It took a while for this mage to even accumulate his full Magister’s (Tier 0) blue set – for a long time I was running dungeons in blues accumulated late 40s/early 50s dungeons. I didn’t have all the main slots filled with epics for many months after getting full T0 and I think I might have been using blue rings/neck all the way up to TBC’s release. The furthest I got was full T1 except helm (which was T2).
In short, it wasn’t exactly easy.
Random freak epic drops did happen, though. I remember a Nightblade dropping in a random Mara run with my guild, and my high school friend managed to luck into not just 1 but 2 epic staff drops for his mage: first, the coveted [Glowing Brightwood Staff] from a literal random boar in Blasted Lands before he was 60 and then a few months later an [Elemental Mage Staff] from an UBRS run (dropped near rookery). I was in the same room as him with the glowing brightwood dropped – I’ll never forget his sudden ecstatic shout!
You don’t need much FR for progression unless you’re a tank, you just need to farm Greater Fire Protection pots. AQ40 only has one fight where you really need NR for and even then its just Melee to soak. The biggest roadblock for progression is definitely going to be getting enough people the Onyxia Scale Cloak for Nef.
Um, did you not run the ravamped MC during the anniversary? If you put those people into the classic raid with all classes and abilites (and worse gear) it will be harder imo.
For starters epic gear in vanilla was not handed out like food stamps like it is in retail. So an opinion of “how hard” really depends on your definition of hard.
It was very difficult. At the bare minimum you needed to complete 25 man Zul’Gurub raid (a very fun raid by the way). Getting the color purple had meaning and felt rewarding.
Epics 1-59 were few and far between and were like 1% drop rates. Once you got into raids MC/Onyxia you were a 40 man raid and bosses only dropped 3-4 items from what I remember. The issue also being that if you were horde you still had paladin tier drop and if you were alliance shaman gear would drop (These classes were locked to one faction at the time). I remember killing onyxia and having all stormrage covers drop… good times.
Once upon a time , rep grinds compared to todays easy mode are no big deal. So back then getting a purple was a task. I experienced Alterac Valley battlefields to go on for days. I was one of the first Unstoppable force users on my server. I lost months getting it. MONTHS I wont be back to vanilla.
The anniversary raid had the “dispels have a cooldown” that classic won’t have (and a whole lot of mages and druids that weren’t even acquainted with what their decursing button was). However, I do remember that being rough even with half the raid being in my guild and the others were invited into our voice chat (not all of them came). I likely had a number of dps on a “totally not worth healing” list before we downed the third boss.
You are seriously comparing LFR to Classic raiding? LMAO hahahhaahha. LFR you can stand in fire and be fine and ignore mechanics. You can’t ignore them in Classic or back in Vanilla. You can’t even compare the 2.
Also, if you don’t like random lowbies getting epic gear, I’d think you’d freak if you played ESO. Cos you can get epic gear in that game simply by crafting.
First thing you had to defeat was the guild boss. Either you had to be outgoing enough to get people to want to play with you or kiss the bottom of those who were.
After getting in the guild, you had to be the right class they wanted.
Next up you had to be part of the “in” crowd in the guild.
Than you had to be geared correctly.
Now you had to farm daily for mats to get consumables just in case you could go with the raid.
When you finally get in the raid, the strat was easy, almost no mechanics. If a piece actually dropped that you could use, the guild leaders friends got it first (by choice or DKP usage where you could be kept out simply by the raid not choosing to take you).
All of the above was not really tied to skill, it was usually about who was friends with who, whose wife flirted with who and all the other RL BS drama that comes from any cliche…