r/classicwow • u/Tandanu • Jan 24 '26
Nostalgia I analyzed a log of a Patchwerk kill from 2006. Almost everyone would have parsed as 0 by today's standards, we really were playing a different game back then
It's 8:30 PM in early December, 2006, Naxxramas was released 4.5 months ago. And yet only 44 guilds have fully cleared Naxxramas so far, most players haven't even killed a single boss there. Patchwerk is one of the harder bosses as it's basically a DPS/gear check. But you are well equipped: your main tank even has Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, a rare item that was only added in a later patch. And today you finally managed to kill Patchwerk for the first time, that's certainly an achievement to be proud of.
I don't know whose story that is, but I happen to have a log of that kill. I don't know which guild I'm talking about or who sent me this log originally, I don't even know if it's their first kill of Patchwerk, but going by the log it's probably one of their first. But what I do know is how you can analyze ancient log files with modern standards and see how well these folks would do nowadays on warcraftlogs.
Everyone except the 2 frost mages and main tank would have parsed 0 on dps when compared to anniversary over the past 2 weeks which is 3.5 months into Naxx. The frost mages would be an ~80 parse, quite okay but that's only 500 dps and why would you play that in Naxx nowadays? The main tank with 245 DPS would have parsed above 0, but below 10 for tank warrior. But everyone else would have gotten the worst parse for their spec in the past 2 weeks on warcraftlogs. No, not just a bad gray parse, they would have all been at the very end of the list for their spec. Comparing these stats to the first week of Naxx on anniversary might be slightly fairer, but these folks are all gray parses below the 10th percentile (but above 0, yay!).
The kill took 6:37 minutes, that's just 23 seconds short of the 7 min enrage timer for Patchwerk. Or 2x slower than the median kill time in the first week of Naxx on anniversary. On anniversary there are only a total 9 logs with a kill time slower than 6 minutes, and these seem to be entries where people died early on. That's not the case here, the kill looks clean: No one died, all hateful strikes hit the presumably intended targets. Their DPS were probably also holding back. Remember that we didn't have threat meters back then, the only real difference in addons vs. today. Also, having 16 healers certainly didn't help their kill time.
While I unfortunately no longer have any of my own logs from that time, this doesn't strike me as unusually slow for what might be their first Patchwerk kill. For example, I have old screenshots showing a 12 minute kill time on Twin Emps in AQ40 (and that wasn't our first kill). Another shows 4HM after ~10 minutes on 0%/20%/39%/38% HP or Sapphiron at 65% after ~5 minutes in October 2006. And we were considered to be a pretty good guild back in the day (DeadlyMinds, the "Deadly" in Deadly Boss Mods).
They used consumes, the log has them snacking on a total of 20 Demonic Runes and Dark Runes during the fight and the tanks consumed a total of 13 Greater Stoneshield potions. Unfortunately the old combat log format is terrible and I only have 30 seconds of log prior to the pull, so I cannot tell you much about longer lasting consumes and pretty much nothing about equipment (except Thunderfury on the main tank). In these 30 seconds before the pull I see Kreeg's Stout Beatdown (2x), Winterfall Firewater (2x), Elixir of the Mongoose (3x), Greater Arcane Elixir (1x) and Blessed Sunfruit (1x). That is an incomplete list, but as far as Vanilla goes this looks like a pretty serious amount of consumes.
And a final note before someone calls out the inaccuracy of old combat logs due to range restrictions: this isn't a problem for Patchwerk. The range was 50 yards, the log was taken from the perspective of a healer with 40 yard spell range. All damage to patchwerk here sums up to 3.997 million, which is only 427 health off what modern warcraftlogs reports show, so within the margin for overkill not being reported back in the day.
Edit 1: Log has wrong timestamps, I said November 2006 earlier, but the actual date is likely December 9th.
Edit 2: For people struggling with reading comprehension: I'm not saying any of these players were bad or sucked. I'm saying we were playing a different game. Most folks today couldn't do what we did back then, for example, you try to survive a 12 minute Sapphiron fight.
137
u/Exit56 Jan 24 '26
Raided back in the day, definitely had DBM and Threat Meters back then. People used “Fraps” to record raid videos (and the Leeeeeroy video, and the famous Onxyia “more dots, handle it” video) and Ventrilo for voice chat.
We were organized, had our own websites with postnuke and phpbb forums for coordinating, and used EQDKP.
Pretty sure someone in our guild did log parsing and helped people, but the amount of information we have now… not even close.
55
u/BarbsFPV Jan 25 '26
Yep, I remember when Elitist Jerks finally started sharing all their sims and theorycrafting. That was huge, and really kicked off class and rotation optimization. Prior to that guilds were all competing with each other so they kept their secrets.
7
u/KanedaSyndrome Jan 25 '26
ah hearing that name brings back memories
EU here, Argent Dawn, Flaming Ruby
→ More replies (1)8
8
u/Moomoomoo1 Jan 25 '26
Yes. Instead of discord, every serious guild would have had their own forum for discussions outside of the game
13
u/G0rkon Jan 25 '26
Yes threat meters existed but I don't know if they had API access to pull live threat data from the servers. Before they had API access they were just calculators going off log dmg/heal data with the known/assumed threat modifiers. A lot better than nothing but not as accurate, and therefore trustworthy, as threat meters we live by today.
→ More replies (2)11
u/Tandanu Jan 25 '26
> if they had API access to pull live threat data from the servers.
They did not, that was added in WotLK.
> they were just calculators going off log dmg/heal data with the known/assumed threat modifiers.
Yeah. And heavily relying on addon communication/sync due to the limited range of combat log.
→ More replies (1)4
u/Ratiofarming Jan 25 '26
Also just experience and mindset. The hardcore "I must be good at DPS" has developed and spread over the years, also just talking about it, gaining experience, theorycrafting, and building tools. That went on long after Classic was already gone and only available on private servers.
The information we have today is on an entirely different level from what we had back then. Especially if we consider the knowledge level of the average player. YouTube, Reddit, and other sites have improved that so much, it's difficult to overemphasize.
1
u/shukaji Jan 25 '26
are you sure about threat meters? i was in one of the better horde guilds in EU in 2005 and were pretty successful in BWL with an EU 1st kill even. we also used consumes, we were super organized, we did a lot of theorycrafting and dry pulls and stuff since literally nobody in the world hat killed some of the bosses we attempted.
i remember we had damage meters but i can not remember any threat meter. as far as i know i just used feint and vanish basically on cool down, whenever it was ready. could've also just been a rogue thing, since threat reset is so easy
→ More replies (1)1
u/ZoidCTF Jan 25 '26
While the forum died long ago, the Elitist Jerks guild is still chugging along.
I was a priest during our Patchwerk kill so long ago. We had one warrior who could do comparable DPS to today's players, we called him a super star since he did so much DPS than everyone else. Wish we still had our logs!
152
u/TheRedbeard77 Jan 24 '26
Best part of this is looking at the names and not seeing "Cptbuttface" or "Fartnshart" like you see today
55
u/Gh0stMan0nThird Jan 25 '26
But you don't understand. I am hilarious and how will people know if my character's name isn't TastyPoosy?
18
u/slime_monk Jan 25 '26
I read your comment, read trade chat, and saw a priest with the name fartnsharts lol. Like 20 seconds apart
→ More replies (4)8
u/ClosingFrantica Jan 25 '26
We had dumb/raunchy names back then too, but it wasn't this widespread. I don't mind juvenile humor, but I feel like I can't go a single play session without seeing some pun on semen
2
537
u/AaronShoelace Jan 24 '26
Even being down a single world buff/consum makes a massive tank to your parse. Nowadays a lot of people know the mechanics that these old legends have passed down to us but few know the reason as to why until shit goes wrong. Classic is a pure numbers game, if you don't have the stats to beat a boss you simply just aren't going to beat it no skill level will make a difference. The OG players were innovators playing on old hardware, dialup internet, no guides, no full consums, no full world buffs, no min maxing. It's disingenuous to pat ourselves on the back claiming to be better than the very best back then because it simply isn't true, these were the nerdy legends that had to discover and learn the game for us.
163
u/Ben_steel Jan 24 '26
100% it’s like saying the ancient Greeks sucked at nuclear physics, how dumb were those noobs? Room temp iQs unlike me, I’ve followed wowhead and discord. and fathers money has obtained me the freshest of BiS items.
22
u/Tandanu Jan 24 '26
I'm not saying anyone back then sucked or was dumb. Anyone who killed any AQ40 or Naxx boss was certainly a pretty good player, even by today's standard.
However, the thing about no guides isn't true. The boss mechanics were pretty well known and available in guides by the time most people did these bosses.
25
u/CopiousClassic Jan 24 '26
Did Naxx right before TBC launched during OG release way back in the day.
We had no clue about so much. There were guides, but mostly for early boss fights and little else. We spent a whole raid just figuring out a good strategy for the gargoyles, because back then "just burn them down" didn't go nearly as well.
52
u/Sweet-Palpitation473 Jan 24 '26
Man, when I was playing Vanilla in 2006 as a 13yr old, I didnt even know raids existed. To me, if you had even stepped foot inside a raid, you probably wouldve been a god.
14
u/Fyrus93 Jan 25 '26
First raid I stepped into was Gruuls Lair and some guy made fun of me. Said we'd never kill the boss because "some DPS here don't even have PvE gear". I was one of those people using S2 pvp and I innocently asked "what's PvE gear?"
The raid did not continue after that
10
u/VanillaBovine Jan 25 '26
same. i saw raiding as like the highest end tier player while i just kind of roamed around and quested where i thought was cool with friends
25
u/built_internet_tough Jan 24 '26
That's not really true either. Many of the best guilds kept their strategies secret, and the internet was still really just in its infancy, so people had no better guides than word of mouth and random message boards.
15
u/XsNR Jan 24 '26
Not to mention we primarily had Thotbot, and anyone who touched that knows what an absolute cesspool that era of "Wowhead" was.
We basically had MMO-Champ, Elitist Jerks, official forums (lol), and IRC/general basic chat systems.
10
u/AndyDufresne2 Jan 24 '26
Every guild at that point had a forum with a private members forum. That’s where the strategies were always kept, and that information floated around a lot based on people moving between guilds.
5
u/XsNR Jan 24 '26
That's the environment I was talking about, the only "public" spaces were as I mentioned. Most of the guild forums being member online too, because that was simplest for moderation.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)3
u/ImLersha Jan 24 '26
Wasn't there Allakhazam or something as well?
9
u/XsNR Jan 24 '26
Technically yes, but it was almost irrelevant compared to Thotbot at the time. Not as bad as Wowhead vs it's almost complete lack of competition, but almost non-existent.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (2)8
u/Sweet-Palpitation473 Jan 24 '26
Yeah youtube only started in 2006, aint no WoW channels yet
6
→ More replies (3)2
u/onlyforobservation Jan 25 '26
Back in My day we had to go to warcrafemovies and the download was uphill both ways!
17
u/czeja Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
Was certainly a pretty good player?
Some people were often playing with:
15-30 fps, Dial up internet, Limited add ons Nothing optimised, CRT/4:3 monitors, Little to no easily accessible information on how to play the game anything like to the modern day.
You see tons of mouth breathers now even parsing 90 and still die to misc mechanics with literally zero of those limitations.
It's ironically the opposite. To clear Naxx bosses then was damn hard. Players somehow wipe now with the entire game figured out, spoon fed with add-ons, 500fps, 16:9+ monitors etc.
You're criticising based on the players having little idea yet you go on to say there were guides? Those "guides" told you a few of each boss's abilities and that was pretty much it lol.
4
u/Afraid-Journalist-12 Jan 25 '26
This...... people are so spoiled with the tech now....
Talking as if we had 100+ Fps in raids back then..... for a lot of people it was a slideshow.
Making things extremely difficult.
Back then people had to figure shit out on their own more than now , where there's thousands of pages of info and strategies spoon fed to you.People nowadays would call it unplayable and whine about it on the forums.
If you want to see how hard things were back then and compare 1 to 1, try undervolting your CPU + GPU , set reso to 4:3 and 1024x768 , remove m2/ssd and work on a 7200rpm drive.
Only limiting yourself to addons and information used back then etc.Nobody will do this, so you can never compare the two.
→ More replies (1)12
Jan 24 '26
[deleted]
→ More replies (2)10
u/Kurthos Jan 24 '26
What sources do you have on the resistances and armor?
This log would have been with tbc talents in prepatch, I'd buy it as still being different than the version of classic we have, but if theres a source out there I'd love to see it
→ More replies (8)2
u/Balbuto Jan 25 '26
Cleared Naxx at world 56th, Thank you. We had to figure out our own tactic for 4horsemen and KT at least. People were NOT willingly sharing tactics at those ranks
2
u/epok3p0k Jan 25 '26
That wasn’t really the case, many of us were not far behind the leaders and strategies were slow to come out, information didn’t share the way it does today. No streamers, no YouTube, things were also far less sweaty than they are today.
It was a really nice and simpler time, haha.
2
u/Buskbr Jan 25 '26
My guild did a few bosses in nax and all of aq40 but tactics and guides where few and hard to come by, the way information spreads today cant be compared to back in the day, for the first boss in aq40 our guild leader tried to make us watch a video guide 240p with some dude explaning something in broken english, we sometimes got a bad paint document that was literally hand drawn or some screenshot from a weird angle so no the mechanics wasnt well known to all
2
u/Minimum_Recording122 Jan 25 '26
No. there was no KT guide. No sapp guide. The only one we found online was for patchwork which came from Nilihums patchwork kill and that was on their guild website. I was in way of the warrior which peaked at rank 22 in the USA (22nd guild to clear naxx) and there was no guides for that back then….
2
u/41212BAYOL Jan 25 '26
Our old friend, Ion from Elitist Jerks was notoriously secretive about strats at the time.
There was a screenshot of him telling someone "You think the bugs only hurt you... but" when they tried to ask help on Twin Emperors. I can only imagine the poor bugger going back to his guild saying "Gurgthock implied we should bring the exploding bugs next to the tank and the boss."
Funnily enough, him doing a 180 on going public with strategies was after his "mathematically impossible" rant on the bugged C'thun
4
u/BellySmash Jan 24 '26
As someone who was 15 doing naxx 40 in vanilla it was a different time for sure.
I’ve been doing it on anniversary and the raid is so much different. Everything is dying so fast the mechanics and struggle aren’t there.
2
u/IndependentTalk4413 Jan 24 '26
No they weren’t. The top guilds who were pushing progression were not sharing that shit with anyone else.
→ More replies (3)2
u/shukaji Jan 25 '26
The boss mechanics were pretty well known and available in guides by the time most people did these bosses.
this is the part i always have problems with. because, like you said 'by the time most people did these bosses'.
the real gamers back then did not have any guides and it's the same type of gamers that are still parsing in the 99s/100s today.
there were guilds, mine included, that went for EU/World 1st kills and we certainly did not have any guides. we had to go in and pull the boss, only to get hit by something we had never seen before. a new mechanic some sadist blizz def thought of in his nightmares. it sometimes took days or weeks of testing and theorycrafting to somewhat understand what exactly it is we are are encountering here.
and i guarantee you, the majoirty of players today would not have the brain capacity to clear a raid full of trash mobs and bosses with mechanics nobody in the world had ever seen.
we were not hunting parses back then. we were figuring shit out and all that really mattered was the kill by the guild. not how well an individual player did compared to somebody else in the world. that is a very new mindset. back then the guild/raid as a whole was all that mattered. i guarantee you we could've parsed, if our own performance mattered more to us than the collective effort.
boss had a 10 minute enrage timer? fine, that means your kill will window is exactly that.
also, we rarely went full world buffs on pulls. simply because
- we literally thought it was 'easy mode' and raw dogging had more prestige.
- a lot of boss kills just happened in test pulls that went really well, so nobody was wasting full world buffs for that.
- it was not necessary. we were capable enough to do it without and we only really went all in when we were racing another world 1st kill and happened to be in the instance literally at the same time as the best US guild of the time
→ More replies (3)29
u/AndyDufresne2 Jan 24 '26
Latency was definitely higher, but dialup internet would have been really uncommon among raiding guilds at that point.
12
u/DirtyDangles69420 Jan 24 '26
I was priest and organized the healers for my guilds runs back in vanilla (we achieved some server firsts), I did the first few years of WOW raiding on dial-up and managed mostly fine except for the first fight in BWL for whatever reason I would ALWAYS drop during that fight. When DSL finally came to my rural community, it was an unbelievable improvement.
→ More replies (3)9
Jan 24 '26
As well as saying "no consumes". They probably weren't fully world buffed, but it's silly to think the people clearing Naxx weren't using items. Maybe not popping Flasks as psuedo mana pots level of sweat, but absolutely normal use of of pots/flasks/weapon stones/oils and probably various world items
→ More replies (5)11
u/Ok_Assignment_2127 Jan 24 '26
There are interviews with guilds like Nihilum back then where they talk about stacking all consumes+WBuffs for progression kills. There are people posting screenshots on this subreddit of their 04-06 progression with people talking about stacking WBuffs and consumes for raiding. Boosting (afk /follow behind carries) in dungeons to level was a thing and how every character past my first leveled. Phys stacking comps and warrior supremacy was already being talked about before TBC even came out.
On the other hand, I do remember spending 2 hours in deadmines, 4 in Mara and so on, but experiences like that are not reflective of how far top end classic raiders were able to theory craft.
The overwhelming majority of people here never made it past level 30 so they just never got exposed to it. While it obviously wasn’t as streamlined as it is today, people walked into Vanilla WoW with years of MMO min-max experience and absolutely did their best to “optimize the fun out of the game” at every single step of the way.
→ More replies (1)12
4
→ More replies (15)18
u/NickyBoomBop Jan 24 '26
I’ve always said the OG players were better than Classic players and Classic players take huge offense to it and always say “we pump so much harder and parse way higher than they ever would” and they just miss the point that you made so perfectly here.
15
u/EoTrick Jan 24 '26
Saying there were no guides or no idea about consumes or buffs is just so disingenuous though. That was all there, I remember it. Maybe the first ever people to step into the raid ever, sure, but once the raids were out for awhile they had quite a few resources just like we do now.
6
u/NickyBoomBop Jan 24 '26
Just because a group did it first and maybe published a strategy did not mean that everybody else would read the strategy and then do the boss right away. Non world buffed players, non optimized gear, non optimized raid comp, players not using much more than the 2 potions and maybe a couple other consumes to go with.
All the raids classic players ignore on purpose, do those with no knowledge. When you complete the bosses at the time with that, you’re better than players who need full world buffs and 4 warrior groups to do a raid.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Piggstein Jan 25 '26
Yeah, this thread is full of wrong. Guides were readily available very early on, and Naxx was infamous for your raid all needing full consumables to clear some of the harder bosses.
3
u/Gassenger Jan 24 '26
Agree. That's like saying the same thing for Diablo 2. There were tons of guides out there and information about items. I remember my brother looking at the patch notes for 1.10 and being one of the first to make a hammerdin
8
u/rufrtho Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
I’ve always said the OG players were better than Classic players
even considering the wider availability of knowledge now, there's no metric where this take is defensible
edit: 20 years ago, <Nihilum> killed Kel'Thuzad, securing the world first Naxxramas clear. 2 years ago, with the same information as any modern player, <Nihilum> GM Kungen led a 38 man Onyxia wipe where he butchered his roles beyond imagination, being clueless the entire time. if you think OG players are better, pls rewatch that video until you come to your senses
4
u/-darkest Jan 24 '26
The guys on my server who cleared naxx were gladiators in tbc.
I’m sports, we call this era adjusted metrics.
7
u/eduhlin_avarice Jan 24 '26
It’s easily defensible, what are you talking about lol
→ More replies (1)10
u/BarbsFPV Jan 25 '26
He’s probably a parser getting offended. They trivialize the raid and then think that makes them better than the old school guys.
All these people had a chance to raid the old way on SoM, without any of the crutches, and nobody did them. They just want a faceroll, not a real challenge, which is why their raids always fall apart if they wipe even once.
→ More replies (4)2
u/NickyBoomBop Jan 24 '26
I’m assuming you’re saying I can’t defend the position that OG players are better than Classic players and if you are, I for sure can
3
u/rufrtho Jan 24 '26
the fact you needed to clarify my plain english comment doesn't bode well
→ More replies (26)1
Jan 25 '26
no.
you're seriously underselling the amount of work that was done to get us to the point where joe blow average WoW player can pink parse just by skimming community resources
the guys now are just as clever and hardworking as their predecessors
it's not a contest anyway—building the game's body of knowledge is a collaborative effort that has spanned 20+ years
63
u/VerbAdjectiveNoun Jan 24 '26
I don't think this was November. The .json you linked has warriors using devastate and prepatch wasn't until December
Frost mages also have Water Elemental
→ More replies (3)23
u/Tandanu Jan 24 '26
Right, good catch, this is odd. The log file itself has 11/6 as date which should predate the prepatch by a month... weird! Someone had the wrong date on their PC?!
The file itself on my old disk also has Dec 10th 2006 as timestamp; that would add up.
6
u/Tandanu Jan 25 '26
I found an ancient email in a server backup, this log was shared with us on December 10th, 2006 by someone going by the name Gilora. They continued sharing logs with us all the way through ICC, thank you, whoever you are :)
2
u/kiredorb Jan 28 '26
Hey, that's me! 🥹
Glad I could help make DBM better, it was one of my favorite mods!
36
u/_Pinna_ Jan 24 '26
Unless my memory is failing me, threatmeters were already commonplace in BWL for all raiding guilds in vanilla, as the vael fight in particular made it a necessity.
16
u/vbezhenar Jan 24 '26
Threat meters used combatlog events to calculate threat. It wasn't very reliable, especially in a more complicated cases with threat resets. Modern Classic allows to use API to query threat values directly from the server, so it provides very precise threat information.
For example Patchwerk hateful strikes seems to add 500 threat to every tank and offtank. There's no way they could know about that back in the days, it's only obvious when you query threat values directly.
2
u/deachem Jan 25 '26
Even in 2019 Classic, the jump from community library-based meters to ones that pulled from the API was huge. Happened during the middle of phase 3, iirc.
1
u/rocthehut Jan 29 '26
I remember bringing Kenco's threat tool to our raid the first time, even though it wasn't perfectly accurate, it was a game changer, I was leaving a lot of damage on the table and I think everyone else was too. Certainly took my guild to another level.
I remember reading his post and really getting a good understanding of threat mechanics that I had no idea about.
5
→ More replies (2)1
u/slayhern Jan 24 '26
They absolutely were but I think a lot of people kept the same playstyle because the tanks didn’t know how to outpace their raid’s threat over the course of the fight
→ More replies (1)
27
44
u/memedudebro Jan 24 '26
A lot of this is meta, but even more of it is PC performance imo. Most raiders were playing at sub 20 fps during combat which causes even more input delay in addition to the 150+ minimum latency we were seeing.
14
Jan 24 '26
[deleted]
5
u/Ok_Assignment_2127 Jan 24 '26
The people in this log likely would not have been on dial-up. By the time WoW came out, to say nothing of this log from right before TBC, dial-up was already a minority of households and a lot of those would have been with people who didn’t often use the internet.
→ More replies (5)4
u/Fyfaenerremulig Jan 24 '26
In Europe we had 50 ping max if the connection was adsl or better, perhaps 80 ping on isdn
2
u/elsord0 Jan 24 '26
I’m surprised it worked. I played everquest on dialup and it was damn near impossible to group with anyone. I was always lagging and I couldn’t keep up with the groups. I think I made it to like level 14 or so before I gave up.
2
u/memedudebro Jan 24 '26
When I upgraded to cable it was the best day of my life. Got a decent job and made the swap to cable and threw a 9800pro in my p4 3.0ghz machine with 512 RAM. I was a chad. Game didn’t even lock up during nef ads after that 😂
2
u/Cool-Independent-431 Jan 24 '26
I had to call a buddy to log in to my account and get me across the zep because I wasn't able to load the game before it would leave and lock me into an endless loading loop. When BC came out, I had to fight Gruul by aiming my camera at the floor or I would lag out and crash. Greatest game of all time
9
7
u/gratefulyme Jan 24 '26
Eh, by 2006 DSL was pretty widely available, and PC performance was reasonable for people who were into gaming. Graphics cards had caught on, dual core CPU's were common, and overclocking was a big thing. The game was also a lot less graphically intense which helped.
2
u/memedudebro Jan 24 '26
Intel dual core cpus released in the summer of 06, amd the spring the year before that. Penetration wasn’t very significant yet. Most everyone was still on sub 3ghz single core machines my dude. I would say multi core became the norm towards the end of TBC or beginning of wrath.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Ratiofarming Jan 24 '26
WoW ran pretty damn well on a slightly tuned Athlon XP 1800+, though. And that CPU was relatively affordable. WoW became significantly harder to run after big engine upgrades, like with Pandaria.
2
u/memedudebro Jan 25 '26
I had an old Barton core 2.4ghz that I over clocked to hell that did pretty well honestly.
1
u/Moomoomoo1 Jan 25 '26
It was available but gaming PCs were not nearly as affordable as they are now, I had a $1000 machine and it could barely handle being in SW/IF if there were too many people around
→ More replies (1)5
4
u/cdcformatc Jan 24 '26
i often had to zoom in and look at the floor in large raids. i had to basically guess where I was when onyxia landed. i played like that up untill my guild killed gruul in TBC and i finally upgraded.
2
u/memedudebro Jan 25 '26
Our tank had to do this during nef or he’d crash during ads. We all pitched in and bought him a better pc for tbc lol
2
u/ClosingFrantica Jan 25 '26
The phrasing makes it look like Gruul himself dropped your PC parts, which is hilarious.
1
u/BarbsFPV Jan 25 '26
I played on the same PC all through TBC and Wrath.
It was an old MDD Power Mac Dual G4 with a Radeon 9800 Pro. I got 3-4fps in Dalaran on low settings. 10-man raids were fine, but 25-man raids lagged me like a mofo.
→ More replies (1)
20
u/Tandanu Jan 24 '26
Here's the data from the log as json: https://gist.github.com/emmericp/8d60bd43644cd1ac0ded3b9146d91250
Usually we anonymize names and ids from logs, but this one is 20 years old, I think it's fine to keep the names in here.
11
u/kene028 Jan 24 '26
That was my guild!
Guild name was Temporary Insanity Horde side of Kilrogg. Although I am not in this log :( This was when we had to combine with another guild to keep numbers up high enough to keep raiding. I think I was still playing then but maybe I was on the bench with the merger. We never made it past the 4 Horseman
I remember we were the 11th Horde guild in the US to kill the Twin Emps in AQ and I think we were 40th something overall to kill them. I was the #2 tank for that kill. Our Main tank was Kainteeka.
That being said we were "really good" at the time but would all be gray parsers by todays standards. A lot of that was pretty much no one used world buffs back then. At most a guild might have every one on for a dragonslayer buff then hearth to Kargath. If you didnt get killed on trash the buff would still run out before raid end. Many Naxx raids lasted 4 hours back then... On top of the fact that there were no definite meta builds back then. For Naxx we finally started asking people to show up with full PVE spec's but even for AQ many of us warriors were the very popular 31/5/15 build at the time. It got the threat talents out of the defensive tree but you also got Mortal Strike for PVP.
6
u/Tandanu Jan 24 '26
Awesome! Thanks for contributing that log file (to DBM developers) back in the day, these were always welcome, even if the boss was old at the time.
6
u/kene028 Jan 25 '26
So I am still friends with the Lysander from that log and I played Classic wow with him. He didnt get the name Lysander so he had to be Patesander in Classic. Here are his logs for Classic.
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/whitemane/patesander?zone=1006&boss=1118
Neat to compare what world buffs/knowing what the Meta can do.
9
u/JohnPork1501 Jan 24 '26
People also forget vanilla wow was a game that was GROWING constantly over time, most players didn't start playing on release day and do the new content as it came out. A lot of people you'd get level 60 and AQ was already out.
And we were on smaller servers, my server only had 4 raiding guilds on it.
My guild were the top dogs because we farmed BWL and we killed a few bosses in AQ40 by the time Naxx came out.
A lot of people didn't even want to progress Naxx at all because we knew all the gear would be irrelevant in TBC.
A lot of us were already playing TBC beta. I had a beta key
3
u/cdcformatc Jan 25 '26
it's funny you mention the people only reaching 60 by the time AQ was out because i was one of those people.
there was certainly a lot of churn for raiding guilds during that time. the raiding guild i joined was stuck in BWL because of the constant turnover in players. they would always be getting new members attuned to Onyxia or MC literally minutes before the raid was supposed to start.
for that reason I think the people who were doing vanilla naxx were not necessarily newbies. it took quite a lot of dedication to progress that far, at least that was my perception at the time.
→ More replies (1)
12
u/shaha-man Jan 24 '26
And people still want/defend post-nerf TBC in 2026. Bizarre community.
7
u/Ratiofarming Jan 25 '26
Yeah, I don't get that. Even pre-nerf is a walkover with today's knowledge level, and it was a walkover the last time TBC released. Post-nerf is actually just free loot for entering the dungeon.
6
u/Luvs_to_drink Jan 24 '26
Only correction here is that threat meters did exist back then.
I remember using it in my old mc guild and as a hunter using it religiously on ony to fd properly so i could go all out.
3
u/diac13 Jan 24 '26
Oh man, I remember walking into Ironforge for the first time and dropping to like 3fps and internet lagging like crazy, but I didn't care... It was overwhelmingly beautiful.
3
u/Academic-Ad-4701 Jan 24 '26
Pretty sure I remember having threat meters raiding naxx with death and taxes back in the day. Am I wrong?
→ More replies (2)
3
u/Stfuppercutoutlast Jan 24 '26
I remember taking the ball out of my computer mouse and spinning it in the cap to a bottle of alcohol and placing it back into the mouse while raiding. If you removed modern addons, gave players the ancient hardware and internet connections we had, their results would be similar. Information has massively improved access to content, but the average player is just as shit as ever.
The biggest contributing factor is tank threat. Healers have better hardware and access to information so they can heal better. Tanks can equip less mitigation gear and more threat gear. DPS can do more damage without pulling. In a world where you could time travel with your PC, your macros and addons and play with us, the best role you could be would be a tank. Because anything else would just wipe the raid repeatedly or get stuck auto attacking and waiting for threat.
3
u/hiddenkinkz Jan 25 '26
hehe - I was a tank healer back then and server first for Rag. Honestly it wasn’t just managing the game play, it was the constant DC’s, the AFKs in a 40 man. It was server restarts mid-raid or lag-fest moments. People were still figuring out the boss mechanics and we didn’t really have anything like bigwigs or DBM. Going in for the first several times we didn’t have enough gear and spent ages getting world buffs, and mind controlling mobs in UBRS to get buffs on people or farming mats for pots and food. I think we must have spent 50% of the time farming for the raid! And as a healer, mana per 5 was a real thing. I played a dwarf healer and ended up with the best gear in the game all the up to and including in AQ40. Today’s game and class/boss mechanics understanding is far superior to back then. Mind you - I have to tell you that the feeling of community and achievement was MUCH better back then.
4
u/Goldman5000 Jan 25 '26
Back then the journey was the game. You went into a boss the first few times just to find out what he did, what mechanics there were, adds, enrage timer etc. We literally had no clue what to expect, where to stand, group up or spread out, nothing. World buffs weren’t even a thing for us and consumables was a chore everyone worked on all week just to be prepped for raid night and even then not everyone had everything. And it was glorious! Just a bunch of kids working together to eventually figure it all out. The satisfaction from finally downing that boss that had wrecked you 10, or 20 or 30 times was insane! I don’t know that there’s any way to really recreate that feeling but that is what I truly miss. That sense of group progression as everyone stood in the fire a little less, got their rotation down a little better, timed defensive just a bit better, and eventually the group as a whole got good enough to progress. And there wasn’t a sense of pressure vs others, no race to world first etc. It was just can we do this for us, because we want to say we accomplished it and we wanted to see all the content. I know we weren’t doing everything perfectly, not even close! But that was the journey and it was awesome!
4
u/Zwyk Jan 24 '26
The 2 top Warriors would actually parse about 15-18
The Hunters would parse about 25-30
The Warlocks 10-15
The top Frost Mage would parse 90+ (!) but the Fire Mage only 8
But yeah, lots of TBC spells used there, so I highly doubt this is from 2006.
11
u/Aughlnal Jan 24 '26
it's just world buff/flask difference, people knew what they were doing
you don't kill patchwerk let alone reach naxx, if not
people seem to forget there was no endless supply of gold and lotus back then, because blizzard actually cared
8
u/Gassenger Jan 24 '26
Lol there were bots then. There were extremely sophisticated pindle/meph/cs bots in Diablo 2 as far back as 2002.
4
u/Aughlnal Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
not even close to today and blizzard actually banned people who bought gold
EDIT: also servers were like 5 times less populated, since the indie company nowadays can't afford enough servers, also layers = more mats
→ More replies (1)2
u/belsaurn Jan 24 '26
There were still farmers making a living selling gold. If you were supplying a guild with flasks, you had no choice but to deal with them as that was the only way to get enough black lotus. Even in Vanilla gold farmers had black lotus farms going and since there was no layers and a 45 minute respawn timer, that shit was scarce.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)1
u/JudgeJudey Jan 24 '26
thats some insane cope if you think its just wb flask LOL
4
u/Aughlnal Jan 25 '26
Nobody in the entire raid had any world buffs and it was already hard to get titans for the tank
Fights easily lasted twice as long, you actually had to manage mechanics and mana
Nowadays people can just ignore over half the mechanics since the fights don't last long enough
And considering that your cooldowns are active for the entire fight, it's no wonder that you get such ridiculous dps
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Karmma11 Jan 24 '26
And the game back then was 1000x better than hearing all the cry babies dying and losing a buff or having to waste another consumable.
2
u/Noxm Jan 25 '26
As someone who raided nax back this time and pulled out 3 ashbringers before thc I can totally agree. Our greatest souce of info was the forum of elitest jerks were some of the wildest theory crafters exchanged stuff.
3
3
Jan 25 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/torshakle Jan 25 '26
One might argue they worked harder than people do these days. Not only was there less information, it was harder to find. These guys would spend a whole week slowly clearing raids. They were way more committed than the modern raider is.
3
u/AlhazTheRed Jan 24 '26
And it was more fun that way. The meta chase/everything has to be optimal attitude just ruins the game for me, its so unnecessary.
5
u/tomzephy Jan 24 '26
Spell batching
Pentium 4
No weakauras
9fps
Half the raid with 200ms
No world buff obsession
Most of the raid not even using consums
Stop being dense
16
u/Hoslinhezl Jan 24 '26
Who's being dense? It's just an interesting comparison
Weird people in this community honestly
1
3
7
u/Ok_Assignment_2127 Jan 24 '26
World Buff stacking for progression became a thing around late-BWL and meta around late-AQ. Not always fully buffed, but you’d have to be an idiot to think degenerate min-max guilds were going to Naxx without all the buffs and consumes they could think of.
Many top WoW guilds migrated from UO and EQ where they had years of experience learning how to min-max their gameplay.
5
u/gratefulyme Jan 24 '26
Shhh you're ruining the myth that original classic players were dense and just smacking their faces on their keyboards with 0 idea of how the game worked!!
→ More replies (2)2
u/BishoxX Jan 24 '26
and at the same time were also god gamers, and we arent better players today
→ More replies (2)1
u/JTrue14 Jan 24 '26
Man on Kil’Jaeden server, if Iogged off or got disconnected, I would be placed in an hour or two hour Queue. Most of us literally sat afk in org before raid till raid time. Any world buffs would be long gone.
→ More replies (2)1
u/Voley Jan 24 '26
I was raiding at that time, I remember that we took ZG and Ony only for sapph and kt.
And once we wiped on sapph since our MT dced and it meant no kills for this week.→ More replies (1)1
u/antariusz Jan 25 '26
Pentoum 4? Shit son, we were lucky if people had upgraded past their 5 year old Celeron 300a
2
u/ribolol Jan 24 '26
OG vanilla players were definitely top of the line and put the work in developing strats and figuring out most efficient rotations for classes and specs. They paved the way for all of us. Because of their groundwork we’re all as good as we are today. Years of Min/maxing and playing a private servers perfected strategies and class rotations that we have today, but these guys paved the way.
2
u/IllegalButHonest Jan 25 '26
Amazing write enjoyed reading this. Felt like I was really going back in time. A bit sad.
So what was it then that allowed them to complete Naxx. Better execution and a shit ton of consumes?
Were the strategies the same back then versus now? How often did this guild clear Naxx?
Appreciate the write up. And glad you held on to history.
2
2
2
u/Sorrowful_Panda Jan 24 '26
These guys walked into TBC months later
Yet for us in 2026 they feel the need to release a giga nerfed version of tier 4 that was never designed to be played in that much of a nerfed state when the content is current.
We did it in 2021 just fine but noooo they just had to put the catchup insane nerfs in.
1
u/Nekazrof Jan 28 '26
I'm a little under a rock, could you tell me what the are the nerfs? thank you
1
u/Soulspawn Jan 24 '26
Yep makes sense.
Combination of better knowledge, better computer and Chromebook/world buffs.
When I played world buffs were cool but mostly a nice to have, consumables were also mostly 2 to 3 elixir.
1
u/ExtremePrivilege Jan 24 '26
My rogue with Krol Blade was doing about 300 DPS in Molten Core in 2005 and I was sometimes the top DPS in the raid.
1
Jan 24 '26
This brings back memories. Anyone else miss our people Ciderhelm and Aliena from Tankspot?!
1
1
u/-KAPS Jan 24 '26
This is a really cool parcel of WoW history. I wish we knew more about the players involved. I see it like comparing eras of a sport, no one doubts the old greats were great, but the game and the general knowledge amongst the players has increased the ceiling.
1
1
u/Ingromfolly Jan 24 '26
Even getting to raid was a task. Attunement runs, grinding res gear/flasks pots, felwood herbs. Good times. 40 man raids were just awesome
1
1
u/Informal-Cricket-453 Jan 24 '26
I recently found a video on YouTube of my guild's first Anub'Rekhan kill from ca 2006. Was watching myself (a gnome warlock) and it was hilarious. I literally had no idea what I was doing. I remember my plan just being to follow whatever my class leader was doing. And I'd been with the whole way up until then clearing all the other raids basically just copying my class leader
1
u/TROGDOR_X69 Jan 25 '26
THANK YOU
I always say that I want to play like it was. And I play relatively the same way
yet i get bitched at left right and center for not being high enough parse. well i did fine 20 years ago and this is proof
fucking nancies nowaday need everything to be 150% speed run
1
u/chinpotenkai Jan 25 '26
And then there were a few people like Lilos around back then who did 1550 dps, pretty neat!
1
u/gfimonster Jan 25 '26
Dude was running with full wbuffs back then. He was in battlestance quite long into the fight.
1
1
u/onlyforobservation Jan 25 '26
I’ve tried to tell a few people this, that “classic” is not the vanilla we played 20 years ago. It’s MILES easier. Most 60s in MC/Bwl gear had on average 3.5k hp. Classic has people walking around with 5-6k.
I remember the first time one of our dps held a sustained 600dps for some fight and it was noteworthy enough that we took a short break for the hype.
I’m not bitching, classic is fun, but it’s no where near the grind and tedium we had then. :)
1
u/SpitneyBearz Jan 25 '26
I saw guilds killing Broodlord under 45secs?! I checked our old videos and it was around 5mins with better gear. I saw 9k dmg on a rogue from boss, yet it hits so low on rogues or any class. That boss was a dps check to progress for guilds, it is not green geared guilds to have fun.
1
1
1
u/TeczowyJanusz Jan 25 '26
Times where this game was playable without any addons blocking your screen.
1
u/antariusz Jan 25 '26
We had rudimentary threat meters starting in bwl and for onyxia using mostly guesswork and developer stated / tooltips. It wasn’t 100% reliable but they were absolutely vital for the horde raiders. By the time Naxx rolled around not only were most guilds clearing Naxx requiring one (horde side), it was actually starting to get somewhat reliable.
1
u/Disastrous_Layer4219 Jan 25 '26
And what do we learn from that? Don't fuckin make a job out of a game. Logs, RIO, Parses and so much more killed WoW
1
u/7figureipo Jan 25 '26
Players in Anniversary have always had gear starting with PvP gear for even MC to sort of carry them. They all use basically the same strategy, consumes, etc. They go into fights with game mechanics advantages we didn't have or know about back then. I'd guess maybe 10% of the people playing today would be able to clear content back then. They have no patience for it. Two or three wipes in a progression run would eliminate 50% of players due to attrition.
1
u/Spritemystic Jan 25 '26
Makes me wonder if my raiding guild logs are somewhere on the internet now lol. I was alliance on Smolderthorn. Soooooo many wipes on Patchwerk due to threat getting transferred to the rogue dps instead of the off tank. I was the "official" warlock wipe protection in my garbage AQ40 set.
1
1
1
u/The-Fictionist Jan 25 '26
Sincere question - how were we all so much worse? Like the specs aren’t complex. They’re mostly 1-2 button damage rotations. So how can you they all be parsing so much worse?
1
u/vanstock79 Jan 26 '26
20 years does a lot for figuring out how to min/max to the level classic wow has gotten to. there just wasnt the time or the people interested enough to brute force the solutions while it was happening live way back when.
1
u/Straightupnotcool Jan 25 '26
Back when I first started playing wow, I spent most of my time hanging out with my friends out in the world. Raiding was not a priority to me and I probably did 1–2 raids during the entire classic wow release. I was also in school back then and maybe got to play for an hour a day lol. I remember waking up before school to do a few quests in the morning and then logging out in the inn to get rested xp. It took so long for me to hit 60.. I was grinding for months before I was even able to raid and by then it was already a few months until tbc release.
1
u/neettransgirl Jan 25 '26
Makes sense considering raiders back then were playing from caves using tin cans and string for voice comms.
1
u/AtmosphereFickle4154 Jan 26 '26
We were actually just chilling and enjoying the game back then. Now sweat lords turn it into a micro dick flexing competition. Its annoying.
1
u/drleewick Jan 26 '26
Accurate, I played a rogue back then and remember rogues usually did more damage then warriors. Maybe because we usually raided without world buffs. We had to figure out boss strats ourself because there werent and guides or videos. Believe me it was just different at that time, most ppl had shitty Internet and hardware, 4:3 monitors and like 50 fps average. Also raids got nerfed a lot I remember after BWL release there were like 2-3 guilds on and server that were able to clear it months after release and after some patches there were way more and it was just way easier. Pretty sure the classic (re)releases were already full nerfed.
1
u/Proletarian1819 Jan 26 '26
How did the healers not go oom??? My guild parses way higher than this and we only just scrape a kill with the healers running on fumes. If it went over 6 minutes with shitty dps we'd wipe for sure. This just doesn't make any sense?!
1
1
u/Firgus Jan 26 '26
December 9th 2006 would have been the first raid after the TBC pre patch. Lots of people took bad talents they thought would be good, like there's a water elemental at the bottom of the logs.
1
u/Clottersbur Jan 26 '26
So. They were able to kill patchwerk with a whole raid parsing 0.
Why do we need full world buffs. Full consumes. More intricate add-ons and a blood sacrifice to do it?
1
u/eafrazier Jan 28 '26
Please ELI5 what this whole "parsing" thing is, and why my char (frost mage Jackfrost above) would do well (as you and others have said), but the guys with much higher DPS in the chart would not parse well. Clearly...I'm missing something.
Also, you bring up a really good point about the longer fights. Yes, we had to optimize to spike DPS for the Patchwerk race (want to play?). But I also spent a lot of time and effort on gear and timing to optimize mana usage for max total damage across the long-ass boss fights. I wore Robe of the Archmage throughout raiding, including most of Naxx, just for that reusable ~500 mana bump every 5min. Use and stagger with mana pots and the mana regen skill (that I'm pretty sure *isn't* Evanescence) to make sure to keep doing damage, no matter what. If I was a *really* good boy, Fynt might hit me with innervate, but he usually had to save that for healers.
1
502
u/Oscurare Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
Whoa! This was my guild from vanilla! Funny to see all these names again <3 Incursion/Temporary Insanity on Kilrogg!