The Road to Raiding

We read up on the raids, and learned about the long attunement quest chain required. We had a pretty good dungeon team now, with Leffe tanking (as Fury) in my absence, so we started doing all the necessary dungeons, and after a lot of hard work we could finally enter Karazhan. I remember the satisfaction of zoning in for the first time, and just standing in the lobby, watching the trash mobs. The only thing we needed now was another six people and we could start raiding! This was when we realized only one other person in the guild was attuned to Karazhan, a Paladin by the name of Dreamevil. We had a bunch of people at level 70 in the guild, and quite a few in the high 60's. We offered to help them reach 70 and do the attunement quest chain, but as soon as they turned 70, most people rolled alts, and more or less retired their high level characters.

This was of course frustrating to us, but we persisted. We managed to pull a few people through the attunement chain, but at no point did we have ten active characters in the guild that were attuned. Slowly we began to realize that raiding was not going to happen in this guild, or at least it would take a very long time. Then one day, Dreamevil left the guild and joined a raiding guild called Thousand Souls. He was the only person in the guild that was as dedicated as we were, and his departure was a turning point for us.

Our last day as casual players.

Again, after long consideration we all applied to Thousand Souls. Leffe, Dingus, and Caninen were accepted right away. I, on the other hand, had a friendly chat with one of their officers, Orzolek, who told me they were pretty stacked on Shadow Priests, but I could join them if I was willing to go Holy. I had grown quite fond of my Shadow spec, and thanked him for the offer but told him I'd rather stick to Shadow for now. With all of my friends in a raiding guild, I went on with the endless dungeon runs. In one of those pick up groups, I met my old acquaintance from Blackrock Depths – Memory – now a member of the raiding guild TDC. We talked for a while and he convinced me to apply, and so I did.

The Best Expansion Ever

Then came The Burning Crusade. On the day of the release I created a new character, a Blood Elf Priest called Flax. I did enter Hellfire Peninsula on my Protection Warrior, but spent most of the time on my Priest. I took the dungeon runs to the next level and leveled pretty much all the way to 60 by healing in pick up groups. I believe it was while grinding Blackrock Depths, which I did for quite a few levels, that I met two Italian Paladins who I would stumble upon many times while running pick up groups. One of them was Memory, a name I am sure many who played during The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King will recognize. He became one of the first persons I became friends with in the game, beyond just running instances together.

Kazzak going ape shit in Orgrimmar.

It wasn't long before I had caught up with my friends at level 70, and again, we didn't really know what to do after reaching max level. This time around, we were intent on raiding, and once again realized our own guild probably wouldn't be able to pull it off. So we agreed to join another guild, and after long consideration we joined the Swedish guild Valhalla Immortals.

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...

Level 10 Protection Warrior

Some time in the fall of 2006 my girlfriend (now wife) and her sister started playing World of Warcraft. I had actively avoided the game during the hype at its release. In no small part this was due to the cartoony graphics. I had played all the Blizzard games up to that point, with StarCraft being my favorite, but I figured a game with childish graphics like this clearly must be aimed at children.

One evening I created an orc warrior on my girlfriends account. I was stuck for the rest of the night, and the very next day I bought the game. I spent a few moments looking for information on the different classes in the game, and found out that warriors were in high demand for group content. That sounded pretty good to me! After telling two of my friends that I started playing World of Warcraft, they were immediately on board. Thus we had our five man team. Caninen as Holy Priest, Lyonea and Dingus as Rogues, and Leffe and me as Warriors, Arms and Protection respectively. We had no way of knowing that four of us would become hardcore raiders, and three of us would become officers of the best guild on the server.

My oldest screenshot. Level 18 orc tank in The Sepulcher.

This was thirteen years ago and information about the game was very sparse. None of the plethora of sources that are available today existed back then. Youtube existed, but besides some PvP show-off videos, there was hardly anything about World of Warcraft. You basically had to resort to Thottbot and a few forum posts. I managed to find some kind of tank guide on one of those obscure forums. Little did I know that it was aimed towards end-game raiding, so I started working towards that final tank build from the very beginning, getting my first Protection Talent at level 10.

Introduction

When World of Warcraft Classic was first announced, it got a lot of people thinking of the old days of World of Warcraft. I love reading stories about the early days of the game, so I thought I’d write a short post about my memories from Darkspear-EU to share them with others.

As it turned out, when I started writing it down, it got a bit lengthier than I had expected. So what I present here is The Complete History of Darkspear-EU. Since Wrath of the Lich King is generally regarded as the expansion where World of Warcraft stopped being good, I dare call it the complete history, since anything that happened afterwards is irrelevant. My intention is to share the history of the Horde side of the server, but it will obviously be from my perspective, and also the history of my World of Warcraft experience.

For those of you that didn’t play back then, played Alliance, or just didn’t pay attention to the raid guilds, I played from Vanilla to Wrath of the Lich King, and was a founding member, officer, and guild leader of the guild that had every server first kill for the latter half of The Burning Crusade to the end of Wrath of the Lich King – that is more than two years – so I have a decent grasp of the events during those two expansions. To further amend the situation, a lot of the communication back then was made by e-mail, so I have been able to read through tons of old mails to refresh my memory and validate information. On top of that, I was a Fraps user and have loads of screenshots that I have kept to this day. Also, I have never played on another realm so the history of Darkspear is my history.

My intention is to make a post every day until the release of Classic. If you played on Darkspear-EU during this period, I invite you to comment and share your own memories. I would love to hear more stories from old Darkspear.

Flax@Darkspear-EU