Hard to believe WoW was only 6 years old when Cataclysm released.

"We want honor not PvP" That pretty much sums up the mentality in WoW Classic. Min-max, efficiency, play like a robot.

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

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!

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.

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.

Classic 2019 fresh was amazing. Best experience ive had. P1 SoD gets second place

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

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.

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

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.

Just give us fresh progression servers already. I'd happily play through vanilla again to get back into TBC.

fantastic work, outstanding job sir..... 2019 Classic wow was the best time of my life, its been down hill ever since...

Awesome video, I can tell you put alot work into this. Thank you!

That was a dope video, you should do more of these grouping videos. Maybe like expansion by expansion 👀

My guild were still using bag of marbles on Brutallus progression in Sunwell haha.

Wonderful video, Really captures what made vanilla so magical

fucking sucks that sod was such a cluster fuck in p3, there was so much promise in p1/2

Black lotus and world buffs are a perfect example of how the player base ruined a great game.

EQOA is most unique, so unique, you never knew a EverQuest game was on a console.

Amazing work . Thanks for video

Really nice video!

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.

You and Madseason should coordinate so you dont release almost identical videos again lol

Thanks for your work❤ omg how much I wish for a Classic+

This was insanely good content holy

This is a great video, watched the entire video.

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.

I loved this video so much. Thank you for the amazing content

Thank tou for the very nice video of the very best wow chapter...❤

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.

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.

Love this kind of video

Wow nice video, so much effort on it

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.

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

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?

Damn I hope they will do wow2 or something with that much content but all fresh

"Why do you say the design of classic wow was so bad?" *"Black Lotus."*

i enjoyed very second of my Grand marshal and warlord grind

I think Blizz can manage keeping literally one or two servers per region of PROGRESSION Vanilla. And even TBC and Wrath.

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.

Just what we needed :)

42:38 hahahhahahahaha those degen memories. Good times.

Massive effort with this video - great work. Really good video. Thanks for doing this, love vanilla content!

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

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

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.

"They physically did not have time to get it all done." What a sentence.

Wonder how they will tackle the lotus in SoD..

That brought my down memory lane and game me PTSD

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.

amazing video

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.

tier 3 was tokens, wasnt it? ... nice video :)

Never forget the USS Liberty

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)

the story telling is so good

2019 classic release was amazing!

rent is due boys

Weren't there only 10-ish spawns for Lotuses per zone? It was a lot easier to camp them

The comments 5 mins after upload, the vid is over an hour😂😂😂

z0mg no way light of elune???? this changes everything!!! w0wzers!!!!

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 devs just kept experimenting with Seasons to add bits and pieces of content to an everlasting Classic+ version game...

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.

The one thing that will always bug me is the change in how the characters run. The retail version just looks weird to me.

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

You should explore osrs

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..

I'm like 10 of those 13,000 enhancer parses 😅

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 .

Every time I see or hear anything about classic WoW I always think of going back to play again, started in Vanilla during the AQ War Effort and played through Wrath. The main reason I don't play, aside from not having the time, is that the way the game is played now just doesn't seem fun anymore. I played Classic when it launched and the overwhelming "You have to play this way, spec that way, blah blah blah" just killed me. I enjoying min maxing to the extent that I want to, not what everyone else wants to force others into. It reminded me of when I use to play League... and that made me quit.

wow classic content creators try not to make the same video 400 times challenge: impossible edition

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 😂.

In my whole experience in classic wow, I could not find a single black lotus due to bot farmers and guild mafias camping the zones

If only the SoD devs put half this level of thought into new content.

tfw you know the people shown at 36:55

This is why we need a fresh again

Safe to say there is PLENTY of content to make classic plus properly. but we ended up with the lazy ass SoD... sigh

If this makes top comment I'll get a tattoo

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.

They need to make an official classic wow server that is pvp and full loot, but not character deletion.

just have to scale down tbc content and make the outside world monster level 60 to 64 and character cap 60

I wish they maintained being able to earn rank titles under the new system. It’s kinda flavorless to always see Private and Scout

Shoutout to WillE for not doing reaction vids. Legend.

The flask change was bad imo, in wrath u barely feel the effect of a flask.

Make guildhouses

Fresh vanilla(1.12) Starfall 29 june(private)~5k+ online estimated

I don't think Blizz can do a vanilla+ well. I am looking more to pservers at this point.

How have you AND Madseason not mentioned the rogue quest with tons of story and a reputation that just…. Ends…… for no reason.

I hit level 51 at the start of p2

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?

Madseasonshow

I love this

Vanilla WoW wasn't all that special in regards to these kinds of things. They were in every MMORPG back then. It's modern design sensibilities that's removed these kinds of "lose threads" and flavor in favor of a more streamlined and predictable experience.

Yes

Never been this early

51:05 I don't get the whine about execution. If the meter goes to 0 regardless, and the mob dies regardless, why care?