Vanilla WoW from the perspective of a Wrath baby.

[Lighthammer]

I never really played WoW until Wrath of the Lich King and is as such, a notorious wrath baby who doesn't know anything about how brilliant the game used be back in the day. That's why I'm playing here, to see if it indeed was better back in the day. I have played vanilla little, but usually it was on friend's accounts or funservers. Most of my experience is in late Wrath and Cataclysm, which I think is the best expansion (oh no he didn't!!).

Step 1: the journey to level 60

I started on day 1 and after some initial difficulty in killing anything, I started levelling quite nicely. I did level a toon up in the old world during Wrath, but that was the only time I saw that world and most of it was in dungeons or friends levelling for me. The first real change I noticed was that even as a warlock, you can't pull more than 2-3 mobs or you'll die. While I found it annoying first, I quickly understood that the game is meant to be played with other players, it's an MMO afterall, something that retail WoW seems to have forgotten.
The second change was in Westfall when suddenly there were no more quests, I asked around for advice and the only answers I got was git gud nub and grind your way to the next zone. Eventually someone said I should visit Loch Modan and do the quests there, I quickly realised that this is common throughout the levelling process, you never stay in one zone for very long. While it's fun to go exploring, it's quite annoying sometimes if you can't play a lot. Some days I'd only have like an hour to play and that was hardly even enough to switch zones.

The difficulty of the dungeons was a welcome improvement over retail. Having to really engage in the dungeon and plan pulls etc was so much fun. I feared a mob because I thought they'd stay in one place like they do on retail, but he ran around and pulled half the dungeon. The only complaint here is when you just can't find any players for a dungeon and again, if you don't have the time to sit through an hour of finding a group + 20 minutes to get to the dungeon + the actual dungeon time which can be considerable and also the time running around to get all the quests, it can be hard to ever get a dungeon going. So far the game seems catered to people with a lot of time on their hands.
Eventually I managed to reach level 60 with around 11 days played, on to the next step.

Step 2: gearing up

Immediately when I hit 60 I tried to find groups for Scholomance since I wanted dat epic staff and holy shit is that a hard instance when nobody has any gear. I joined a guild and started doing proper instance runs over teamspeak and that made it much more fun and smooth. However I didn't really know what kind of gear existed, I didn't know anything about the shadowweave gear, I just went for my D0 set which is pretty terrible for warlocks in PvE. I didn't think I'd get into raids anytime soon since I've heard it takes forever to get geared in vanilla, but it only took a week until..

Step 3: End-game raiding

My first ever 40-man raid blew my mind, just seeing so many people populate the dungeon was amazing! We raided MC for 3 hours and ended up taking down Ragnaros after a few tries. I expected Vanilla raids to be super hard, but I guess since this is the first raid and it's 10 years old, it can't be that hard anymore. For me as a caster I thought Onyxia was much harder because you actually need to move around a bit to avoid the deep breaths. Garr is a bit tricky as well because you have to keep track of your banished target while being slowed. However compared to mythic raiding, this is a cakewalk. My big complaint here is how useless the tier set for warlocks is. This was before the gear got updated in the DM patch, but it's still pretty terrible. Those green shadow wrath items are much better, this doesn't make much sense to me. Now BWL is out and the tier set is still very bad, however now there are offset items that are very good, I did indeed scream loudly when I pried the Staff of the Shadowflame from Nefarian's cold dead hands.

What I don't like about raiding so far is that it's so focused on grinding outside of the raid for consumeables. You can't really log in and raid only those 2-3 nights a week, you also need to get out and farm the ghost shrooms etc. While this may not be absolutely necessary atm, I've heard that AQ and Naxx requires heavy use of elixirs, pots and flasks. For me with school, extra job and one of those girlfriend things, I have trouble getting enough money for it.

Step 4: PvP

Oh my, the ganks are real. Now it must be said that I've never been much into PvP, so I usually got destroyed when getting ganked out in the world. However I googled around and asked some other warlocks for advice and soon I could stand toe to toe against the evil gankers and even win a couple of fights. The true difficulty came in the last levels though, when every savvy PvPer on Horde side ganked lowbies for honour while waiting for queues, those were rough times.
Since the raiding gear was awful, I decided to try and rank up. I played for quite a lot, but didn't get anywhere in the ranks, then I discovered premades. Unfortunately warlocks doesn't seem that appreciated in alliance premades, probably because 90% of hordes are immune to fear, but I got a few spots and managed to grind my way up to rank 9 before I had to catch up with school. Overall I'm not that excited about pvp in vanilla, outside 1v1 world pvp it seems to be more about how much time you can dedicate to premades rather than being a skilled player like in arenas and rated battlegrounds. Alterac Valley seemed really epic, but why can't you do it with an entire guild group on TS? That would be soooo epic!

Conclusion:

While the game certainly has had me throwing my fists around, yes I'm looking at you Steezy and Osirus. Overally it's been a pleasant experience. I'm certainly favouring this over retail as it is now, but my favourite times in WoW will probably be during Cataclysm (to the dismay of many players on this server I'm sure), but that's just when I had the most fun. The game sure is a lot more grindy than retail, which I don't necessarily like because it feels more like a job than a game. However it's great to get an item you've ground for a lot, feels like it's more deserved than if you just pressed queue and roflstomped your way through 15 dungeons every week.
With all the raiding content being cleared in the first week, I really hope that AQ and Naxx ups the difficulty level a lot, especially on an individual basis. Standing for 3 hours spamming shadowbolts is not that fun once you've had the raid on farm for weeks.

No doubt there are other wrath babies or even later birds who are playing here, would be interesting to hear your perspectives as well.

[Dr. Doom]

75% of your complaints are too much time, too hard levelling. Disregarded.

Raids could be difficult and entertaining if people weren't reading guides nonstop, copying years old strategies and treating it like a chore to optimize rather than a fun encounter to have. But in this point I agree with you.

As someone that started to play retail in 3.0.8 and stopped at 3.3

[TomDeBaere]

Very nice and interesting read. Even though I know you can never bring back the Classic wow days, it's a nice experience for me to to go through this again. I myself played very casually in Classic wow and only became "hardcore" in BC. BC for me is still the best days I've ever had. WotLK was the start of the decline for me but Ulduar still holds the best raiding experience for me. I'm looking forward at least to see what happens with Nostalrius in the future!

[Botanist]

hello reddit

[Dr. Doom]

Very nice and interesting read. Even though I know you can never bring back the Classic wow days, it's a nice experience for me to to go through this again. I myself played very casually in Classic wow and only became "hardcore" in BC. BC for me is still the best days I've ever had. WotLK was the start of the decline for me but Ulduar still holds the best raiding experience for me. I'm looking forward at least to see what happens with Nostalrius in the future!

I think that his 'best' days in Cataclysm are precisely for the same reason you had them in BC. It was the moment he finally got full picture of the game and had his first experiences with end-game content.

I agree on all regards with you regarding how wotlk was the first step down in game quality (I refused to continue paying a subscription after I learnt I had missed the better game and was paying for watered down remnants), yet Ulduar being quite the pleasant place to be.

[Vaulken]

Thanks for posting this I found it very interesting to read

[ProMeTheus112]

ye interesting to read
best times were in beta/vanilla for me with the meetups in the outside world and random wild pvp, but I've never done a raid at all lawl (other than low level 5men)

[Jademunkey]

As a fellow Wrath baby, I cannot overstate how much more I enjoy vanilla. No rose-colored glasses here--it's simply better in every way.

[Dr. Doom]

As a fellow Wrath baby, I cannot overstate how much more I enjoy vanilla. No rose-colored glasses here--it's simply better in every way.

Same comment in all regards.

[Drain]

Step 1: the journey to level 60
In Classic, quests were only designed to be barely enough to get you by; which was a good thing. If you did not utilize your rested, you'd often run out and have to grind. If you play the game as intended, always using rested, there's plenty of quests. On my characters, I don't even do a large amount of the quests. The problem is that players want to play more every day than intended. Blizzard put in fatigue to slow down your leveling rate. They cleverly renamed it "rested", and most players stupidly view it as a bonus rather than the penalty it actually is. In other words, you actually level slower gametime wise from 12h a day as opposed to 6h a day. Once your rested is spent, it's no longer an efficient use of your time on a character. It's not 200% vs 100%, it's 100% vs 50%. You're being fatigued, or punished, for playing too long at a time. You're also being fooled if you don't realize all of this. This is exactly why there's not enough quests if you're always fatigued. The question was, "How can we get players to play less per day, and instead put in more days?" Fatigue is the answer.

I should add that Blizzard also expected you to kill everything in your way. But most players prefer to run around and avoid everything. They never imagined the game would be played like this. And that's more XP players are throwing away. You see they didn't just design a quest to give X amount of XP, but also Y for all the mobs in your way to get there and then get back.

Step 2: gearing up
This depends upon the drop rates, but was deliberately designed to make players farm for weeks and weeks. If you could get everything in <1 week, like you can today, more or less, you'd get bored of the game much faster. Like fatigue, it was done to drag out the amount of days you play the game. The question was, "How can we get players to run dungeons repeatedly?" Drop rates are the answer. As a Warlock you have it easy, but try getting a Truestrike shoulder and Baron cape.

Step 3: End-game raiding
There's nothing terrible about your tier set, and I wouldn't use green shadow wraths over them at all. This is a common misconception from elitists that only view +dmg as the only valuable stat. They run out mana in 10 seconds and die in 1 shot from any AoE. I chuckle seeing these shadow or frost greens go for ridiculous amounts of gold, while the higher level eagle ones go for almost nothing. Btw, intellect=crit chance, and Warlocks are basically just purple mages in Classic. But what's better than your tier set are the other dungeon blues of higher levels. It's just another example of players not playing the game it was intended, and thus viewing weaker items as better ones because of their biased view on certain stats.

But regarding the difficulty... the problem comes down to hardware. In 2005, no one could properly run 40man raids, not in bandwidth, not in CPUs, not in GPUs. Most people probably ran in 10FPS, or even less. The staggering performance issues is what made the game difficult, and it was practically designed with them in mind. That's why now, with a solid 60 FPS and <200ms across the raid roaster, it's quite easy. No more fighting the delays to try to remove debuffs or heal fast enough, or having 5 people in the raid DC in a fight. You also have to take into account that mechanics were simple back then. MC/Ony barely had any development time before launch, as they were day 1 content in a game where 1-60 took up most of the development time.

Step 4: PvP
I agree with this guy when it comes to PvP, if you want to listen for about an hourt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlU6JrwePNs
But the main thing that kills it for me is the high level ganks on low level players. Rather than put in strong penalties for doing it, they just yanked out world PvP entirely. This is a game designed for PvE where PvP was optional, but never implemented the way I would have implemented it. BGs were mainly created just to remove world PvP and separate it from the rest of the game. A better solution is to punish high level players for abusing lower level ones, and put in world PvP for every level bracket. I'm still waiting for the days when GW2's WvW style of PvP will be in the entire world of an MMO alongside questing, but it hasn't come yet. We just don't live in that kind of world. We live in a world where people want a giant separation here, putting the PvP in their own little worthless corner where they can't disturb the precious questers; all to prevent to ganks and to please players that can't stand being killed.

But yes ranking is terrible. 9 is probably as high as you'll get. Was glad to see this system bite the dust in BC. Speaking of BC, that's even better and you'll probably like it the best.