Is Upper Blackrock Spire a raid?

Leveling all the way to level 60 as a Protection Warrior in Vanilla sounds like an enormous (and stupid) undertaking, but for me it wasn't that bad. Seldom did I play alone, and we spent a lot of time grinding dungeons with our melee team. On those rare occasions when none of my friends were online, I had an easy time finding groups for the various dungeons in the game. After all, Protection Warriors at level 30 was a rare commodity. Thus, I played a lot of dungeons while leveling up.

Like so many others, many of my fondest World of Warcraft memories are from this time. It was the first time playing the game, and we experienced a large part of it together. The only MMORPG I had previously played was Anarchy Online, and that game didn't focus on instanced group content in the same way as World of Warcraft. I loved – and still love – doing dungeons with a group of friends. Doing most of the dungeons with our group meant we had minimal outside influence. This, and the lack of online resources at the time, meant that we had to figure out everything for ourselves in regards to tactics and how to play the classes.

Before Discord - interesting discussions in guild chat.

We started our own guild, and grew quite a bit. In large part due to a bunch of Russians with very limited ability to communicate in English joining us. We met a lot of weird and interesting people along the journey. At one of our many dungeon runs – it might have been Shadowfang Keep – we met one of these characters. It was this Portuguese Mage called Vegetar. He introduced us to such advanced techniques as crowd control and raid symbols. Sheep the moon, kill the skull first, then the cross, all that kind of stuff. He was a World of Warcraft god to us!

In preparation of writing this, I read through a lot of old e-mails from the time, and remembered how seriously we took the game from the very beginning. We planned dungeons and group quests in advance, had a calendar for dungeons, discussed tactics, quests, loot, etc. Still, we were pretty bad at the game. I like to refer to us as casual hardcore. We had the commitment, but lacked the knowledge.

Ahn'Qiraj opening - obelisk in The Barrens.

Sometime around level 50 or so, Caninen’s sister quit the game. Remember that the road to level 60 was a completely different story back then, so this was several months into the game. Finally reaching level 60, we didn't exactly know what to do. We had heard about this raiding thing, and knew it required 20 or even 40 people. Way more than we could have online in our guild on any given day.

While figuring out how to move on, we grinded Stratholme and Scholomance for the Dungeon Sets. With limited success, I might add. Those places were hard at the time. Vanilla WoW hard. One day, Caninen told us she had met some guys that used to raid "back in the old days". They were starting up a casual raiding guild. We had all heard about the insane schedules of the hardcore raiding guilds, so this sounded good to us. We didn't join their guild, but ran Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire along with them a couple of times. Barely enough so I can say I technically raided in Vanilla. The raids were a complete mess. No voice chat, no add-ons, we were pretty much given no direction at all, and people were getting killed all the time and getting lost on the way back. I remember thinking that this raiding thing seemed a bit overrated. Soon enough, this would change...