I've never played World of Warcraft

[azeth]

Anyone hyped up on enough coffee this morning to draw parallels between vanilla WoW and the early expansions so I can better understand the draw that the game had?

Was itemization done perfectly where you felt compelled to chase upgrades?

What was the social interaction like when trying to put together pick up groups?

Identify some of the most sought-after pieces of equipment that would leave a noobs mouth agape when they saw somebody with it equipped. What were the hurdles you had to jump through to get those pieces of gear? How difficult were the raids, the group content, etc..

I've seen a few videos from various streamers and YouTubers where it seems like loot was distributed by the raid leader based on only their discretion. Is that accurate, and what about that process made it fair for people?

Was PVP toxic? Were there meta classes and skill configurations that you felt obligated to use to avoid being steamrolled?

Ultimately just looking for somebody to contextualize this experience with the classic EverQuest experience.

[magnetaress]

It was more casual and more active play for vanilla than EQ classic. Faster pace. Still quite a grind. Itemization was way better than EQ. PVP has always been toxic AF LOL. It was always buggy as heck in WoW there was always one meta build that was just so broken and OP if you wanted to pvp seriously you had to take all those gems or whatever.. the grind for pvp was insane and only crazy ppl would do it. But pvp was great for leveling back in the day (they nerfed that in modern wow) so it didn't matter as a noob u just let urself get wrecked and played with ur team. Got plenty exp.

EQ:
Slow pace.
More specificity.
More variance in classes and power lvls.
Less RNG as far as world drops.

Vanilla WoW:
Faster pace
Builds are specific but not non meta builds suck
More RNG in world drops (you could get randomly just gear from worlds)
However> questing and certain quest gear was more important in wow/more determined
PvP> Much better than EQ butt still very flawed needed massive grps to succeed in pvp zones otherwise you wouldnt be able to quest in a horde zone
Raids> Instanced
Random Blues X auction house/and crafted gear == best gear in game early on until u replace with raid loot --- I think there where some dungeons u had to run over and over to get some specific gear

As far as gameplay wize... EQ much better imo. WoW art is kinda generic but looks great also. EQ has more diverse environments. WoW has a ton more lore and way cooler more involved quests... like that paladin quest where u go to save the lady on the farm...

[Ciderpress]

I never played WoW either, I played EQ2 instead at launch (aaaaaaand then ended up back in EQ1 obv).

I've often wondered if WoW would have been nearly as popular if not for blizzard's long-established and already popular warcraft franchise. For some reason what turned me off is that it's not a fully original world, it's the lore from an RTS franchise plopped into an mmo. And I loved the warcraft rts games, but for some reason their association with WoW turned me off.

[magnetaress]

I think vanilla wow has a lot more content than classic EQ and in a more finished state.

Nothing like eqs dungeon designs though. Not really. All wow dungeons are fairly linear and you can skip the non linear parts.

Vanilla Blackrock depths tho is something else.

Vanilla wow raids are far more interesting than EQs. Tho plane of hate is special. Hard to top that zone.

[Iron Chob]

WoW addressed some of the critical MMO features in a different way to EQ.

The most obvious, and arguably important, was simply that of aggro management - EQ"s philosophy, oft-stated, was mob aggro is a group function - it is the responsibility of everyone to manage their own aggro relative to the tank.

WoW (I like to blame Furor, but it was in the game when he still doing PR work for WoW on the FOH forums before WoW's release) had a warrior taunt that worked - that alone shifted the goalposts for all group activity. Every warrior could hit an ability that (in almost every case, excepting high level raid mobs at the time and even then was successful upwards of 95%) guaranteed 6 seconds of aggro, on a 6 second cooldown.....eternal focused aggro for the tank. No more furiously hoping for a proc, or a successful taunt, or for the other group members to have clue....it didn't matter anymore.

Groups thus become less about synergies of competency but simply how fast could anything be burned down. The metric shifted from nuanced, risk-management to just.....faceroll. With enough DPS, anything could be overcome.

The fact the the world of EQ is put together to present challenges in every zone, that travel is inherently dangerous and death is costly, was once one of it's greatest attractions...WoW catered to safety being the norm and a ridiculous ease of resumption after dying, enabling the faceroll philosophy - just pew pew till its dead and if you die....NBD.

It was great fun....but by the third expac, I'd already quit twice, as had most of my guild - we moved as a guild from EQ1 to WoW, so competency/efficiency/content devouring wasn't an issue. It just became.....stale.

The best WoW PvE players would have zero chance of achieving anything in EQ - however, the reverse isn't true.

When there's almost always a mistake you can make in EQ that will lead to a lengthy CR for yourself if not a bunch of others, in addition to a progressively more punishing XP penalty....death is something to be avoided at all costs.

WoW made death less than a minor inconvenience and consequently suffered as a result. The design philosophy at the time took advantage of the time investment that EQ required and went the other direction - make everything easier and more accessible to the casual player.

Was itemization done perfectly where you felt compelled to chase upgrades? not until level 60 and gearing for raids...and you would be in much the same gear as the next person of your class, with the odd exception.

What was the social interaction like when trying to put together pick up groups? Easy, but there was little incentive to make friends from that - instances were over very quickly in comparison to a good xp group in EQ.

Identify some of the most sought-after pieces of equipment that would leave a noobs mouth agape when they saw somebody with it equipped. What were the hurdles you had to jump through to get those pieces of gear? How difficult were the raids, the group content, etc.. The original game had MC and Onyxia as the 40 person raid zones. MC was accessible after doing 1 quest in a 5 man group instance. Ony was a bit more involved, requiring a successful kill of the final boss of what was then a 10 man (2 group) dungeon instance.You could do both in a day, if you were anything like organised. With the tank enjoying the benefits of an almost unresistable taunt, and AoE being telegraphed, there was therefore no requirement for everyone to load up on a set of resist gear for example. Once you had 40 people it resumed the DPS is king approach....as with most guilds, we would give priority on gear upgrades at each new tier to the DPS. Tanks got the tank pieces and healers had to wait until the DPS already had the piece of gear. That approach is still widely adopted by raid guilds today, as out-healing spike damage is not about gear, but about using abilities....and spike damage is all that matters if you have sufficient DPS to burn anything down before the healers go OOM - extending a mana pool or increasing healing efficiency is secondary to 25-30 people doing 2-3% more DPS. They introduced DPS check mobs in the second raid zone, BWL and those became the bottleneck norms. Every subsequent raid zone had a DPS check raid boss.

I've seen a few videos from various streamers and YouTubers where it seems like loot was distributed by the raid leader based on only their discretion. Is that accurate, and what about that process made it fair for people? No, we did it the same as we had done it here - a combo of raid council and DKP

Was PVP toxic? Were there meta classes and skill configurations that you felt obligated to use to avoid being steamrolled? Of course lol.

It was certainly fun, but I often recall my guild leader from EQ saying to me in our first weeks on WoW....'It has no depth'.....she was damn right.

[magnetaress]

^ great post more in depth than me

[Evia]

Wow does a lot of things better than EQ. For example, quests.
What wow doesn't do as well, imho, is itemization. There are infinite amount of items you'll use leveling up that you will never remember.
Eq has iconic items that you can see without even having to inspect someone.

Outside of this, I truly do believe there isn't a single game that feels like EQ besides classic wow. If you can be OK with items not having any true value or meaning until raiding, I think it's a great alternative.

[magnetaress]

Selling junk in wow is a lot easier too. Wish takp had some of that QoL

[Old_PVP]

Classic WoW was a really fun game, full of many positives. There was a reason it had the highest subscription count at the time. Highest subscriptions ever perhaps?

The game was simplified with just the right amount of complexity to it. Only 2 teams, obviously. So right off the bat you knew who your enemies and allies were. Unlimited level range PVP which made it more of a team sport. Some of those zones were just hot spots for PVP and it was great fun. Battlegrounds made it even better, but also took away some of that organic world PVP at the same time, which wasn't good.

The quest system was a good way to make leveling more digestible for people who don't want to just mindlessly grind. It also allowed you to feel like you were making progress and completing zones. This inevitably took away some of that sense of adventure and "sandbox" feel though because quests would essentially handhold the player and tell them where to go next.

Overall, many QoL features like flight paths and auction houses, mailboxes, instance raiding, mounts, user friendliness which made it easy to lure friends in. Which were all probably good things.

[Toxigen]

Originally Posted by Iron Chob [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The best WoW PvE players would have zero chance of achieving anything in EQ - however, the reverse isn't true.

lol yeah ok bub

if you think bleeding edge raiders couldnt figure out a CH chain....just...lol

i was one of the few US players to kill M'uru 1.0 (negative energy spell pushback) and then went on and did all of wotlk hard modes (except Yogg 0 alone in the darkness)

EQ is childs play compared to top end WoW raiding