PVP realms were added due to popular demand.

Shadow priests melted faces.

There weren't riding skills. Or there might've been, I don't remember, but all the costs came from the mounts themselves.

Kazzak was the only source for the other priest epic quest trinket.

Some female porn star reaped fame points by playing WoW.

Thistle tea would give 100% energy no matter your level.

I could be wrong but I think you couldn't hold breath underwater nearly as long as in 1.12.

There weren't target mark icons.

Mages cue to party members which target to polymorph was to cast detect magic on it.

You didn't get extra money for completing quests at 60.

I think you used to get max reputation from quests no matter your level. Or it was no rep at all if it was grey. lol go figure.

You would always check the arena first before entering DM. Considering the pop levels in retail it was normal to get jumped by other group or vice versa while you were fighting the elite.

There were methods and addons (later banned) which allowed you to communicate with the other faction in a rudimentary way.

There was some decurse addon which was very popular and did the whole job for you basically automated. I didn't had the spells so no experience but I recall it was something like it automatically targeted players for you, so you only had to press one button. Then Blizzard changed the rules with addons and every game action thereafter had to follow IRL player action or something which changed many addons.

 

[krutopatkin]

The belf NPC's in Azshara and Stonetalon and wherever they might've been, didn't had the belf models we know of. I've completely forgotten what they looked like.

Just like nelfs with white skin

There wasn't dressing room feature. At least on AH.

the entire feature was added later on, in 1.6 or so.

Nice work again

 

[jorim]

Last pope to die was during vanilla.
that is some serious fact lol!!

yea flight paths not being connected was a real bitch.

i remember that the introduction of dishonorable kills really killed world pvp. People didn't want to be in pvp raids anymore.

 

[thatdcdewd]

I know you've heard it already a lot of times, but dude you're awesome

Just a bit of clarification

Trolls used to have even worse racials.

It was throwing weapon specialization only. (Besides the combat hp regen, beastslaying and berserkering)

There weren't any air totems to use most of the times in caster groups. Then Blizz came with the tranquil air totem.

That is why horde raiding was much more challenging unlike alliance tank-n-spank with Blessing of Salvation on everyone. Tranquil air totem was implemented only the patch 1.10 (iirc),(which is still just an immobile object, giving 20%! threat reduction) so technically horde raiding was twice as hard as alliance (Still a horde guild got to kill Cthun/KT first, lol). Flame on

Don't know if it was more a realm thing but there were loads of lagspikes and offline time. Blizzard handed free days like candy.

This. So much. Right after the release of vanilla the servers were really unstable in the first months, nearly unplayable. Even later on you could never raid on Wednesdays (maintenance day). Never ever. Every server (especially the crappy ones which only got replaced/relocated later on like Bloodscalp EU) lagged really hard after the maintenance, sometimes for days. At that time every nerd was considering lawsuits against Blizzard, until someone pointed out that it was part of the ToS, so just take it as a man and wait for them to fix stuff. Free days were awesome, but they shortened the short lifespan of vanilla:/

At some point the rolling culture changed in level 60 instances to everyone passing the greeded BoP's, except the dedicated disenchanter. At the end of the run we would split the shards and roll for leftovers. Something I've yet to see in the vanilla private realm scene.

That's pass or need actually, the enchanter always rolls greed, just in case. Don't worry, this even works on Russian private servers (if you're doing guild runs), so I'm sure the general mentality will support this on Kronos.

The really pro and crazy enough shaman would spam between wf and agility totems for maximum dps in the melee group. The wf buff would last for a few seconds after the totem was replaced.

I've playing shaman since the EU Beta, never did that In theory this sounds amazing as a warrior/rogue, but technically you would go OOM in 8-10 switches as resto ofc.

Guild Wars was to be the first supposed WoW killer.

Yes. So was Warhammer online and all the rest. I heard so many people saying they would leave WoW on the release day of those games. None of them actually left, not even for a day

There was a method to mind control mob in LBRS to gain a fire resist buff. It was one of those facts most knew about and guides remembered about it. But the logistics of the feat as you might imagine was too much so I don't know anyone who would seriously use it for raiding.

I remember my guild actually using that to have a smoother Raggy kill or smth. I also remember having fun in BRD, giving 100+ stam buffs with MC'd Medics to the party.

You couldn't fly straight from A to B. If there were points between them you had to fly to each stop along the line manually and creep that way to you destination. No afk sandwiches or showers!

That was the case for quite some time. We used to look up the official WoW webpage/manuals for flight points and connections.
You might have mentioned this: There was no Un'goro FP until like 1.10-1.11

Some guild got banned in AQ because they were skipping boss or trash with model editing the instance layout.

I remember that! and the funniest thing about that is, they already had AQ in farm status looong time ago when this happend. Laziness has no place in vanilla, they learned that the hard way I guess.

None of this private realm global chat silliness. Or even linked trade channel chat in cities. If you were looking for group to dungeons, you would go to capital and actually use the LFG channel. And whispers. So many whispers...

This changed in the patch when weather effects came in(1.10). I was flying through Loch Modan, to Badlands, I got all wet from the rain and I realized in Kargath that I could actually see the LFG channel there

Those tips in the loading screens were added later. Damn consolitis!

This was in 1.9 when they changed major things which everyone cared about, like quests completed at 60 rewarding gold and all that.

There was some decurse addon which was very popular and did the whole job for you basically automated. I didn't had the spells so no experience but I recall it was something like it automatically targeted players for you, so you only had to press one button. Then Blizzard changed the rules with addons and every game action thereafter had to follow IRL player action or something which changed many addons.

This was Decursive and every single person who played a class able to dispell used it. With 40 people it took ages to always target members with dispellable debuffs then click dispell, resulting in wipes really often. This and bossmod addons make people think vanilla raids are easy. Try them without addons/consumables!

There weren't riding skills. Or there might've been, I don't remember, but all the costs came from the mounts themselves.

This is the reason why I started writing my comment in the first place Yes! We had riding skills and it was 1/1 Undead Horsemanship, or Kodo Riding or w/e race you were playing. Before the 1.12 revamp, there was only one kind of riding skill, and all kinds of mounts at different prices. You could buy an epic kodo for 700ish when you were exalted with TB, and since all the mounts were Binds when used, people actually traded mounts for that tiny (100-200g lol) profit/discount.

 

[Teppaz]

I remember that! and the funniest thing about that is, they already had AQ in farm status looong time ago when this happend. Laziness has no place in vanilla, they learned that the hard way I guess.

Mainly for the C'thun's world first race, you could skip a lot so you'd get to him faster and not lose a night to clear up to him.

 

[thatdcdewd]

Mainly for the C'thun's world first race, you could skip a lot so you'd get to him faster and not lose a night to clear up to him.

Yeah I know, and I remember the trash before C'thun too, but we never did that no matter how much killing that trash sucked and they didn't do it for world/server first, just out of laziness that's the point of my comment.

 

[Fact]

Just like nelfs with white skin

You're right. I would have remembered they were some kind of unholy combination of existing species. Found these pics:
http://i.imgur.com/xy9M9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/A8CeJ.jpg

i remember that the introduction of dishonorable kills really killed world pvp. People didn't want to be in pvp raids anymore.

I grinded my pvp rank to sergeant (never was much into BG pvp) for the discount and buying my epic mount the day honor calculations came. Hour after purchasing the mount we did raid to Theramore and I lost my rank during the offensive. Phew dodged that bullet. Didn't know it was even possible. But you're right there used to be many pvp raids before dishonor. And random goofing around Waaaaaagh! raids with no specific target.

Also horde people used to whine how all our cities had back entrances unlike alliance. So they had even that on easy mode.

That is why horde raiding was much more challenging unlike alliance tank-n-spank with Blessing of Salvation on everyone. Tranquil air totem was implemented only the patch 1.10 (iirc),(which is still just an immobile object, giving 20%! threat reduction) so technically horde raiding was twice as hard as alliance (Still a horde guild got to kill Cthun/KT first, lol). Flame on

Yeah that! Also blessing of kings. Don't forget fear ward. I had to stance dance like a circus monkey. :crying: Miss the horde vs. alliance animosity.

You might have mentioned this: There was no Un'goro FP until like 1.10-1.11

I didn't. Now I remember the sweet spot in Tanaris where you would drop down to Un'Goro to save time travelling.