Get a start on FRESH With RestedXP, they have the best leveling guides available from 1-60 made by speedrunners. Ive done 10+ 60s on Classic and they even improved on the routes I used. Free up to level 20. www.restedxp.com/?ref=WillE Use Code: willeFRESH for 15% off!
We had no idea at the time WoW would still be around now. For a while every expansion felt like it might be the last, which is probably why the whole 'WoW is dead' rhetoric started. Cata is good, though. Not perfect but it very much still feels like 'old school' WoW with a lot to do. The fact the community on my server is still very active is promising too - Wrath felt oddly quiet after the initial week.
I miss the server communities in vanilla classic. On Zandalar Tribe we had the Peacebloom War (AQ opening), which made friends and guild mates enemies, trolls and griefers became freedom fighters and some of the HC guilds on alliance showed their true colours as tyrants. And i loved the exiliration of wondering wether getting the ZG buff would kill you or not. What a time to be alive!
In classic we was several guilds who made scarabs lords for the people who was dedicated, after those guilds helped them getting scarab lords most formed their own guild so remember how pissed people was at them lol. In vanilla I recall the person who had the mallet gonged like early night or morning so people logged in to see what happens as the word spread, sadly most people did not even enter silithus bcs the boat lagged out and they was stranded in stone talon mountain then they logged in, weird shit happen with the vanilla AQ event. Also it crashed the server for people who was in silithus and tried to kill the mobs/bosses so it was people who relogged in right after dc every minute or so.
Here is one of many things you will never see in classic, in vanilla in PVP you could SOLO the BG, you did not have to join the group, if you were good enough you would get far more honour per kill and if you left the group you did not get kicked from the BG.
Another one: Dungeons didnt have a player cap, meaning you could enter every dungeon as a 40 man raid and complete quests/get loot. This is why MC and BWL entrances are inside dungeons and Naxx entrance was supposed to be in Stratholme.
@@vladimir4526 Oh, so that's why they changed how raid groups interact with quests. I knew about being able to bring raids into certain dungeons, but since I started (in early/mid TBC) its not been the case. For good reason, I suspect.
Sod is utterly terrible. IMO if they didn't have the rune system and just slightly extended each classes talent trees, We'd have been far better off. Pvp is a joke, PVE is a joke, the games a joke.
I'm 37 years old and when wow was released in 2004 I couldn't play (*). I always dreamed of what it would be like to have played Wow vanilla at launch. Last year I made some of that dream come true by playing wow classic hardcore! What a fantastic game, even after 20 years, I don't know a better or more complete game than wow! (*) Here in Brazil it was impossible to ask your parents for a credit card. I tried to create a bank account for myself, but the bureaucracy wouldn't let me
When I first started out (a bit older) I used physical game cards I'd buy from the local game store. It wasn't until I was in my 30's I actually felt able to subscribe via my bank account!
@andromidius haha yes I remember buying the 30 day game cards credit cards were not a real thing in nz back then so only people with rich parents or a credit card themselves could put on game time via blizzard at a very heavy discount it used to be $50 for 30 days pre paid time here😆
Writen by AI comment lmao. Imagine being some 50+ year old guy who's dream it is to play a shit game like wow. The only thing that might make me believe this is true is that he claimed to be from Brazil. Yea, i can imagine if you live in the shittiest country ever, playing wow can be considered a dream
57:40 let’s not forget aged core leather gloves for rogues….which you never take off unless by some unfathomable miracle you get deaths sting out of AQ 40
@@rook6591 I read it is apparently less of an issue on PvE servers. But then you give up on world PvP. It's a shame really. I thought games were about having fun. Take that rank 14 grind, that does not seem like the embodiment of fun. I doubt many people will instantly try to get rank 14 again after achieving it on a character.
Not the design was bad, the players mentality was. At some point you didtn even get a guild or raid if not full on sweatlord. For raids that can be done without. The players mentality went so much worse over the time
@@feroxk.9266 It's not even "player mentality", it's a specific subsection of the community, whom are extremely toxic, who find value in life in games like these where they can exert their power over others. It's just the same type of people who would love to go lynching in the past.
100% facts. I was in one of those guilds on Classic launch. After abyear I got a new job. The guild leaders cursed me and were so irrate I didn't "fulfill my duty to the guild by staying because I made a commitment!" Lol Oranthul was the guild. Bunch of no-lifes! @feroxk.9266
Vanilla went about as far as it could before needing redesigning. Without raising the level cap and forcing a 'reset' on power levels the game would have rapidly become incredibly hard to balance. Warriors were already scaling out of control in Naxx - imagine the gap in power if tier 5 was at level 60. Which is a solvable issue of course - just complicated and bound to upset people (since Warriors would need to be nerfed or everyone else buffed, having a knock-on effect with lower gear levels). Not to mention the biggest problem - catching up becomes more and more difficult the more tiers there are in a level bracket and the playerbase gets more and more spread out. Now this wouldn't have been a problem if everyone shared one huge world together, but back in the day server populations were much lower. With the estimated 1% of players even getting into Naxx and the general server size being around 10-20k characters meant only a few hundred players per server - which is enough for two or three raid groups/guilds. Add another tier and that number will likely drop to a single raid group per server, poaching players non-stop from guilds progressed behind them. And if yet another tier comes we're left with that single raid group still with possibly no-one behind them anymore, slowly grinding to a halt as they inevitably lose players they can't replace and gear quickly enough to continue. Its why I feel like Vanilla as it was is perfect in its imperfection. Could a 'Vanilla Plus' game mode work today with bigger servers and a higher quality of player (not just skill, but internet connection and information available)? Possibly, yes. But back then I think it was at its logical limit and needed big change - hence The Burning Crusade expansion, which reset player power and balance and became a more accessible game to increase the pool of potential raiders. And so we got to the state of things now - expansion drops, very accessible, gets progressively harder until only a relative few can 'beat' it' and then another expansion to reset.
Yes I agree with this. There is a lot of talk about classic+ so you would think it is something hugely desirous. However, with the current classic playerbase I think it's a dead end. Do people really want more deadmines or something to that effect? That's just not how the game is played anymore. Look at how quickly people got annoyed with the world hopping quests added to SoD. Classic+ would have its fans no doubt, but I don't think it would be as massively popular as the private server gang think it would. Vanilla was a great game for its time but there is no question that the game improved over time. There is only so much 1 button rotation and painfully slow combat that one can take. In terms of gameplay, TBC sort of already was classic+.
Remember selling flasks for +300 gold at the peak. Then the new patch with increased came and at first prices plummeted. So I bought alot of lotuses for so cheap. A week or two later, the prices went back up to 80-90% of the original price again. So I was set for the rest of classic haha
Blizzard changed the way Black Lotus spawned about halfway through classic. This change was to encourage more players herbing a lotus vs a bot. The original Black Lotus spawn was 1 hour. The updated lotus had a random spawn timer, ranging from 5 minutes, up to 60 minutes. This gave the average player a higher chance to find one. This was my favorite farm back then. I basically lived in Burning Steppes. 3 accounts, camping nodes, using eagle eye and track herbs on mini map. One eagle eye loop to each lotus area took 25 seconds. 10 minutes If you were a boomer, running loops on your mount.
18:50 The Flasks weren't nerfed for being overpowered in general. And barely anyone used them for PvP either. The reason they were nerfed is that they make boss-design/-balancing crap: Every Raid seeks to use flasks as best they can, but if they are that powerful, you have to design the bosses around the Flask's presence, which means that they become truly mandatory instead of just giving you an edge, and then Raids become especially hard/impossible to do for casuals.
It's crazy to think about it now but, back in early Vanilla til TBC, my realm of Greymane only had 1-3 large guilds, and they were responsible for most of the rare spawn materials like Black Lotus and Devilsaur Leather etc getting to the AH. Most of them were kept inside the guilds though I'm sure. I only remember one of their names, it was the largest guild on Greymane for years, the alliance guild Crimson. they also had our only alliance Scarab Lord, at least for a while. Another cool memory was when we had one single Horde guy get the highest rank in pvp, and he was the only one on the server with the full set of High Warlord pvp gear. In AV the dude was like an outdoor raid boss. It was a few weeks before we had an alliance guy get Grand Marshall.
The world spanning questlines are super cool. For leveling I want my quests bunched up together and easily completed, sure. But for endgame, it feels like something really out of the way and thus adds an almost "secret mission that not everyone knows about" feel. I'm just very excited to return to the questgiver when one of those quests is complete.
25:00 I was pretty happy when they "nerfed" the Zone and respawn times for BL in Classic. I was one of these BL farmers cause i worked extremly early so i was pretty much alone in the eastern plaquelands. Would say i picked 1-2 BL per workday and they would be priced at 200-250g after "nerf" when i remember correctly. Easily had 1-2k Raidkost per week which is insane when you think about that even an Epicmount in Vanilla was a struggle.
25:00 That's not inflation. That's simply supply and demand. Inflation is not the same as just prices rising. Inflation started only with BC and its ludicrously increased gold rewards from quests and later daily quests as constant income streams. The Elite Flying Mount could also be easily paid for if you used up all your questing gold, and you'd still have some to spare. That was just a singular gold dump, and WoW generally lacked gold-dumps outside of item-repair.
3 หลายเดือนก่อน
3:17 Wowhead hides some items such as those that are NPC only. That there is no item found by wowhead doesn't mean anything necessarily.
47:05 as a priest who mindcontrolled people into blackrock lava every single day for months i am now very sad that i did not know of this. mindcontrol in classic to this day is my all time favorite spell in world of warcraft. such a simple tool to cause so much annoyance and i enjoyed every single second of it, even when people started to gank the living crap out of me.
On Kel'thuzad there was an infamous night elf rogue (who happened to be a friend of mine) named Vidas. He had rank 14 which he always bragged about getting while using thrash blade, then eventually having thunderfury. While he was known in the pvp circles back then, he was most notably known for dying to a group of level 20's in ashenvale which was posted in a youtube video way back when. His infamy exploded from this for several reasons. I miss the good ol' days haha.
23:00 Okay, I'm really confused now. Maybe it's because my raid-alliance had the EU-7th Ragnaros-kill and we knew what we were doing and knew how to organize raids and guilds, but Raidsupply is a Guild-Effort. You may know only this from the artificial AQ-opening-questline, but real Raid-prep means everyone in the Guild does what's possible while not ruining real life. Requiring every player to get his or her own flasks is plainly idiotic. They would also not be popped for training or trash clearing, but only for serious tries and then everyone would give it their all for 2h. WoW wasn't a "Massively Online-Singleplayer-Game" back then, but an "MMORPG". The Herbalists in the Guild also knew their routes and had no trouble finding more than enough Lotus's to supply the raid and stock up on top. How do you think those flasks got into the auction house in the first place? On a sidenote: Hydraxis or whatever his name was, was also placed on purpose. He is, for his position, strategically positioned perfectly, sending the unwary adventurer, as well as the notoriously incompetent who refuse to learn from death, to their doom. The fun of WoW-classic was that it still taught its players how to play the game through failure, through tough situations, through necessity to think at least a tiny little wee bit.
Hey willie kinda random you’ll never read this, but I got back into sod this week hit 60 got stacked with gear having the time of my life. They finally made classes and specs viable in different areas I could literally spend forever in sod with new raids, yes it’s easier but less stressful but still rewarding. I know it won’t last forever like classic but damn am I happy for once with wow , wrath and cata made me so depressed. Tbc was great but after that it felt like my hard worked characters were wasted
I remember the party when Gutrot reached max level. There were hundreds of naked level one trolls. The party started in Durotar. In the end we decided to raid Storm Wind. Oh wait, upon unpausing the video i realize you included that part.
That hunter inspired me to solo on hunters until this day. Also as for leveling through gathering I did that in cata classic lol. 2 characters going from 80-85. Obviously nothing impressive like 1-90 but it was actually chill and quick.
i truly miss the idea of needing to go into the world for things. teh MC entrance, enchanting trainers in redrock/ulda, needing to get books for final spell levels. the epic mount quests for warlock were SO MUCH FUN! i wish that was still a thing. it brough people into a sense of comunity. it does not need to be as crazy hard as retail vanilla was but still, i want to feel engaged in teh world. not just have all my needs met in the capital city
Rogues could also pick pocket farm and farm the keys for the small vaults (forgot the names) in brd. Also, I had a rogue that I'd camp black lotus with. It wasn't that hard to get one and I was on one of the most populated servers on classic, whitemane.
I absolutely screwed some people over that I didn't like in my guild with dishonorable kills. A warr/priest that was an IRL couple had gotten me killed while leveling a few times and laughed about it on discord so after 60 I got in a group with them going to strat and I started killing NPC's. I got kicked from the guild but they were big mad 😂.
14:00 Emerald Dreamway was accessible in Legion (after the raid) and in BFA (You help Merithra defend the dream from void stuff). Dragonflight had a whole ass zone. I know this is a compilation of old videos, but this information is straight up wrong at this point and shouldn't be in a video released 3 months (!) ago.
Looking at the Black Lotus prices and rarity, good thing i stoped playing Classic before BWL. I remember hearing a story about a High Marshall back in Vanilla, who messed up his marriage because of the rank. Back in Vanilla, what i found really anoying as a totally casual mage, the lack of lvl55 water, which was added around Naxx.
@@vibesmagma8451 Yep, additionally he speaks as if the Emerald Nightmare and the little bit of the end of it is all we got of the Emerald Dream in WoW, while Dragonflight recently added it as a zone. Probably a compilation of old videos
Another thing is holy might stone. It’s paladin sunken temple quest reward was patched out I think start of tbc and it’s butf is insane. I still have mine lol
Nevermind classic. Was the Warrior DPS that crazed in vanilla? I didn't raid back then so I do not know, but in dungeons and PvP people seemed to hate warrior DPS. If you weren't tanking you could sod off. Didn't matter if the group already had a tank - warrior DPS was a no go everywhere I went
A bit late, but Warriors were top DPS in Naxx. By 30% above the next class. They are HEAVILY gear dependent, but once they have that gear, they do the most damage in the game. At least in vanilla
Oh man I loved Bracket busting… the rage, the drama, the absolute hate, I ate that shit up and loved every second of it. Try and tell me how to play the game and it’s what you get. Best 3 weeks of classic. I have screenshots of several different people threatening to kill me and hack me. Never got hacked, still very much alive.
Dota inside a 5v5 WoW arena would be FUCKING AWESOME. Teleporting around to help your teammates in a fight. I wonder if that queueable Raid VS AI assault the fortress style content in BFA was meant to be that.
I never understand the 'cut due to time constraints' reasoning? I mean, nothing was forcing them to release an expansion when they did...they could have iterated on the original world as much as they wanted through patches. The first expansion could have been released 5 years after vanilla and everything they had planned. Other than the quest for money, am i missing something?
Quests like that overly grindy whelp one in the Badlands are there to actually give you the requisite exp you need to progress at that point. If you weren't killings the mobs there you'd be pressing the same buttons killing some other mob in some other zone anyway so why does it matter if the quest takes 45 minutes?
Back in vanilla it was guilds making alts and inviting people to raids, and then killing civillians to decrease your rank. And they would laugh at you after.
Imagine if instead of expansions, blizzard kept releasing smaller content releases to vanilla WoW for free, without raising the level cap. This would give the vanilla level 60 cap a much longer progression cycle as your make your way up to even higher tiers of PvE and PvP content.
Eso really nailed the player housing. I quit wow to play eso and don't regret it one bit. There's a ton of similarities. But i think the world is so much prettier too. Im truly obsessed and pissed i didn't find eso years ago
They should start a 1-2 yr project to make a release of WoW: Classic Complete. Basically the director's cut of Classic! All of the unfinished and unreleased content that was planned and never given to the players.
There's a reason why this was never given to the players, and it's not only time constraints. Some stuff was just plain bad and blizz knew it. Emerald Dream for example, pretty far in development as a patch in Vanilla. Never released.
i would keep replaying and restarting original vanilla again and again because its the best experience ever. Even with all info now being available its still the most difficult and fun without the nerfs and lame freebi stuff. If they could have fixed the server issues itd been amazing without all the problems but unfortunately it got to crazy. Vanilla wow is the greatest game ever created with burning crusade close behind .
Spell batching existing was the only reason I could tolerate playing on NA as an EU player - my classic experience would've been terrible if I hadn't been able to play with the pserver communities
I miss the times when you could put a clearly unfinished content in a game and to players it would be this big mystery. Azshara was my favorite Classic zone despite being mostly empty and I hate what they did with it in Cata.
If they are doing vanilla+, they should design new raids in a way which breaks min-maxers. While it would be very difficult, and labour-intensive to design with randomizes and insane difficulties, it's the only way to capture the audience once again. If they want to create the vanilla experience, a big part of this is making sure no one knows that they're doing. That's the authentic vanilla experience, I know because I was there. Forcing the playbase to interact and stay off discord and information databases, so people have to work together in-game, that's how they could regain millions of subscribers, even from the old days. They have to approach the game with a different mindset, if it's gonna have a thriving community in 2024. This isn't impossible. Getting everyone together back in the day, despite the shitty computers and slow internet connections, and somehow get them to pay 15€ a month. It seemed just as impossible to us back in the day, as making a modern "anti min-maxxing" MMORPG seems to us today.
I'll never understand those saying, "just give us a fresh classic server"...why? So that it can just die in 2 weeks after the nostalgia wears off and people have 3 level 22 characters? At this point people need to ask for classic+ and stick with it, SoD is fine but your stuff goes away at the end. If they want a living community they need to feed into 1 version of classic not just going with whatever trend is popular..
44:35 Ok, now I get where my confusion is coming from... You are nostalgia-gushing over the remake-vanilla WoW, which at this point is as well 10 years old now; you didn't play actual Vanilla-Original-Release-WoW. For there was no discord back then to pull even more tricks to make the game easier. The PvP-Honour-System in the original was a bit deadlier than what you presented here. That there is tame.
I was really annoyed they killed order halls. I hoped they would rework them to be expansion agnostic and start giving us more class content. SO MUCH opportunity was missed there.
I personally think, after Cata Classic, they should scrap all the classic servers and just focus on Classic+ and Retail. The playerbase is incredibly split already, and if there's enough out crying, we can have certain servers for certain expansions. However, I think they should primarily focus on Classic+ and Retail. There's enough potential for Classic+ and Retail will always keep progressing to newer things. And they should do it how Jagex does with OSRS and use community polls on what they should add for Classic+. Take all their shortcomings, failures and successes with expansions and use that to make Classic+ the best mmo out there.
i'm a retail player and i'm not really fond of the "retail bad" classic andys. but classic wow is a niche which blizzard has to care about. it's a completely different gaming experience and blizzard would do good just releasing fresh classic servers every now and then (and maybe keep the bots in check)
Get a start on FRESH With RestedXP, they have the best leveling guides available from 1-60 made by speedrunners. Ive done 10+ 60s on Classic and they even improved on the routes I used. Free up to level 20. www.restedxp.com/?ref=WillE Use Code: willeFRESH for 15% off!
Hard to believe WoW was only 6 years old when Cataclysm released.
WoD is almost culturally closer to patch 1.1 of vanilla than it is to us in 2024 😢
My brain always considers Cata a "late" expansion, and that is kinda how it felt at the time. 14 years on, I think it's time for me to adjust.
They definitely did the whole "Revamped world" concept way too soon. Should've been the 5th or 6th expansion not the 3rd...
We had no idea at the time WoW would still be around now. For a while every expansion felt like it might be the last, which is probably why the whole 'WoW is dead' rhetoric started.
Cata is good, though. Not perfect but it very much still feels like 'old school' WoW with a lot to do. The fact the community on my server is still very active is promising too - Wrath felt oddly quiet after the initial week.
@@HugeAckMan420 it is undoubtedly more like vanilla than retail
I miss the server communities in vanilla classic. On Zandalar Tribe we had the Peacebloom War (AQ opening), which made friends and guild mates enemies, trolls and griefers became freedom fighters and some of the HC guilds on alliance showed their true colours as tyrants. And i loved the exiliration of wondering wether getting the ZG buff would kill you or not. What a time to be alive!
Yup mmorpg socialization is strictly against activision Microsoft female dev team of inclusive values
@@WoWUndad keep your weird agenda pushing to your subreddit creep
Dude! No other game will ever top Vanilla wow and how it mafe you feel. Classic couldn't even due it. Mainly due to the players.
@@MoveInSilence2444 games aren't the main issue, people are
In classic we was several guilds who made scarabs lords for the people who was dedicated, after those guilds helped them getting scarab lords most formed their own guild so remember how pissed people was at them lol.
In vanilla I recall the person who had the mallet gonged like early night or morning so people logged in to see what happens as the word spread, sadly most people did not even enter silithus bcs the boat lagged out and they was stranded in stone talon mountain then they logged in, weird shit happen with the vanilla AQ event. Also it crashed the server for people who was in silithus and tried to kill the mobs/bosses so it was people who relogged in right after dc every minute or so.
Here is one of many things you will never see in classic, in vanilla in PVP you could SOLO the BG, you did not have to join the group, if you were good enough you would get far more honour per kill and if you left the group you did not get kicked from the BG.
True can remember solo one hitting clotthies as rogue, in Avs
Another one: Dungeons didnt have a player cap, meaning you could enter every dungeon as a 40 man raid and complete quests/get loot. This is why MC and BWL entrances are inside dungeons and Naxx entrance was supposed to be in Stratholme.
@@vladimir4526 Oh, so that's why they changed how raid groups interact with quests. I knew about being able to bring raids into certain dungeons, but since I started (in early/mid TBC) its not been the case. For good reason, I suspect.
Classic 2019 fresh was amazing. Best experience ive had. P1 SoD gets second place
2019 was golden era of gaming for me. Sod p1 had me so excited but let us down in later phase.
Sod is utterly terrible. IMO if they didn't have the rune system and just slightly extended each classes talent trees, We'd have been far better off. Pvp is a joke, PVE is a joke, the games a joke.
@@idkidgaflol relax man . 15 year old you back in the OG game would disagree
@@Thrall966cucking. 15 year old him would dislike the game being ruined too.
I'm 37 years old and when wow was released in 2004 I couldn't play (*). I always dreamed of what it would be like to have played Wow vanilla at launch.
Last year I made some of that dream come true by playing wow classic hardcore! What a fantastic game, even after 20 years, I don't know a better or more complete game than wow!
(*) Here in Brazil it was impossible to ask your parents for a credit card. I tried to create a bank account for myself, but the bureaucracy wouldn't let me
When I first started out (a bit older) I used physical game cards I'd buy from the local game store. It wasn't until I was in my 30's I actually felt able to subscribe via my bank account!
@andromidius haha yes I remember buying the 30 day game cards credit cards were not a real thing in nz back then so only people with rich parents or a credit card themselves could put on game time via blizzard at a very heavy discount it used to be $50 for 30 days pre paid time here😆
But couldn’t you just buy time cards? I bought them as a kid
Writen by AI comment lmao. Imagine being some 50+ year old guy who's dream it is to play a shit game like wow. The only thing that might make me believe this is true is that he claimed to be from Brazil. Yea, i can imagine if you live in the shittiest country ever, playing wow can be considered a dream
@@MoonTurky Don't you have better to do ? Spewing nonsense on a random stranger is really the best thing you could do right now ?
57:40 let’s not forget aged core leather gloves for rogues….which you never take off unless by some unfathomable miracle you get deaths sting out of AQ 40
or of course for the 1000's of warriors, Edgemasters handguards.
"We want honor not PvP" That pretty much sums up the mentality in WoW Classic. Min-max, efficiency, play like a robot.
@@rook6591 I read it is apparently less of an issue on PvE servers. But then you give up on world PvP. It's a shame really.
I thought games were about having fun. Take that rank 14 grind, that does not seem like the embodiment of fun. I doubt many people will instantly try to get rank 14 again after achieving it on a character.
Not the design was bad, the players mentality was. At some point you didtn even get a guild or raid if not full on sweatlord. For raids that can be done without.
The players mentality went so much worse over the time
@@feroxk.9266 It's not even "player mentality", it's a specific subsection of the community, whom are extremely toxic, who find value in life in games like these where they can exert their power over others. It's just the same type of people who would love to go lynching in the past.
100% facts. I was in one of those guilds on Classic launch. After abyear I got a new job. The guild leaders cursed me and were so irrate I didn't "fulfill my duty to the guild by staying because I made a commitment!" Lol Oranthul was the guild. Bunch of no-lifes! @feroxk.9266
Look at SoD now… no AB of WSG, just av for 8 minutes
That old Ironforge area was also used for the Dwarf Heritage armor quest.
Vanilla went about as far as it could before needing redesigning. Without raising the level cap and forcing a 'reset' on power levels the game would have rapidly become incredibly hard to balance. Warriors were already scaling out of control in Naxx - imagine the gap in power if tier 5 was at level 60. Which is a solvable issue of course - just complicated and bound to upset people (since Warriors would need to be nerfed or everyone else buffed, having a knock-on effect with lower gear levels).
Not to mention the biggest problem - catching up becomes more and more difficult the more tiers there are in a level bracket and the playerbase gets more and more spread out. Now this wouldn't have been a problem if everyone shared one huge world together, but back in the day server populations were much lower. With the estimated 1% of players even getting into Naxx and the general server size being around 10-20k characters meant only a few hundred players per server - which is enough for two or three raid groups/guilds. Add another tier and that number will likely drop to a single raid group per server, poaching players non-stop from guilds progressed behind them. And if yet another tier comes we're left with that single raid group still with possibly no-one behind them anymore, slowly grinding to a halt as they inevitably lose players they can't replace and gear quickly enough to continue.
Its why I feel like Vanilla as it was is perfect in its imperfection. Could a 'Vanilla Plus' game mode work today with bigger servers and a higher quality of player (not just skill, but internet connection and information available)? Possibly, yes. But back then I think it was at its logical limit and needed big change - hence The Burning Crusade expansion, which reset player power and balance and became a more accessible game to increase the pool of potential raiders. And so we got to the state of things now - expansion drops, very accessible, gets progressively harder until only a relative few can 'beat' it' and then another expansion to reset.
Yes I agree with this. There is a lot of talk about classic+ so you would think it is something hugely desirous. However, with the current classic playerbase I think it's a dead end. Do people really want more deadmines or something to that effect? That's just not how the game is played anymore. Look at how quickly people got annoyed with the world hopping quests added to SoD. Classic+ would have its fans no doubt, but I don't think it would be as massively popular as the private server gang think it would. Vanilla was a great game for its time but there is no question that the game improved over time. There is only so much 1 button rotation and painfully slow combat that one can take. In terms of gameplay, TBC sort of already was classic+.
Loved chipping away at this extra long video throughout the day
Remember selling flasks for +300 gold at the peak. Then the new patch with increased came and at first prices plummeted. So I bought alot of lotuses for so cheap. A week or two later, the prices went back up to 80-90% of the original price again. So I was set for the rest of classic haha
fantastic work, outstanding job sir..... 2019 Classic wow was the best time of my life, its been down hill ever since...
Just give us fresh progression servers already. I'd happily play through vanilla again to get back into TBC.
This is the one that no one thought they wanted and they didn't want
Your wish has been granted
And here we are !
Hope you are having fun now in anniversary servers! It's been a blast so far, I'm taking my time and looking forward to TBC
Blizzard changed the way Black Lotus spawned about halfway through classic. This change was to encourage more players herbing a lotus vs a bot. The original Black Lotus spawn was 1 hour. The updated lotus had a random spawn timer, ranging from 5 minutes, up to 60 minutes. This gave the average player a higher chance to find one. This was my favorite farm back then. I basically lived in Burning Steppes. 3 accounts, camping nodes, using eagle eye and track herbs on mini map. One eagle eye loop to each lotus area took 25 seconds. 10 minutes If you were a boomer, running loops on your mount.
Wasn’t until well into naxx
@@ShinraEQ Wrong. Black Lotus change was in May of 2020. Naxx came out in December 2020.
18:50 The Flasks weren't nerfed for being overpowered in general. And barely anyone used them for PvP either.
The reason they were nerfed is that they make boss-design/-balancing crap: Every Raid seeks to use flasks as best they can, but if they are that powerful, you have to design the bosses around the Flask's presence, which means that they become truly mandatory instead of just giving you an edge, and then Raids become especially hard/impossible to do for casuals.
Wonderful video, Really captures what made vanilla so magical
EQOA is most unique, so unique, you never knew a EverQuest game was on a console.
This was insanely good content holy
Never forget the USS Liberty
Never
My guild were still using bag of marbles on Brutallus progression in Sunwell haha.
jesus that shit sucked lmao
It's crazy to think about it now but, back in early Vanilla til TBC, my realm of Greymane only had 1-3 large guilds, and they were responsible for most of the rare spawn materials like Black Lotus and Devilsaur Leather etc getting to the AH. Most of them were kept inside the guilds though I'm sure. I only remember one of their names, it was the largest guild on Greymane for years, the alliance guild Crimson. they also had our only alliance Scarab Lord, at least for a while.
Another cool memory was when we had one single Horde guy get the highest rank in pvp, and he was the only one on the server with the full set of High Warlord pvp gear. In AV the dude was like an outdoor raid boss. It was a few weeks before we had an alliance guy get Grand Marshall.
fucking sucks that sod was such a cluster fuck in p3, there was so much promise in p1/2
Awesome video, I can tell you put alot work into this. Thank you!
Thank tou for the very nice video of the very best wow chapter...❤
The world spanning questlines are super cool. For leveling I want my quests bunched up together and easily completed, sure.
But for endgame, it feels like something really out of the way and thus adds an almost "secret mission that not everyone knows about" feel. I'm just very excited to return to the questgiver when one of those quests is complete.
If this makes top comment I'll get a tattoo
“Zug Zug “
@@actionjackson8282 dig
Ez
They were going to get a tattoo anyway
Tattoos are stupid. Instead, brand 2 dicks colliding at high speed and I'll like your comment.
Thanks for your work❤ omg how much I wish for a Classic+
That was a dope video, you should do more of these grouping videos. Maybe like expansion by expansion 👀
25:00 I was pretty happy when they "nerfed" the Zone and respawn times for BL in Classic. I was one of these BL farmers cause i worked extremly early so i was pretty much alone in the eastern plaquelands. Would say i picked 1-2 BL per workday and they would be priced at 200-250g after "nerf" when i remember correctly. Easily had 1-2k Raidkost per week which is insane when you think about that even an Epicmount in Vanilla was a struggle.
I loved this video so much. Thank you for the amazing content
25:00 That's not inflation. That's simply supply and demand.
Inflation is not the same as just prices rising. Inflation started only with BC and its ludicrously increased gold rewards from quests and later daily quests as constant income streams. The Elite Flying Mount could also be easily paid for if you used up all your questing gold, and you'd still have some to spare. That was just a singular gold dump, and WoW generally lacked gold-dumps outside of item-repair.
3:17 Wowhead hides some items such as those that are NPC only. That there is no item found by wowhead doesn't mean anything necessarily.
Love this kind of video
47:05 as a priest who mindcontrolled people into blackrock lava every single day for months i am now very sad that i did not know of this. mindcontrol in classic to this day is my all time favorite spell in world of warcraft. such a simple tool to cause so much annoyance and i enjoyed every single second of it, even when people started to gank the living crap out of me.
It was nuts in BRM
I will never understand why people enjoy being anoying pricks, must be some unresolved trauma or small dick syndrome
"They physically did not have time to get it all done." What a sentence.
spacetime
On Kel'thuzad there was an infamous night elf rogue (who happened to be a friend of mine) named Vidas. He had rank 14 which he always bragged about getting while using thrash blade, then eventually having thunderfury. While he was known in the pvp circles back then, he was most notably known for dying to a group of level 20's in ashenvale which was posted in a youtube video way back when. His infamy exploded from this for several reasons. I miss the good ol' days haha.
Massive effort with this video - great work. Really good video. Thanks for doing this, love vanilla content!
ripped off from mad season
@@anarchy8263 cry and suck a D about it
Damn I hope they will do wow2 or something with that much content but all fresh
Turtle wow will attempt it
23:00 Okay, I'm really confused now. Maybe it's because my raid-alliance had the EU-7th Ragnaros-kill and we knew what we were doing and knew how to organize raids and guilds, but Raidsupply is a Guild-Effort. You may know only this from the artificial AQ-opening-questline, but real Raid-prep means everyone in the Guild does what's possible while not ruining real life. Requiring every player to get his or her own flasks is plainly idiotic. They would also not be popped for training or trash clearing, but only for serious tries and then everyone would give it their all for 2h. WoW wasn't a "Massively Online-Singleplayer-Game" back then, but an "MMORPG". The Herbalists in the Guild also knew their routes and had no trouble finding more than enough Lotus's to supply the raid and stock up on top. How do you think those flasks got into the auction house in the first place?
On a sidenote: Hydraxis or whatever his name was, was also placed on purpose. He is, for his position, strategically positioned perfectly, sending the unwary adventurer, as well as the notoriously incompetent who refuse to learn from death, to their doom. The fun of WoW-classic was that it still taught its players how to play the game through failure, through tough situations, through necessity to think at least a tiny little wee bit.
This is a great video, watched the entire video.
Amazing work . Thanks for video
Hey willie kinda random you’ll never read this, but I got back into sod this week hit 60 got stacked with gear having the time of my life. They finally made classes and specs viable in different areas I could literally spend forever in sod with new raids, yes it’s easier but less stressful but still rewarding. I know it won’t last forever like classic but damn am I happy for once with wow , wrath and cata made me so depressed. Tbc was great but after that it felt like my hard worked characters were wasted
I remember the party when Gutrot reached max level. There were hundreds of naked level one trolls. The party started in Durotar. In the end we decided to raid Storm Wind.
Oh wait, upon unpausing the video i realize you included that part.
Try playing with no npc interaction, its a fun game. If you want too take it to next step do it ssf
Wow nice video, so much effort on it
effort that was stolen from madseason
That hunter inspired me to solo on hunters until this day. Also as for leveling through gathering I did that in cata classic lol. 2 characters going from 80-85. Obviously nothing impressive like 1-90 but it was actually chill and quick.
Really nice video!
Black lotus and world buffs are a perfect example of how the player base ruined a great game.
i truly miss the idea of needing to go into the world for things. teh MC entrance, enchanting trainers in redrock/ulda, needing to get books for final spell levels. the epic mount quests for warlock were SO MUCH FUN! i wish that was still a thing. it brough people into a sense of comunity. it does not need to be as crazy hard as retail vanilla was but still, i want to feel engaged in teh world. not just have all my needs met in the capital city
You and Madseason should coordinate so you dont release almost identical videos again lol
Why would they do that? Most people will watch both
the story telling is so good
thank madseasonshow for that, this is basically a copy pasta
Rogues could also pick pocket farm and farm the keys for the small vaults (forgot the names) in brd. Also, I had a rogue that I'd camp black lotus with. It wasn't that hard to get one and I was on one of the most populated servers on classic, whitemane.
I absolutely screwed some people over that I didn't like in my guild with dishonorable kills. A warr/priest that was an IRL couple had gotten me killed while leveling a few times and laughed about it on discord so after 60 I got in a group with them going to strat and I started killing NPC's. I got kicked from the guild but they were big mad 😂.
Freakin Blizzard. Their handling of Black Lotus back in the day encouraged bots and gold buying. Only 4 in any one zone? An hour CD? SMH
14:00 Emerald Dreamway was accessible in Legion (after the raid) and in BFA (You help Merithra defend the dream from void stuff). Dragonflight had a whole ass zone. I know this is a compilation of old videos, but this information is straight up wrong at this point and shouldn't be in a video released 3 months (!) ago.
Looking at the Black Lotus prices and rarity, good thing i stoped playing Classic before BWL.
I remember hearing a story about a High Marshall back in Vanilla, who messed up his marriage because of the rank.
Back in Vanilla, what i found really anoying as a totally casual mage, the lack of lvl55 water, which was added around Naxx.
Is this not just a ripoff video of MadSeasonShow's "The unreleased Secrets of Vanilla WoW" that was released very recently?
Some parts were veeeeeeeery similar, even felt like they came in the same order haha
I think this is a collection of past videos
It definitely is. You hear him fade away and cut out as if it’s just edited together
@@vibesmagma8451 Yep, additionally he speaks as if the Emerald Nightmare and the little bit of the end of it is all we got of the Emerald Dream in WoW, while Dragonflight recently added it as a zone. Probably a compilation of old videos
It's an hour and 30 minute long video and Madseason put his out in the last 2 weeks. It's pretty close to impossible to pull that off
Another thing is holy might stone. It’s paladin sunken temple quest reward was patched out I think start of tbc and it’s butf is insane. I still have mine lol
tier 3 was tokens, wasnt it? ... nice video :)
think u had tokens for 2-4 classes and traded at chapell of light for the gear. and u needed mats like mooncloth/cured rugged hide etc.
Nevermind classic. Was the Warrior DPS that crazed in vanilla? I didn't raid back then so I do not know, but in dungeons and PvP people seemed to hate warrior DPS. If you weren't tanking you could sod off. Didn't matter if the group already had a tank - warrior DPS was a no go everywhere I went
A bit late, but Warriors were top DPS in Naxx. By 30% above the next class. They are HEAVILY gear dependent, but once they have that gear, they do the most damage in the game. At least in vanilla
It's insane how they thought of player housing in 2004 and still havent implemented it in retail, and no garrisons were not player housing.
Oh man I loved Bracket busting… the rage, the drama, the absolute hate, I ate that shit up and loved every second of it. Try and tell me how to play the game and it’s what you get. Best 3 weeks of classic. I have screenshots of several different people threatening to kill me and hack me. Never got hacked, still very much alive.
Dota inside a 5v5 WoW arena would be FUCKING AWESOME. Teleporting around to help your teammates in a fight. I wonder if that queueable Raid VS AI assault the fortress style content in BFA was meant to be that.
Shoutout to WillE for not doing reaction vids. Legend.
I never understand the 'cut due to time constraints' reasoning? I mean, nothing was forcing them to release an expansion when they did...they could have iterated on the original world as much as they wanted through patches. The first expansion could have been released 5 years after vanilla and everything they had planned. Other than the quest for money, am i missing something?
money
17:50 that is a magic: the gathering reference????????????
Quests like that overly grindy whelp one in the Badlands are there to actually give you the requisite exp you need to progress at that point. If you weren't killings the mobs there you'd be pressing the same buttons killing some other mob in some other zone anyway so why does it matter if the quest takes 45 minutes?
You forgot pally gear dropping for horde and shaman foe alliance
i enjoyed very second of my Grand marshal and warlord grind
Back in vanilla it was guilds making alts and inviting people to raids, and then killing civillians to decrease your rank. And they would laugh at you after.
Imagine if instead of expansions, blizzard kept releasing smaller content releases to vanilla WoW for free, without raising the level cap. This would give the vanilla level 60 cap a much longer progression cycle as your make your way up to even higher tiers of PvE and PvP content.
Wonder how they will tackle the lotus in SoD..
Great video
Weren't there only 10-ish spawns for Lotuses per zone? It was a lot easier to camp them
Did you just copy and paste madseason? Lol
Yeah I've just commented that. It's a bit sad tbh.
This is a compilation of old videos
Y'all is a videogame
Could be a coincidence
"Why do you say the design of classic wow was so bad?"
*"Black Lotus."*
I think Blizz can manage keeping literally one or two servers per region of PROGRESSION Vanilla. And even TBC and Wrath.
Eso really nailed the player housing. I quit wow to play eso and don't regret it one bit. There's a ton of similarities. But i think the world is so much prettier too. Im truly obsessed and pissed i didn't find eso years ago
This legit feels like a fever dream now. I can't believe I did this.
They should start a 1-2 yr project to make a release of WoW: Classic Complete. Basically the director's cut of Classic! All of the unfinished and unreleased content that was planned and never given to the players.
There's a reason why this was never given to the players, and it's not only time constraints. Some stuff was just plain bad and blizz knew it. Emerald Dream for example, pretty far in development as a patch in Vanilla. Never released.
i would keep replaying and restarting original vanilla again and again because its the best experience ever. Even with all info now being available its still the most difficult and fun without the nerfs and lame freebi stuff. If they could have fixed the server issues itd been amazing without all the problems but unfortunately it got to crazy. Vanilla wow is the greatest game ever created with burning crusade close behind .
Spell batching existing was the only reason I could tolerate playing on NA as an EU player - my classic experience would've been terrible if I hadn't been able to play with the pserver communities
I miss the times when you could put a clearly unfinished content in a game and to players it would be this big mystery. Azshara was my favorite Classic zone despite being mostly empty and I hate what they did with it in Cata.
If they are doing vanilla+, they should design new raids in a way which breaks min-maxers. While it would be very difficult, and labour-intensive to design with randomizes and insane difficulties, it's the only way to capture the audience once again. If they want to create the vanilla experience, a big part of this is making sure no one knows that they're doing. That's the authentic vanilla experience, I know because I was there. Forcing the playbase to interact and stay off discord and information databases, so people have to work together in-game, that's how they could regain millions of subscribers, even from the old days.
They have to approach the game with a different mindset, if it's gonna have a thriving community in 2024.
This isn't impossible. Getting everyone together back in the day, despite the shitty computers and slow internet connections, and somehow get them to pay 15€ a month. It seemed just as impossible to us back in the day, as making a modern "anti min-maxxing" MMORPG seems to us today.
Safe to say there is PLENTY of content to make classic plus properly. but we ended up with the lazy ass SoD... sigh
rent is due boys
That brought my down memory lane and game me PTSD
The comments 5 mins after upload, the vid is over an hour😂😂😂
The video is a collection of previous videos just so you know.
I'll never understand those saying, "just give us a fresh classic server"...why? So that it can just die in 2 weeks after the nostalgia wears off and people have 3 level 22 characters? At this point people need to ask for classic+ and stick with it, SoD is fine but your stuff goes away at the end. If they want a living community they need to feed into 1 version of classic not just going with whatever trend is popular..
Alright if it ever comes out don't play it
If devs just kept experimenting with Seasons to add bits and pieces of content to an everlasting Classic+ version game...
z0mg no way light of elune???? this changes everything!!! w0wzers!!!!
44:35 Ok, now I get where my confusion is coming from... You are nostalgia-gushing over the remake-vanilla WoW, which at this point is as well 10 years old now; you didn't play actual Vanilla-Original-Release-WoW. For there was no discord back then to pull even more tricks to make the game easier.
The PvP-Honour-System in the original was a bit deadlier than what you presented here. That there is tame.
I was really annoyed they killed order halls. I hoped they would rework them to be expansion agnostic and start giving us more class content. SO MUCH opportunity was missed there.
18:30 Massive Exaggerations. Black Lotus were rare ingredients but not as impossible to get as made out to be.
The winterspring quest could involve throw snowballs but then again its blizzard IT must be grand or else...
The one thing that will always bug me is the change in how the characters run. The retail version just looks weird to me.
I personally think, after Cata Classic, they should scrap all the classic servers and just focus on Classic+ and Retail. The playerbase is incredibly split already, and if there's enough out crying, we can have certain servers for certain expansions. However, I think they should primarily focus on Classic+ and Retail. There's enough potential for Classic+ and Retail will always keep progressing to newer things. And they should do it how Jagex does with OSRS and use community polls on what they should add for Classic+. Take all their shortcomings, failures and successes with expansions and use that to make Classic+ the best mmo out there.
i'm a retail player and i'm not really fond of the "retail bad" classic andys. but classic wow is a niche which blizzard has to care about. it's a completely different gaming experience and blizzard would do good just releasing fresh classic servers every now and then (and maybe keep the bots in check)
niche? it's like 1/3rd of their players
42:38 hahahhahahahaha those degen memories. Good times.
2019 classic release was amazing!