Vanilla WoW players - how well did you do?

[Pawnless Endgame]

I thought I'd open a nostalgia thread, as WoW opened to the public 10 years ago! Thought it would be nice to share what classes we were, server, when you started, when you hit 60, guild politics, how far you got in the Vanilla end-game, and, how did WoW go for you post-Vanilla with Burning Crusade and beyond, and then finally, when did you quit? Have you played any previous Warcraft games?

For me, I played Warcraft II extensively, then went onto Age of Empires II which I thought was the next game up naturally in that genre.

I started WoW in Dec 2005, which meant that I played Vanilla for about a year before expansions. Being my first MMO, I made weird class decisions, talent points askew, bit under-geared while levelling. I wanted a wizard type character, so that was either mage or warlock. I liked the idea of pets, so warlocky it was I rolled 2 warlocks, again weird, but I wanted an orc and a human to try out both factions. Got both of them to level 10ish and it transpired that I was getting into more groups on the Alliance side. So human warlock it was. Got to level 60 in May 2006. The guild I joined was one of those up-and-coming guilds, getting attuned to Onyxia. That meant I was able to learn the raids with them, rather than joining an experienced guild and them having the fights explained to me. We cleared in the following order > Ony > MC > ZG > AQ20 > BWL. By Christmas 2006, most people were geared up in tier 2. I especially liked BWL because it was boss after boss with very few trash mobs inbetween We were starting on AQ40, got to the 5th boss, can't remember name but it did a whirlwind attack and we never got past that.

January 2007 came, Burning Crusade arrived and we were all levelling again. Because we were a large guild, 110ish players (probably 80 frequent players), there was in-fighting as who would get into the smaller 10-man and 25-man raids. The guild became elitist, and the more casual players like myself + guildie friends doing heroics 3 nights a week got left behind. In June 2007, the elites have already cleared KZ and they were working on Gruul's and Maggy's. For Gruul's 1st attempt, they were short on about 5 players, so myself + friends got into the raid. After 3rd wipe, we got Gruul down. A caster sword dropped, and the elites, already geared in epix fought on Teamspeak for like 20 minutes as to who should get the sword. They argued that me + friends only had blues, but other side of the argument was that we haven't raided since Vanilla. The sword finally got assigned to someone who already had an epic. 2 days later, I log back in, to find that the guild had disbanded. It was all because of that sword! Me + friends + other casuals then formed our own guild and we managed to learn KZ, Gruul's and Maggy's ourselves before the year 2007 was out.

In 2008, Lich King came out and we did Naxx, which was the only raid we didn't get to see first time round. In late 2009, I was made redundant, plus I lost interest in WoW with its expansions, so I cancelled my sub before I got too addicted again while being jobless. So yeah, I played WoW for 4 years.

 

[Alpherah]

Played from beta up until Wotlk.
Migrated from Shadow..something .. onto Magtheridon (Alliance).
Completed MC and Onyxia very quickly (on previous server), got upto the end boss in BWL before guild disbanded.
Joined a new guild as a tank, finished BWL. Quickly finished AQ40 (server 3rd i think), got up to the second last boss in Naxx.
Ended up with a BWL geared Druid, Naxx geared Warrior and Naxx geared mage.

BC - swapped playing to my mage only. got server 2/3 on pretty much all content, managed to complete Hyjal and the other one with that blood elf guy before the nerfs.
Completed Illidan server 3rd, and finished the final instance server 4th i think.

then I quit.

 

[FoxEye]

I was spoiled by the early days of EverQuest, and for the most part WoW felt like a backwards step.

Did enjoy my short time with Vanilla, but I quit before the first xpac, having attained level 46 with my Druid (let me live out my fantasies of being a cat )

The graphics and the polish were impressive, as was the seamless loading.

I'm not WoW bashing here, EverQuest 2 felt like a backwards step as well. Early EQ1 was for me the perfect MMO.

 

[ExRayTed]

Played from Beta and still play today, although I've had a couple of 6 month + breaks.

Original gave me many happy memories. Got to 60 playing with my wife. She picked druid, I picked hunter. Got into a small friendly guild after we hit 60. Literally nothing to do once we hit 60. Couldn't get into MC as you had to be attuned and needed a ton of fire resistance gear. Best we did was 15 man Blackrock Spire.

Paladin buffs lasted 5 minutes, they did next to no damage but were impossible to beat in a duel. Priests were healers, tanks were warriors. There was no global cooldown. There was no diminishing returns. No battlegrounds. PvP consisted of raids on Crossroads or Southshore. When Battlegrounds were first introduced your PvP rank decayed and if it decayed too much you couldn't wear the gear for your rank, which meant playing hours of PvP per day.

Vanilla WoW was great while levelling and some of the open world PvP was awesome, but once you hit 60 there was next to no endgame unless you were in a big guild.

 

[Devlish]

LOL Pally duels with my rogue - good grief, stun lock mania. Best memories were world pvp around tarren mill, before BG. That was great fun, such a shame it got killed off. In all honesty I don't mourn vanilla, the game moved on and people did too. Games like Darkfall proved that to me, the interest just isnt there anymore. We might remember it fondly but if it was plonked down today for us in another game im not even sure that game would last a month before going f2p...

 

[oll3h]

Started a year or so after launch. Rolled a Nelf warrior on a where a friend, his brother and his mates were playing. Had no clue what I was doing but enjoyed exploring, running around and getting killed by mobs with a skull on them. After a while I got the jist as to what was going on and had a little help from some other random players. After having "Come" and "Follow" barked at me I learnt a bit more. I did some mining with a view to making myself some cool new items. I think at this point I was only level 15 or so and might have not long made it to Darnassus. On finding the AH in Darnassus I was soon selling my copper ore on the AH for......the suggested AH price. Damn it sold quick! But again I soon cottoned on to what was going on After a while the people I was sporadically playing with quit and I was left on my own...

A couple of other friends expressed an interest in playing so I then re-rolled on a new PVE realm with them. I chose a warlock and at first didn't like it one bit. I stuck at it though and slowly but surely it grew on me until I was actually enjoying flinging curses and shadow bolts. All three of us got to level 60 but found it tough to get into groups and were perhaps a bit unsure of what was involved in being in a guild meant. My two friends got bored and for whatever reason I carried on playing. I did a bit of reading and got my head round the finer points of being a lock and started doing dungeons with randoms. It was kind of scary at first but I think the general WoW player was a bit more forgiving back then (luckily) and I was fortunate to meet some new friends along the way. This led me to being invited into a mostly Greek guild called Legends. They were attempting MC and hell I fancied seeing what that was all about so I tagged along. It was great! 40 people all trying to kill some stuff while a guy on TS yells commands out in greek? hilarious! We never managed to kill much in MC from what I remember but we did do some Zul'Gurub (I think it was called back then?) and had some mild success and I even think I managed to bag my first epic. Vanilla then came to an end and it was on to a new expansion and even a new guild!

For TBC I joined a new mostly English guild called Feersum Endjinn after meeting some nice engrish speaking folk. We all got to 70 as quickly as we could and the plan was to clear Kara and hopefully attract some new folk so we could then move on the 25s. unfortunately Blizzard didn't think the whole 10 man raid then a whole bunch of 25s thing through and many a guild was split, merged or destroyed for this simple reason. A chance then arose to join a much bigger guild called Reign. This was a newly formed guild lead at the time by a crazy Spanish Warrior tank called Golfolio. From here I got to see Gruls, SSC, That raid in Netherstorm, Black Temple, MHJ and Sunwell. We cleared them all prenerf with the exception of Sunwell where we got upto and including M'uru before it was nerfed into the ground. Sunwell became a after that which was a shame as it was by far the hardest and most interesting raid I have seen (and still is). We lost some people during this period including the raid leader. He was replaced with a guy from New York called Orthwein, another Warlock and a nice guy to boot.

Wotlk came and well.....the levelling areas were nice and Ulduar was nice but it all started to become a bit easy and very Lazy on Blizzards part. The nail in the coffin for me during this xpac was the trial of the crusader raid. What a joke. After this was cleared I took a break. The game was going down the pan for me so I quit for a while and played some other stuff until the next expansion.

Cataclysm came. I was interested again! I couldn't bring myself to raid to the standard in previous expansions so I left Reign and joined a smaller guild called Aurora. More relaxed, less raiding. It was fun for a while. I got my Legendary staff, we killed stuff at our own pace, I made some new friends. The realm and the game had definitely changed though. Lots of familiar faces had left the realm or quit the game. It was far easier to progress through content, gear was given to you and the need for a guild was minimal with lfr etc. As a guild we cleared all the content but I was no longer really enjoying it. I don't know if I simply grew out of it or if it was the fact the game felt like it was being dummed down. I quit again after all the content was clear, I had tried my hand at raid leading during the last two raids. I was not very good at it and it killed some of the fun for me

Blizzards super fun Panda land expansion came. I started playing again but just casually. Questing was a choir. Dailey's were a choir. Areas were nice to quest in though. Instances were short and easy...just how I like my women....but not my games :/ No longer being part of a raiding guild ment I had to go do LFR if I wanted my fix. I hated it like a red headed stepchild. I pondered joining a proper guild again.....I decided to quit. A combination of RL and the game turning to brown smelly stuff did It for me.

 

[Devlish]

Plus weve all grown up - I cant even contemplate spending six hours straight in front of a comp these days....

 

[gpuerrilla]

Played it on release but no beta action. Chose an Orc Shaman just by reading the character descriptions and racials then played it having fun to 60 not creating any alts (to level) except for bag space.

I was one of the first on my server to reach 60, by that I mean realistically not the power levelling and auto-quest help you get these days. That was great fun then enjoyed the Bg's when they got released after people got tired of city raids.

Played BC got a BE pally from 1-70 when that was released and got into raiding a bit more than just pvp. Played WotLK but by now the grinding burned me out and started to dislike the game.

I briefly returned for MoP and was going to go back into Arenas before completely quitting. I realised too much time is soaked into these games, rl was more important and got back into sports getting out in my spare time.

Great times and many people met, was fun while it lasted but I don't think there will be one quite like that era again. Too many choices now and too much expectation means it will be hard to replicate.

Edit - I enjoyed vanilla wow more because it was fresh, no-one knew of cookie cutter builds, gear was not a chasm of difference as not many raided high end and you had to run to your body when you died. Proper bullying and you had to pick your moments and take it like a man!

 

[regulus]

Human Pally in Vanilla. I had NO idea what I were doing. Didn't even know about talent points until level 50ish. Noob didn't begin to describe me. I tried tanking with a two handed DPS sword, I tried my hand at healing with that sword. Stats meant nothing to me.

I started reading and educating myself and ended up pretty much MT for the server leading guild on my server.

This was all in TBC. My glory years. And oh what years they were. We were the first guild on the server to complete the Armani Bear run. We done about 50 successful runs and started selling runs for 30k a pop. Nice money during those years. The guild lost a few good members and we bootlegged through Hyjal and BT. The better players had to play twice as well as they usually did just to make up for the lesser ones. I remember tanking WHOLE waves myself in Hyjal times after time.

After TBC the guild fell apart and became a 10man guild. Call me a Luddite but that just didn't feel right to me. We could've still pushed a 25man raid three times a week but the leaders felt it's was too much work if a 10man version were a good alternative. A few of us left with heavy hearts and joined another famous guild on the server (this is Argent Dawn by the way) that were running 25man (and still is to this day bless them) and played the whole WOTLK with them

But my heart still belonged to my old community and TBC. I just couldn't love my new guild as much as I loved my years in TBC. Ulduar I enjoyed very very much but it wasn't a patch on SSC, Hyjal or BT. For some reason I very much disliked Tempest Keep. SSC being my favorite raid.

Anyway, I quit during TOC on Anub HC25 and quit 'for good'. I came back towards the end of Cataclysm and promptly quit again until Pandaria which I played for about 2 months and quit again. In my heart I know I'm done.

Even if they brought out something like TBC again, the communities have changed. My people has gone and quit. The emails between us have gone silent. Everyone moved on in life. I don't want to be that guy that still grinds it out long after his glory years are gone. It may sound melodramatic, but that's how it feels/felt for me. We used to meet up somewhere in Europe on occasion and all hang out. They were awesome awesome people. The best ever. All brought together by a computer game. That thought still surprises me to this day

For me there will never be another game and another time like this.

 

[Guerrilla]

Played not too long after launch, maybe a few months...

Rolled a Human Warrior, as my friend played alliance on Stormrage, more as a joke than anything as it was the 'most boring combination'.

Leveled fairly slowly, not really knowing what i was doing but thoroughly enjoying it, only ever seemed to join very small guilds throughout my Vanilla experience.

Discovered the joys of PVP at about lvl 30ish and fell in love, it became my main focus and when I got to 60 I started the 'Honour grind' to see how far I could get... Working full time and in a way competing with those who didn't work wasn't the easiest, pretty much every moment of spare time went into it, eating at the computer, showering whilst in the queues etc.
Ended up getting to Rank 10, then had a full week of PVP and I lost rank so decided that was about as far as i could expect to go.

I tried other characters after that a night elf hunter and a dwarf priest mostly but nothing ever felt the same as my warrior.

Rerolled horde and made a druid, absolutely loved it! From the first few levels everyone was so much more friendly and helpful (i believe horde were outnumbered back then so perhaps that was something to do with it) kept playing my druid, PVPing with him through BC until I started to miss my warrior, rolled an undead warrior for a while and then not long after that a troll warrior. The troll warrior became my main, by this point I was playing a lot less and after playing through WotLK I stopped playing.

Started playing when there was a reroll project on these forums (can't remember exactly when) to start on Defias Brotherhood, levelled a troll druid up but once i started to get high level began to miss my warrior and transferred him across, played a short while more before quitting again.

Came back to WoW a few months ago and rolled a troll shaman to level up, then went back to my warrior Still playing now, still mostly just BGs with the warrior, maybe get 2-3 battles in when I get chance to be online and that's about it... Have rolled an undead hunter to level up but quite often my new chars get unused.

Enjoy when I play, in some ways the newer 'casual friendly' approach works a lot better for me, I'm no longer prepared to invest the time in it like i used to and use it simply as one of the most enjoyable time-sinks i have found Certainly beats watching TV. One thing i do very much miss is the community and recognizing people from the server when they were the only ones you could BG and instance with... It's a real shame that now there isn't much chance of seeing people again, peoples default attitude is to be horribly rude.

Looking forward to the new expansion, the PVP zone sounds like exactly what I am after, hopefully it'll be good and my character can live there

 

[misterjingo]

Played in beta and first started as Horde on Shadowmoon. My main was a Tauren shamen called BigMac and a troll hunter called mudbug. I remember being one of the first on the server to get a mount.

I also had a twink called Playtime *cough*

I played fairly frequently until TBC came out, then I lost interest. I came back for a bit and transferred to Magtheridon, but gave up again shortly afterwards. I haven't really played since!

I really enjoyed vanilla WoW, but felt it lost something as it got expanded.

 

[Edrof]

I had one of the first epic ground mounts on my server. I farmed Azshara every day for that! It was silver kodo and people would actually stop and do a double-take in Orgrimmar when I was on it.

Simpler days!

 

[flinco]

A brilliant time of gaming.

I started in Nov/Dec 05, rolling as a dwarf hunter at first. I remember getting to lvl 17 ish and getting eaten by crocodiles in the Wetlands where I then gave up with that character.

My next character was a night elf rogue. Eventually got to lvl 40 and couldn't afford a mount without a big loan from my guild mate, which must have taken me several months to pay back!

Eventually got to 60, but by now my small guild of 4 or 5 regular players "Deaths Hand" disbanded

Did the usual UBRS/Strat/Scholo for a while. (usually taking at least an hour hanging around IF putting a group together)

Eventually got into a guild who had just finished MC. So we started clearing MC and Ony, followed by BWL. We got up to the twin emporers in AQ before deciding to move onto Naxx. We managed to kill Instructor Razuvvious and the spider boss before the first expansion came out.

I can't remember that much of BC raiding. I think we got up to the 2nd last boss of SSC. After this I went to uni and never really raided again until LFR in Cata and Mists which I've plated for a few months of each. Not playing at the moment, might be tempted by the next expansion for a month or two when it gets cheaper.

 

[solado]

Started the game in 2005 when I was 15, made a night elf hunter as my first ever character. Took me a good while to get to level 60 as leveling in vanilla took an age to do, at the time I wasn't really new to MMO's though so had some understanding of how things went.

When I got to 60 I started trying to do instances and had to wait hours to get a group together due to me being a DPS and tanks / healers being almost no where to be found. From there I decided to make a priest, made it to 60. Found a guild to play with and did AQ20 -> ZG -> MC and Onyxia.

Then TBC hit and I completed all TBC, All WOTLK. I started to give up in Cataclysm and now that im 24, I just can't see myself playing 4 hours a night of "raiding"... Got much better things to do with my time

 

[Tute]

I got into the game in beta. I actually worked a small stint in GAME back then, and we got sent beta keys for all the staff - so that's how I got into WoW.

I remember downloading for what must have been about 2 days in order to just get on the damn thing. It was a very early iteration of Blizzard's P2P downloader and connections back then were 512KBit normally so it took a while.

And when I was in I started on a human paladin, got to Goldshire with little clue of what I was doing, got lost in the mine just to the South, and gave up and started trying other classes.

By the end of beta I have a Hunter in the high-30s and a Druid in the mid-20s. I settled on Druid for live servers.

Rolled onto Zenedar PvP with my housemates at the time, but found around level 30 that I actually preferred the hunter so I moved over to that class. Around the same time, my real life friends left the server as they hated being PvP enabled all the time. I kept it up and got into a raiding guild at level 60, but we failed to make any progress in MC and I got fed up with being banked so I left as well.

I ended up on Kilrogg PvE and got into a guild on there. We server first cleared MC, then due to infighting and bickering it all went sideways.

I drifted in and out of the game from then, levelling various classes to max level but not trying raiding again until WotLK. I applied for and got into a raiding guild, but the officers turned out to be a bunch of knobs only out to line their own pockets - they would share out most of the loot between themselves and then whinge when others weren't as well geared. I told them GM to stick it and left.

That broke my faith in raiding a bit and I went back to levelling various classes again upto MOP.

I don't know when I got into playing enhancement shaman, I think it was around late-TBC. Either way it was a class I wanted to take further, so I sought out my old housemates from vanilla, who were all playing on Argent Dawn RP-PvE, and rolled there. I wasn't expecting to do any raiding but when I got to level 90 they started chucking gear at me and encouraging me to do dailies/world bosses/LFR and before I knew it, the leader of then raiding group they were in contacted me and asked me to join them.

I went along just to see what it was like and that was about 9 months ago. Since then i've helped them finish off ToT (cleared +2 hc bosses) and work on SOO (cleared +3 hc bosses and still going).

I'm quite enjoying the game now.

 

[Dave****]

Managed to get upto Twins in AQ40 before TBC was released.

 

[nuttyprot]

Started late into vanilla just before tbh came out got hooked badly on the game. PVP never interested me and I was a heavy raider started making some of my own mods when LK got released and also got the over 9000ss achievement including insane to the membrain before they nerfed it.

I struggled to like cata thee game became stale and I realized I was only playing due to addiction. This resulted in me deleting all of my chars and changing passwords to unknown ones.

MY fav achievement is this

 

[Rainagul]

I started my WoW trial at the start of vanilla but my computer at the time could barely run it at a playable rate, so I gave it a break.

A few months later I got a new computer and delved back into the game. I remember it took me an age to level up as priest.

I wasn't really into PvE so much back then as I was a proper noob and didn't realize what was going on. PvP on the other hand was much more fun, got myself the Legionnaire title on that same priest. Wish I had pushed for a higher rank with hind sight now.

Couldn't afford WoW for a while being a young teen and got sucked into CS:S/Dota so I stopped playing. I returned at the end of BC and leveled a rogue and it's been an emotional roller coaster ever since.

WotLK is still my favorite expansion ever! It's probably down to the social element of having a core group of friends that would do everything together right until cata came out.

 

[caz32]

I played in 06 when the game was released in the EU. Before I had played Warcraft 3 and TFT in a cyber cafe which got me interested in Warcraft so the MMO was a no brainer.

I remember talking to my mates what class they were gonna be on the way to a blink 182 concert (lol) and I think we all rolled different classes but 1 of my mates didn't start until around 2008.

I've been playing on and off since all the way up to MoP which has killed my impression of the game due to the dailies.

I'm still interested in it and might start again when the new expansion comes out (I stopped playing in June 2013). I'll be a lot more casual though as the raiding is just a snore fest these days. The golden days of 40 man raids are gone and the game will never be the same.

and FYI, We cleared everything in Vanilla up to Huhuran in AQ40 and attempted the first boss of Naxx then TBC came out and our guild merged with another.

I also don't think I'll ever have as much fun in a game again after WoW, the people I played with in TBC and WoTLK was just amazing and nothing has ever came close since.

 

[Ryan-3]

I tried it as BC came out, but I started playing it around the end of 3.2 and quit earlier last year.

Didn't get much raiding done in WotLK with starting later, but I got a fair bit in Cata, clearing 5/8 on heroic in the final raid of the expansion. I often wondered why my 388 ilvl'd Paladin could out heal the priests with over 400... Once they decided to 'nerf' the raids, that was pretty much the final straw.

The thing is far too simple now - even so in Cata, never mind now - which takes away a lot of the fun of MMO's and I don't ever expect to go back to it.

Was fun while it lasted, I suppose.