A Few of My Favorite (Old) Things

Tonight I thought I would talk a little about my favorite memories about playing World of Warcraft "back in the day" as they like to say. Although WoW Classic only includes Vanilla content I will also include some Burning Crusade memories as that really was my formative years playing WoW. Read on for some of my thoughts on my fondest WoW memories.

Vanilla

Thinking back to Vanilla I have to admit that while Vanilla was going on I didn't really play all that much. My wife played Vanilla a lot more than I ever did. I only got up to level 35 for most of Vanilla while she actually had a level 60 character in Vanilla. Not only did she have a level 60 character but the also had a level 58 character which was the level you needed to be able to go into Outland and start playing in The Burning Crusade.

I remember that I felt so bad that she had two characters that would be able to play in TBC and I didn't have any that I spend the better part of a week leveling my level 35 hunter to level 58 so that I could go with her into TBC.

The reason that I only leveled to 58 was that getting from level 58 to 60 in TBC was so much easier than leveling from 58 to 60 in Vanilla. I know it has been like 14 years since we did that but I remember how long leveling took. It took forever.

Recruit-A-Friend

One of the ways that helped me level my characters faster was Recruit-A-Friend where if you leveled with your "friend" you would both get 300% XP. Not only that but they recruited friend would get one level to give to any of your toons for every two levels that you got. In addition if they added or paid for three months of game time you would also get a mount.

So what I would do was recruit myself and then just "dual-box" two accounts at the same time. (I call it dual-boxing but it was really just two instances of World of Warcraft running on the same computer.) So I would level two characters at 300% XP. In addition I would add a 90 day game time card to the second account so that I would gain access to my mount.

I would also level an additional character to level 30 and would then take the giftable 30 levels from my recruited character leveling from 1-60 and boost the level to level 60.

I think that I did this at least 3 times. I know because I have 3 additional WoW accounts that I merged into my main Battle.net account when they would let you consolidate multiple accounts into one. Before that you would have a separate distinct account for WoW account you had.

BlizzCon 2008

One of my favorite things that I was able to do was attend BlizzCon 2008. I had so much fun. My wife and I and some friends made the trip out to California and we had the time of our lives. It was so much fun to able to be around other gamers who were into World of Warcraft as well as get to be near the developers.

If you've ever considered going to BlizzCon I highly recommend doing it at least once.

Running Dungeons with Friends

I know that this may be a regular occurrence for a lot of you but in TBC my wife and I and a few of my friends from my work (I was a video game developer making an MMO) would meet together online once a week and run dungeons.

Eventually we were able to start running heroic dungeons and some of the fondest memories I have of the game is being on Ventrillo (a voice chat app we all used back then) and communicating with each other and running dungeons. We never made it past running heroic TBC dungeons but those nights were awesome.

I was a hunter and my wife we a warlock. We had rogue as the third DPS and warrior tank and priest healer.

Some of the heroics took an extreme amount of skill. There were some pulls where we had the following crowd control (and this was just for one pull): a rogue sap, a hunter chain trapping as well as a hunter pet off-tank, and a warlock banish or pet off-tank. That is 4 CCs that you would have to maintain and the sap could be broken if they took any damage.

This was serious business. If we took all of the mobs in those packs on our tank would have been smooshed or our healer would have run out of mana. There was none of this "just go in and round them up and burn them down" mentality. We had CC and we learned it and we used it.

I loved learning how to play my class and was proud of playing that class well.

Playing a Hunter...Well

I know I mentioned it a bit above but I loved the skill that it took to play a class well in Vanilla and TBC. I mained a hunter throughout all of TBC and I loved playing my class well.
Playing in the Classic stress test took me back to some of things that had changed about being a hunter including a minimum distance requirement meaning that if a mob got too close to you you couldn't shoot your gun. Not logically that doesn't really make much sense but knowing how to stay far enough away (and how to get away it not) took some skill and added some flavor to the class.

By far my favorite hunter skill that I gained and loved using was what we called chain-trapping. Chain trapping was a form of crowd control. Crowd control is basically keeping a mob controlled for an amount of time for various reasons. One may be that the tank can't take all the mobs at once so you crowd control some of them until the tank is ready to take them on. It is a way of spreading the damage out and helping you survive.

Hunter chain-trapping consisted of the following:

1) The hunter would need to determine if the mob was a caster of melee. If your tank was skilled they would always give you a melee as it makes chain-trapping much easier. It isn't impossible but you have to break line-of-sight with a caster mob or they will just sit there and cast at you.

2) The hunter would need to determine where he wanted to place his trap and he would need to place it before the pull so that the trap cooldown would start ticking down and he could be ready to place a second trap down before the first trap broke.

3) The hunter would want to pick a spot to chain-trap that would be far enough away from the action that no one would hit the mob in the ice trap and break it.

4) Once the pull happened by the tank the hunter would shoot the mob with something that wasn't a DOT which would break the trap. Arcane shot usually worked.

5) Once the mob was aggroed on the hunter he would stand so that the trap was just in front of his feel so that the mob would hit the ice trap right as he was about to get to the hunter.

6) The hunter would then move some distance directly to the side of the trapped mob with a bit of distance.

7) As he was running to his new position he would then place his (by now cooled down) ice trap on the ground and would then stand beside it so that the trap was between himself and the mob that was still in the trap.

8) Once the trap broke and the mob was running at the hunter again it would then again get frozen in the ice trap.

9) At this point the hunter would move to another position (I usually went back to my initial position) and place a trap down and would stand to the side of it so the mob would again get trapped.

If a hunter we skilled at chain-trapping they could keep a mob chain trapped indefinitely. This was great in situations where there was a mob that you wanted to save for later like a really especially hard hitting melee mob.

The reason that a melee mob was preferred as that melee mob would run into the trap where casters would sit there and cast once the trap was broken.

There were situations where you would need to trap a caster and the most often used ways to get it into the trap, if you had the room, was to place your trap and shoot the mob and then run out of range of their spells at which time they would stop casting and run at you to get into casting range. You had to be sure to place your traps up a little further up but it was doable.

If you were lucky there would be some big piece of geometry like a pillar set into the wall that you could use to break line-of-sight with them in which case you could place your traps along the edge and go around the pillar and they would come to get LOS and get trapped and you would then go back around the object breaking LOS and when the trap broke they would come to find you again to gain LOS and hit your trap.

Again melee was best but it was possible to chain trap a caster if you used all your skills.

And that type of stuff was stuff that I really felt like started to get pulled out of the game with things like Looking for Dungeon and heirlooms and the like.

Now I understand that playing with a tight-knit group is much different then doing an LFD but I never got the sense that there was much skill other then "round everything up and nuke it down" in most of the LFDs that I've done.

Conclusion

So those are a few of my favorite memories and things I liked about how World of Warcaft was back in the day.

Will Classic be able to bring some of that feeling back or will I realize that I am really only remembering what I considered to be the "good times" and that I am failing to remember all of the bad that was in the game back them.

Well when the 27th rolls around I'm anxious to see if it really is as good as I remember or not.

I also want to tanks those of you who have been reading these recent blog posts. I would probably still write these if no one read them but I'm glad to see that people are reading them and I hope you are enjoying them.

If there are topics you would like me to write about please leave a comment below or email me at powerwordgold@gmail.com.

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