I wonder how you guys did it in the past ...

[zenga]

... the levelling up.

I started with the game in october this year, and about to ding 80 this weekend. Now in my grind I had a bunch of things available:

- RAF, 3x speed
- Ingame guides that told me where to go, what to click, what to do
- Tons of sites with useful info about the quests, gear, ... to avoid mistakes (thott, wowhead, wiki, allak, ..)
- Tons of forums with useful discussions
- Tons of add ons that make my life easier
- Tons of instance/boss vids

I was thinking how a pure grind would be/look like i.e. without any quest guides, forums, addons. How it would be if i just made a toon, and had to find out everything by myself. My initial motivation disappeared as fast as it showed up :P

But then i realized that the very early players actually played this way. Bottomline, I'd love to hear/read stuff from the early days. How it was back then, what problems you were facing, etc ... and maybe hear if the evolution to all the things that are available now have taken away some part of the fun.

[Starbuck_Jones]

My first group was a priest and 4 mages. This was back when you had to talent spec Arcane Explosion to be instant cast. It took forever to get to level 20 and was a good 6 levels later before I was able to clear Deadmines. But once I got the major learning curves down and the right talents, it went very well after that. I recall running SFK and SM about 70 times to get all the drops to keep them geared identical.

I did very little questing. Once I was able to take down bosses, I just farmed them over and over to get all 5 guys the drops they needed before moving to the next. Once BC came out, they became unreal with the gear upgrades a few quests in. Alas they only got to level 67 or so, Thats when it became clear that it was not a viable PvE group w/o a dedicated tank.

[Acidburning]

Even at the start of wow, thotbot (dunno if it is still around) was pretty heavily used. 5 years, whoooooosh. :D

[HPAVC]

Thott was in beta, so wow has always had that. It was a bit goofy and spell changes have always been hard to deal with and of course every mob drops clam meat.

Healing was easy, target the highest guy in the ct emergency monitor list and heal could be bound to a single key.

No diminishing returns on stuns / fears / cc's, lol.

Defense skill was 66% stronger and didn't have a diminishing return or rating.

No 5sr, so my priest was a walking stack of spirit and could regen at the same rate she could casta gheal.

Soon dire maul is going to come out and its going to be insane!!!

[Fef]

Playing WoW when it was released was great ! Probably better than multi-boxing heroics now. I had very little experience of MMOs, I had tried EverQuest and EverQuest2, but I never go sucked into it. WoW was a revelation. An MMO that's not trying to look realistic but "moves" well, with a great world and amazing lore. I took a 6 months subscription after less than a week.

What WoW had then that it will never have anymore, is complete novelty. I am part of these people who actually find it a pleasure to read quests, have to understand and think about where to go, look for things, etc ... It was great to be surprised every couple minutes.

Some snapshots of moments I remember :

- Bumping into a Gnome for the first time (I was playing a Night Elfe) : OMG, it's tiny.
- Realizing at level 8 or something, that gear can be repared, no need to replace it.
- Seeing for the first time a character on a mount : Sweeeeeeeet, want one ...
- Bumping into a horde player and wondering why I could not talk to him (I was PVE until RP-PVP server were introduced).
- Looking up on the net that a mount is 100g : OMG, I will NEVER have enough gold, EVER ...
- Applying to Azerothian Trade Union, and being accepted to what is still the nicest online gaming community I know.
- Getting my first blue drop !

Getting to level 60 was hard and long, demanded efforts. People would give a "party" in Ironforge to celebrate their level 60, bying beers to other characters, shoting fireworks, etc ...

It was just good. WoW is still a great game, but honestly, not quite as good as it was back then.

Of course, I never saw the end-game because it was just not possible without being in an active raiding guild, in that sense I enjoy myself much more now.

Bha, I like levelling anyway. I cannot wait for Cataclysm and 5 more long unseen levels ! :)

[Seldum]

What about questing... did you have to run around looking for stuff?

I have a friend, playing aion, and he likes the fact that its more "hardcore" than wow.

I can't imagine having to search hours to find something like a body or whatever. Today, you look at questhelper and ride to the area...

Or the simple fact that Instant Quest text must have been a royal pain hehe... but again, it probably got its charme to it aswell.

[Starbuck_Jones]

lol Hardcore was UO. You lost it all when you died. Or EQ1. You lost it all AND lost XP when you died and you had to chat with NPC's based on hidden keywords to do quests. Had to quest uphill both ways in the snow!

[Multibocks]

What sword?
What burnished sword?
Why did they want the sword?
Where can I get the sword?
Who has the sword?

...



FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING SWORD!

[falsfire3401]

Before there was an AH in Darnassus...playing a night elf and having to boat from Auberdine to Menethil (where it used to dock), then run through Wetlands (L23 mobs raping your lowbie self, also pvp-flagged as it was contested territory on my initial server, PvP), then through Loch Modan, and Dun Morogh...just to get to Ironforge to use the only auction house.

When it came time to go quest in Desolace. No mounts available at all until level 40, so you had to hoof it. For a human that hadn't been to Loch Modan or Wetlands yet, having to run from IF->Dun Morogh->Loch Modan->Menethil, boat to Theramore, run to Barrens, run THROUGH Barrens (horde territory!), past the level 40 guards to Stonetalon, through Stonetalon, to Nigel's Point. Sheesh, that was about an hour long run on foot, through hostile territory to boot.

I remember when I was level 6 and just arrived in Goldshire. Saw a yellow ?? troll mage sitting on his mount in town square, all the guards and NPCs dead...and thinking WTF?!?

I remember when the first person on my realm dinged 60, how huge a celebrity they were. Now I don't remember their name...

I remember when my buddy was the realm-first player to get a legendary...The Hand of Rag. I couldn't whisper him anymore, he'd turned off whispers from his chat windows b/c so many people were trying to talk to him, duel him, come see it, etc. I had to actually call him on the phone to talk to him about it :)

I remember all the running around on foot to quest until level 40, with no idea where you're going...

I remember my first 40-man, when I was a total n00b rogue in greens, 2.3k hp, brought into the realm's #2 guild by the same Hand of Rag buddy who was owed a favour by the GM, having no clue what I was doing with all these people in PURPLE gear :)

Then I remember being told I had to get attuned to Onyxia...OMG what a pain in the butt to do that.

Next, I remember having to run out to the middle of nowhere in the far east of Azshara once a week to get Acqual Quintescence to extinguish the flames in MC...


Finally, I remember almost losing my marriage because my raid guild stole all my time...literally I'd come home from work, go straight to the computer without saying more than "hello" to the wife, if I was lucky she felt sorry for me that day and brought me dinner in my office (which I'd often fail to notice and say thanks for and sometimes fail to remember to even eat it until the end of the raid at 1am when it was long since cold), crawl into bed after she'd gone to bed...sheesh how did she put up with that for so long? Eventually the stress and burnout of all that hardcore raiding led to an EMO moment that caused a gkick from the new guild (server #1 guild) I'd hopped over to. *THAT* /gkick saved my marriage lol...wow fell instantly from a 60-80 hour a week "job" back to a 2-3 hr a day hobby and has remained such ever since.

Gotta say though, after that it was kinda nice being a nobody in a nothing guild but in tier3/tier2.5 gear...horde who couldn't recognize top-notch item graphics would try to gank me all the time and be in for a nasty surprise :)

And of course, realizing those hundreds of hours (90+ days /played at level 60 alone (that's right, not counting 1-59) thank you very much) were all for naught as I quickly replaced all those epics in outland clown greens :)

[Nitro]

What about questing... did you have to run around looking for stuff?

I have a friend, playing aion, and he likes the fact that its more "hardcore" than wow.

I can't imagine having to search hours to find something like a body or whatever. Today, you look at questhelper and ride to the area...

Or the simple fact that Instant Quest text must have been a royal pain hehe... but again, it probably got its charme to it aswell.

I just quit aion last week, was the first player to max level (50) on my server and I can assure you that Aion is no more hardcore than vanilla wow was. People went to aion in hopes of finding a good pvp game, the funny thing is that you have to pve for your pvp gear and once your 50 most people cant find good pvp anywhere.

The only hardcore thing about aion is trying to keep yourself entertained for more than a month after you hit 50

[Seldum]

The only hardcore thing about aion is trying to keep yourself entertained for more than a month after you hit 50

Epic comment.

Thanks for all the stories. Its really interesting to hear about the "old" wow.

I still find the current wow a grind, and i know its nothing like it used to be. But for a more casual player like myself it's nice not having to spend hours and hours doing some lame stuff to get some gear. Theres still alot of this around (rep grinding), but I guess its the never ending problem of wow, they have to try and satisfy players playing for 15+ hours a week to people like me who plays 5-7 hours a week.

A friend told me, that in the beginning (Beta maybe?) you had so swim between Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.... lol... that would suck.

[Overpowerdin]

swimming to GM island was fun

and I miss my hunters shield!

[Fursphere]

Brute Force and Ignorance is how we used to roll.

5x Shaman > Burning Crusade

[falsfire3401]

I remember a patch note from 1.02 or something:

"Hunters casting Eyes of the Beast while on a flight path will no longer be dropped to the ground at their current location"


And another...AFTER I'd done the quest in question:
"The debuff cast by Felhunters in Desolace that causes 300 damage to a player when they cast a spell no longer affects non-spell abilities from non-spellcasters such as a rogue using Sinister Strike"

I hated killing those stupid felhunters then...I could only white attack them...300 dmg was like 1/4 of my health at level 38 or so IIRC.

[offive]

Man some of the comments in this thread made me think back to the old days, when I was one of the many NE hunters on my realm from day 1 of WoW.

Trying to pug as a hunter!
Leveling a holy pally blacksmith engineer. (money pit)
Zul'farrak temple event... oh i hated that fight.
Running everywhere until you could scrape together the money for a mount.
Rading Crossroads...serious business!
Watching my wife run Black Rock Depths soo many times on her rogue for the Ony chain
Watching my wife grind Timbermaw hold rep for the agi enchants for days (forming a continuous raid that lasted for days) no extra quests or nice things like that.
Killing the few mobs that were in SIlithus that didn't drop anything.
A content patch for Mauradon! oooohh ahhhhh
Being able to ace Baron timed runs in dungeon blue gear.
Running Scholo so many times my head hurts thinking about it for my Dungeon 0 helm! And never getting it :(
Teaching scores of people how to play a hunter (yes you can kite, yes you have to dismiss your pet before you jump off that)
Raiding 40 mans... what a cluster.

Then PvP really came to WoW with rankings!
The rolling South Shore battles week one before BGs! (the original concept for Wintergrasp lag fest)
The 4 hour AV queue times! Battlegroups what are those?
Rolled horde undead shadow priest, played the snot out of it for weeks on end and only got to Blood Guard. But queue times were instant (not 4 hour waits for AV on my main alliance toon).

Played TBC to 70 on several toons, took a break and came back to try out this thing called multiboxing (no RAF) because I saw a video of Zin.

[Kedash00]

the old days were definately good times,
i remember the crossroad raids that went so well we would head to Org and get our asses handed to us, back when there were only a handful of 60s on the whole server.
I remember mind controlling people in pvp situations and using their big abilities (warrior abilities come to mind but i can't remember the name)
I remember seeing a huge group of horde invade westfall and thinking i could take skulls when i was level 20ish.

I remember when i switched to horde i played a shadow priest, and i'll go ahead and say they were a bit overpowered right before the last patch came out that everyone got pvp gear with. Battlegrounds were still kinda new and i could take on 2 people with devouring plague before they nerfed it to shit. Man that one skill was ungodly. I thought i was really good at pvping but it just turns out priests were insanely overpowered at the time lol. good times, good times.

And the most rediculous, i remember rogues that got a new sword in MC and have used daggers the whole time, so they equipped the sword and leveled up their weapon skill inside MC cause they thought it was better because of the DPS than the dagger they were maxxed out on.

[Verriit]

[QUOTE=Fef;251349]



Some snapshots of moments I remember :


- Realizing at level 8 or something, that gear can be repared, no need to replace it.


Lol... I didn't realize until level 20 something that if an item was green that meant it was better then what the vendors sold. I was so excited to buy a full set of level 15 leather from a vendor in Auberdine... Man I looked cool in that set.

Some other highlights :

- Taking 13 months to level my rogue to 60 - I got very sidetracked in the beginning and didn't find Allakazam/thottbot (sp?) until I was level 47
- Leveling a rogue with daggers -- Gouge -> run behind them to backstab -> Kidney Shot -> run behind them to backstab
- My first pvp encounter -- A guilde and I saw a skull (turns out he was level 41) horde mage. We just ran BRD and thought, eh two level 24 rogues can kill ANYTHING. 5 corpse runs later we realized we should not attack things that had a skull by their picture.
- Level 1 enchant alt with bags full of illusion dust/GEE/and shards

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Ah, the Olde WoW(tm).

When a mage was decently geared in full Mooncloth tailored stuff.
When UBRS was a difficult 15-man raid.
When AV wars took over 24hours at times.
When Arcanite Reaper was uber.
When PVP in PVE gear wasn't a death sentence.
When it took more than one person to kill all the npcs in Crossroads.
When Flight Masters were mean and usually meant death by Enraged Wyvern.
When enhancement shamans were still interesting.
When having certain hunter pets was worth more than just "hey, nice color there."
When you had to reroll to respec (hope you like that prot warrior leveling LOL).

[Acidburning]

I remember doing UBRS with 30+ (all guild).

We were the first guild to enter MC on our server, and the 1st molten giant dropped the warlock epic belt.

[offive]

I remember mind controlling people in pvp situations and using their big abilities (warrior abilities come to mind but i can't remember the name).


Ah yeah the countless morons I would MC off the cliff at AB lumber mill. Man that was fun. Thinking ahead, how fun would 5 gnome shadow priests be in BGs with noggenfogger?

[heyaz]

I boosted the first time without RAF. Just took 3 times as long. 1-60 was more of a 2-3 week project rather than a couple nights.

[Seldum]

I boosted the first time without RAF. Just took 3 times as long. 1-60 was more of a 2-3 week project rather than a couple nights.

Dahm... took me 7 days to get from 0-60 without boosting (as I diden't have any really good toon to boost with).

[Catamer]

I remember doing lots of internet searches for quests and reading about where they were and eventually got an addon that display my location on the map.

[Fef]

Someething that I find very representative of how the game changed since I started playing it is that they (Blizzard) made an Explorer title, and now they provide you with a list of places to visit so that you would get that title ...

Duh ?

[kadaan]

It wasn't bad because that's just the way it was. There wasn't anything to really compare it to. No MMO at the time had any questhelper-type interface, in fact most online games at the time didn't even HAVE quests. Being able to supplement your grinding with quests was "OMG how did people play MMOs before quests?!?!"

Thottbot was around since beta, and was pretty well fleshed out by the time WoW launched. Allakhazam was around too, but I never really cared for it. If you got really stuck on something, you could look at the comments on thottbot.

End-game wasn't the same as it is now, and there weren't many true raid guilds back then. Someone in full blues was amazing, and I remember when I saw a rogue with 8/8 shadowcraft and thinking they were insanely hardcore to have the full set. Dungeons had no player limit, so it wasn't uncommon to see 30-40 people in a raid doing Stratholme or Scholomance, you just had to be sure to drop the group before killing a quest npc to get credit for it. When they made the fix so you couldn't do it, I remember thinking that all those dungeon quests became impossible to do. Seeing someone with any epics at all was just amazing.

My first character to 60 had about 16 days of playtime (priest), and I thought was pretty fast. My second took 14 (warrior), third took 12 (rogue), and fourth took just under 10 (mage). There weren't as many people all at 60, so it wasn't too hard to find "end-game" groups willing to take people in their high 50's. I did MC for the first time on my priest at 58.

Gear was vastly different too. Attack power? Spell power? Haste? There were a few items that had flat +1% or +2% to crit, and very few items that had "increases damage and healing by spells by up to X", but for the most part it was all about stacking the base stats.

Epic mounts were EPIC. 1000 gold was a LOT. There was no exp->gold for quests at 60 and no dailies, so all the gold coming into the system was from looting gold and vendoring items.

Shaman shoulders were funny looking: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screenshots/WoW/WoWScrnShot_040106_195157.jpg (and seeing a hunter wearing them let you know they were bad)
Getting 2 arcane crystals was like winning the lottery: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screenshots/WoW/WoWScrnShot_052606_235946.jpg
AV was the best place to fish, and you could get the highest level fish with low level fishing: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screenshots/WoW/WoWScrnShot_101605_005728.jpg

[Multibocks]

No one even laughed at my everquest comments, I feel so old. =(

[kadaan]

No one even laughed at my everquest comments, I feel so old. =(

Lots of friends in college played EQ, but I was very anti pay-to-play back then so I just stuck with my text-based MUDs. WoW corrupted me.

[Acidburning]

Shaman shoulders were funny looking: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screenshots/WoW/WoWScrnShot_040106_195157.jpg (and seeing a hunter wearing them let you know they were bad)


QFT. haha, awesome screenshot. :D

[heffner]

It's not really different when the cap is L60, L70 and then L80 given the changes that accompany the increased levels.

Basically I just did quests, the same quests I did when I started over many times over the years. There were a lot of them available and you could solo level up to the cap through questing which was one big appeal to playing WoW from the very beginning. The quests are designed very well and they direct you to where to go next without a guide. Not to mention the player base was so huge for WoW there was a ton of information and spoilers on the net if you needed them.

So, in terms of leveling, nothing has really changed. It probably doesn't take longer to get to 80 then it did to get to 60 back in the day since they have changed the XP requirements to level etc..

I am sure Cataclysm will be the same, with the exception that they will add the "alternate XP" and "guild XP" etc.

TLDR - Leveling in wow was just as easy five years ago as it is now.

[Fizzler]

It was easy actually. Having come from MUD :P ok lets not go back that far.

My first true modern MMO was Ultima Online. I loved that game, it was ahead of it's time with housing and guild towers. I think I went on to Asheron's Call or EQ, Asheron's Call 2, than EQ2 all of them much more of a grind. When I first started playing WoW I could not believe you could level so fast and how cartoony it looked. I loved it I had a few kids, found my career and just did not have time to sink into the game anymore. It was a perfect match and I have never looked back.

[Trick]

Ah, the Olde WoW(tm).
When UBRS was a difficult 15-man raid.

I still remember how uber my guild was when we were able to 10-man UBRS with no purples...




Shaman shoulders were funny looking: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screenshots/WoW/WoWScrnShot_040106_195157.jpg
QFT. haha, awesome screenshot. :D

My Alliance Paladin from back then had not only the Shaman shoulders, but also all of the crafted Shaman regen mail from Silithus. Looked funny as hell, but I could spam Flash of Light all day long with 150 m/5 and 100% mana back from crits.

[Lokked]

Multibocks, I get it. EQ's questing system was ahead of its time and didn't have access to the proper technology to make it work (Natural Language Processing). That technology still isn't developed enough for use in games. Luckily on my bard I did not have to partake in any of that crap until I did my Epic.

Up until recently, Planeshift (Free, open-sourced MMO developed by a community made up of Randoms - http://www.planeshift.it/) used this exact same sort of word-search questing system, until the most recent patch when it was removed, due to user complaints. They used a NLP Engine, but it was community designed and not very good.

A person could go on and on about how tough things used to be in MMOs. EQ for example:
10% of your level's worth of XP loss on death, to the point where you can Delevel.
30min - 1hour Corpse Retrieval runs, gear stays on corpse when you die, gear was everything.
Class imbalance to the extreme. Some classes couldn't solo effectively past lvl 20. Almost no classes could solo anything that gave XP at the higher levels.
No Life-bars, no Target Indicator (if you are taking damage, you are the target), No Numerical Indications on anything.

When you think about the way things are progressing, the question I have is When will developers stop making things easier? How much further along this path can they go?

I think its just like using Game Genie :p The game was entertaining before, but you pop in the Game Genie, Cheat, and then the game's entertainment value lasts for about 10 more minutes before dieing completely.

[lacitpo]

Maybe I can add to this nostalgiafest


Playing a Night Elf Hunter, thinking I was unique in planning to be a "damage dealing machine"
Not knowing I could get a pet until about lvl 25 as a hunter and it taking almost 2 hours to hoof it back to the starting zone to do the quest
Installing Cosmos UI without any understanding of what addons did and how to use them
Addons that would walk your character from one zone to another for you
Addons that could handle conditional statements in combat meaning you could create a single button that was more efficient at DPSing than a human player ever could be as long as you mashed the hell out of it.
Raiding MC with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Basically just point and shoot with little to no strategy
Tier 0 and 0.5 gear and working so hard to get it.
Being so proud when I saved the 1000 gold to buy my epic mount.
Using feign death and goblin jumper cables to save the raid from a wipe many many times.
Having to read quest text to figure out where to go to do quests.
The ability to scale any hill or mountain side in the game via glitches in the textures.


Vanilla wow was the most fun for me, but I think that is the same way you remember things better than they actually were. The game as it stands today is the best it's ever been IMHO. I long to return to the vanilla days when druids, paladins, priests, and shamans had to heal in raids or stay at home, warriors were the only viable endgame tanks and raiding was something you replaced your girlfriend or wife with.

But those days weren't that great. The game was just exciting and new to me and I didn't have a yardstick to measure it with. Now I see the major improvements with every class having 3 viable specs, and the content being more accessible.

[bartholomeo]

* flight from flightmaster to flightmaster, u couldn't fly more 1 flightpath at a time.
* Ubrs was a tough instance. The amount of times we had a group that didn't have the key...
* Endless runs to scholo and strat all night long. 2 - 3 hours for a run were not strange.
* 6 hour AV battles, 1 hour queue's
* The pure joy i had when I finished the paladin epic mount quest. Man that was expensive and tough !
* To this day I have no clue of what my paladin was specced for, I think dps/holy.
* Collection that 0.5/1 tier was months of work. But damn did that judgement set look good.
* More then 1 character ? Really ? I didn't start alts until my paladin had his first epic gear. And that took a long time.
* Questing in Redridge mountains at lvl 14, finding a group for that castle there, and some guy had a friend that would came over to help. That guy was lvl 40, at that time I had no idea of how high the lvl's went :)
* Getting my first world drop in Ashazara ( what was i doing there anyway )

man, memories.

I still play with a few guys who I met 4 years ago. They have become good friends.

[-silencer-]

Old WoW was a grind..
Back in Open Beta (October '04), those of us from closed beta knew enough of the key quest rewards and instance rewards to level much faster.

Upon release (end of Nov. '04), you were lucky to play for more than a few hours without a World Down message, and if you were on Archimonde, good luck playing at all. Those first 2-3 months were a trying time full of Bliz adding free days to our subscription to make up for lost time with unavailable servers.

Once they smoothed it all out, it was a great game.. except crafting still blew since so few recipes were worth making. The closed & open beta players had a big head start since they had gone through quest lines and knew content.. we played on Alliance Magtheridon, and I remember the first few days. The top players in level/xp were solo grinders, as quest xp was next to worthless. It was all about reducing downtime and always having the next mob nearby. 60 took about 2 weeks of solid grinding back then. Thottbot was by far the best web service, and it hasn't changed much over the years as sites like wowhead have grown. Cosmos was an awesome UI addon suite, but there were a bunch of great addons in the early days too.. like auctioneer, recap, enchantrix, etc.

When I hear players complain about the 60-70 or 70-80 grind.. (or even the current 1-60 non-RAF grind), I laugh. I'd even go so far to say that 1-80 today takes less time /played than 1-60 back in early '05.. and it's surely more entertaining as we can prod through content instead of migrating among the few great grind spots (Tanaris pirates anyone?)

I remember the days when PvP meant gathering up your friends and running towards Org or UC for some world PvP - the only kind that existed. Battlegrounds (and later Arenas) weren't out for months. Resiliance didn't exist. Neither did raids. It was a whole world to explore.. now how can a World of Warcraft 2 be made? Re-use all the lore and begin again on Azeroth with a new system? A new continent with a whole new history? Just please.. make the freaking crafting system more useful right from the beginning next time!

Edit:
And I'll never forget my first epic! Less than a week after launch, as a lowly mid-30's rogue grinding through STV (and killing the few horde high enough to level here in the proecess), I nearly shit myself when the text of a drop was purple! Of course, it was the main hand tanking mace, Ardent Custodian. I was SO tempted to use it, but I was a combat dagger rogue and there were no talent respecs. I sold it to our guild main tank for 50g (which back then was more equivalent to 10k gold today).

[Tasty]

My first group was a priest and 4 mages. This was back when you had to talent spec Arcane Explosion to be instant cast. It took forever to get to level 20 and was a good 6 levels later before I was able to clear Deadmines. But once I got the major learning curves down and the right talents, it went very well after that. I recall running SFK and SM about 70 times to get all the drops to keep them geared identical.

I did very little questing. Once I was able to take down bosses, I just farmed them over and over to get all 5 guys the drops they needed before moving to the next. Once BC came out, they became unreal with the gear upgrades a few quests in. Alas they only got to level 67 or so, Thats when it became clear that it was not a viable PvE group w/o a dedicated tank.

I started with a priest and four mage's too. /represent :D I remember when I finally got Arcane Explosion and talented it to instant too, was awesome :)

[Tonuss]

But then i realized that the very early players actually played this way. Bottomline, I'd love to hear/read stuff from the early days. How it was back then, what problems you were facing, etc ... and maybe hear if the evolution to all the things that are available now have taken away some part of the fun.
I think that it depends on where you came from. I started playing WOW with some friends after playing Everquest for a bit over two years. Aside from the ways that EQ punished players directly (death meant exp loss and a very risky corpse recovery), it really was a grind. Quests were sparse compared to WOW. They were harder to find and waaaay harder to complete, and the rewards (in exp, money, and/or gear) were horrible for the effort involved. There was no instancing of content. For the most part, ordinary exp mobs in EQ were the equivalent of elites in WOW-- they had lots of HP and they hit pretty hard. Soloing was only really possible by a few classes, and it was still very slow and boring.

In EQ, getting exp meant finding a group of people, finding an unoccupied corner of a level-appropriate zone, and pulling roaming mobs to the group. One at a time if at all possible, a few at a time if you had a competent crowd-controller. Each kill rewarded you with a microscopic amount of exp (how much exactly? No way to know for sure, the game did not provide numbers for this). Hour upon hour of killing mobs one at a time, and assuming a good group (ie, a good kill rate and no deaths) you wound up with 5-10% of your level. The next day, you'd do it all over again.

Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.

By contrast, WOW was a breeze. Lots of quests, outdoor mobs and quests could be solo'ed. If you had a group, you could clear instanced zones. Gear was easy to obtain via quests, via tradeskills (don't get me started on tradeskills in EQ), via random world drops, even via merchants. To be honest, I don't think I even noticed the level grind until my first character got to 50 or so.

Even now I don't consider it much of a grind, although WOW has spoiled me into being much less patient than I used to be.

[thinus]

Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.

In vanilla EQ they introduced epic items for each class, long quest lines and raid objectives. They also introduced these planes, Plane of Hate, Plane of Fear, etc. The aggro radius of mobs in the planes were huge and there were a lot of mobs. Usually a class that could feign death would zone in first and feign death immediately and scan for mobs. Once it looked relatively safe the whole raid would zone in at once and start killing immediately. Usually it was a race to kill fast enough before you were overwhelmed. And once you zoned in you couldn't zone out. You needed a mage to port you out.

If you wiped you had to get your corpse back as all your gear is on your corpse. This means you had to get someone to clear the plane so you could zone in and you also needed a mage friend to go with you. Corpses lasted a week.