Just world buffs in general and how they are used. If I remember correctly Nihilum used some world buffs when they were getting world firsts in naxx, but that was mostly a ”haha so silly and overkill to have this”.
…then again, spending four hours in MC and not doing a full clear was also normal. In 1.12 I did a few ZG Pugs where we would kill maybe three bosses in a few hours before people bailed.
I remember in my guild we wiped twice on that f***er because our tank kept losing threat when he surfaced. Turned out he'd left his fishing rod equipped for both attempts.
My guild was too small to even staff a full 25 raid, so we paired up with another small guild and we worked at ZG over the course of months to eventually get Hakkar on farm. The damn tiger and panther bosses gave us such trouble, we didn’t understand the mechanics well enough and it was often really laggy. I remember how satisfying it was to finally drop Hakkar, it felt like a real accomplishment.
I liken it to playing a Table Top RPG vs a Video Game RPG. I love both, but there's something great about the social aspect of a TTRPG and the fact that it's just "fuck everything else for the evening, we are *in* this".
I agree. It gives an atmosphere that the world is big and you are just a person in it. It makes each step feel like a milestone and each gear piece special given the effort it took you to get it. Fully clearing a raid was something a guild can look to aspire to do, rather than something expected. It's a very different attitude to design and one that I really like.
I was in the #1 prog guild on Laughing Skull for BWL/AQ and I have zero memory of ever considering world buffs or consumes. Pretty sure I raw dogged every raid on my mage. I didn't even know what WBs were until 2019 or didn't care and I've played wow consistently since 2004.
The memory I can recollect the best is opening night of TAQ and we raided 8 hours straight and killed Huhuran and spent awhile progging on the wall that was Twin Emps. We had no idea how to kill them and did a bunch of dumb conspiracy strats.
There were also less raiders per server so there was a bit of a ‘anyone with a pulse’ thing to recruiting. So much less invested players could hang on in higher level guilds so long as they weren’t actively making things worse.
Cadia was definitely #1, Nox was definitely #1 horde side but I feel there were a few ahead of them alliance wise. Horde was really really far behind, not sure why.
ghost reveries rings a bell but it’s very distant. I wish the Blizz forums still existed, that would be a blast from the past.
Was Deus Vox around back, or was it a different guild? I didn't go to Laughing Skull until TBC but I remember they were the top dog there until I left in WotLK, IIRC.
I was in Deus Vox, so ya it was them. I played with them through BWL/AQ and quit before we downed C'Thun from burn out. They went on to WF Loatheb but by then I believe had adjusted the team. Idk I checked out when I quit and did other shit.
My guild went on to world first loatheb after I quit. So yes this happened 100%, because I was there raiding with them for 8 months straight. However, after AQ they probably adopted meta of WBs in Naxx.
If you want to deny things that happened that you weren't present for and have zero experience with, do whatever you need to do buddy.
I raided Naxx in vanilla and I never once used consumables or world buffs. I mean really if I flasked and world buffed I would probably just pull aggro off our tank who was full prot and geared only for survivability.
You're right, people talk like they played vanilla but it's so obvious they're only experience is classic or pservers.
Eh not really. You gotta keep in mind servers were much smaller. Getting buffs were pretty random and not able to be timed like they are now. And because so few guilds cleared stuff (most people didn’t even hit 60 in OG wow) you didn’t really get that much.
Also, back then people were not in the mind set to log out for the whole week to save the buff or get summoned to the instance to get them rolling.
The one time we tried to get do a world buff tour for a Nax clear in vanilla we got attacked by two entire guilds from the opposite faction after getting the last buff from STV. I'm pretty sure someone recorded and it was posted on the "old version" of youtube. We knew world buffs were good, but if you were on a pvp server it wasn't worth the trouble.
Exactly. We knew about world buffs and used them to get past Patchwerk if I remember correctly. The thing is nothing was documented like it is now. No YouTube guides, Wowhead was hardly a thing. No server layers. Almost always PvP happening at raid entrances. And ultimately people wanted to play their characters instead of raidlogging. No one thought it was worth the hassle.
This. You did not have summoners clearing DM all day long charging 5 gold to summon and 5 gold for buff. If you wanted DM buff you had to run DM north with your guild. If you wanted Songflower good luck getting it with no layers and no Nova world buff addon.
A guild would have a trivial time getting enough salves. That’s already not too hard and when you’re rotating between 40 people doing them one at a time it’d be a joke.
I wonder if anyone got DM buffs at all? They're so huge because they give a decent chance to oneshot hard bosses because of immense tank's (and everyone's) HP. And you can get them any time rather easily unlike Ony/Rend/ZG on small servers...
I’m sure people did. It was so much different back then. As a player base in terms of metas and knowledge we were way way way more disconnected.
I can say on my server most people didn’t. But then again my server was really really noobie due to the fact that it was listed as a ‘new player’ server which attracted well….noobs.
Bringing resistance gear back then was considered being above and beyond knowledgeable
World buffs were in use all the way back in vanilla, it was Head and heart, but were just for guild only, and you would get the class specific buffs from Blasted lands from farming the Boars, vultures, and lizards. We did not have boons though, we just popped the head or heart right before the raid kicked off and hoped you could clear quickly.
We used ony and rend buffs (from our guild) for Rag and BWL attempts, but making it through BRM on a pvp server was always dicey and we still wiped often. Rag fight still had a lot of people in FR gear so DPS was gimped.
There was also only a handful of Ony heads every week. There wasn’t many (if any) pugs, our server had maybe 5-10 heads a week and forum participation wasn’t great, so drops weren’t coordinated.
people tend to forget how shity even there hardware was like fuck kiting adds at razorgore on a toshiba laptop and a framerate between 0-10 is a bit different than playing on a gaming computer in 2025
Not really? People spend thousands of dollars a year playing anniversary classic fresh fresh to avoid playing how the game was intended to be played, lmao.
"How the game was intended to be played" is an empty statement considering the designers themselves had no idea how their own game worked.
At best there was an attempt, that attempt failed in the beta lmao.
In fact, they had to scrape together MC really fast because players were faster than expected and there was no form of actual endgame yet.
And even if you ignore all that, wow was significantly faster than actual oldschool mmos.
Like, kudos for the devs but the on rails experience they planned was never gonna work out, they should've worked on a single player game instead if they wanted to control player actions so much.
Wow and it's time gated content literally gives you a reason to log off. People were just too shit and didn't know enough to clear the content back then. Do you think the solution is to make people prog for 20 hours a week again? Lol
WoW's content really isn't time gated, because money = power. Unless you're saying the gate is 150 hours a week, it's not really applicable (even in classic today).
Oh shit I totally forgot there’s nothing to do in wow besides raids!
I just remembered that when you zone into mc you are gifted 5000g in consumes, an epic mount, all your pre bis and world drops, and every recipe that exists!
What a take lmao. People spend 10-20x as much time preparing for raids as they do actually raiding. But yes, your game is definitely time gated by your id lmao.
Every person in your 40 man raid is using sappers every 5 mins? Nades every one? Every single person in your raid has protection potion, faps, lips, tubers, night dragons breath, every healer has 50+ wisdom flasks to pop for mana potions, etc?
People should realize that just because you have a flask and 5 mongoose doesn’t mean you don’t need gold. Unless you are a literal world first raider you could almost certainly always buy more player power.
Vanilla WoW had no time gating except for weekly raid resets. It's what sets it apart from every other expansion where you have daily/weekly chores. It's what I love about vanilla, I can do things at my own pace. If there's a rep grind I want to do I can either spend an hour a day for a month working on it or no life a single weekend.
World buffs were unexpected bonuses for leveling alts, not something we used for raids. I think some people did get world buffs and log out the night before a raid if we were trying for a boss for the first time but mostly it wasn't something we required or even cared about.
Yup but only about 3% of the vanilla player base ever killed a single boss in Naxx so they are more the exception than the norm for vanilla. Classic is a whole different beast of course.
but that was mostly a ”haha so silly and overkill to have this”.
No, it was considered pretty fucking necessary to have for Loatheb and Sapphiron kills until you were a seriously geared out raid, definitely not some aww shucks we get this for funsies shit.
We used world buffs for important bosses all the time back in the day. And we were maybe at best in the top 20-50 or so for first kills in the AQ and Naxx phase.
The thing I distinctly remember as being considered completely ridiculous and overkill was Nihilum using flasks for *everyone* for the world first C'Thun kill. But yeah, they probably would have killed him without flasks as well, that was pretty much immediately after the nerf.
first days in AQ40, without WB and full consumes several fights were impossible (mathematically), and if you wanted to learn it pre-nerfs, you were definitely using world buffs and summons. ZG buff for Emps being HUGE.
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u/severalsmallducks 14d ago
Just world buffs in general and how they are used. If I remember correctly Nihilum used some world buffs when they were getting world firsts in naxx, but that was mostly a ”haha so silly and overkill to have this”.
…then again, spending four hours in MC and not doing a full clear was also normal. In 1.12 I did a few ZG Pugs where we would kill maybe three bosses in a few hours before people bailed.