WoW Archivist: Recapping classic World of Warcraft
by Alex Ziebart 
Sep 27th 2011 at 1:00PM
The Archivist has come a long way. We've just about wrapped up the chronological history of classic World of Warcraft. Sure, there are still bits and bobs that have gone unexplored for now ("The Ashbringer ...") but we've covered every single major patch from the World of Warcraft from prerelease all the way up through the final raid tier of level 60 content. The next time we tackle a set of patch notes, we'll be firmly in The Burning Crusade territory. Exciting, isn't it?
Before we leap into that sweet, sweet Burning Crusade, let's recap what we've covered already, starting way back in July 2009.
The WoW Archivist actually started back in mid-2009 under the name Patches of Yesteryear, written by my co-senior editor Adam Holisky. It was a great concept -- we loved it, you loved it, but the Patches title was quite limiting. We wanted to do more with the concept than just patches. A year later in 2010, Patches of Yesteryear evolved into Old School WoW. For one reason or another, it just fell off of our radar for another year and didn't go anywhere.
In March of this year, I sat down and took stock of all of the columns we did once upon a time but discontinued for one reason or another. I tried to decide whether any of them were worth resurrecting. Readers had been requesting two in particular: Two Bosses Enter and Patches of Yesteryear. So what the heck, let's bring them back! I began writing Two Bosses Enter again (which has since been passed on to Mat McCurley) and resurrected Patches of Yesteryear/Old School WoW as ... the WoW Archaeologist.
The first week of this column, it was called Patches of Yesteryear. The second week of this column, Old School WoW. The third, WoW Archaeologist. The fourth, WoW Archivist, a name that finally stuck. I'm fairly sure this is the only column that has had so much trouble finding a name. If I remember correctly, it's one of two columns to have changed its name after its first publication at all.
With that bit of history out of the way, let's look back on what we've covered so far. If you've missed any of them, now's your chance to catch up.
Beta patches
Release patches
- Patch 1.1, World of Warcraft
- Patch 1.2, Mysteries of Maraudon
- Patch 1.3, Ruins of the Dire Maul
- Patch 1.4, The Call to War
- Patch 1.5, Battlegrounds
- Patch 1.6, Assault on Blackwing Lair
- Patch 1.7, Rise of the Blood God
- Patch 1.8, Dragons of Nightmare
- Patch 1.9, The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj
- Patch 1.10, Storms of Azeroth
- Patch 1.11, April Fools' Edition
- Patch 1.11, Shadow of the Necropolis
- The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj war effort
- Talisman of Binding Shard, the lost legendary
- The Corrupted Blood plague
- Scepter of the Shifting Sands
- The evolution of Naxxramas
Next week on The Archivist ...
You are not prepared.
The WoW Archivist examines the WoW of old. Follow along while we discuss the lost legendary, the opening of Ahn'Qiraj, and hidden locations such as the crypts of Karazhan.
Filed under: WoW Archivist
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
alzeer Sep 27th 2011 1:25PM
wasn't C'Thun unkillable when first introduced
and some guy prove it mathematically?
did that guy get anything?
Diop Sep 27th 2011 4:27PM
I do recall that being said, but you do have to wonder the truth of it, since the game was still fairly in its infancy and the whole min/max, strategy nature wasn't quite as developed as it is now. Yogg Saron with 0 lights was also thought to be mathematically impossible in BIS gear at launch so the major guilds like Paragon and Ensidia didn't even try it, but STARS proved them wrong by stacking the raid with warlocks and rogues.
Cephas Sep 27th 2011 4:31PM
I don't think it was ever "mathematically" proven, possibly "theorycraft-ily" proven, but that's not exactly the same thing.
It's probably most accurate to say that it was "practically" proven by the endless wipes experienced by every single high-end raiding guild playing at the time. Maybe with superhuman reflexes, exceptionally low ping times, and just a whole lot of luck you could squeeze out a victory, but for all practical purposes it was impossible.
ecwfrk Sep 28th 2011 4:54AM
Math can very easily and accurately determine the *best* possible outcome for an encounter. None of the formulas and RNG ranges are ever a secret. If the RNG has a choice between 1-20, if you always use 20, you get the best possible outcome.
By assuming everyone in the raid played perfectly, had the best possible gear, and the RNG always rolled the best possible numbers for the players and the worst possible numbers for C'Thun, someone figured out for C'Thun to be beat in his original implementation everyone in the raid would have to have less than 20ms latency. Which meant in the real world, it was utterly broken.
Yogg was a bit different as theorycrafters knew it could be done, they just knew it was extremely unlikely. And Stars did it eventually, but it took them a few hundred tries to do it. According to the armory, some of them have died more than 5000 times in 25 mans. Although it looks like individual stats for the older individual raids are either bugged or they died to trash *a lot*. And it looks like Bugged is the right explinaion as my old Wrath char shows 4 deaths in Uld25 bosses with the most deadly being Freya with 2 deaths but I know that we wiped on Mimron at least a 30 times in one night.
tympanic Sep 27th 2011 1:37PM
Did I miss Patch 1.12 somewhere?
Alex Ziebart Sep 27th 2011 1:39PM
I'll be discussing it in the context of Burning Crusade, so I didn't include it in the classic WoW recap.
Nina Katarina Sep 27th 2011 1:48PM
I'm a wrathbaby, so I wanted to ask, did players from vanilla have any semi-derogatory names for people who started playing during Burning Crusade?
Bellajtok Sep 27th 2011 2:11PM
Almost certainly "lolnewb" was used. But then, I'm a cata baby, who thoroughly researched my class before playing it, and has never experienced any of the kind of thing. So I have no clue.
Newchron Sep 27th 2011 2:39PM
I played since vanilla and I was called noob all the time because I was level 60 and NOT decked out in epics.
I personally couldn't tell who just started and who was a veteran when TBC was released.
Matheus314 Sep 29th 2011 8:34AM
Burning Babies???
Oh wait!
D=
Skarn Sep 27th 2011 3:43PM
Hmmm. Hard to remember for sure, but I don't think so. I chalk a lot of that up to BC being so difficult. A lot of the "Wrath baby" stuff popped up in response to the relative ease of Wrath. Raids and dungeons in BC were NOT easy, so it prevented a lot of the "oh back in MY day, stuff was HARD" that arrived post-Wrath.
VSUReaper Sep 27th 2011 3:46PM
No, there was no semi-derogatory name for people who started in TBC.
The whole reason wrath baby came about was the game took a major design change and people that started playing in Wrath would "cry and qq" about not getting the epics they felt they deserved. Observed from the point of view of someone who played in TBC or Vanilla, it was a bunch of bellyaching.
Unfortunately, everyone that started at that time was clumped together, no matter what.
Shao Sep 27th 2011 3:56PM
My memory is that kind of 'lolnewb' and 'l2play' stuff diminished after BC launched. As Classic WoW aged and the guilds became more and more locked in and stratified, the kind of caste system that led to those kind of put downs, more or less, went away.
BC hit a giant reset button on guilds and raiding, and it changed things in such a way that you could arrive late to the party and still work your way up to the end-game. I felt that I couldn't do that it Classic (I even got /gkicked on the day Ahn'Qiraj opened on my server because I had to work and could only be online for two hours of it). The guilds which were on BWL, for example, required you to have done MC to join because you needed the gear. More and more, it felt like a closed system. There was no KZ or heroics to bootstrap you into raiding if you'd missed the first wave of raiding guilds who were clearing BC and beyond, and if you missed that first wave, it was going to be very, very difficult to catch up.
It seemed that the guys in those raiding guilds had some propensity to be, shall we say, less than magnanimous about their success compared to others in combination of being the possessors of little patience.
It seemed to be the worst when Naxx launched, and the raiders found themselves needing to grind Argent Dawn rep to get attuned to Naxx, and that meant doing Stratholme and Scholomance with guys who were still wearing quest greens. Someone trying to tank Scholo in quest greens with a Rogue who was in AQ gear who enjoyed ColdBlood empowered Ambushes on Krastinov led to many 'l2tank's as the rogue ripped aggro, got himself killed, and wiped the group.
BC, among its other virtues, diminished that since it broke those guilds up and gave an alternate path to catch up if you missed a raiding tier.
Schadow Sep 27th 2011 6:12PM
"Wrath Baby" came about because Wrath changed the fundamental nature of instancing. In BC, crowd-control was a requirement unless you vastly out-geared the content. There was no "go go go" stuff - you marked up each pull carefully.
In BC, AoE was bad. Tanks had very little AoE threat - only Paladins really had strong AoE. If the DPS went in all AoE-happy, they either broke CC or pulled aggro. Shattered Halls was a nightmare for non-Paladin tanks, and was often dual-tanked.
In Wrath, AoE was good. Every pull, you just spammed your strongest AoE until everything died, and you whined and complained if the tank took a breath between pulls.
As a tank in Wrath, if you did pause for the healer to get mana, the DPS would pull for you (that was inevitably fatal in BC). If they couldn't use their strongest AoE ability at the moment of the pull, they hurled abuse at the tank. It was all about speed runs, even though the instances themselves were far shorter than BC instances.
The "Baby" part of Wrath Baby was all about entitlement. They felt they were entitled to speed-runs, and entitled to purples - even tier gear - and they wanted it NOW. Anything that impinged upon their entitlement was met with QQ - pretty much just like an infant.
RetPallyJil Sep 27th 2011 9:10PM
Oh yes. I still refer to all of you as "expansionoobs."
Boobah Sep 28th 2011 12:28PM
"In BC, AoE was bad. Tanks had very little AoE threat - only Paladins really had strong AoE. If the DPS went in all AoE-happy, they either broke CC or pulled aggro. Shattered Halls was a nightmare for non-Paladin tanks, and was often dual-tanked."
Just as importantly, Seed of Corruption was the only AoE ability that scaled enough to be useful on normal instance trash mobs. If you weren't a warlock, during BC you'd do more damage single target... just about always.
AoE was also bad because even if your tank was good enough to hold threat over the healer on a big pack (no shockwave, thunderclap only hit four targets, and swipe only hit three) it was very unlikely that the healer could keep the tank up through the incoming damage, though of course that got better if you got a tank and/or healer with tier 5 or 6 gear. You single-targeted because that way the incoming damage went down faster.
Diop Sep 27th 2011 4:23PM
"If I remember correctly, it's one of two columns to have changed its name after its first publication at all."
I'm guessing the other is the Queue, because it used to be called "Ask a beta tester" or something like that, a name that would be massively confusing most of the time, or were you thinking of something else?