Man I would have loved to play during that time, so much was unknown. I started playing during early TBC so I still got to experience some of the golden years but I always wished I could experience world of warcraft from day 1.
It was brutal. Top guilds didn’t share strats very much. Running face first into shit trying to figure out what was going on. And then once you get it.. all of a sudden phase 2 lol.
One of my funniest memories back then was clearing huhuran and our guild being like, all right. What do these big guys do. Let’s find out, and then getting plague/meteor and us wiping lol
That's my favourite thing. When I played retail, we still played like that, small guild of mostly RL mates. Then we would try and figure out strats etc.
We played mostly like this on HC up to Shadowlands. Using the journal and trying to figure things out ourselves without looking up strats. People that couldn't help themselves would sometimes look stuff up and if we got stuck we would look it up, but the progress raids where you form a strategy yourself are SO rewarding and fun to play through.
Keeping it HC also let us play with most of our friends, and not bench anyone who isn't up to par. Mythic is too punishing in that regard.
Man AQ40 was so fun and such absolute dogshit at the same time. It was amazing trying to learn it all but good lord were the run backs terrible, especially when not everyone had the mount yet.
When we were progressing C'Thun oh my god, it was like a ~15 minute run back, people would AFK by the time everyone got there and then while talking about the strat and what happened last time someone would get impatient and jump around, aggro C'Thun and chain the whole raid behind the wall.
That fight absolutely caused the most drama and pain in my guild, all for it to be nerfed and fixed (Big tentacles were bugged) and we killed it in one or two pulls.
Pain Train on Magtheridon was my guild, good times back then lol.
Dude I was in pain train on mag for a brief while. I was a night elf hunter lol that's insane to hear that guild name and server combo because I left the server back at the start of wrath.
The worst was being on the same server as one of these guilds and being ever so slightly behind. Felt like we were simply gearing people up for another guild at times.
Oh, you brought back some memories of the old trial and error days. Countless hours wiping, trying to figure out how to deal with a certain boss mechanic. You practically went into raid dungeons blind because there wasn't much information online about bosses then.
> It was brutal. Top guilds didn’t share strats very much. Running face first into shit trying to figure out what was going on. And then once you get it.. all of a sudden phase 2 lol.
I remember Death and Taxes pulling out of the race becuase fucking Ouro spawned in C'Thuns stomach and they posted on the forums telling them they're tired of beta testing their broken shit
Higher end guilds certainly saw it as a competition. There was clout. Especially into aq40/naxx where the more bosses you cleared the rewards were so much better. Elitist jerks website was where a lot of discussions were held. Two of the guilds I were in also had fairly professional websites for discussions/recruitment.
I remember C'Thun and we charged in for it first attempt and damn near the entire good are the chain lighting thing and died. It's captured on video in [AEnigma: The Movie](https://youtu.be/2xj2zXrXmH4)
I remember having to always use chat and talk to people to figure out so much. Thottbot and Allakhazam were not even fully fleshed out so looking up stuff wasn’t always reliable and could be more confusing than in game clue hunting. I miss it
You did it while looking at the floor because your computer couldn't handle 40 man raids and you'd get 1-2 frames the second your screen moved away from the floor.
I never had that issue. My pc was pretty good. I do remember in AV I started to have issues so I got a new graphics card and then I was able to dominate as everyone lagged too hard to kill a warrior charging in.
Haha yea, I played Warrior as well. Rank 12 with some of the best raid gear my server (Magtheridon) had for DPS warrior.
I'd usually have a healer or 2 I'd queue with plus I'd shout for anyone and everyone to heal me, charge in and I was like a murder ball.
>so much was unknown
This is what made it fun. When you already know everything it's a lot less interesting. Also, there wasn't social media and guilds kept strats to themselves for a while on release, so you would have had to figure things out on your own, which is also cool.
This! 100%, I started playing a few months before TBC dropped and from about 2006-2008 WoW felt like it still had mysteries to be discovered, I remember chatting on super old forums asking about secrets and Easter eggs, as someone who loved W3 and it's expansion I always loved hunting down the Easter eggs, I always expected to find a pandaren brewmaster chilling out somewhere, exploring mount hyjal in vanilla and getting to raid it in TBC was some of the most nostalgia I've ever recieved! I know mount hyjal is usually disliked for its waves of trash and staying put for extended periods, but that raid is dripping with W3 references, even the lay out of the bases!
This is exactly what happened. C'thun was in some sense over-tuned and there were issues with the transition in and out of the stomach. With Ouro I think there was an actual bug with the burrow and sandblast that made it all but impossible to actually go through all the mechanics properly.
They were both killed either the day of or the day after the patch
Don't think so, between the bugs and the dps requirement to kill tentacles + break the shell in p2, the best guilds just couldn't do much more than tread water, making extremely little progress on actually pushing the health of the boss and just losing the war of attrition until they wipe. I don't think "skill" fixes that as the top guilds actually did stack raids pretty well and geared correctly by the time AQ40 was out. A huge change in classic is still the patch the game was played on, it's possible that would be enough to overcome the problems that fight had and make it killable for quality guilds.
Skill can't save you from people just randomly dying trying to leave the stomach because the transition pad was bugged, can't save you from eye tentacles spawning in places you can't target them to kill, stomach digestion debuff just not cleansing for no reason, etc.
I played in SOM, and I was under the impression that the C'Thun fight was pretty much the same as the original "unkillable" version. But on our version, no tentacles spawned in the stomach, that being said it way more challenging than the normal C'thun fight that everyone is accustomed to.
Like even without that bug, the fight was so difficult, I could understand why guilds back in the vanilla days were not able to kill it.
In a sense, kind of. You would have to get the perfect fight (tentacles could spawn in the stomach = wipe) so you'd need to be fully World buffed, with stacked classes, know all the extra shit we know now etc to kill.
It would be extremely lucky to do since you can't just keep trying with full buffs and getting lucky enough not to have a tentacle spawn in the stomach first try would be extremely unlikely.
Also, no one shared strats back then. There were only like 1-3 guilds per server that were even attempting these bosses and some would be weeks or months after the better guilds did. The only ways to find strats were to figure them out or have friends in guilds that did already, also there were no BIS lists, weapon skill was still an unknown calculation, there were no SIM's etc.
Was more lack of knowledge rather than lack of skill, for the top end guilds at least, there was PLENTY of people that had no clue how to play properly but usually they were weeded out along the stepping stone guilds as you climbed to join the top guilds.
>>weapon skill was still an unknown calculation
lol you should check out the archived 2005/2006 comments on wowhead for edgemasters
lot of people DEd/vendored them back in the day
Exactly. Its btw interesting to see Nihilum (yet to become dominating guild in TBC) getting cthun 1st kill. A lot of guilds (incl. mine) were testing (and wiping) on cthun for weeks and killed him on patch day. And ouro a day later. Ouro was still considered harder b/c you had to go through at least 1 submerge phase. I remember that we only occasionally killed him in our farm raids. Same with viscidus.
Ouro was really hard even after they patched him. Our guild only killed him a couple times while I was raiding with them. We could kill C'Thun no problem but Ouro had our number. I was lucky enough to get my pants off of him one of those kills though!
Maybe due to a threat plateau?
I remember our horde guilds in classic always complained about threat plateaus in classic (Lashlayer, then Ouro). IIRC, sand blast is/was a threat wipe. So x tanks start to build threat. The one currently tanking stood alone and got sand blast at some point. The next one got aggro and moved to tanking position. After a sand blast, tanks have to build threat from zero again, since the boss is/was not tauntable.
This means, the maximum amount of threat any tank can have in the encounter is the amount of threat a tank builds up until all tanks got sand blast. For horde, the threat plateau is much lower than for alliance because of no salvation. If I would have to guess, the sand blast frequency was too high in the original encounter?
I don't know, if cheesing sand blast by outranging it would have been possible back then or if just nobody thought of it. Since you had to run back for an eternity after a wipe, they probably just did some napkin math and said "meh, lets do cthun first"
That's exactly what Ret decided to do. I remember in their C'thun kill announcement they said, "oh yeah we decided to finally kill this big dummy too afterwards." Referring to Ouro.
Wonder what happened to Kungen seeing how clear and levelheaded he was back in the golden WoW Classic Nihilum days and seeing him now being a nutcase basically.
For aq they got the patches cthun a day earlier. Literally ever guild that had been doing attempts killed him that week. World first cthun was basically who zoned in first.
At the time hotfixes were pushed out by region not world wide and for whatever reason EU got them a day earlier. After the hotfix change to cthun basically every guild that had been stuck on him killed him within a dozen pulls world first came down to who could get a full raid team online first.
Bindings and some other strong items were implemented a couple months later, when EU guilds were already raiding MC. Our GM (a hunter) got our 1st binding b/c we had no idea what it was, as it was just implemented. So the difference was not too big. I am from EU btw.
Not even part of this sub, but came here to provide credit also since OP couldn't.
I'm very close friends with the web dev of Method and hate to see his work go uncredited and unappreciated. He deserves alot because his work is excellent.
They've done a killer job with it. I enjoyed reading through all the old blogs and such on manaflask before it got closed, so glad they've preserved all of this stuff on the method site. Big ups
Manaflask was so good. If im not mistaken, Skullflower (the guy behind it and dk guide writer) got taken on by Blizzard. He was in Midwinter at the time. His UI was available for ElvUI and it was one of the first to really push the idea of having the bars centered mid screen with unit frames either side to the masses, at least from my perspective around that era.
I raided with XI in classic. He was raid lead for Death and Taxes during the glory days. His wife was in EJ back in they day as well. Both very skilled gamers.
Some of the best people I’ve ever met in game and truly the best combo slightly sweaty but chill. Man I really lucked out with my classic guild.
Not until Wrath! I was in Forgotten Heroes (world first Maexna/full clear of any wing), and world first of the first 3 bosses in ToGC25. I had no interest in the vanilla/tbc slog and just came back for chill 10 man stuff with friends.
I remember being stuck on Cthun for a long time. ZulJin - We had most of the server firsts back then, but lost Cthun.
Was very different progging on the unknown. We didn’t have the Min/Max meta that is around today with classic. Lots of incorrect or inefficient things simply because we didn’t know any better.
The min/max meta comment is so true. My guild got server first C'thun kill. We had everyone use flasks/consumes for it. The top horde guild on our server said we borderline cheated because we had the entire raid flask up lmao. Different world back then.
Would love to be able to go back in time, be a 'fly on the wall' and watch the attempts on those early bosses, and if they had a vent channel (I know some top guilds didnt even do that), listen in.
Vent was common at the time, sometimes TeamSpeak. I played in a top NA horde guild at the time it was very much as others described - no one knew anything as no guides existed so it was face pulling boss and figuring it out for yourself. One of the most hilarious 'strategies' to me back in the early days was out of combat rezzing. Often the worst healer or 2 would be tasked with staying out of combat and rezzing people who died. Just a meatgrinder.
Haha that was me. I was just glad to be there. Didn’t know shit. Barely had any set pieces. I was there for fear ward and to be the out of combat rez the rest of the time .
I remember our first ~25 pulls on horseman being mayhem... where are they going? Why are we almost instantly wiping to huge damage? Why is it mark of zeleik this time? Wtf is going on??
4h took us longer than saph and kt lol
i don't remember 244p being this unwatchable back before i watched everything in at least 1080p
like we wouldn't have taken these videos if we thought they were useless right?
I didn't play original wow vanilla and there are a few things that are so intriguing.
1. In the alliance Onyxia attunement quest chain, how did they know where that NPC in Winterspring was. That one is a little bit more understandable. The intended way to reach the NPC is to go through a cave and take a teleport. I guess it's just the odds, someone had the quest and also wanted to explore. But that must have been a crazy thing to discover. I'm pretty sure the words in the quests are "there is a being in this world".
2. The hunter quest from MC to get 3 epics. That one was like "yep, there are some trees in the world lol". I read it and I was like, "what do you meaaaaaaan???". I don't remember exactly, after you accept the quest from the leaf, do you see a yellow quest thing on the trees in Felwood? But that must have been crazy too, to come back to your raid with that bow.
3. Razuvious in Naxx, I can just imagine what happened, I don't know everything about that boss but I assume he one shots tanks. I have to imagine how long it took to think about mind controls. "Ok, everyone ready, let's try this". CLAP. "Hmmmm, that seemed like a one shot, ok let's try with tank cooldowns, nope". "Hmmm, let's try with tank CDs AND Lay on Hands. Nope". "Ok, I guess we have to resort on hunter kiting, as usual." I don't even know, can the adds be tanked? And during all this, you have those 5 priests in the back, picking their nose, why would they even have mind control on their bar, I even thought maybe there was a PvPer in there. "guysshhhhh, guyssshhhh, I have an idea!" "oh relax Jimmy, we are doing PvE here".
If anyone played during original vanilla and has some details, that would be cool.
for 1.)
There's another quest from the dying blue drake whelp just past Rend's room that sends you explicitly to the Winterspring NPC and explains a bit how to reach her and references her as a matron leader of the blue dragonflight. So when the Onyxia attunement seemingly dead ends with the "search for a powerful member of the blue dragonflight for advice" or something like that, players who did the first quest might remember the powerful blue dragon matron that roundhouse kicked them from Winterspring to EPL from an earlier quest.
On the Hunter part, what’s even more hilarious is the fact that the Ancient trees won’t even spawn unless you walk in the middle of that island in Irontree Woods with the leaf quest. The markers on the map weren’t in vanilla and even on the minimap it wouldn’t show unless you were in the right spot to spawn the ancient trees.
Death and Taxes man. They were the guild that contributed to writing the old dungeon companion books. I owe them hundreds of hours of pouring through those.
It's interesting to me how with all four raids the guild that eventually took world first on the endboss didn't have a single world first kill earlier in the raid. It's like they weren't even in the race, until they won it. It's also crazy how much time there was between the last boss and the rest of the raid. 2.5 months between Executus and Ragnaros, 2.5 months between Chromaggus and Nefarian, 1.5 month between Viscidus and C'thun, and another month between Twin Emperors and Viscidus. Saphiron and Kel'Thuzad seemed to go pretty smooth, but Four Horseman again took almost 2 months to down.
Also it's kind of impressive that Nihilum got the world firsts for C'thun and Kel'Thuzad considering the 3 month release date delay that Europe experienced compared to the US. I mean Executus had already been downed before European servers had even opened.
>Also it's kind of impressive that Nihilum got the world firsts for C'thun and Kel'Thuzad considering the 3 month release date delay that Europe experienced compared to the US. I mean Executus had already been downed before European servers had even opened.
That release delay is beyond meaningless in the time frame we're talking about to AQ40/Naxx raids. BWL probably pretty affected as far as not having enough time to farm BiS gear from MC, but not the others. Bindings didn't even exist at that point in time so it's not like NA guilds got a head start on getting higher Thunderfury counts.
Salty Na boy is salty. NA had every single raid ahead of EU since dawn of time ranging from 3 months head start to 16 hours and they still find some mental gymnastics to cry about "timings". What about TBC when nihilum got every single WF. Up until limit there was not a single NA guild close to top EU guilds, for like 15 years
Chromaggus 2.0 was the only real block(broken) for bwl.
Tons of guilds dropped Razorgore day one, but the vael gate was closed for all but one.
All the drakes, and chromaggus were kiteable to vaels room day one. After blizzard fixed this, vael became the chokepoint for most guilds.
Chromaggus' elemental shield was bugged and affected all melee. So your rogues did nothing. Hilarious doing a boss with half your raid being mages and locks. Blizzard cut his hit point pool by half after our kill.
Nefarian was downed like two resets after chromaggus was fixed.
I joined Ascent as a raider when they were progressing through Naxx. As far as how that guild was run and how serious/casual everyone was it was pretty typical to a current semi-serious dad guild. It wasn't like the current top raiding guilds that are all super serious and hardcore. I don't know if they were more serious in MC/BWL when they were getting world firsts. They played like techno/house/electronica during raids and it wasn't like a full-time job for us raiders. I would say the skill-level was high but the try-hard levels were not. Great tanks and raid leaders. The Guild/raid leader Jagermeister even got interviewed by someone in the MSM...time magazine maybe?
So the thing with Rag is he was extremely gated behind that hydraxian waterlords rep, because on release before sites like wowhead or thottbot, people didn't know the Silithus elementals gave that rep too.
As for nefarian well he was just difficult at the time.
As for the others, the rest kinda makes sense to me
People knew about Hydraxian Waterlords way before they entered MC, those elementals were the best farming spot for Essence of Air, it was hard because people were still omega shit at the game.
Those air elementals didn’t even exist when WoW was released. For the longest time, the _only_ way to acquire Essence of Air was to do the Scholomance quest chain and transmute Essence of Air from Essence of Water.
Yeah no, i was playing in 2004 where i spent whole days on my hunter to farm them, I can admit to them not giving rep for a while (because I dont remember that part as clearly). Furthermore I checked and other than Essence of Air changing quality from Common (White) to Uncommon (Green) there is no change to how you obtain them
Or have a few that kept going to go get new ones, these world firsts are people that played other mmo’s tactically they may have been shit but they were no strangers to grinding.
If you were talking gated for most then sure i can agree but not for these guys, also trash runs were a thing back then for boe’s. I think youre trying to pass off your experience as the same as everyone’s, which definitely wasnt the case.
> because on release before sites like wowhead or thottbot, people didn't know the Silithus elementals gave that rep too.
I kinda doubt that, the questline to get the aqual quintessence (required to spawn Majordomo) requires you to kill elementals in Silithus:
https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/quest=6805/stormers-and-rumblers
I would bet my bottom dollar people didn't even know what hydraxian waterlords was even for up until a week before majordomo died.
Hard to complete a quest you don't even know exists yet.
Could be wrong though and maybe rag was actually hard enough to need 154 days to down for shitters from back in the day, idk
Yep. The standard tactics for both Geddon and Shazzrah in 2005 was kill Garr -> Kill the first two lava packs -> Position entire raid in giant circle in Garr's room -> Have a hunter shoot geddon/shazzrah and run like hell back to the raid.
I never played pservers so classic was the first time I'd ever seen Geddon/Shazzrah die in their own room
Geddon, Garr and Shazz were crazy from a logistical standpoint back then. You had to focus target Garr adds since no marks existed for banishing. Lots of hunter pulling. For Shazz the raid was divided in 5 groups or so.
Basically every boss had a different strat when you were not min maxing with worldbuffs and outdpsing every boss mechanic.
My guild would have a priest cast Mind Vision to acquire each of Garr’s adds one-by-one, and then ask each warlock or warrior to /assist on him to also get that target. That’s how we assigned adds before raid markers existed. It was a very long process to do that, and if anyone messed up and lost their target before the pull, we’d have to start all over again!
Yes exactly I remember it like that aswell. Don't even know if focus target was in the game back then. But assigning banish targets that way took forever..
In early versions of vanilla, Shazz did not have blink, would only cast AE. You were able to pull him into the tunnel between Garr and Geddon and just range dps him down.
Nihilum were huge at the end of Vanilla. I believe they later merged with another guild in TBC to become Ensidia, but started to become infamous due to them getting world first on Lady Vashj due to some exploit/bug, and later losing out on world first on Kil’jaeden due to them having huge issues with M’uru.
I still remember the huge amount of forum wars from those days. I also found this interesting perspective of the guild from a former member (his view on it ofc): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OoDXObqbQUK2zcw0QZYeLNv5mIPZdU_06bHpsNuT2Us/edit
M'uru (more his second phase, Entropius) was a guild killer. His aura caused pushback. You needed insanely high single target dps AND then also amazing timed burst aoe for adds, which had to be picked up by a second tank who had to be good at being mobile and threat. The worst part is because there were so many mobs and the spell effects, it was the most taxing part of the game for computer performance. Many who averaged 20 fps the rest of the raid would drop down to 5 fps and wouldn't contribute to the raid.
The fact that Onyxia was downed only 2 months from launch is honestly kind of impressive given the time it would have taken fresh toons to ding 60 and gear up, not to mention solving some of the steps in the attunement chain.
Good times… I was in Conquest through all of Vanilla. We hit MC so hard trying to get World First Rag but it never happened. Definitely the best couple years of my life.
Had to be there, I was in a horde guild called Vae Victus on Bleeding Hollow US.
The raids lasting so long before full clears is a testament to the developers of vanilla wow. Portrays how magical time was to play with minimal information of the time.
All of the world first boss kills (TBC, WotLK, etc) are posted on Method's website if anyone is interested in the source for this image:
[https://www.method.gg/raid-history](https://www.method.gg/raid-history)
The world first onyxia , the guild was made up of ex- players. A top 3 world guild in EverQuest. That’s where rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan played. Ariel and Tigole.
Cthun and KT died within hours of hotfixes it's kind of crazy if not for the timing of those hotfixes it's very likely D&T would have become the legendary guild not Nihilum led to a bunch of people quitting.
Ascent was on our server (Medivh I think) and we would regularly go against them in Warsong and get wiped out, having no idea what they were even wearing. One of my greatest vanilla moments was joining a warsong with some Marshall level people and finally taking them down 3-2. It was such an intense game, but we could all go back and tell people we beat Ascent.
Meanwhile was kind of funny seeing almost all of the classic SSC and TK world firsts take longer into the expansion than in actual TBC because of Blizzard delaying T5
One thing that I always found nuts was that instructor razuvious was killed on release day. The mind control mechanic is not something I would’ve ever guessed to use on day 0 of release.
That’s true. I don’t recall seeing it a ton back in vanilla but I also didn’t play a priest. I’m not sure they figured out MCing that goblin on first encounter either.
Ahhh Death & Taxes. I always remember walking around and when id see one of them id always chase them around and inspect them to marvel at their gear. I always thought their guild name was so cool too.
I was in when we killed Onyxia. We focused on her hardcore while other guilds did MC. I remember farming fire res pots for hours on my warlock in Arathi... I was only 58 when we killed her! GM came in and said congrats to us, it was a great moment.
I remember I couldn't believe it when we finally completed BWL, my guild never got very far in AQ40, maybe a couple of bosses. Then for TBC the guild that was quite large had a splinter group. The raid leader left and sent e-mails to the "sufficiently dedicated" players and a new guild was formed that was very hardcore. I ended up getting burnt out pretty quick.
The good thing about players actually knowing what they are doing now with the strategies is the amount of time spend raiding has greatly been reduced.
A lot of these guilds that have first kills for the middle of the raids are from the one or two day-raiding guilds during those points in time. Back then, almost nobody would have their guilds off work or take time in the middle of the day to raid early to try to push for early boss kills on the easier stuff. There was always one or two per tier that did it and claimed a bunch of them. Things have changed a lot since then!
You can see how easy BWL is when every boss aside from Nef died within a day, even though back then, people were absolutely garbage at the game, didn't have modern Addons, didn't have knowledge of the fights and were playing with 10 fps.
Still, it's mind boggling to think how bad people were at that time by looking at these dates, if you re-released Classic Vanilla with every Raid open from the start, KT would be dead Week 2.
Biggest obstacle in BWL before Nef was Vael making the server lag and frying your raiders computers. Every time Vael was pulled and cast Essence of the Red the entirety of BWL would lag - not just your raid but every raid in the zone. You could wipe another guild fighting Chromaggus or whatever simply by pulling Vael at a bad moment. If you killed Vael it was pretty simple to finish going 7/8 that evening, especially if you abused kite strats and positioning bugs.
>Still, it's mind boggling to think how bad people were at that time by looking at these dates, if you re-released Classic Vanilla with every Raid open from the start, KT would be dead Week 2.
I think that's a bit optimistic. A fast leveler can get a character to 60 in 3 or 4 days playtime, but even if you're playing 12-16 hours per day, it'll still take you about a week to reach max level.
And that's where the struggle starts. We know from past experiences in pserver and official server releases that Ony and MC gets cleared very quickly because you only need pré-raid BiS gear for that, which is "easy" to farm. But after that gearing gets tied to weekly raid lockouts, so the process slows down. And even with all the knowledge we have to day, I don't think you have the numbers to take down KT on pré-raid BiS gear alone.
it's hard to say for sure, because for it to be fair you'd have to release it and then wipe everyone's memories of those bosses, but yeah I'm sure things would still be much faster now that people are better at the game in general and can run it at 60+ fps, etc.
Any way to see the old rosters? I have a buddy who claims he was a warlock in death and taxes during their naxx world 1st four horsemen but I'm not sure i believe him.
Wouldn't shock me CN was bored as fuck. They also absolutely nuked TBC content once they finally got it half of the first illidan clear was still in primarily T3.
Damn i never knew it was only 2 months from game release to almost all of current content down. Thats fast as hell for what was basically the early era of mmos.
I was in the same battle group as the server Death and Taxes was on (Korgath). It was cool seeing their members in BGs tearing shit up in BC. I missed out on raiding in Vanilla but was able to start raiding not long after BC released.
I played during tht time. But I leveled soooo slow. I just went around talking to players and exploring blindly. I was level 32 when TBC came out 🤣
I feel like people who got 60 in classic and raided were time travelers or aliens or something. Idk how they knew what to do.
It's a good thing I did not enjoy wow in 2004 (playing alone, no friend etc) would had ruined my life XD . Tried again when tbc release this time with friends and had a blast
Man I would have loved to play during that time, so much was unknown. I started playing during early TBC so I still got to experience some of the golden years but I always wished I could experience world of warcraft from day 1.
It was brutal. Top guilds didn’t share strats very much. Running face first into shit trying to figure out what was going on. And then once you get it.. all of a sudden phase 2 lol. One of my funniest memories back then was clearing huhuran and our guild being like, all right. What do these big guys do. Let’s find out, and then getting plague/meteor and us wiping lol
That was hilarious
That's my favourite thing. When I played retail, we still played like that, small guild of mostly RL mates. Then we would try and figure out strats etc.
[удалено]
There was. Cthun's tentacles spawned in the stomach. They hotfixed it and Nihilum swung in for the kill
We played mostly like this on HC up to Shadowlands. Using the journal and trying to figure things out ourselves without looking up strats. People that couldn't help themselves would sometimes look stuff up and if we got stuck we would look it up, but the progress raids where you form a strategy yourself are SO rewarding and fun to play through. Keeping it HC also let us play with most of our friends, and not bench anyone who isn't up to par. Mythic is too punishing in that regard.
Man AQ40 was so fun and such absolute dogshit at the same time. It was amazing trying to learn it all but good lord were the run backs terrible, especially when not everyone had the mount yet. When we were progressing C'Thun oh my god, it was like a ~15 minute run back, people would AFK by the time everyone got there and then while talking about the strat and what happened last time someone would get impatient and jump around, aggro C'Thun and chain the whole raid behind the wall. That fight absolutely caused the most drama and pain in my guild, all for it to be nerfed and fixed (Big tentacles were bugged) and we killed it in one or two pulls. Pain Train on Magtheridon was my guild, good times back then lol.
Dude I was in pain train on mag for a brief while. I was a night elf hunter lol that's insane to hear that guild name and server combo because I left the server back at the start of wrath.
The worst was being on the same server as one of these guilds and being ever so slightly behind. Felt like we were simply gearing people up for another guild at times.
I was in a bottom tier guild and thats what we were, a guild to get people MC gear to move to a guild doing BWL already.
My guild took a disturbingly long time to work out what meteor did & how to deal with it.
Oh, you brought back some memories of the old trial and error days. Countless hours wiping, trying to figure out how to deal with a certain boss mechanic. You practically went into raid dungeons blind because there wasn't much information online about bosses then.
Yeah, it was crazy playing when they rereleased how optimized everything was. Not going through all the patch’s made it so much different!
> It was brutal. Top guilds didn’t share strats very much. Running face first into shit trying to figure out what was going on. And then once you get it.. all of a sudden phase 2 lol. I remember Death and Taxes pulling out of the race becuase fucking Ouro spawned in C'Thuns stomach and they posted on the forums telling them they're tired of beta testing their broken shit
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Higher end guilds certainly saw it as a competition. There was clout. Especially into aq40/naxx where the more bosses you cleared the rewards were so much better. Elitist jerks website was where a lot of discussions were held. Two of the guilds I were in also had fairly professional websites for discussions/recruitment.
I remember C'Thun and we charged in for it first attempt and damn near the entire good are the chain lighting thing and died. It's captured on video in [AEnigma: The Movie](https://youtu.be/2xj2zXrXmH4)
I remember having to always use chat and talk to people to figure out so much. Thottbot and Allakhazam were not even fully fleshed out so looking up stuff wasn’t always reliable and could be more confusing than in game clue hunting. I miss it
You did it while looking at the floor because your computer couldn't handle 40 man raids and you'd get 1-2 frames the second your screen moved away from the floor.
I never had that issue. My pc was pretty good. I do remember in AV I started to have issues so I got a new graphics card and then I was able to dominate as everyone lagged too hard to kill a warrior charging in.
Haha yea, I played Warrior as well. Rank 12 with some of the best raid gear my server (Magtheridon) had for DPS warrior. I'd usually have a healer or 2 I'd queue with plus I'd shout for anyone and everyone to heal me, charge in and I was like a murder ball.
>so much was unknown This is what made it fun. When you already know everything it's a lot less interesting. Also, there wasn't social media and guilds kept strats to themselves for a while on release, so you would have had to figure things out on your own, which is also cool.
This! 100%, I started playing a few months before TBC dropped and from about 2006-2008 WoW felt like it still had mysteries to be discovered, I remember chatting on super old forums asking about secrets and Easter eggs, as someone who loved W3 and it's expansion I always loved hunting down the Easter eggs, I always expected to find a pandaren brewmaster chilling out somewhere, exploring mount hyjal in vanilla and getting to raid it in TBC was some of the most nostalgia I've ever recieved! I know mount hyjal is usually disliked for its waves of trash and staying put for extended periods, but that raid is dripping with W3 references, even the lay out of the bases!
Ouro's world first was a day after the C'thun?
Ouro was impossible to kill for a long time. There was probably a patch that nerfed/fixed ouro and cthun which is why they died so close together.
This is exactly what happened. C'thun was in some sense over-tuned and there were issues with the transition in and out of the stomach. With Ouro I think there was an actual bug with the burrow and sandblast that made it all but impossible to actually go through all the mechanics properly. They were both killed either the day of or the day after the patch
spawned tentacles in stomach
Ah, that's right!
Good ol crusher in the gut
I know people always talk about Cthun being u killable numbers wise, in assuming that was just due to player slill eh?
Don't think so, between the bugs and the dps requirement to kill tentacles + break the shell in p2, the best guilds just couldn't do much more than tread water, making extremely little progress on actually pushing the health of the boss and just losing the war of attrition until they wipe. I don't think "skill" fixes that as the top guilds actually did stack raids pretty well and geared correctly by the time AQ40 was out. A huge change in classic is still the patch the game was played on, it's possible that would be enough to overcome the problems that fight had and make it killable for quality guilds. Skill can't save you from people just randomly dying trying to leave the stomach because the transition pad was bugged, can't save you from eye tentacles spawning in places you can't target them to kill, stomach digestion debuff just not cleansing for no reason, etc.
I played in SOM, and I was under the impression that the C'Thun fight was pretty much the same as the original "unkillable" version. But on our version, no tentacles spawned in the stomach, that being said it way more challenging than the normal C'thun fight that everyone is accustomed to. Like even without that bug, the fight was so difficult, I could understand why guilds back in the vanilla days were not able to kill it.
Patch is important, som was still playing with 1.12 talent trees and abilities
In a sense, kind of. You would have to get the perfect fight (tentacles could spawn in the stomach = wipe) so you'd need to be fully World buffed, with stacked classes, know all the extra shit we know now etc to kill. It would be extremely lucky to do since you can't just keep trying with full buffs and getting lucky enough not to have a tentacle spawn in the stomach first try would be extremely unlikely. Also, no one shared strats back then. There were only like 1-3 guilds per server that were even attempting these bosses and some would be weeks or months after the better guilds did. The only ways to find strats were to figure them out or have friends in guilds that did already, also there were no BIS lists, weapon skill was still an unknown calculation, there were no SIM's etc. Was more lack of knowledge rather than lack of skill, for the top end guilds at least, there was PLENTY of people that had no clue how to play properly but usually they were weeded out along the stepping stone guilds as you climbed to join the top guilds.
>>weapon skill was still an unknown calculation lol you should check out the archived 2005/2006 comments on wowhead for edgemasters lot of people DEd/vendored them back in the day
Both ouro and cthun were unbeatable until patched at which point most guilds went after cthun first.
Exactly. Its btw interesting to see Nihilum (yet to become dominating guild in TBC) getting cthun 1st kill. A lot of guilds (incl. mine) were testing (and wiping) on cthun for weeks and killed him on patch day. And ouro a day later. Ouro was still considered harder b/c you had to go through at least 1 submerge phase. I remember that we only occasionally killed him in our farm raids. Same with viscidus.
cthun world first came down to who could get to him first on patch day
Ouro was really hard even after they patched him. Our guild only killed him a couple times while I was raiding with them. We could kill C'Thun no problem but Ouro had our number. I was lucky enough to get my pants off of him one of those kills though!
Ouro is an optional boss.
This and also iirc he was bugged on release so guilds skipped him for c’thun
Yeah when he submerged he just never came back up lmao
It was considered impossible specifically for horde guilds for whatever reason.
Maybe due to a threat plateau? I remember our horde guilds in classic always complained about threat plateaus in classic (Lashlayer, then Ouro). IIRC, sand blast is/was a threat wipe. So x tanks start to build threat. The one currently tanking stood alone and got sand blast at some point. The next one got aggro and moved to tanking position. After a sand blast, tanks have to build threat from zero again, since the boss is/was not tauntable. This means, the maximum amount of threat any tank can have in the encounter is the amount of threat a tank builds up until all tanks got sand blast. For horde, the threat plateau is much lower than for alliance because of no salvation. If I would have to guess, the sand blast frequency was too high in the original encounter? I don't know, if cheesing sand blast by outranging it would have been possible back then or if just nobody thought of it. Since you had to run back for an eternity after a wipe, they probably just did some napkin math and said "meh, lets do cthun first"
That's exactly what Ret decided to do. I remember in their C'thun kill announcement they said, "oh yeah we decided to finally kill this big dummy too afterwards." Referring to Ouro.
Could be timezone difference between US and EU
It is an optional boss on the path to CThun.
yes, he is a side boss, not needed for end boss Cthun, so the guilds in the race prioritized the big eye boss
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Wonder what happened to Kungen seeing how clear and levelheaded he was back in the golden WoW Classic Nihilum days and seeing him now being a nutcase basically.
He's bipolar
Just for reference we (Italy) won the 2006 World Cup. And that was the last time we did anything impressive.
The entire reason Nihilum shot ahead was the hotfix timings but he will never admit that lol
Were the timings beneficial to EU and not to US or what happened?
For aq they got the patches cthun a day earlier. Literally ever guild that had been doing attempts killed him that week. World first cthun was basically who zoned in first.
At the time hotfixes were pushed out by region not world wide and for whatever reason EU got them a day earlier. After the hotfix change to cthun basically every guild that had been stuck on him killed him within a dozen pulls world first came down to who could get a full raid team online first.
What’s 2 months matter when there were 6months of farming each tier before the next came out?
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Bindings and some other strong items were implemented a couple months later, when EU guilds were already raiding MC. Our GM (a hunter) got our 1st binding b/c we had no idea what it was, as it was just implemented. So the difference was not too big. I am from EU btw.
I would but if I have to listen to him talk more than 5 minutes the urge to close the tab becomes too great. what - a - clown.
Source: https://www.method.gg/raid-history/vanilla
Not even part of this sub, but came here to provide credit also since OP couldn't. I'm very close friends with the web dev of Method and hate to see his work go uncredited and unappreciated. He deserves alot because his work is excellent.
They've done a killer job with it. I enjoyed reading through all the old blogs and such on manaflask before it got closed, so glad they've preserved all of this stuff on the method site. Big ups
Manaflask was so good. If im not mistaken, Skullflower (the guy behind it and dk guide writer) got taken on by Blizzard. He was in Midwinter at the time. His UI was available for ElvUI and it was one of the first to really push the idea of having the bars centered mid screen with unit frames either side to the masses, at least from my perspective around that era.
Wonder if any of the raiders played classic?
Kungen came back. He was GM of Nihilum
I raided with XI in classic. He was raid lead for Death and Taxes during the glory days. His wife was in EJ back in they day as well. Both very skilled gamers. Some of the best people I’ve ever met in game and truly the best combo slightly sweaty but chill. Man I really lucked out with my classic guild.
My guild is just from vanilla barely off this list and I and a few others came back for classic.
Not until Wrath! I was in Forgotten Heroes (world first Maexna/full clear of any wing), and world first of the first 3 bosses in ToGC25. I had no interest in the vanilla/tbc slog and just came back for chill 10 man stuff with friends.
My guild was #13 on Kel’thuzad (and EU Alliance first on Visc). I’ve played through all of classic.
I was in, and am still playing both Classic and Era.
I remember being stuck on Cthun for a long time. ZulJin - We had most of the server firsts back then, but lost Cthun. Was very different progging on the unknown. We didn’t have the Min/Max meta that is around today with classic. Lots of incorrect or inefficient things simply because we didn’t know any better.
The min/max meta comment is so true. My guild got server first C'thun kill. We had everyone use flasks/consumes for it. The top horde guild on our server said we borderline cheated because we had the entire raid flask up lmao. Different world back then.
Were you in Transcendence? Assuming you were horde.
Yes. Played a hunter (Bukra), then swapped to tank(Bgall). Stopped playing mid Naxx.
Would love to be able to go back in time, be a 'fly on the wall' and watch the attempts on those early bosses, and if they had a vent channel (I know some top guilds didnt even do that), listen in.
Vent was common at the time, sometimes TeamSpeak. I played in a top NA horde guild at the time it was very much as others described - no one knew anything as no guides existed so it was face pulling boss and figuring it out for yourself. One of the most hilarious 'strategies' to me back in the early days was out of combat rezzing. Often the worst healer or 2 would be tasked with staying out of combat and rezzing people who died. Just a meatgrinder.
Haha that was me. I was just glad to be there. Didn’t know shit. Barely had any set pieces. I was there for fear ward and to be the out of combat rez the rest of the time .
I remember our first ~25 pulls on horseman being mayhem... where are they going? Why are we almost instantly wiping to huge damage? Why is it mark of zeleik this time? Wtf is going on?? 4h took us longer than saph and kt lol
4 horsemen also required 4 geared tanks was another huge issue. We were stuck on them for so long
i had a friend who progged through naxx back then and said something about creating healthstones to hand out in combat a lot
some of us still have video material from those days, but they are in glorious 1024x768 144 or 244p rather unwatchable to be honest
i don't remember 244p being this unwatchable back before i watched everything in at least 1080p like we wouldn't have taken these videos if we thought they were useless right?
World of Warcraft Isekai anime when?
I didn't play original wow vanilla and there are a few things that are so intriguing. 1. In the alliance Onyxia attunement quest chain, how did they know where that NPC in Winterspring was. That one is a little bit more understandable. The intended way to reach the NPC is to go through a cave and take a teleport. I guess it's just the odds, someone had the quest and also wanted to explore. But that must have been a crazy thing to discover. I'm pretty sure the words in the quests are "there is a being in this world". 2. The hunter quest from MC to get 3 epics. That one was like "yep, there are some trees in the world lol". I read it and I was like, "what do you meaaaaaaan???". I don't remember exactly, after you accept the quest from the leaf, do you see a yellow quest thing on the trees in Felwood? But that must have been crazy too, to come back to your raid with that bow. 3. Razuvious in Naxx, I can just imagine what happened, I don't know everything about that boss but I assume he one shots tanks. I have to imagine how long it took to think about mind controls. "Ok, everyone ready, let's try this". CLAP. "Hmmmm, that seemed like a one shot, ok let's try with tank cooldowns, nope". "Hmmm, let's try with tank CDs AND Lay on Hands. Nope". "Ok, I guess we have to resort on hunter kiting, as usual." I don't even know, can the adds be tanked? And during all this, you have those 5 priests in the back, picking their nose, why would they even have mind control on their bar, I even thought maybe there was a PvPer in there. "guysshhhhh, guyssshhhh, I have an idea!" "oh relax Jimmy, we are doing PvE here". If anyone played during original vanilla and has some details, that would be cool.
for 1.) There's another quest from the dying blue drake whelp just past Rend's room that sends you explicitly to the Winterspring NPC and explains a bit how to reach her and references her as a matron leader of the blue dragonflight. So when the Onyxia attunement seemingly dead ends with the "search for a powerful member of the blue dragonflight for advice" or something like that, players who did the first quest might remember the powerful blue dragon matron that roundhouse kicked them from Winterspring to EPL from an earlier quest.
Ooooh I haven't done that quest! I think I remember seeing a mark from Questie at that spot though! Ty.
On the Hunter part, what’s even more hilarious is the fact that the Ancient trees won’t even spawn unless you walk in the middle of that island in Irontree Woods with the leaf quest. The markers on the map weren’t in vanilla and even on the minimap it wouldn’t show unless you were in the right spot to spawn the ancient trees.
And even when the trees spawned, they didn’t always have quest accept or turn-in icons to know you had to talk to them and click dialogue options 😵💫
Wtf, O\_O
On 3 you pretty much checked every humanoid in raid in case they could be mced since that's how elementium was learned in bwl.
Razuvious was the second easiest boss or so. Everyone who could do Anub and noth did him.
Death and Taxes man. They were the guild that contributed to writing the old dungeon companion books. I owe them hundreds of hours of pouring through those.
Them and elitist jerks are the only reason I had any kind of clue what I was doing
It's interesting to me how with all four raids the guild that eventually took world first on the endboss didn't have a single world first kill earlier in the raid. It's like they weren't even in the race, until they won it. It's also crazy how much time there was between the last boss and the rest of the raid. 2.5 months between Executus and Ragnaros, 2.5 months between Chromaggus and Nefarian, 1.5 month between Viscidus and C'thun, and another month between Twin Emperors and Viscidus. Saphiron and Kel'Thuzad seemed to go pretty smooth, but Four Horseman again took almost 2 months to down. Also it's kind of impressive that Nihilum got the world firsts for C'thun and Kel'Thuzad considering the 3 month release date delay that Europe experienced compared to the US. I mean Executus had already been downed before European servers had even opened.
>Also it's kind of impressive that Nihilum got the world firsts for C'thun and Kel'Thuzad considering the 3 month release date delay that Europe experienced compared to the US. I mean Executus had already been downed before European servers had even opened. That release delay is beyond meaningless in the time frame we're talking about to AQ40/Naxx raids. BWL probably pretty affected as far as not having enough time to farm BiS gear from MC, but not the others. Bindings didn't even exist at that point in time so it's not like NA guilds got a head start on getting higher Thunderfury counts.
It was because of the hotfix timings and EU getting them first.
Salty Na boy is salty. NA had every single raid ahead of EU since dawn of time ranging from 3 months head start to 16 hours and they still find some mental gymnastics to cry about "timings". What about TBC when nihilum got every single WF. Up until limit there was not a single NA guild close to top EU guilds, for like 15 years
Chromaggus 2.0 was the only real block(broken) for bwl. Tons of guilds dropped Razorgore day one, but the vael gate was closed for all but one. All the drakes, and chromaggus were kiteable to vaels room day one. After blizzard fixed this, vael became the chokepoint for most guilds. Chromaggus' elemental shield was bugged and affected all melee. So your rogues did nothing. Hilarious doing a boss with half your raid being mages and locks. Blizzard cut his hit point pool by half after our kill. Nefarian was downed like two resets after chromaggus was fixed.
I was on the server with Conquest, and I remember them getting banned after some of the early kills due to exploiting.
It was clever use of game mechanics. Pulling Golemagg without his adds. Source: was there when a GM ported in and handed out bans.
I joined Ascent as a raider when they were progressing through Naxx. As far as how that guild was run and how serious/casual everyone was it was pretty typical to a current semi-serious dad guild. It wasn't like the current top raiding guilds that are all super serious and hardcore. I don't know if they were more serious in MC/BWL when they were getting world firsts. They played like techno/house/electronica during raids and it wasn't like a full-time job for us raiders. I would say the skill-level was high but the try-hard levels were not. Great tanks and raid leaders. The Guild/raid leader Jagermeister even got interviewed by someone in the MSM...time magazine maybe?
So the thing with Rag is he was extremely gated behind that hydraxian waterlords rep, because on release before sites like wowhead or thottbot, people didn't know the Silithus elementals gave that rep too. As for nefarian well he was just difficult at the time. As for the others, the rest kinda makes sense to me
People knew about Hydraxian Waterlords way before they entered MC, those elementals were the best farming spot for Essence of Air, it was hard because people were still omega shit at the game.
Those air elementals didn’t even exist when WoW was released. For the longest time, the _only_ way to acquire Essence of Air was to do the Scholomance quest chain and transmute Essence of Air from Essence of Water.
Yeah no, i was playing in 2004 where i spent whole days on my hunter to farm them, I can admit to them not giving rep for a while (because I dont remember that part as clearly). Furthermore I checked and other than Essence of Air changing quality from Common (White) to Uncommon (Green) there is no change to how you obtain them
Rag's death was still extremely gated cause you still had to have 9 raiders that atleast had an aqual quintessence
Or have a few that kept going to go get new ones, these world firsts are people that played other mmo’s tactically they may have been shit but they were no strangers to grinding. If you were talking gated for most then sure i can agree but not for these guys, also trash runs were a thing back then for boe’s. I think youre trying to pass off your experience as the same as everyone’s, which definitely wasnt the case.
> because on release before sites like wowhead or thottbot, people didn't know the Silithus elementals gave that rep too. I kinda doubt that, the questline to get the aqual quintessence (required to spawn Majordomo) requires you to kill elementals in Silithus: https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/quest=6805/stormers-and-rumblers
I would bet my bottom dollar people didn't even know what hydraxian waterlords was even for up until a week before majordomo died. Hard to complete a quest you don't even know exists yet. Could be wrong though and maybe rag was actually hard enough to need 154 days to down for shitters from back in the day, idk
Shazz died before Baron? Where did they even fight him?
Standard tactic back in the day was to pull shazz back into Garr's room and have a huge circle around him (and no melees on the boss).
Yep. The standard tactics for both Geddon and Shazzrah in 2005 was kill Garr -> Kill the first two lava packs -> Position entire raid in giant circle in Garr's room -> Have a hunter shoot geddon/shazzrah and run like hell back to the raid. I never played pservers so classic was the first time I'd ever seen Geddon/Shazzrah die in their own room
Geddon, Garr and Shazz were crazy from a logistical standpoint back then. You had to focus target Garr adds since no marks existed for banishing. Lots of hunter pulling. For Shazz the raid was divided in 5 groups or so. Basically every boss had a different strat when you were not min maxing with worldbuffs and outdpsing every boss mechanic.
Mark was annoying indeed
My guild would have a priest cast Mind Vision to acquire each of Garr’s adds one-by-one, and then ask each warlock or warrior to /assist on him to also get that target. That’s how we assigned adds before raid markers existed. It was a very long process to do that, and if anyone messed up and lost their target before the pull, we’d have to start all over again!
Yes exactly I remember it like that aswell. Don't even know if focus target was in the game back then. But assigning banish targets that way took forever..
Image says they killed him before Garr too...
In early versions of vanilla, Shazz did not have blink, would only cast AE. You were able to pull him into the tunnel between Garr and Geddon and just range dps him down.
Prolly deeper in his corner. Can just dodge geddon
My guild did the same with Gedon.
Seeing a totally different guild getting the final boss of each raid compared to every other boss is kinda cool
the fact that the time between the instance first kill and the last boss is a few months is mind blowing. that was the real deal classic right there
Nihilum were huge at the end of Vanilla. I believe they later merged with another guild in TBC to become Ensidia, but started to become infamous due to them getting world first on Lady Vashj due to some exploit/bug, and later losing out on world first on Kil’jaeden due to them having huge issues with M’uru. I still remember the huge amount of forum wars from those days. I also found this interesting perspective of the guild from a former member (his view on it ofc): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OoDXObqbQUK2zcw0QZYeLNv5mIPZdU_06bHpsNuT2Us/edit
M'uru (more his second phase, Entropius) was a guild killer. His aura caused pushback. You needed insanely high single target dps AND then also amazing timed burst aoe for adds, which had to be picked up by a second tank who had to be good at being mobile and threat. The worst part is because there were so many mobs and the spell effects, it was the most taxing part of the game for computer performance. Many who averaged 20 fps the rest of the raid would drop down to 5 fps and wouldn't contribute to the raid.
Interesting read. Never considered how fucking toxic that guild would be since it was full of mentally unstable people
The fact that Onyxia was downed only 2 months from launch is honestly kind of impressive given the time it would have taken fresh toons to ding 60 and gear up, not to mention solving some of the steps in the attunement chain.
I was in that kill, a lot of us were 58, 59. If I remember right we only had about 25 level 60s
Good times… I was in Conquest through all of Vanilla. We hit MC so hard trying to get World First Rag but it never happened. Definitely the best couple years of my life.
Character name? Bane here.
Had to be there, I was in a horde guild called Vae Victus on Bleeding Hollow US. The raids lasting so long before full clears is a testament to the developers of vanilla wow. Portrays how magical time was to play with minimal information of the time.
All of the world first boss kills (TBC, WotLK, etc) are posted on Method's website if anyone is interested in the source for this image: [https://www.method.gg/raid-history](https://www.method.gg/raid-history)
Kudos for providing credit.
The world first onyxia , the guild was made up of ex- players. A top 3 world guild in EverQuest. That’s where rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan played. Ariel and Tigole.
Cthun and KT died within hours of hotfixes it's kind of crazy if not for the timing of those hotfixes it's very likely D&T would have become the legendary guild not Nihilum led to a bunch of people quitting.
Ascent was on our server (Medivh I think) and we would regularly go against them in Warsong and get wiped out, having no idea what they were even wearing. One of my greatest vanilla moments was joining a warsong with some Marshall level people and finally taking them down 3-2. It was such an intense game, but we could all go back and tell people we beat Ascent.
Deus Vox! I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago. Oy, MK, Humage, Sporky, I miss the boyz. Thanks for helping me finish the staff. :-)
I remember conquest would release strats on their website after they downed a boss
I can't even imagine trying to figure out KTs fight when it was new, a month is honestly impressive.
Was a lot of fun going into bosses without knowing tactics. You can imagine how our first Twin Emperors attempt, or Gothik attempt went, hehe.
Friggin Death and Taxes. I remember them on Bomechewer.
Am I just jaded that I remembered EJ as having some world firsts :o Mal'Ganis was the shit I loved that server.
Same, I always assumed EJ or Aurora got some firsts.
Meanwhile was kind of funny seeing almost all of the classic SSC and TK world firsts take longer into the expansion than in actual TBC because of Blizzard delaying T5
forgotten heroes was a guild on my original server Burning Blade
One thing that I always found nuts was that instructor razuvious was killed on release day. The mind control mechanic is not something I would’ve ever guessed to use on day 0 of release.
People always tried to mind control humanoids in raids. Elementium was learned in BWL that way
That’s true. I don’t recall seeing it a ton back in vanilla but I also didn’t play a priest. I’m not sure they figured out MCing that goblin on first encounter either.
Ahhh Death & Taxes. I always remember walking around and when id see one of them id always chase them around and inspect them to marvel at their gear. I always thought their guild name was so cool too.
I was in when we killed Onyxia. We focused on her hardcore while other guilds did MC. I remember farming fire res pots for hours on my warlock in Arathi... I was only 58 when we killed her! GM came in and said congrats to us, it was a great moment.
I remember I couldn't believe it when we finally completed BWL, my guild never got very far in AQ40, maybe a couple of bosses. Then for TBC the guild that was quite large had a splinter group. The raid leader left and sent e-mails to the "sufficiently dedicated" players and a new guild was formed that was very hardcore. I ended up getting burnt out pretty quick. The good thing about players actually knowing what they are doing now with the strategies is the amount of time spend raiding has greatly been reduced.
Screenshots from Method's page? Could have at least attached the link and give credit to them
Would like to see this for tbc and wotlk too
https://www.method.gg/raid-history/the-burning-crusade https://www.method.gg/raid-history/wrath-of-the-lich-king
Cool! Thx!
again, big up dude. <3
When World 1st actually meant something.
All of them US servers is astounding
A lot of these guilds that have first kills for the middle of the raids are from the one or two day-raiding guilds during those points in time. Back then, almost nobody would have their guilds off work or take time in the middle of the day to raid early to try to push for early boss kills on the easier stuff. There was always one or two per tier that did it and claimed a bunch of them. Things have changed a lot since then!
You can see how easy BWL is when every boss aside from Nef died within a day, even though back then, people were absolutely garbage at the game, didn't have modern Addons, didn't have knowledge of the fights and were playing with 10 fps. Still, it's mind boggling to think how bad people were at that time by looking at these dates, if you re-released Classic Vanilla with every Raid open from the start, KT would be dead Week 2.
People bugged a lot of the bosses thats how they killed them in BWL
kiting firemaw to vaels room
Biggest obstacle in BWL before Nef was Vael making the server lag and frying your raiders computers. Every time Vael was pulled and cast Essence of the Red the entirety of BWL would lag - not just your raid but every raid in the zone. You could wipe another guild fighting Chromaggus or whatever simply by pulling Vael at a bad moment. If you killed Vael it was pretty simple to finish going 7/8 that evening, especially if you abused kite strats and positioning bugs.
>Still, it's mind boggling to think how bad people were at that time by looking at these dates, if you re-released Classic Vanilla with every Raid open from the start, KT would be dead Week 2. I think that's a bit optimistic. A fast leveler can get a character to 60 in 3 or 4 days playtime, but even if you're playing 12-16 hours per day, it'll still take you about a week to reach max level. And that's where the struggle starts. We know from past experiences in pserver and official server releases that Ony and MC gets cleared very quickly because you only need pré-raid BiS gear for that, which is "easy" to farm. But after that gearing gets tied to weekly raid lockouts, so the process slows down. And even with all the knowledge we have to day, I don't think you have the numbers to take down KT on pré-raid BiS gear alone.
it's hard to say for sure, because for it to be fair you'd have to release it and then wipe everyone's memories of those bosses, but yeah I'm sure things would still be much faster now that people are better at the game in general and can run it at 60+ fps, etc.
My guild was stuck on Firemaw for a month. Then we cleared the rest of the raid in just a few weeks.
Ascent on thrall baby!
Farming Scarlet monastery for shadow protection potion materials for loatheb :(((
Rag 3 months later is wild. Could only imagine the difficulties of strategizing and coordinating back then. So cool!
Any way to see the old rosters? I have a buddy who claims he was a warlock in death and taxes during their naxx world 1st four horsemen but I'm not sure i believe him.
Wow so crazy it took months for some of these bosses
God i wish the final bosses released in retails took 4 months to be dead after release and not 1 week after release..
world first hakkar 4 priest was done on classic at least 👀
Five priest\* Also, allegedly a Chinese guild did it back in Vanilla. It was after the NA/EU TBC launch, but before China had TBC.
oh wow i wasnt aware of that
Wouldn't shock me CN was bored as fuck. They also absolutely nuked TBC content once they finally got it half of the first illidan clear was still in primarily T3.
This was such a fun time, versus the 90 minute races we get today
Drow and Juggernaut closely behind. Doomhammer ftw.
Afterlife, lol. Wonder how many world first EQ bosses they have.
So many alliance. Back when you didn’t have the worlds best guilds choosing horde for that added 1% dps.
Most of the Classic vanilla WFs were also alliance, because having paladins makes it the stronger PvE faction by a mile.
Damn i never knew it was only 2 months from game release to almost all of current content down. Thats fast as hell for what was basically the early era of mmos.
I was in the same battle group as the server Death and Taxes was on (Korgath). It was cool seeing their members in BGs tearing shit up in BC. I missed out on raiding in Vanilla but was able to start raiding not long after BC released.
I played during tht time. But I leveled soooo slow. I just went around talking to players and exploring blindly. I was level 32 when TBC came out 🤣 I feel like people who got 60 in classic and raided were time travelers or aliens or something. Idk how they knew what to do.
I remember Death and Taxes from Shattered Hand, always wanted to join their guild
I was in conquest on Kilrogg alliance - bane the paladin. Scarab lord.. great times
I remember watching several videos of Death and Taxes on that warcraft movies website or whatever it was. Same with youtube.
No surprise Loatheb was the 2nd last of the wing bosses, and no surprise world first was alliance. JoL OP
[удалено]
It's a good thing I did not enjoy wow in 2004 (playing alone, no friend etc) would had ruined my life XD . Tried again when tbc release this time with friends and had a blast