World of Warcraft: Classic

Kiki · Apr 23, 2019

Really it was just last stand for oh shit, which is pretty early in the tree (but I can't remember with all the patches fucking with it if that changed). Maybe improved shield wall or early taunt for switching but you give up alot. The rest was pretty garbo. Stuns and interrupt/silences didn't really work on raid bosses. If anything full prot was better in dungeons (pugs) than raids.

Hekotat · Apr 23, 2019

Goon squad pulling and hiding all the flight masters on each zone and taking over the boats then putting up a ransom was definitely top 10. Shame on that guy for not referencing that.

Lightning Lord Rule · Apr 23, 2019

Kiki said:
Really it was just last stand for oh shit, which is pretty early in the tree (but I can't remember with all the patches fucking with it if that changed). Maybe improved shield wall or early taunt for switching but you give up alot. The rest was pretty garbo. Stuns and interrupt/silences didn't really work on raid bosses. If anything full prot was better in dungeons (pugs) than raids.

Not really. Here's the vanilla talent calculator.

The thing is, the top of the fury tree was essentially useless while wearing tanking gear. Enrage is great if you take a crit, but if you're defense capped you don't get crit hardly at all and you certainly didn't WANT to take a crit as the main tank. Flurry is basically +30% white (auto-attack) damage with a certain level of crit, but that crit level is very high, like 25-30% or greater iirc. Certainly much higher than you can get wearing tanking gear. Realistically you're looking at maybe 20% uptime on flurry, especially since you wanted very fast base weapon speed as the MT to boost your rage generation. Flurry really didn't shine unless you had the attack speed and the attack frequency of dual wielding, which you certain wouldn't be doing while tanking. Bloodthirst the skill is an instant attack, but had no additional threat attached to it and was predicated on your attack power, which is not high at all in tanking gear since it prioritized defensive stats, so Bloodthirst would actually hit like a wet noodle.

Now compare that to the top of the prot tree. You get 10% extra damage with 1h, essentially negating the damage penalty of defensive stance which was -10%. Shield slam also has a healthy threat bonus attached to it and scaled with your block value, rather than attack power so it scaled with better tank gear. Defiance increases your threat by 15%, equivalent to 15% extra damage from all sources (this by itself is better for threat generation than flurry, which only affected white damage). Improved sunder makes it easier to deal with low rage situations, along with imp Heroic Strike in the arms tree. Finally 5 seconds of extra shield wall time could literally save your raid from wiping at times.

The real MT spec was something like 8/10/33 with slight variations.

a c i d.f l y · Apr 23, 2019

We took down Nefarian with a Fury/Prot tank in like, January 2006. He had maybe 4 pieces of T2 gear and my mage was running a lot of blues. Pretending like gear fucking matters is hilarious. Hit your defense cap and that's literally all you need. Well, Ony cloak, I guess. We stopped fucking around with heavy resist gear in AQ, too. 100-150 if you're the tank, maybe. Stam and throughout was more important.

Naxx is a different monster. Most never got to even enter it because the rep grind/money for a key - also, critically, BC was announced, which basically fucked raid attendance for the guild I was in at the time.

With a long enough runway and enough poopsockers, it's going to be a cake walk. Fags on private servers juice to the teeth for speed running the shit, and the population is so tiny. Fights are almost authentic (hahaha...sigh). Folks who do it and say it's hard are hilarious. When you've got so few players... I bet it takes maybe 2mo before your average raid is clearing it in 1-2 nights, or selling raid clears.

Lightning Lord Rule · Apr 23, 2019

My guild killed untauntable BWL drakes in July 2005 and almost killed a HORRIBLY bugged Chrommaggus but he leashed back away from the raid before we could. We also got pre-nerf Ouro down to 9% before he and C'thun got nerfed. Gear mattered at that time, so that's my frame of reference. It mattered far less months later when everyone knew the strats and mechanics.

Also, old raids were nerfed when new ones came out. Molten core was nerfed, and so was BWL. I don't remember what mob it was, but I do remember one of our healers noting it was far easier to heal people in MC runs after they patched in BWL (or right before it opened, it's been a while so I don't remember the exact time). The mob I'm referring to went from hitting tanks for 4K to like 2.5K. I'm less certain if AQ was nerfed other than the big nerf to make C'thun and Ouro killable. Naxx never was because it was the last raid of vanilla.

That's all just history e-peen tho

Assuming they release everything with patch 1.12 values, it's true that content up to Naxx will likely be piss easy.

Kiki · Apr 23, 2019

AQ and after I agree with you wanting a bit more in prot but really if you didn't want to spend a crazy amount repeccing you were running around with mortalstrike/5/15 early on. But also my guild was heavy into pvp, I'm talking half the raid had High Warlord in front of their name toward the end. Plus we had to stance dance for fears on Horde so anger management was pretty nice.

a c i d.f l y · Apr 23, 2019

Lightning Lord Rule said:
My guild killed untauntable BWL drakes in July 2005 and almost killed a HORRIBLY bugged Chrommaggus but he leashed back away from the raid before we could. We also got pre-nerf Ouro down to 9% before he and C'thun got nerfed. Gear mattered at that time, so that's my frame of reference. It mattered far less months later when everyone knew the strats and mechanics.

Also, old raids were nerfed when new ones came out. Molten core was nerfed, and so was BWL. I don't remember what mob it was, but I do remember one of our healers noting it was far easier to heal people in MC runs after they patched in BWL (or right before it opened, it's been a while so I don't remember the exact time). The mob I'm referring to went from hitting tanks for 4K to like 2.5K. I'm less certain if AQ was nerfed other than the big nerf to make C'thun and Ouro killable. Naxx never was because it was the last raid of vanilla.

That's all just history e-peen tho

Assuming they release everything with patch 1.12 values, it's true that content up to Naxx will likely be piss easy.

I can't say they nurfed MC so much as they fixed the gear. The addition of spell/healing power was huge. They also tweaked the stats and bonuses on tier gear. Want to say they also took out a couple of the roaming mobs, or shortened their pathing in MC so you weren't picking up an extra corehound and then a rocky asshole comes charging up... Definitely made it easier, but it was already pretty easy.

Untauntable dragon's was a fucking nightmare. "This fight is fucked, do you need like 8 tanks or something like Vael...?" Want to say we dropped attempting Flamegor for a week or two until it was fixed (happened very quickly after BWL was released). After that, it was pure positioning.

Looking forward to see what folks end up doing on that first fight in BWL when dps isn't enough to stop the swarm....

tower · Apr 24, 2019

Kuro said:
Note that when they talk about Fury Tanking and not getting defense capped and shit, that's generally not-pants-on-head-retarded raid groups. So, not 90% of general population 40 man raid groups. If your healers are busy typing out their RP shouts before each heal you should probably make sure you've got a solid focus on mitigation/crit-immunity and just let any DPS who can't sit on their hands a bit die. And the full-out Threatgen Fury tank that's been talked about a lot in the last year is basically Everquest 1 with healers spamming Big Dick Heals on your ass constantly until OOM, on the theory (and practice) of the higher threat cap meaning more DPS, meaning bosses die before the spamming healers actually OOM. Speed-run shit.

The Druid thing is weird, they have better baseline armor/avoidance, and if you grind the fuck out of gnomer every week, really good high-threat windows, but they don't have crush immunity that Warriors get from shieldblocks, and their threat falls to the shitter without the pummeler buffs.

Thinking back to actual Vanilla, I mostly remember raid tanks being arms because they were all divas and didn't want to pay to switch specs for "pwning noobs" in PVP.

This isnt the case if theyre riding with 1.12 but back in the day prot was pretty useless past like 14 (? maybe a little more) talent points so yeah everyone was arms with a 2hander because PvP and the magic of fury hadnt been mass discovered yet. But if they're going with 1.12 talents the private server crew are probably going to be more right than theyre wrong

tower · Apr 24, 2019

I'm going to be forever bitter about using 1.12 and not 1.1 but I know I'm mostly alone in that. I'm just going to miss shit like this

a c i d.f l y · Apr 24, 2019

tower said:
I'm going to be forever bitter about using 1.12 and not 1.1 but I know I'm mostly alone in that. I'm just going to miss shit like this

View attachment 204546

Ahh, the original shit Tier 2 that still dropped in MC...

Ossoi our lady priest (god rest her soul) got T2 shoulders and chest from fuckin Garr and Baron Gedon before BWL was even a thing.... was very jokey the terrible models. What was the name of the dwarf priest that also got a T2 piece from MC?

That said, I still miss the original helm for the paladin dungeon set (the red helm with wings) before they fucked that up with the gold "hat". Some enemies in Stratholme and Western Plagues still have that same helm model.

BoozeCube · Apr 24, 2019

Yeah when they put effort into what the sets looked like. I still remember first seeing the Warrior tier 2 and thinking it looked like what would happen if a Rhino fucked a trash can. Somehow Paladin T2 and Rogue T2 are still some of the best looking sets in the game.

Fartbox · Apr 24, 2019

Gear mattered and so did spec. You weren't fiddling around with non-prot specs as a tank if you were in a serious guild. It was usually my job to be "oh shit" tank because I could ride second on threat for bosses well. Tanks died a lot, so this gave us 2x last stand, 2x shield wall in a row when shit got weird. Helped a lot with early kills on Chromag, Nef, Huhu, Maexxna, and more in Naxx. Imp revenge as weird as it sounds was of the better things - it didn't work on bosses themselves but was great for bosses with shit going on. Nef P1 I could almost solo tank with good procs and thunderclap + demo + howl kiting. Anub'rekhan in Naxx could basically perma stun-lock the adds.

BoozeCube · Apr 24, 2019

The level of defiance from some of you about going deep in the Prot tree is kind of amazing. Much of Vanilla people didn't even know what gear to wear let alone how to spec made even more obvious by the people here insisting that somehow people went deep Prot even though it was pretty much useless past 15 points.

tower · Apr 24, 2019

I guess its possible people were just bad I mean I was top MC dps in my guild running 31/8/12 as a rogue until the guy with a deathstriker specced combat daggers and even then I was still a hard 2nd

a c i d.f l y · Apr 24, 2019

Fartbox said:
Gear mattered and so did spec. You weren't fiddling around with non-prot specs as a tank if you were in a serious guild. It was usually my job to be "oh shit" tank because I could ride second on threat for bosses well. Tanks died a lot, so this gave us 2x last stand, 2x shield wall in a row when shit got weird. Helped a lot with early kills on Chromag, Nef, Huhu, Maexxna, and more in Naxx. Imp revenge as weird as it sounds was of the better things - it didn't work on bosses themselves but was great for bosses with shit going on. Nef P1 I could almost solo tank with good procs and thunderclap + demo + howl kiting. Anub'rekhan in Naxx could basically perma stun-lock the adds.

LOL, no. Only reason a tank died is they missed their tank swap (sometimes due to the rare resisted taunt) or healers were shit. Or they fucked up stance dancing. Tanks shouldn't be dying unless they're bad, not def capped, or healers suck. You're sooner to have a dps pull aggro and wipe a raid than a tank die.

Kiting mobs on Nef? What. Strat sounds solid otherwise, but still, what.

Fartbox · Apr 24, 2019

So you killed every boss on the first attempt? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

BoozeCube · Apr 24, 2019

Fartbox said:
So you killed every boss on the first attempt? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Neranja · Apr 24, 2019

BoozeCube said:
The level of defiance from some of you about going deep in the Prot tree is kind of amazing. Much of Vanilla people didn't even know what gear to wear let alone how to spec made even more obvious by the people here insisting that somehow people went deep Prot even though it was pretty much useless past 15 points.

I think that is because the warrior talent tree has been revamped and finetuned between patches. Was that around BWL? I don't really remember anymore. Also, for me a lot of memories are mixed with TBC era, where the prot tree definitely wasn't useless. It's been so long.

Also, raiding in vanilla depended a lot on the group you where raiding with. The raids themselves weren't hard or mechanically challenging, they didn't even have hard enrage timers. But the logistics of 40 people attending was a lot like herding cats.

This time around we have the hindsight 20/20 buff, and also Blizzard is basing the client on the current mainline 7.3.5 or 8 client. This means that addons like the classic Decursive won't work, but at the same time threat meters could work with Blizzard API provided data. We still haven't heard their stance on that, though.

Kiki · Apr 24, 2019

tower said:
This isnt the case if theyre riding with 1.12 but back in the day prot was pretty useless past like 14 (? maybe a little more) talent points so yeah everyone was arms with a 2hander because PvP and the magic of fury hadnt been mass discovered yet. But if they're going with 1.12 talents the private server crew are probably going to be more right than theyre wrong

This exactly. You ran mortal strike and 15 in prot. Sweeping strikes and thunderclap for adds. And crit for rage to keep aggro with heroic strike dumps and mortal strike. Classic Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Change hamstring for whatever, but again we were a pvp guild.

But I just played the thing, I didn't memorize specific patches so I'll have to figure out where we end up. They messed with it into TBC and I think I stayed full prot because I remember that in Kara.

I miss my glowy shoulders, I think I finally de'd them sadly before they put in transmogs. And the priest epic quest was a throwback which was cool. They removed emergency heal and decursive which i used to top healing meters.

Lunis · Apr 24, 2019

I had 7/8 Nightslayer with old red hat Bloodfang. I never did get Vis'Kag the Bloodletter... fucking 2% drop rate.

World of Warcraft: Classic

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