37 replies to this topic

[Liebe]

A week or so ago I renewed my retail account after more than half a year and here I'm sharing my experience. Feel free to write how it was like for you, when was the last time you played retail and if you want, what made you quit in the first place.

It took me about 3 days of rather intensive playing to kite my owl in full S11 honor gear, coming from a full s9 gear.

It took me one aternoon to clear all current pve content - 3 5 man "heroics" and 2 raids.
I started with raids, that can be seen and completed by just clicking 2 buttons, select your role (tank, dps, healer) and select the raid you want to queue for. Yes, queue, the system does the rest of the work, you just have to wait. And sure enough after 10 minutes I was in, owning those bosses that are basically tank and spank with some rather mild "dont stand in fire" (you really need to afk in it to actually die) and some "stack up" (you might actually die if you dont, but you just follow the crowd really). Both raids are using locations and models from WotLK, so the effort that went into them must have been minimal.

What I liked that while bosses were simple the moonkin rotation came a long way from "spam wrath and starfire when proc" being out of practice kept me entertained. But I don't feel any need to get back again, the whole place looks like they said "hmm, we need to make a final raid, but we don't want to spend a lot of money" so they took a part of zone from the previous expansions, filled it with already existing models and called it a day. I killed Deathwing with honor pvp gear, I've seen everything and I'm not inclined to go back and repeat it, because doing it and wearing the gear it rewards means nothing. Every idot can do it, it has nothing to do with dedication or skill. I could go and join some mid tier pve guild to progress on hard mode, which basically mean doing the same bosses that hit harder, have some extra abilities and reward better loot, but really there is no magic to it. It's like fapping all day for 3 days and then hiring a 20 EU hooker, sure it will be super hard to nail her, but it's not like you're doing anything special.

Another thing I was reminded of again was that there is basically little or no need for farming, using professions and trading in order to be able to do anything. Everyone is rich, all remaining consumables are very easily obtainable and really don't make such a huge difference to start with. Then cut back to when C'Thun came out on Warsong and Gromsblood was the most valuable herb on the server, I never though I'll have so much adrenaline soaked fun gathering herbs in Felwood, camping spawns at 45 minute respawn rate, fighting off rogues, warriors and anything else that wanted to gank me.

I'm really enjoying the pvp aspect though, damage can be very bursty in certain situations, but in general you always have time to actually use your abilities, which is more than I can say for Archangel right now. MoP is also looking pretty good in terms of pvp (class) balance, it might be the best pvp expansion ever, but I could never raid on that crap again.

All in all they still know how to write lore and, judging Cata as a whole and excluding last raiding tier, design boss fights. Even with all it's flaws it's still the best MMO there is and even with (relatively marginal to be honest) subscription numbers dropping it's still by far the biggest MMO.

EDIT: This is also the best time to advertise project like Feenix, since people are bored of current expansion and just wish for something new. I'm not saying you should spam the official forums or trade chat (horrible idea), but talking to people you meet in game can go a long way.

[Farador]

Retail has become so boring, so mediocre. It's not really the same game as the one that came out in 2004 that blew our minds. I really miss Vanilla, and I am so glad that I found this server. I have been playing on this server for a long time now, and it is way better than retail. I have been coming back to retail from time to time to check it out, but never really stayed. Feenix is the server I keep coming back to. Cataclysm is a decent game, but it's not World of Warcraft anymore.

[karasi]

I totally agree with you, guys. Retail requires no skill.

[Azsharia]

I had the same experience on retail but id didn't lvl up to max only about 79-80 that was enough to scare me away from it.
+1 feenix
-100 blizz

[ToxicTeufel]

i totally agree with u on retail. my rogue on live is 6/8 heroic current tier , legendary daggers, near full heroic gear but everything is too easy. i rank on world of logs all the time and thats the only thing keeping me going till MOP (in the beta and PVP feels sweet).

i literally just found out about feenix last week and boy is TBC the most refreshing experience ive had in a long time. i loved Vanilla WoW pve & TBC PVP . so u guys make it the perfect combo

thanks for the experience! and im waiting for ED to release for the fresh Vanilla experience.

[Nephi]

I played on retail and I'm still playing, not as much as before but I log in sometimes, and I can agree with you guys, retal became so so soooo boring... Yesterday I made an account here (because I miss good old TBC ) and I enjoy playing here. Community is nice while on retail there are a lot of boosted kids and they think they invented the game, anyway you get my point I'm thinking about quitting my subscription on retail to be honest... I'll wait for MoP to come out and see if it's going to be interesting, then I might continue playing on retail.

[Sideoflife]

My retail account was resurrected by a mate couple of days ago, I logged onto my very first char I made back in vanilla, a night elf hunter with the corporal rank...tihih
and man, I saw ppl flying dragons above stormwind and then came the alt f4.
But retail still brought me lots of joy, playing with my friends and totally g33king our arses off.

Keep it Classic! foevhha!

[Liebe]

Ha ha, they kinda overdid it with all the shiny flashing dragons everyone is riding, yeah.

As far as PVE goes the biggest mistake was made in wrath with release of ToC when full raiding gear suddenly became obtainable by just doing 5 mans. You could still stand out in full T8 and heroic Ulduar gear, it took a decent guild to ever see Yogg while most pugs were first boss only (the infamous "LFM Ulduar FL run, Ironsoul reserved) and maybe 2-3 bosses more if they were good pugs. With ToC everything fell apart and I remember guilds suffering because of it. And it's not like boss fights as such were bad, both ToC and ICC introduced new and interesting mechanics. And being able to pug ToC with alts and offspecs while raiding ICC with main had a nice social effect, I met many people on my holy pally alt that way, some of which I later recruited in our guild.

The main problem is that a gear reset should only happen every expansion, which keeps people motivated to improve they gear. On warsong even guy in greens is motivated to gather pre-raid BiS blues, since he knows that pre raid BiS will actually stay pre raid BiS, nothing will devalue it, nothing can take it from him, and he'll be able to get into ZG and AQ20 raids easily or join a decent raiding guild. Getting BiS on retail still has value, but it's greatly diminished by the fact that every patch there is a total gear reset, not to mention everyone looks the same, since the only thing that separates you from some random 5 man farmer is color of your gear, the design is the same.

[hnilobijec]

I never played retail, but from wotlk, everything becomes easy. Only needed consumables are flasks(tanks don't need anything), that are easy to obtain(5 minutes of whatever farming and you can buy one). No resistances needed, tanks recieves minimum damage(bosses have slower attack speed?, defense is capped with only neck and 2 rings). If anything goes wrong, there is healers with infinite mana(except for first month of new expansions because of low gear, and that's only because nobody knows what is mana potion). And you can get gear with marks and badges, when there is 10 mans with 2 items(or more?) per boss. That's like getting T2 in UBRS. One good thing is PvP, classes are more balanced now.
Nevermind, waiting for Emerald dream.

[Relly200117]

I started my wow experience during the Sunwell patch, I rolled a human mage. I can still remember that feeling of exploring the areas around goldshire and gawking at all the high levels and their epics. Turns out I never got my mage to the level cap, this was because when I hit level 55 I just got Wotlk, so I made a death knight as soon as I could. My human death knight eventually turned into my main, reaching level 80 a month before the Ulduar patch was released. I got BiS for raids and started to raid Naxx with a fresh raiding guild. Over a month or so I had been screwed multiple times gear wise and ended up getting treated like shit. A few other shitty guilds later I decided to faction change my death knight, there I was met with the same shit so I faction changed and realm changed to an rp server. There I, you guessed it, rped. I joined a raiding/rp guild and had probably the most fun I'd had in the game since then, the server I was on had a great rp community (It wasn't moonguard goldshire xD) and we would always meet at the blue recluse in the mage quarter. We would also run rp naxx runs, we were on ICC at the time, and just rp our characters, it was pretty awesome! However the couple that ran the guild had a pretty hard falling out and the guild fell apart. I continued to rp and raid but I started to hop from guild to guild until I finally gave up and canceled my subscription. And of course, hump my life, cataclysm was announced a few weeks after I had deleted all of my characters and froze my account. And just about a few months ago I found this server and thought "Hey I never got to experience vanilla, I'll give it a go!" And here I am today. The moral of my story/experience is that gameplay can make a game great but the people who you play(ed) can make a game the best game you have ever played.

[Liebe]

 Relly200117, on 20 July 2012 - 08:13 AM, said:

I started my wow experience during the Sunwell patch, I rolled a human mage. I can still remember that feeling of exploring the areas around goldshire and gawking at all the high levels and their epics. Turns out I never got my mage to the level cap, this was because when I hit level 55 I just got Wotlk, so I made a death knight as soon as I could. My human death knight eventually turned into my main, reaching level 80 a month before the Ulduar patch was released. I got BiS for raids and started to raid Naxx with a fresh raiding guild. Over a month or so I had been screwed multiple times gear wise and ended up getting treated like shit. A few other shitty guilds later I decided to faction change my death knight, there I was met with the same shit so I faction changed and realm changed to an rp server. There I, you guessed it, rped. I joined a raiding/rp guild and had probably the most fun I'd had in the game since then, the server I was on had a great rp community (It wasn't moonguard goldshire xD) and we would always meet at the blue recluse in the mage quarter. We would also run rp naxx runs, we were on ICC at the time, and just rp our characters, it was pretty awesome! However the couple that ran the guild had a pretty hard falling out and the guild fell apart. I continued to rp and raid but I started to hop from guild to guild until I finally gave up and canceled my subscription. And of course, hump my life, cataclysm was announced a few weeks after I had deleted all of my characters and froze my account. And just about a few months ago I found this server and thought "Hey I never got to experience vanilla, I'll give it a go!" And here I am today. The moral of my story/experience is that gameplay can make a game great but the people who you play(ed) can make a game the best game you have ever played.

Playing a Devil's advocate here, but max level retail characters are, as far as I know, never deleted. I've delted all my characters once, trying to quit, and when I came crawling back I made a ticked that was answered in mere 5 minutes. All my characters were restored, together with all the items, gold and professions. In a way it's a lot like a heroin dealer calling his old custumers that quit or are trying to quit saying "how you're doing, how's life?", ha ha. Love the RP part though, I only got to taste it a few times and it was mostly not actual RP itself, but people being a lot more mature and generally more interesting to talk to on /w. I pretty much chatted my way to 80 on a warlock I was then leveling on Argent Dawn.

And yeah, a very strong point, the community plays a very high role.

[Exiztence]

 ToxicTeufel, on 19 July 2012 - 03:50 PM, said:

i totally agree with u on retail. my rogue on live is 6/8 heroic current tier , legendary daggers, near full heroic gear but everything is too easy. i rank on world of logs all the time and thats the only thing keeping me going till MOP (in the beta and PVP feels sweet).

i literally just found out about feenix last week and boy is TBC the most refreshing experience ive had in a long time. i loved Vanilla WoW pve & TBC PVP . so u guys make it the perfect combo

thanks for the experience! and im waiting for ED to release for the fresh Vanilla experience.

You are 6/8 when there is what, currently 30% buff active? That means you are just a mediocre progressed person (Hope you won't take offense), the PvE is hard if you do on the hardest setting just after the tier comes, if you are at 6/8 and you have nearly full heroic gear and YET you are not killing the final bosses that is kinda of sad.

[tyllindan]

 Exiztence, on 20 July 2012 - 12:30 PM, said:

You are 6/8 when there is what, currently 30% buff active? That means you are just a mediocre progressed person (Hope you won't take offense), the PvE is hard if you do on the hardest setting just after the tier comes, if you are at 6/8 and you have nearly full heroic gear and YET you are not killing the final bosses that is kinda of sad.

rofl

[Clutch AKA Clutched]

All of you guys that say "Wotlk ezesauce blah blah" obviously never did Heroic ToC / ICC / "hard mode" achievements in Ulduar such as Firefighter and No lights in the darkness. That shit was hard when it first came out. And by hard, I mean VERY hard. You can't say retail is easy when you only raided the normal versions of the raids or did Heroic content after it was nerfed.

Personally, I'm going to give Mists of Pandaria a try. The PTR is now live on retail so I'm going to try it out and see how it's been changed. I've been playing private servers for many years, sometimes taking breaks to go play retail. Honestly, retail may become boring at times, but so do private servers.

[trestan]

 Clutch AKA Clutched, on 21 July 2012 - 05:59 AM, said:

All of you guys that say "Wotlk ezesauce blah blah" obviously never did Heroic ToC / ICC / "hard mode" achievements in Ulduar such as Firefighter and No lights in the darkness. That shit was hard when it first came out. And by hard, I mean VERY hard. You can't say retail is easy when you only raided the normal versions of the raids or did Heroic content after it was nerfed.

Personally, I'm going to give Mists of Pandaria a try. The PTR is now live on retail so I'm going to try it out and see how it's been changed. I've been playing private servers for many years, sometimes taking breaks to go play retail. Honestly, retail may become boring at times, but so do private servers.

i'll agree on that, if u want challenge in retail u have it. I don't like retail anymore cause of the raid progression, i prefer the vanilla or tbc style, when u had to do progress through all content and not just the latest. Retail is only good for me in the first tier of every expansion so maybe i'll try MoP

[Liebe]

Boss fights experience remains challenging and fun, but the whole social frame was broken with ToC release and smashed even further with Cata. Sorry I won't be spending 4 nights a week just to look exacly like some nab that farms 5 mans and knowing that same nab gets to see the content I'm doing my best to conquer. It's a very social thing and it's also a very basic element of human nature, I laugh at retarded blues (basically office drones that have to produce what they're told) spewing stuff like "achievements have a date, what does it matter if somene sees the content few months after you, you want to feel special because someone can't have what you have?". Really, achievement date, that is your argument? GUYS LOOK AT MY PRO SICK ACHIEVEMENT DATE PLS!!!! Jk, no one cares.
And yes, Firefighter was a living nightmare (.

EDIT: Best are idiots saying "hy if 30% buff is too easy go in greens you elitist and you get chalenge, we get epix )"

[SirRot]

I know this is going to be an odd answer but I prefer to remember WoW retail from a nostalgic "remember the good times" view of when I was first amazed by this game called WoW The Burning Crusade, rather than the time I renewed and saw that W.O.T.L.K didn't give me the same sense of interest, excitement and wonder that I got from that first character who headed to The Outland. Maybe remembering it the way I do is a nice way to to think about it, an experience I enjoyed at the time. So I guess my retail experience was what I care to remember, first seeing Zangermarsh, helping the sporegarr, looking at an undead rouges flying mount and going .

I am delighted to be playing on the Archangel realm and returning to the times I enjoyed.

EDIT: Also I don't really like to put negativity on The Burning Crusade but the mobs in Molten Core must have gotten lonely after the expansion.

[VmpX]

Rather huge reply inc.

I first got in contact with World of Warcraft around summer of 2004 after i won a beta invite for US servers. I barely remember anything over there, i still have a tons of screenshots from it ( used to walk and press printscreen every 30 seconds because of some awesome shits i was seing ). The Beta ended with Blizzard QAs and GMs spawning huge infernals over every major city and created some kind of chaos apocalpyse.

After that i kinda got hooked to the game, even tough i only managed to level a human mage to ~25 and a nightelf hunter to ~30.

Game launched in EU around February 2005 but since i was from Eastern Europe i had a hard time geting my hands on the retail version. Around that time various sand-boxes and early private servers started to appear. They were buggy as hump tough...for example : Mobs used to chase players on the exact same path and there were no agrro-tables. I remember we used to group up in 5-6 players and kill Magni in Ironforge in order to level up. One guy was hiting him first and started runing in circles, while others stood in midle and dps.

Around summer 2005 i finaly bought the EU version of the game and made a character on the Eu-Darksorrow realm. It was a troll hunter that after 1 year got banned ( Was paying with a stolen credit card ).

It was around patch 1.2 or 1.3 i belive, there were no PVP ranks yet. Not even all the zones were opened. At The Bulwark there was this huge infernal called "Guardian of Blizzard" that used to prevent players from entering The Plaguelands. He used to cast Death Touch on everyone that came close to him.

Silithus was only half of what you guys see now in 1.12 and later. There was no scarab wall at the south, and Cenarion base consisted of 2-3 tents scatered in the middle of the map. Later around patch 1.7 i belive, some buggs appeared in the mountains in the south ( still half a map ). They were targetable but when you tried to attack them, all the attacks disappeared, like you never did them.

They also used to have a old model for the outlands portal, older than the one on the loading screen / black morass. It used to look egyptian'like and they used it as a placeholder for some instance entrances. ( For example, there was one at the Darrowmere lake, holding place for Scholomance ).

One of those portals was also located in Azshara, right in the middle of the gulf, underwater. Everyone belived a instance will be available there aswell. Apparently Blizzard scraped that ideea and nobody ever found out what instance was suposed to be released there.

The game was fresh and vulerable to alot of crazy ideeas and buggs. ( Everyone remembers the famous Reckoning bomb paladin @ Kazzak ). However there were more severe exploits and bugs available.

I remember a certain script that you could whisper to any player that was inside an instance. Doing that would of instantly disconnect the targeted player. Upon loging back in, he was @ his HS place.
Typing n would of instantly disconnect you. Everyone was trying to fool noobs into typing a secret emote "nice".
Other players used to pull InnKeepers with the help of cross'faction friends and set their HeartStones in all kinds of strange places (Blackrock Mountain f.e.).

Then players discovered they could swap their models trough the client files, and altough some of those were harmless, crazy ideas started poping. ( Chainging Campfire models to Horde Towers/Dark Portals that you could climb or removing certain walls inside instances to facilitate the progress. <Hello AQ40 guild Overrated> ).

What i remember a bit clear is my first BRD run. BRD was like, the first high end instance available. Everything before that didn't really stretched players abilities and focus as BRD did ).

BRD was huge, i remember it took us like 5-6 hours to clear it first time. We used to get lost inside that place alot. We had no addons to display the map, no such things ever existed back then, so we used to draw a map IRL as we progressed trough it. BRD was the base of the mountain regarding WoW progress curve. You had to CC, you had to position good, you had to pay atention to the patrols, you had to use certain tacts for special bosses or zones (Hello Lyceum).

Then Stratholme....Stratholme was a blast at start. Besides the fact that it was capped @ 10 players till around 1.10 (alot of players didn't knew it lasted this long), it was so humping intense, and so humping hard. You had to move really fast because the place was crowded with some Crystals that used to respawn and spawn alot of adds, and also casting some beam thing that was doin' quite a bit of damage. They used to remove them towards the end. Another aspect was the fact that, if you wiped @ Rivindare, the dor wouldn't open anymore, so in the first months you had like, 1-2 shots at it.


I still look back and thing, was it the game harder back then ? or was the playerbase new to the game and didn't adapt as it should. I myself remember, after i got banned on my hunter, got another account and rolled a rogue. I still remember gathering and stacking Crit Gear...and i was not the only one, nobody had acces to detailed informations, to spreadsheets or knew the way class abilities and mechanics work. The design was flawed as hell aswell ( hello dodge on T2 rogue shoulders ).

- Speaking of T2: it had a different skin back @ release....Bloodfang was just an RED Shadowcraft.

What made the difference is the fact that back then people had fun with all kind of crazy ideeas. I look trough my screenshots and see events everywhere. Hunters pulling those Emerald dragons in Cross Roads or Orgrimmar, random players grouping up to kill a certain NPC, just for it. Astranaar raids...you had to love those, you used to get invided even if you were level 20. And you had 1-2 level 60's in your raid, and you used to shit brix looking at them smashing trough low level enemies.

Hell, i have screenshots from inspecting players in Orgrimmar and looking at how awesome their gear is. Screenshoting Lok'Delar and Rok'Delar like 5 times. The thrill....

I remember we used to make gold by farming earth elementals near Kargath (North side). We used to vendor all grey stones and kept elemental earth for AH. A stack of grey shits usualy sold @ vendor for around 30silvers. Used to make like 10 gold / 30 mins....rich ! Then my guild master figured he can buy the FA book from Dustwallow for 25s and sell it at AH for 20-30g because not alot of people knew the trick.




Random DB sites apeared. Allakhazam anyone ? ( and the other one...white collor, bad design, can't remember name atm ) and with them appeared the random farmers that used to kill shitty mobs all across the map because those sites pointed the highest rate of BoE Epics drop there. I did that myself, i admint....those poor trolls in Arathi...they never saw it comming.

Speaking of Epics....My first epic was the Seal of Gurubashi Berserker. I think i got it approx. 1 year after i started playing on the rogue. ( 1 year because i spent like 6 months leveling from 1 to 60. ). Anyway, got the epic because i finaly got inside a raiding guild. Your first serious guild...you used to be so thrilled about that aswell, you used to make alot of friends inside it.

Anyway, after around 6 mounths i used to walk around decked out in ZG/MC epics and sudently, i went from the little nice guy that used to printscreen other people's gear, to a imba geared rogue that used to walk around with 4-5 low'level chars after him in Orgrimmar.

Speaking of MC...nobody used the amount of buffs and potions that everyone are using today, and if i stay and think about it, that kinda affected progress alot. Even at the end of MC days, when we stepped foot in BWL seriously, we still had wipes @ Domo and Raggy. BWL was different, Vael especialy. That fight is probably the fight that transforms or breaks a guild. You realise you need to buff up, use pots/scrolls/world buffs.

Sadly that was all my PvE contend on Retail Vanilla, i stoped raiding when we hit the huge wall that's called Chromaggus and focused on pvp for the following days, till TBC arived. Managed to get rank 10 when TBC poped. 1 month or so before TBC poped, they made HWL gear available with honor, and also introduced lvl 70 Talents. That was a huge boost in pve for us. In 2 weeks we downed Neffarian and got 4 bosses in AQ40. Guild entered a pause stage after that, because content was faceroll.


The Burning Crusade arived. People kinda tend to forged what TBC was like at the start. it was harsh tunned, merciless and bad. The fight mechanics were amazing but still, the level of difficulty was huge at start. Oh Gruul in the first month was unbelievable. And adding more salt to the wound, when T5 appeared, and people got a peak at Lady Vashj, it was the ultimate fight. The amount of coordination needed, the high complexity of the fight, topped with tons of adds, 5 phases and the humping tainted core made it hellish.

Altogh alot of people dont agree, the beauty of TBC came after the initial nerf of the T5 content. That's when TBC got on the smooth ascending path of progress difficulty.Everyone has the same elitist attitude regarding retail T5. The truth is, nobody even tried those fights, so stop it. After the nerf everything went on cool and smooth, altough Vash and Kael remained one of the best scripted and most challenging bosses i ever came across in WoW and any other game. (Vashj being the boss that tops my list).

I went up to M'uru in TBC (Without killing it, even after the HP nerf in sunwell - guild broke before that). M'uru is a different story,M'uru is the kind of boss that they put there just to play gods with us. Everyone who atempted him before nerf (and even after i belive) probably knows what i'm talking about. M'uru wasn't complex in any way, like Vashj or Kael used to be. It was just a mindless zerg trying to controll those bloody humping adds, while still bursting him. In perfection, looking back now, M'uru was probably the only fight that stretched 25 players in a raid to the absolute maximum. The fight was boring as hell but it was the only fight that managed to achieve that.


......................................................................................................


4:00 AM here, dunno if you guys need another wall of text regarding more TBC experiences, bugs, start of WotLK, the Alone in the Darkness achievement or my first and last 4 days in Cataclysm. Waiting for feedback before i carry on.

[Liebe]

Woah, you posted some really original information about classic there, there are a few lists "did you know what WoW was like" floating around, but all your info is new to me. Do you have any of those old screenshots, could you post some perhaps?
Also reason for people using less buffs, apart for being less informed, was that it was a lot harder to grind than it is on Warsong. There were only a few Black Lotuses spawning and it was a dynamic spawn, a friend that played there told me that he was routinely checking all possible spawning places at 5 AM every day.
As for database you're thinking about Thottbot - it was designed that way on purpose, so it was faster to alt+tab to it. The front page is still there, but every search redirects to Wowhead now.

[Snarf]

Carry on
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