This is so true. There is nothing more to add. Think about the time when def warriors only reliable source of income was fishing stonescale eel. We farmed ubrs, lbrs, strath & scholo for month gathering the T0 pieces.

I remember one night when we all farmed essence of air together in sillithus for this one hand weapon agility enchant. 20 people roaming through the land. 2 hours later we had 40 of it.

Or did somebody remeber what real reputation farming was back in vanilla? Two words: thorium brotherhood.

Your timing On chomaggus seems off. Generally from memory we killed in 15 or so or ran oom. or ran out of tanks. Ebonroc? Now he could go over 30 mins. I remember a attempt where the healers where complaining because it had been 35 mins and he was at 90%. They wanted a chance to reiax and rebuff and just start over.

The two big advances that broke open MC for more then the elite were raid frames and decursive. Dieing as a resto shaman to Ignite Mana from geddon because the priest in your group was incapable of selecting you and cleansing it was a fairly sad way to wipe.

But another one i should mention is the Hakkar plague that wiped out whole citys if a hunter pet died to the hakkar blood disease and was resummoned outside the instance in IF or SW or such. It was pandemonium for a while.

i sitll think that Vanilla wow had the best feel. Talents weren’t “balanced” and nerfed on what now seems like a constant basis every month or two.

i could go on and on…

great post

OUTDOOR RAID BOSSES! They were so much fun.

Azuregos

Kazak and his 3 mins ultimate enrage timer with open horde/alliance and other guild griefing

4 dragons of the emerald dream. Taerar, Lethon, Ysondre, Emeriss

Random spawn timers, one shot or the other guilds racing to get to the spot will take a turn after you and the loot is lost!

also, no PTR for a long time. I think AQ was the first real PTR, so BWL was a complete trial/error at LiVE. If anyone remembers, there was just one guild that could get past the razorgore bug for weeks!

you could raid all 5 mans cause there was no such concept. I still remember stratholme with dozens of people because there were so many mobs with such huge hit points and dmg output it took alot of people.

My fondest memory is still that of our Rag kill. The ventrillo server was screaming for 5 minutes with cheers and congrats. 2 months of wiping and making resist gear runs on Overmaster Pyron for the off chance you wouldnt get cloth bracers with tank stats for your mage. Kills like that were epic. Months to achieve. C’Thun is a close second since we beat him with 1% hp left before his invuln wore off for the second time. we litterally beat 1 dmg out of him per person per second for 10 exeedingly long seconds for the last few thousand hit points.

Second time around it was a year later and there was much more Theorycraft and Wow-sense around.

Also MC became much easier if you had some ZG gear (once it was added). I remember first kills of Lucifron (26 man), Mag (25, one Tranq shot), Baron (28), flame packs (28 and no FR gear other than one tank), everything pre-Domo with less than 35 man. Domo was the first boss that took real time to kill and that was mostly getting situational awareness sorted.

We also one-shot Onyxia on the first attempt with less than 30.

This guild then got broken by Razorgore because the hunters sucked at kiting and the groups in the corners had too much trouble co-coordinating. Funny story is that I was a slot-filler for Chrom and Nef for a more advanced guild, but I never beat the first couple of bosses in BWL.

So many tanks and healers HAD to have dps farming alts just to raid on their mains. I never did so I kept quitting raiding I got so sick of it. Even in TBC I hated doing the dailies on my holy priest. Now I finally have a hunter and have dual spec on my priest so I can breeze through dailies, but still hate them

And MCing UBRS I almost forgot that was great, do it then race to the boss, then have the guilds who are past us in progression call us losers for using the buff.

Food buffs were done through cooking and fishing in those days, too. In the winter months, I spent ages and ages fishing up Winter Squid, which I could cook into Grilled Squid for a +10 agility buff, or killing bears to make myself a +24 AP buff, though in those days the agility was actually better. Go look at the list of artisan cooking recipes, and imagine being one of two cooks and fishers in a guild that wanted all of them. That was my raid farming.

Defeating bosses always did feel like more of an accomplishment. There was no ‘hard more’ and no ‘achievements’. Everything was ‘hard mode’ and if you couldn’t do it, you found other people who could, or you gave up. Organizing forty people to all do the correct jobs was the first part of that hard mode. But it was fun, at times, and you always knew you were accomplishing something, even if it was one person out of forty learning to do it better. With twenty-five people, or especially with ten, I tend to feel less like we’re learning to work together as a unit and more like we just suck, when we wipe.

There were damage meters, though they were often inaccurate, and I remember the rise of KTM Threat Meter. And having a certain dps was less important than knowing the fights and being a good team member, anyway. I remember seeing somone trying to pug MC back in those days, and he was shunned – the idea of pugging a raid was just outrageous – do the work, get yourself guilded, and be a team member. No slacking.

Those were the glory days, to me – not because of the difficulty, but the level of teamwork and commitment that went into raiding.