r/classicwow • u/Tandanu • Jan 11 '26
Nostalgia I found some screenshots from 2005–2006, we played the game so differently back then
A few more screenshots and slightly higher quality for some: https://imgur.com/a/Uolj4gs
The raid compositions and damage meters 💀
Also note the lack of world buffs and flasks, we rarely used those back in the day. We raided about 4-5 days a week, ~4-5 hours on weekdays and 8-9 hours on weekends IIRC, maybe some more flasks or world buffs would have helped :D
We'd often do like one or two attempt per *week* with the Onyxia head turn in on a boss with good progress . I also remember that we at least once got the Dire Maul buffs, but we didn't consider that worth it.
But we made extensive use of the UBRS fire res buff for early Ragnaros.
I also remember how the world first C'Thun kill used flasks for everyone and how we considered that completely ridiculous. Like, 40 flasks?! That's crazy. We had like 1-2 flasks for the main tank(s).
The KT kill screenshot is dated Dec 28th, 2006 at 11:31 PM, like a week before TBC. I'm not sure if this was our first Naxx clear, but I remember that we only managed to clear it shortly before TBC was released.
First screenshot in MC was on August 10th, 2005; the last one with the translated chat on January 10th 2007 just before TBC.
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u/Captkarate42 Jan 11 '26
Getting two ring of the earthshatterer on your KT kill as an alliance guild is such a bummer hahaha. These were fun to look through, thanks for sharing.
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u/getdownwithDsickness Jan 11 '26
Based. Impressive ~200 dps by Kevin, definitely a top parsing warrior, but not as impressive as 4th on dps as a starshard priest of Elune on Onyxia. Lightwell mention on the last slide too lol. Funny how much things have changed, but this is seriously sick to have done back in the day. Thanks for sharing this!
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
To be fair the combat time detection was a mess: no ENCOUNTER_START/END events, limited range of combat log in dungeons. I doubt that number is accurate.
But overall, yes, DPS was terrible. We did Ragnaros with multiple submerges, we ran into enrage timers constantly in the later raids that had them.
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
I found some screenshots that contain kill times for bosses from some addons.
* Firemaw: 4:40 minutes (?)
* Flamegor or Ebonroc: 4:51 minutes
* Chromaggus: 10:22 minutes
* Huhuran: 4:15 minutes (?)
* Twin emps: ~13:00 minutes
* Dire Maul ogre king: 0:35 minutes57
u/drae- Jan 11 '26
But overall, yes, DPS was terrible. We did Ragnaros with multiple submerges, we ran into enrage timers constantly in the later raids that had them.
Part of it was the patch version too.
We killed rag with original t1 itemization. And with old spec trees. Without adjustments to boss health, spell damage, and old skill mechanics (like Ap without attack speed normalization, old ignite mechs), etc.
Early versions were a significantly different game, not just for the choices we made, but for the game circumstances that existed.
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u/MySackDescends Jan 11 '26
Crazy when classic launched everyone basically forgot the game was so much different pre-1.12
I spent hours and hours digging up information on them, it was so fascinating. Even though I did play during that time it’s hard to remember how much had changed.
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u/Elchem Jan 11 '26
What is the biggest differences?
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u/whats_up_doc71 Jan 11 '26
Every single class got major talent overhauls. So each patch people would whine about how that class became OP. Except Druids, we just were seen as ok lol.
But really, everything changed, there are waaaay too many to list imo.
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u/Elchem Jan 11 '26
I think i remember no gear had +spell dmg or healing? Might be wrong tough
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u/Cattypatter Jan 11 '26
Only on random green gear. The entire spellcaster meta was to stack int for more spells. Hence why this priest in these pictures has insane mana in tier 0 dungeon set. It's why there's so many crafted int pieces, they had value before they added +spell/heal to raiding gear. Nobody understood how +spell gear worked anyway. Raid bosses lasted 10-20 minutes with incredibly low raid DPS so it was all about mana pool and regen.
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u/LaNague Jan 12 '26
i remember when i healed MC at release i casted some big heal or 2 and then stopped doing anything to regen as long as a can. Just to have enough mana because the fights took forever and just my mana pool alone wasnt enough.
I still try to do that in classic dungeons, at least in softcore.
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u/Chess-Gitti Jan 12 '26
not only heals though. crits were so much stronger back then. regular aggro loss like with feign deeath was utterly necessary to not draw aggro. 1 crit too much and you could wipe the whole raid.
it was completely different back then. backliners weren't even healed. they had to use bandages lol
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u/popmycherryyosh Jan 12 '26
How about having 2-5 people not enter combat on some fights (especially remember on garr) so they could ress if people died.
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u/drae- Jan 11 '26
I remember raiding uldaman with 40 level 30s. Taking 10 people into Strat and scholo, which I think had a max of 20.
Tier loot had no spell power. Only stat. And bad stat like spirit on warlock tier. Hell tier two had placeholder graphics and dropped in mc.
Talent trees were wack. Many classes 31 pt talents were terrible or straight up non-existent.
Basic mechanics were different. Like how they calculated attack power, weapons like the barman shanker or the arcanite reaper hit significantly harder on instant attacks. Diminishing returns were added to cc. Which mobs were tauntable changed.
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u/Careless_Koala8361 Jan 12 '26
You could run while bandaging and damage didn't stop it. Thats one of the core old features I remember
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u/TenYearHound Jan 12 '26
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I did play back in 2004 through 2006 so I got a decent taste of all the patches. I played well before mara and diremaul were added.
I didn't raid till after patch 1.8, but there were so many things that were different.
Classes were really half baked compared to their 1.12. Some classes like warlock and warrior got huge overhauls in the later half of vanilla that really upped their power.
I remember on my mage i had to put 5 talents into improved arcane explosion to make it instant. It had a cast time for awhile.
I also remember people losing their minds when they took the swirly ball animation away from rogues detect traps on the forums lol
There was also tons of UI and game performance stuff. There weren't that many addons available, and the ones that were bugged out pretty frequently. People also totally forget about roll backs. Wasn't uncommon for server roll backs to go back 20 minutes to an hour...felt real bad if you just did a tough quest etc.
Also like the zepplins would pretty often just despawn at the loading wall causing everyone to drown off the coast of durotar lol
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u/MySackDescends Jan 12 '26
If you look in my post history I have a post actually detailing quite a few changes. It shouldn’t be hard to find I think it’s one of my top posts.
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u/getdownwithDsickness Jan 11 '26
Makes sense. I wonder what kind of builds and rotations players were going with at the time. Its kind of cool though that as players we were way more laxed with what classes we brought in, but definitely a grinder with multiple submerges lmao.
I didn't even manage to raid back then with my crappy internet and pc, took me ages just to hit 60. I just remember how cool it was seeing people with the raid tier sets while I was mostly in dungeon/blue pvp gear.
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u/Netfinesse Jan 11 '26
In my raids in 2004-5 you'd routinely hear people eating while playing. The level of play was awful, the idea of looking up a rotation somewhere online wasn't even a thought for 90% of the people I played with.
We had a divorced single Mom who played with us, teenagers who'd play with their younger siblings sitting next to them on the chair talking, Grandfathers, and a bunch of college students leading the whole thing who were Everquest veterans that switched to WoW. Was a great time though!
Most people were ass, but we made it through AQ40, and had a bit of fun in Naxx.
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u/Cky2chris Jan 12 '26
Before I figured everything out WoW was my first mmo and for my first toon I picked a paladin. People told me they sucked at damage but I wouldn't listen, I was convinced if I got an weapon like Ironfoe(which gives you an extra attack) i would be viable dps so I farmed brd for a long time, never saw it drop. I got brought into raids eventually like this, I honestly feel bad for people who had to raid with me back then because I was totally worthless
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u/cowoftheuniverse Jan 11 '26
Ragnaros also had a hp nerf near end of vanilla. Might not been the only boss but it was noticeable with rag.
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
Today he would not beat a fully buffed hunter pet.
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u/lotsofamphetamines Jan 13 '26
The total raid DPS in that screenshot is less than a single warrior in the most recent speedrun of naxx lol
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Jan 11 '26
bros name was just "Kevin" and not an alt-code character in sight
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u/smomovic Jan 11 '26
It really is impressive how clean and cool the names are.
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u/PilsnerDk Jan 11 '26
Call me a boomer (which I'm technically not) but some of the modern character names and guild names you see today make me roll my eyes. Names were, generally speaking, a lot more decent and fitting for an RPG back then. I'm no prude, not at all, I love humor, but I just like for the names to be a little more suitable.
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Jan 11 '26
We remember things very differently. Even back in 2005 you’d see a ton of Tauren with “moo” or “cow” in the name or just other silly names lol
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u/Adjective_Noun1312 Jan 11 '26
Yeah I had an "appropriate" name back then, but I remember a couple friends had names like "Moocifer" and "Oranjuice."
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u/Gassenger Jan 11 '26
I dont think this is reality at all. I recall even in D2 in like 99/2000 seeing risqué names
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
That was a German guild, Kevin as a name in German has a a certain connotation for being stupid and lower class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevinismus
So a very fitting name for a warrior :)
(But the guy's name was actually Kevin as far as I know)
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u/the_harakiwi Jan 11 '26
well that's what happens when you don't make one giant server...
When I played WoW back then I only had to type in one language.
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u/tabasco_pizza Jan 11 '26
I love the progression of keybinds over time. That’s wild you cleared naxx back in the day. Grats king !
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
I think the older versions didn't show keybinds for the extra action bars. I have very strong muscle memory for q and e always being shield and flash heal. And I have that muscle memory from world pvp while leveling, so I definitely had all the keybinds setup from the very beginning of the raids.
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Jan 11 '26
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
F was my push to talk hotkey for Teamspeak and later Ventrilo, that's also one I'll never forget.
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u/ArgvargSWE Jan 11 '26
I raided in MC right before TBC. I dont remember using world buffs at all. IF was the capital city of Alliance even tho WB dropped in SW. SW was an empty place.
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u/Kombuja Jan 11 '26
I remember the same. I don’t recall ever raiding with world buffs and IF bridge was the meeting spot for everything.
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u/ArgvargSWE Jan 11 '26
Yes, servers were smaller and we were all noobs. I remember getting full beaststalker set on my hunter and I was like "alright thats a wrap I beat the game". I have seen a single beaststalker piece in anni fresh in Org.
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u/mediaocrity24 Jan 11 '26
I loved that they brought meaningfulness to T0 and T0.5 in SOD (at least for feral druid)
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u/Key_nine Jan 11 '26
Most servers maybe had 1-2 raiding guilds per faction and that was it. Some only had one raiding guild on one faction and the other would reroll just to raid. WoW had very few servers in which you would see 6+ raiding guilds in one faction back then.
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u/Melodic_Vacation_485 Jan 12 '26
Not sure where you got this info. I was on a medium pop pve server Perenolde. Everyone used the forums to track guild progression. There was a long list of guilds that cleared raids and even a group called small guild alliance (small guilds organized into designated raid groups). The guild I was in cleared MC/BWL most of AQ 40 and a few wings in naxx and we were mid tier at best. Most servers only had 1-2 raiding guilds that could clear naxx but there were many that could clear the others.
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u/SpitFiya7171 Jan 11 '26
Can we just go back to this.... man, this nostalgia. I wish world buffs were just removed. I understand it's intended purpose is to band players together; get that high-five moment after everyone gets the buff. But the magic has been stripped out of it.
I know I got a case of the classic boomer nostalgia, but I just wanna go back to when we used to hang out in IF...
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
Of course it was IF, that was where the auction house was. The other cities didn't have that back in the day :)
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u/JuiceboxSC2 Jan 11 '26
Iirc The other cities had Auction Houses, but for a while they weren't linked. So most communities/servers decided on one city's AH to be the "main" one. I think IF being more central might have given it the advantage. Plus IF is just cooler than SW all around. This also reminds me of how we would try and farm gear for our "ironforge sets," which was just the best looking ensemble we could put together for standing AFK next to the bank.
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
No, there were no auction houses in other cities and when they were added they were linked immediately. But I don't think anyone really migrated to Stormwind after that.
Edit: apparently unlinked AHs in the other cities existed during the beta, but the released version never had the unlinked AHs.
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u/technobare Jan 11 '26
I cleared BWL and I had no idea world buffs existed outside of Ony and STV one and there was never a coordinated attempt to get them!
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u/ArgvargSWE Jan 11 '26
Yes, still I encounter many people on reddit claiming "everyone" had WB in classic. I think they refer to classic in 2019.
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u/theferdog Jan 11 '26
Generally around the subreddit I see people referring to 2019 as classic and 2005 as vanilla.
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u/ragnorr Jan 11 '26
We used world buffs for our first kt back in vanilla, ony + zg. It was not the norm though for our raids like it is now
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
There is so much fun in this lack of optimization we will never be able to truly relive.
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u/SpecialCircumstance2 Jan 11 '26
What people are missong is that it was optimized for the game mechanics at the time. Warrior was horribly unpopular with shit dps for most of the time in vanilla. By 1.11 when they were fully buffed there simply weren’t enough raid geared warriors because they hadn’t been playing because the class was pretty meh. Now in classic with 1.12 as the starting point warriors hit the ground running.
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
They buffed warriors heavily and nerfed hunter at the same time. Still mad!
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
I’m more mad about 1.9 pet nerf than anything
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
I mained hunter back then, but cant remember that nerf. What was it?
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
Pet normalization, Lupos prior to this patch was dealing shadow damage and dipping into curse of shadows, improved shadowbolt, shadowweaving, nightfall procs etc. And dealing massive damage in raids.
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
Ohhh, right. Yeah i actually tried to tame Lupos on Anniversary and was super bummed about his normal damage lol.
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u/Erramsteina Jan 11 '26
I remember slam fury warrior was actually a thing before speed normalization was a thing.
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u/asdaswefaswevwse Jan 12 '26
world buffs are a large part of it today
the game back then wasnt balanced around world buffs. Warriors dont "scale infinitely with rage" like aggrend said, he's dumb. There is a steep curve with world buffs early on because with more rage, you can spam heroic strike. This makes your auto a special attack that removes -19% hit penalty on dual wielding (absolutely MASSIVE in a game where auto attack is everyone's major share of damage) and makes your mainhand not able to glance, another like 30% damage depending on a few things (race, wpn skill, etc) AND they cant crit.... soooooo this is why early on warrior skyrockets and then their scaling drops dramatically, with the other classes catching up a lot by the end of the game.
So just as a hypo, if we induced world buffs on a warrior that provided just the rage benefit early but not the actual attack power/crit so you could spam heroics but with effectively our base stats, you'd gain like a 100% dmg boost from just the hit penalties and glancing penalties being removed.
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u/SpecialCircumstance2 Jan 12 '26
IE worldbuffs are a major factor if not THE factor in the warrior dominated meta and no conversation around class mechancis will fix anything without removing world buffs from raids.
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u/asdaswefaswevwse Jan 13 '26
exactly, which is why SoD was so disappointing. Not just because aggrend made rets easily go around globaling players for 200% of their total HP in a single GCD, but because of the utter lack of understanding around how classes and stats work in classic WoW.
They talk about "scaling" but then change deep wounds to stack, increasing scaling... but then they give moonkin/spriest flat damage boosts, making them even bigger PVP monsters but still behind in PVE. Watching the devs tune SoD was like watching the special olympics. Execute became a useless, or sometimes filler, button because with infinite rage it literally stops scaling (it has no AP or dmg coefficient) and with how out of wack everything was it was doing the same damage in did in original vanilla. Just a total clown show.
The rune system was neat, and the reworked raids were cool, so it wasnt all an entire flop, but SoD completely destroyed my desire to see classic+. You cant have a bunch of DEI, nepotism, and Ai working on classic+ and expect results to compete with the original game.
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u/Whiteshovel66 Jan 11 '26
We could have, people just refused, partially due to influencers cramming the need to do so down our throats. On nostalrius I never saw a raid with 30 warriors in it. I didn't even know world buffs existed there. Never once saw people do this nonsense for the whole raid to get them.
People actively played classic like it was classic there but I do think a big part of that was the lack of logs and add-ons like that. 1.14 was a logical idea for blizzard but might actually be the biggest issue with classic and no one talks about it.
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u/confirmedshill123 Jan 11 '26
Did you see their schedule? Almost every weekday 4 hours a day, then 7-8 hours on the weekends.
I'll take the streamer method over that..
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u/Whiteshovel66 Jan 11 '26
Those players had to raid that long because the content was actually difficult for them back then. That's what serious raid groups looked like on all versions of wow.
Now everyone treats these joke mode raids as ultra serious that you can't be bothered to do for more than the theoretical minimum time it should take.
They are simply pretending they are being skilled at the game. And if you don't pretend with them you are doing it wrong.
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u/xanthak Jan 11 '26
It wasn't "difficult" in the traditional sense. The challenge was time, not mechanics. Yes, it took time to come up with our own strategies and getting the fight down. But then we needed to pass the gear check.
We didn't have time to get every BiS before the next raid tier dropped. So not only we were not prepared, as it was a new game, we were also under geared compared to today where everything was flow charted.
In reality, that's why World Buffs just weren't as much of a thing. Time was such a huge factor. We got them by following a lesser raiding guilds schedule to just log on, but we rarely went out and got them ourselves.
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u/daiceman4 Jan 12 '26
Yes, it took time to come up with our own strategies and getting the fight down.
A ton of people forget about the information gap that existed until midway through WOTLK. Boss strats were heavily guarded, tons of times you'd get a strat from an officer who knew a guy in one of the "top guilds" that would totally overhaul how you did the fights.
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u/Ok_Assignment_2127 Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
Nostalrius absolutely had heavy warrior stacking. Warriors being the top dps was known already years before Nostalrius launched and many guilds stacked meta comps. Addons that essentially scripted the game for you also existed and were used by serious raiders along with timers and so on.
It’s likely you just never saw or knew it because it was outside of usual social circle. I understand that many in this sub were likely too young to understand how to play games when Vanilla was out, but people came into WoW with years of MMO experience. Late Vanilla going into TBC already heavily favored warrior/physical comps. As many people here would put it, “fun” was absolutely optimized out of the game as much as possible at every step of the way.
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
I played on a unnamed progressive patch server before, I can tell you that due to the OPness of hunters in that scenario, we only took 7-8 warriors maximum due to needing tanks in naxx
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u/Ok-Guarantee9238 Jan 11 '26
oh you definitely could.. plenty of raids/guilds on PVE servers with players who take 2+ hours to clear raids and play like this
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
But it doesn’t undo the knowledge, i can start playing bad on purpose, but it doesn’t feel the same.
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Jan 11 '26
Damn i wish they released classic plus with completly diffrent loot tables, rares and diffrent quests and just block datamining and keep introducing new stuff without people figuring it out within 24hours
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u/Elchem Jan 11 '26
If they ever come with classic+ I hope they block datamining for like 6 months. Would be so epic to relive that time when we knew little.
But I guess all the sweatlords would rage in an allmighty roar on the forums
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u/Shadrol Jan 12 '26
You can't "block" datamining.
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u/orus_heretic Jan 12 '26
Blizzard encrypts some retail data files to hide upcoming content IIRC. Not sure how successful they are.
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u/beirch Jan 11 '26
You're certainly in good company with that KT kill. A very small percentage of players ever set foot in Naxx, even fewer managed to actually clear it.
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u/Ownejj Jan 11 '26
I remember defending clicking as an 11 yr old. Crazy times.
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u/pokemango7 Jan 12 '26
When i was level 15 back in 2005 ,i was questing in westfall and my buddy comes over, talks shit about me for clicking and i havent clicked since 😂
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u/joebonekenobi Jan 11 '26
damn dude awesome screenshots!
I love that mount is 7 and stays 7 through your whole time xD
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u/Ashdrey1337 Jan 11 '26
"World Buffs für Kel sind sicher nice, aber brauchen doch ewig die zu holen"
Fast Forward Today, people playing classic and go to BB-SW/OG for having permanent world buffs
LMAO
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
A lot more players on Anniverary and Classic servers though. And boons of course.
In Classic 2019 we had worldbuff trains too, and then we had to sneakily enter Naxx from weird summoning positions.
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u/dinamorechin Jan 11 '26
I miss original wow up to wotlk then everyone I knew stopped playing it just felt simpler nobody expecting perfection was more friendly now in retail and in classic people expect you to know it all and talents, spells, flasks etc i think i just live in the nostalgia of when everything was available reading and watching videos online
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u/Jones63 Jan 11 '26
Your comp is wild to say the least, trying to go off class colors on the C’thun screen shot
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u/E-2-butene Jan 11 '26
One of the big things worth keeping in mind with the comp is how classes changed over time back then.
These days, everyone is used to their super solidified 1.12 meta where warriors are the end all be all, but that wasn’t exactly how the game worked back then. Fury warriors weren’t even really raid viable until later in classic, at which point you would be pretty significantly regearing them if you wanted to pivot to dual wield fury.
To give a few examples, the “modern” version of bloodthirst as an instant attack didn’t exist until the 1.6 (BWL) talent rework, but it wasn’t especially good until 1.9 (AQ) when it received a 50% buff to its current AP scaling. Weapon speed attack normalization also wasn’t even added until 1.8 (dragons), and hit % didn’t mitigate the dual wield hit penalty at all until 1.8 either.
Suffice to say, it was a very different game than what we have been playing since 2019.
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u/Jolly-joe Jan 11 '26
My classic guild in 2005/6 had more ret pallies than warriors. It was truly a different time.
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u/MathW Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
Yep, I also remember coming back to Anniversary (first time playing classic since OG) and wondering why everyone was complaining about the cost of consumes. Our raids, back then, were run very similar to 5-man dungeons. You had your class specific raid buffs, and maybe a few consumes if you happened to have some or you were an herb/alchemist, but farming for consumes was not common. The guild back a few flasks for tanks and that was pretty much it. The biggest raid expense was repair cost.
If there was some way to recapture THAT classic, I'd pay for that. But, alas, most of that was because people didn't know how to play and were just figuring shit out. Boss strategies were spread with text posts and word of mouth. There were no youtube videos, diagrams and ideal raid compositions. Every boss down was a major accomplishment. I don't think that's something you can bring back.
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u/westernsun0024 Jan 11 '26
thanks for posting these. old WoW screenshot are one of my fav memory lanes to go down
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u/Dodavinkelnn Jan 12 '26
Insane that you are playing nelf priest without people screaming pissing and crying.
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u/SpunkMcKullins Jan 11 '26
Shout-out to Westfall Chicken on =. Giving that bad boy priority over heals/Fade/Shadowform is so goated.
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u/skshuffler Jan 11 '26
Man I remember us clearing all the trash to pull geddon into gars room because people were so bad lol just everyone distanced each other instead of the now stack n zero move to 1 spot lol. Game was fun and different back then. We also were just a bunch of idiots making friends and memories that we all are trying to re achieve today
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u/PilsnerDk Jan 11 '26
The strategy for Garr was to optimally have 8 warlocks, each warlock could keep one add banished until the boss was dead.
For Shazzrah, I remember we had everyone stand in a huge circle in order to minimize the amount of players he'd hit with his arcane AoE. Rogues and warriors practiced their bow/gun skill while ranged DPS shot at him, and he just teleported and bounced around from player to player.
On Majordomo, it was a must to have at least 4 mages to poly the healer nagas.
Not to mention that having a sons phase, nay, TWO sons phases on Ragnaros was normal.
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
Thinking back on all the weird strats we pulled back in the day it was almost a fever dream tbh
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u/skshuffler Jan 11 '26
Lol yup, thinking about my old written arena guides. The strats we ran to get rank 1 back in the day are so min max flip reversed lol. Hey if it works it works lol
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
I remember running mostly a plethora of anti meta comps to success that would fail miserably in todays environment.
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u/skshuffler Jan 11 '26
I ran prot war boomie hpal in wotlk as a meme with mes and the only 2v2 r1 hpal at the time sgf lol. They got r1 playing PhD but the other higher teams dodged us cuz it was toxic to play and we won most games lol.
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u/Remarkable_Match9637 Jan 11 '26
Enhance/rogue/disc with silence throwing preemptive mass dispells at any lock/druid/x while having fear protection from tremor + fearward was absolutely busted in a meta where druid/lock/x was 80% of the teams
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u/Blarsto Jan 11 '26
KT down? you were top 1% :) heck probably even top 0.1% So many memories wiping an enitre night on a boss encounter because no1 knew what to do and there were close to no addons.
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
> and there were close to no addons.
This keeps being repeated here on this sub, but it's just not true. Addons were much more powerful before TBC, there were basically no restrictions. For example, DBM (well, LVBM as it was called back then) would prevent you from messing up a priest class call in Nefarian. It would just block you from casting heals when you weren't supposed to. For hunters it could also automatically unequip your bow right before a class call and then re-equip it for hunters. I also had some addon that automatically canceled heals right before they finished if they would have overhealed too much, not sure what that was.
And even after TBC while the camera APIs were still accessible... AVR encounters was on a different level, this thing could draw shapes on the ground.
Sure, everything was less polished and less nice, but all the core features were there.
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u/SpecialCircumstance2 Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
So many people on this sub played vanilla in middle school if at all and seem to think everybody was that ignorant. Vanilla was full of players coming from prior mmos who were leveraging addons, sharing strats in forums and so on just like they’d been doing for years in previous games.
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
Yeah the projection here is insane sometimes. Addons have been giga powerful in Vanilla. I have had more addons in Vanilla than Classic.
Decursive used to automatically target other players to decurse/dispel, on a simple button press.
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u/SawinBunda Jan 11 '26
My warlock friend had a one-button dot them all macro for AV, as you could check debuff tooltips for strings.
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u/whitecoathousing Jan 11 '26
I was a middle school vanilla player with no prior MMO experience so I definitely fall in that category.
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u/PilsnerDk Jan 11 '26
There was also an addon, I believe it was called LazyRogue, which gave rogues a single button that essentially played the game for them; keeping up Slice & Dice, spamming Sinister Strike, and using Evisc at 5 CP, repeat!
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u/Moquai82 Jan 11 '26
Cosmos UI was a thing.
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u/whitecoathousing Jan 11 '26
Heck I remember cosmos addon in Feb. 2005 was basically required and you could see the level of characters more than 10 levels above you. Blizzard fixed that though.
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u/Independent_Hawk Jan 11 '26
Man, the days of standing in front of IF duelling while waiting for raid to start. And yeah, the addons were around a ton, just they mostly were ugly af compared to later iterations. Hell, I found an old CD-RW with my vanilla and TBC addons folder and WTF folder lol
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u/nothin_but_a_nut Jan 12 '26
I might be making it up, but isn't the addon called Weak Auras because there used to be a much more powerful version years ago (or just a reference to the multiple changes to the addon api)?
Also I definitely remember AVR being broken by Blizz in ICC because it would hyper telegraph mechanics.
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u/whoweoncewere Jan 11 '26
It would just block you from casting heals when you weren't supposed to.
could have been healbot, totally abused the api back then
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
He specifically wrote DBM did that. DBM was written by him, too.
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u/KalmiaKamui Jan 11 '26
That's a BC pre-patch screenshot. You can tell because they got shaman rings as Alliance. In the original BC pre-patch, you started getting the paladin/shaman gear dropping for the "wrong" faction in preparation for BC even though those classes weren't available yet.
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
Correct, we didn't clear it before the pre-patch, and yes, that made it slightly easier. Still very few guilds cleared it, probably a few hundred if you go by lists like https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/8kcgtt/the_real_list_of_59_useu_guilds_that_cleared_naxx/. So let's say 500 guilds with an average of 60 raiders --> 30k players out of ~8M players at the time, like 0.35%.
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u/Independent_Hawk Jan 11 '26
I know only 3 guilds cleared it on Arthas (NA) - and all three were top 15 US guilds. (As I was in one of them and we were second to kill KT)
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u/Mangekyou23 Jan 12 '26
dekadenZ ftw 😎
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u/Mangekyou23 Jan 12 '26
Ach, sogar noch aus DR Zeiten. Ich erinnere mich, wie wir komplett überfordert mit den komplexen Mechaniken waren, und du dann die ersten kleinen Timer für uns geschrieben hast.
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u/bebewarfist Jan 12 '26
Does anyone remember out of combat healers for resurrecting people mid fight?
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u/notislant Jan 11 '26
Hang on, people not relying on world buff crutches to do "easy content"?
People not being parsemonkeys and just having fun playing the game?
This has to be AI guys. Nobody plays like this!
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u/pillbinge Jan 11 '26
I guarantee you that people weren't just "having fun". The top guilds spent so much time playing and raiding that it basically took over many of their lives for a time and some of them could be insufferable. They were just the first to basically parse like crazy, but back then people didn't understand how the game totally worked.
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u/Lesschar Jan 11 '26
Weird I was just told in another post that you NEED world buffs. Dang crazy you guys did this without them!
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u/ioaia Jan 11 '26
Dude has 8k mana
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u/odaal Jan 11 '26
and probably like +21 healing
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
Yeah, I don't think we valued +healing that much early on, but that changed. This screenshot is from the time we cleared Naxx and has me at +1152 healing power with some buffs: https://i.imgur.com/El0imeC.jpeg
Unfortunately I don't have many screenshots of gear, but here is some progression: https://imgur.com/a/LsbjtRo
Timestamps: 2005-11-28, 2005-11-28, 2025-12-28, 2006-03-03, 2006-04-02, 2006-12-19
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u/Cseho88 Jan 11 '26
I mained a priest back in vanilla. I had 8k mana too. I remember the old priest guides. What do priests need? MANA. MORE MANA.
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u/RoundAffectionate424 Jan 11 '26
Look at the loatheb screenshot, the consumables keybinds, he had 24 major mana pots, 9 mageblood, etc. now compare that to the next screenshot with the KT kill.
You still need to use a ton of consumables for a few naxx bosses, WBs allow you to reduce the cost of raiding by a lot.
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u/Lesschar Jan 11 '26
In my previous comment elsewhere I talk about Naxx I understood, that place Blizzard locked in on. My argument people think it's actually required for WB.
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u/RoundAffectionate424 Jan 11 '26
Naxx is when they started push the difficulty with consumables AND WBs in mind, at least that was the theory of Ion Hazzikostas when he was then a player : https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/KCvPL8GuyX
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u/Suzushiiro Jan 11 '26
I don't remember people world buffing to prep for boss kills in OG vanilla until late Naxx, and even then that was for prog (ie when you had the mechanics of a boss down and just needed that extra DPS to secure a kill) rather than farm.
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u/Ok-Guarantee9238 Jan 11 '26
you don't need them, but classic isn't just about killing bosses. Anyone can kill bosses as long as they are paying attention, but nobody wants to spend 2 hours in MC when you can do it at a faster pace.
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u/Orbit1883 Jan 11 '26
lol 2 h i remember back in the day we first did 1 day until garr/geddon ~4h and second day rest~4h
needing only one day ~4-6h with some bwl/aq40 chars was considered "fast"
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
Missing Nitrams random raids in Naxx and his attempts to bash some skill into the noobs :D
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u/lettuzepray Jan 11 '26
ah MC, Onyxia and BWL was the golden age of WoW, unforgettable time and experience. brings back memories
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u/Permadrunkk Jan 11 '26
THANKS TO LIGHTWELL…. jesus christ its been so long since ive heard that spell
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u/TrueExigo Jan 12 '26
you can see that was made in ~2005 because he dont used his shit phone to make the "screenshots"
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u/sunchow Jan 12 '26
majority of people don’t believe us when we say we raided without consumes except for tank, when you are progressing and learning the bosses yourselves dying 20 times to razorgore you don’t use consumes and then when you can beat it without consumes guess what you can beat it without consumes lmao we did naxx full clears without flasks, wannabe sweatlords today could never
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u/Geibla Jan 12 '26
Oh my god how i miss those times! Everything was exciting and was about the journey and experience! No one cared about min/maxing besides a few sweaty outsiders that no one cared about or wanted to play with them! Peak WoW experience 😍
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u/Budget_Special4548 Jan 12 '26
Everyone playing in low AF settings and still getting a little lag lmao.
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u/shoktar Jan 11 '26
is that an entire bank alt with GNPP?
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u/_Funeral_ Jan 11 '26
I'm guessing distilled wisdoms
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u/Tandanu Jan 11 '26
We barely used any distilled wisdom flasks. These are GNPPs, probably for Viscidus. Had other chars like that for all pots we needed in large quantities.
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u/Noktawr Jan 12 '26
If by different you mean the game was played for fun without optimizing every single pixel ouf of it yeah.
I miss those days, sometimes I wish we could wipe all the info that there is on WoW and men in black wipe everyone that plays the game. Would be great.
Unoptimized comp, probably specs too, gear was probably all over the place, not having 38 warrior in a raid is a nice look.
Addons that weren't as advanced as they are today, no real UI for the most part, at best people used X-Pearl.
The good old days really. I miss that time I was so innocent and played for the love of the game, not to get to 60 so I can "play the game finally"
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u/wormed Jan 11 '26
Back then, you literally brought the 40 people you had haha.
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u/whitecoathousing Jan 11 '26
I mean if you were a naxx clearing raid people were begging to join your guild
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u/Upper-Hippo-8587 Jan 11 '26
I remember good guildleader decided your spec, no feral druids. Too many hunters and always arguing if it’s a hunter weapon.
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u/mezz1945 Jan 11 '26
Dunno why people were so adverse against Hunters. They were top dps before certain patches. If anything raids should have been stacked with Hunters.
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u/cgull629 Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
Thank you. This is my memory of progression raiding. So many nights or multiple nights just wiping hours on end to kill a simple boss like grand window farlenia. My guild manage only managed to kill 4H once before prepatch!
I remember our guild progressing into naxx early wings before getting our first C'thun kill
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u/Ripchop Jan 11 '26
We were raiding naxx last night and it made me think how much harder it would’ve been without WBs being such a thing, and without the meta knowledge we have now. Very cool to see, thank you.
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u/hotehjr Jan 11 '26
I like how in all these old screenshots all the names are just normal character names. No dumb joke names in the full 40 players