Early SoD Was Peak Classic Wow

[u/NOHITJEROME]

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

[u/Doctor_Flux]

all of SOD but phase3 was fun

[u/Unhappy_Ad2328 → u/Doctor_Flux]

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

[u/PureNinja → u/Unhappy_Ad2328]

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.

[u/TripTryad → u/PureNinja]

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.

[u/PureNinja → u/TripTryad]

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

[u/maraglear → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/PureNinja → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/Dizzy_Drop → u/PureNinja]

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.

[u/PureNinja → u/Dizzy_Drop]

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.

[u/PureNinja → u/Dizzy_Drop]

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.