Sword: Downing three level 60 raid bosses in Sunwell Plateau gear and getting lucky.
Zulian Tiger: Downing one or two level 60 raid boss (half-raid, not a 40 man) in ICC gear.
Black Battle Tank: A lengthy, limited time questline requiring running current raid content at a fast pace, completion of a lengthy reputation grind, and coordination with groups across the server in order to originally obtain, with intention it would not be obtainable otherwise.
Those are not equivalent. We aren’t talking about MoP challenge modes, hall of fame titles, etc. We also aren’t talking about cars because there is 0 cost to this conversation. That is a separate conversation, one that does not align currently with Blizzard’s stated philosophy regarding these items. Non-challenging items like the tabards, the Naxx weapons, Zulian drops, should all be available, preferably through their original associated instances or added in an associated manner, such as the original Naxx craftables being available through the Old Naxx secrets.
Honestly I think it would be a neat thing to collect for some people. Give it some Long storied questline for classes that can use 2h weapons. Maybe connect its reappearance to the Infinite Flight if you need to.
Me personally, I never cared for the design of any iteration of the Ashbringer. But I know a lot love it and want to see it return.
You’re also forgetting it was 15+ years ago, I was a kid/teenager, and just getting stuff done in WoW was difficult.
The majority of players never hit 60 in actual Vanilla.
TBC was when WoW started to really take off, many people were still leveling for the first time, at the time I was 70.
You’re underselling how hard these things were to achieve.
Comment from WoWhead about the Tabard of the Protector:
"It’s hard to accurately describe how lucky those of us with characters who own this tabard should actually feel. The quest to obtain it was only in the game for a single week leading up to the launch of TBC and it was a level 60 quest that required you to go to a high-level zone and kill several level 60 demons. Simply doing a max level event quest these days sounds like nothing but there are a few things about Vanilla to consider before you apply that logic to the game as it was in early 2007. The fact is leveling took a lot longer in those days because very few people actually knew enough or took the game seriously enough to do it efficiently. I know it took months for me to reach max level in 2005 on my single main character and I only got there towards the end of the year. Information about the game was also very poorly distributed. Back then you just logged into the game from the WoW program and there wasn’t much additional information given if you didn’t visit the official site.
So you had to have already gone through the big task of having a max level character, had to had visited the website and read about the event or heard about it from another player in the game, and had to have cared enough about what was a simple cosmetic reward at the time to travel all the way to the Blasted Lands to do it. It had to be the perfect storm of all those things aligning at once within a 1 week period.
Add to this that the tabard has never been available in the game again unlike other legacy rewards and it gives it even more prestige. All the old PvP titles have been added as achievement rewards. The Hand of A’dal title is still available to players today as long as they kept the quest. The Champion of the Naaru title was available for years and in some cases even after TBC had wrapped up. No other legacy reward in the game was available for such a short period of time as this tabard while also having such steep requirements. For ages now it has solidified my main as the Rogue I made in early 2005 who I obtained the tabard with and that will never change."
The quest was to kill 6 non-elite mobs. The only challenge was to have been there at the time, and been on level. That is not the same as a challenge mode content.
Not a single title that was an expression of high skill, the Seasonal Gladiator and Legend titles, from PvP has been returned. The honor grind titles are still available, the prestige titles are not.
Then they never had any real value other than bragging rights dude, just say that and stop dancing around it.
If your only enjoyment of something your “worked for” goes away when someone else gets it, the item or reward never mattered to you, the ability to say “haha you dont/cant have it” did.
Which is sad tbh, and devalues your own “efforts”.
Except someone who wants to obtain the appearance of that item, where they can see it exists, but are unable to obtain it. The only people hurt by someone being able to obtain it is people who literally only want the item because they know other people are unable to have it, it doesn’t diminish your experience getting it or your successes. If you can’t be happy with the item you worked for and obtained, because someone else also owns one, that is pretty sad.
It’s stupid how they have all these ways to preserve prestige but insist on holding back QoL changes and essentially content additions for people who weren’t invested at the time.
Nobody is hurt by people being able to, either. So why bring it up?
If you are proud of it, more power to you. You can still be proud about having earned it, but you are choosing to whine at the thought of someone else getting one instead of enjoying your own and the experiences getting it.
You have no idea how overlooked warrior artifacts felt. I mean really Blizzard, you couldn’t think of ONE lore weapon to give us? You had to make up 3?
It’d be fine either way, so the barrier is nonexistent. Just make it available, opening old Naxx as is is already a trek, it’s not like people are going to Dalaran and buying it for 4 gold.
The Warrior artifacts were pretty rough. Shalamaybe was literally split in half, lost in Legion territory, and the Axe of Cenarius was one of two weapons to wound Sargeras. I think Scale of the Earth Warder, the twin blades of Shalamayne, and Axe of Cenarius would’ve been a solid set personally.
Again, the same argument you keep projecting to everyone else rears its head. If this is your argument, nobody can have something because I have one, it’s a trash argument, but I can’t help you if that is how you feel. Just sounds pretty sad.
Gladiator mounts are items that were hard to obtain. That’s not even in the same league as the conversation which is about returning non-challenge items that boiled down to winning a dice roll, or literally showing up.
I always thought it would have been pretty unique that both the arms and fury weapons were Shalamayne. Maybe that would have had some relic problems though.