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What was Vanilla WoW like? I am curious to know...
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Post by
Stigoz
I haven't read all the posts up untill now. But from what I've seen, I feel I need to say this to all the nostalgic people: Is it the game, or you that evolved?
I remember the first time I played WoW, too. It felt so huge and immersive. I remember leaving the starting place in Teldrassil and getting all worked up about "wow, another village!". I remember seeing the sign to Darnassus and gettin pumped on adventure, because "this is the elven capital!".
I'd read the quest descriptions several times, just because I loved the intertwined storylines that brought you from place to place.
However, now, when I level my 6th ot 7th alt, I go on routine. I accept the quest and look on the map where to go, all while I'm queued in the dungeon finder. Teldrassil doesn't amaze me anymore, it's just not the same.
This is like saying "the sun was brighter when I were a kid" or "back when in the 50'ies men were men". It's easy to look at everything with rose-tinted glasses, as many people uses it to create a "us and them"; "they are noobs for not being in Vanilla when all were magical and sparkly and unicorms pooped butterflies."
Try to compare it with other things. Did you play Pokémon as a kid? Do you remember the feeling of epic as you walked down route 1, accompanied by
this music
? It still gives me chills when I listen to that music, but I know that no matter how hard I tried to bring back those memories, if I pulled out a Gameboy Classic and fired up Pokémon Fire Red, it would just be another silly game.
It was magic, granted. But it's over now. Let the new kids on the block enjoy their new game.
Post by
Pwntiff
I still play red/blue from time to time...
Also, why is Aestu linking images from TBC?
Post by
Agoraphobic
Gear, gear, gear....
This is a WotLK baby talking.
Pretty sure gear was a huge factor in vanilla as well.. Don't see what their point has to do with when they started. If you're going to insult people, perhaps you should dig a little deeper than expansion content to do so yourself.
Post by
lonewarrior
On a PvP server where I first leveled..you made friends assisting each other during gankfest.
I remember those glorious fights of 20 or more players from each factions battling it out in SS for hours. It was great faction bonding. They turned into emotes of waves and hello's later on and invites to dungeon runs from player you didn't know prior.
Running into some one all the time questing made for comradely especially when you had to foot it until level 40.
I don't think the new players can experience this anymore because the focus has become to get to the latest expansion area because that's where everyone and all the action is.
If your on one of those huge pop servers where new player status is no longer given to bring in fresh blood... then this situation becomes even more exasperated.
Funny I use to talk to a lot of people before WotLK...but by the time I hit 80 and was raiding and with LFD...I lost touch with so many of them.
I think the best way to describe the difference between vanilla and now is that WoW had a more personal feel to it in vanilla. Just my 2 cents.
Post by
DarkOpeth
we to walk uphill both ways! , on FOOT until lvl FORTY, and then its twenty more level until 60, and you would have been lucky, LUCKY dammit, to afford a 100% mount. (sorry, old memories.)
Also, there was no such thing as welfare epics.. it took blood, sweat, tears and luck to get a full set of epics....
Vanilla WoW = WoW Hardmode
Post by
451639
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Post by
Rilgon
Vanilla WoW = WoW Hardmode
not really no
Post by
lonewarrior
My first char was dwarf. When leveling in Loch Modan i came to Mo'grosh stronghold. Back then those ogres were elite I believe and you needed a group to take them on. But it was no problem because there was always someone there. I ran that place at least 5 times during my time in Loch, with and without quests involving it, just because it was fun, they were "tough" elite, and there was friendly people to play with, just like that.
I remember that fight...I made a half dozen friends doing the same thing. Most of them became long time guild members.
Good times.
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78077
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2259
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160546
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Post by
etrin
a lot of the traveling in vanilla was like the quest chain in storm peaks. HOW MANY TIMES did we go from one end of that land to the other?
And in the first part of the expansion we didn't have flying mounts so they gave us a free one in the zone.
Cold weather flying is one of the biggest rip offs (gold dumps) in the game. but thats besides the point.
Travel gets old when its 80% of the time spent on the quest. BUT travel is a lot cheaper to set that up than a good quest chain. And time is money (going into their pocket) If you spend 2 hrs on a 2 minute quest they feel they have given you play time wasted or not.
Post by
Quilan
Vanilla was TBC on steroids. Remember all those boring uneventful quests in the beggining of Hellfire Peninsula? Think of that but 10000000x worse.
Post by
Xsound
It was a hell, that being said, it was AWESOME! Got tWo characters to 60, and I loved it. The challenge to improve your gear, getting my first epic, PvPing, oh PvPing :') I miss it. Speccing the way you liked, playing the way you liked.
It was the worst grind Ive EVER done in WoW, but god did I feel a sense of accomplishment. Just making the gold to enchant your gear and buy epic mount, I felt like I god when I walked through Ironnforge and people inspected me looking at how much I had accomplished, and I inspected others and were amazed by those, trying all their gear on my self.
Overpowered classes, it was awesome! Looong dungeons, looooooooooong raids, THOTTBOT with crappy infrastructur, getting Thunderfury for our guildleader and having everyone know our guild. 40 people working as a team. 3 first ragnaros downs and druid legs all the time <3 Twins in AQ O.o What a horrible grind, but what a cool boss!
So PLEASE ! Stop saying we're lying when we say it was awesome.
YES It was a horrible grind - BUT I felt a sense of accomplishment, now I just take my new epic, slap it on, gem it, enchant it, and on with my life.
/end
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93865
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146856
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160546
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Post by
picman
All answers and more:
http://www.masterofwarcraft.net/2010/06/world-of-warcraft-trip-down-memory-lane.html
Since you didn't get your mount untill lvl 40 and basicly the whole game is going out on exploring the world it was prolly a hell. Even though people where kinder. :)
Post by
97333
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Post by
woohaa
I have fond memories of Vanilla but they will stay that way. I don't ever want to play Vanilla ever again. It's true that vanilla had alot of things right, but they also had alot of things terribly wrong.
5000 man Queues to log into WoW - somedays i gave up because i couldn't wait 4 hours to log into wow.
Bad quest descriptions - No quest helper back then and the quest mobs were south and the description said Northeast.
leveling from 1-60 took forever
Getting a dungeon run going was a pain in the butt. No summoning stone or LFD. Most times people left before the whole group got to the instance.
I didn't buy my first mount till i was 45 and buying the 60 mount took months of farming.
Before BGs Hillsbrad was non-questable. there was always a constant battle going on.
The long ass AV's were fun to a point, but getting into a AV was not fun. Queue time was usually anywhere from 5min if your faction was underpopulated to 4hrs+ for the higher pop side.
Gearing for pre-MC was a pain. Those of you saying you didn't really need to get much gear probably didn't go thru progression MC raiding. UBRS was a 15man run and got reduced to 10. Strat and Scholomance were 10man runs. They later got reduced to 5mans and the difficulty levels of the dungeons were drastically reduced. Most people farmed months for their gear...no emblem gear...just drops.
MC raids took days to complete at the beginning. Trash took forever to kill in greens and blues. If you managed to kill them at all. You could only have 8 debuffs at a time. It later got increased to 16, then 32, and later 64.
Rolling for gear in MC was terrible. You'd go months raiding every week before you received a piece of gear.
MC and BWL attunements were a pain in the butt to get all 40 people attuned. Also, getting enough Fire Resist gear for everyone to attempt ragnaros.
Have you ever been in a raid for 14 hours straight? MC trash were like bosses all on their own in greens and blues. They also respawned every 45min which doesn't sound like much but if you wiped more then 3 times on a boss you had respawns.
Farming onyxia everyweek for the scale so you could make onyxia scale cloaks so you could attempt nefarion.
I HATED VANILLA ONYXIA! (onyxia deep breaths still make mad to this day)
Anyone remember Taunt immune bosses?
I could go on forever about vanilla. It took dedication if you planned on raiding high end content or becoming a High Warlord/Grand Marshall. Alot more dedication then now. Raid encounters were alot easier then now but remained difficult due to 40 people all committing human error every attempt. Addons and Macros also trivialized many encounters...failure to have said addon/macro made it alot more difficult.
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