For those who played WoW early on (2005)

Cat_In_Pyjamas said:
Why do I have a feeling that people who yearn for Vanilla times to come back play warrior/any dps class?
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Yeah i played a warrior. And guess what? for the most part it was TANK OR GTFO.
Not a lot different.
Vanilla WoW was pretty easy untill late Naxx, unless your playing with complete noobs with the correct spec and gearing you can clear the instances pretty quickly after release.

My old guild only raided 4 days a week (Quickly down to 2 days a week) in vanilla WoW and i ended up with:
Naxx geared warrior (Tank and DPS gear)
AQ40 geared druid (Resto)
BWL Geared Mage

And i would hardly call 2 days a week 'hardcore'
 
In tbc i used to raid sometimes 5 days a week. Was fun having something challenging to do. Near the end of naxx before ulduar, could faceroll it, sarth 3d and malygos in less than 1 raid night. Thats just meh.

Id rather have tbc back but i also liked vanilla (i played resto shaman back then)
 
I've played wow on and off since beta, with experience from other mmo's starting with vanilla everquest. I did the majority of my raiding in vanilla wow, like most people it seems, I prefered the pre-expansion world. The majority of my play after vanilla was from a casual perspective so I can appreciate making content more accessible and making meaningful progression possible for those outside of a hardcore guild.

However the increasely casual nature of the game has definately diminished its spirit, blizzard seem very quick to nerf high risk encounters at all levels of the game. Although the content is largely better designed everything seems more trivial, it feels as if your playing a game catering for people still unsure of the rudiments of their class after presumably hundreds of hours of experience.

The core gameplay in wow is undoubtably far superior to everquest, but it never felt as special, I appreciated the fact that wow unlike everquest, wow didn't feel like it was designed to force you to play your life away. Vanilla reached a nice mid-point in which there were some high risk encounters throughout the game, and some insane grinds, but there was enough to keep you involved if you werent playing hardcore.

The current direction of cataylsm and the game at large does concern me, having fewer abilities, dumbed down stats and forcing people to play more casually doesnt bode well, but I'm sure the expansion will be worth playing for a while.
 
Vanilla wasn't that easy, took us a good while to clear MC and I know we were first to clear MC on Bladefist. People were still learning their classes back then, which ofc added to the difficulty.
 
Ive been playing wow pretty much non stop since beta somewhere around July '04 on US servers, although I play on EU servers now.

It was a brilliant game then, and for a player like me, its even better now.

I absolutely love the fact that after a days work, going to the gym, cooking dinner and doing cleaning/laundry/looking after bills, I can play for 60-120 minutes while the GF watches Greys and have fun while developing my character.

I can do a daily dungeon for badges, I can do a daily BG for honor and arena points, I can do a VoA if its available, there is lots of options that are both fun and give me a shot at some character progression in some way.

If I can get a night to myself every now and then, I can even pug an ICC/TOC normal Raid for a laugh and ofc a shot at some nice gear. I like that I dont have to pre-plan my evening and can quit if something come up IRL that I need to attend to.

If Im the sort of casual player that people dont want to influence the game, I dont mind - Im enjoying it more than I ever have before.
 
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Got it the day it came out in the EU, I think it's just a bad case of rose-tinted glasses. You had to jump through hoops of fire to get anything done, down from crafting armor to simply making flasks. TBC lost some of the challenge, but that was slightly addressed with the heroic modes in WOTLK.

I do actually miss the insanely hard difficulty of vanilla though. A lot of the encounters were harder than the majority of heroic modes in WOTLK. It took me and my guild back then two months to kill the twin emperors for example. Nearly every single boss needed two or three weeks of solid wiping. The game didn't even need gating (limits on how often you can wipe on a boss before it's over for the week).

The intensity of vanilla meant you just couldn't jump in and play it in short bursts which went against what Blizzard's vision was. It was either stagnate at 5-6 million subscribers, or address why they couldn't get any more. They did the right thing in the long term. (I believe it's at 10-11 million active subs now)
 
Think i have been playing since the eu release, have been a warlock 95% of the time. Having raided the old classics MC/BWL/AQ40/Naxx, and being on a relatively low pop sever, i can only look back and feel how epic it was.

Can anyone remeber what we had to do to 'open' AQ40? It took an entire sever, in our case about 3-4 weeks after AQ was officaly released, for it to be open to raid. For those that dont remember, it required a massive collection of items and consumables through quests and crafting, to donate towards the 'war effort' for the gates of AQ to open.

And being online whilst the then top guild announced that they where ready to open the gates and having allmost the entire population of the sever rush to AQ and wait...dueling to pass the time....sitting with the horde and /dance....everyone on vent both alliance and horde....and then the top guilds guild leader opens the gate......still one of the greatest online moments i have ever seen.

Second only to being the warlock tank for twin emperors, which as a dps class before that was such a rush, when we finnaly killed them, it was the greatest online gaming moment i have had so far. TBC aswell as Sunwell had some really epic moments but nothing came close to the feeling of AQ and the sheer size of that place, you honestly felt lost some times, only to exit from into massive chambers with colossal bosses. The only thing that was similar in WOTLK was Uldular, it was big and impressive but a B movie to AQ+Naxx's blockbuster feeling.

Rambling on, i would say that i am dissapointed in the current and future WoW, but having been lucky enough to experience the majority of vanilla WoW with a great bunch of people, i cant feel too angry at blizzard for giving me the greatest online gaming moments i have ever had.:D
 
Tombstone said:
I played WoW from its release in late November 2004. What killed the game for me wasnt so much the expansions, for me it was more the arrival of the battlegrounds and arenas. That was what ruined the game for me, I had enormous fun with the world pvp, but that world pvp was hugely impacted by the BGs/arenas.
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This for me also...

I dont understand why MMO's add this feature in, they have a huge land mass that should be populated but isnt.

I played WoW from beta, then quit before TBC was released. Although i bought TBC i never got round to play it.

ATM i am playing Lich King and enjoying ICC, but thats about it. The PvP side of WoW is still a joke, battlegrounds is just crap. Its more like a Guild wars or Global Agenda style game with this instant access to stuff.

Where is the RPG?
 
Vanilla WoW was way better, raiding was difficult.

Blizzard have dumbed the game down for the more casual gamer.

Having a full Epic set of gear was only achieved by a small percentage (myself included) however 99% of players have epic gear.

I still raid, and have downed the lich king on 10 man and 25 man. But it's so much easier now.
 
Nico_Joey said:
Can anyone remeber what we had to do to 'open' AQ40? It took an entire sever, in our case about 3-4 weeks after AQ was officaly released, for it to be open to raid. For those that dont remember, it required a massive collection of items and consumables through quests and crafting, to donate towards the 'war effort' for the gates of AQ to open.

And being online whilst the then top guild announced that they where ready to open the gates and having allmost the entire population of the sever rush to AQ and wait...dueling to pass the time....sitting with the horde and /dance....everyone on vent both alliance and horde....and then the top guilds guild leader opens the gate......still one of the greatest online moments i have ever seen.
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I can remember coming online one Friday night pretty drunk and the world had gone crazy, I was in Taranis and Gadgetzhan was under attack from all these eyptian like mobs who were dropping mad loot. I was about lvl 40 at the time so didn't realise what was going on until later when I found out about AQ. Was one of the most memorable moments in WoW for me.:)
 
Don't think any game can replace what was vanilla WoW to be honest, it was a fairly special time but with that said I can see why the game had to move on and change. Whilst I'm not 100% sold on a few of Blizzards ideas I think in general the majority of the changes have been for the better.
 
Ace Modder said:
AQ opening was so epic, it was amazing!

Anyone got the AQ mount? Limited to 1 per server
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A friend of mine got it although at lvl 70 on a new server. We rerolled and did it all from scratch, not just a transfer with sceptre ready made rubbish that some do. Was fun doing all the quests etc even at 70.
 
I remember AQ opening well, also remember missing half of school the next day because I was up at 6am fighting the mobs. Bloody Spanish and their stupid timezone (Spanish guild on English realm got the sceptre :( )
 
Alpherah said:
Yeah i played a warrior. And guess what? for the most part it was TANK OR GTFO.
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Key words: most part; DPS warriors were frequent enough - someone had to sport those two-handers after all.

Vanilla WoW was pretty easy untill late Naxx (and AQ 40)
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Agreed - all those claiming otherwise seem to be forgetting how simplistic mechanics were used on the majority of bosses, really if anything WotLK bosses are far more intricate when it comes to mechanics (ok not all of them), only things that are different: player base experience (if wotlk was vanilla, and vanilla was the last expac you'd still cry about how lame the bosses are) and itemisation - have a look back at the stats tier gear provided in vanilla. Aside from t3, they were all poorly itemised, and some set bonuses were questionable at best (shorter cast time on HS...lolwut?).
 
I agree vanilla wow was something special although TBC had many bad points arena being one of the biggest but raiding in TBC was spot on with the attunements and difficulty no gimmicks like the "easy and hard mode" just one way or gtfo.

But yeah nothing good lasts forever :(
 
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