Honor patch brought roaming low level death squads in STV. This is the closest gaming has ever gotten to Vietnam/Nicaragua/Cambodia war simulator.
Tarren Mill vs. Southshore was lots of the times a delicate courting dance between two lines moving in harmony. In a while some brave soul advanced or fumbled to the no man's land between the lines and got nuked or charge stunned in a second. I didn't actually encounter that much full-on PvP with everyone piling on another, it was more like a threat of ass kicking feast. The reality was proxy skirmishes involving lots of dead questers.
Plenty of epics looked more "crappy" (aka. better imo). Most were overhauled in one patch. T2 sets in particular. I was really disappointed how my Drillborer Disk became "glowing item #5856178", which Blizzard only took to more ridiculous extremes each expansion.
ZG was vastly harder than MC. Because the tactics were more sophisticated.
One could get rich with savory deviate delights. Or sending scam cod mails with wrapped crap.
People waiting for class talent overhauls like christmas.
People didn't get called as noobs by their spec much. There was one instance I agreed with: If you as a mage didn't spec instant arcane explosion, I wouldn't see the point of playing that class anymore.
YTMND was what the rage faces and other meme shit is today.
You could wall jump the mountain wall near the Orgrimmar entrance and get on top/bottom of the Orgrimmar that way. Park a level 10 ally hunter there and terrorize the AH dwellers with your mark.
Wall walking was more a thing anyway. There was a way to get top of everything I think with enough patience. The aforementioned Orgrimmar part got overlooked for a long time.
Naked rogue PvP videos were a fad.
In raids you didn't automatically enter combat. I don't remember the specifics if it was proximity to boss or damage/heal or something which triggered the combat stance. So in those times one of the raid jobs was out of combat resser, whose only job was to stay out of combat and resurrect fallen comrades during a boss fight.
Windfury could proc god knows how many times.
As a tauren you could grow huge as shit with some halloween buff, winterfall firewater, Sen'Jin Village buff and some other stuff which escapes me. I'm pretty sure Blizzard "fixed" this later in vanilla.
People half-jokingly thought having lucky rabbit's foot or entering first to the instance or grasping whatever old wives' tale witch doctor methods available would affect the loot table.
If you were going to Strat, you were going to Baron or Scarlet. UD or Living wasn't on the terminology.
Hunters kited Drakki to the Beast room while the raid killed the adds. This is actually a tactic employed whole vanilla, not just pre 1.12, but I added it here because I've seen it very rarely in private servers for some reason.
Same goes with soloing the torch room in BRD as a rogue. Again, it was very common when forming groups to reserve spot for a rogue for this reason. I've seen a rogue confident enough to employ this tactic _once_ in a private realm (granted, bugs might have something to do with it).
Adds were kited in Razorgore.
People raided every lvl 60 instance except DM iirc, and sometimes even Maraudon and stuff. I could swear for some strange reason it was harder and we wiped more during those raid runs than when we went questing.
There was a legit way to farm the dusty tomes as any class iirc in DM.
The end boss of BRD used to drop some Paladin D1 piece. Also there was some pain to get skippable boss set piece for mages in Scarlet, I think postmaster or some such.
Every Shaman, Paladin and Druid wore Egan's Blaster.
People didn't use DPS meters to measure DPS. We measured total damage. :tongue:
Barman Shanker was banned in raids. Mobs had very limited debuff slots and I don't think there were any debuff priority systems.
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.