Last vanilla patch before TBC

[Galadourn]

You don't want me to have water elemental @ 60 it made frost mages near godmode for a month, that and free high warlord gear for all.

no, the tier 8-9 talents would be removed, since they are designed with a level 70 cap in mind. Still, I didn't know that patch 2.0.1. brought so many other changes in the core design that all level 60 content was nerfed apparently.

[Norjak]

free high warlord gear for all.

Yeah, everybody went out & bought the epic weapons with honor points, and went around being OP for a while...this was definitely not Vanilla.

[Askental]

Yeah a lot of people got rank 14 gear fairly easily during this patch, so if a server like this gets released you would have EVERYONE in full rank 14 gear really quickly, making a lot of PVE content almost completely useless too... It was fine as a transition into tbc but keep in mind this type of server would stay in the same state forever. It would feel like these instant-60-fun-server types, but with a leveling grind... and odd talent trees!

[Galadourn]

yes, the new Honor ranking system meant free epics for everyone. But this can easily be fixed, the problem is the other imbalances introduced with this patch.

[Ickuss]

Porting back to 2.0.1 would be horrific for a vanilla legacy server... that patch was a hold over... there would be no honor grind, dumbed down raiding and just... no terrible idea... Just even do 1.12.1 then port over to a tbc platorm when the expansion is done. IF a group of volunteers can backport patches... I think the multi billion dollar company can.

[drchristie]

yeah the earlier the patch the harder the game

There was a lot of item itemization changes as well. I switched to Kronos 2 and with the Nost cache still there, some items were showing up with the wrong stats. Ie some 25 spirit 10 fire resist staff is now 11/11/11 stats, 10 fire res and 1% crit.

1.12 patch seems fine, def easier than vanilla tho because DM gear, new mage water, new itemization

2.0.1 patch makes the game a joke. As a mage i remember the pre-bc water elemental frostbolts hitting as hard as my frostbolts non crit. Also threat as a warrior is a joke with revenge, it changes the game way too much. Also things like earth shield, mangle, felguard, killing spree 1 shotting people, Vamp touch (huuge for pve). It's like a vanilla on steroids. It's why like 2 guilds cleared naxx before this stage and then like 21 others cleared it after this patch. Huge difference.

The best progressive is releasing on 1.0, with a new patch every 2 weeks or something, and it stops at 1.12. Locked raids conditionally. Ie/ MC/ony out, then BWL gets released as soon as rag dies, and AQ/ZG as soon as nef dies (maybe ZG earlier?) and naxx, well, we've never seen a good private server naxx yet. We'll see

Just my 2c

[Drain]

I think they let the game run broken like this for a while so you could try to catch up on clearing content before Outlands opened. Of course a better idea would have been to just run Legacy servers and "not" forcibly patch everyone up, something players like myself tried to tell them every year, and they ignored us every year, hence the situation the game is in now. It would have been much easier to just hold some servers back every release, rather than fall behind like this. Now they'll have to play catch up recreating what was already created in the first place. This is unless of course they still have the code, which they say they don't, herp derp.

[Galadourn]

I find it VERY hard to believe that a company the size of Blizzard has not kept the code of each and every iteration of the game archived somewhere.

[theluda]

I find it VERY hard to believe that a company the size of Blizzard has not kept the code of each and every iteration of the game archived somewhere.

They have. It's not about code, it's more about changes made to their server infrastructure, release rollouts, integration with Battle.net, etc. That was not a thing back then, vanilla and TBC basically was its' own infrastructure distinct from Battle.net.

Also back then code was heavily optimized for a specific type if rack server (HP Proliant), and now hardware and data centers have changed a lot. Performance on current hardware may fail, or even building may fail.

Just take compilers... C++11 was a not even in sight back then, now it presents a whole different landscape, many compilers even have obsoleted what was built in 2005.

In the end it is not all about having the code. If you take a piece of software from a century ago, it does always require time and effort to update it for the current landscape of development and systems. Legacy software often means a lot of effort is involved to make it run again, as what it ran on in the past is simply gone.

[Heldunder]

lets not forget that they changed the items from %s to ratings and completely ruined itemization for level 60 items.