The Legacy of Vanilla WoW - Raiding

The final part of our 3 part series on classic wow. There are an unmentionable amount of subjects not covered to save time, everything from battle shout tanking to MOAR DOTS, leave a comment of your favorite quirks of old.
www.preachgaming.com

[@Nuuboat]

Timing your shots so you wont delay autoshot. Moving so you wont delay autoshot. When oom, feign to drink. Keeping 24/7 eyes on the spawn locations of the 4 green dragons. I miss being woken by the phone at 3 in the morning from some german guy telling me ze dragons are up. But mostly i miss Heartless.

[@JackWessNevux]

''I miss being woken by the phone at 3 in the morning from some german guy telling me ze dragons are up.'' I just sat here laughing for 3 minutes

[@andreaskarlsson5251]

Why no love for the poor mages and warlocks that had to show up 20minutes pre-raid to make stones and water? :( From a solo mage doing 40man raids

[@Chase615000]

Man I miss those days...the deafening cheer when you downed Rag's for the first time brought a smile to my face, I had a ton of fun back then in WoW.

[@NaliaaS]

Unlike today where dumbass noobs (or boosted 90's)get yelled at by actual trying good players until they do it right.

[@TeamOmega27]

LeedleGod We were all noobs once... Dumbass noobs, might I add.

[@NaliaaS]

TeamOmega27 By that I meant people who want to THINK they are doing OK when they are playing something they have not truly experienced.

[@TeamOmega27]

LeedleGod I'll admit, when I was a noob and knew absolutely nothing,I thought I was a pro and knew everything. But noobs learn and eventually figure it out. Have patience with those people. Either they will figure it out or quit, either way it's a good thing.

[@chrandal3007]

The joy of all in the raid when u did down a boss that you have had like a 100 trys to down :P Best feeling ever. Twins is the boss i remember best from those days when we got them down!

[@trouts4]

i know the travel times sucked, you had to run a lot. a lot a lot. and not everyone had an epic mount. like most people didnt. but to me it just helped make the game world feel bigger. it took longer to get to places, you were actually exploring. gathering people manually to do gnomeregan, running to the instance and wiping time after time because it was hard back then. its not the same anymore.

[@fafafak6]

it wasn't hard... wipes happened because of stupid people...

[@trouts4]

fafafak6 no it was literally harder. everything is nerfed now + heirlooms make it way easier. gnomeregan used to be a huuuuge dungeon. now players dont even see half of it. its a shame. and i didnt even dislike the wiping, the wiping and difficulty made it CHALLENGING. leveling wasnt just a few smooth weeks. it felt important, it felt like an accomplishment to have a high level characters.

[@padrerosse]

aypierre Its actually true gnom was verry hard and it was a real maze if you wanted to kill every boss, and it also took quite a while to actually clear it and remember back then at like level 25-28 you hitted for like what 50-60 know with heirlooms you go up to 1k crit or more so yes it was way harder back then.

[@MrTBONESTEAK]

And people didn't care if they wiped. Just run in, stay positive and keep trying. No one got blamed (usually). It took way longer to actually get a new group, so you might aswell keep trying. Patience was required to play this game. I also loved the raid travels. Arriving early, getting ganked by the opposing faction when suddenly your entire guild rained in on them and decided to return the favor to the gankers. Good times.

[@fafafak6]

MrTBONESTEAK no... what i understood from top guilds who managed to get through naxx many people were bad... if not terrible,

[@paulschlacter4181]

Vanilla had its ups and downs, above all I'd say it has nostalgic value, but only for those who had friends to run around with. Running around grinding rep or mats for resist gear and attunements for hours while hanging out on ventrillo. The raiding was fun when it actually got going, but it was a mess beforehand, especially as a raid leader. The hard parts were mostly getting the right gear together, mechanically it could be considered as hard as the current Deadmines, rallying your 39 friends to follow the strategy was definitely the toughest part. I really can't say I miss the fights, the class mechanics, or the way things worked in general, but I cherish my memories with my guild and people I ran into. It was amazing how you could get so many people together to just go do something, when a lot of people didn't even have microphones. Like rallying three raid groups and riding (mostly running, 100g was a shit ton lol) across the continent to attack the enemies capital. You really did feel proud to be part of your faction, at least to me it felt great to "slaughter enemies in the name of the Horde". But, that's probably enough rambling from me, I'm sure a lot of people will disagree and say WoW should be like vanilla again.

[@Keemo577]

I think part of what made it so awesome was how much effort it took to achieve levels, attunements, and gear/mounts. There was more of a sense of accomplishment. I also miss the epic OG AV battles! Good vid!

[@Robology13]

Old WoW has it's flaws, and it's strong points. New WoW has it's flaw, and it's strong points. If both strengths were applied we'd have an amazing MMO. I also think the community in general is a large reason why the WoW 'feel' just aint what it used to be. Like you said Preach, these days there's 1000's of websites talking about every strat & build possible. The knowledge of the game by the players has become a bit of a bad thing. Too many people take the game too seriously and forget it's a game, not a place to prove your worth to humanity. They demand everyone to be 'Pro', they demand everyone 'know', they try too hard to prove how much they 'know' compared to others and the fun aspect is lost. Back in the day nubs and baddies weren't hated on as much, you had to reeeeaaaallly suck to piss people off. These days the slightest thing about a player pisses people off. The competition seems to be more against each other than against the dungeon itself. I think just as much as the devs can learn from their trials and errors overtime, the community can too.

[@TheGoldblaze]

Robert Schwartzback That is a logical flaw in itself since new WoW's strong points come from fixing vanilla flaws and vanilla's strengths comes from those same flaws themselves. You bonded with other people because you were so dependent on them, not because you were a better person as a player. There were a lot of ninjalooting, asslicking and plain rude assholes back then too, they were just wearing the skin of a much nicer person because that's what they had to do. Nowadays a lot of stuff feels much more automated, but I'd say that it's much more good than it's bad.

[@voinyhelvetti]

TheGoldblaze "There were a lot of ninjalooting, asslicking and plain rude assholes back then too, they were just wearing the skin of a much nicer person because that's what they had to do." Isn't this better than loud as fuck raging assholes, though? As long as they behave like civil people should, I don't give a damn who they are deep deep inside.

[@mikemilz8351]

Robert Schwartzback WoW's community's always been among the worst in the genre. Don't kid yourself.

[@nukubu9379]

Mike Milz Sure, blame it on the community :P

[@Gotmilk0112]

Robert Schwartzback Vanilla's only "strong point" is that everyone was a noob. Everyone was new to the game, and THAT is why it felt so amazing, because everything was fresh and new and you had a huge world to explore and learn about. You couldn't just log onto Wowhead and look up a quest and have 30+ comments telling you exactly what you needed to do; the only way you learned about things was hearing it from other players. But as for Vanilla itself... The combat? Clunky mechanics everywhere. The class balancing? Kek. The player progression? Long and grindy as hell. The raid bosses? Extremely simple and mostly gear-dependent, not skill-dependent. The gear/stat system? Nice Agi/Spirit/Defense Rating leather gear you've got there. Vanilla was a mess. People only look back fondly at it because it was new and fresh and at the time, there was nothing better.

[@aengle.]

I miss this, so much. I miss the raids, I miss the PvP, I miss my old guild, I miss my Dwarf Warrior and I miss how everything was broken!

[@magnoosen2835]

Thank you for this classic WoW series! I haven't played WoW in years and just happened to stumble across this video. The trip down memory lane left me with a warm, wholesome feeling, and definitely hit all the nostalgia buttons.

[@wickysmall8607]

Down-ranking was actually a pretty cool mechanic as a healer :) You'd change your setup depending on how hard the boss hit because mana was pricy back then, overhealing was out of the question.

[@Terestrasz]

As a former Vanilla Raider, you're spot-on - heck I apologize for my comment yesterday. Combine the terrible drop rates with that drama you mentioned in one of your videos about the cliques. We had this happen once: -Hunter Gear almost NEVER drops. -Hunter A has been with the group for awhile, and is still in blues while we're throwing away warlock gear that the game keeps raining down on us. -Hunter B is a newer 60. Raids for awhile since Hunter A has a bit of an emergency IRL but we understand it. Hunter B gets more DKP. -Hunter A an B are in a raid. Hunter gear finally drops. -Hunter A wants it since he's been here longest. Hunter B bids and has more DKP. -Hunter A is PIIIIIIISSSEEED! -HUGE fight breaks out in Ventrilo -Hunter B finally gets pissed at the envy. Leaves. -Two healers and four DPSes leave as well. -"Whoa, who were they?" -"THOSE WERE HUNTER B'S FRIENDS!!!" -"Well he can go piss off."

[@machineofadream]

As a former Vanilla raider, I can confirm the accuracy of everything in this video. A few more things left out: 1. Getting a full set of epic gear was a great accomplishment, except you had to unequip half your gear in favor of resistance gear on a pretty substantial number of fights. Ragnaros, firemaw, Nefarian (cloak), Princess Huhuran, Loatheb (shadow resist + resist potions) just to name a few... 2. Paladin blessings were single target and only lasted 5 minutes, so paladins would spend the entire raid doing nothing but buffing. Group buffs in general were added as world drops in later patches, and required reagents. 3. Dwarf priests were the only ones with fear ward to prevent the tank from losing aggro due to fear. Horde players had to pray that a totem would break the tank out of fear quickly. My guild's main tank actually bought a second WoW account and leveled a dwarf priest to 60 just to bring to raids to cast fear ward in case our normal dwarf priest couldn't make it online. 4. Speaking of shamans, their totems only affected people in their group, so you needed a huge number of shamans if you wanted to benefit from totems, a massive problem since horde didn't have blessings. I'm not saying it was a bad game, but I have to think that the game would die quickly if it ever went back to that state. WoW's peak subscription numbers came well after Vanilla was over. I do wish I could play on a Vanilla server again just for a couple months, though, for old time's sake.

[@싸넬동지-7성담배]

Vanilla was hardcore, that is why there wasn't many people playing it. But, i continue to think a remake of Vanilla would be awesome, keeping the hardcore but reworking the tries but not too much, to make any tries to be viable! Desperate hope, but it's good to dream about it sometimes ^^

[@casual5170]

HollystineGaming damn, imagine a re-mastering of vanilla :O sounds amazing

[@azemlk]

its true what u say but its like the same since you guys got heroism and we didnt,p

[@drno87]

Horde tanks had to switch to Berserker Stance and pop Berserker Rage as the boss was casting Fear.

[@chrisspike3282]

The first one is just not true, so I don't know what kind of game you played... Forgot Greater Blessings? Those were per class and 15 minutes.

[@3lit3gn0m3]

First character, got Dreadmist Wraps in my first Scholomance run at level 56 or something ( I think?) and was excited out of my mind. Now, I get 2-3 pieces of loot in a raid, say "nice" and forget about them the next day. Loot was indeed very difficult to get with raid sizes and low drop rates, but that made getting gear an incredible experience. That feeling will never come back to WoW, and that's fine; I've had my time with the game and it's just time to let it go.

[@Lagatrus]

3lit3gn0m3 farming half a year for molten core and anq. and I don't want to start with the naxx gear farming... literally throw all the old stuff away and farm frost resistance gear

[@3lit3gn0m3]

Cedric S. I never got to raid Naxx, unfortunately; furthest I got was AQ40. I do remember farming Fire Resist for my lock to banish elementals in MC, and then Shadow Resist for Mother Shaz(spelling?) in BT. Few others I'm forgetting, but resist gear tended to always be an "oh joy...." affair. =P

[@Lagatrus]

3lit3gn0m3 never finished naxx. the gear changing made people rage so much that they started to do PvP or stopped playing wow

[@3lit3gn0m3]

Cedric S. I can see why. Hardcore raiding is draining enough without those requirements.

[@natedawg3654]

Just thinking about trying to keep 5 minute pally buffs up all raid hurts my heart.

[@Buzzed27]

15 minutes for group buffs.

[@natedawg3654]

Buzzed27 That was after. When i started Molton Core it was just 5 min and you had to go 31 points in ret to get kings lol.

[@SnikkasHD]

Im just thinking of the Prot Pally with cloth, lether, mail and sometimes plate armour, standing at the boss, hitting him with the melee. lol

[@noobpower96]

SnikkasHD you mean the portable buff/vending machine? ^^

[@SnikkasHD]

Yes

[@dumac6557]

I feel the pain, and I agree I had a blast raiding in vanilla mostly due the people. I played a holy paladin and the buffing was horrible. Imagine having to buff 40 people every 5 minutes lol.

[@Fringedabyss97]

10 years, time flies 😢😢

[@IronstarPaladin]

haha 12:04 minutes of laughing and noding :D Awesome video and a awesome way to explain! I should do a raid on Kronos where i only allow the class specs you mentioned at the begin of your video. But let's be true, the amount of loot in each boss made this game full of emotions! I hope to see some fellows on project Kronos WoW to get these times back soon, in its full gloss.

[@nikitaromanoff2617]

Let's repeat our past mistakes and raid Vanilla again x)

[@Ohrami]

or just play nostalrius, the beeeeest in the marketplace

[@nikitaromanoff2617]

***** that's what they've said you? Cause I see no proofs of it's "the beeeeestness" except their assurances. I'm going to wait for one more month, since Kronos videos are superior and they have an open Bugtracker... Will check if my opinion is right from tomorrow on Kronos Beta :)

[@allied006]

You say Molten Core was LFR difficulty, but remember when it came out for that time in LFR. That was complete hell, NO one knew how to Dispell. My first group failed HARD, and after we failed a decent number of times, a Druid decided it would be funny to die, spawn in as quickly as he could, and get aggro before we were ready so it would kill us again before all of us where even back in instance, over and over again. We could not kick him because we were always in combat. "So Annoying"

[@ZoldZsolt]

+allied006 Omg, that was the shit, dude. I was going for the mount, and we had like 2-3 people, who were oldschool and knew all the bosses (and the trash). I can't even count on my 2 hands how many people we had to kick because they didn't understand the stuff we were explaining to the raid. I mean, how hard can it be not to pull the next pack of dogs too fast because they'll rez the prev. pack...fun times.

[@ShadingNight]

Vanilla was amazingly fun... However, people who say "Lawlz bring back l33tzor vanilla so deese cazuals can leave dis game" are only reffering to this because it was their NOOB experience. It's all nostalgic value, EVERYONE loved their first memories and time playing WoW.

[@general2109]

I can vouch for that. I only got to level 43 in Wrath, my first time in WoW. I loved how mysterious and huge the world felt but I wouldn't want to go back to it.

[@Jraptor1959]

My worst part of the Ony attunement was finding Rexxar and his bear love mate. I wandered the plains daily looking for him, beggiing players to tell me if they saw him, even offering them gold if they spotted him. I know other people who didn't have a problem with this part, but I think he and Misha (?) hid out in a cave and made man/bear love every time they saw me looking for them...

[@richardfld]

Am I the only person that actually liked vanilla BRD?

[@flippardlol8590]

old ubrs was amazing

[@richardfld]

+bob jones Everything in blackrock mountain kicked ass. Didn't like LBRS so much, but it was still freaking awesome compared to the shit we have now... Don't get me wrong, at times those dungeons could be a disaster and yeah you used to wipe... A LOT... But, overall I had so much fun down there and have some epic memories. Plus, I used to make a ton of gold boosting jail break quests/MC attunements and opening up UBRS :)

[@LaserfaceJones]

+richardfld I tricked kids in Dungeon Finder by skipping the boss that you'd get the satchel for, and just take them through the whole thing. Even back in Vanilla/BC/Wrath, I loved getting groups to do the whole thing. Even got Ironfoe from Thaurrisan eventually! I haven't played in ages, but my warrior's still wearing his Master Builder's Shirt. Loved it.

[@HashUpAshole]

No, the only people complaining about classic WoW are anti-social rejects that forget it was about finding people, and forming groups to complete difficult quests. You would makes friends, and form guilds because of this. I literally discard everything these kinds of people meme on about. Classic WoW had problems, but those problems were what made the game good. The adversity of trying to complete complicated quests, and the frustrations class counters is what forced you to actually make friends. There was no LFG/LFR. You actually knew everyone on the server. Horde or Ally.

[@drosso4956]

+Big Mouth Smurf look it was cool but imagine half the specs in the game being bloody useless today oh ye and 8 tanks 4 horsemen.hope you like retarded raid mechanics sorry but it's BC or WOTLK 4 me

[@sexcannonmusic284]

Vanila wow was an adventure where daylies didn't rly exist

[@TheHorreK2]

Timbermaw? Argent Dawn? I remember some really nasty daily grinding

[@xSlattzZ]

Yes, but there was not endless hubs of dailies to do like there are now.

[@xd-wd1tr]

+xSlattzZ "endless hubs of dailies" MoP had more dailies at launch than WoD did at its end.

[@xSlattzZ]

What does that have to do with this? Was not saying there were more dailies now than ever before... just saying compared to vanilla which had very little, there is a shit ton now.

[@DodderingOldMan]

This is definitely one of the most reasoned and sensible analyses of what raiding was actually like back then. I'm so glad it's changed, and yet I've never had so much fun with WoW since MC/BWL/AQ40. If it hadn't changed at all, though, I would have got bored and frustrated by the time BC came out. And so, I think, would most people, despite their rose-tinted glasses.

[@JonnyBeoulve]

I hardly remember any of this. This video takes me way back. THANKS!

[@breechare]

One of my favorite videos by Preach.

[@dannkk]

I understand the tragedy of only 1% of the population seeing all the content, but that's what made the game interesting. It's what made the game real. Players could be heroes. You could judge them by their armor. You'd know where they had been and what bosses they had killed. You knew the first warlock you saw with a Dreadsteed on your server was a badass because not only did you have to gather tons of bullshit, you also had to have a group of friends willing to help you through the most bullshit 5 man in vanilla. Scholomance. To have those friends you had to be good enough that they'd want you along to help them with their bullshit quests. I haven't played since Wrath. Quit halfway through. If I'm beating the hardest content of the game, I want a better reward than a color swap on my armor. Zones you will never see and gear you'll never obtain add mystery to the game and make it a bit more like the real world. It's not like I get a brown BMW instead of a red one because I'm poor. I get a Ford Fusion. lol

[@BattousaiHBr]

+dannkk still 1% of the population complete mythic raids

[@dannkk]

+BattousaiHBr it's still not the same.

[@BattousaiHBr]

dannkk what do you mean?

[@Number1RichPianaFan]

+BattousaiHBr oh god don't try to argue with such people they're too delusional and crazy.

[@BattousaiHBr]

Peter Graafmans i mean, i was literally reading up 30 minutes ago that mythic archimonde was the hardest boss in wow, ever, according to the world first guilds that managed to defeat it. i actually dont understand what people who say this kind of things when the very hardcore players say otherwise. funnily too, the other hardest bosses that kinda come close are mythic blackhand, also from WoD, heroic ragnaros, heroic lich king, heroic spine of deathwing and such, none from vanilla.

[@Grandy_UiD]

Ah I remember flying to Azshara (not all that bad as Horde, also the zone was freaking beautiful and you'd run into Azuregos every now and then) and getting the water every sunday morning after raiding the previous night. It was just a part of my life. Good times.

[@tyrionlannister2354]

Warriors weren't the tank master race. They were the only tanks.

[@graog123]

Exactly. Because they were the master race. There were other tanks in the game and they were shit. Warriors were the master race.

[@DrPluton]

graog123 Which "other tanks" are you referring to? Feral druids were considered worthless outside of questing, and protection paladins had almost no ability to hold aggro (Seal of Fury was crap).

[@charleshiggins2084]

DrPluton I tanked as a paladin in vanilla. The key was to use Seal of Righteousness. Why SoR? Because it did holy damage on every attack which Righteous Fury increased the aggro of. Granted, you also need a bit more time to build up initial threat, but it was possible with a smart group. I tanked every 5 man instance up to and including Dire Maul. Never had to tank strat, scholo, or any of the other 10 mans as there was always a warrior around. another help to tanking as a paladin pre-BC was to make a macro to cast Blessing of Protection on target of target... then when someone pulled aggro, you just bubbled them pulling them off the aggro table.

[@graog123]

Charles Higgins "I tanked some 5 mans" lol. Ok. Doing a few dungeons and having 3 DPS accomodate your low threat doesn't mean you're a viable spec. Warriors were the only viable tanks in Vanilla for raids, period

[@DrPluton]

***** We are talking about classic WoW, not the current state of the game. Paladins excel at tanking currently, but they were a joke back then for any purpose except healing and buffing.

[@Duxaization]

Anyone else watching this to learn how to Vanilla WoW when Nostalrius comes back up from Germany?

[@AstridCeleste96]

+Duxitisation B I was watching is HOPE that Blizzard hears the community, but Nostalrius Returns? From Germany!?

[@zIkA835]

+Duxitisation B Wait,what?

[@alejandropacheco637]

Duxitisation B yes....

[@DantesonofSparda85]

Nost got a Cease and Desist notice with threat of suing from Blizz a while back, it's Elysium now and it's running from some region in a country where they can't be touched by legal action nowadays

[@Listhebaroness]

Everything that was said to be bad/saddening for being hard to get (items and all): Made it all more EPIC and RARE. Achieving stuff at that time felt like... ACHIEVING

[@empire0]

This video is great, makes me a bit sad though. Such great times doing 40 man raids, probably the most fun i'll ever have in a game.

[@carolasmx2516]

empire nothing will compare to that feeling of being in a teamspeak server with 35+ people for the first time and mounting up to go to Blackrock Mountain. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

[@N4chtigall]

+carolasmx Nostalgia strikes back

[@carolasmx2516]

Nachtigall u must be one of these guys who thinks every expac is better. lol...

[@N4chtigall]

carolasmx No I just think that people talk shit

[@carolasmx2516]

Nachtigall successful vanilla servers are proof sir. it's the nostalgia argument that's shit

[@aska221]

I wish I had been older during the wotlk times so I could've been part of the raiding a bit more. I like TBC for the challenging HC dungeons, but my earliest leveling memories lies in vanilla and I didn't see it as a game where you were suppose to get max level asap, it was an adventure instead.

[@lo0nytntwow]

Who is watching this because you are getting ready for WoW Classic

[@arogers75]

guiltyyy

[@x3i4n]

hell yeah baby

[@ericpeavey]

I wish it wasn’t so far away

[@Grubiantoll]

I'm just watching this video to remind my self that ageinst my strongest feelings , returning to WoW classic would be the most terrible investment of my time in my lifetime

[@ThisIsGoogle]

I changed my mind. Seems like it's gonna be a grind fest without any skill involved.

[@SPQRTempus]

Thanks for the memories Preach - I still have my full t1 and t2 sets I got in vanilla to remind me just how hard a grind it was to get.

[@TheWolfwiththeDragon]

This is my favorite playlist on the whole KZbin! I can watch it so many times and still get entertained! It even beats Smosh!

[@Emnasty63]

Basically, Vanilla was fucking hardcore.

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

Hardcore, but easy in terms of skills and coordination.

[@paulschlacter4181]

Eisaar The problem was compiling skills and coordination. Getting people attuned and resist gear was a chore in itself.

[@Mindbender05]

Eisaar Coordinate 40 people in a raid.

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

Mindbender05 Depends on the raid. For example in MC most fights you just stood still and dps'd. And even bosses where you didn't it was simple as "move to X when Y" and nothing else.

[@cubed07]

Eisaar Not really if your tank and healers weren't geared properly, you could do the fight right but your take would die and the raid would wipe. It was skill plus gear which was extremely hard to get back than.

[@taavidude]

Vanilla raiding in a nutshell: It was super hard to get into raids... abit too hard imo. Trash took 10 hours to clear cause Vanilla raids were insane trashfests. Some bosses were nearly impossible (C'thun and Kel'Thuzad and bunch of other Naxxramas bosses) Getting 40 man together and summon them all to the raid took crap ton of time.

[@strongfp]

+taavidude Some truth to what you said and some probably because you were in a guild that wasn't organized. Non of naxx was 'impossible' like c'thun was. And getting into raids was rather easy, you just needed to spend all your spare time playing pretty much and worked within the 9 - 5 life style.

[@Iron883Man]

+Patrick Strong Totally agree. It wasn't harder to get into than Mythic raiding is today. I never considered Naxx or C'thun to be impossible. They were hard, but if you look back at it with todays Mythic boss encounters in mind I can find no other reason than gameplay being the cause of that and not so much the encounters themselves. If you look at the bare boss mechanics that are going on in a boss fight, Naxx pales with every Mythic or even Heroic raid today. Yet Wow being a more balanced game today makes people perceive it as 'easier'.

[@poopjeans1135]

+Iron883Man Its not nostalgia that makes people think that vanilla raiding was difficult...it was that difficult. Naxx 40 destroyed guilds. Take Anub'Arak and the locust swarm. In Wrath of the Lich King the this put a dot on the raid which did 1200 dmg every 2 sec. Easy to mitigate when players had 25-30k hp. In vanilla the dot did 1200 dmg every 2 sec, and clothies only had on average 3500 hp. Loatheb...unless you had Nature resist gear(YES, resistance gear) you had no chance. Miss a decurse on Noth, and it was a guaranteed wipe. Yes, old school raiding mechanics may be weak compared to some newer boss encounters. However, don't forget the gear disparity that Naxx 40 brought. Even with tier 2.5 you were almost hopelessly under geared. You had guilds clearing Naxx 10 at lv 80 with their sunwell gear in less than a week, while Naxx 40 took almost 4 months. only 23 guilds cleared Naxx in vanilla. something like less than 0.1% of the player base.

[@Iron883Man]

This has nothing to do with the actual difficulty. You're basically saying what I am saying and that is that encounters weren't balanced as they are today. Boss abilities may do less damage today, but where in early raids they had 1 or 2 abilities, they now have 5 or more and on Mythic level they will still wipe the raid. Vanilla was difficult because it was unbalanced and that to me is not real difficulty that is just a flaw in the game. BTW: don't compare Naxx 40 to the WotLK version. Naxx was an entry level raid in WotLK as in Vanilla it was the end Tier content. You can not compare raid progression either. Naxx Vanilla took 6 months for Nihilum to get their world first for various reasons: less loot dropped in 40 then today in 10 so it took a lot longer to gear a full raid of 40 + 40 man and the time you needed to farm resources to raid didn't allow for 4 raids every week. So no, Vanilla wasn't more difficult. It required a bigger time investment (way to big imo) to a) get resources and b) get geared. It had terrible balance and far less abilities on both chars and bosses. None of those things actually qualify as making the game more difficult. Taking into account 6 boss abilities compared to two, being able to apply a dozen abilities in an encounter instead of 3. Wich would you say is more difficult?

[@strongfp]

Naxx 40 was both hard and a time sink. If you executed the mechanics right the raid went flawlessly. There were only a few blips in the actual instance. And vanilla resource grinding WAS part of the game, the more there was the farm the more difficult the game was. The only reason that has changed is because it slowly changed into a casual game where it focused more on the individual than the collective team. Mythic now days doesn't require you go above and beyond to farm mats and such, everyone has the equal opportunity to get flasks, and enchants. Although mythic is a collective team effort, naxx 40 was completely a team effort. Before naxx 40 pliers would simply be carried by core skilled players, naxx you need 40 solid players.

[@tomshanks1828]

Damn i miss my night elf priest at 60 doing molten core 40 man and black wing lair... Granted everything was more frustrating, but WAY more rewarding when you finnaly slay nefarian in bwl and you get your transcendance peice on the same run! YEAAAAH!

[@Knive89]

Zelda music.. with vanilla wow video!? you're fucking with my nostalgic feels!

[@zulawoo]

That moment rag died... the goddamn nostalgia.. I really loved all the old vanilla bosses, never hated it, still miss it. Best times.

[@Zaiqahal]

Only time when WoW was a challenge.

[@DriftNick]

yea it was a real challenge, back when you had bosses with little to no mechanics and most classes spammed 1-2 spells the whole fight.

[@Zaiqahal]

equoowe Yeah, no... it really was a challenge. Doesn't matter if there were very little mechanics during boss fights, they were still tougher than boss fights these days. A LOT tougher. And you're just talking about a tiny percentage of the whole game. Everything was tougher. You know that's true. And it doesn't matter that it was way back then when everyone was bad at the game. I play on a private server with a bunch of people on it, and it's just like Vanilla. And it's still hard as fuck in every aspect.

[@DriftNick]

Lucas Kane compared to the game now it isn't really a challenge other then being a long grind, bosses and classes now have more complex mechanics, the skill cap is higher and its better because of that, the game is less about a long grind of gearing up raids and 15min run backs from wipes and is much more about players playing well.

[@jay_cee583]

equoowe I don't know how long you've been playing but I can assure you the primary difficulties during a raid fight consisted of mana issues, aggro issues, getting 40 people to do all the right things at once, and the lack of a useful moveset to compliment the boss mechanics. All of which are a non-issue now. I wish I could say the faster pace of today's bosses made the game harder, but it just doesn't. All it does is it makes it so people don't have to rely nearly as much on others. 'Skill' back then was defined as what a group could do, not an individual. Because of the lack of movesets, if something bad happens, usually only 2 or 3 people in the entire 40 man raid can do anything about it. These days you could have 20 out of 25 people do something about it. Much better odds!

[@Zaiqahal]

equoowe You really have no idea, lol. It's about much more than that. But, take it from the last guy who commented.

[@Moleculardnb]

Started playing on late TBC, never played Vanilla but seems way more fun than nowadays... no social factor, everyone hates eachother lmao

[@Ecliptor.]

a game like that wouldn't work, the game just got adapted to us, in my opinion... we changed too much, for the worse

[@yafhaioaeiohtoia4445]

+NEVER LUCKY Ummm, it definitely "works" m8

[@subaveragejoe2]

That's bullshit to a military degree. The WoW community is impatient and taciturn sure, but it's nowhere near the ridiculous fuckbarrel that is league and DoTA 2

[@FluffyWesties]

I liked Vanilla, so much derpage, so much rage, so much loot drama.. but still.. nothing like a 40 man raid, boss on 5%.. only 15 players up... the floor on fire, watching to see if the few remaining buggers in the raid could pull it off :) Nothing like those desperate few last points on the boss with everyone shouting and carrying on like idiots, good times :)

[@LordXelous]

Vanilla Wow... I can hear the songs now... "Those were the days my friend, We thought they'd never end, we'd rez and raid forever and a day..."

[@danielskrivan6921]

I think the gating mechanisms in Vanilla and BC helped make content stay fresh longer. Most of them weren't unreasonable. Getting attuned for Kara involved a lot of dungeons (which you'd do anyway to get geared for Kara). Most of the attunement for Tier 5 meant killing Tier 4 bosses, which you wanted to do as a litmus test and for gear anyway. Same with moving from Tier 5 to Tier 6. However, gating things and slowing progression down meant it took weeks or months and kept you entertained for that long. Most players in WoW today will get through whatever difficulty level of the current tier they can without slowing down, and then quickly tiring of progression once it gets hard. This is because they've seen the content, so there's no new pixels to dress your character in or new lore and bosses to see...only more fights you've already seen on a harder difficulty with a higher item level as a reward. I think the preparation required for Vanilla and BC raids made it feel more epic, while the ease of logistics involved for LFR and Flex modes makes the game too quick and done.

[@xBeauGaming]

I remember 12 hours of raiding a day when we did MC back in the day.

[@LazarSoljaga]

I loved BRD when i started playing...good times

[@DmGray]

I forgot shield slam was talented :3 I started just before TBC, but was totally committed to prot warrior, and 5 man tanking was the shit. Vanilla 5 man was challenging for a tank and I loved it, sweating buckets in strat or scholo, making a name for myself as a guildless scrub to the point I'd get whispered as soon as I logged in to join a group. Good days. TBC gave us heroics for the challenge, but started us down the road of total pick up groups, and blizz needing to make tanking viable for awful players to accommodate the vast player base on dps classes. When we hit Cata and the initial crop of heroics were dialed up to TBC levels of challenge I could not believe the level of bitching. Blizz keeps trying to open high difficulty content to all for mass appeal. Imo, doing tough content should almost be discouraged. Normal should be fun for all, and give access to all the content but "heroic" should be reserved for people that *want* to be challenged. Challenge mode was such a let down with the emphasis entirely on time and learning a route. There's no *real* challenge in it, and that is sad. 5man tanking should be the preserve of committed tanks, and made to challenge them, An impossible dream, but one I think every true tank wishes for.

[@danthewatcher9681]

maybe WoD will deliver in that regard :), who knows. Dough I must agree i started just before WotLK so don't know much bout vanilla but when me and my ex-guildies bumped into Cata dungeons for the first time coming from WotLK ones we were shocked at the level of difficulty, yet later when i changed to tank i enjoyed it a lot while it lasted dough i didn't get to see the last coss of the first raid till they nerfed it :) still enjoyable and i wish they would give us that level of difficulty more often, just a few dungeons for people to enjoy not all so the Lazy Ones can have butter-soft content to slice through and people who want a challenge can have some fun interesting dungeons that will never be outgeard :> something that scales with the average gear of the players in the party would be nice for the future wouldn't you say ?! Much like they are doing with LFR and Normal raids in WoD but with dungeons and 10x better : )

[@begley09]

We'll id say blizzard has accomplished that in mop if you go by the statistics. Heroic garrosh is a very hard fight and only a small percent of the WoW pop has downed him. The problem with mop is their was nothing to do once you hit 90 at the start of MoP. Heroics were a push over so everyone was almost forced to do dailies*cringe*. Now I'm hoping they make heroics harder in WoD, I mean they don't have to and id still be happy because their will always be challenge modes. I went 9/9 gold on my resto shaman and they really were challenging I found but I was not a fan of it being timed.

[@DmGray]

begley09 MoP has failed on basically everything except boss fights. There have been some AWESOME bosses this expac, but the game is so thin. Challenge came out too late (imo) and the content was already stale. The time trial is the only challenge in it, and the fact they're often retardedly quick (10-20 minutes) just proves that the difficulty aint there :P The problem is that everything outside of heroic raiding can simply be walked through. When there is some moderately challenging content for a distraction, all it needs is some incentive. Decent 5man instances that reward your VP at the "best" rate (if done by a good group) and viola, it'll remain viable throughout the expac. At the end of TBC, people were STILL doing 5man heroics, and the addition of Magister's Terrace added variation AND extra difficulty. (much like the ICC trio were a great addition in Wrath) The best fix seems to be what they're doing? Offering gear in challenge, so hopefully is can be tuned for genuine difficulty and reward. Keeping it as premade will mean no need to dumb anything down for queues. I just hope tanking gets freshened up, because despite many morons stating how happy they are to be dps that gets punched, there is no tanking game anymore. Press a button when you take a damage spike, while performing a dps rotation in the general direction of mobs. Hopefully the item squish and the ability squish will remove the emphasis on aoe, and bring CC back into the PVE game :P

[@begley09]

Dm Gray The boss fights defiantly have a ton of mechanics compared to classic. I think one key thing where they went wrong was the whole story of MoP. It was suppose to be alliance vs Horde. IT WAS WARR!!! I don't know about others, and I didn't feel that. Well the time trial is defiantly one thing, lets not forget your gears item level gets deleveled to 468 and the mobs HP gets boosted. They are very quick and that's what makes it difficult. Like I said earlier, they do need to make Heroic modes in 5 man dungeons more difficult and you should not be able to get into these through the LFG tool or it will go to complete shit.

[@DmGray]

begley09 Pretty much, I just personally don't rate time trials :P (and the challenge times seem to encourage cheesing the content, which is bullshit)

[@alexcarson7901]

I'll be making my weekly pilgrimage to the Legacy of Vanilla videos until Classic realms are out.

[@Cease838]

That Rag kill.... Moments like that made it!Anyone else remember starting Onyxia and everyone only doing white damage for the first few minutes so tanks could establish solid aggro?

[@johngraeff6022]

I remember that. I had to use my wand at the start! LMAO!

[@JamesMichaelDoyle]

does anyone remember the early bugs where sometimes you would zone into someone elses raid id? I remember the time it did this, but mashed ascent and fury raids together. lol it just turned into a pvp slaughterfest in MC.

[@Nemzky]

I remember that happening but with only 1 member of our raid going into another raids ID. It took a while for everyone to notice it too xD

[@thenarrator1984]

yeah remmeber that as well what a blast that was. but we noticed instantly it was one of those "OK GET BUFFS READY WERE GOING WAIT WHY ARE THERE HORDE HERE?"? i remember seeing AOE being used and pulling mobs with rank one bolt to fuck with people lol

[@grahamvandyke]

This is the exact reason why epics were actually CALLED epics. During vanilla if you saw someone in fully decked out epics riding an epic mount, it was a sight to behold and everyone would be inspecting him.

[@TheROCKCANTDIE]

whut's wrong with downranking spells, i miss the time when i used a rank 1 frostbolt in pvp :(

[@mohammedjawahri5726]

nothing better than a rank 1 frostbolt :(

[@Razerzcut]

Man I remember how it was back then, just like you I died laughing in some of those raids. 40 people running around and half kept dying. I miss those days. And I agree with alot of you guys commenting about how the game is now compared to what it was. And yes lewtable in those days you did envy someone with teir 2 gear lol and it wasn't as easy to get either. I gotta say I enjoyed reading the comments about the older WoW bringing back memories and watching his video. I didn't realize how different it was actually I didn't think of it until now and I really enjoyed watching it . Keep up the good work bro

[@slivovich9821]

I played hardcore WoW since beta Alpha. Raided with Death and Texas until 4 horsemen in Naxx, then guild broke and i joined Void and raided with them until Illidan BT and guild broke, then Sunset upto Heroic Rag in Cata and i quit until 3 weeks ago to check out MOP. Everything what he said is true, one important thing he left out if you were on Horde side the Palladin tier still could drop for you which sucked big time, same for Alliance and Shaman tier. People who say "omg Vanilla was better, TBC was better". Then only thing i can say MOP is the worst Xpac ever (except the Pandaria world environment is done well). One thing that people miss/don't understand why Vanilla/BC sits so deeply in people's hearts is because game was fresh! Raids was something new to everytone, PvP aspect, social aspect...then BC came 25 man introduced, heroic dungeons, better itemization and utilization of all specs (well at least by mid BC), flying mounts, arena...after that WOTLK (except normal/heroic mode) ---CATA--->MOP shit got stale...you know what to expect now, you know whats the deal, know what is ahead of you. That is the freaking difference only why Vanilla/BC was better. Game had its run, it was great, but you can't make cake better by adding more sugar to it.

[@takeshiC1]

Ah classic Molten Core raids.. The excitement of your class tier set dropping. People shouting LOOT THE FUCKING DOG. The lols of people dieing in lava and joking about (yes we actually had time for that). The joy I felt at finally getting my Priest Epic Staff quest item at Majordomo...

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

You are a troll, right? It was called molten bore for a reason back then because it was so easy (LFR difficulty) and so mind numbing.

[@takeshiC1]

Eisaar Might have been a bore for you, but was great fun for the rest of us! Raiding with 39 other people was awesome and the bosses were a good challenge.

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

Good challenge? Please explain where the challenge is in MC bosses. You never played vanilla. Nobody knew what to do when they started MC and easily half the raid could afk when doing the raid.

[@1man1year150]

Eisaar because MC = naxx? Stop comparing all of vanilla to 1... literally 1.... raid. You are another who obviously didn't get far in vanilla .... because you are clueless.

[@1man1year150]

John Mcjohnson Video is LITERALLY CALLED Vanilla raiding.... not MC... holy shit, I would love to have seen "Half the raid" walk away during Gar or Shaz. FFS you most likely didn't even do the content. Your statements prove it. No Mods then, no flashy warnings saying move or markers, no distance warnings.... But yeah, you did MC though, right?

[@CryOverdage]

Nostalrius soonTM

[@aksiniy-a]

Hooray, Vanilla will be back!

[@ronnydevlaming3023]

Best vanilla server

[@richardunich7409]

Kronos is love, Kronos is life.

[@backpedalnambaone6138]

WTB time machine till Kronos relealse, server will be awesome

[@centrihd]

Cant wait!!

[@Expl0rati0n]

A new vanilla private server just opened and the scripting is great! Check out Nostalrius, 6300 people were playing tonight during prime time and everyone is still low level. Nows the time to join for the real experience! Just passing the information on for anyone else who may want to try it out

[@SyZyfication]

Feenix is better

[@BanteJames]

SyZyfication Hope you're joking

[@GillyWeed99]

Expl0rati0n I am loving it! I have already made quite a bit of friends, and we all use TS. Its crazy how much you bond with other people in vanilla. Just hit level 30 and I cannot wait to experience raiding in vanilla because I never got the chance to when it was new.

[@harioschtroliki]

Expl0rati0n Comment reported for spam

[@xermy1648]

BanTe He's not.

[@mss977s]

Just recently started playing WoW again with my 10 year old son and this brought back a lot of memories from my vanilla wow raiding days.

[@moviemaster13]

agreed, although i am for moving on and into the future, accepting changes as they come. There is nothing like the game i leveled up with, i was only a noobie in those days but to hear tales of the raiders and see their gear and fruits of their labor was legendary. It wasnt until BC that i raided for the first time and absolutely loved it, nothing compares to those days, the fact that it was hard is what made it fun. I will always stand by this statement, which ive said many times to my friends especially to the newest players; "This game used to be an Adventure, and required alot of patience for the things you wanted, but was an emotional ride for which i will never forget and unfortunately ever see again. Today is easy, today it is only a game, No longer a way of life."

[@etherraichu]

I sitll preferred vanilla raiding to BC raiding. For most of BC, the way I would do the most damage is just casting Shadowbolt. Nothing else. Just shadowbolt. Infinite shadowbolts. Forever.

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

Exactly like in vanilla eh? So what's your point?

[@sucraloss]

You were destruction warlock then? It was pretty bad.

[@johnmcjohnson9755]

Craziguy33 What do you mean? Most warlocks were SM/Ruin and all warlocks only spammed on button back then (shadow bolt) like all other classes.

[@WoRmTaLe123]

yeah now u have drain soul

[@JakeSlaughterr]

Catfish ahhh shadowbolt while being drunk. Good times. I have no idea what it's like in wow nowadays.

[@ccBRiAN2]

actually screaming out loud for finishing a raid in WoW, epic times :D 5:50

[@SensationalBanana]

Still happens very much today. Latest time I shouted was Garrosh HC. Didn't win the mount though but our tank deserved it.

[@PrimarchEldarAutarch]

You must not raid anymore then, at least not outside of lfr

[@ccBRiAN2]

PrimarchEldarAutarch well its not as satisfying as it was in vanilla :(

[@BurakkuHishou]

back when having a purple meant something. Seriously, that loot table you talked about, that made purple loot feel epic because the raids we're hard back then and only a select few people got items, if you saw somebody with that you KNEW they were among the best of the best. Heck i had a guildie when i started playing and he had a BLUE mace that dropped off of ragnaros called "twig of the world tree" I was so impressed. Now if you see people with blue items they are practically laughed at.

[@a1be31s8x9]

All this video is doing is making me remember how awesome vanilla was

[@JiggityJack]

Good video but Preach is off on a few things: - Prot spec tanks were actually much better then tanks of other specs, not just with survival, but for threat. The tree would make your threat abilities cheaper but also increase the threat, so dps would be able to squeeze in A LOT more damage with a proper specced tank. Also, Shield Slam did a lot more threat then sunder armor, in particular once you had 5 stacks of sunder and also because it could crit. - Healers would have to use multiple ranks true, but the max rank heals would still get used quite often. There were many instances in which the tank took huge damage and if you could properly time your max rank heal it was very efficient, this was most common in 5 mans though, but also on bosses like Rag or Broodlord. - Some of the specs he listed as not working are in fact way off. Arcane specced mages (with points in frost) did way more damage then frost spec mages, for example. Most guilds usually brought in one enhancement shaman, and even with feral druids they were good because they could help off tank trash when needed, required a different type of gear then regular tanks, could heal as needed, and when not, they could give extra dps. Also innervate was a huge plus. - - For a while healers could actually stay out of combat and just give rez's but this was a bug and was fixed during the MC times. Not really a part of blizzard's design though. Just about everything else is on the money though.

[@admarvelwarlock]

05:30 " Here comes the PAIN Bich !!! " Epic Boss Fight ! xD

[@KjeftenLP]

I guess this is how it works, people who played the original WoW likes that better, because that was their first experience. I for one liked TBC alot, because thats when I started playing. I for one have enjoyed the majority of content released, however.

[@TheRandomshenanigan]

Interesting, I started in WotLK yet I'm enjoying MoP a lot more. Guess it's all about personal preference.

[@pufabs]

I can still remember the 5-6 hour MC raids, joking aside Vanilla WoW was easily the best time of the game.

[@SirMalorak]

Attunements which are account wide and NOT time gated. Boom. Cool stuff to do which doesn't feel bothersome. IIRC Legion has sth like this for a dungeon or 2? Awesome. Can't wait.

[@jari56ify]

Man, brings back some memories...this is ALL true, and it was cool seeing some of those old icons again. Good times

[@DocDewrill]

almost droped a tear as i saw Raggi die in oyur video, that you, not about the worlds first kill but about "WE ACTULY KILLED IT!" it was so hard.. 40 people, 5min Buffs, for. each. player. single. and after you buffed everyone? well pally, you better take your Leather/Priest Gear, stay directly at the boss so you can autohit (to keep your sign of Light up witch has a 10sec delay if you wont hit him over and over again and was 100% needet as a heal for the tank) and blame on oyu if the buffs run out! uh btw.: back in that days you needet an item, to cast your 5min buff. and this got wastet after each buff. so you needet about a thousand and more per Raid. i still remember each and every second of MC as a paladin... and then.. raggi, killed him first time in my life, my whole raid, 40 grown man tears in their eyes, Yeeling out of joy... that was WoW that was a game wich deserved the titel "WoW!"

[@MrTBONESTEAK]

Haha, I remember the screams and the chills I got when we first killed Rag. No one was even thinking about the loot at that moment, we were just happy we actually killed him together as a team. I actually made friends for life trying to tackle the hard content in Vanilla. I have honestly not made a single friend in the game after Vanilla. Really weird.

[@DiseasedPopeno]

omg dude... I totally forgot about pallies having to wear cloth, lmao.

[@DocDewrill]

they forced me to wear robes and Druid Shoulderpads while i had to hit Garr with my 1h weapon because of its 0,8 hittime :< i'm scared for life..

[@1lamafarmer]

MrTBONESTEAK I made all my true WoW friends in TBC. Never raided Vanilla but for me TBC was WoW at its best. All the dungeons and raids were challenging, there was just the right amount of attuning and grinding, many more interesting mechanics and spells were added to the game, the gear looked freaking awesome (I used to stand outside SSC and gaze at warriors waiting to raid in their Tier 5), and the whole experience still had that personal touch, since there was no LFG or LFR, no x-realm stuff or noob-friendly additions to the game. You really had to work for everything, and if you didn't know what you were doing you got punished for it. Just raiding 10man Karazhan with my lowly guild was the most fun I've ever had in a game, and everything from Gruul's Lair right up to Sunwell was awesome as well. Definitely some nostalgia going on, but I don't think anything since TBC has come close.

[@Achille12345]

WoW Vanilla, WoW *PRIME!* The best of the best it will never be *AS FUN* and *AS EPIC* as back then! *Totally not sarcastic here!* More seriously, I started playing like 1 month before the release of BC for the first time and to be honest I'm quite happy I didn't have to play this grindfest garbage to much.

[@Kebobmeister]

Daaboo to all the complaining TBC and above bitches, saying vanilla wasn't harder. How come it took longer time, to clear naxx40, a none heroicmode instance, with an already full 40 man already raid equipted guild, than it took from the WoD expansion release, including level 90-100 level'ing+gearing, to the first 7/7 HC clear? It took less time for Wod level'ing+gearing to first 7/7 HC down, than it did for a full prepared guild to clear naxx40. so stfu about vanilla wasn't harder ! and graveyard running is not an excuse. it simply was harder

[@ecx3274]

Dont even try to pretend like live wow (mop & wod) isn't grindy.. -Dailies to cap justice, valor & honor -Random bg's with weekly honor caps for gear -Never ending mat farming to level professions to 400+ -Mundane faction reputation -Expansion after expansion of kill & collect quests for leveling

[@DriftNick]

Morten Fønsskov I'll list some reasons why it took longer to clear the content pre-Wotlk but wasn't harder. Even if you had best in slot gear from the previous you didn't have enough gear to clear the raid, you needed 6+ warrior tanks with the tier 3 set bonus before you had any chance of killing 4 hourseman, you needed a raid with full frozen resist for Sapphiron, you needed to spend months gearing up the raid unlike SoO where you could clear the content easily with gear from the previous tier and the few drops you got while clearing it. Wipe recovery and trash clears eat up a lot of time in Vanilla raids, unlike now you couldn't recover from a wipe in 5mins, you had trash packs that took 30mins-1hour to clear and you had to reclear them every 45mins-1hour, top guilds took 500+ wipes to kill a boss like Heroic Rag, there was no boss in Vanilla that took that many wipes to kill, for some the hardest bosses could only get 3-5 attempts in per hour and most guilds killed the bosses before they wiped 100 times. Class mechanics and boss mechanics were very very simple pre-wotlk, most classes had a rotation of 2-3 spells (some just spammed 1 spell), lacked any offensive or defensive cooldowns or any utility at all, didn't have to worry about spell procs or trinket procs, the skill cap was much higher in MoP for even the most simple class compared to the game pre-Wotlk, raids has few mechanics and even less that the whole raid had to do, it was normal to just stand in one spot the whole fight and tunnel the boss. The top guilds are much more hardcore now, they also have players from all around the world to choose from, this just didn't happen in Vanilla, you were pretty much limited to the people on your server, they doing multiple Heroic clears to gear up the first few weeks, they spend 12+ hours a day raiding for 5+ days a week, people theorycraft every single aspect of the game, min/maxing on the level that is happens today just didn't happen in Vanilla, even just basic stuff like logging didn't happen in vanilla. The best guilds in the world wiped 100's of times on the last boss of Mythic Highmaul, this isn't even the last boss of this tier and it's already harder then any boss in Vanilla, all you have to do is compare what the players need to do to clear the content and play at a high skill level to see the game now take a lot more skill.

[@NikukaiFightOn]

Morten Fønsskov Just because clearing trash took all day, doesn't mean it was harder. It was just more annoying.

[@Kebobmeister]

People even died on trash back then. Enough said

[@TheVanGetInIt]

Its interesting to see people complain about vanilla vs other exp. Then when the vanilla kids get together they complain about who was better at it.

[@tullegutt991]

This were literally SPOT ON, I cried of laughter midways watching this.Thank you sir.

[@ExBruinsFan]

Very cool video. I didn't Raid in vanilla, and only did Karazhan in BC, but I still remember a lot of VERY cool moments like you describe here. Watching the last two guys kill a boss with everyone else watching as corpse was SO cool and exciting. The CHEERING! oh man, the CHEERING. So much fun when it happened. It breaks my heart to see what WoW has become. Playing Wildstar now, and the early dungeons ARE tough, so I am hoping for a return to pain and joy.

[@mvpmikey]

WoW was the 1st game to introduce new genre on MMO and that's the same reason it was Fun on vanilla. The actual reason WoW died is because of the word "Knowledge". People have brains, created Min/Max forums separating the Noobs from the Not. People can simple read and learn everything about the game without even playing. Unlike before when everything is "Unknown" and simple smashing the buttons and panicking can lead to a boss kill. Times have change, people know more. Game had become easier and the idea wow introduced have become outdated. I think its about time people move on and completely kill wow so a new and better game would pop out of nowhere like when vanilla wow showed up. I suggest giving a way to the new age MMO which are the full action genre which uses the latest engines. This games didn't exist before because we lack the technology but with the speed of progression some finally showed up. Everyone please move on and lets play games that matches our generation. We are living with better technology so its about time we make use of it. All play full action MMO and quit the old system.

[@padrerosse]

did you actually ever played wow vani in the first place or even BC :)? if you would have then you should know that most ppl actually go and try playing other games but 85% of the time they just go back to their roots in this case wow. yes there are other verry good games out there but still for old wow players they just don't feel like it for old wow players those new games are just a remake of wow and frankly thats what it is most of the time. I apologize for my english its far from being perfect. Have a nice day.

[@mvpmikey]

loic roosens That's the same reason games are all recycle and remodels. People are being stubborn and just WONT move on. Times have change and people should just adopt "changes" and "advancement" to our technology. People are so emotional because of those good times they reminisce which are synonymous to golden or glory times. This hinders the games from evolving into a NEW generation game. Its No different from a grandparent not wanting to learn how to use a cellphone since they are so emotionally attached to the good old days where people talk on landlines. A change is necessary and we need to kill the old system. Go with the flow and let all developers install the new engines and new game systems to all MMO. This is reality and people should accept it.

[@Judgmentdayz]

mvpmickey1 Guess you'll just have to accept that people think differently from you

[@mvpmikey]

Judgmentdayz As a Human, I hate the fact I am a minority and forced to accept everyone's belief for the sake of fitting in. I am just that Earth is Round type of guy while everyone else thinks the earth is Square.

[@mvpmikey]

Judgmentdayz Mine isn't a belief but an unavoidable progression. I am not forcing my own ideals to other but plainly pointing out some things are meant to change. The only thing that doesn't change is change itself. I gave out a choice: >Take advantage of our own progression to create games ahead of our time. Need before Greed. >Delay its evolution, be get stuck with the old system. Greed before Need. People have the right to give in on their own emotions but change will happen and there is nothing we can do about it. Accept reality means decide wisely. Sometime we need to suppress our own emotion for the sake of something better.

[@emiliosilva1477]

LIVE TO WIN!!!!

[@Shana_Fenix]

RIP Headphone users :'D

[@simonjs8075]

+Shana like me

[@prismaticbeetle3194]

+Shana lololol

[@itsgreenblackman]

I never got to end game in Vanilla WoW. BC had just came out when I hit 55 so we were all moving on to the new. But I would think to myself, as I was leveling and spending time dancing naked on top of the Orgrimmar mailbox, about how few amount of people had all that epic raid gear. Did the raids take forever? Yes. Was the entire game generally more difficult? Sure. But if you were doing end game, you were in the top percent! You were the elite and not many people had made it to the point you have! You didn't need an achievement to remind you of your accomplishments because you just knew, and so did everyone else. I give props to the people who made it to end game in vanilla. There will never be others like them.

[@twalsh01261972]

I remember those days .... that brought back so many memories. Thanks for the video.

[@tankwfw]

I'll still take Vanilla over Cata and MoP anyday

[@Mushnp]

MoP is one of the best expansions only beaten by wrath, TBC and Vanilla weren't very good.

[@dvr1337]

Nick lol mop is by faar the worsz

[@subaveragejoe2]

PFFT, lol no.

[@MarthinHD]

Vanilla sucked ass x,D I'm so glad that WoW is where it's at atm... So much more TIME for fun instead of wasting time on finding people for raid? WoW is a freetime activity instead of a lifestyle now. Thank you.

[@someone-ji2zb]

Define fun. WoW 4-5 years ago and even right now has been daily/rep fests, empty worlds, meaningless worlds, and piss poor 5 mans. The only decent things have been the raid encounters, but the raids themselves are poorly designed (layout wise). PvP hasn't even been a tiny focus of blizzard's for 5+ years, and even with BFA, it is an crappy attempt at forcing world pvp rather than having a system that allows people to see it happen naturally.

[@IdgaradLyracant]

It was awful. 3 hours waiting around for 40 people to get their shit together. Raiding in vanilla was a shit bag of hours getting shit set up for 30-40 minutes of actual raiding ending in a wipe. Then if your had a group that was successful it was 2 hours of 1 guy yelling into a mic while everyone sat around waiting for 1 guy to come back from afk.

[@Blackadder75]

Or you could be in a good guild... where raiding at 19:30 meant everybody was at the gates at 19:15 (or be penalized, which hardly ever was needed) , the raidleaders were capable people, and we only wiped on progress night (but since that meant competing for first kills it was not that bad) So you got 4 hours of smooth raiding.. And the one afk guy was ok, he just announced it and we would go on. Of course any decent guild has backups for each role

[@EQOAnostalgia]

This played directly after Total Biscuit' "Addicted to [EPIX]" video lol. The irony is strong in this one.

[@uncaringbear]

This is such a fantastic summary of what raiding was like in Vanilla, and it brought back so many wonderful and not so-wonderful memories. I'll never forget my guild's 8 hour Molten Core sessions and that epic feeling of downing Ragnaros for the first time. Probably one of the most satisfying game moments for me.

[@BugCatLove]

You are wrong about tanking. sunder wasn't the most efficient. you had to spam it, yes, but you also had other reactive abilities that generated more threat and were not in global cooldown, plus heroic strike on every auto attack cause you had tons on rage. you had to generate lots of threat and have a good tps in order to allow your raid to damage. + you needed to know the boss's mechanics, when to run, when to change the tank, when to proc shield wall ... etc.

[@BattousaiHBr]

yeah... lets not try to make it more complicated than it actually was. the depiction in the video was not far from the truth.

[@Uchujinsan]

You also needed shield block to push the crushing blows out of the hit table.

[@BugCatLove]

For that you needed more Defense skill. Shield block just blocked a little bit of the damage, but not from bosses, cause they were high lvl

[@Uchujinsan]

NickeTMD No, crushing blows had nothing to do with defense skill, but were a level dependend 50% extra damage on a swing, fixed 15% chance by enemies 3 level higher (boss level always meant player level+3). If it's more than 3 levels higher crushing blow chance drastically increased, but that didn't matter for raids. 2 levels or less higher had a crushing blow chance of 0%. The important part here is how the hit table worked. Highest priority had crit, then parry, dodge, block, "crushing blow" and last of all "hit". Not sure where "miss" was, somewhere at parry/dodge I think. Or even before crit. Crit was calculated by 5%+(enemy weapon skill-your defense skill)*0.04%, meaning your defense skill needed to be at least 125 higher than their weapon skill. Their weapon skill was 15 higher than your defense (3 levels higher times 5) so you needed 140 defense from equipment to get rid of the crit. (in vanilla, bc gave some additional ways to reduce crit) Once you had that and let's say 80% combined block/dodge/parry/miss that meant that if you add 15% crushing chance you the boss only had a 5% chance for a normal hit (others would have been blocked, dodged parried or plain miss) If you had a 90% chance of /dodge/block/parry/miss you had a 10% chance to be crushed and a 0% chance to be normally hit. The rest fell of the hit table. Now if you have 99% only 1% chance to be crushed was left, and with 100% you couldn't be crushed anymore (and the rest of the block chance fell now off the hit table). That's why the bonus to block chance from shield block was so important - not the reduced damage, but pushing crushing blows off the hit table. There was no other defense against crushing blows, because it was a purely level based mechanic, and bosses always were 3 level higher than you for these calculations. Crushing blows were removed from the game btw, not sure if it was wotlk or cata, but I think cata. Yes, I know the crushing blow mechanic was a little arcane and not that well known, but that's how it worked.

[@sandrsofias]

My gf telling her girls about our sex the night before 04:17 :)

[@flippardlol8590]

lmao it was so fucking long..but so cool

[@lilgaydevon]

+bob jones the first time

[@Ecliptor.]

tyrhard

[@2thezaza]

Lorem Ipsum t

[@jordanhuff2422]

your so wrong about so many of those " unplayable" sspecs seriously

[@adij1950]

feral druids were pretty bad in vanilla

[@jordanhuff2422]

Yeh they werenet very good but you normally can take one for the buff and AoE/FIre res tanking

[@adij1950]

jordan huf true. But Idve taken a mage or holy pally over a feral any day in vanilla

[@jordanhuff2422]

Ya if you had to make that choice but theres 40 slots you can Have enough or more then both of those then you need and still have multiple slots in which a feral or boom can be potentially good

[@adij1950]

jordan huf yeah that is very true. But the specs were broken other aspects of the game like levelling so most people wudnt be playing those specs anyway meaning more ppl wud be applying as mages or holy pallys so there wud be plenty of those to fill the 40 and if a mage is competing with a feral the mage is an easy pick

[@GnothiSeaudon95]

I will seriously always cherish this game as a important factor in my childhood.

[@codymazza7303]

i get home sick watching this....i so miss the countless hours raiding... im crying

[@krupam0]

Guess it's more relevant than ever now. I still don't get why people would even want to play Vanilla.

[@AstridCeleste96]

+Krupam There are a good amount of people who like working towards things. It's pretty much similar to the Dark Souls mentality. Vanilla was by NO means perfect, or even amazing. But it was fulfilling, fun, and social. Those aspects cannot be discounted, no matter how imperfect the medium for delivery is.

[@dvr1337]

Krupam i dont get why people play mop or legion lol

[@Jeryyyyyy875]

Enough of this crap. Vanilla was awesome. It was also just plain fucking terrible. The thing is, it was so good because of how bad it was. I am sick of the whole "It was more of the journey, the fun of just playing, leveling, questing" You were new to a massive game. It was awesome. The new stuff is better, and it is easier because less focus goes into the random crap. Questing is, on a majority, for leveling. People don't like leveling as a majority. So it is easy and fast. It is different, but unless you have tried and/or done EVERYTHING in the game, you cannot truly judge it. New players (Cata-WoD) stop, it was fun for us. Vets (Pre cata) shutup. We had our fun, but don't pointlessly argue. It was bad, we enjoyed it, and we know why.

[@JosephDeVictoria]

You have no idea what you are talking about man... First off, you can NOT simply spam sunder armor as a tank. It gives you fast cheap threat gain, but shield bash, retaliate, heroic strike, taunt, challenging shout, and Mocking Blow (because taunts were often resisted, and mocking blow required a stance change) are essential parts of tanking. Downranking spells added an interesting element to the healing, as there were penalties for using down ranked spells (less plus healing was applied to your heal for example). You had to use them correctly to remain mana efficient. Bosses didn't have as many mechanics perhaps, but they forced the players to execute them perfectly to avoid wipes (in addition to having substantial gear and consumables) and came with no visual warnings or identifiers. I agree that the invalidity of specs was one of the worst aspects of Vanilla WoW, but you pretend to tell people that raiding in vanilla was easy, which is blatantly false.

[@BattousaiHBr]

no, it was in fact pretty easy, or at least compared to today's standards. players in nostalrius were stomping the raids even in pug groups.

[@TheTaXoro]

People on nostalrius was stomping MC and onyxia, if there were high requirements to join.. There was ONE BWL PUG. ONE. Hosted by some of the best guilds on the server. Listen to waht preach said.. You weren't meant to be 40 pro raiders, it was more like 25 good players carrying some scrubs.

[@BattousaiHBr]

Niels Rasmussen i dont understand you. are you saying MC was pugged just as easily in vanilla too? if not, then your whole argument is pointless.

[@subaveragejoe2]

It's been a while but wasn't retaliate a 5min CD? And wasn't shield bash just an interrupt on a 12 second cooldown? and ooooooh taunt and taunt and aoe Taunt, how complex ooooh and a rage dump that wasn't on the GCD and didn't clip any other abilities. Yeah, all that shit is baseline for anyone who actually knows shit about tanking. Preach discounted those abilities because they're SOOOOO simple and SOOOOO wrote that they weren't worth mentioning. 90% of everything you did as a tank was sunder armor. Everything you called out was the about 8% of the other 10. THAT'S why preach didn't bother with it and that's why vanilla tanking was stupid easy.

[@Marmo720]

This made me laugh and brought back so many great memories. Thanks for the upload!

[@Pleplerhep]

+Preach Gaming, the removal of downranking was the first step down in the spiral down the shit pit. The downranking were a extra dimension of strategy and theorycrafting i really missed when they removed the possibility. It was all about heal pr mana and not overheal.

[@DavisProductins]

Wait. Let me get this right. People love vanilla because there were long 40 mans with 75% of the raid being afk, people aggroing shit, bosses having 2-3 mechanics, unbalanced pvp, boring quests. /facepalm. I have no idea what to say. Explain.

[@prismherp]

tbh its just nostalgia and being/feeling young again

[@DavisProductins]

***** I dont envy them. I was 15 when I started cata and now I'm 17. I'll only start feeling nostalgia for WoD when its 3 xpacs away... and I still feel nostalgia for cataclysm and I miss it.

[@alextygesen3101]

Let me explain. People are fucking stupid

[@DavisProductins]

Alex Tygesen Good riddance.

[@DavisProductins]

Andrew D'Acunto I don't get it.

[@TheWarlockrock]

After classic vanilla has had its run....this video did not age well at all lol. And brd is the greatest dungeon that has ever graced azeroth.

[@Ivo-]

Biggest BS video about vanilla ever, especially the bit where tanks couldnt use abilities. Im sorry but you couldnt be further away from truth, must have been really poor tanks. Oh and todays console generation raids are kittens compared to the old hardcore raids. miss those days.

[@DriftNick]

warriors just spammed sunder because it was the most single target threat, spamming 1 spell as your rotation in vanilla was normal for most classes. now every single class has to do so much more to be played at a decent level, Heroic raids are harder then anything in vanilla, all you have to do is go watch a video of heroic siegecrafter blackfuse then try to tell me how the raiders now are kittens...

[@Zamolxes77]

equoowe ... that what a stupid moronic tank would do. A good tank would spin sunders on 3+ mobs, weave specials and auto damage that put it on top of the damage tables too. And once you got the uber dps epics, you would mix and match dps and +defense gear and tank dual wielding. I was always on top of damage tables, 1 mage managed to surpass me eventually, he also got the dps gear.

[@DriftNick]

Zamolxes77 not sure if troll or just really stupid...

[@mohammedjawahri5726]

Zamolxes77 OMG OMGMGSGODsjifddsjgdsojgijsdgiosedoigdsjfdjifsjdfijsd U NEED TO SUNDER 3+ MOBS INSTEAD OF ONE OMG NOW I CALL THIS FUCKING HARDCORE SKILLS what's so pr0 about mixing gear as ur saying ? like.. what ? OMG I HAVE TO RIGHT CLICK SOME ITEMS ANDD EADsjadjaslifasiofo EQUIP THEM OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG VANILLA WAS HARDCORE BABY

[@1man1year150]

Zamolxes77 sooooo wrong, especially with an 8/8 might tank.... lol obviously you didn't vanilla

[@hagakure8398]

some stuff I remember. >guilds breaking up because some one ninjaed a piece of gear or mount. >MC taking so long that the adds at the beginning responded >some raids taking as long as two days to complete >every single person being on vent even for instances, and you where not allowed to join most groups if you didnt use it.

[@jimbobberson4638]

Definitely miss those days, back when the game was magical and good.