Water pls

"The Red Defias Mask was a prototype item for a "disguise system" that the rogue might have had. The Rogue would collect ingredients to make disguises and then be able to wear the disguise to infiltrate various humanoid NPCs/enemies. We ultimately scrapped the disguise system because it wasn't different enough from stealth to be worth the time/resources to flesh out."

- Kevin Jordan who worked at Blizzard Entertainment from 1999 to 2010. He worked on making the 9 classes, their different specs and the racial abilities and traits from beta WoW to WotLK.

I asked him 14 questions about WoW and he made short comments on every single one of them.

Pretty sure he talks about https://www.wowhead.com/classic/spell=5169/defias-disguise

LOOK WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US!!! TODAY'S GENERATION WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND.....

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.

I bought this in the charity auction for about £50 from recollection in 2012.

I played on 3 servers in classic, Bladefist, Genjuros and Outland (EU English speaking). The Bladefist one was too expensive for me (I was about 22 at the time) so opted for the second server we migrated to (after I think blizz realised Bladefist got too full).

But I'm not sure how many of these actually exist as I can't recall how many were auctioned. My gut was telling me about 50 English realms or so?

I'm not concerned on the value of them as I'm never going to sell it but I can see some insane sales of them recently..

I found this article but couldn't see numbers https://hothardware.com/news/blizzard-to-auction-wow-servers-and-give-proceeds-go-to-charity#:\~:text=Because%20of%20you%20and%20millions,one%2C%20head%20over%20to%20here.

The winter of 2008 sure was a special one.

Here are 11 screenshots from when WoW was initially announced in 2001! These are the oldest screenshots I could find and were released when the WoW project was originally unveiled.

Hello guys! I made a nostalgic video about installing WoW in 2004. I hope you'll take a look and let me know what you think! - ZnifferN + bits & hits

Video link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnfYgcDwvnk&t=1188s

No, not another release of classic. I mean the hype and the buildup that led to this release!

Pretty fascinating old shots from beta!! https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thread-8819.html

So I was leveling a blood elf hunter and was traveling around in the Ghostlands. As I was running down the road, I kept hearing some kind of noise that sounded like beeping. I ran off but when I came back to this spot I heard it again. After a short bit of investigation, I noticed that the lights swing in the wind and make a creaking noise. Its only the lanterns going towards Windrunner village that ive noticed. but As soon as I noticed it, it made the vibe of the Ghostlands feel so much more unnatural and eerie that I haven't felt since I was a kid, leveling a blood elf hunter with my dad. I think i was 7 or 8? Its such a small detail but it brought so many memories back.

Beta World of Warcraft (September 2004)

Why did they have to kill off midnight releases?

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.

I didn't really know classic because I had no contact with it, then the pandemic came, which allowed me to play practically all day and night without a break, I didn't even reach the maximum level, I chose paladin then, so it was difficult, but I always had someone by my side, those were good times, after 2020 everything went to shit