I still had the most fun in Vanilla than any of the expansions.elvor0 said:
This is probably because i don't consider end game raiding the be all and end all of an MMO. What there is to do in the world as a whole is a HUGE part of it for me.
After two years of playing in vanilla, there were still things to do in the world outside of raiding. The questing was actually interesting to me.
Specifically things like the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest chain, and things like that. Picked up at like level 30 initially and the quest chain went with you all the way to 60, sending you off to explore places all over both continents. It's things like that i miss most about vanilla. Not to mention the class specific epic quests through end game. Benediction, the hunters quests, the dreadstead and doomguard quests, all of those things for people to do. Loved it.
The 5/10/15 man dungeons were more interesting. How many people new every secret BRD had to offer? Scholomance? Maraudon? LBRS/UBRS? Dire Maul? Not many. These dungeons were brilliantly designed with so many secrets and extra little things for the great player.
Professions meant something. High level crafters with rare recipes were sought after on servers, were known by name and reputation. Leveling a profession was a difficult process, and getting the high end stuff was profitable and satisfying. I remember for the longest time there were only 3 horde enchanters with crusader back in the day, and all three of us basically inhabited different time zones, so there was one of us on at a time.
Oh before cross-realm stuff. The servers were communites then. People new who people were, and their strengths as players. My warlock was sought after by name to do dungeon runs because i had the reputation of the most efficient crowd-control on the server. As soon as i would log in i'd get multiple tells from people asking me to come CC a dungeon. You knew which people you were pitted against in pvp that were going to be a cakewalk or a formidable foe. The collective groans when you joined AB and saw you were up against a No Quarter (Ally guild on my server back in the day) premade, and new you were in for a shellacking, but occasionally, you won and it was glorious. Not to mention 8 hour AV games, where to win you had to utilize every tool in the map with summoning bosses to help and all that. And i missed the hell out of pvp ranking from vanilla.
World PVP was big and constant and fucking brilliant. Lord do i miss the 120 v 120 Tarren Mill/Southshore battles.
All of the above helped add to the sense of community on a server.
As far as raids go, yeah, there were better boss fights later, and even better instances (Looking at you Ulduar - According to my girlfriend TBC Raids were the best, but i wasn't raiding during that expansion, so can't say personally). However, raiding wasn't about fucking Gear Score back in the day. It wasn't a direct upward progression from one raid to the next.
You wen't from doing MC and BWL and getting all of your fire and shadow resist gear, then went to AQ and got fucking slaughtered, and went back to Blue level gear to start progressing through those dungeons. I think that was a MUCH better concept than the constantly bigger numbers game that was all the later expansions. There was little to know tactical use of gear. Like in aq... you'd be constantly asking yourself things like "how much Nature Resist can i safely use to up my DPS with my better dps stat gear from other raids?". It kept it interesting.
See people keep saying that later expansions of wow have gotten easier, but i think that is mostly just limited vocabulary. When you get them to elaborate on what they mean in my experience, what a lot of people really mean is that it has gotten more shallow. Its just a straight line progression with no real need to think about it outside of the actual boss fight itself.
I think in order to make the majority of boss fights better is to do one thing. Go back to the old school way of "Bosses are immune to taunt". It makes for much better tactical play in my opinion, keeps the need for bigger numbers down, and opens up the bosses to be beatable by people with lower tiered gear if they have the skill to play well.
From memory, there was only one raid boss in all of vanilla that was tauntable back in the day, and that was the first boss in AQ20, and it was a gimmick mechanic for that boss only because of the way the need to tank swap worked.
I could keep going on but i've ranted enough i think.
But yeah, people do still think Vanilla were the best days, but maybe not people who only gave a shit about raiding, and getting all "teh best purplez".
I sure as hell do.
edit: BTW, i was playing and raiding when General Drakisath WAS the end game boss
MC hadn't even been opened yet when i first killed him and that fight was FUCKING HARD.
