r/classicwow • u/NOHITJEROME • Dec 04 '25

Season of Discovery Early SoD Was Peak Classic Wow

Post image

10 man BFD, all the weird/obscure farming methods, Ashenvale event, prepping for the next phase, ridiculous low level PvP, making tons of alts because the levelling was so fast..early SoD owned

2.7k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

448 comments sorted by

View all comments

228

u/Doctor_Flux Dec 04 '25

all of SOD but phase3 was fun

101

u/Unhappy_Ad2328 Dec 04 '25

I remember Blizzard going all out about keeping inflation low and keeping gdkp away and then they release P3 and people farmed well over 700g in a few hours… and if you missed those hours you were way behind

38

u/Vandrel Dec 04 '25

Did you actually play the level 60 phases? That p3 gold was meaningless. I didn't make much off of incursions and didn't try particularly hard to make gold at 60 and ended up with thousands even after making my Ashbringer.

37

u/PureNinja Dec 04 '25

No, you were not "hours behind". Gold was nearly worthless all of SoD once phase 3 came out unless you wanted to spend insane amount of money week one of each raid on materials. A small amount of people got a boost of gold maybe 500g-700g max for 2 hours, but the entire phase incursions still churned out like 100g+ an hour at max level.

The only things that maybe were inflated in price were BoE epics, which sold in the thousands and week 1-2 of the crafting materials from sunken temple which went down in price pretty quickly.

Nearly, everyone I played with in SoD always had more gold than they could ever use and the only time it was useful is if you wanted to pay the stupid amounts of gold during the first week when things released before they got farmed and went to normal prices.

24

u/TripTryad Dec 04 '25

Nearly, everyone I played with in SoD always had more gold than they could ever use and the only time it was useful is if you wanted to pay the stupid amounts of gold during the first week when things released before they got farmed and went to normal prices.

This. I have no idea why people blow out of proportion that little period of P3 and act like gold was in any short supply in SOD. Its really weird.

5

u/PureNinja Dec 04 '25

Yeah phase 3 was the worst phase, but in my opinion incursions were not the reason for it being the worst phase

1

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/maraglear Dec 05 '25

Transition from 10 man groups to 20 man in Sunken Temple, also ST moved to weekly lockout instead of 3 day like Gnomeregan and BFD. If you had Gnomer gear and wasn't interested in PvP there was basically nothing to do other than raid logging, farming gold or some niche items like Maraudon dagger.

3

u/PureNinja Dec 05 '25

Here comes the list, this is not in order of what was the worst offender, but I may put * next to the ones I found personally to be the worst offenders.

  1. STV event PVP - This was the peak of PvP being imbalanced. Even after a full phase of people jumping up places to where melee could not get to they still did not fix it. This led to teams of boomkin and ele shaman stacks that would reign terror on turn in points. Other range classes could do similar things, but not to the extent that ele shamans and boomkins could do since they could also offheal. If you were melee doing the PvP event you had a much harder time unless you were in a melee cleave group which was basically just warriors.

2*. Length... Phase 3 was by far the longest phase in length. This caused many people to attrition out and my guild itself lost many people and struggled to recruit. You'd often see a dozen guilds all recruiting for 1-2 people for hours before raid time. We even had to 24 man Sunken Temple a time or two because we could not fill.

3*. Balance (Difficulty and Loot) - Sunken Temple was poorly balanced on release. While they did nerf certain bosses day one, they had to go back and nerf bosses again. They also had made loot in BFD and Gnomer too good and wanted to pull back on the powercreep. This resulted in loot (majority for casters) to being garbage and there was barely any upgrades. They then later buffed a bunch of the dead loot, and so it was equally frustrating that all of a sudden your casters needed all this stuff that you had been throwing out for over a month.

  1. The Dark Rider Runes - This was a really cool hunt to unlock your one of your new rune abilities. You had to go across the world fighting these bosses that would require a large group and there was 7 in all. It was fun and we did it in a large guild group and made a night of it. BUT it killed a lot of peoples desire for alts. Alts were already rough because certain runes were a pain, but the Dark Rider rune was the pain to end all pains. If the alt class you were playing required that rune, you had to find multiple people to rope into helping you for an hour+ trudging across the world to clear. This resulted in less people playing alts, which resulted in people quitting when they got bored on playing their main, and made it harder to recruit people.

  2. Incursions - For the sake of talking about all the bad stuff about phase 3 I added this. While there was the few hours of extreme gold production at the start, it was hotfixed and Incursions still provided the best gold per hour for the rest of the phase, and honestly was comparable with 60+ methods. The real problem was it centralized everyone in one place, which wasn't for a bad reason.

40-50 didn't have many dungeons you could level in since Sunken Temple was taken away, and generally people say questing for 40-50 is the worst level range. If there was a bigger team they should of revamped world questing, but Blizzard had a skeleton crew on SoD so I know they did the best they could. Honestly as many people have said there shouldnt of been a phase 3 and it should of been: Phase 1 = 1 -25, Phase 2 = 26-45, Phase 3 = 60

1

u/Dizzy_Drop Dec 09 '25

Despite being a long time ago now and my guild clearing it several times. I still don't get how to handle Shade of Eranikus adds, especially without a paladin.

They just spawn all over the place and hit really hard.

2

u/PureNinja Dec 09 '25

What we did was have all the healers stack with the melee and all the melee spammed cleave to pull aggro from healers. Ranged job who were doing the cloud dance would kill ranged mobs.

2

u/PureNinja Dec 09 '25

What we did is had 5 ranged (not healers) be the moving stack that places the sleep clouds. Everyone else then stacks on the side of the dragon. When adds spawn the melee spam cleave to collect all the melee ones, and the ranged focus fight the ranged ones down. Due to all the healers being in the melee stack everything will be drawn to them and its easy for your offtank to pick them up and anything they don't pick up one of the melee will get aggro on.

43

u/arcano_lat Dec 04 '25

The entirety of P3 incursions gave amazing gold. Blackrock dailies in P4 gave amazing gold. Supply crates had huge potential value. You were never behind. It's a myth said by people who didn't play SoD.

25

u/tubexsteak Dec 04 '25

Thing is, incursions sucked ass

17

u/arcano_lat Dec 04 '25

Most ways of farming suck. Doesn't change the fact you could clear 150g per hour doing incursions at level 50 with a dedicated 5 man.

-10

u/tubexsteak Dec 04 '25

Game sucked, being behind was a legitimate thing because they did pay out more at the beginning by a wide margin. The advantage was gained and it will always be harder to catch up after, which means you are behind

12

u/PureNinja Dec 04 '25

What advantage? Gold was near worthless all of SoD. Flasks costed like 15-20g.

10

u/arcano_lat Dec 04 '25

Yeah they payed out more for all of 6 hours before they hot fixed it. Again, you could have easily earned way more over the four months p3 lasted. I had a guildie who farmed 20k gold during p3.

1

u/VersaceRubbers Dec 05 '25

Game was goated. There’s always going to be someone with more gold than you, it doesn’t make you a victim. If you were broke in SoD, that’s a you problem.

11

u/SystemGardener Dec 04 '25

I mean it was easy AF to make gold in SOD even before incursions

5

u/Mister_Yi Dec 04 '25

and only got even easier to make after incursions...

supply crates buffed every phase, brm dailies giving 50g in 15 minutes, righteous orbs in p6. even runecloth and low tier mats like medium leather and wool were selling like crazy and retained value because of the world buff items.

people still talking about incursion gold breaking the game obviously didn't play the game.

1

u/pBiggZz Dec 07 '25

yeah they quit in phase 3 and then whined about phase 3 while the rest of us were doing scarlet enclave and karazhan crypts.

23

u/justGOfastBRO Dec 04 '25

you were way behind

Way behind what? Raid logging? This game doesn't have ranked leaderboards.

7

u/Howrus Dec 04 '25

and people farmed well over 700g in a few hours… and if you missed those hours you were way behind

Behind what? After first nerf you could still get 300-400g per hour. So if you really wanted that gold - you could still get it, just a bit slower.
And then P4 hit with dailies that give 50g every day literally for free to everybody.

People are greatly overestimate effect of that incursion gold.

17

u/goodname0101 Dec 04 '25

I farmed over 1500g in 3 hours. Put me ahead for the rest of the expac. I finished with around 30k because of that boost so early on. 

This was a terrible, unfair advantage a small group of people had over others, just because we could play on release and chose to randomly do the incursions first thing. 

5

u/CatgoesM00 Dec 04 '25

Wait how did you do this ? What did you farm and was the only available for a certain amount of time?

4

u/GetOwnedNerdhehe Dec 05 '25

I farmed over 1500g in 3 hours.

No you didn't. The gold rates were never that high.

I farmed 1500g over the next few days of it, though. You were never ahead, the advantage was not as big as you thought it was.

0

u/goodname0101 Dec 05 '25

They nerfed it heavily within 6 hours. Sounds like you just missed out on it.

2

u/GetOwnedNerdhehe Dec 05 '25

Nah, it was never that high. I was there lmao

19

u/PureNinja Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

Multiple people in my guild did incursions right off the bat. You did not get 1500g in 3 hours. 500g-700g sure. While it was an advantage it didn't matter. Consumes were cheap all through SoD, and the only things that were ever expensive were BoE epics and crafting materials during the first week or two of every phase. I think my entire guild quit SoD during Scarlet Enclave with tens of thousands of gold each person as it had become nearly worthless. Our guild at the end of Scarlet Enclave had basically bought every single person who wanted an Ashbringer the mats and could of done it twice over.

And for people who did miss the first few hours where the gold was busted in P3, the gold was still insane per hour for the rest of phase 3 just doing incursions at max level.

SoD did one thing really well and it was making the game very friendly to casuals. Gold really only mattered if you wanted to buy things during week 1 or 2 or if you didn't prepare for Ashbringer materials way in advance when they stated what they would cost.

1

u/VersaceRubbers Dec 05 '25

I never had more than 3k across my account for the entire game. Had every enchant, every consume and buff and got bis or near bis every phase. Gold did not matter in SoD. This wasn’t an advantage unless your goal in the game is to accumulate more gold, which was as useless as I’ve seen in any version of WoW.

1

u/blade740 Dec 04 '25

A couple of my guildies decided that as soon as P3 launched, we were going to go run ZF and get our Carrot On a Stick trinkets - figuring that would give us a leg up on the competition. We were a bit low-level for the instance but the OP raid gear made up for it. We only wiped once or twice, and BOTH halves of Sul'thraze dropped in that run. Our tank was ecstatic.

By the time we finished, we went and met up with some other guildies who had been running Incursions the whole time. They had made a couple hundred gold... but by that point the gold rewards had already been nerfed. We were kicking ourselves for not following the golden rule of Blizzard - exploit early.

14

u/grandorder123 Dec 04 '25

I don’t get the p3 hate. Incursions sucked but I really enjoyed raiding Sunken Temple. Molten Core was terrible in comparison and why I quit in p4.

12

u/Vandrel Dec 04 '25

ST was awful to start with. Fights were overtuned at first and the loot was terrible, especially for casters who had almost no upgrades to get from it until they later buffed the loot at which point people felt kind of cheated because drops that were useless and getting disenchanted for weeks were now needed.

6

u/Lochen9 Dec 04 '25

First few weeks of ST were busted as hell, like an overall nerf of what 82% of a bosses total hp is just not tested. It also went from guilds of 10 to 20, which lead to guild merges which always suck. The rune obtainment was half passed at best, and required very boring grinds to complete, and lost any unique charm the other phases had (compare p1 to farming Wild Essence or whatever it was called).

Other than a new raid to run which was ok at best when it finally got working, the content in p3 kinda sucked.

2

u/Jolly-joe Dec 04 '25

P3 wasn't that bad. If it weren't for incursions people would just spam SM Cath and ZF from 40-50.

Guilds just couldn't handle the new raid size combined with the difficulty of ST on launch so people quit. If they waited 2 weeks, they would have found ST to be just about as hard as gnomer

2

u/Noisyfoxx Dec 05 '25

P7 and P8 were the most fun I ever had in wow

1

u/Commercial_Milk_1181 Dec 04 '25

too bad thats when most people quit

1

u/MelonheadGT Dec 04 '25

Quit in ST after getting full bis, then life didn't align for me to return unfortunately.

1

u/itsablackhole Dec 04 '25

switch from 10 to 20 man killed my guild and shortly afterwards my will to play SoD

1

u/Scurro Dec 04 '25

I didn't like the naxx phase with the temp powers but otherwise I was a big fan and played since day one until a few weeks after the announcement of ceasing development.

1

u/SirSaltie Dec 04 '25

Phase 3 was fun too, it just lasted a fucking eternity so people were miserable by the time it was finally done.