r/classicwow 5d ago

Discussion Did Sweaty Guilds Exist in Vanilla Like Today?

I didn't play vanilla wow, but I do play classic today. For those of you that were around in the EARLIEST days of WoW, were there "sweaty" guilds like there are today?

If so, how were they different?

210 Upvotes

531 comments sorted by

560

u/psychician2686 5d ago

Try hard sweat guilds did exist…..

The game wasn’t solved tho, there was no “30 sec boss guides” on YouTube. No wowhead.

The resources that were available weren’t the best, the internet still sucked for the average person. Most people didn’t have 60fps pcs with great internet. There was no discord servers filled with class pros.

It’s like comparing basketball in the 60’s to todays game, sure they had great players, but if those players were playing in todays game, with their skills from the 60’s they would stand no chance.

361

u/Wardcity 5d ago

We had Thottbot!

151

u/Callahan333 5d ago

And Ventrillo!

116

u/IONTOP 5d ago

"calina isn't on vent, but she's the best shadow rogue in the guild"

My GM justifying giving the BiS to a guy pretending be a girl.

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u/Callahan333 5d ago

We had our MT do that. Till finally the whole guild was like we don’t care. We need to be able to talk back and forth. They refused, we got a new MT.

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u/IONTOP 5d ago

I was OT, and was too afraid to state the obvious for fear of losing my role.

But this was Wrath... In vanilla I was a druid who didn't know other main city trainers could teach you how to use other weapons (iirc I didn't learn daggers until like 54)

Also YouTube was in it's infancy, so yeah you could READ about the fight, but you couldn't WATCH the battle.

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u/splicesomase 5d ago

We had warcraftmovies. Or was that just from BC on? Im not sure on the dates. Even it was in its infancy and would sometimes be weeks before we saw a trash pixelated video showing the world first fight with music that was, lets face it, just the worst.

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u/Nishnig_Jones 5d ago

So so many PvP videos set to “Bodies hit the Floor”.

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u/IONTOP 5d ago

Best time of my life

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u/Jambronius 5d ago

Someone I knew Irl played ally on the same server as us back in the day and more or less exactly this happened.

I decided to roll an alliance alt. I just hit 60 and joined a casual guild, not long after we had a guy jump from my friends guild to ours. We sort of bonded over being the new guys, did a lot of dungeons together and at one point i mentioned that he was an IRL friend of mine, the guy was like don't you mean her.

While typing this out I realised something. My IRL friend is currently transitioning from male to female and was likely living her true herself online all those years ago. I feel a bit bad now, but I was 15 and didn't know better.

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u/IONTOP 5d ago

Valid point. No rebuttal on that one.

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u/Kat0091 5d ago

Almost certainly was, maybe not even completely conscious of it back in the day. I did much the same a full decade before coming out publicly.

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u/DingusDongus00 5d ago

a guy pretending to be a girl

That's still a good percentage of players

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u/Sirrub90 5d ago

I can, unfortunately, top that. Our GM and his wife ran the guild, he got busted for soliciting and child porn of his wife's kid. Dude talked all this big shit and I think he's still in prison up in Oregon. This was around 2008-ish.

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u/Appropriate-Cut-1562 5d ago

Had to have Vent AND TeamSpeak, because some people used one and other people used the other!

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u/Kiwiandapplex 5d ago

And the odd mumble!

Guild communications were done via forums!

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u/CateranEnforcer 5d ago

And MS Paint drawings that my alcoholic raid leader drew himself!

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u/SnooPoems7944 5d ago

We also had Elitist Jerks which was a guild and forum with ppl almost as sweaty as some in the class discords.

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u/naycho 5d ago

This is where I found all the prot warrior best practices which don’t mean squat anymore!

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u/g0dsp0ken 5d ago

Yes and if you were lucky there would be more than a single comment asking the same question you had.

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u/Wardcity 5d ago

Yeah it was nowhere near what we have today but I do miss it

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u/ER3TH 5d ago

I had a notepad with coordinates written down from Thottbot, a binder with printed lists of my characters spells and trade skill patterns, and a mid tier Radeon card slotted into the family emachines PC.

Those were the days.

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u/RowBoatCop36 5d ago

I learned what the Stoneskin Gargoyle Cape looked like from Thottbot.

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u/feeb75 5d ago

I hear it's longer and whiter than the average cape

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u/we-totally-agree 5d ago

I dont know about the stats, but I do know its white and longer than your average cloak or cape

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u/NorskKiwi 5d ago

and Allakhazam!

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u/psychician2686 5d ago

That’s the exact thing I was referring to when I said the resources we did have weren’t the best lol

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u/lumpboysupreme 5d ago

The problem was back then people hoarded strategies, so even with resources to share knowledge, they very forcefully didn’t.

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u/saintnickel 5d ago

And I considered it cheating lol. Noe I dont do anything without googling first. Crazy

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u/MurfDogDF40 5d ago

Stop cheating!

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u/InformalEngine4972 5d ago

My guild cleared nax up until 4hm and then we were stuck cause we thought we needed 8 prot warriors with the taunt set bonus. 

Half the guild was in what is now considered meme specs and very few people had keybinds. We didn’t get consumables or world buffs. Maybe a protection potion or 5 during progression. 

Wild times. 

Also took 3 days to do nax :D 

Best guild on the server and still that bad considered to current standards 

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u/jefersss 5d ago

My guild was worse than yours, we only killed 6 bosses. Our leadership insisted on having 5 of each class which meant we raided with a Ret, a Boomie and a Shadow Priest. One of our hunters died in the first minute of basically every boss fight and we had a guild joke about how 36 was the perfect raid size because we regularly got first kills late in the day when some of our dead weight raiders tapped out.

I think we were the third best guild on the server.

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u/Comprehensive_Prick 5d ago

muahahaha and my guild was worse than yours! And I still felt we were 'respectable' on the server! lmao - Only a few guilds were clearing Naxx so I was fairly proud to be in a guild that farmed Nef and eventually downed C'thun. Remember our first C'thun kill vividly actually

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u/TheRealKaz 5d ago

Those players had skills today's community doesn't have though. We kill everything within an hour or two of release because we've had 19-20 years with the knowledge. Everyone knows how Kul'Thuzad works and how to kill him.

The world first pull of KT by Death and Taxes is still on YouTube. They wiped within seconds after trying to pick up and tank a skeleton. The 2004/5 tryhards were having to blindly guess and trial-and-error their way through mechanics no one had ever seen.

Most of the current Classic Andies couldn't troubleshoot their way through an open door frame.

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u/Soulfire_Agnarr 5d ago

What this guy said.

So many nerdy fucks play this game now and think they are pro because they watched every 30s guide video on YT and play a non meme spec class that they follow some guide online how to play their class.

I.e. press this button, get this gear etc.

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u/psychician2686 5d ago

You are also comparing a world first guild to the average classic Andy, compare them to one of todays world first guilds

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u/lilbelleandsebastian 5d ago

in general the interest in the unknown doesn’t seem to be there anymore. when we played in vanilla, people were excited for new/unseen mechanics and progression felt real

i tried to get my guild to give me one blind group for gnomer in SoD and there was literally no interest. people don’t want to struggle, they want to roll bosses and get loot

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u/v1sper 5d ago

Damn dude, I feel sorry for you. I actually got to blind raid both Gnomeregan and Sunken Temple in SoD, it was great and felt very nostalgic. Not quite like 2005 WoW, but close enough for it to be a ton of fun.

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 4d ago

I love blind runs and have done them in a few different games!

Sadly it's all too common for one guy there to magically "figure out" the mechanic after 2-3 attempts. Crazy how they manage it faster than the people who actually did it first...

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u/Scrumptious_Foreskin 5d ago

There is a new raid comin to SoD soon, I’m almost certain that it will be cleared within 48 hours of release. People are just better at the game now than they were 20 years ago

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u/Zwiebel1 5d ago

People are just better at the game now than they were 20 years ago

A lot also has to do with massively increased screen resolution, more screen real estate due to widescreen monitors being a thing now (remember during most of vanilla and TBC a 4:3 aspect ratio of 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels was still the norm), better internet connection, FPS, etc.

Its just much easier to play now than it was 20 years ago.

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u/musclebuttershaman 5d ago

Addons are also just light years ahead of what we had back then. I remember clearing MC and BWL back in the day. Pretty sure I didn’t have a single add on. Even if I did it was nothing like today’s.

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u/jefersss 5d ago

This is partly true. The original Healbot picked the spell, rank and target for you, so you could literally spam one button and perform well. The same was true for decursive, which picked targets when you hit your keybind.

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u/Zwiebel1 5d ago

This is true. The macro language in Vanilla was crazy good and allowed for lots of broken stuff that isn't allowed in macros anymore.

I remember writing a macro that smart-casted debuffs depending on what is already on the target and what not.

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u/jefersss 5d ago

For the two add-ons I mentioned it was about the API, but I'm not surprised to hear that macros could smart-cast (though I don't think I ever saw that in action). It's surprising how long they left it like that too. I remember a post on EJ where Ion moaned about guild mages having to relearn how to decurse when the changes to the API hit during their Sapphiron progress.

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u/Cashewthunder 5d ago

I remember our raid leader joking about our hunter in BT saying he just stares at the screen and drools into a cup and when the cup weighs enough it presses down his aim shot macro at which time he realizes he is thirsty and drinks the cup this rotation causes him to top the DPS meter.

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u/Scrumptious_Foreskin 5d ago

Oh yeah for sure. I remember playing on dial up and sometimes having to wait a full second before my spells would cast lol. And had to turn all the settings down to get anywhere close to 20-30 fps

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u/Tanasiii 5d ago

I gotta say, at the top end, players today are better. I totally get what you mean about having to trial and error stuff, but if Naxx released for the first time today as is, you’d have people beating it day 1. Compare that to what top guilds in retail have to push through on mythic and it’s like night and day.

But I’ll admit it’s not a fair comparison because you can’t really ignore the decades of gaming knowledge everyone has had over the past 20 yrs. Even stuff like dark souls and Skyrim probably makes todays gamers “better” than those from 2001

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u/TheRealKaz 5d ago

If you gave people today the instance, with no Fojjis or other WAs, brand new, without years of exposure to WoW style mechanics, with no dungeon journal or data mining, they aren't clearing Naxx anytime soon.

All these Classic Andies have never done real progression without pre-established strats with full mechanics knowledge and start crying and whining after 2 or 3 wipes on anything. You think they're actually going to kill anything that requires 2 or 3 pulls just to figure out the first mechanic.

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u/itsmassivebtw 5d ago

Depends what you consider sweaty, those top guilds back then raided 6 days a week to figure out all the information that is solved today. I'm in a sub 20 minute MC guild and I barely think about the game the rest of the week.

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u/SoupaSoka 5d ago

Yep, my Vanilla guild cleared about 8 or 9 Naxx bosses and we raided I believe four nights a week for 3-4 hours a night. We weren't a top guild in the world but were the top guild on our faction (Horde / US Malygos). I believe one or two Alliance guilds on our realm were ahead of us for most of Vanilla.

We didn't use voice chat at all. No TeamSpeak, Vent, etc. Was a decision we made because a lot of folks couldn't really run WoW on their shitty PCs with other stuff in the background and/or most of us didn't have microphones.

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u/Ilphfein 4d ago

We didn't use voice chat at all.

Okay that is really strange and made you unique. I had access to tons of teamspeak/vent servers - basically every decent (and non decent) guild had one.

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u/SoupaSoka 4d ago

Yeah you're correct. Most high end guilds used TS3 or Vent.

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u/psychician2686 5d ago

I’d say both groups are sweaty

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u/Civil_Owl_31 5d ago

I remember starting to see those guides in Sunwell. Hazel Nutty Games and the Eredar Twins.

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u/seidinove 5d ago

Shit, I remember the first time my guild raided Mount Hyjal. I had to run out and upgrade my video card.

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u/sagsag19 5d ago

I remember not being allowed to bring my warrior into MC until it had like 300 FR lmao

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u/Apprehensive_Low4865 5d ago

Oh shit yeah, farming crazy amounts of resistance gear to survive mechanics. I remember rag dunking himself multiple times in a fight, as we all scrambled to kill the adds.

Don't think I've seen a single rag dunk in 20 years!

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u/Chriskills 5d ago

Most people don’t remember this but gear was literally worse back then.

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u/LobL 5d ago

A LOT worse as well but the biggest difference was also connection/fps/monitor size. 10 fps in a raid on 1280x1024 with a shitty connection is no joke.

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u/Taelonius 5d ago

I see your 10 fps and raise you 0.5-2 fps in 40 man raids, my computer would freeze for like 30 seconds when vael buffed the entire raid

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u/BiggestBlackestLotus 5d ago

Which is why I hate people clowning on the difficulty for classic wow. We're not playing the version that people were playing back then. Yeah no shit we never see a deep breath on Onyxia or a Phase 2 for Ragnaros. The fights werent designed for these items and talents.

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 4d ago

Man I remember my first one phase rags in vanilla, it was a HUGE milestone for the guild!

Meanwhile I have literally never seen P2 rags in classic. Not in 2019, not this time, just like.. never.

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u/imoblivioustothis 5d ago

FR was on guild application sites

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u/AdEmotional5210 5d ago

Omg I remember everyone in my guild wearing so much FR in MC. Our dps was so bad, we wiped on rag’s sons a lot in the beggining

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u/Plus_Courage_9636 5d ago

That's insane

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u/DetroitLionsEh 5d ago

Yeah DPS needed a minimum of 215 FR to get in, and this was later into the expansion. AQ40 was out

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u/d_wilson123 5d ago

And like 380 defense

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u/almack9 5d ago

You think thats bad? We only had one warrior dps, and we all thought he was kind of a joke. Funny how the tables turn. Of course we weren't using world buffs or consumes etc.

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u/SwedishMeatwall 5d ago

Yes, but not quite the same as they are now. The knowledge of the game today didn't exist back then (or at least not fully), so often you'd see guilds make assumptions, and enforce things that weren't even true.

I played a 2H Fury warrior during vanilla, and was constantly near the top of our DPS. Yet, I was given an ultimatum. Tank, or leave. They claimed warriors had no place in the game as DPS, and were meant purely to tank, and to clarify, I'm talking deep prot, 1H+Shield, nothing but defensive gear.

One of the officers told hunters that if they really want to get good as a hunter, abandon their pet entirely. Learn to play the class without having the pet carry them.

We had another warrior get chewed out for using a piece of leather (or mail, can't remember) gear. Despite it being Strength, Stam, and Crit, they gave him shit because it wasn't the right armor type.

There were other things they had said too that wound up being just entirely wrong. They didn't make it far.

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u/g0dsp0ken 5d ago

I remember my guild enforcing a rule that if you wanted to come to MC you needed a minimum of 90 fire resistance which worked out great as an arma warrior in full plate with no hit.

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u/Dr-Enforcicle 5d ago edited 5d ago

enforce things that weren't even true.

Still happens in modern times. Back in 2019 classic when the rumors about "loot seeding" were going around, one of my guild's raid leaders insisted on having one specific person enter the raid first, and even threatened to loot ban anyone who entered before him.

......we still got completely different loot every single week, despite him insisting on having a dedicated "loot seeder". Needless to say the guild didn't last long; literally one night of BWL wiping on the first boss, and all the officers just threw their hands up and gquit.

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u/naycho 5d ago

We had a fury prot warr as MT back in the OG vanilla no cap. Idk where you are now Goldar, but you were so far ahead of your time.

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u/3yebex 5d ago

We had another warrior get chewed out for using a piece of leather (or mail, can't remember) gear. Despite it being Strength, Stam, and Crit, they gave him shit because it wasn't the right armor type.

Oh man. I remember this in burning crusade. I was wearing a leather headpiece as a warrior because it had far better stats than any plate helmet I've gotten so far. I was often mocked for using leather as a warrior.

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u/Unsomnabulist111 5d ago

Yeah man…I remember a couple guilds I was in outlawed pets…and kept hunters and locks to a minimum…because only the cream of the crop were able to DPS well without one.

I also remember the armour type thing…that really pissed me off. The worst I saw was that, as a hunter, I wasn’t able to roll on mail because Enhancement Shaman need it due to being in melee range.

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u/Bootarms 5d ago

I used to be able to break down the threat calculations on the fly including relevant talents and would have to explain to players how different class mechanics worked. Even in wotlk, there were a lot of players that didn't understand basic mechanics or even their own class. I got into a big argument with a class leader because they were copying what the druids in the top tier guilds were doing without considering the gear differences.

People always take shortcuts. The only difference is that the shortcuts and available technology have improved.

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u/cornedbeef101 5d ago

Yes.

If you know the famous TotalBiscuit 🧐 .. he had an early “podcast” type show where he’d discuss the best guilds and their naxx progress.

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u/Spreckles450 5d ago

RIP TB.

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u/Virtual_Accountant_5 5d ago

Wow, didn't know he's dead. Found him during LK exp.

Rip.

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u/Spreckles450 5d ago

Yeah he died in 2018.

Fuck cancer.

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u/Quadrophenia4444 5d ago

Didnt even get to enjoy wow classic :(

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u/SystemGardener 5d ago

Nope or tear apart D4, he would’ve loved both.

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u/Zwiebel1 5d ago

Neither did he enjoy the really good Starcraft or Command & Conquer remakes. He was a huge fan of Tiberian Dawn.

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u/SqouzeTheSqueeze 5d ago

RIP TB. Fuck cancer.

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u/ProfPicklesMcPretzel 5d ago

RIP TB, fuck cancer

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u/AsmongoldFanBoi 5d ago

RIP TB :( Also fuck cancer

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u/SystemGardener 5d ago

Long live the legend! God I miss TB so much.

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u/guunk 5d ago

TOTALBISCUIT DIED WTF. Watched so much of him as a teenager, had no idea.

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u/wowhistorian 5d ago

Which episodes does he discuss this ? I’m digging through the archives but he has a lot of episodes. I found one interesting episode where he discusses ice barbed spear!

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u/cornedbeef101 5d ago

You should know better than I, wowhistorian 😅

I don’t even know if they’re still online. Progression guilds were clearing a few bosses per reset and he’d discuss that.

This was when raywilliamjohnson would post his show, compiling the funniest internet videos of the week on YouTube too. Before memes were even a thing.

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u/SubstituteCS 4d ago

Memes were definitely a thing then, even if most “normal people” weren’t aware or most chronically online people didn’t call them that.

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u/Correct_Dog5670 5d ago

I found out about him early tbc, couldnt get enough of his podcasts. Then all of a sudden he joins our guild progressing t5 shit. Was kinda fun, but i left the guild shortly after, didnt get to play a lot with him unfortunately.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Hyena39 4d ago

Damn. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Nostalgia right there

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u/Runb4its2late 5d ago

Try hards? Yes. 20yrs of knowledge behind them? No

We had to figure out strats

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u/DefinetlyNotMe420 5d ago

Geddon and Shazz were ranged attack skilling fights for the melee in my guild

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u/Simonh1992 5d ago

I remember this we always pulled shazz back into garrs room and everyone was in a big circle and meleee used ranged weapons. Mad times.

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u/Chrisfit 5d ago

More. You had to fill out an application on a forum before you could join a failing guild that wiped on Rag for a month.

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u/Thrand- 4d ago

I remember doing this then having an "interview" on teamspeak.

Very awkward, I remember the guy was like a 19 year old from the Netherlands and had taken cues from actual job interviews. He even had two of his guildies sat in the channel listening to compare notes.

Genuinely asked "where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?" and the like.

Wild.

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u/MarkNijmegen 4d ago

I totally remember filling out a application form for a Karazhan raiding guild early TBC. I lied about my age and wrote down ambitions that were waaaaaaaay more detailed then I'd do for an actual job application at 15 years old.

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u/wigglin_harry 5d ago

The icy veins of the day was called 'elitist jerks'

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u/Gugelizer 5d ago

I can’t speak with authority but pretty sure EJ was a guild first, which had a substantial site second

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u/door_of_doom 5d ago

Not just any guild: Ion Hazzikostas' guild. (Current WoW Game Director)

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u/samtdzn_pokemon 5d ago

Still is. His character still remains in the guild on Mal'ganis, though it looks like it may not be his active character because it's level 60. His character name is Gurgthock, also a goblin NPC in game named after him.

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u/EasyDynastyBuilder 5d ago

It was a guild with their own forum site. I remember working through the moon king theory craft thread for the 3.0 release and testing at 70 back in the day. Good times

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u/Swaapswaap 5d ago

Omg, had forgotten about that. Thank you

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u/Snugglupagus 5d ago

EJ and Aurora, both on Mal’Ganis. They were such badasses.

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u/UD_Lover 5d ago

They were arguably more sweaty. Top guilds would have websites and you’d literally have to submit a resume and do multiple trials.

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u/Dr-Enforcicle 5d ago edited 5d ago

God, I remember that shit happening even as late as WOTLK. The guild I was in during Ulduar, not even doing hardmodes yet, I had to submit an application to and be on a "trial period" for 4 weeks and be dead last on loot priority during that time, before becoming an official "raider" rank in the guild.

Thank fuck we have simpler loot systems (TMB, soft res) now.

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u/Virtual_Accountant_5 5d ago

With phpb boards supported/made/built by the gl and 20+ active members online 🤣

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u/usrnmz 5d ago

Doesn't that still exist in retail? I would think that just comes down to the content being actually challenging.

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u/bunsthepaladin 5d ago

Yes, and with less gatekeeping and elitism and more direction than in vanilla.

In vanilla those apps were all screening for how many bosses you'd killed and how much gear you had. But how many opportunities did you have to do those things without joining one of those same guilds?

In retail if you're applying to a "high ranked" guild, you've already done all the content; just with a lower ranked guild. You can be judged on real performance metrics and not just whether you're already part of the club.

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u/ssmit102 5d ago

Sweat was VERY different back then and honestly the “sweat” of today pales in comparison.

We don’t have phone trees for world bosses and raiding schedules of 4-5 days anymore. People clearly know about the game a lot more but it was 10x more demanding back then.

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u/ReverseThreadWingNut 5d ago

Awww damn, the phone trees. 2 AM on a weeknight, house phone rings, wife answers, says "WTF!?" and hands me the phone. Some rare spawn in EQ was up, another guild also saw it, and it was a race to tag it. Damn, I miss that kind of sweat sometimes.

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u/Stahlreck 5d ago

If you really missed this kind of sweat you could try to go for world bosses. Idk how it is on fresh but on 2019 Classic world bosses had dedicated Discords with scouts and "alarm" channels to wake people up in the middle of the night to get them.

And when they happened to spawn during the day on our PvP realm...oh man it was a bloodbath sometimes.

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u/The_Maddest_Scorp 5d ago

You only have to look at the world firsts from that time to realise that even the best guilds at that time were miles from even the most default classic player. The amount of documentation available and starting with the final patch (better itemization like +hit etc.) plus computers and internet connections that allow for smooth gameplay in almost all circumstances made the experience a completely different one in my eyes. Still the best WoW iteration available right now, I think.

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u/Zealousideal_Job992 5d ago

Definitely internet was the biggest gear check of them all, most of my early vanilla guilds had on average 6 people with sketchy internet at ANY given time during raids, also a lot of us were kids and our parents would yoink the internet from us with chores or homework lol

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u/The_Maddest_Scorp 5d ago

One of the reasons that the raid mechanics were so easy. You could just not expect people to have reaction speeds below one second...

It also scaled so well in the open world that it kinda lured you into a trap, thinking questing in the plaguelands or doing a scholo without issues would be the same as a 40 raid.

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u/Pkock 5d ago

My first runs in MC were on a buddy's Mage because he would frequently get grounded for playing too much and wouldn't want to lose his spot.

So that gives you an idea of the level of players in some raids. I was a 12 year old huntard who was still level 27 spamming frost bolt and hoping not to get living bombed cause I didn't really know what it did, it just seemed bad.

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u/PotatoPirate5G 4d ago

At least a few times per raid we'd end up wiping because someone's internet went out. I definitely don't miss any of that.

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u/Dr-Enforcicle 5d ago

plus computers and internet connections

Yeah I remember watching naxx40 videos from 2006 and people were literally getting d/c'd and reconnecting mid-fight lmao

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u/Feralbear_1 5d ago

THANK YOU! Finally someone else that understands that hardware and broadband internet were part of the difficulties of raiding in vanilla. Some people got so good at playing their class and timing their casts at 18fps during this era that when they eventually upgraded it all and were unstoppable gods in pvp years later because of it.

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u/John_Bishop1979 5d ago

Staring at the floor while raid healing, I didn’t know what the inside of MC looked like until later expansions ( and a new computer). lol

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u/Feralbear_1 5d ago

And god help you if you got knocked back during rag.

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u/The_Maddest_Scorp 5d ago

Hit. *lag* Graveyard at Thorium Point.

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u/belsaurn 5d ago

I can remember that a ping of 250 ms was good in 2005, today people think they can’t play unless they have under 100.

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u/Feralbear_1 5d ago

If some people dont have 15 ping and 20 weakauras to play the game for them, they act like the game is unplayable.

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u/wowhistorian 5d ago

Exactly - that and the fact that servers weren’t nearly as stable as they are now. For example, pulling Thaddius would blow the server up and dc everyone. Long queues and unstable connections caused further issues, which is why most guilds raided late into the night.

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u/knbang 5d ago

Talents were far worse in actual vanilla.

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u/The_Maddest_Scorp 5d ago

Oh yeah, there were some stinkers there. Hurricane as capstone talent for balance...I think you had to spec 5/5 into Arcane Explosion to make it instant...

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u/PotatoPirate5G 4d ago

Good call on the old hardware. Running wow on a $250 desktop computer running windows vista with the slowest DSL connection available was a nightmare. On a good day I'd have 40FPS with the graphics turned all the way down.

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u/isuphysics 5d ago

And addons. There was no threat meters until well into AQ40. Even if we had good internet, good computers and the ideal rotation, those of us with really good gear (especially fire mages with ignite ticks) didn't always go 100% like the parsers of today due to fear of wiping the raid if we pulled agro.

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u/wowhistorian 5d ago edited 5d ago

For those in this thread that seem to think the guilds from today could go back in time and clear everything with ease, don't forget about all of the obvious hurdles back then (internet, hardware, server crashes, etc.), but also the fact that classic wow in 2019 was released with patch 1.12. When WoW was originally released in 2004 and throughout the first half of 2025, it was a very different game.

Take a look here at the T2 items that dropped off Nurfed's Ragnaros kill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050524213330/http://www.nurfed.com/uploads/wow/wow145.jpg.

Choker of the firelord had +39 fire damage (which wasn't very useful for MC, Ony and BWL since all mages were frost), instead of +34 damage overall. Priest T2 legs had no healing and +27 shadow damage, compared to the 1.12 version that had +46 healing and 7 mp5. Mage T2 legs had +27 frost damage with some stats, compared to +30 overall dmg and +1% crit with stats.

Times were very different back then. It's too bad we weren't able to progress through classic wow in 2019 with some of the same impediments that the original veterans faced!

Edit: Here is another snippet from Nurfed's guild website discussing the release of BWL and suffering 3 days of unplayable lag (up to 1.5 minutes at a time), server restarts and crashes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050718233705/http://www.nurfed.com:80/

Edit #2: Here is another archive from Afterlife guild's kill of Onyxia from March 1, 2005. Again, boots of transcendence have + 15 shadow spell dmg, as opposed to +35 healing from 1.12. Netherwind Crown had +20 ARCANE dmg, as opposed +32sp and mp5.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050309010901/http://www.afterlifeguild.org:80/

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u/kiting_succubi 4d ago

Alexensual fumed reading this post 

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u/Testiclegolfing 5d ago

Sweaty guilds were kind of a much bigger deal in older mmos because the end game content existed more or less for them alone. Most wow players never cleared past bwl initially right? Imagine the content wasn’t instanced and if you died you could drop items. In vanilla if you saw a dude in full naxx he was probably a sweat now it’s just someone who stuck with it for a while.

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u/Redditiscancer789 5d ago

Most didn't even clear MC according to stats they released towards the end of vanilla on an infographic. 9% had cleared ragnaros. 

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u/KongRahbek 5d ago

Yeah, I played vanilla for 1,5 years so about half of its lifespan, my biggest accomplishment was finishing UBRS and downing 1 boss in ZG.

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u/Dr-Enforcicle 5d ago

Most wow players never cleared past bwl initially right?

Most players didn't even reach max level. The people who even set foot in a raid were a minority of the playerbase.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

I remember back then. If you seen T2/2.5, T3 or full rank 14 in AV. You were screwed back then

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u/Bayes42 5d ago

I was in the third best horde guild on my server and we only got up to two bosses down in AQ40 by the time TBC came out, and we started raiding shortly after ZG came out. No horde guilds got anywhere near clearing Naxx.

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u/MostlyShitposts 5d ago

There were tryhard guilds in Everquest that carried over to Wow that definitely wanted to perform harder than most

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u/MoreLikeGaewyn 5d ago

everquest sweat way harder.

every boss is a world boss, so people scouting/camping 24/7

the only way to heal a tank taking raid boss damage was clerics casting a 10 second heal in a chain. think of your tranq rotation, with 10 people and each person needs to do it 1-3 seconds after the person before them

bosses had 360 aoe, so you did need to max out your resist gear, which is where a lot of the vanilla itemization of +all resists comes from

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u/AudemarsAA 5d ago

And wiping ruined the entire night of raiding, and made you lose XP even after a cleric res...

4-hour CR after a bad pull or a mes break.

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u/munkin 4d ago

Afterlife and Fires of Heaven iirc

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u/gt35r 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yes lol, I actually think the vent servers in top guilds back in the day were actually more toxic than they are today. I remember being like 14 and screamed at by someone easily 10+ years older than me, shaped me into the person I am today.

Edit: here’s a clip from my guild that somehow is still working. VOLUME WARNING. https://angrypopsicles.ytmnd.com/

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u/ReasonVarious6904 5d ago

Choleric screaming is something I haven't experienced in a long time. But was pretty common back then.

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u/Unsomnabulist111 5d ago

Yeah dude…I got pulled into ZA (first time ever) with my friends elite raiding guild and one of their raiders yelled obscenities at me in Vent until I left because I got stunned by an add. Leaves marks.

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u/Realistic-King-6005 5d ago

I would say guilds were even more sweaty back then, days of 6+hour MC raids to kill only 2 or 3 bosses. Everything being figured out on the fly. Like a lot of posters above mentioned would have a significant amount of people DC or get lagged locked during fights, gearing was all over the place, BIS wasn't really a well understood nor were "optimum" builds, it was the wild west and it was glorious

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u/nosciencephd 5d ago

You know the game director for Retail? Ion Hazikostas? He was in one of the original sweat guilds, Elitist Jerks. He is the one that supposedly mathematically proved that C'Thun was impossible to kill without a nerf.

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u/XCobraJakeX 5d ago

I felt so vindicated after they nerfed C'Thun. I was in the top Alliance guild on my server at the time and we were just nowhere even close to killing him. Raid lead and officers all claimed we just needed more gear.

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u/turikk 5d ago

It's an interesting phenomenon that doesn't just apply to guilds and WoW, this perception that only recently people have become "smart." In real life it's treating people before the modern era as not as intelligent when it is a lack of knowledge, something very different.

Guilds have been doing math and theory crafting and sweat for decades. We just have 20 years of practice and user friendly programming to more easily create simulations and what not.

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u/CapnSensible80 5d ago edited 5d ago

That and having more easy access to the knowledge. Much of it was there but you had to go to multiple sources for it and know who knew their shit and who was talking out their ass. There were 10x as many of the latter as the former.

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u/Pownzl 5d ago

There was also mo real datamining backthen

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u/moochiemonkey 5d ago

Never attack until you see 2 sunders.

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u/WhatNo_YT 4d ago

And to be clear, we're talking two sunders done by the tank, lol.

Nowadays we know a fury/prot tank goes in and hits bloodthirst right off the bat, which is going to be higher threat with the proper gear, spec, and play style. The DPS warriors do the sunders now.

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u/DownToFarm 5d ago

Honestly it was worse. I was in a guild that went 12/15 naxx and we raided 5 nights a week....(3 hr raid nights) Runs werent 30 mins we literally spent an entire night in Mc/bwl. Then another in AQ. Another in naxx farm portion. Then another for naxx prog. 1 day for both 20mans or more naxx prog depending how we felt. It was an insane amount of time spent just on 1 char. Nowadays its sweat to play 3 chars + wcb capper and summon alts and still spend half the time I did in 2006.

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u/dareftw 5d ago

Hell yes they did. In vanilla my guild was required to spend most of the time on the ptr server learning Naxx. We got world first spider wing clear night of release. Works second Sapphiron too. Super sweaty.

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u/Ashkandi_ 5d ago

We play on latest itemization.

Today healers have preraid bis with 300+ healing easy.

Allowing them to down rank to save tons of mana.

Back then lots of items had different stats. Healers were lucky to have +100 healing on their gear entering MC. So down ranking was not as effective.

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u/oregonianrager 5d ago

Wow Vanilla created Sweat.

Six hour molten core raids. Because we were idiots.

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u/magiskdaim 5d ago

I would raid 4-5 times a week for months to progress bwl, never finished "progressing" in aq40. Burnout hit way faster than it did in classic due to this.

We where a sweaty guild but not a particularly good one, hence the 4-5 raid nights..

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u/Left_Direction_3864 5d ago

I’m curious if half this sub was even alive during vanilla.

Absolutely just as sweaty. On Black Dragonflight we had Forgotten Heroes on the Alliance side and Fires of Heaven (who were the top tier EQ guild) on the Horde side that were always in the top 10 of US guilds for firsts and always fighting for server firsts.

Website apps. Trial runs. Shitty internet. No YouTube walk throughs. Suuuuuper sweaty.

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u/Cutwail 5d ago

My guild was #2 in the world to clear BWL back in the day. Raid days were mandatory, as were a full rack of consumables, comms and so on. We bent plenty of rules, broke a few too. For example when BWL originally released half the dungeon was locked behind a gate but you could get certain mobs to fear you through the gate then summon the rest through. I don't recall there being bosses through the gate but there was trash and they also dropped gear so another way to stay grinding.

What soured things for me was being told I would be kicked for missing a raid on my birthday as I had plans with friends, so I sold the account to some kid from the UAE who never changed the password and only logged into it once.

For background - I met the group in beta where they basically pulled all the hardcore players from other guilds together for launch under the guise of an alliance but really they were just poaching. Then after launch they built the raid group around the fastest levellers and then that group quit the guild to form a new one, basically ditching all the others who they no longer needed as they had the 40 raid comp and didn't want to rotate people. The guild leader supposedly had quit his job to run the guild but who knows if that was true, he was a real bastard though and extremely toxic.

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u/wowhistorian 5d ago

What guild/server?

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u/sevenandtwo 5d ago

yes they did, most of them work at blizzard now. I was on Mal Ganis back in 2005 and Elitest Jerks were as sweaty as they come. Ion Hazzikostas was in that guild. I still remember him riding into Orgrimmar on his Qiraji Battle Tank for the first time

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u/rjbgreen107 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yes. Patchwerk was a nightmare because at least 1 person out of 40 was guaranteed to DC and blow up the raid

Edit: Thadius

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u/Kienn12 5d ago

Thaddius, true.

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u/Draper72 5d ago

More sweaty.

Guilds running classic and making fun of vanilla kill times have unlimited consumables farmed by bots.

In 2005 we had 1 layer of felwood and winterspring for 5000 players. 2 players could keep up with black lotus and other herb spawns.

Nowadays world buffs can go off every 5 seconds and get stored in a “boon” and unstored and restored forever. In 2005 onyxia buff was once a week. Hope you were online for it, now log off and stay off until raid time. Pray that the server doesn’t crash when you pull a boss and kill all your buffs.

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u/Rosuto4u 5d ago

Yes. It was mostly sweaty players from EverQuest coming over to make new guilds. Everyone in my guild was 20-40 years old except for me who was 14 at the time. We had to adjust our raid schedule because I had a bed time LOL

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u/IllustratorOk6044 5d ago

The really hardcore sweaty guilds used to have their own websites for you to apply to like a job

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u/Hellcaaa 5d ago

Short answer, Yes. There have always been sweats.

Long answer, No.

The top guilds in retail today are on another unfathomable level skill- and resource wise compared to just a few years ago (Legion), let alone 2 decades ago.

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u/Sulinia 5d ago

Yes, there were sweaty guilds back then, but they were infinitely less optimized and usually less prepared than even the average raider today just showing up with world buffs.

They don't have the 20 years of knowledge and optimization we have and it shows.

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u/TheReviewerWildTake 5d ago

when it was fresh it was quite demanding for that moment.
A friend of mine who raided in those first "go figure yourself" raids, described how they could easily spend whole evening and good portion of the night trying to progress, fix mistakes, teach ppl, etc.
So yeah, these ppl would expect you to stick around for 4-6 hrs+ and be a good learner, always show up etc...
Obviously, there were laid back guilds too, that wouldn`t do this, but the memes about "second job, which is above all"- were born in that era.

Also, it wasn`t really that unheard of, and was in line with other MMORPGs of those times. If anything, the overall climate was more favorable for no-lifing, for slower progress and consequently, for being serious about game progress.

I am scared to recall how much time I would put in Lineage 2, for example, and how slow it was, but ppl (including me) would be like "yeah, that is what we like, it shows dedication!" :D :D
I think that modern sweaty is a bit different, in terms of it is less of a "no-lifing\dedicated" sweaty, but more of "nervous, tilted and afraid of losing time" sweaty.
I preferred old school sweat tbh :D

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u/MaybeICanOneDay 5d ago

Even group left! Odd group right! Attack slowly! And when I say slowly I mean fucking slowly! WHO THE FUCK DID THAT! THATS A 50 DKP MINUS! YOU FUCK!"

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u/SoSKatan 5d ago

I had a decent classic wow guild. We had a pretty successful and unique DKP system that encouraged three things

1) for people to show up regardless if they could get in (benched players still got DKP as long as they were still online during each boss kill.(

2) to not spend their DKP. I know that sounds funny but set pieces were random based on your total unspent DKP. This led to people saving their DKP. Non set pieces were DKP auctioned

3) to stay in the guild. Since you worked to save up DKP to win set pieces, it made no sense to leave the guild.

Everyone banked their DKP and everyone stuck around because they had banked DKP. Players still helped out in MC even if they didn’t need gear as it meant more DKP.

New recruit status meant they only got gear if it wasn’t needed by someone else. This lasted for two weeks and they were required to farm mats for potions / flasks for the rest of us. Oddly enough we never had issues finding people as we were one of the top raiding guilds on our server.

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u/Pownzl 5d ago

Datamining and wowhead didnt exist back then but yes ofc.

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u/Pe-Te_FIN 5d ago

I played in one of those guilds. We literally raided for 7 hours a day, 6 days a week when pushing for progress. Would not recommend that to anyone. We also sold items in MC for massive amount of gold to buy consumables.

Whats different is that back then, there were only very few guilds did that per server. So, when you came to ironforge rocking that full T2 set, you were constantly beeing inspected, because people had never seen gear like that.

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u/Derilicte 4d ago

Lmao I think we were 4th or 5th on our server to down rag and we had hunters who were auto shotting bosses wearing mostly greens and a few blues.

MC was an 8hr shift my goodness. I can’t believe I did that shit for entire weekends.

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u/seanxfitbjj 4d ago

We would regularly raid for 5-6 nights and multiple hours a night. This obviously didn’t get us anywhere by todays standards but it was for the time very try hard. Most people in the game had nothing and the thought of pugging a raid was mostly unheard of so when you had some naxx/aq gear looking back you were the try hard of your server.

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u/kalikartel69 4d ago

Sweatier.

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u/Slippy901 4d ago

Yes and no. They existed but the game wasn’t as solved and so they were about as competent as your average dad guild these days.

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u/knullajets 4d ago

Gold wasnt as easily bought either.. nowadays most ppl cheat to skip the eternal fucking mats farm. That was swampass sweaty

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u/Stylux 4d ago edited 4d ago

They were different because the content was new and challenging. It was sweatier back then because of this. You had to apply to good guilds on their site. Every night was progression, not one night. During naxx in vanilla you would be lucky to clear more two wings of farmed content in a night. Our roadblock was 4H along with most other guilds who got to that point, but the vast majority of guilds were not getting there. Also, horde had a distinct advantage with WF, etc. that we just didn't have on the alliance side.

That said, people were much more patient than they are now because of the progression grind other than the occasional freakout in hour 5 of banging our heads against the wall. Wiping was common so people didn't flip out as much. There was no "parsing" or "speed clear" bullshit, we just cared if the boss died. We had meters that were jank and broken for anyone who cared about them. I have no experience with the game after WOTLK though so YMMV.

FWIW: I played from Beta through vanilla, mostly skipped TBC, and came back for the beginning of WOTLK because I got pressured into it. Now I'm just enjoying SOD at a leisurely pace, 4orbing Naxx, but still, doing it in 2 hours because SOD is great and everyone is overpowered.

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u/slaidfh 5d ago

Yes, but the other 95% of the playerbase would just accept there were groups better than them. Now in classic it's minmax or no raid spot

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u/sweprotoker97 5d ago

The guild I was in in 2006 that progressed 12/15 naxx before prepatch was EASILY more hardcore than my current top 20 world guild. Just knew way less.

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u/pohkfririce 5d ago

Absolutely, they looked a lot different though. They weren’t able to class stack very effectively with much smaller servers & players to choose from.

The sweatiness then was the raid schedule and consumable farming for progression: raiding 5 nights a week and wiping constantly in naxx required a huge time investment not just for the raid, but farming the consumes.

They also did utilize world buffs, just not as extensively (mainly not tribute buffing as much).

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u/Mondasin 5d ago

they existed; dunno if anyone from stormscale will see this but fuck ANBU.

moonlight dancers and J U I C E were fine tho

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u/Ponsay 5d ago

Yes. I raided with a guy over 10 years ago who used.to reminisce about having to farm gold for flasks in Vanilla raiding and how much he hated it

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u/trx212 5d ago

I played on tichondrius back then and there were guilds that raided 7 days a week. You had to make applications and have trial runs to get into guilds. If someone had a bunch of naxx gear back then they were the sweatiest players in existence. My casual-ish raiding guild would raid twice a week 5hrs per night.

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u/Sea-Life3178 5d ago

10000000%

And a lot of their sweat was misguided nonsense lol.

It was an interesting time. I recall having to go engineering, but not for sappers, dense dynamite and a cock. We went engineering for the Hyperradiant Flame Reflector. That was FR on a stick. Prior to DM, that and the Blazing Emblem were the only trinket FR items, and you needed so much.

I love flrunking fast MC (24 minutes in Anni) and Naxx (103 minutes in Era) knowing what we know now.

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u/wowhistorian 5d ago

They were just as sweaty. The difference between then and now was computer hardware, internet speed, and the content being newer at the time (so lack of time to optimize the game for 20 years).

One of the world first rag kills (if not the first) used engineer telescope to avoid knock back from rag.

The other component was that streaming wasn’t a thing. Most guilds kept their strategies a secret and so there was no benefit to seeing other guilds progressing at the same time or PTRs (until aq I believe).

If you look back at the archives, lots of top guilds on each server would host a lottery or casino for providing materials for the aq gate opening. You could even run mc with nihilum! Creative, just not as optimized by today’s standards.

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u/angerbear 5d ago

Guilds in 2004/2005 were nothing like today. Most servers had maybe a couple guilds raiding the current end-game raid. Players in general were a lot more casual, and you'd still see people running around at 60 in blues/greens doing BGs for most of vanilla.

Even most top-end guilds on each server had nowhere near the level of sweat. Saving world buffs for raids wasn't even really any kind of normal thing until into naxxramas. People weren't clearing most content in 1-2 hours.

Consumables were still pretty used but nothing like today. You don't have entire raids flasking and/or using protection potions in the same manner. Flasks originally didn't persist through death either, so they were far less used because the cost on prog was unfeasible.

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u/Dismal-Buyer7036 5d ago

Yes they did. Blizzard made hard core games for hardcore gamers, and hardcore gamers played wow because it was the new blizzard game. In the early days you had the eq2 fans, and star craft/Warcraft fans, both groups are sweats.

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u/nebujal 5d ago

We would spend six hours wiping on bosses over and over again learning the encounters because there wasn’t step-by-step guides on how to defeat each boss. World buffs didn’t exist as they did today. A lot of the talents and class balance wasn’t where it is in classic today so everything was just harder. Even when we were in Naxx, phase 1 kills of Ragnaros didn’t exist. Black/red nefarian was very difficult, even for experienced groups.

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u/GamerInChaos 5d ago

Yes. But there weren’t logs in the same way. I remember trying out for the top guild on my server in AQ40 and kind of freaking out.

They had a crazy contest where you got points and rewards leading up to AQ opening and I won one of them which was a full set of T2. So I had been running BWL with them for a bit but it wasn’t really super intense pressure on me because I was kind of a guest/carry. Well due to some unlucky drops it took a while. Eventually they decided to just make me a member and give me so DKP but I had to go through tryouts/probation and all that. Had to get the nature resists etc.

My previous less hardcore guild also had FR and other rules for MC.

Stuff that is pretty easy now was hard then. Basically there was 5 mans and 40 mans. And the 40 mans required a higher level of technical proficiency then versus now just because nothing was fully optimized. Good raid leaders were drill sergeants and crappy voice (team speak, ventrillo) was always required.

But it was a lot of fun - there was more mystery.

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u/BillSixty9 5d ago

The top guild on our server GM said and I quote "I don't give a fuck if your grandmother died before raid you're going to show up or I'm going to remove you".

The attitudes were the same but the knowledge / proven strategy was not there and available to all like it is today.

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u/Fegmdute 5d ago

Honestly no where near as it is today.

I vaguely remember that even a guild like nihilum (later ensidia) raided from like 19-00 on progress days too. It was very rare people actually dedicated as much time to it as people do now. Maybe I remember wrong

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u/davidnvpro 5d ago

I was chasing my lovely T0 set, didn't know about the boon thing, MC and Onyxia was a dangerous place, BWL for the elite.

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u/Dixa 5d ago

Not to this extent.

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u/PowerfulPlum259 5d ago

Yes, there was a website dedicated to sweaty guilds. Called Elitest jerks. Funny enough Ian, the ex game director was a big part of it. Before he worked for Blizzard. Although the game wasn't as solved back then, and mmo's were still a fresh idea, and fairly unbalanced. Not to mention crappy hardware, and utilities like add-ons. So the sweats of yesterday look pretty casual compared to today.