WoW Archivist: Paths not taken

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?
Recently, Blizzard addressed rumors that their ultra-secret next MMO, codenamed Titan, had been "reset." Developers were indeed reassigned to other projects as the slimmed-down team made "some large design and technology changes to the game." Since we don't know anything about Titan for sure, despite some compelling leaks, we'll never know what features the game would have had as part of its original design.

The WoW team, on the other hand, has backed away from many different announced features and content additions that didn't work out. This week's WoW Archivist will look at some of the more interesting and infamous canceled or delayed features.

Homeless

Believe it or not, player housing was briefly tested in alpha. Model viewers showed files going back to alpha in a folder called "playerhousing" (as shown below). Only human houses were ever designed. Blizzard also added a portal in Stormwind as an entrance to an instanced player housing area. An alpha blue poster named Katricia wrote, "Our current idea (which could change) is to extend the cities to have player housing neighborhoods. For example, in the canal area of Stormwind players can see a blue instance portal behind a large portcullis; this is the entrance to the player housing neighborhood in Stormwind."

Why it was scrapped: Blizzard CMs and execs have commented on housing many times over the years. In 2004, Caydiem said housing is "a huge feature with a lot of dedicated time needed." Blizzard "definitely wants to do" housing, but it is not a "soon after release" feature, but rather an "on the horizon" feature. Two years later, Nethaera said housing had "no ETA." In 2008, Tom Chilton said, "It's incredibly complex to do right and we're not sure yet if it's going to be the right thing for WoW in the long run. It has major implications for the game itself and again I wouldn't go out of my way and say never but it's not on the immediately of things to do." More recently, Chilton did go out of his way and said "sometime after never."

What happened to it: Nothing yet. Players continue to ask and to wait. It didn't survive

WoW's classic beta included a minor profession called "survival skills." The profession included the ability to create campfires and torches. The original purpose of campfires was twofold: to allow cooking anywhere and to allow faster recovery after combat. The developers envisioned longer recovery times after each fight, with a campfire reducing the time required. The "Basic Campfire" was called that because you could learn to make better versions by leveling the profession.

The Dim Torch was a mobile version of the Basic Campfire. They could be equipped in a player's offhand slot in lieu of a weapon, and they lasted for up to one hour.

Why it was scrapped: We don't really know, but we can speculate. Perhaps Blizzard thought the profession lacked depth and they didn't have enough good ideas to flesh it out. It's hard to guess at what else the profession could have allowed players to do or make.

What happened to it: The campfire ability became part of cooking instead. Torch models are used for some items. AV kills AC

Azshara Crater was a battleground planned for release during vanilla. It was intended to be similar to the original Alterac Valley. Entrances had been set up in the Forlorn Valley area of the zone, but portals never appeared.

Why it was scrapped: Alterac Valley, as WoW Archivist previously covered, had a long evolution. For years, Blizzard tried to figure out how to balance the zone and how a large battleground like that should work. They acknowledged that AV's problems led to AC's delay.

What happened to it: Goblins strip-mined this area of Azshara after the Shattering, but Blizzard still considered releasing an Azshara Crater battleground as recently as Mists. During BlizzCon 2011, Blizzard said that AC was one of three BGs in the works for Mists, and that it would have DOTA-style gameplay. In 2012, they said they settled on the other two instead, and AC still hasn't seen the light of day. Files for it are in the game, however. Nosedive

One of the announced features for Wrath of the Lich King was aerial combat. At BlizzCon 2008, Tom Chilton talked about two types of planes that could be flown in Wintergrasp: a small but fast fighter and a slow bomber. The counters to these planes were pilotable goblin shredders with anti-air guns. Videos have been released showing fighter plane-style vehicles that could fire guns to take out flying enemies. The Wrath of the Lich King box even proclaimed, "Engage in aerial dogfights with flying mounts and new, gnome-engineered planes." The feature never appeared, however, and Wintergrasp remained a land war.

Why it was scrapped: In BlizzCast Episode 8, Tom Chilton said that the feature lacked polish. He said they wanted to implement real flying physics: "If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics..."

What happened to it: It's likely that the Dragonblight blightbeasts quest used some of the coding from air combat, among others. The Harrison Jones quest line in Cataclysm's Uldum zone and the goblin starting area also involved plane combat sequences that could have reused assets from this work. Stomp the studio

It's been discussed to death, but no discussion of canceled content would be complete without mentioning the ill-fated dance studio. When Wrath of the Lich King debuted at BlizzCon 2007, the announcement trailer told us "new dances" were on the way. In later interviews, Blizzard used the words "dance studio." The studio was a new system that could teach your character dances beyond your original race- and gender-based move-busting.

Why it was scrapped: Before Wrath even launched, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton told Curse that the dance studio had been pushed back beyond the upcoming expansion. Zarhym told us that animators were "hacking away" at new dances in 2009, and that the studio would "come when it comes" -- without dropping a single Soon™. Nethaera posted, "Creating additional dances takes a significant amount of animation work and we want to make sure that when we do put them out, that they meet our standards. We still intend to put them in, but we have no current ETA on their addition."

What happened to it: In early 2010, as Wrath wrapped up, Blizzard said in a Twitter chat that "It's still on the list!" We can speculate that perhaps Blizzard wants to implement new models for the original races before giving them new dance animations. Garrosh's new orc model certainly shows that it might be worth the wait. Unraided

Several zones and raids have either been developed or announced and then canceled. The Emerald Dream has been part of the game files for a long time, and you could even access it if you knew how. Tigole described it in 2003: "The Emerald Dream is shaping up to be extremely cool. We don't want to preview any of that content yet as it is endgame and we want some surprises for players. The zone is massive and beautiful." Azjol-Nerub in Wrath of the Lich King was originally planned as an entire zone with the possibility of a raid.

In Cataclysm, Abyssal Maw was planned as a counterpart to Firelands. It's not clear whether it would have been a dungeon or a raid, but Ghostcrawler described it as "three bosses inside Nespirah." Blizzard also announced a Caverns of Time raid for the War of the Ancients.

Why they were scrapped: In many cases, we don't know for sure, but we can guess that Blizzard either ran out of time or the design didn't live up to their standards. Ghostcrawler commented on Abyssal Maw's cancellation: "The reason it was originally appealing to us was because we had so many Vashj'ir assets that we could use ... Firelands received a lot of new art, from bosses to environments, and we just didn't feel like Abyssal Maw was going to compete." In the same comment, GC said that Abyssal Maw is not what he's saddest about canceling, but the Azjol-Nerub zone. Me too, GC.

What happened to them: The Emerald Dream has been part of WoW's ongoing story and players have briefly visited it -- during the Valithria encounter in Icecrown Citadel, for example. However, the area as designed in pre-alpha has never been released as a zone or a raid. The Azjol-Nerub assets were used in two dungeons: Azjol-Nerub and Ahn-Kahet: The Old Kingdom. Players expressed disappointment that Anub'arak was "only" a 5-man boss, so Blizzard brought him back as a raid boss in the Crusader's Coliseum. Abyssal Maw never materialized in any form, and the War of the Ancients raid became a 5-man dungeon, leaving Cataclysm rather light on raid content beyond its first tier. Path closed for renovation

Finally, we come to what could have been a truly game-changing feature for WoW. Announced at BlizzCon 2009, the Path of the Titans was Blizzard's ambitious plan to give our characters new ways to advance at the endgame beyond gear or reputation.

Choosing your path meant committing yourself to a given Titan, although respecs and dual specializations were planned. Named for the road that runs through Dragonblight, the path allowed players to earn new abilities and bonuses. Blizzard estimated that completing all ten ranks of your chosen path would result in a 20% power increase over the course of the expansion. Any class or race could choose any path, though Ghostcrawler expected that players would min/max which path was optimal for a given spec.

The system proved to be quite complex. Your progress would be earned through the new archaeology profession, as you located and turned in titan artifacts. The actual abilities and bonuses came in the form of a new type of glyph called an "ancient glyph."

Examples of these bonuses included damage reduction, resistance against debuffs, and better first-aid bandaging (no, really). The abilities shown were a 10% DPS cooldown and a 10% group damage reduction cooldown.

Why it was scrapped: It seems that everything Blizzard names "Titan" is doomed to go back to the drawing board. Path of the Titans was officially canceled at the June 2010 Cataclysm press event. Blizzard said the system didn't feel different enough from glyphs. Ghostcrawler told GamePlanet, "We sat down and really tried to simplify the Path system and we realized we were taking out almost everything except for this idea of making glyphs cooler because glyphs really didn't live up to what they could've been. So we wanted to revamp the glyph system and realized, why are we spending all this time on the Path system when what we really want to do is fix glyphs up?"

What happened to it: Archaeology became a minor profession, as promised. It suffered without the Path as context, though. Most players found it grindy and disappointing. Glyphs got the overhaul they needed and are much improved, but the Path itself never made a reappearance. As a result, Cataclysm had very little to offer at endgame besides raiding and PvP. Ghostcrawler said that Blizzard might revisit the feature someday: "We still like the idea of having some kind of endgame progression, more character customization, we really like the way it ties into the lore and the history of the world -- so we might do it someday."

Could the next expansion see the Path reborn? We are likely to find out one way or another later this year. After months of surveying, WoW Archivist has been dug back up! Discover lore and artifacts of WoW's past, including the Corrupted Blood plague, the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and the mysterious Emerald Dream. Tags: abyssal-maw, aerial-combat, azjol-nerub, azshara-crater, blizzard, blizzard-archives, blizzard-archivist, blizzard-history, blizzcon, dance-studio, emerald-dream, featured, gaming-history, mmo-history, online-gaming-history, path-of-the-titans, PC-gaming-history, player-housing, survival-skills, vanilla-warcraft, vanilla-wow, war-of-the-ancients, warcraft-archives, warcraft-archivist, warcraft-development, warcraft-history, warcraft-nostalgia, wow-archives, wow-archivist, wow-development, wow-history, wow-nostalgia

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WoW Archivist: Patch 2.3 -- Azeroth iterated

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Blizzard likes to talk about their "iterative" process, meaning they make many small improvements over time to produce the best possible result. In the case of the lackluster patch 2.2, players were disappointed that more was not done. With the game's subscriptions still skyrocketing, Blizzard felt pressure to deliver a major dose of new content and improvements.

In November 2007, Blizzard answered the bell and unleashed an iteration that reshaped the game from top to bottom. Players of every level experienced sweeping changes to their play experience -- many of which are so integral now that it's hard to believe we played without them for so long. If you ask players about patch 2.3, they'll call it the "ZA patch." Zul'Aman was a great raid, but 2.3 offered so much more than that.

Old World 2.0

When The Burning Crusade launched, Azeroth no longer encompassed the entire World of Warcraft. Players referred to the two classic continents as the "old world." With the level of polish that the expansion brought to the game, especially its dungeons, the old world had begun to look a bit outdated by comparison.

Dustwallow Marsh, in particular, had always been a bit of a disappointment. It had a few quests, but it was mostly just the zone that housed Onyxia's Lair. In 2.3, Blizzard seeded the zone with brand new quest content and fleshed out Dustwallow's story.

After the expansion, Azeroth had become a tougher place to level, with so many elites in the world and fewer players to tackle them. The leveling process from 1-60 still took quite a long time back then. Players who were impatient to reach Outland became frustrated with the last few levels before they could cross to the other side of the Dark Portal that taunted them every time they booted up the login screen. To solve these issues, Blizzard implement a major overhaul of the classic zones and dungeons. Many elites lost their status and became normal chumps. Many quests that required a group could now be solo'ed. This was an especially welcome nerf to the mobs around dungeon entrances. In vanilla WoW, you needed a group just to get to the portal for many dungeons because of all the elite mobs around the entrance. Sunken Temple was perhaps the worst offender here. The maze of passageways full of elite mobs meant that your group had to fight their way out and then back in whenever you had to replace someone.
Classic dungeons were adjusted to have a narrower range of levels. Some dungeons spanned up to 15 levels, meaning you could run it at the lower end, but you could only progress so far before you'd have to come back after leveling. The tighter range meant you could always clear to the end, at least in theory.

The loot tables for the dungeons also received a big overhaul. It's hard to imagine it now, but many bosses in vanilla dropped a green (uncommon) item rather than a blue (rare). Even some of the bosses in "end game" dungeons such as Blackrock Depths/Spire, Stratholme, and Scholomance only dropped greens. Blizzard changed the tables so all bosses would drop rare items.

Finally, Blizzard reduced the amount of experience to level from 11 to 60, so that everyone could get to Outland faster. This was the game's first major experience reduction to account for an expansion's extra levels.

Sparkles, bubbles, and banks

The patch also made huge improvement to the game's interface. We take for granted that player names are colored according to their class, daily exclamation points are blue, and quests and flight paths show up on our minimap, but this is the patch that added all of those elements to the game.

Those handy sparkles on quest objects? Nothing sparkled until 2.3. You had to really search for them. Quest objects that gave quests or let us turn them in also didn't have the ! and ? symbols on them. This made quest lines like the Linken one from vanilla much more hidden than they are today. What was once an unremarkable and difficult to locate pile of talbuk turds now became a majestically sparkling and extremely visible pile of talbuk turds.

The tracking bubble on the minimap is another 2.3 addition. Previous to this, hunters had to use a hotbar button for each tracking type they wanted to access quickly. Tracking fish pools was also added in this patch.

NPC mouseovers that show hearthstones for innkeepers and so on were another handy addition. NPCs got less chatty. For example, flight masters now took you directly to the path selection map rather than striking up a conversation first that had to be clicked through. The patch also introduced reputation-based discounts from NPC vendors.

The auction house received an overhaul that streamlined categories and made 48 hour auctions possible, with 12 hours as the shortest auction. The previous limit was 24 hours, and the shortest was 8. Azeroth's envelopes also grew more robust and could now mail up to 12 items at a time.

The ability to see whose loot is on a corpse put an end to the cries of "Loot the hounds!" forever. (Now we could yell at specific individuals.)

Most controversial of all the UI changes was the ability to inspect players' talent selections. What was once private could now be seen by anyone of your own faction. According to where you stood on cookie cutter builds, this change gave "elitist jerk" players one more way to make a player feel bad about themselves or let a veteran "filter out the noobs."

Finally, patch 2.3 added guild banks after many, many requests. Prior to the patch, guild officers used bank toons to store the guild's hoard of items and gold -- and it was much easier for guilds to lose everything when an officer suddenly gquit or stopped playing.

These incremental but (mostly) very welcome improvements are great examples of how Blizzard iterates.

Expertise and healer help

Blizzard also made big changes to itemization and scaling. This patch ushered in expertise as a stat, replacing "+ weapon skill." At the time, +weapon skill was a highly desirable stat for just about every melee spec. However, the stat made for frustrating moments because it was 100% tied to your equipped weapon(s). +10 dagger skill did nothing for you when you equipped that shiny new sword that just dropped. Expertise solved that problem. All racial bonuses that related to weapon skill, like humans' Mace and Sword Skill racials, had to change too. They all became 1% critical strike bonuses.

Another major change to items came in the form of spell damage on healing items. Prior to this patch, a player in healing gear had gear with mostly +healing bonuses, which were much larger than +spell power bonuses. That also meant healer spells hit like soggy pasta in their raid gear, which made soloing a chore -- especially since dual specs weren't yet implemented. In 2.3, Blizzard added small amounts of +spell damage to healing gear to help healers who wanted to solo quests. (Later, the two stats would be integrated into a single spell power stat.)

Remarkably, many healing and shield spells prior to 2.3 scaled only with spell rank and not your character's stats. This included druids' Tranquility, priests' Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing, and Holy Nova, and warlocks' Shadow Ward. All of these spells gained stat scaling in this patch.

The godsend of Zul'Aman

The trailer for patch 2.3 featured the lore of the Amani trolls and some chilling voice work for Zul'jin. Zul'jin ends the trailer with the memorable line, "We gonna bury you here."

As well designed as it was, Zul'Aman, like Zul'Gurub before it, had a strange place in progression when it went live. As a 10-man raid, ZA did not provide items that competed with its 25-man contemporaries. Thus, players who had been running the Black Temple and Hyjal needed very little from it, even though it was two patches more recent. For them, Zul'Aman was for gearing up alts and recruits, earning a few extra Badges of Justice, and proving their skills by riding around on a big armored bear.

For other guilds, ZA was a godsend. Many guilds had never made the difficult transition from 10 to 25-man raids. They had been raiding Karazhan exclusively since the launch of the expansion almost a year prior. The lack of anything else to raid had eaten some of these guilds alive, as players jumped ship for other communities to see all the 25-man content. ZA stalled that attrition.

Mercifully, this new raid had no attunement requirements. Also like Zul'Gurub, it had a three-day lockout.

As a follow-up to vanilla's infamous 45-minute Strat quest, Zul'Aman included a timed run. Players who killed its first four bosses within the time limit received extra loot and one Amani War Bear. Instead of an overall time limit, however, killing the first two bosses increased the time you had available. That meant you could be close to running out of time and then win a last-second reprieve when you killed a boss. The design made for a tense and frantic pace. Only those groups with superior DPS, sustainable healing, and tanks who could navigate the most efficient path through the instance rescued all the hostages in time.

Due to their inclusion in the timed run, the first four bosses were not as complex as many other raid encounters. To make up for that, the final two bosses had a boatload of mechanics. Hex Lord Malacrass would steal spells from whatever classes were present, including massive self-heals like Holy Light and nasty AOEs like Rain of Fire. Zul'jin was a five phase fight. He shifted into four different shapes with new abilities and wiped threat every time he did so. Some of the phases were true gamechangers, like his Eagle form that dealt damage to a player for every spell they cast or his Lynx form that could carve up a nontank if you didn't use cooldowns to keep them alive during a Rush.

Sadly, Zul'Aman the raid no longer exists. The zone became a five-man dungeon in patch 4.1, with similar bosses and a timed run. Zul'jin stayed dead, though. His defeat was more than a setback. And all this other stuff

If feels like we've covered so much content already, but patch 2.3 offered plenty more.

The daily quest concept was in its infancy during The Burning Crusade, and 2.3 gave us our second round of dailies. The patch introduced the first ever profession dailies. A goblin called The Rokk offered daily cooking quests out of Shattrath that rewarded players with cooking materials and a chance for new recipes. Random daily dungeon quests for both normal and Heroic versions became available for the first time, as did a daily battleground quest. Since this patch took place during the pre-dungeon finder era, the random quests gave players an incentive to run all the dungeons, instead of just the easiest or most efficient.

This was also the patch that reduced the requirement for Heroic keys from revered reputation to honored, so players could run Heroic dungeons after less of a grind. Since unlocking Heroic dungeons was an early milestone on the long road to attunement, most players celebrated this change. (Those who had already done the grinds were, naturally, somewhat bitter.)

Like most patches, 2.3 included many, many class changes, including tons of spell and talent tweaks. Of all the class changes, four were the most significant: Mage tables: Mages no longer had to conjure and then trade drinks to other players. Now they could just cast Ritual of Refreshment and create a table for players to loot. Mages everywhere rejoiced.Rogues also benefited from this patch. It changed the duration of their poisons from 30 minutes to 1 hour.Hunters not only enjoyed the tracking bubble, but also the pet AI change that taught them to attack an enemy from behind. Raid bosses often had nasty frontal cleaves that would shred pets. To keep their pets alive, hunters had to position pets as well as they could. The patch removed that hassle. Warlock pets were affected as well, but few warlock pets attacked from melee range in those days.All shamans learned to train two handed axes and maces. Previously, the ability to wield these weapon was an enhancement talent (and originally, changing specs meant resetting those weapon skills, too).On the PvP front, the biggest change was the complete redesign of Alterac Valley. Blizzard removed most of the elite NPCs and introduced a resource system so that a round of AV took minutes rather than hours -- or days. Some players applauded the new version, while others missed the grand scale of the original with its mini bosses and hard-earned NPC summons. Blizzard also increased the amount of bonus awarded at the end of BGs, to tempt players to fight to the end instead of giving up when their faction falters.

Professions also received some love in this patch. Most notably, Blizzard added the very first profession-based mount. Engineers could now build a Flying Machine and its deluxe model, the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, complete with dashboard hula girl.

For Blizzard, the greatness of patch 2.3 paid off in spades. Two months after its release, WoW achieved an astonishing 10 million subscribers worldwide.

Check out the full patch notes on the next (several) pages!

After months of surveying, WoW Archivist has been dug back up! Discover lore and artifacts of WoW's past, including the Corrupted Blood plague, the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and the mysterious Emerald Dream. Tags: alterac-valley, blizzard, blizzard-archives, blizzard-archivist, blizzard-history, featured, flying-machine, gaming-history, mmo-history, online-gaming-history, patch-2.3, PC-gaming-history, vanilla-warcraft, vanilla-wow, warcraft-archives, warcraft-archivist, warcraft-development, warcraft-history, warcraft-nostalgia, wow-archives, wow-archivist, wow-development, wow-history, wow-nostalgia, zulaman

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WoW Archivist: Launch classes' 9 biggest aggravations, part 2

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Vanilla WoW is properly considered the golden age of this beloved MMO. The evolutionary ideas behind the game were exciting, the art style was fresh, and the world was full of mysteries. Some yearn for a return to that time. But many forget that classes at launch suffered from some truly aggravating designs. Last time on Archivist, we looked at priest racials, hunter mana, warlock shard farming, and shaman weapon skill resets. This week, we review the most aggravating aspects of warriors, mages, druids, rogues, and paladins.

Warriors: The leather conundrum

Let's be fair: warriors, for the most part, had it pretty good in vanilla. Back then, they were the only class that could viably tank and their DPS was better than most hybrids. Rage had its share of problems early on, it's true, but the mechanic worked -- warriors just needed more of it. Stance dancing was annoying to some but the mark of a pro to others. Warriors also had a crippling bug at launch that would register all enemy dodges and parries as misses, preventing skills like Overpower from ever proc'ing. The bug made early leveling painful, but it was solved a few months after launch.

The biggest aggravation for warriors throughout vanilla -- and beyond -- was leather.

Leather had a strange itemization in vanilla. The problem at its core was that agility was too good. Agility granted dodge, armor, and crit, in addition to attack power for agility-based classes. To balance that out, Blizzard removed some agility and added pure attack power, which provided raw DPS but didn't come with all of agility's extra perks. The separate agility and attack power bonuses meant that agility items had one more stat than plate gear. In the vanilla itemization system, diversifying an item's stats allowed an item to have more total DPS stats on it, because fewer points would be allocated to stamina. Stamina was also heavily favored on plate items, because Blizzard wanted them to have a "tougher" overall feel.

So, amazingly enough, agility leather had better DPS stats for warriors than strength plate.

Players figured this out early on. For DPS warriors, leather was the way to go. The agility gave you crit and the AP gave you damage. Any crit or hit on the item helped just as it would from plate, and you got a little more of it. Even agility weapons and rings were preferred, for the same reasons. (Mail also had some great items for warriors, like the Crown of Destruction, but even mail with agility often included other stats that were useless to a warrior like intelligence, spirit, or spell power.)

Many plate items were sharded over the years because they simply could not compete. Remarkably, this held true all the way through the Wrath of the Lich King era. The Black Temple's Cursed Vision of Sargeras, for example, was the envy of every warrior, and not just because you could look like Illidan.

The way agility leather was itemized meant that warriors, rogues, feral druids, hunters, enhancement shamans, and to a lesser extent ret pallies and DPS death knights all had an interest in it. Of the strength-based specs, leather gear worked best for warriors, however. In fact, it worked too well. Many warriors were reluctant to take gear from leather-only classes and would wear plate even though it meant dealing less damage. Some warriors just hated to run around looking like rogues. Meanwhile, rogues and feral druids resented the warriors who prioritized leather over plate. Players on both sides of the leather problem felt punished by this lopsided itemization.

In patch 3.1, Blizzard changed Improved Berserker Stance to give a bonus based on strength rather than attack power, but that only fixed Fury's itemization. Agility items were still better for Arms warriors.

Blizzard's solution to this problem was twofold. First, they got rid of attack power as a stat in Cataclysm and allowed physical classes to get their AP solely from agility or strength. That evened out the issue of extra stats. Second, they added Armor Specialization bonuses. The bonuses give a 5% increase in primary stats if you wear the armor that your class is supposed to wear. This change was actually quite huge. Prior to these bonuses, nearly every class that wore leather, mail, or plate would mix and match armor types to get the best stats possible. Now it's far from optimal to do that. Armor Specialization was a good change for the game -- and for DPS warriors in particular.

Rogues: Mind-numbing poisons

Like warriors, rogues also fared well in vanilla. Their damage was good and their energy, unlike hunter's mana, was infinite. They could even Vanish if they had to drop threat, so they didn't have to worry about being threat-capped like most other DPS did. But rogues were not immune to vanilla design problems.

It's a toss-up here between lockpicking and poisons, but I have to go with poisons. Lockpicking was mainly a class perk. If you never leveled it, your DPS wouldn't suffer. Poisons were an integral part of the class, however, in both PvE and PvP. You simply couldn't be an effective rogue without them. Despite the cool quests to obtain them, poisons were a headache. Poisons only lasted half an hour in vanilla. Also, they disappeared if you zoned. If you rode a ship or zeppelin, or entered a dungeon, or died in a dungeon and released, you had to reapply poisons. Because poisons were crafted items, you didn't have an infinite supply.

Yes, just like lockpicking, poisons constituted their own profession, which meant you had to grind up your poison making skill. Just like any other crafting skill, this process was not particularly interesting. While the profession was appropriate from a roleplaying point of view, it was a hassle that no other class had to endure just to acquire class mechanics.

Poisons also didn't scale with attack power. They gave you a flat bonus based on the rank of the poison created. You could only apply one at a time, so if your raid needed you to use Mind-Numbing Poison, you had to sacrifice your DPS to do it.

Blizzard improved the poison mechanic over the years. They fixed the zoning problem in patch 1.11. In patch 2.3 the duration was increased to one hour. The profession got the axe in Wrath of the Lich King and all poisons became purchasable from vendors. At the same time, Blizzard allowed poisons to scale with attack power. In Mists, they finally did away with poison reagents entirely and just made them spells.

Mages: Spec immunity

People who didn't play mages in vanilla might cite their status as Azeroth's vending machines as the most aggravating part of the class. Certainly the lack of mage tables made life a hassle. You had to chain-cast the water spell and then individually trade the stacks of water to other players. Mage water isn't such a big deal these days, but in vanilla healers would sometimes have to drink between every pull. That got costly without a mage around.

However, nothing comes close to the aggravation that a Fire mage experienced upon first zoning in to Molten Core. Yes, the premier raid of vanilla focused on enemies made of fire, and they could not be hurt by fire. It's logical, but from a gameplay standpoint it was a molten middle finger. Your biggest trinket-powered fireball crit wouldn't scratch Ragnaros. He'd laugh it off as IMMUNE scrolled over his head in big yellow letters.

Immunities were actually quite common in vanilla. Frost enemies could not be Frost Shocked. Ghosts couldn't bleed or be poisoned. These limitations are realistic -- no one can deny that. But they made some specs miserable. You could not run Molten Core, Onyxia, or Blackwing Lair optimally as a Fire mage. You could not face Azuregos as Arcane or Frost. Without Dual Specialization and the ability to swap on the fly, changing specs was a process rather than a button (and a rather expensive process, at that).

Many mages just chose a hybrid of two trees and said "good enough" -- but they still felt a bit put off that their spec was not determined by preference but merely by the backstory of the raid boss they were attacking. After all, no one who named their mage Pyroclastica wanted to raid with a Frost spec.

While it's true that many classes had completely unviable trees (more on that in a moment), no other class suffered from the immunity problem like mages did. Blizzard finally did away with the idea of spell-school immunities at the end of The Burning Crusade. They also added spells like Frostfire Bolt that chose the lesser resistance of the spell's dual schools to calculate its damage (although they no longer work like this as of Cataclysm).

Druids: Go tree or go home

Blizzard left most druid specs in the wilderness in vanilla. Tanking druids didn't have nearly the tools or the survivability of warriors. (It didn't help that they shared their talent tree with a melee spec.) Rogues outclassed cats at every turn. Melee DPS for ferals didn't even scale with your weapon's DPS until Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard added a bandaid fix in the form of a "feral attack power" stat in patch 1.8. Only certain weapons had this stat, and all others were terrible for ferals.

Perhaps the most sad and neglected talent tree of all class specs at launch, however, was Balance. Balance didn't even have a form. Every other druid went into battle as a fierce tiger, a stout bear, or a gnarled treant. Balance druids went in as ... guys who cast Moonfire. Weakly. Moonkin Form was not a thing until patch 1.8 made it the 31-point talent for Balance -- and it didn't even warrant a specific mention in the patch notes.

If you wanted to raid in vanilla as a druid, you were Resto or you were out. To highlight the weakness of the other trees, Resto had Innervate. It was the 31-point Resto talent, and Innervate was incredibly important in vanilla PvE.

Granted, all hybrids except warriors were healers in vanilla. Druids were not alone in this regard. But no other class so strongly promised the ability to do so much more, to be whatever you wanted, as the druid did. The core of the class, after all, was shapeshifting. Vanilla players who rolled druids imagined a class that could shift from shape to shape in combat based on the situation. But if they wanted to run dungeons or raids, they spent most of their time at 60 as trees.

The eventual viability of non-Resto specs was an uphill battle. Bears and cats saw improvements throughout The Burning Crusade but were still second-class citizens until Wrath of the Lich King. That expansion finally tried to made all specs viable, but hybrids suffered from a "tax" on their DPS as a check on their extra utility. Cataclysm finally did away with the tax and put all specs on equal footing, at least in theory.

Paladins: The curse of blessings

That brings us to the final vanilla class, another versatile hybrid that spent all of vanilla WoW as a healer in raids. Unlike druids, however, paladins didn't get to do much actual healing. Paladins were in raids for one reason only: to bless.

Applying Blessings is so easy today that it causes physical pain for vanilla paladins to compare the two processes. You just pick your Blessing and it buffs the raid for an hour.

In vanilla, blessing players was an art. It was also a giant pain in the greaves. You see, the original Blessings lasted five minutes. That was not typically long enough for an entire boss fight. Not even close. Blessings could only be cast on one player at a time. In a 40-player raid, by the time you were done blessing everyone, you could cleanse a few debuffs before you had to go back to blessing everyone again. In fact, your gear rarely mattered, because blessing and cleansing doesn't scale.
You weren't off the hook if you had multiple paladins, either, because players could receive multiple Blessings -- one per paladin. That actually made things worse, to an extent, because now you had to plan who would give which Blessings to whom. This was true all the way through Wrath, and addons such as PallyPower were created just to manage Blessings among multiple paladins.Also, Hand spells like Hand of Freedom used to be Blessings. That meant Hand spells overwrote whatever Blessing you had originally cast on the player.

The worst moment in a raid for a paladin was when you had blessed the whole raid before the pull, and then someone turned out to be AFK. Three minutes later they came back, and you had to rebless everyone all over again.

Thanks to Blizzard and the Light, those days are over. Like most of the aggravations on my list, the solutions came piecemeal over time. Greater Blessings were added in vanilla that could buff everyone of a given class. That was a huge improvement over the one-per-player system, but still had to be micromanaged. If you had Prot warriors and Fury warriors, they needed different Blessings and you were back to individual buffs. Cataclysm finally did away with these shenanigans and treated Blessings like any other raidwide buff.

As much as we all loved vanilla, no one wants to go back to these problems. The nine launch classes have come a long way since launch, and they are without exception tremendously improved, with much less aggravation and more fun. Blizzard deserves a lot of credit for all the hard work they've done to make each class and each spec as engaging and stress-free as possible. WoW would be a very different game otherwise! After months of surveying, WoW Archivist has been dug back up! Discover lore and artifacts of WoW's past, including the Corrupted Blood plague, the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and the mysterious Emerald Dream. Tags: aggravations, blessings, blizzard, blizzard-archives, blizzard-archivist, blizzard-history, featured, fire-immune, gaming-history, launch-classes, mmo-history, online-gaming-history, PC-gaming-history, resto-druid, rogue-poison, rogue-poisons, school-immunity, vanilla-classes, vanilla-warcraft, vanilla-wow, warcraft-archives, warcraft-archivist, warcraft-development, warcraft-history, warcraft-nostalgia, warrior-leather, wow-archives, wow-archivist, wow-development, wow-history, wow-nostalgia

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WoW Archivist: The triumph and tragedy of Ulduar

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

With patch 5.2 on the PTR, everyone is talking about Mists' next tier of raiding content. If the buzz seems more intense than usual, it might be because of the hints that Ghostcrawler and others at Blizzard have dropped comparing the Throne of Thunder to Wrath's Ulduar raid.

Perhaps it's too soon to revisit Ulduar in an Archivist column. After all, the raid went live less than four years ago. I don't care. I want to talk about how amazing this place was, how Blizzard still managed to screw up such a good thing, and why we should all be excited for an Ulduar-style raid in 5.2.

Put the rose-colored glasses away here, folks. You don't need them -- Ulduar really was that fantastic.

Gaze upon its magnificence

If Blackrock Depths is WoW's ultimate dungeon, then Ulduar is WoW's ultimate raid. Many of the same reasons apply. The lore behind Ulduar -- a titan complex housing the prison of an Old God -- demands a massive layout. Ulduar delivered scope like no raid has before or since.

The area where players meet the first boss, Flame Leviathan, is still the largest pre-boss trash area in the game by a long way. Every area except perhaps for Hodir's was absolutely massive. Kologarn was so gigantic that his death formed the bridge into the rest of the instance. Mimiron's area was so big you had to ride a train to get to him. The final push to Yogg-Saron featured huge stained glass windows, some hanging shattered but suspended in midair -- just to creep us out. Even a 25-man raid felt small in this place. The raid also had a great variety of locations: the wide-open outdoor Siege area, Hodir's frigid and claustrophobic caves, Freya's lush meadows (including tons of herb nodes), Mimiron's mechanical workshop, the evil cathedral vibe of the Descent into Madness, etc.

Fourteen bosses waited within to challenge players, from a giant protodrake to a childlike robot, titan guardians, and the scariest Old God ever. Of all the raids in WoW, only Naxxramas has more encounters than Ulduar, by one.

Equally vast was the number of loot drops. With so many bosses, Ulduar would have already approached the record for the most loot ever, but the hard mode drops put it way over the top on that score. Like all raids of its day, it also had completely different loot tables for 10- and 25-man versions.

Titan innovation

Ulduar had so much that was new to WoW, right from the very first pull. Clearing to and engaging Flame Leviathan was like playing an entirely different game -- for better or worse. Blizzard had experimented with vehicle fights early in Wrath, especially in phase three of the Malygos encounter. However, never before (or since) had players piloted vehicles through an entire room of trash and then a raid boss from start to finish. What's more, most of the vehicles required multiple players manning them, adding to the sense of teamwork and strategy. Many people complained about the Flame Leviathan fight early on, but it seemed like most players eventually embraced it. After all, how many fights let you launch your friends with catapults?

Blizzard never tried to replicate it, but bosses like Professor Putricide and Amber-Shaper Un'sok can trace their heritage back to the success of Flame Leviathan.

Even much of Ulduar's trash was new and entertaining. One standout were the Arachnopod Destroyers that you could arachnopod-jack(?) once you DPS'ed them down. Clever players used the mechanical spiders' abilities to wipe out consecutive pulls. Other trash mobs would put up a damage-negating shield over all their buddies or instagib your squishies. Freya's Elders, the Storm Tempered Keepers in the central chamber, and the two colossi in front of the Furnace were all nearly bosses unto themselves. Trash wipes were common in the early days of the raid. Many players wryly commented that Ulduar's trash was harder than Naxx's bosses -- a testament to Blizzard's ability to make even the trash engaging in Ulduar. The Obsidian Sanctum introduced hard modes to WoW, but Ulduar perfected and expanded the system. Like Sartharion, Ulduar's bosses had multiple difficulty tiers and sometimes hidden triggers for the harder version. Not every boss had such a trigger, but the ones that did were memorable. Leaving up Flame Leviathan's four towers gave him extra damage, reduced his damage taken, and gave him new abilities. By choosing which tower(s) to leave, raiders could select one of five different difficulty levels. Breaking XT's heart enraged him. The Assembly of Iron became more difficult depending on the order of bosses defeated (an idea first explored in Ahn'Qiraj). Clearing Thorim's gauntlet quickly summoned his wife (or was she?) to his side. Freya's three Elders gave her extra damage, health, and abilities for a total of four difficulty settings. Yogg had five difficulties depending on how many Keepers you asked to help. And who could forget pushing the giant red button in Mimiron's room labeled "DO NOT PUSH"? Hitting it started an 8-minute self-destruct timer on one of WoW's most frantic, complex, and hilarious encounters ever.

Algalon the Observer was WoW's first "hard mode only" boss. To access him, you had to defeat five of the raid's hard modes, including all four Keepers. Algalon lived up to his billing -- he was indeed very difficult. The stakes couldn't have been higher, either, with the Observer impassively threatening to purge all life on the planet. (That, ladies and gentleman, is the ultimate enrage timer.) After defeating him, raiders could trigger an event in Dalaran that other nearby players could witness. The event called you out by name to the zone, which was a nice bit of recognition for all the effort. Blizzard carried this idea over to Cataclysm's first tier by giving us the Sinestra encounter.

Tremble, mortals

Some encounters like Auriaya and Vezax were rather average, but most of Ulduar's bosses were incredibly unique and epic in scale. Dragging the out-of-reach Razorscale down from the sky so you could whomp on her felt great. The childlike XT has the most striking personality of perhaps any WoW boss to date, with some of the most memorable lines of all time. Dying to his tantrum only to hear "I guess it doesn't bend that way" always brought a smile to my face despite what was likely an impending wipe. His popularity -- or perhaps infamy -- earned him a pet in the Blizzard store, a pet that had an equally infamous bug.

Fighting through Thorim's gauntlet while the rest of your raid struggled to survive his arena brought a sense of urgency that few encounters manage. His pre-fight speech even became a meme. Hodir had many interesting ways to boost your DPS that rewarded savvy and alert players. Mimiron's Voltron-esque creation was a masterwork of raid design. Each phase -- a tank, a turret, and a flying robot head -- felt completely different, culminating in a chaotic final phase where you faced all three pieces conjoined.

Even Kologarn and Ignis had their moments -- these were among the first raid bosses to actually pick us up and toss us around. For the raid to achieve true success, however, Blizzard had to nail the Yogg-Saron encounter, and they did. The Sanity mechanic added a compelling element of terror, convincing us that we were up against something ancient and unknowable. Yes, the first phase with its hard-to-see clouds was overly long and dull, but Yogg's second phase remains one of the great all-time boss phases. Dealing with the tentacles took coordination and awareness. Subjecting yourself to the Old God's illusions by entering portals into his mind was a brilliant moment in the fight -- one that every raider should experience.

Algalon's Planetarium was like nowhere else in the game -- half constellation map, half Hell's disco. The mind-blowing visuals complemented the fight's epic difficulty. Few boss abilities were more terrifying or more appropriately named than his Big Bang. Blizzard didn't dub him "Algalon, Destroyer of Raids" for nothing. To make matters worse, you only had an hour after your first pull to defeat him -- still the only raid boss in WoW with such a timer.

New toys? For me?

As great as Ulduar's bosses were, players still may have been disappointed if the drops weren't equally amazing. Great weapons with fantastic skins seemed to drop from everything: Lifebinder, Voldrethar, Dark Blade of Oblivion, the Fang of also Oblivion, Aesuga, Hand of the Ardent Champion, Dark Edge of Depravity, and many others. Trinkets such as Mjolnir Runestone, Show of Faith, Dark Matter, and Meteorite Crystal were highly prized, even into the next tier. The Vanquished Clutches of Yogg-Saron summoned a friendly tentacle -- an upgraded version of C'thun's.

Ulduar also provided the game's first and only legendary weapon dedicated entirely to healing. Players had to reforge Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings in the maw of Yogg-Saron himself. Acquiring all the fragments took a long time, but this remade titan relic was vastly powerful in its tier, especially given its shield proc. Its power in future tiers became controversial -- Blizzard didn't want it to be relevant throughout the expansion, but players felt that all the work required to build one warranted greater relevance in future tiers. Blizzard eventually buffed the weapon's stats to keep up with current itemization, but also nerfed the proc to make swapping to it in combat less advantageous.

Finally, killing Yogg without any Keepers earned you the best flying mount ever: Mimiron's Head. This version of the encounter was no joke, however. The first guild to do so resorted to an exploit to beat it.

Lose your illusion

Achievements were still new in Ulduar's heyday, and Blizzard had yet to work out some of the kinks. Beyond the hard mode achievements, we were also charged with such tasks as killing adds with Mimiron's own rockets, getting all of Hodir's buffs at once, and blowing Sara a kiss. These achivements were at least entertaining.

The meta had some issues, however. Some of the requirements were flat-out exasperating rather than difficult. Destroying both of Kologarn's arms and then the guardian himself for Disarmed was tricky to time -- and usually you only got one shot at it per reset. Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare was easy to earn, but it took the patience of a titan. So many things could go wrong, and Razorscale didn't use her breath attack very often. It often took several rounds of hitting her enrage timer to roast enough dwarves.

Blizzard shoots themselves in the tentacle

For years, Blizzard gave lip service to the idea of pushing content patches faster. Despite this goal, patch after patch, expansion after expansion, it seemed like players were bored to death of the old content before we got anything new. In Mists, Blizzard seems like they've finally figured out how to do it -- at least so far.

The only other time they pushed a patch through so quickly was patch 3.2, the one right after Ulduar -- and it was the worst thing they could have done. If the patch had included only daily quests like 5.1 did, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, the patch brought with it an entirely new raiding tier, making most of Ulduar "obsolete" just 14 weeks after it released.

Granted, if the Trial of the Crusader had been as epic as Ulduar, or if the lore hadn't been quite so silly, perhaps we wouldn't look back and sigh like we Wrath vets do now. Alas, many players consider this raid to be the worst that Blizzard has ever created. ToC offered only five bosses. All but the last took place in one static, circular room -- the Crusader's Coliseum. It was the opposite of Ulduar in virtually every way: tiny in scope, less interesting in its mechanics, and lacking the varied hard mode triggers of the prior tier. That's partly why the gap between patches was so tragically short. As a result, many guilds had just begun to scratch the surface of Ulduar when they had to make the switch to the Coliseum for progression. Ulduar, the greatest raid in WoW's history, never had the relevance that it deserved. Sure, plenty of people went back for achievements, mounts, or Val'anyr. Even so, if ever a raid could have lasted us through the typical six-month-plus wait for new content of years gone by, it was Ulduar. Yet it was one of very few tiers that didn't get that gap.

The other tragedy is that no raid has implemented such a dynamic system for hard modes since. We got a boring toggle in the Coliseum and it's been a toggle ever since. Blizzard told us that the triggers were too obscure and unintuitive, or too easy to enable accidentally. XT's heart and Thorim's timer are two such examples.

I'm sure part of the reason was also how difficult the triggers were to implement and how easy it may have been to run out of new and interesting ways to create a hard mode trigger. The Protectors encounter in the Terrace of Endless Spring, reminiscent of Ulduar's Assembly of Iron, hopefully points to more Ulduar-style options in the future.

When the Throne of Thunder goes live, we will have had seven tiers since Ulduar, or basically half the tiers in WoW. It's appropriate then that Tier 15 should endeavor to return to the Ulduar model. I can't wait to see what Blizzard has in store for us. We already know that it will feature at least as many bosses as Ulduar's normal modes: 13 are known so far. If the Throne of Thunder is even half as amazing as Ulduar, we'll be in for a special treat during this expansion -- and I have a feeling Blizzard will give us ample months to explore it this time around. Let's just hope we don't have to wait another seven tiers for a similar raid!
After months of surveying, WoW Archivist has been dug back up! Discover lore and artifacts of WoW's past, including the Corrupted Blood plague, the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and the mysterious Emerald Dream. Tags: achievements, blizzard, blizzard-archives, blizzard-archivist, blizzard-history, featured, gaming-history, hard-modes, mimiron, mmo-history, online-gaming-history, PC-gaming-history, raiding, raids, tier-8, ulduar, vanilla-warcraft, vanilla-wow, warcraft-archives, warcraft-archivist, warcraft-development, warcraft-history, warcraft-nostalgia, wow-archives, wow-archivist, wow-development, wow-history, wow-nostalgia, Wrath-of-the-Lich-King, yogg-saron

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