i remember back in the days, noone took wow that seriously, everyone was just having fun, noone cared about numbers that much, if something looked cool, it was cool

Spirit has been the strongest leveling stat in Classic. The more spirit you could stack the less downtime between mobs existed for you

All these items make complete sense in the context of Vanilla WoW.

the imperfection of vanilla makes it perfect to me

This is actually what was good about vanilla, you had to use your brain and figure out the best combination of gear instead of just choosing the streamlined ones by blizzard. This gave a huge adventage to theorycrafters that could see and think about the pros and cons of each item. I also fell into the trap of chasing bad dungeon gear set before I wizened up and had to figure out the best gear for my playstyle, and this was part of the fun and had a lot of benefits for people doing some work thinking about this stuff.

Spirit was actually quite important for hunters. The basic rotation was aimed shot, then multishot, then wait for the cooldown of aimed shot (10 seconds), all the while not clipping your autoshots. The "out of combat regen" meant that you had to not cast anything for 5 seconds (the so called "5-second rule". It is not just for food dropped on the floor). With their rotation, about half of the time hunters were in mana-regen mode. Without spirit, you would run out of mana in those long fights like Nefarian or C'thun, and mana potions chugging on cooldown just wasn't enough. I have heard alliance had it a tad easier with pallies and judgement of wisdom, but shamans just didn't provide enough juice for us horde hunters. Agility was great. Big aimed shot crits that pulled agro from the tank and forced us to feign death were really fun. However, agility is useless if all you can do is autoshot cause you are OoM.

You're comparing items from the beginning of wow with dire maul and zg items that were much more itemized. Most caster weps pre-dm didnt have spell dmg on them.

Health/mana regen is important while out of combat. So spirit is great for "living" in the world. Think of it as a survival mechanic.

Spirit was needed for hunters, they used mana and got oom quickly

I had a R14 druid and a R12 paladin and I disagree with your statement regarding druid's pvp set. The main role of a druid in WG, for example, was to steal and carry the flag. To do that you needed all those stats. Int allowed you to have enough mana so you could keep shapeshifting out of troubles. Your str+agi+attack power let you fight in bear form, which would be your main form when carrying a flag. Spell damage helped you cast your rejuvenations between shapeshifting...You might argue that the set pieces should give increase healing instead of spell damage then, but that would just make a feral/resto druid in WG OVERPOWER. OVERPOWER. FM Sanctuary was a great set. I loved and needed its stats and set bonus. So what were your druid's rank?

Did you even play Vanilla? It seems you're confused how things worked back then like spell damage (or lack there of back then), weapon speed advantages/disadvantages, off-hand weapons, mail armor for healers (shamans) etc...

I feel like you never played Vanilla at all- seems like you dont quite grasp the concept of a HYBIRD class- played mostly Ench shammy- they are the jack of all trades- which means they are a master of none- but played correctly the pvp sets are quite useful- though it does take skill- maybe stick to a dps class-

Blue Overalls. Cloth chest with 4 strength. Thanks Blizzard.

You've done absolutely no research on this mate. Back in the day (about the staff) people we're a team. so 20 int to everyone was great. And spirit was always useful, like really useful. Its like listening to some WoD-pleb..

Have to remember that vanilla wasn't just 1.12. In the early days a lot of the bis stats we know today were extremely rare. A lot of the best items were added post-launch and some items got updated with an improved statline to keep up with things like the items in Dire Maul, which is where you found most of the best items even outclassing a lot of what was on offer even in Molten Core. Not all items were "fixed" though, as can be plainly seen.

Stamina is required for all classes. It makes your stuff generate faster and that is pretty important for a lot of classes. Priests most notebly, but also for instance mages, who could have 30% mana regen during casting.

Actually, at low level whilst levelling, spirit and stamina items were way more viable than any other DPS stat because of scaling. For instance, 14 agility on a Rogue equals to 1 dps, then there is the formula of level, swing and armor factors to include. But 14 stamina will always be 140 hp and spirit will always multiply regain, like a passive bonus that won't be affected in most situations. In this video you are actually shitting on the gem of vanilla and what made it so unique in comparison to generic retail.

You're missing the context of all of these items, bonus damage, bonus healing, spell hit etc didn't even exist before Dire Maul IIRC, making the dungeon set increadibly strong as the set bonus gave I think the only spell damage in the game, if the set bonus wasn't something else I can't remember. I do remember the set being increadibly good at pre-raid. The ZG sets were also designed as PvP sets IIRC, atleast they're all good for it in vanilla. The druid pvp gear is itemized after how vanilla druids are played in small scale pvp, you're bearforming, casting shit, healing shit, swapping between roles as they're needed. Icemail Jerkin is also one of the best healing items to get before 60, for holy paladins and resto shamans. Spirit is also one of the strongest stats for leveling, even a hunter would use that chest over an item that has 20 agility, as spirit directly gives you damage because you'll spend mana faster than you're getting it. Please consider the context of the items you're trashing before you make a video like this, you're misrepresenting the entire scope of them and missing their point. Vanilla WoW was a massively different game through the 12 content patches, 1.12 is incredibly different from 1.0

I remember it differently :) Spell damage and spell hit on epic items weren't even ingame at the time people fished for the Headmaster's Charge, so they couldn't have been on it, for example. I remember using a green spell damage wand well into BWL which was where the epic gear we know today started to drop ( but it had % crit and % hit on it, no ratings yet ). So there was not even the slightest chance a dungeon item could have those stats, and they couldn't have been on Headmaster's. A very big concern at that time was the lack of scaling for magic caster classes, as intellect didn't give any spellpower as it does today. That's the phenomenon known as 'World of Roguecraft', when melee classes got their main stat Agility tied to AP and also got weapon damage scaling from new weapons, but casters didn't. For reference, see the old Tier 1 Warlock or Mage sets ( no boomkins and elementals back then, but you had one shadow to give your 40 man regeneration ), you will find no damage stats on them! Every item was sta/int/spi and the tier boni were utility based - so again, no scaling to be had there. So melee essentially scaled three times ( % stats, weapon damage, Agility ), which made them outscale other classes. Back in the day, rogues got 2 AP from agility and 1 AP from strength, even. Plus they had Perdition's Blade from Ragnaros, which allowed them to scale with weapon damage even more - again something no caster had until BWL ( and to a lesser extent, Dire Maul, but those were blues ). My point? Heall yeah those items were weird, but some of them couldn't have been changed in the way you suggest as some

Why do a video about Vanilla wow when you have no idea about Vanilla wow?

Back in vanilla set bonuses weren't a big deal. Noone I knew would sacrifice dkp or whatever points guilds used to get an item just for a set bonus (there are exeptions or course). Spirit wasn't as bad as people may think. Mana management was a huge deal back then. I play mage on a private server, mostly T2.5 and T3 and some Naxx stuff but even with that gear I can't cast throughout a Nefarian fight. I know it seems strange since retail WoW is just about dps and noone with half decent gear ever runs oom. Vanilla had easier boss mechanics but mana, aggro and people were things that needed to be managed very carefully.

If you want a laugh, check out the Hunter tier 2.5 set. +42 spell damage when the best damage rotation uses only aimed shot and multi shot genius

There was also a shield that dropped in Stratholme if I remember right. It boosted shadow damage..... Yes, that's right a shield with +Shadow Damage. .. From what I hear it was meant for deathknights which in the earliest days were intended to be able to use shields.

Ehhh. I don't disagree that items were not perfectly tuned. Classes were also horribly balanced. The game that blizzard thought they were making became far different when players got a hold of it. But you have to remember in Vanilla WoW, survival was important. In Vanilla the gameworld existed much differently than today. Nobody had the dps to one shot every single non elite mob in the overworld. Not even close. AOE combat was far less common. Getting swarmed, actually posed a real threat to your survival. The differences in item level of higher tier gear was miniscule compared to today. So things were not so easily overpowered There was no LFG/LFR. You actually had to go out into the world to do things. And you couldn't fly there either. You had to run, likely on your slow mount. Dungeon runs involved lots of CC. Accidents took some skill and effort to overcome. Having some amount of defense meant you could survive that much better. Everything in live wow is so perfectly streamlined and straightforward that it is a very different game now. So you can't look back at it with the perspective of today. Back then, having extra armor and defense on my DW sword rogue from Dal Rends set meant I could survive better from ganks, or pulling multiple mobs. Or when my sap broke my stealth (even talented, Sap still had a 10% chance to break my own stealth!) leaving me standing there in front of 3 other mobs mashing the Vanish button. None of those risks still exist in the game except ganks.

Warlocks in vanilla stam stacked for tapping. So yeah, Warlocks would love Headmaster's Charge.

Where you said at 7:55 tier set bonus for priest is smite, maybe it was intended for questing and doing some things outside instances, so that they wouldn't change gear so often. Same goes for druids you told at 9:00

It's almost like you don't realize that there was no such thing as spell damage on gear when wow launched. And then when they did add it (the first time, not the second where they went and added it to a lot of the older stuff) it was on extremely few items. When WoW launched the Headmaster's Charge really was one of the best items pre-raid that you could get. Epics were extremely rare, and it had a good chunk of all three caster stats (spirit being shit for locks or mages or not). The other two staves you linked were added in 1.3. Blizzard obviously realized that casters needed better scaling to compete with melee, and so the Dire Maul loot was much stronger than other dungeons of equivalent level. They also started adding + Healing items around that time, and eventually went back and added spell damage and / or spell crit onto already existing gear. Not saying there wasn't a lot of mixed bag items, or items that were shit compared to how stats are itemized in the current iteration of WoW, but it was a different game back then and their visions of classes were very different than how they are now (paladins and shamans I'm looking at you with your every-stat-under-the-fucking-sun-items).

Uhh Dalrend's set gives +50 attack power, the off hand essentially says "+50 ap" which is as good as 25 strength, or 50 agility of AP

headmaster's staff gives no intellect but it gives you intellect? i mean sure you have to keep reapplying the effect, but in essence that were you are getting the stat from. and if you consider how much intellect it would give you, its higher than what the other two staffs had.. no?

5:45 +Spell Damage wasn't introduced into Vanilla WoW until Molten Core opened.

Spirit on level 40+ mail items was awesome! When I level a hunter in Vanilla spirit is the second most important stat for me after Agi. Remember in vanilla downtime due to poor mana regen was huge and spirit helped a lot! So Icemail Jerkin and Helm of Narv are great items.

fury warriors used quick weapons for the most of vanilla... you'd never get a dal'rends mainhand for a fury warrior when the weapon was actually relevant. you'd simply never have any rage using slow weapons, bloodthirst scaled only with AP, so speed made no difference, heroic strike added a set amount of extra damage, so it didn't benefit much from a slow weapon either. while you got more rage per hit with a slow weapon, it didn't add up to be the same as a fast weapon hitting more time, especially since crit was so high in demand with fury wars, crits giving more rage.

this guy is completely oblivious to how the itemization worked

Headmaster's Charge wasn't bad, If you actually played during vanilla you might've know that

Warlocks: "We got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit how about you!"

As far as the Headmaster's Charge goes, its important to remember that Warlocks were seriously just a weird bit of everything slammed all into one class. Preach has a great video on them called The Legacy of the Warlock. Also WoW was in its infancy in Vanilla as far as seeing how stats would apply to game, and spirit was, as Dysekeru points out, an out of combat survival mechanic, not a combat one.

loved spirit on hunter to regen while running to next mob during 24 hour farming sessions

I rember that my brother did play as a undead shadow priest in vanilla, he use a trick with vampire thouch+ devouring plague and a wand with Shadow dmg, he dot up the taget then he could wand them to death while he get the healing from the shadow from his wand, was fun while i try it myself :D

I was a power level and raider in Vanilla (60 rogue/lock/priest). When I eventually was working on gearing my priest for MC raiding I went through thott and alakazam to find the best items, and had a similar time with my lock. I found that a large portion of the best gear outside of Tier 1, and even through that came from dungeon blues. I was raiding MC on my lock with 50% blues, and making it into the top 5 of the DPS meter, solely because of my gear, rather than the color. For my priest I specifically remember a cloak from DM that dropped off the hunter and her bear that was so good it compared to some epics. So not only did Blizz biff hardcore on epics, they did so on blues as well, but only in a good way. Over powered blues were great. My lock was able to easily solo 1-2 mobs in scholo with mainly blues. It was pretty ridiculous.

This video just made me more excited for grinding on WoW classic and finding shitty items I shouldn't use but will anyway.

Hamsterwheel is like a young boy. See someting>Develop an idea>And then shutting off his brain.(No offence) One thing.. "Most shamans in vanilla were resto" This is an idea he has got from his many private servers. -----------Enhancements when wow was released was amazing, why? ------------------ ||||||||||There was a thing that later got called a bugg|||||||||| "Fixed a bug that caused an additional attack beyond what was intended. In addition, fixed a bug that caused the next normal melee attack to happen sooner than intended." ||||||||||instant melee spells got changed|||||||||| This was the patch that mostly removed enhance and arms warrior from Pve use It was a change to help faster weapons be as good as slow weapons. ||||||||||Flurry got fixed for 3 swings only|||||||||| Before this fix haste could last up to 7 swings with right rotation. ---------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------Enhancement on 1.12.1 isn't amazing, why? ---------------------------------- Recap Scaling with mc gear and 1.12.1 reduced 2h weapons(slower) does less damage. Windfury procc domino removed Flurry swing haste reduced from 5-7 to 3. ---------------------------------------------------------- My one and only point is, Private servers and vanilla isn't the same thing. :)

talking about why these items dont have stats that didn't exist in vanilla

Player: I'm gonna go for my class set Blizzard: That's the spirit!

One thing to consider is the idea of hybrids which was present in those early days. Basically, a hybrid would come into a raid and be able to e.g. DPS and heal. Now they're very rare (I remember in Cata they did something with disc priest, I stopped playing at the beginning of Mists so I'm not sure if they're still hybrid or not) - no, actually they were rare from the beginning but it took devs some time to wise up to that. The gear was made with hybrids in mind; eventually they realized people are not going to play hybrids and started designing gear with a single role in mind.

you make some pretty ridiculous statements here dude. Did you even play back then?

This guy makes my ears bleed, he's clearly never played Vanilla, and did not understand the mechanics going on behind the scenes back then, SPIRIT WAS FUCKING IMPORTANT. If you're a raid healer, doing Nefarian, people would literally BLACKLIST you from the raiding community if you went OOM halfway through the fight because you did not stop casting to regen mana, there's a reason we had 4 healers back in the days, so they could take turns, healing, regen mana and then begin healing again. AAARGH.

part of the game was finding out what stats you need/ are best for you if all the item were best in slot why even have loot? Just give people all the stats they need by default and gear only increases armour

"Was it all bad in vanilla? Only if you were a Ret paladin"

u are complaining about the tier 1 molten cor esets, but i remember rocking both sets full on priest mage warlock and shaman and i rekt literally everyone, so there is nothing wrong with the stats, ur talking about making them stronger, they were strong enough lol this video doesn't make any sense to me ^^

many things were broken back in the days ... thats why i quite palying after i reach 60 lvl on zeth .. like only mages farm gold 100X time faster ppl dont want enha/feral/sp in raids ...

Blizz had a hard-on for Spirit. It was actually an okay stat for healers in 5-person dungeons because you weren't constantly casting. A lot of itemisation simply didn't make sense - and was confusing for many players who trusted that Blizzard knew what they were doing when it came to gear.

I know quite a few shamans grabbed Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon (100% mana regen while casting for 15 seconds) to go with their Tier 1 sets, so that 112 spirit was actually quite useful... That AND Innervate from druids meant that the mana regen multiplied out from SPIRIT not mp5... I had a spirit priest (stacking spirit, human) in classic, and BC, and Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon was my primary trinket in both - there was that heroic dungeon trinket too, but that only gave 30% mana regen when it procced. Sure the heals weren't as amazing as the atypical Holy priest, but my primary job was spamming Renews and Power Word: Shield, and rebuffing people who got resurrected (a common occurrence during Deep Breath).

This guy is mental

I was waiting for this video for soo long and I'm sure that this video will be great!

We called it tier 0.5 and tier 0.75, not dungeon 1 and dungeon 2, on the server I played on in EU-Eng back in vanilla. And then t2 would be the MC sets. As for the weird stats for items in vanilla, it was meant for non-raid content where people had the freedom of choice to either be a teenzy tiny bit more tanky or have a teenzy tiny more damage even with healing gear or more health regen for a little faster recovery between fights out in the world content or even for just a tiny bit of utility inside bgs, and so on and so forth. Such items weren't meant for BiS gearing to begin with. The same for gear that dropped in raids, some were not meant for BiS gearing. They were made for customization for optional content, that's all.

Regarding the Headmaster's Staff, Spell damage on weapons was almost impossible to find before BWL. There wasn't much to go around. Your list has a bunch of green items that most people didn't know existed. People weren't that well informed in the vanilla days. And Warlocks actually really liked stamina. Mostly because it let them life tap with more safety. The int buff helps them life tap less often, but its really about the stamina. 30 stam was pretty damn high. Again, there was almost no spell damage in the entire game, so at that point you had nothing else to grab for gear except stam or int. And to a warlock, stam IS int. Why grab int when you can grab stam? Also your alternative is a DM tribute weapon which...well in those days I think a majority of players probably didn't even know that thing existed. Let alone could do tribute runs regularly. Headmaster's charge was just more well known because its in scholomance and people know its in scholomance because they run scholomance regularly.

Imperfections were part of Vanilla WoW phenomena. Go outside your box to see the big picture.

ok you clearly have no idea what a healer class is a portion of your out of combat mana regen was available during combat this is for all casters that is why the spirit and all Trolls keep a part of their health regen so the claims about spirit you are having is stupid

Dal'rend set had 41.4 DPS, which was the highest obtainable on a blue melee weapon at the time. The main hand was 2.8 speed, the slowest you could reasonably find at that DPS - before normalization, this was amazing. And the offhand was the fastest at that DPS level easily obtainable, perfect for on-hit procs. The additional stats were bizarre, sure, but for the longest time, they really were the best readily available option for melee.

I'm glad you made this video and I agree, the itemization was just weird back then. I know ur a big fan of vanilla so its good to see someone point out some legitimate flaws in the game design back then without acting like vanilla was perfect. Don't get me wrong... I loved my time with vanilla and still miss the community and the adventures I'd have in classic WoW but it def had some issues which Blizz thankfully improved on with later xpacs. If I had to pick my top 3 issues with vanilla it would be: 1. Spec viability - Only certain specs were viable and good for raids, most notably with hybrid classes like shaman or druid who usually had to heal, or how warrior was the only real tank. This is the biggest issue for me because I love hybrid classes and specs like Enhancement shaman but its sucks when they aren't very well designed or up to par compared to other dps.... we were basically a buffbot (tho shaman/pally did do a good job with that buff support role). Oddly enough tho... back in the day people didn't care as much about specs as they do now.... they just needed 40 people to raid and took variety of classes, while private servers today people have much more info about how specs performed and that bias has influenced them to be more negative nowadays in game toward a druid if they are balance instead of resto for example. Class balance in WoW now is amazing, almost every spec is viable and fun to play, there is no more hybrid tax or anything, and the specs even feel different from each other. There were alot of improvements to gear that helped this, which is my next point. 2. Gear itemization - This is what you mentioned, but the gear design choices were pretty bad and again hybrids got screwed over for having different roles or playstyles which made gearing more complicated. Gear was badly itemized.... it is hilarious to see people defend spirit when it truly was a junk stat.... for healers, priest/druid worked better with spirit while pally/shammy was better with mp5 cause of healing styles, but many of these bonus stats like spell power, hit, or mp5 were not found on gear early on.... just spirit. It was still a useless stat tho.... and stuff like how INT only increased mana pool but not SP while STR/AGI did increase AP and crit. You had plate classes wearing rogue leather at times cause it was better itemized, or even druids wearing "rogue" gear cause their gear had all stats so half of em were useless in any role (I know, they supposed to do it all, but doesn't usually work like that). The thing that annoys me the most is how spell damage and healing was split, along with hit and crit rating for spells or melee, and then you had resistances. This made being a hybrid very difficult to gear properly. Gear drops were rare too and had to be shared between 40 people instead of 20.... so took forever to get even shitty gear. Thankfully in later xpacs they merged spell damage and healing into just spell power, made hit and crit the same for melee or casters, and slowly got rid of resistance gear which was just a hassle. They fixed primary stats too, so STR/AGI/INT gave AP or SP based on ur class and you always scaled up in damage with better gear which makes way more sense. The most recent improvement they made in WoD/Legion that I love is that your gear's primary stat (str, agil, or int) will switch based on ur spec, so as melee Enhance my armor uses agility but when I switch to resto spec the stat turns into intellect. It makes it SO much easier to gear your offspec since they can share much more gear..... even a trinket drop can switch from STR to AGIL so its useful for any melee class in your guild. Tier gear is shared too, but the set bonuses change based on ur spec. Brilliant idea. 3. Talents and abilities - I feel like I typed too much already so not gonna go into detail, but I much prefer the new talent system and ability rotations. The old talents had tons of boring 3% hit and stuff, few actual talents to change gameplay and still had "cookie cutter" specs even if people could be more creative. The new talents actually give u choices that can change how u play the spec, plus another pvp talent tree for more customization. The rotations back then were super simplistic too, you mostly spammed just a few abilities with little synergy or combos or procs, had to deal with debuff limits and stuff, and it was just slower cause stuff had longer cd's and for melee more reliance on passive autoattack damage. New rotations are more engaging. They have made tons of improvements to the game, mostly for the better..... but the playerbase and community was just better in vanilla. People talked to each other, helped, grouped up, and u knew ur server well. Now people are just spoiled and bitchy and wanna rush everything..... u can see how much better stuff like gearing and class design is now but people still bitch about the dumbest shit without realizing how good they got it compared to back then. Another thing I miss from Vanilla is /global chat. They have unofficial ones on most servers like LFG channel but people rarely use them... in vanilla it was like trade but good for all kinds of stuff like quest help or finding groups or doing world pvp or whatever... it helped make u feel connected and learn more bout the names on ur server.

I'm sorry but it sounds like you're a bit uneducated with vanilla.. 1. Yes there was spirit on most things because most classes did use mana and there was no real regen in combat aside from that or mana pots. 2 Classic Hunter.. it's mail? it must be for me...3. no spell power is and was common.. why do you think Zandalarian Hero Charm was so fking broken for mages? oh yah the Spell Power buff... RIP

The way you are talking it tells me you didn't play Vanilla wow.

Right up until late in the WoW Beta phase Spirit governed items/enchant procs, and said procs were a huge component of damage. This is why spirit was inexplicably on everything, and often weighted very highly on items where it made no sense. Imagine that jerkin in a world where Spirit makes Windfury Weapon proc more, and it starts to make a bit of sense. Fortunately for all of us though, someone realized that proc based damage for literally everyone was a terrible idea, and so they took that property off of spirit. However, they didn't have time to change all the gear. So spirit on Valor, spirit on random epics. Spirit for everyone.

What do I remember best about Vanilla WoW... before the BG's having PVP servers crash because open world PVP battles would overload a zone map when too many players got involved and after 3 or 4 crashes, when they'd restart a server, logging in and finding yourself at your hearth point.

this entire vid is basicly 'hurrdurr old items didnt make sence cuz diff speccs' but 99% of people doing raids back then if druid, were healer, if shaman, were healer, if paladin, buffbot. 'no spellpower on it' woops seems you forgot that intellect gave spellpower back then and items with actual + spell damage on it were like, ...2 only....

That's what's so great about Vanilla. It's not perfect. But it works 👍🏻

Spirit is important while leveling. ESPECIALLY for a Hunter / Shaman that know how to utilize the 6 second rule for mana to regen once more while in combat. ie: if you do not use any abilities that cost mana, starting at 6 seconds, you will start to regen mana based on your spirit. This allows hunters and shaman to have ZERO down time. ZERO. A hunter that stacks agil / stam / int may be able to burst a mob down 10-15% faster, but will need to stop after every 2 or 3 mobs to drink. With your hunter, you open with your mana abilities Mark > Sting > Arcane shot, and then just auto attack until it is dead. You end with full mana because of your spirit.

I had full Magister's on my mage, but I rarely ever wore the entire set at any given time. Mind you, I also played before many items had been changed to add spell damage and healing in the BWL patch, and by that time, I had mostly upgraded my gear to phat purplez. I had actually a lot of go-to sets; the typical resistance gear, a high crit set (for fire spec), and an all out +spell damage set (for frost), and a high stamina/spell damage pvp set. Also, spirit was useful for the cloth casters to a pretty high degree. At least 1/3 to 1/2 your DPS uptime was wanding. I have run OOM on quite literally every raid boss in Vanilla, and had to resort to wanding for some time while mana regen'd. Higher Spirit reduced this wand time, with my priest regenerating mana at tremendous speeds (alt night was filled with more priests then we needed, so I got to raid Shadow).

Great video Hamsterwheel

Incoming vanilla fanbois who will dislike cause "old is best" logic.

The weird stats and offensive set bonuses on healer sets were supposed to make it so that healers didn't get as shafted when it comes to farming raid mats/pvp with their PvE gear upgrades. DPS classes still got way better upgrades for their non-raiding activities from their raid items but this is why they are there.

a lot of things in vanilla were actually more broken than what people think, which is why a lot of stuff got nerfed. +healing on a hunter allowed Azuragos to get solo'd due to how much healing was done to the pet. +Arcane with the trinket from blackwing lair trinket was able to blow up large groups in AV choke points. Hell, hybrid builds were actually stronger than what people thought back then. Most players followed the "cookie cutter" marks build, but had points in talents they were never gonna use. Personally back then I played a Survival hunter(for the agility multiplier)/Marks(intel atk power boost/aimshot) build. Would you say no to 600 agil and 1400 atk power with 40% crit unbuffed? This was in full T2 and ZG claw weapons (intel enchanted). Hell, entrapment(which proc'd off the toon and the trap which multplied the effect) is what helped my raiding group get the first Nef kill at the time. You have players who either don't know what they are doin, follow the cookie cutter, or think out side the box. This was my first main. My second main was a feral druid who could tank or dps in "dps gear" and still had 12k mana if I put on "healing gear". Downranking was the key to never really go OOM. I used to toss out my innervates to other healers which got annoying since I rarely got to use it myself. The trick to a good feral was gearing back then... the darkmoon trinkets Heroism and Maelstom were amazing (alot of people didn't realize they didnt have an ICD). With the full PvP set, those trinkets, some MC/ZG items and the AQ20 silithus quest gear(rep items) and Live strat book off hand, you actually did amazing damage... if you had a raid willing to take you (luckily I did with my 2nd raiding group). Even was able to solo full instance bosses in LBRS (stealth run) and farmed Uldaman (mageweave/silk farming) constantly to get gold. Back then it truly was the player, not the game, that broke stuff. A lot of gear was also overlooked.

You should have named this video "WoW vanilla and it's items that are trash"

You didn't play Vanilla huh? Since you seem to forget how important spirit was, and also, you are taking the piss out of totally good items , since its there for you while you level up and gear up, in vanilla, gear was much, MUCH harder to get... Vanilla was the start of WoW, Its like looking back at your past and blaming yourself for how it was like, i dont know, 20 years ago...

That first item - Icemail Jerkin was my first epic drop in classic WoW. I was killing crabs for some reason, in Swamp of Sorrows I think it was and it dropped! I linked it in guild and everyone gave congrats! I was on my warrior and looked at it and said, what is this even for? We couldn't decide. It was in my bank for years as no one wanted it! It may even still be there.

As a rank 13 pvp feral druid, I agree that the complete set was not optimal for doing damage in cat form. Apart from that evidence, I used to shapeshift a lot and used all my forms/aspects in pvp such that the stats in the different categories really improved my survivability, especially when I equipped the epic set vs the rare set.

The author of this video has an ego because he played in vanilla at the final tier of game and comes off as a knowledgeable player. However if watching this and other of his videos, you will realize that he is very misinformed. Thus leading to confusion which should not be happening had he been correct on his statements. He's basically an egotistical know it all telling others that played vanilla how things where. It just so happens that he is wrong and refuses to understand that based on his replies in the comments. It's almost as if he made this video with an incentive for views.

Vanilla sucks. Jk

Because in Vanilla WoW - Hunters used MANA - not Focus. It was common in BC even for Hunters to enchant +Mp5 to help with Mana Regen so they could DPS longer. That's why Agility Mail typically had Spirit on it.

Great video. One thing I wanted to point out is I don't believe everyone was out there to have the most amazing stats, especially back then when MMOs were still developing people were just enjoying grouping together to have an adventure or explore the world or just challenging themselves against dungeons and mobs. I know I didn't care if I had BIS. I would prefer having a matching set of armor than the absolute best stats, or just helping a friend travel to a far off place to get that blue or purple item. Going to Shadow Fang Keep as an 20ish alliance group was such a thrill on a PvP server, I honestly don't remember that piece of equipment that dropped, but the experience was the fun part. I think that is why games really have such a toxic community thanks to people nitpicking and being obsessed over stats rather that just "playing" the game. Doesn't help developers have removed a so much of the Multiplayer from MMO, that's a whole other subject.

the icemail jerkin is absolutely underrated for hunters, and i buy it off the AH every time i see it underpriced by people who don't know the value of spirit. even warriors can beenfit from a small amount of spirit. any leveling spriest worth their brass knows the importance. sadly, most people are too used to retail to know.

I mean, I for one mained a paladin in vanilla wow and from that standpoint I could see the rationale of what they were thinking with some of the dungeon sets: it may be a little silly, but it seems like Blizzard gave these hybrid classes “a little bit of everything” with the expectation that they’d actually be DOING “a little bit of everything” - the concept of different flavors of the jack of all trades, the ace of none. I get it, but it didn’t work out for most people’s play styles and that’s why the change was necessary...

Throwing spirit onto an item was a way to use up some of it's stat budget without making it more powerful. It's why it showed up on literally everything. Blizzard getting better as Vanilla went on wasn't so much them figuring out how to make items as much as it was progression. The off hand sword was great for combat sword rogues who wanted two swords. The defense wasn't useless because things did try and hit you from time to time. In early raiding 20 int was a pretty big deal, when you had to stack literally every buff to make progress. The low level epic mail were resto shaman pieces. The occasional dps set bonus on healer gear helped out when farming.

I swear to god min/maxers and meta theorycrafters are the plague of gaming... Pick a class, figure out the best damage output rotation, base every gear drop expectation in the game for their class to be based on said rotation. Like... Wtf? You were supposed to do something else than raids... Respecs were costing an arm, what is wrong with a little bit of versatility and extra stats? It's really annoying... Especially when this elitist way of approaching things is becoming the fucking rule or "it doesn't make sense and you're a noob". That's why I'm so afraid about Classic WoW. KZfaq is already littered with "fastest way to 60 right here boyz", "best gold farming methods here", "dungeon and raid guides here guyz", "essential addons for classic wow gentz", "everything you need to get before the first raid mates"... I miss the times when all those so called guides were fucking books that you had to buy. You guys are hurting games like no others. Especially this one, I used to call it the retail mentality but since it's gonna be imported to Classic thanks to KZfaqrs and Streamers I guess we'll just have to let it happen. Incoming : reserved runs/BiS only raid spots/viable specs only group spots/herbs camping/devilsaur mafia/gold sellers to satisfy the needs of all these "rush" players/fucked up economy. It's not the games that are streamlined, it's the freaking player base. When too much knowledge actually fucks all the fun in video games.

In regards to the staff, I will point out that 1) spell damage was *EXCEEDINGLY* rare to find on items... intellect just increased max mana, and maybe gave a little bit of crit. Warlocks thrived on Stamina. ALL the stamina. More stamina meant more Life Taps, which meant more mana; Intellect was actually a DUMP stat for Warlocks, believe it or not. They wouldn't say no to it, but they didn't actively seek it out. Maximizing your DPS wasn't the concern back then - your tanks determined your max DPS by virtue of how much threat they could put out, and you had to slow down your pace so as to not rip aggro. The concern back then was longevity. Going OOM wasn't just a risk; it was a FACT. Sooner or later, you would run out of mana to DPS with. Every caster who played back then has resorted to using their wand on at least a few occasions. Except as a Warlock... you could just lifetap a couple times and keep going. Aww yeah. What's that? More stamina? MORE HEALTH? MORE LIFETAPS! YAY! Holy shit, this staff has a metric fuckton of stamina on it? GIMME! EDIT: I... wait. You bash the Headmaster's Charge for not having any good Warlock stats... but you then proceed to slam Spirit on Warlock items because they can lifetap? Hey, guess what's good for lifetapping? MORE HEALTH.

the druid pvp set was great for hybrid builds. the mana regenerates in cat and bear form

Man, the people who worked at blizzard back then really had no clue what they were doing with that game, but neither did the people know how to play it, so it was balanced 😁

I played a mage and a paladin in Vanilla. I didn't have much use for spirit on my mage but did need a tiny bit due to Mage Armor. As a frost mage, my spells were very inexpensive, and I never ran out of mana. My paladin ended up with spirit on gear quite a bit, but paladins (even holy ones) didn't have any use for spirit back then. While healing dungeons, I counted on critical healing to return mana and could judge seal of wisdom on the enemy to regain more mana through melee attacks.

Stats weren't weighted towards an ilvl in vanilla (ilvl was added in later) Additional spirit was a bonus for any caster's gear, it ment you didn't have to drink as much.

Total agreed. The stats in PvP gear back in Vanilla were actually better than most tier sets. I think whoever design these items didn't really pull their head out of their ass until BC and Wrath and that was when the BiS gears came in to play.

Those Dal-Rend's i think was the single best drop in my entire vanilla experience. I was a warrior, and the only melee class doing that dungeon. And BOTH Dal-Rend's dropped at the same time. That instantly made me switch to Fury. (When switching specs in vanilla was a big deal) Praise RNGesus!

1) Icemail Jerkin - hunter lvling chest ..has agi ..good, has stamina ...good, has some resists that could be usefull in pvp due to tick related CC checks and has spirit.... WHile lvling you to use arcane and drop dot sting on a target after that you mostly autoshoot the mob wihle going into 5 sec out of combat regen and spirit in this moments is quite helpfull to reduce downtime. and lvling in vanilla is quite a challenge so it's quite good to have JUST lvling related items. 2) resto shamans while healing 5 man insts and having NO + heal gear can not capitalize from spamming cheap heals, so the best strat is to wait till tank HP drops and then drop a big heal.... while healing like that u're having some gaps and u regen your mana with spoirit quite well. There is no mp5 gear that will regen SO much mana at these lvls of the game. Helm of Narv works with the same logic in mind, but still alot of stats even minus the spririt for a 54 lvl item, so just take some out of combat mana regen as a bonus.

spirit originally increased proc rates. Plus, as a filler stat, its not all that bad, sure it doesn't do too much, but its kinda nice to regenerate a bit faster.

I wouldn't have sold that headmaster's charge for a million if I could. After I got that staff, together with some pvp blues, I got known as the "tankmage", with the added feat of making all warlocks jealous.

as an enhance shaman, Blizzard didn't learn how to make gear until the sunwell patch

Dal Rend's sword set was amazing for combat rogues in the 50-59 bracket. It wasn't necessarily the stats, but the dmg they gave. Also the offhand gave energy back I believe? I dominated the 50-59 bracket with these guys for quite a while.

I believe it was because Blizzard was trying to not think about Min Maxing. So they made items that gave balance to a class, but people would never use it.

Icemail Jerkin = Level 39, Main atribute is Spirit. Made for Holy palies or Resto shamans. Just because they could equip Leather or cloth, doesn't mean that's what blizz intended.

It's like you NEVER played vanilla. Imagine that.

Back in the Beta Blizz thought Agi would be a nice Defensive Stat for Casters because it gives Armor/Dodge and Spirit was probably meant as Regeneration Stat for all Classes. But Dire Maul Itemization was 10x better already.