How hard was getting Epic gear back in vanilla

Community General Discussion
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Compared to now? Shouldn’t be that difficult I don’t think.

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how good was your guild?

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It was harder then because you wouldn’t see an epic piece until a few months after you’d get into the end game. Even blues were harder to get. If you referring to what it’s going to be in Classic, likely far easier since there will be 15 years of knowledge.

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You didn’t get epic gear til you killedOnyxia or got into MC

Very rarely 0 to 60 an epic piece dropped like .001 percent off final dungeon bosses and you crapped your pants

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You don’t need a guild, or a good guild, to get epic gear today.

In Vanilla it was almost a prerequisite to getting epic gear, or at least frequent opportunities to get epic gear. It was exponentially harder to get powerful loot back then [in my day lol].

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Very hard if you were the one who keeps pulling whelpings.

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Or a very lucky world drop if I’m not mistaken.

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Yea my first epic was the ZG trink though I didn’t start right off the bat. The T 0.5 bracers usually were first for most people

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Epics were a lot more scarce then, thats for sure. But you could still get 1 or 2 epics fairly easy through PvP. I specifically remember on my rogue having lobotomizer (AV exalted if I remember correctly) ready for me upon hitting 60 and then you had AV trinkets that ranked up as you ranked up with AV. Eventually that trinket becomes epic. So as long as you pvp sometimes you can at least get 2 there before 60. Other than that, unless you make the ZF sword/SoS instance dagger, or get something like Krol Blade/Hammer of the Northern wind, you won’t get epics without raiding or pvping a lot. :slight_smile:

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Think about it this way, epics only dropped in raids, raids had 40 people, and each boss only dropped 3 pieces of gear.

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It should also be noted that even if you put aside the need for a guild to run raids to get epics, there is also the fact that even with that, loot was far more “diffuse”. Nowadays, if you have a raid of 10 people, you are going to get around 2 pieces of gear per boss in a raid. In Vanilla, raids were 40-mans, and bosses on average dropped 3 pieces of gear. Loot in modern raids is over twice as prevalent as it was back then, meaning people tend to gear themselves out from a particular tier much faster.

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And sometimes all 3 pieces were the same. Damn you Onyxia and your 3x Dragonstalker helms when my rogue was waiting for his hood.

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There were boe’s like always. That krol blade was a very popular one. You also got epics through the battleground but that was added later. But then back in that time most people weren’t playing just to gear up. It was an awesome experience just playing the game with your friends, you made friends etc. Not sure when the game shifted toward what we have today, it’s something that has been creeping slowly up throughout the years.

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I basically never did get epics. I had all the fun I needed hunting around all-nighter 5-man dungeons for blue gear.

I did actually get one epic world drop randomly that I sold and financed the next two expansions with the proceeds.

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I would guess 25-50% of people with lvl 60s never saw one for at least the first year.

it was world of blues. epics were “epic”

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I took the bait clicking on this thread but I ain’t falling for this. That’s asking too much!

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Depended on lots of variables. How good your guild was, then how good you were, then how you ranked in the guild compared to others of your class, then how many points you had, then after all that if you were lucky enough to get a drop.

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If you think you’re going to get epic gear easier in Classic, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

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It wasn’t that hard despite what people tell you in terms of the content.

It was for the main raids

Ony, BWL, MC, NAXX and AQ40 only so many people can get a piece of loot in a 40 person raid

The lower raids the UBRS, LBRS and ZG had a mixture of blue,purple

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I actually think I got my first epic at level 40 in Vanilla. They were cloth bracers that I bought for honor points from the WSG PVP vendor. I replaced them with the level 58 version when I could. I never managed to get any raid epics though, I was newish to my guild and didn’t have enough DKP for items.