Get a start on FRESH with RestedXP, they have the best leveling guides available from 1-60 made by speedrunners. Ive done 10+ 60s on Classic and they even improved on the routes I used. Free up to level 20. www.restedxp.com/?ref=WillE Use Code: willeFRESH for 15% off!
The funny thing is, you found Lupos in Duskwood, where many of the mobs, who were undead, were shadow resistant. So you tested Lupos out as a pet and though his damage was terrible
Some things that I remember: 12:00 Very early on (i.e. late 2004, maybe up to early 2005) you could take 10 people in a raid into some of these instances and with some quests you could simply leave the raid group to loot a quest item. I remember doing this with a picture ("Of love and family"?) that was lootable inside Strat Live. That worked for a while. I seem to remember it being completely normal for a while to run Scholomance and Strat in 10-man raid groups. 14:05 There used to not even be battlemasters located in major cities. You actually had to go to the entrance to the battleground in the world (in Ashenvale or Alterac Mountains, for example) and talk to someone at the entrance to put yourself in the queue there. Sometimes the wait time could be 5-6 hours lol.
yep and AV was a disaster because it was on the cusp of Hillsbrad Foothills which was always a warzone among factions because of Southshore vs. Tarren Mill proximity.
@@TheRealSalali Originally there wasn't any guards there next to the BG entrance and vendors. They added those later when PvPers started camping entrances whilst in queue.
The flaws are kinda what made it perfect. I remember a time when only orcish warriors could reliably break CC. I’d trade that for the boring schlop class balance we have now, nothing is unique.
Theres 2 or 3 graves near the entrance of the tin mine at Westfall, at night a white rare ghoul might spawn accompanied by its "relatives" It's strange that these are quite specific graveyards since the others near Moonbrook are just normally placed graves, theres no other ones like these in the entire zone.
A great piece of lore, is that you can find the grave of Invincible (Arthas' horse) near Balnir Farmstead in Tirisfal Glades, it was added in patch 3.0.2 with the grave open and empty, because Arthas resurrected it!
In Feralas, the Alliance quest to kill naga in the cave of Isle of Dread has a secret. At the end of the cave, the pool of water has an underground route to another back part only (accessible via swimming) which has a special area with more naga. Sometimes, an elite rare will spawn back there on a platform.
@kswiss89 No, but that's also on Isle of Dread which gets you the Chimaerok Chops stamina food buff and is part of the AQ chain. The one I meant is a short quest chain that starts with Against the Hatecrest. It's a level 43 chain.
14:00 - for a patch or two(?), there wasn't even battle masters in major cities. You would have to go to Ashenvale/Barrens or Hillsbrad Foothills and run into the portal to join the queue. You could also only queue for one BG at a time. On my server there would usually only be one AV up because it was so bothersome to actually queue up for the BG, and you often had to wait for at least 2 hours (if you played alliance which was ~60% of the population). I remember standing in the Alliance Warsong Gulch area in Ashenvale waiting along with many others for my WSG invites. When you returned from the bg, you'd converse with the other players how your WSG went. Nostalgic, but inconvenient as hell.
The path from hinterlands to scholo was great during classic phase 2, as many horde didn't know about it and it let us alliance get around that area without being camped to death like every other zone.
@@Smandiithis is the first time I’ve ever come across another stormrage EU vanilla player after so many years 😅 played on it from launch to wrath on alliance side with a guild named Insight
No it was anytime a 5 man But it was possible to Go with 10. Quests only worked for 5. Same for ubrs it was for 10 But was possible to do it with 15 just for easy loot.
@@b0w7 I must have misremembered, and it may have just been server culture. But dungeon quests worked in raid groups until 1.3, which is also the patch that limited all but a few dungeons to 10 players, and BRS to 15. BRS was further capped to 10 in 1.10.
Hey WillE, I know you probs have heard it many times before but I thought Id just say, I really appreciate your videos and the style in which they are done. I hope you know your a integral part of the WoW culture in my eyes now and have been for years. Thanks again.
lupos is an absolute monster, i got to experience it myself on a private server that did progressive patches. it got so bad that the alliance had a whole "lupos mafia" and controlled which hunters could tame it lmao, good times
I specifically made a hunter to use Lupos in PVP as I was obsessed with WSG, and he really did absolutely melt everyone- even those we perceived as tanky back then.
When you right click on Zalashji from afar it tell you to "get closer to interact" which is not the case when a NPC has 0 interaction. It has to do something (even a blank text) but no one figured out the condition.
The weapon skill/tradeskill system is entirely based off how Ultima Online’s skill system worked. If you use swords your sword skill increases and you could only have a total of like 700 points between all your skills, crafting included.
Elders Scrolls Morrowind was also very popular and featured this skill system, Runescape also did the same. Very much a fashionable RPG mechanic of the time.
I remember running a lot of lv60 dungeons as a 10 man back in OG vanilla . There was an exploit for a while where if you disbanded the raid into 2 separate groups you could still do the quests.
I remember doing "class groups" for Scholomance and Stratholm back in the day (on Earthen Ring server) - the party was made up of one of every class - which meant that anything that dropped would be potentially useful for just one character.
You really feel like you accomplish something with each action completed in Vanilla. Retail feels more show and glitter with pay to win. Also, the lack of having to hoof it from location to location makes a full server in retail feel empty. People liked seeing other players running around along the road trying to get from town to town. Makes the server feel alive.
There are also two battle pets that are seasonal, the Snowy Owl, from Winterspring, and the Qiraji Guardling, in Silithus near the entrance for Ahn'Qiraj.
With regards to raids in 5 man dungeons, at some point it was changed because I remember doing 10 man strath runs and 15 man ubrs runs way back in vanilla days. I don't know which patch they stopped that though.
Pretty sure you can still do ubrs as 10man and I think lower too. I believe the rest are capped though at 5 but idk. Definitely seen 10man ubrs groups though on hc.
The footage of the Hunter shown at 5:43 doesn't even have Lupos, he has Echeyakee the white lion from Barrens... This is also evident by the Prowl ability on the pet cast bar, which wolves can't get in Classic.
There's a rogue class quest called "The azure key", and one of its rewards is a pair of boots that increases your effective stealth level by 1, making you harder to detect. Mostly folks chose one of the other two rewards - a cloak that reduces fall damage or a hood that gave crit and attack power - so people kinda forget about it. What I don't remember is if stealth counted as a class skill.
Yup I remember the days. Fighting over rolls on stitches or Righteous Orbs, sometimes Scarlet Thread, etc. No one knew how the rare spawns worked. No one wanted to do Frias Siabi or mailman stuff. Imagine the first time the mount dropped lol.
@@DIEGhostfish I don't really remember, but it was not hard to get them completed. Most people did not know of all the quests and the only ones doing them were after reputation for the vendor / quest rewards. There were no such quests like Baron 45 minute, etc. There wasn't even a possible thought of doing it under 45 minutes realistically...lol. Maybe top guilds with max geared players, but nothing the normal folks could fathom.
@@megakristof3855 No, I was there on a day 1 server and at the beginning, a lot of people didn’t even know roles like tank, cc, healer, dps, etc. Also keep in mind most players were in greens trying to upgrade to blues.
Back in 2005, it was absolutely common to do Strat and Scholo as a 10 man group - and it mostly was pure chaos... UBRS was a 15 man dungeon initially and got scaled down to a 10 man dungeon later in Vanilla. It was never intended to be done with 5 man.
Back during Vanilla before battlegrounds, players were craving large scale pvp and wanted a space for that. Eventually, the area between Southshore and Tarren Mill became a war zone on some servers due to the close proximity and open field with no high level mobs. I'm glad you added a clip of that!
Fun note, actually when WoW launched you could bring a full raid of 40 into any dungeon, and we did. The first few months of Vanilla people did full raids of BRS, Scholo, Strat and BRD. Gear from leveling up was so bad back then that many people had to do that in order to clear the content. You’d have 4+ tanks because they kept dying mid fight, etc. My first BRD was with a 30 man group and my first Scholo pug was a full raid of 40.
you used to be able to raid all the dungeons. I remember going on 10 man scholo raids with our guild for the class sets. I cant remember which patch blizz "nerfed it" by capping it to 5 players only.
I remember that too. They left raiding of Blackrock Spire though, right? (Hmm, according to Will here most dungeons could be 10-man raids even after a few were strictly 5-man)
I think it was sometime around 1.4 that Scholo was lowered to being a 5-man-dungeon. In the beginning, it was a 10-man-raid. I started playing around that patch and I remember wondering how cool it would be to do these dungeons with 9 other players
@@cattysplat Not sure whether they were nerfed or not, but the quests existed originally too, which were always 5-man. Anyway, I remember this change very well, and it was much later, around 1.9 or 1.10, the same time the tier 0.5 questline was put into the game which had us going to all the endgame dungeons doing extra stuff.
12:20 Dire Maul was also a dungeon that you could not bring in more than 5 people into. And it was like that when it was released in patch 1.3 "Diremaul will be limited groups of no more than five players each." (patch 1.3 notes) 9:50 That wasn't Tirion who comes to help Alliance players. It was Bolvar Fordragon.
I remember finding a Rare Elite white lion pet for my hunter, that was near or in the Tauren Zone, and this thing had a faster than normal attack rate, something like 1.1 sec or less and it was absolutely brutal when used against Casters, as it could effectively prevent them from finishing spells before you killed them... then they nerfed it and it was just an ordinary lion pet.... which was unfortunate. Also, I really missed the random PvP Raids that would form escalations of pvp fights that would break out in the Barrens or Southshore. I remember running through Ironforge one day and a Horde Raid invaded the city. First a ton of Warlocks summoned Infernals and let them run loose on the city, back when Infernals were actually dangerous... then the Warlocks started summoning Doomguards, which were insanely powerful at this time, and then the rest of the raid went through and cleared out everything that survived the demons, and it was absolutely brutal.... but such an awesome thing to be able to happen. I really miss things like that.
When classic first launched in 2019, dungeon grinding in a raid was bugged so that the experience gained from each kill wasn't properly scaling for having over 5 people in the instance. Since the open world was packed and lagging like hell, taking 7-9 people and blasting through bigger dungeons, specifically SM (where you could do all 4 sections in 1 lockout) and ZF, turned out to be the optimal way to level. IIRC it was nerfed within the first or second week along with BRD torch farm, just after APES and a few other hardcore guilds were able to take advantage of it.
if i recall correctly there used to be a bug with the flight paths on alliance, where, if you took the fp from IF to Eastern Plaguelands you would get teleported to Hinterlands instead. making the plaguewind ravine a very nice shortcut to scholo
Man... after a very long time, I'm getting back into Warcraft, starting to miss the universe... Just started watching this video and the epic "shaping of the world" gives me chills like crazy, love WoW and its music 🖤
It's Bolvar who saves you in that WOTLK quest, not Tirion. I remember that chain well. Another honourable mention about Westfall in vanilla is a rare called Leprithus, he is an undead linked to those graveyard ghouls in that he only spawns at night. Another place is Feralas, I remember looking there in TBC using my Far Sight and finding an out of reach area full of blue chimera NPC's, each one was 60 to 63 elite and they had the health of raid bosses, what their purpose was I don't know. Another frequently overlooked NPC was a rare spawn in the Drowned Reef off Arathi Highlands, he was a Naga which dropped a BoP trinket called Tidal Charm which had an on use effect which stunned your target for 3 seconds, this got nerfed on BC launch to only work on targets below level 60.
The chimera area are part of the AQ40 sceptre quest chain which you would raid with your guild for needed drops. Completely useless after the gong was rung and the AQ gates opened, as quest chain no longer doable.
@@cattysplat Ah so they had a use after all! Reminds me of those demons in the tainted scar where Kazzak was, the Doomguard Commander had a chance to drop a BoP grimiore which taught the summon doomguard spell to warlocks without them having to do the long quest chain.
In EverQuest, there was an entire zone called Kithicor Forest that changed became higher level and full of undead at night... apparently they've since changed it to stay in undead mode full-time though. Skill grinding was similar in EverQuest, I remember spending hours working on skills in both games. I remember hearing about Brokentooth, but not sure about Lupos. Definitely remember that mountain pass from Hinterlands as well as Zalashji. Didn't raid much in WoW, at one point I was an off-tank for ZG and AQ20 (as arms-spec warrior no less). I remember finding the one in Darkwhisper Gorge back in the day... Didn't do UBRS much, but every time I did it was a 5-man. Wait, was that a clip of the Southshore Wars there near the end? I wasn't part of it (never really liked PvP) but I remember entire guilds going there for PvP and keeping the wars going for days on end... it was insane!
Dont forget that for a while, UBRS (and LBRS by connection) used to be 15m. It was around the same time that they nerfed Strat, Scholo and BRD from 10m to 5m that they nerfed UBRS from 15m to 10m.
1st scholomance i ever did in early OG vanilla was 10man afaik and 15man UBRS runs helped in early days when casters had like 0 +DMG/healing still collecting dungeon 1 blueitems class sets with majorly +INT +SPI so casters had bad gear if they didnt do DM N tribute runs etc for +dmg n +spellcrit etc.. good ol dayz!!1
I have one - As Alliance I had *no idea* what to make of the Nancy and Grandpa Vishas cottage on the northern coast of Alterac Mountains. Horde get a quest in SM from an undead NPC on a torture rack that points them to this cottage for a quest, but that NPC is hostile to Alliance, so Alliance _never_ get the hint to go look for a cottage way up there. I was bewildered when I first stumbled on it.
In the old vanilla days there were split flight paths, to go to Chillwind, you flew to Southshore and took another griffin to Chillwind and Aerie Peak to Light’s Hope Chapel. I wonder if the path from Shindigger’s Camp to Scholo was a carryover from then.
More useless info but in vanilla before one of the patches the flight paths weren't connected so you manually had to fly from point to point instead just flying near a FP and autopaying. I started playing around Dec 2005 so it was around that time. I remember it well because when grouped up with my roommate to run a dungeon or whatever we would pop out for a quick cigarette or go back in and fly to the next spot and then go back outside to finish smoking.
People absolutely took more people into dungeons in Vanilla. Everyone did 15 man Upper Blackrock Spire, 10 man Scholomance, etc. if not more players. In fact, I hit 60 on my first character in a 17 player group inside Stratholme, it was wild. 😎
@@koffin522 Patch 1.3 made it so that all dungeons (excluding the newly released Dire maul as well as Blackrock Spire) were limited to 10 people. With Diremaul at a max of 5 and BRS having a max of 15. Mainly because UBRS was classified as a raid. Still have no idea why Blizzard didn't just make UBRS and LBRS into two different instances during vailla, or have UBRS separated by a raid portal inside LBRS. Given that any quests that took place in LBRS was flagged as "dungeon" while quests in UBRS were flagged as "raid". Patch 1.10 made further changes to the limit by adding Statholme, Scholomance and Blackrock Depths to the '5 player only' group. Diremaul was no longer alone. Blackrock Spire was then limited to 10 players. With UBRS will being considered a raid. Then when TBC came out, all dungeons (past and future) excluding Blackrock Spire were limited to 5 players. Blackrock Spire would later be capped at 5 players regardless with Cataclysm. Which scaled UBRS down from a 10 man raid to a 5 man dungeon.
@@koffin522 15 man BRS was intended and worked. It was capped at 15 in 1.3, the same patch that made dungeon quests not work in raids and capped most instances at 10. BRS was later capped to 10 in 1.10. BRS specific quests would still work even in a raid group.
@@koffin522 No problem bro. Had to look up some of it myself. But I distinctly remember raiding UBRS with 15, I had my guild's only seal of ascension for a while. I also remember Scholo being hard as hell when you could only bring 5. We weren't trying to get pre-bis, we were trying to replace shit from SM and claw our way up to MC.
I can see where a guild trying to reserve an item for a specific person would bring more than 5, especially if they can farm the loot tables and they don’t want/need the quests.
Regarding taking more than 5 people to the dungeons (more than 10 for blackrockspire), back in vanilla it was very common to take one of each class into scholomance, stratholme and two of each class to blackrockspire. In general it was agreed that only the players of the specific classes would roll for the pieces of their tier 0 set. This way it was less likely for the items going to waste and usually you didn't have to worry about someone else taking the items. Since the dungeons were pretty much endgame content, the reduction in experience didn't really bother anyone anyway. Also regarding quests, I admit I'm not sure about that, but I think at the time you could do quests in those dungeons if you went there as a small raid party. Blizzard didn't like that any resemblance of challenge was pretty much gone in those dungeons due to the numbers people brought there, so they capped the number of players. I think it was capped sometime in 2004 or 2005.
You forgot to bring up the rare wolf named Snarler. He used to be a very popular pet as he retained the 100 pts resist after taming, making him very good vs casters.
I remember unable to play WoW for months because game was sold out back in 2005 in Europe. Blizz was caping the number of copies available while they created more game servers... good old says...
So fun fact, end game dungeons like scholo, strat, etc were meant to be 5 man dungeons but they were either too hard or players weren't very good yet (depends who you ask nowadays, but gear and talent trees were very basic in these days too, but I digress), so bliz opened them up to be completed as 10 man raids and BRS as 15. This happened bc too many players were complaining they were too hard to complete. A lot of people misremembered this, self included, bc by the time we got there bliz already made the change. They didn't switch back until 1.10 patch I believe. Also fun fact, when WSG and AV first came out we didn't have battle masters in city to queue from. You had to travel to the instance entrance out in the world like a dungeon.
When you travel to scholomance, for horde the nearest flightpath is tarren mill, you just follow the river to the north and you'll end up in darrowmere lake. Alliance's nearest flightpath is aerie peak and then going into that shortcut, so yeah, the shortcut is pretty useful when you are grinding scholo, because if you fly to eastern plaguelands you'll have to walk the whole zone.
10:36 WoW couldve been a completely different game for real, way more like Warcraft 3 used to be. maybe it wouldve been a sick extra mode like "creative" mode with player housing. has great potential imo
During first re-release of Classic, my friend group was regularly 6-8 people online. We "raided" every 5 man instance we could and it was amazing. We didn't care about XP loss and we even went to dungeons that were a little too high level. The 10 man cap for instances was brilliant and we used it all the time.
When I first got a character to the Hinterlands, I didn't know about the entrance and the south-west end of the Hinterlands, and I saw that entrance on the map, so for a while that's how I'd always get to the hinterland, by going through the Western Plaguelands first.
Remember tagging along as a 58 mage in UBRS - on final Boss I had lowest dmg/aggro so everyone else died & they were saying it's a wipe, but I was able to blink and get the killing blow. Got my chest piece in the loot too. Good times.
Back in 2004-2005, we used to run all the dungeons with more than 5 unless we were doing a quest run. Typically 6-8 to make sure all our friends on-line could come. Was a lot of fun and made the runs more social. When classic first came out, we did a 10 man deadmines for shits and giggles and to help a friend get loot. Good times.
Please do more content like this Wille (secrets, mysteries, hidden places and general unreleased content) irs great and for me not useless information at all :D it jusr confirms how unique vanilla is in the history of gaming
I really enjoyed how classic vanilla wow had you interact with players. I remember fighting around WC in the barrens for a while doing LFG in chat until we got a group together. Then we did the dungeon. It felt more organic and i made some friends doing that. Then the LFG queue system came out and not you just tp into a dungeon speed run run it, and no one talks unleaa its yelling at someone else.
I debated even clicking on the video, assuming it was gunna be a bunch of info I've heard a million times. I learned some new things and even the stuff I already knew had some extra tidbits of info thrown in. Since you asked, I figured I'd reply and let you know that I'd be interested in more of this type of content.
there were some weird pets one was a dead fire pit (raptor) another was an humanoid (worgen) and i miss the skills they had, like tendon break for crocs, snare web for spiders, etc there is a video about them xD
Back when Strat (live) was called Strat SM (Scarlet Monastery) and Strat UD was called Baron...and everyone started Strat SM by going through the actual front gates...to which many pugs died and spirit res'd because there's no exit unless you fight your way back out the Baron gate...which never happened. And there was no LFG channel to find replacements.
I never realized you could bring 10 into almost every dungeon until tbc halloween event, cause people would bring 10 for more mount chances, kinda sad we never got make use of it in phase 1 of classic
~13:30 Blizzards mistake for Open World PvP was to not have any zones specific to encouraging this. They didn't know what they were doing with the whole PvP-system - as well as how to integrate that into PvE servers - that might have worked more easily - but rather how to have the free PvP of PvP-servers also affect the game beyond PvP-Zones that could yield benefits by controlling them. Final Fantasy had a great solution to that, at least mechanically, not necessarily by immersion: They had different zones in the world rotate to be PvP-zones every once in a while, and players entering would be temporarily leveled down to that zones maximum level to ensure some level fairness and allow everyone participation.
You didnt mention 2: Nelf Shadowmeld used to be more efffective at night and all races had to level up their "Common" language if they werent human, it resulted in crazy amounts of spam
There was a Linux client in Wow beta. The client was refered last time in the game installer in tbc (or maybe wrath didn't check wrath). You can still find the binary the client was distributed up on patch 0.9 .
7:27 ... Don't you think his den is named after him? Imagin the naga lalala'ing around and stumble upon the Zashi den and think "Hmm i should name myself after this den" x)
Get a start on FRESH with RestedXP, they have the best leveling guides available from 1-60 made by speedrunners. Ive done 10+ 60s on Classic and they even improved on the routes I used. Free up to level 20. www.restedxp.com/?ref=WillE Use Code: willeFRESH for 15% off!
i know its dumb but i always liked how in classic/vanilla you can get wool by skinning a sheep sometimes.
You touch one of the core elements of vanilla. It was a real RPG.
Flying to Chillwind Camp, you die before your char touches ground. Fun and interactive gameplay.
@@Hybridsixtynineno u dont
@@raduradu334 in classic you did, welcome to server lag
@@raduradu334 ok buddy
Original 2004 wow is something that I would LOVE to completely forget & experience completely fresh again, best gaming memories.
I want to do that with a lot of games both old and new!
The funny thing is, you found Lupos in Duskwood, where many of the mobs, who were undead, were shadow resistant. So you tested Lupos out as a pet and though his damage was terrible
Some things that I remember:
12:00 Very early on (i.e. late 2004, maybe up to early 2005) you could take 10 people in a raid into some of these instances and with some quests you could simply leave the raid group to loot a quest item. I remember doing this with a picture ("Of love and family"?) that was lootable inside Strat Live. That worked for a while. I seem to remember it being completely normal for a while to run Scholomance and Strat in 10-man raid groups.
14:05 There used to not even be battlemasters located in major cities. You actually had to go to the entrance to the battleground in the world (in Ashenvale or Alterac Mountains, for example) and talk to someone at the entrance to put yourself in the queue there. Sometimes the wait time could be 5-6 hours lol.
I remember stumbling across the AB battle master and vendors. I was so impressed with it and thought what a cool idea it was at the time.
yep and AV was a disaster because it was on the cusp of Hillsbrad Foothills which was always a warzone among factions because of Southshore vs. Tarren Mill proximity.
@@TheRealSalali Originally there wasn't any guards there next to the BG entrance and vendors. They added those later when PvPers started camping entrances whilst in queue.
Vanilla wow was so special. Looking back there were lots of flaws. But in the moment it felt perfect.
The flaws are kinda what made it perfect. I remember a time when only orcish warriors could reliably break CC.
I’d trade that for the boring schlop class balance we have now, nothing is unique.
It’s the only time when it was an actual WORLD of warcraft. We never had 2 huge continents with 50 new zones to explore for an expansion.
Theres 2 or 3 graves near the entrance of the tin mine at Westfall, at night a white rare ghoul might spawn accompanied by its "relatives"
It's strange that these are quite specific graveyards since the others near Moonbrook are just normally placed graves, theres no other ones like these in the entire zone.
A great piece of lore, is that you can find the grave of Invincible (Arthas' horse) near Balnir Farmstead in Tirisfal Glades, it was added in patch 3.0.2 with the grave open and empty, because Arthas resurrected it!
I remember the first time seeing that, blew my mind.
how could you see it when it's Invincible
In Feralas, the Alliance quest to kill naga in the cave of Isle of Dread has a secret. At the end of the cave, the pool of water has an underground route to another back part only (accessible via swimming) which has a special area with more naga. Sometimes, an elite rare will spawn back there on a platform.
Don't tell the secrets bro
Is that the quest to get the epic food recipe?
@kswiss89 No, but that's also on Isle of Dread which gets you the Chimaerok Chops stamina food buff and is part of the AQ chain. The one I meant is a short quest chain that starts with Against the Hatecrest. It's a level 43 chain.
It’s also a great place to farm mithril.
whaaaat, i used to grind there to level 51 in vanilla as my standard leveling method and never knew that. lol xD
I love the niche Vanilla facts/lore videos. I could listen to WillE talk about WoW all day.
14:00 - for a patch or two(?), there wasn't even battle masters in major cities. You would have to go to Ashenvale/Barrens or Hillsbrad Foothills and run into the portal to join the queue. You could also only queue for one BG at a time. On my server there would usually only be one AV up because it was so bothersome to actually queue up for the BG, and you often had to wait for at least 2 hours (if you played alliance which was ~60% of the population).
I remember standing in the Alliance Warsong Gulch area in Ashenvale waiting along with many others for my WSG invites. When you returned from the bg, you'd converse with the other players how your WSG went. Nostalgic, but inconvenient as hell.
And sometime the AV would be running until server restarts.
The path from hinterlands to scholo was great during classic phase 2, as many horde didn't know about it and it let us alliance get around that area without being camped to death like every other zone.
Still use it in sod
Why were you on a pvp server if you don't want to pvp?
@@adrianwilson5950I like end game pvp. I don’t like getting corpse camped by sweatlotds while leveling
@@gaybuzzlightyear1294 What you like doesn't matter.
What a dumb comment. Jesus..@@adrianwilson5950
Strat and Scholo were 10 man to start with and UBRS was 15 man.
On my old server (stormrage-eu) it was quite common to see 15 man lbrs and ubrs the same run, just for the loot
@@Smandiithis is the first time I’ve ever come across another stormrage EU vanilla player after so many years 😅 played on it from launch to wrath on alliance side with a guild named Insight
True, they were changed a few patches in when people started outscaling them pretty hard. 5 man scholo was hard as fuck when it first got changed.
No it was anytime a 5 man But it was possible to Go with 10. Quests only worked for 5. Same for ubrs it was for 10 But was possible to do it with 15 just for easy loot.
@@b0w7 I must have misremembered, and it may have just been server culture. But dungeon quests worked in raid groups until 1.3, which is also the patch that limited all but a few dungeons to 10 players, and BRS to 15. BRS was further capped to 10 in 1.10.
Hey WillE, I know you probs have heard it many times before but I thought Id just say, I really appreciate your videos and the style in which they are done. I hope you know your a integral part of the WoW culture in my eyes now and have been for years. Thanks again.
There's actually multiple spots in Westfall where there are gravestones and undead pop out at night, not just Moonbrook
9:47 It's not Tirion that shows up to the fight, it's Bolvar Fordragon.
lupos is an absolute monster, i got to experience it myself on a private server that did progressive patches. it got so bad that the alliance had a whole "lupos mafia" and controlled which hunters could tame it lmao, good times
Lol nice was that a recent private server?
I specifically made a hunter to use Lupos in PVP as I was obsessed with WSG, and he really did absolutely melt everyone- even those we perceived as tanky back then.
When you right click on Zalashji from afar it tell you to "get closer to interact" which is not the case when a NPC has 0 interaction. It has to do something (even a blank text) but no one figured out the condition.
The weapon skill/tradeskill system is entirely based off how Ultima Online’s skill system worked. If you use swords your sword skill increases and you could only have a total of like 700 points between all your skills, crafting included.
Elders Scrolls Morrowind was also very popular and featured this skill system, Runescape also did the same. Very much a fashionable RPG mechanic of the time.
I remember running a lot of lv60 dungeons as a 10 man back in OG vanilla . There was an exploit for a while where if you disbanded the raid into 2 separate groups you could still do the quests.
I remember doing "class groups" for Scholomance and Stratholm back in the day (on Earthen Ring server) - the party was made up of one of every class - which meant that anything that dropped would be potentially useful for just one character.
The item sets that dropped were considered BIS at the time.
You really feel like you accomplish something with each action completed in Vanilla. Retail feels more show and glitter with pay to win. Also, the lack of having to hoof it from location to location makes a full server in retail feel empty. People liked seeing other players running around along the road trying to get from town to town. Makes the server feel alive.
There are also two battle pets that are seasonal, the Snowy Owl, from Winterspring, and the Qiraji Guardling, in Silithus near the entrance for Ahn'Qiraj.
With regards to raids in 5 man dungeons, at some point it was changed because I remember doing 10 man strath runs and 15 man ubrs runs way back in vanilla days. I don't know which patch they stopped that though.
yes, correct. it was common (at least in pugs) to do 10-man scholo before patch 1.10
In the original leeroy jenkins video, if you count the number of players they have, it's around 12 or 13!
Pretty sure you can still do ubrs as 10man and I think lower too. I believe the rest are capped though at 5 but idk. Definitely seen 10man ubrs groups though on hc.
The footage of the Hunter shown at 5:43 doesn't even have Lupos, he has Echeyakee the white lion from Barrens... This is also evident by the Prowl ability on the pet cast bar, which wolves can't get in Classic.
There's a rogue class quest called "The azure key", and one of its rewards is a pair of boots that increases your effective stealth level by 1, making you harder to detect. Mostly folks chose one of the other two rewards - a cloak that reduces fall damage or a hood that gave crit and attack power - so people kinda forget about it. What I don't remember is if stealth counted as a class skill.
I remember there being a few LW items that increased stealth, so I'm going to guess no... because druids...I think it's about stealth detection
Back in Vanilla when people were bad at the game we used to run 10 man strat and scholo all the time. Doing 5 man was actually seen as a big deal.
Were the quests 5man locked?
Yup I remember the days. Fighting over rolls on stitches or Righteous Orbs, sometimes Scarlet Thread, etc. No one knew how the rare spawns worked. No one wanted to do Frias Siabi or mailman stuff. Imagine the first time the mount dropped lol.
@@DIEGhostfish I don't really remember, but it was not hard to get them completed. Most people did not know of all the quests and the only ones doing them were after reputation for the vendor / quest rewards. There were no such quests like Baron 45 minute, etc. There wasn't even a possible thought of doing it under 45 minutes realistically...lol. Maybe top guilds with max geared players, but nothing the normal folks could fathom.
May be true for you, but most didn't.
@@megakristof3855 No, I was there on a day 1 server and at the beginning, a lot of people didn’t even know roles like tank, cc, healer, dps, etc. Also keep in mind most players were in greens trying to upgrade to blues.
Back in 2005, it was absolutely common to do Strat and Scholo as a 10 man group - and it mostly was pure chaos... UBRS was a 15 man dungeon initially and got scaled down to a 10 man dungeon later in Vanilla. It was never intended to be done with 5 man.
I used to off-tank as a paladin in 15 man Ubrs, I was basically a proxy for a sheep/sap/freezing trap
Great vid, I do remember a time back in early Vanilla when UBRS was done with 15, at least on Skullcrusher back in the day.
these days I ran by accident by Zashi when exploring, found him pretty interesting thinking it would have a quest or something.
Back during Vanilla before battlegrounds, players were craving large scale pvp and wanted a space for that. Eventually, the area between Southshore and Tarren Mill became a war zone on some servers due to the close proximity and open field with no high level mobs. I'm glad you added a clip of that!
This was a fantastic video. Great concept and great execution. Thank you for your good work sir!
Fun note, actually when WoW launched you could bring a full raid of 40 into any dungeon, and we did.
The first few months of Vanilla people did full raids of BRS, Scholo, Strat and BRD.
Gear from leveling up was so bad back then that many people had to do that in order to clear the content. You’d have 4+ tanks because they kept dying mid fight, etc.
My first BRD was with a 30 man group and my first Scholo pug was a full raid of 40.
you used to be able to raid all the dungeons. I remember going on 10 man scholo raids with our guild for the class sets. I cant remember which patch blizz "nerfed it" by capping it to 5 players only.
I remember that too. They left raiding of Blackrock Spire though, right? (Hmm, according to Will here most dungeons could be 10-man raids even after a few were strictly 5-man)
I think it was sometime around 1.4 that Scholo was lowered to being a 5-man-dungeon. In the beginning, it was a 10-man-raid. I started playing around that patch and I remember wondering how cool it would be to do these dungeons with 9 other players
@@IvyTinwe They also massively nerfed them. They were way harder originally. People wouldn't have raided them otherwise.
@@cattysplat Not sure whether they were nerfed or not, but the quests existed originally too, which were always 5-man. Anyway, I remember this change very well, and it was much later, around 1.9 or 1.10, the same time the tier 0.5 questline was put into the game which had us going to all the endgame dungeons doing extra stuff.
12:20 Dire Maul was also a dungeon that you could not bring in more than 5 people into. And it was like that when it was released in patch 1.3
"Diremaul will be limited groups of no more than five players each." (patch 1.3 notes)
9:50 That wasn't Tirion who comes to help Alliance players. It was Bolvar Fordragon.
I remember finding a Rare Elite white lion pet for my hunter, that was near or in the Tauren Zone, and this thing had a faster than normal attack rate, something like 1.1 sec or less and it was absolutely brutal when used against Casters, as it could effectively prevent them from finishing spells before you killed them... then they nerfed it and it was just an ordinary lion pet.... which was unfortunate.
Also, I really missed the random PvP Raids that would form escalations of pvp fights that would break out in the Barrens or Southshore. I remember running through Ironforge one day and a Horde Raid invaded the city. First a ton of Warlocks summoned Infernals and let them run loose on the city, back when Infernals were actually dangerous... then the Warlocks started summoning Doomguards, which were insanely powerful at this time, and then the rest of the raid went through and cleared out everything that survived the demons, and it was absolutely brutal.... but such an awesome thing to be able to happen. I really miss things like that.
When classic first launched in 2019, dungeon grinding in a raid was bugged so that the experience gained from each kill wasn't properly scaling for having over 5 people in the instance. Since the open world was packed and lagging like hell, taking 7-9 people and blasting through bigger dungeons, specifically SM (where you could do all 4 sections in 1 lockout) and ZF, turned out to be the optimal way to level. IIRC it was nerfed within the first or second week along with BRD torch farm, just after APES and a few other hardcore guilds were able to take advantage of it.
Going with a massive raid to go camp the opposite faction's cities and kill everyone in their town was epic back in the day
Will, the den is probably named after Zalashji lol not the other way around
Horde player and I had no idea about the Hinterlands WPL shortcut, very cool.
if i recall correctly there used to be a bug with the flight paths on alliance, where, if you took the fp from IF to Eastern Plaguelands you would get teleported to Hinterlands instead. making the plaguewind ravine a very nice shortcut to scholo
pvp in the beginning was cool
i remember huge wars at cross roads and in hillsbrad
I love the little passage from Hinterlands to Plaguelands. Always used it when i was on my ghost shroom / plaguebloom farming tour.
Man... after a very long time, I'm getting back into Warcraft, starting to miss the universe...
Just started watching this video and the epic "shaping of the world" gives me chills like crazy, love WoW and its music 🖤
Love your vids Willie. You got me back into wow. I made a pally on HC realms and it’s great. Filling that void until fresh or +
It's Bolvar who saves you in that WOTLK quest, not Tirion. I remember that chain well. Another honourable mention about Westfall in vanilla is a rare called Leprithus, he is an undead linked to those graveyard ghouls in that he only spawns at night.
Another place is Feralas, I remember looking there in TBC using my Far Sight and finding an out of reach area full of blue chimera NPC's, each one was 60 to 63 elite and they had the health of raid bosses, what their purpose was I don't know.
Another frequently overlooked NPC was a rare spawn in the Drowned Reef off Arathi Highlands, he was a Naga which dropped a BoP trinket called Tidal Charm which had an on use effect which stunned your target for 3 seconds, this got nerfed on BC launch to only work on targets below level 60.
The chimera area are part of the AQ40 sceptre quest chain which you would raid with your guild for needed drops. Completely useless after the gong was rung and the AQ gates opened, as quest chain no longer doable.
@@cattysplat Ah so they had a use after all! Reminds me of those demons in the tainted scar where Kazzak was, the Doomguard Commander had a chance to drop a BoP grimiore which taught the summon doomguard spell to warlocks without them having to do the long quest chain.
In EverQuest, there was an entire zone called Kithicor Forest that changed became higher level and full of undead at night... apparently they've since changed it to stay in undead mode full-time though.
Skill grinding was similar in EverQuest, I remember spending hours working on skills in both games.
I remember hearing about Brokentooth, but not sure about Lupos.
Definitely remember that mountain pass from Hinterlands as well as Zalashji.
Didn't raid much in WoW, at one point I was an off-tank for ZG and AQ20 (as arms-spec warrior no less).
I remember finding the one in Darkwhisper Gorge back in the day...
Didn't do UBRS much, but every time I did it was a 5-man.
Wait, was that a clip of the Southshore Wars there near the end? I wasn't part of it (never really liked PvP) but I remember entire guilds going there for PvP and keeping the wars going for days on end... it was insane!
You could do 10 man strathlome actually; I was there, 10,000 years ago.
The Naxx portal in Strat is used in a quest added in Dragonflight involved with unlocking old transmogs from vanilla Naxx
Dont forget that for a while, UBRS (and LBRS by connection) used to be 15m. It was around the same time that they nerfed Strat, Scholo and BRD from 10m to 5m that they nerfed UBRS from 15m to 10m.
1st scholomance i ever did in early OG vanilla was 10man afaik and 15man UBRS runs helped in early days when casters had like 0 +DMG/healing still collecting dungeon 1 blueitems class sets with majorly +INT +SPI so casters had bad gear if they didnt do DM N tribute runs etc for +dmg n +spellcrit etc.. good ol dayz!!1
I have one - As Alliance I had *no idea* what to make of the Nancy and Grandpa Vishas cottage on the northern coast of Alterac Mountains.
Horde get a quest in SM from an undead NPC on a torture rack that points them to this cottage for a quest, but that NPC is hostile to Alliance, so Alliance _never_ get the hint to go look for a cottage way up there. I was bewildered when I first stumbled on it.
In the old vanilla days there were split flight paths, to go to Chillwind, you flew to Southshore and took another griffin to Chillwind and Aerie Peak to Light’s Hope Chapel. I wonder if the path from Shindigger’s Camp to Scholo was a carryover from then.
More useless info but in vanilla before one of the patches the flight paths weren't connected so you manually had to fly from point to point instead just flying near a FP and autopaying. I started playing around Dec 2005 so it was around that time. I remember it well because when grouped up with my roommate to run a dungeon or whatever we would pop out for a quick cigarette or go back in and fly to the next spot and then go back outside to finish smoking.
People absolutely took more people into dungeons in Vanilla. Everyone did 15 man Upper Blackrock Spire, 10 man Scholomance, etc. if not more players. In fact, I hit 60 on my first character in a 17 player group inside Stratholme, it was wild. 😎
When did it change?
@@koffin522 Patch 1.3 made it so that all dungeons (excluding the newly released Dire maul as well as Blackrock Spire) were limited to 10 people. With Diremaul at a max of 5 and BRS having a max of 15. Mainly because UBRS was classified as a raid. Still have no idea why Blizzard didn't just make UBRS and LBRS into two different instances during vailla, or have UBRS separated by a raid portal inside LBRS. Given that any quests that took place in LBRS was flagged as "dungeon" while quests in UBRS were flagged as "raid".
Patch 1.10 made further changes to the limit by adding Statholme, Scholomance and Blackrock Depths to the '5 player only' group. Diremaul was no longer alone. Blackrock Spire was then limited to 10 players. With UBRS will being considered a raid.
Then when TBC came out, all dungeons (past and future) excluding Blackrock Spire were limited to 5 players. Blackrock Spire would later be capped at 5 players regardless with Cataclysm. Which scaled UBRS down from a 10 man raid to a 5 man dungeon.
@@koffin522 15 man BRS was intended and worked. It was capped at 15 in 1.3, the same patch that made dungeon quests not work in raids and capped most instances at 10. BRS was later capped to 10 in 1.10. BRS specific quests would still work even in a raid group.
@@yvoification thank you for the info
@@koffin522 No problem bro. Had to look up some of it myself. But I distinctly remember raiding UBRS with 15, I had my guild's only seal of ascension for a while. I also remember Scholo being hard as hell when you could only bring 5. We weren't trying to get pre-bis, we were trying to replace shit from SM and claw our way up to MC.
I can see where a guild trying to reserve an item for a specific person would bring more than 5, especially if they can farm the loot tables and they don’t want/need the quests.
Regarding taking more than 5 people to the dungeons (more than 10 for blackrockspire), back in vanilla it was very common to take one of each class into scholomance, stratholme and two of each class to blackrockspire. In general it was agreed that only the players of the specific classes would roll for the pieces of their tier 0 set. This way it was less likely for the items going to waste and usually you didn't have to worry about someone else taking the items. Since the dungeons were pretty much endgame content, the reduction in experience didn't really bother anyone anyway.
Also regarding quests, I admit I'm not sure about that, but I think at the time you could do quests in those dungeons if you went there as a small raid party.
Blizzard didn't like that any resemblance of challenge was pretty much gone in those dungeons due to the numbers people brought there, so they capped the number of players. I think it was capped sometime in 2004 or 2005.
did ya guys remember very early the troll mount vendor sold red and white raptors as mounts oO
You forgot to bring up the rare wolf named Snarler. He used to be a very popular pet as he retained the 100 pts resist after taming, making him very good vs casters.
Also, Takk the leaper used to be able to hunt down epic mounts before he got nerfed
I remember there were 1 million people watching classic launch on twitch,good old days
Asmon absolutely carried this in fairness. Doubt it would be close without him. Pretty cool nonetheless
I remember unable to play WoW for months because game was sold out back in 2005 in Europe. Blizz was caping the number of copies available while they created more game servers... good old says...
@@Nicklogann the dragon kiting was pretty funny
I remember being one of the first in a server. Good times, good times.
@@Nicklogannlol, people wouldnt Watch other streamers if there is no Asmon? 😂
I love everything that makes the world non static.
It’s the secrets of vanilla wow that kept me hooked. I’m still playing and it’s almost 20yrs.
So fun fact, end game dungeons like scholo, strat, etc were meant to be 5 man dungeons but they were either too hard or players weren't very good yet (depends who you ask nowadays, but gear and talent trees were very basic in these days too, but I digress), so bliz opened them up to be completed as 10 man raids and BRS as 15. This happened bc too many players were complaining they were too hard to complete. A lot of people misremembered this, self included, bc by the time we got there bliz already made the change. They didn't switch back until 1.10 patch I believe.
Also fun fact, when WSG and AV first came out we didn't have battle masters in city to queue from. You had to travel to the instance entrance out in the world like a dungeon.
I like these positive videos more than your more recent videos recently Wille. Thanks for this video.
When you travel to scholomance, for horde the nearest flightpath is tarren mill, you just follow the river to the north and you'll end up in darrowmere lake. Alliance's nearest flightpath is aerie peak and then going into that shortcut, so yeah, the shortcut is pretty useful when you are grinding scholo, because if you fly to eastern plaguelands you'll have to walk the whole zone.
i was never a big PVPer but i admit that the player-made battles at hillsbrad were epic & much more fun than structured BGs
10:36 WoW couldve been a completely different game for real, way more like Warcraft 3 used to be. maybe it wouldve been a sick extra mode like "creative" mode with player housing. has great potential imo
During first re-release of Classic, my friend group was regularly 6-8 people online. We "raided" every 5 man instance we could and it was amazing. We didn't care about XP loss and we even went to dungeons that were a little too high level. The 10 man cap for instances was brilliant and we used it all the time.
Woah I never realized that you could actually bring 10 people into those dungeons. First time I heard about this
When I first got a character to the Hinterlands, I didn't know about the entrance and the south-west end of the Hinterlands, and I saw that entrance on the map, so for a while that's how I'd always get to the hinterland, by going through the Western Plaguelands first.
World PvPers in Vanilla know exactly what XR and TM/SS mean...
Yep
Remember tagging along as a 58 mage in UBRS - on final Boss I had lowest dmg/aggro so everyone else died & they were saying it's a wipe, but I was able to blink and get the killing blow. Got my chest piece in the loot too. Good times.
The naga you speak of, if I'm not mistaken, is part of the AQ gate opening quests.
Zalashji was part of Dirge's Kicken Chimera Chops i believe.
We used to do 10man scholo and strat back in vanilla.was tough doing them as 5man for the quest
Back in 2004-2005, we used to run all the dungeons with more than 5 unless we were doing a quest run. Typically 6-8 to make sure all our friends on-line could come. Was a lot of fun and made the runs more social. When classic first came out, we did a 10 man deadmines for shits and giggles and to help a friend get loot. Good times.
Please do more content like this Wille (secrets, mysteries, hidden places and general unreleased content) irs great and for me not useless information at all :D it jusr confirms how unique vanilla is in the history of gaming
I'm sure UBRS was a 15 man dungeon in the beginning before MC was released.
Been playing since the beginning and never knew about that path from Hinterlands. So cool to see new stuff after so many years.
I miss Pyrewood Village and some of those other random elite areas that you had to get some friends to quest with.
The NPC who helps us (the player) against Thel'zan in Dragonblight is not Tirion Fordring but Bolvar Fordragon.
I really enjoyed how classic vanilla wow had you interact with players. I remember fighting around WC in the barrens for a while doing LFG in chat until we got a group together. Then we did the dungeon. It felt more organic and i made some friends doing that. Then the LFG queue system came out and not you just tp into a dungeon speed run run it, and no one talks unleaa its yelling at someone else.
Leprithus in Westfall, has 2 spawn locations but I like the little graveyard in north westfall!
A guildie showed me dey wey from hinter to scholo for the 1st time 2 weeks ago in SoD when we were doing part of Ras Frostwhisper quest.
For those who we did play the PvP Patch in the beta/PTRs there was a tabard added as reward.
I did lost mine, but I can remember wearing it.
absolute lovely lore! subbed! love old content
I debated even clicking on the video, assuming it was gunna be a bunch of info I've heard a million times. I learned some new things and even the stuff I already knew had some extra tidbits of info thrown in. Since you asked, I figured I'd reply and let you know that I'd be interested in more of this type of content.
the fact that player housing was a concept for vanilla and yet has never been implemented to this day is a damn shame
I recall doing 15-man UBRS runs back in the day before a patch changed it
In addition to Winter Squid, there is also Raw Summer Bass that has a seasonal window. They share the same waters.
there were some weird pets
one was a dead fire pit (raptor)
another was an humanoid (worgen)
and i miss the skills they had, like tendon break for crocs, snare web for spiders, etc
there is a video about them xD
Back when Strat (live) was called Strat SM (Scarlet Monastery) and Strat UD was called Baron...and everyone started Strat SM by going through the actual front gates...to which many pugs died and spirit res'd because there's no exit unless you fight your way back out the Baron gate...which never happened. And there was no LFG channel to find replacements.
The thel’zan bit, I’m sure it was mentioned, but it was Bolvar that showed up, not Tirion.
I never realized you could bring 10 into almost every dungeon until tbc halloween event, cause people would bring 10 for more mount chances, kinda sad we never got make use of it in phase 1 of classic
~13:30 Blizzards mistake for Open World PvP was to not have any zones specific to encouraging this. They didn't know what they were doing with the whole PvP-system - as well as how to integrate that into PvE servers - that might have worked more easily - but rather how to have the free PvP of PvP-servers also affect the game beyond PvP-Zones that could yield benefits by controlling them.
Final Fantasy had a great solution to that, at least mechanically, not necessarily by immersion: They had different zones in the world rotate to be PvP-zones every once in a while, and players entering would be temporarily leveled down to that zones maximum level to ensure some level fairness and allow everyone participation.
Southshore Isles. The Q NPC in-between the stones just south of the Orgrimmar entrance. The rumour that there are more than 2 (Q) ghost NPCs.
You didnt mention 2:
Nelf Shadowmeld used to be more efffective at night and all races had to level up their "Common" language if they werent human, it resulted in crazy amounts of spam
That sounds like beta.
There was a Linux client in Wow beta. The client was refered last time in the game installer in tbc (or maybe wrath didn't check wrath). You can still find the binary the client was distributed up on patch 0.9 .
7:27 ... Don't you think his den is named after him? Imagin the naga lalala'ing around and stumble upon the Zashi den and think "Hmm i should name myself after this den" x)