World of Warcraft

I also never managed to get to max level. I think I kinda started losing interest around lvl 45, though I hear they've made leveling a lot easier.

BC's release was crazy. Probably one of my favorite gaming moments of all time. The Fel Reavers, all the people fighting over the tiny spawn rates of boars and orcs, the pvp and griefing, going to each new zone and being amazed at how colorful and exotic it looked, and then the first time you see a flying mount or enter Nagrand you're like holy shit. All the lore in the quests were so good too. It all went so smooth too at least my server's release did. I almost didn't log on at 12am because I figured my friends would be right about it crashing and dcing all the time, but it was smooth as heck for me minus the 50 people fighting over the spawning of like 8 boars.

WotLK already did this in 2008.

I think a lot of people let nostalgia colour their view of BC and vanilla. They certainly had aspects that were great about them, but there was still a good bit of clunky and weird design that they had like some specs not fully supported for raiding or only being supported for one very specific aspect of raiding like Prot Paladins in BC only really being used for AoE trash mobs.

The game also offers a lot more content for the non raider than it ever did in the past, but they've made it so quick and easy that we can blow through it 10 times faster. Running a 5 man today can take like 5-10 minutes while back in vanilla a Scholomance run would take at least an hour.

I'm not saying Vanilla WoW was perfect but it was more likable. Nowadays you hit a queue button and your instantly queued up with a group of randoms for a 15 minute dungeon where nobody talks. Even when it goes terribly wrong people usually just abandon ship.

In Vanilla you needed a guild to do dungeons and doing said dungeon was challenging and entertaining. Nowadays it's all auto-pilot.

Not to mention they took away talent trees which means every character is just a copy pasta of everyone else's character. /boring

And don't even get me started on how outrageous the numbers are.

Considering where they started and where they are today... It's stupid.

Just my opinion of course and an unpopular one to be sure.

Hitting a button to queue and get a group before abandoning ship is vastly preferable to spending 2 hours trolling trade chat for a tank and then abandoning ship. Even when there were proper talent trees, everybody took the same talents. If anything, they were more strict with actual trees. Ever since MoP, talents have become actual abilities instead of just +damage or +mana regen. "The numbers"? Do you mean damage? I fail to see how this is even remotely something that anyone can construe as a problem. Is seeing 10,000 instead of 1,000 actively making the game worse? On the whole, they've vastly improved from where they started. 

I don't see how the guild experience has changed at all, in the decade or so that I've been playing. Other than being able to browse guilds who are recruiting and the addition of guild challenges, nothing has changed.

What do the specs that people chose to play have to do with talent trees? That's a completely different point than anything you were talking about before.

Resilience has been removed, so "completely different stat table" is no longer an issue. I still don't see how bigger numbers is bad, you didn't explain that. I'm in top-end mythic gear, and on my Death Knight I have, I want to say, around 415k health. It's been a little while since I've logged on to him since I'm gearing a Demon Hunter at the moment. A tank in tip-top mythic gear might have between 600k and 700k without buffs. Your average DPS, assuming they have a reasonable amount of heroic level raid gear and the legendary ring, will pull somewhere between 50k and 60k DPS, if they aren't blowing their entire load and every single cooldown in their arsenal. Some fights are good for some classes and specs and at times it's not uncommon for a player to be hitting over 100k damage per second, but that's highly situational. We're also 30 levels higher than the end of TBC (soon to be 40 levels once Legion arrives). Even from Vanilla --> TBC was a jump of nearly 10x the old health values. Players' stats are drastically LOWER than they were in Mists of Pandaria, where tanks could easily have over a million health and your average raid-geared DPS could pull over 200k DPS on most fights.

Played since vanilla, off and on. Did some old 10m progression raiding, and used to do a lot of pvp. I love RBG's, and wish it was easier to get 10-15 pvpers together consistently. (And no I don't mean 8 pvpers and the rest x-realm baddies on OQ lol) My highest rated RBG match was 1999, so, lol. No 2k for moi, but I got the 300 win mount on my lock and Veteran of the Horde. (Horde is better than Alliance.)

I'm currently on Dragonmaw with my feral/resto drood Londomoolari, in my old pvp guild where they still make me an officer even though I barely play >.< We had a lot of crazy good times and I have a rep of being a damn fine lock. My warlock has undergone a few changes. The first one was Dimensia an Undead Warlock. I modeled her tone and the way I played her after Drusilla from Buffy. She was lots of fun. She got hacked in WotLK though, lost everything. Wound up making an Ally lock named Mourn to play with roommates after. We transferred to Dragonmaw to join a serious pvp guild for Cata and decided on Horde so I got another Undead Warlock only Mourn was taken so she became Lyre.

Lyre killed a lot of people. Lyre's a bitch. She's also a damn scary pvp warlock. (I use the female UD face with the dead not-glowing eyes. She's pretty creepy. I love her. )

Me and my two roommates at the time shopped some guilds until a few guys we had played with wound up in Trade chat shouting to Lyre, "JOIN US!" >.< Hard to say no to that lol. Glad we didn't wind up in the other guild that we were considering. The GL was a great guy that hilariously enough even lived in the same city. Actually met him and had beers. (Met a few people in the same city. Even a bartender and his ridiculous hot girlfriend that also played.) But the other guy the GL respected was one of those PvPers that's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too uptight about it. If you're yelling at the people in your RBG and calling them "B team" you're really not worth my time.

Instead we got a crazy mexican for a guild leader. Good times. (Actually some of the best times tbh. )

I've had a lot of fun in this game. So many stories, drunkenly leaving a buddy's a character naked with no hearthstone on a floating rock on the outskirts of Netherstorm as a not so subtle suggestion that he needed to save some gold and get a goddamn flying mount already. (Go go gadget, best use for Warlock Summoning ever.)

I remember summoning 40m raids. I literally had to farm soulshards for an hour beforehand and empty my bags to make room since they didn't stack.

Er, had an EotS RBG won around the 1800 rating roughly that was won by our hunter's explosive trap punting the ally fc at MT at .03 seconds. Skype just LIT UP as all of us went berserk. Closest game I've ever had, what a match. Some of the ally group actually made alts just to talk to use about how crazy that match was.

I was into the arena scene for a while but, honestly I don't really like them. RBG's is where I have the most fun by far. Esp when most of the guildies we had were easily 2200+ players. Ridiculously competent group but that was back in cata/mop days and now we're old regretful men. >.< I've made it past 2k in arenas once or twice but to progress further I'd have to really commit and more importantly find a competent partner.

I have a few toons on an RP server Cenarion Circle, connected to Moonglade, which has Pornshire. I never visited there, never knew what it was, until all of a sudden my ally hunter alt was flying through on a friday night and noticed there were 300+ people in the inn. =/

Bloody insane place to be. I'll leave it at that.

Addons wise, er, Z-perl, Bartender are musts. Sexymap is just, sexy, and comes with option map coords displayed, and you can really alter the colour. I don't currently use it though because my addon memory was getting bad and I currently have a potato for a computer. Deadly Boss Mods, where would we be without it? Recount has been a useful tool since, god, I think I started using it around ZG times? Can't remember anymore. Maybe Karazhan?

I used to use Battleground Targets, Gladius, and really just a whole mess of pvp related addons but I don't remember most of em and I'm sure they don't work anymore.

I went from being a pvp hating clicker, to a keybind/macroing pvper. And one of the biggest influences on me in that respect was a crazy mother of two named Tamynde/Xhea/Nynavae. She had a rogue in vanilla that was just disgustingly effective. And this cute pixie voice that I just adored, particularly when it had "bloodlust" overtones to it >.< (She loved stabbing people.)

Now though I haven't done any serious pvp all of WoD. I miss the RBG's but the time and effort to get back into those is just too much.

I did get that itch though when I was doing battlegrounds leveling my druid. Feral is just so satisfying.

If you value life and sunshine, don't.

AoE also wasn't nearly as potent, especially with Warriors not being able to survive or hold aggro on multiple groups at once unless they were vastly overgeared for the content.

Your just arguing semantics. I did Scholo as a pally, war, mag trio back in the day too. Just after the release of MC. You needed friends or a guild to do that though. You would have had a hell of a time picking up two randoms off trade chat spam with the knowledge and know-how to trio Scholo.



I was talking about Vanilla and yes, all the top tier main tanks ran the same build. Main healer Priests too I imagine. How big a percentage of the population do you think that was though?

My best friend ran a fury warrior spec back in Vanilla and never once changed it for raids. He never main tanked but he did DPS and occasionally off-tanked if there was no other prot warriors. Hell I ran a Ret spec Paladin all through MC back in the day. I did eventually respec into Holy when BWL hit as I was one of the guild officers and we needed more Holy Paladins for cleanse/heal duty but I also ran a Shadow Priest in BWL and an Arms Warrior.


There was maybe 5 guilds on my server that raided MC and BWL with any success. It wasn't the majority of the population.


As for the health totals, 12k in Vanilla seems wrong but I'm sure you know better than me. It's been close to ten years since I played seriously.

The point is that the stat totals scaled like 5-10x from level 60-70. Obviously it's not an issue anymore and 110 is a long way from 70 but at the time, when tBC had just released, it fucking sucked to be on a PvP server.