ALPHA WoW Abilities That Were Too OP For Launch | WoW Alpha | World of Warcraft

[@WillEmmo]

Click this link sponsr.is/WillE and use my code WILLE to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev. That’s 25% your first month or your first year, depending on the subscription you choose.

[@jjstraka1982]

Vanilla is the only version of the game where it felt like they were simply trying to map out a D&D campaign that millions of people could then traverse in for two years. As grand an adventure as it is, their ambitions were 2-3x as big.

[@simonramos5553]

Exactly and that’s why it’s great

[@99Pierogies]

Wow, a game that took half a decade to make felt bigger than an expansion that took a year 🙄

[@mitchconner2021]

​@@99PierogiesAnd? Maybe they should have taken more time on expansions and people would love them as much as the old world.

[@BaxstabberzZ]

​@mitchconner2021 Player retention requires content unfortunately. Have too long of a drought and then you lose income and therefore can't fund longer projects. Especially with Blizzard having killed so many projects they certainly couldn't afford that.

[@philbuttler3427]

Vanilla sucks ass.

[@conrad2381]

Disguise for rogues is actually pretty cool and would be a great addition to a classic + to create great class flavor. Just the RP alone is worth it.

[@bigsmerf8158]

Turtle WoW did this, actually. It's not very extensive and I haven't tried the feature out myself but there's some vendors that sell disguises in areas near a certain type of mob/mobs or faction.

[@MoonTurky]

@@bigsmerf8158 Everytime i read a comment about turtle wow, i am less inclined to ever try it

[@wesleydunphy9182]

it exists in turtle wow

[@wesleydunphy9182]

@@bigsmerf8158 turtle wow > retail wow

[@l9arves]

Turtle is first server I sticked too, others were too fast paced for a guy who takes random breaks from game, my warrior is still lvl 44, but leveling became really fun,and I'm starting to get good at the game finally,

[@mheller344]

9:00 we not gonna talk about the flying pirate ship lol

[@atpwolf5590]

Shamans reincarnation used to break all their gear in exchange for rezzing with it xD

[@RosylaStreamingNetwork]

Didn't in Alpha the Paladin's Exorcism used to work on the Undead Race, so they had to remove the Undead designation from them to keep it from affecting them?

[@probablynoctis7872]

That lasted through a good bit of Beta. Forsaken were completely immune to most CC (as Polymorph and such targets humanoid), but vulnerable to Priests and Paladins.

[@RW77777777]

priest is only Horde class with dispel no one plays trolls every UD priest sits shackled in Tarren Mill good times

[@phantom0456]

There are more abandoned old WoW abilities than you could shake your WillE at!

[@Digital-Scriptorium]

Just want to give a shout out to Grender's Alpha Project which made this video possible!

[@jpmor7327]

Plainsrunning was sick. So was the ghostly strike 5CP bug for rogues 😂

[@colin9231]

Alpha fresh when?

[@DrBrickface]

I feel like so many of these could be retuned for classic+. The concept of hunters using focus that only builds when standing still seem like a fantastic idea to me, the only implementation hurdle is the generation rate and the ability cost. Its such a shame that rogue disguises got tossed out too. So many of these concepts seem like incredible ideas that just weren't quite balanced, and didn't have time to be properly implemented.

[@Krulfar]

Having to stay still to generate focus seems absolutely AWFUL to play with. If you could use ranged attacks at melee then maybe but the fact that you can't move or you don't generate focus but if you don't move the enemy will get to melee range and you won't be able to do anything at all would've been the worst design in videogame history.

[@Menolith]

As is often the case, things like this were cut out for good reasons. That variant of focus would make hunters lose much of their famed kiting ability, and they'd be absolutely miserable in PvP. Similarly, while the disguises sound cool... what do they actually do? A whole new system and yet another subprofession for rogues so that they can blend in with troggs and syndicate members?

[@mitchconner2021]

​@@KrulfarYeah I was about to say. Making Hunter's lose mobility would kill what makes playing a Hunter fun. Being able to kite things is the best part of being a Hunter pve or pvp.

[@DIVAD291]

@@Krulfar The hunter having to stand still some amount of time doesn't really matter if he can slow you down by that same amount. So it seems more like a tuning issue than a fundamental flaw of the mechanic. The bigger question design wise is wether it would be fun to actually have to stop moving.

[@Krulfar]

@@DIVAD291 what do you mean?? A rogue/mage dives into you and what are you supposed to do? You can't use any ranged ability and if you try to get distance you don't get any focus. Or a caster outranges you and if you want to chase it you don't get focus. It's just terrible in the context of WoW.

[@danielhenry6777]

I really wish invis , was more of a spell for exploration or getting past things instead of a tool for a combat drop or aggro dump.

[@juraspl93]

Ethereal form is skill from w3 mob, tauren who can change into spirit form immune to physical damage but cannot melee strike

[@mihaimoldo]

Tauren Spirit walker mob

[@juraspl93]

In custom map W3 probably footman frenzy, 12 playera divide into 4 camps with base and auto mob spawn, spirit walker is nice killer with shield of lighting in ghost form

[@thegamemattster]

Man I remember beta so vividly. What a wild time.

[@jotaaonetwo4178]

Oh, wow, a flying boat 9:00 😅

[@Segamain21]

Bear Hug came back at some point but was a 5 second stun for both the druid and enemy. It did percentage damage based on the druids HP to the target. I loved it.

[@natecw4164]

Very very cool! I just got done rewatching the patch history of the beta. Like this morning 😂

[@Ackziegaming]

Love catching up on all the lore and things I have missed over my 18 years of playing this wonderful game. Thank you for all of your videos!

[@MrBacon0927]

10:02 cake in the top left 😏

[@YetiUprising]

Priests have Dominate Mind right now that let's me mind control and still play like getting a temporary pet. I find it fun to MC elites sometimes and fade aggro to them. Or to mc an elite I just aggro'd so I can exit combat and fly away without killing it.

[@Pennyforathought]

Those old Ogre models are gonna haunt me for a while 7:14

[@mitchconner2021]

The sumo Ogres 😂

[@ukjamie96]

What would be interesting is a video on the Classes when the game first came out. Molten core would have been an entirely different experience if we had the original release Classes. Classes were significantly stronger in the 1.12 version of the game, I forget the changes because it's been 7 years at this point since I last looked into it. But there are some big differences from what I remember. There used to be a talent calculater somewhere with the 1.0 game talents but I cannot find it.

[@thomasanderson2551]

11:53 Wow, this makes a lot of sense. I've played a lot Druid in Vanilla. Notably, many many high level duels on henhouse. Also just countless bg's, ranked several times. Druid in general is an incomplete class in Vanilla and on the lower tier in 1v1's (talking the absolute best duelers - not average wPvP/bg encounters). Abolish magic would've solved A LOT of abuse Druids suffered from (properly played and geared) Mages and Warlocks. Would've given them a wonderfully unique raid spot purpose too, whereas in original Vanilla, they're not valuable beyond Mark of the Wild slaves.

[@Twkd1988]

This isn't accurate tbh. Recovering from surgery an hour ago, but Druids are quite strong in 1v1 and are not hard countered. I raided as druid in original vanilla up to 4hm, and in classic 2019 in Fusion's speedrun team. Nothing hard counters feral, albeit hunters with flashbombs are def a pain point

[@JustAvery63]

i think bear hug would of been broken in wpvp or duels due to mp5 kicking in even while shapeshifted. druids already are really good at wittling down their target and slowly regening while kiting if given the space to do so, so if they had the ability to regain a bunch of mana to put out even more moonfires and rejuvinations i think they would be the best wpvp class

[@99Pierogies]

So 0 relevance on anything, since only losers care about "wpvp"

[@manoqueenz]

I think you mean mp2/spirit? Mp5 always regenerates even while casting.

[@TheZajic23]

i wish we got those sick totem models

[@dsmania]

3:30 Spell hit and physical hit were so different that spell hit didn't exist at all. As a mechanic, it did exist internally but not as a stat and there were no ways of increasing it, you were just supposed to miss a percentage of your spells depending on the level of your target. It wasn't until a later patch (I belive the BWL one) that it was introduced as a stat along with items that increased it. By the time there was some debate on wether to make spirit act as a stat to raise hit, as it made sense lore-wise and would make some racials useful for melees, but this idea got dropped without further explanation.

[@fuzzwobble]

I had an edition of alpha where Night Elves could move very slowly while shadowmelded.

6:58 Could be a lack of PvP duration of CC such as sheep at the time. It could be simply an oversight, the duration of banish in this version is close to the PvE duration of sheep.

[@eydis9554]

8:57 The Skybreaker in Alpha WoW.

[@Sypz2552]

i really enjoy these kind of videos. i started playing in late wotlk back then and never experienced vanilla oder tbc. so this is pretty cool :3

[@NormFC]

I played the beta version of wow as a warrior. Charge was much the same as it is now with a gap close and a stunning, but it worked in combat too. So mage blink? Charge. Mage blink? Charge. Also no diminishing returns. So a group of warriors could stun lock someone just off setting charge

[@Jacketpotatos1]

Over time, fun was weeded out in favour of min-maxing

[@Raxerm]

These are just D&D spells and feats very roughly hewn to fit in a real-time game. Very interesting to see.

[@CecilyThanador]

Interestingly the Alpha-Crusader Strike abilitiy is in some capacity still in the game. Some Scarlet Crusade mobs use a variant of it.

[@prodbywifi]

Yo boot dev is actually pretty good. I had it for like one or two months and I learned the basics of python pretty fast with it. Sadly this comment is not sponsored

[@TOXINZ2]

I’d definitely watch more videos of alpha… heck I’d be down if Blizz launched an Alpha version of the game just for leveling since raids weren’t fully developed at that time… or they could figure out a way to shoe horn them in. Either way I’d be down to just try it out, I think it would be AWESOME to explore and play casually when I’m not hardcore speedrun raiding in Cata Classic.

[@peonmyhall]

Hmm no rogues or hunters? Do I get this version of classic with my normal sub?

[@highlordaideren6579]

you also missed on the abolish magic that no magic affects the target so no damage spell would work on you either

[@aldenret]

Man, imagine if retri paladin was a viable spec in vanilla. Having any damaging abilities at all except judgement would have been nice! Remember, all direct damaging abilities a paladin can have they get from holy. Because why not 😅

[@Jerrec]

True but not also. I was there. They nerved the Paladin into the gournd with 1.0. It was fun with 0.9. Holy Strike, Crusader Strike, Exorcism in PvP, they rocked.

[@arcadia1701e]

Lets not forget, that inner fire, a priest self buff spell, used to give RANAGED ATTACK POWER. eg - did nothing ... the fact the game even ran at all through most of classic was pure luck tbh.

[@g4man41]

This is making me wanna play Alpha solo. Seem like it would be a lot of fun.

[@trillu7163]

I genuinely miss when Tauren were their own mounts. They just went into run mode.

[@horyss5496]

We have that one on TurtleWoW

[@bigbigx2250]

It's funny seeing basically all of these abilities just being everquest abilities/spells. I guess WoW really was just meant to be eq for babies

[@Sandsawks]

For a moment there I thought you said that Scorpion had the same ability as my wife

[@julesb.-w.4553]

I don't think all those different abilities were inbalanced at all, since every class had those it was less balanced in certain combinations but gave pretty big diversity in playstyle as a whole. that's not a trade-off. I played the closed beta in 2005 and loved the game and its mmorpg qualities.

[@pragalu]

Did racials or class spells come first? As for druid hug and play dead, could have turned to racials for NE and tauren druids.

[@DJSLANKMAN]

Make more videos on the alpha phase

[@Orthane]

Honestly Rogue Disguises seem awesome. Mostly pointless yes, but still cool.

[@ditonejt3250]

Most of this things u can see on all vanila + private servers but balanced in a good way :)

[@The_Slavstralian]

Interestingly also Locks used to wear leather

[@mandurrudnam7632]

3:19 no, thats actually just vanilla curse of tongues

[@billypoker7822]

the only ability i remember back in the day was scorch had a dot. mage scorch had a dot. i remember.

[@shahgyy]

3:17 bro curse of toungs is already 60% slow for 30 seconds with no cooldown

[@psykopyro]

He just says a lot of information that's already out in the wild without fact checking or anything.

[@sampel3660]

Something that drives me insane is that warlocks used to had a 2 point talent in demo tree that reduced cast time on stones by 50% and mana cost. That is huge if you are a smart lock and trade stones to 3/4 of the raid and SS on cd. Considering warlock talent trees were the less changing in whole vanilla, the fact they removed that huge QoL talent for buffing useless firestone its nuts.

[@99Pierogies]

Imagine being excited by such a garbage talent because vanilla is trash at actual balance

[@sampel3660]

How would you balance wlock stones

[@koma9063]

Thunderclap have more sense now. Some ability are added in vanilla + private server Turtle WoW like rogue disguise and paladin have crusader strike and can tank (its not joke).

[@MS-nl5gh]

Private servers are a joke lol

[@Orthane]

Invisibility Totem would 100% be problematic. You know how I can say that with confidence? Because Rogue Shroud was problematic. This is essentially the same thing, you could pretty much just skip the entire first 1/4 of a dungeon with this totem and only Horde would be able to as well, making it even worse.

[@benfitzsimmons4137]

as hilarious as it is, isnt the fact that the totem itself is visible enough to make the effect useless?

[@MrRedzac77]

Id love to try alpha out holy crap. Can you get your hands on it somewhere?

[@MegaChickenfish]

9:20 at least we eventually got that rogue pickpocket glyph which, combined with some jewelcrafting items, does allow me to disguise as whatever I want.

[@iesdise]

3:48 You forget the tiny teeny fact, that PvP was never intended in the game. Enemy faction was attackable purely for RP and lore reasons. PvP was added much later into the game, ONLY because the people REALLY wanted it. Edit: halfway into the video and you're still talking about PvP... Nothing of this was ever planned to be used on players...

[@Chris_Knight7]

I would love to play the alpha 😂

[@Eyevou]

look up the alpha project. you can play the alpha.

[@skillz0122]

If you played WC3 alot of these look familiar.

[@screweyedfoe]

Think Paladins or if Priest had Shackle Undead? the horde Scourge race. Kinda special.

[@General12th]

Hi Will!

[@n00dle_king]

Permanent invisible isn’t balancable. Have you met rogue?

[@Khorza]

Many of these abilities were just copied over from EverQuest. The Rogue disguises, caster Invisibility, Abolish Magic, Feign Death being available to the melee DPS class (it was a Monk ability in EQ), etc etc. Surprised that there was no mention of any of that in the video.

[@julesb.-w.4553]

so you say mage invisibility was imba, even though it was detectable and unstable? even though that it's perfect for the glass-cannon-design? Fortunately there's no such thing as stealth for rogues

[@lanzer6990]

16:20 what in the hell is OP about this?

[@braindamage7128]

Best wow channel

[@ciprianhosu385]

Man rogue disguises seemed like such an awesome idea. Really wish that had been kept in.

[@Jvshtille]

Here's to hoping we get vanilla+ 2025

[@ShreddedSteel]

.... It seems Overpowered, but everything had a niche and some gimmick, Where they do exceedingly well in certain situations This should have been live

[@murppy9785]

WHAT trap?…oh dig trap….phew

[@BasedGodGotenks]

Wish they’d do another SOM. And world buffs should just be an auto buff before a raid making them optional and you wouldn’t spend your whole day waiting on drops and booning.

[@maltezz]

Wb keeps me awsy from sod.

[@mikesmith7496]

inspired by madseason?

[@StretfordEndGaz]

Invisibility totem talk about a GTFO for dungeon wipes, would be a godsend in HC dungeons, bad pull drop totem

[@dosbilliam]

Surprised he didn't mention the Mage Lockpick spell that got tossed out and hasn't come back...probably since lockboxes are functionally irrelevant in retail now and Blacksmiths exist in Cata. :P

[@TheViken1]

We want Alpha WoW server Blizzard.

[@No-Me3]

I swear, every WoW youtuber got together and said "Lets to Alpha vids!" It's been so beaten to death.

[@Eyevou]

these things go in cycles.

[@horyss5496]

come play on TurleWoW guys

[@malicant123]

Balance? What's that?

[@merlinbooper6756]

And I never left the game after...

[@mcfarvo]

The vanilla WoW F&F alpha is more interesting to me than Cata or TWW lol

[@thebearisradd]

A few abilities & archaic class design are more interesting then a pretty well done expansion (thus far)? I get that it’s interesting but man…that’s pretty sad if you believe that. I don’t even currently play wow and I can even tell you that’s just classic Andy speak right there. 😂

[@shjelde660]

Ahh 0:05 Tel'abim., i see you too are a fan of Turtle wow ;D

[@Eyevou]

That's just the name of the Alpha Project's GM testing server. lol

[@crungushakooter]

Nice try, WillE, but it's not that eas-OK FINE I'll roll a new era toon, again

[@voraxe3032]

Lets get rid of all fun abilities 3xcept for paladins shield, thats sum rayc ist bull

[@QuixoteX]

Proper RPGs don't have leaderboards.

[@DaTrixie]

The clear answer here is hunters and rogues BUCKLERS!

[@CovenantAgentLazarus]

Okay yeah they were on drugs

[@networknomad5600]

Too OP? Naw. Pure fun? Yes. Screw balance, prioritize fun. This is why we play games.

[@maltezz]

Fun for who? Not the enemies

[@otrikas]

How do you even make raids when you can make anyone immune to magic? Balance IS Important. Even for just a PvE game.

[@Ka1ysto]

The ogres were click bait 😞

[@zulugrub]

i get you want to be fancy but all that camera work in the video made me dizzy and i just skipped it..fyi

[@lukashrabovsky3516]

Wow was back then great and we were bad. Low limitation and lot of fun. Then came the regulations. Seems like real life.

[@geobooo]

POOOOP audio do better and dont peak the entire video

[@Apemania69]

funfact, rogues can disguise in turtle wow :)

[@MultiMonx]

and mages pick locks, which isn't mentioned here...

[@johnredcorn4407]

With youtube doing manadtory adds every 5 minutes throughout the video, one is left to wonder, do you still need to have a sponser and subsequent add in the video, i watched your add then got hit with youtubes add right after.....

[@gandalfmagzorzy8753]

Just use an adblock and save yourself the annoyance.

[@FakoBreizh]

I know this is gonna sound blunt, but man, I wish you talked in a different way. I am genuinely annoyed by your tone, and I truly with I wasn’t cause I LOVE your videos. But it got to a point where I just can’t watch them 😕 Sorry for that comment

[@gato1924wow]

diddy

[@godlygamer911]

... you one of the kids he went after? Or just a stunted adult?

[@gato1924wow]

@@godlygamer911bro felt siggy wiggy when he dropped that one 🗣️🗣️🔥🔥

[@benyed1636]

@@gato1924wow Fascinating

[@FF3LockeZ]

Why is the game footage stretched horizontally for the whole video? How incompetent do you have to be at recording and making videos to do that?

[@keithb6344]

Yeah I don’t know why he wasn’t running the alpha client from 20 years ago in 4k Ultrawide.