I played the first day of launch back in 2004, but I didn’t raid at all until probably 1.12, and even then, very very casually. How different were classes during those patches? Assuming we had the actual patches from the live retail version, how much different was it? What would a raid comp actually look like in those patches? I maimed a Druid and I remember leveling as Resto, because if my memory serves, feral, even for leveling, was hot garbage. I don’t know if that’s a false memory of someone who knew nothing, or if things really were that different. It just made me curious. Were things such as prot Warriors necessary? We’re dps Warriors still so good? (I don’t remember ever seeing a fury warrior, it seemed they were almost always arms)
Minmaxing was far less common.
PvP and PVP-PVE Hybrid specs were far more common than PVE specs, because PVP was considered fun by the community.
Consume spam was virtually non-existant in pvp and would get you made fun of.
Boosting was a niche hidden thing that was kept between friends or internal to a guild if it happened at all. There wasn’t much of it.
GDKP was not a thing.
People did not respec often.
Raid comps generally tilted toward more ranged dps because its simpler.
Buying gold resulted in permanent suspensions.
GMs wandered around in game watching people and punishing them/communicating with them.
Customer Service went off script very often and acted like people instead of drones.
17 Likes
In b4 someone accuses you of just having nostalgia glasses.
I also remember actual live GMs. Amazing concept right?
4 Likes
This is mostly what I was wondering. I remember loads of warriors raiding as arms and I remember a lot of deep prot tanks running around.
This is mostly why I didn’t raid. I wanted to PvP as feral and didn’t know how to effectively farm. I don’t think I even had my epic mount until almost TBC.
3 Likes
computers from 2003-2006. Like have you tried to run an rpg from early 2000s vs one from late 2010s. If you see old videos they are playing with a bit of lag like wintergrasp though even now a wrath classic with modern computing won’t be as laggy as retail wintergrasp.
Another issue is people aren’t playing blind so people didn’t really know what to expect.
i was a warlock in vanilla. we had periods of being gods (no diminishing returns on fear), and periods of being… well, as the famous video goes, mushrooms.
2 Likes
Lets not forget the MASSIVE 1.12 dungeon gear changes for catch up. For instance, the ban’kok sash in BRD was a crappy green until naxx launched when it was changed to a blue with hit. We had that version since day 1.
2 Likes
Yes. There were itemization changes throughout. The original mageblade didn’t even have spellpower lmao.
1 Like
yeah that stuff really adds to the power of a character. Worried we will have the same issue in TBC.
Far more balanced. With 20/20 hindsight, WoW Classic players know that melee are superior, so the raid slots are skewed in their favor.
Feral is and was one of the best leveling specs. I don’t know how someone could think that Resto is/was superior for leveling. The Feral tree gives a ton of DPS boosts. The Resto tree gives a lot of healing boosts. Neither Feral nor Resto have any issues healing themselves while leveling; those healing boosts aren’t needed. So between those two specs, the one with higher DPS is the better leveling spec.
“Necessary” in that it was the preferred MT spec. I remember guilds having about 2 deep Prot Warriors for MTing, then a couple 31/5/15 Warrior OT specs, then the rest as pure DPS. Deep Prot is a better tank spec than 31/5/15, so raids wanted their MTs to be deep Prot.
Fury/Prot wasn’t known about as a spec, from what I remember. Or if it was known about, it was only known by a handful of players. Had the players known about it, it should’ve been the preferred MT spec, I’m guessing.
People started realizing Fury was doing better than Arms right around the AQ tier of content, from what I remember. Arms was and is the better PVP spec, and as the guy above said, people didn’t respec too often, leading to several people PVEing in their PVP spec.
People also now know that the debuff slot taken up by MS is a slight pain, so raids don’t want even a single Arms Warrior. This is a minor point, though.
Warriors scale extremely well with gear. Fury was doing really good damage in AQ, and then by the time people started getting geared in Naxx, Fury started pulling away from all the other specs in terms of DPS.
Out of your list, this is the only thing that I believe you’re not remembering well.
Selling gold would get the brakes put on your account with a quickness, but buying it? I don’t think I even remember hearing about someone banned for that, but I could be wrong.
I know botting was shut down pretty hard. WOW Glider was a pretty simple, effective botting tool that tons of people used… I remember quite a few folks losing their accounts due to that.
When I was playing back then I remember several of my guild mates buying gold, and even had one who paid a Chinese farmer to level a Warlock to 60 for him. He basically gave them his account info after creating his character and they leveled it for him. To this day, that absolutely blows my mind. He never had any issues afterward though. His account never got hacked and he was still playing that Warlock when I quit in Cata.
No this isn’t a bad memory. You’re right. The druid talent trees were so bad at the beginning.
I didn’t main druid, I did have a level 60 druid alt but I never did anything with it. I distantly remember one feral druid on our server by name, who raided as a feral cat from what I recall, and he was so made fun of that the entire server knew his name.
People all wore their blue tier gear and that was the stuff to get at the start. Resistance was huge in raiding and getting in raids was related to how much fire resistance you had at the start, on your gear not via consumes, for everyone. Of course you’d swap gear around to your blue gear. I started raiding in Feb 2005 or something and that’s how it was all the way back then.
Another thing about gold farmers etc, not really related to raiding. So I’d spend all day going between zones and world PVPing. This must have been before glider existed because I never saw a bot although we did know of fishing bots which were quickly banned. Anyway I remember two “gold farmers” who were very poorly geared and very easy to kill. I knew them by names and they were the only ones I knew of. I do distinctly remember seeing a speed hacker once and only once. The fly hacking thing of today is way worse.
Account selling was a thing for sure. I knew someone who sold his account and reclaimed it later… Gold selling was also a thing and one thing I do remember them doing is running to Org and dying and spelling out website gold buying addresses with corpses. There was a lot of account hacking and gold was commonly gained by stealing it vs farming it. Although now that I think about it Maraudon farming was a thing back then as well, by players not bots.
As for what others say yes my computer (personally) was way worse and did have a hard time with 40 people etc and lagging. My internet was broadband but did not have the speeds of today.
Everyones goal was to use a tier set with some gear that was outside tiers. There were no BiS lists, they were ongoing lists made by the top guilds and most were very basic. The most advanced of them was probably shadow panther. We had an encyclopedia called thottbot that was unreliable 25% of the time. Half the quests had no answers to them. Addons of this caliber were non existent. DBM didn’t scream at you. An add-on wouldn’t tell you the exact location of a stealthed rogue (Spy). Tarren Mill and Ashenvale always had wpvp, EVEN ON PVE SERVERS as most people would flag themselves. Beyond WCB and Dragonslayer, world buff meta was not a thing for 99% of the raiding community. Consumes were used at about 50% of todays capacity in terms of usage per person and in terms of how many consumes were active. People would farm dungeons for gold with guild mates. We used teamspeak and ventrillo. The game was not solved. MC was hard and you had to spend a month on Domo. Warriors were tanks or used 2Handers. Warlocks went thru many changes and were obsolete often. Rogues were the kings of DPS with mages and hunters shortly behind. Not many attempted Naxx in vanilla, even less killed C’Thun. Mages didn’t have winters chill for 11 patches making MC/BWL quite different for them, druid innervate was a talent, rogues had different weapon sets that were more effective. PvP was actually PVP and not grief-ing or zerging FPs.
The community was a community. Toxicity was blacklisted. Children were a minority and adults were the majority of gamers. GMs existed and players were punished. Blizzard fixed things that were not supposed to exist (ie. mage 1 pulls would not exist if Blizzard knew about them). People never sold boosts, they would help guildmates level in other ways such as quest assistance or AOE large groups in the open world such as WPL farms. People had whatever spec they wanted and they would try and test specs themselves. I was laughed at an ridiculed for having a PoM Pyro build yet I was 2-shotting paladins on CD. Alterac Valley was nicer and lasted for an entire weekend. Getting Epic Mounts was Epic and many never had them. Computers were worse and the DC boss was way more violent [No I did not play on dial up, cable was a thing back then] . Gear itemization was not as rampant. Raid logging weekly was not a thing. Being the first at something, meant something (such as killing Ragnoros or Nefarion where the next guild didn’t for a month or more). Servers were generally 1000 persons per faction. Most people never had alts and if they did it was rarely more than one.
the people gamed to have fun, not to look at parses on logs
3 Likes
I leveled a druid back then as my main and it was hot garbage. I leveled as a resto/feral hybrid and the talent tree was very different. Healing as a druid in dungeons was nightmarish and the difference between a priest and a druid or a shaman and a druid was very apparent.
It happened. My college roommate got banned for it
I remember warriors tanking raids as arms spec. There were also people out there that thought stacking defense was the way to go.
I remember arguments about whether spirit or +healing was better for priests. I remember people trying to make lightwell work, and thinking that they could somehow make it useful.
1 Like
Biggest change we have seen in classic compared to Vanilla (well it started on P. servers first) is the world buff metta. It was rare that people would go into raids with any world buffs (I remember we had the random ony head every now and then?) let alone getting Ony+ZG+DMT+DMF+BL consumables.
1 Like
The game was (relatively) and people were still figuring it out so there were actually useful conversations in chat.
Actually, that’s amother difference: no discord then so a lot of communication actually happened IN-GAME.
The game was also a lot simpler. And it was shiny and new.
It turned out Classic didn’t have this.
It’s like apples and oranges, really, a completely different game.
Online gaming has changed dramatically since the days of WC3 and WoW though so it’s not unexpected that people play the game completely differently now.
I think the earlier patches may have made classic different but not nearly as different as the changed playerbase has made it.