Man. This is the coolest shit. I've been playing since right before BC dropped, and hard off and on since Warlords. That said, WoW has such a special place in my heart, especially those early years. It's just so great to see someone go through all the experiences from almost 2 decades in the past with a prospective like this. Please keep this up. I'll Patreon your stuff if I gotta.
I definitely fell in love with the game as well. It took a couple years to finally start the journey I wanted to take from the very beginning. But, In a way it’s almost better that I played through shadowlands and Dragonflight beforehand. Just getting the backstory on why the game is where it is. Glad you’re here for the adventure!
I started playing WoW during Burning Crusade in my mid teens and quit during Cataclysm, only coming back for a little bit each expansion; but before that I had acquired Loremaster (effectively twice from pre and post Cataclysm). I really like questing in WoW and I enjoy the slow roll through the world. Not too long ago I actually tried to do something very similar to you, but with the goal of completing every quest I possibly could in order. My personal plan was to, for the sake of maintaining a sense of progression, using the NPC to prevent experience gains in the major city to artificially cap myself every 5 levels until I clear an expansion/segment. It was to be something like this: Racial Starting Area and the Starting Area for Draenai/Blood Elves 1-20 Burning Crusade/Outland 20-25 WotLK/Northrend 25-30 Cataclysm/Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor 30-35 Mists of Pandaria 35-40 Warlords of Draenor 40-45 Legion 45-50 Battle for Azeroth 50-55 Shadowlands 55-60 Dragonflight 60-70 Unfortunately, I bounced off of this task when I got to Cataclysm due to some quests being impossible to complete in Uldum due to some bugs at the time, and it killed my motivation. Seeing this, however, might get me to try again.
@@TheJoukai I meaaannnnn you put in SO much work already!! If you can start again from that point that’s a giant jump forward! I’ve also theorized that Cataclysm is going to be my make or break point with this whole thing too (for different reasons obviously) I like your idea of using one character through everything, as that is what I ultimately wished I could do when I first started playing. But, I figured I would just take a character to max through each expansion. So my Mage through TBC and I already know what I’m going to roll for WotLK :)
16:55 You have to get 20 or 25 Heirlooms. Heirlooms can be bought in undercity and ironforge - might have changed since i don‘t play it currently anymore but they should be there.. Heirlooms are expensive because; First you buy them and you will be able to just create out of nothing this Heirloom for your Twink, cross-server and crossfaction -they‘ll grant you Xp boost‘s and the Gear is leveling with your Character so you barely ever need to change your equipment. The effects last only like 20-30 levels under max lvl, you can Upgrade them too but each upgrade adds 5 or 10 levels and cost‘s a couple thousands of gold. Those Vendors also sell you Maps for the fast travel routes. (And lots more stuff ) You gotta pack in surely atleast like 10’000 - 15‘000 Gold but if you want to max out the Heirlooms, basically you end up paying roughly 50‘000 Gold for 5 armor pieces and a weapon. It‘s like a heirloom ~500g First Upgrades ~1000g Second ~2000g Third ~5000g
Well that actually explains why I didn’t know how to get it. When I first started playing someone told me that heirlooms don’t really work the way they used to and I just NEVER learned how heirlooms work or even where to get them LOL. Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate it!!
I am really happy to see you explore all the different mechanics, like blinking off a cliff - those are some very good game mechanics questions you are asking! The Burning Scar and the wreckage of Silvermoon was the result of the Scourge's invasion led by then death knight Arthas Menethil. These events took place in Warcraft 3, so chronologically before the beginning of any WoW at all. But indeed, Blood Elves and the entire Eversong Woods were added in the Burning Crusade expansion, they were unavailable during the original Vanilla version of the game. I must say, I disagree with the statement that there was little lore in the game before Legion! It's just that it was served to players differently. There are over a hundred of books all over the classic part of the world which you can literally open and read some part of the lore from - and that way learn a little more about the history or geography, usually somehow connected to the place you find the book at. That was the way to communicate pre-game lore to the players, and well, the ongoing lore was in the quests and sometimes in off-game sources like IRL books. There wasn't so much delivered via video cutscenes as in some games, actually all the way up until BFA, not Legion. In BFA they started to lean much more heavily onto videos delivering the ongoing lore. I have just discovered this, I subbed! I'll catch up to your current progress and accompany you on your journey!
Welcome to the journey!!! I DO get your disagreement. At the time of starting this, that’s just what I had heard. Basically the community saying Blizzard didn’t have the main story being told through cutscenes or being handed to you on a plate until Legion as you said. Everything that I’ve learned about TBC so far (at least the meaty good stuff) has been from different sources. Mostly looking up dungeon lore for a future video I plan on making. I’m sure that at some point I probably will hop into Classic/Vanilla to beat my head against the Vanilla 1-60 experience and learn all of that stuff too. It’s a right of passage and all 🤣
I've heard this exact advice before. Loooooots of major lore leading into WoW I've heard. Is the reforged version worth getting purely for lore reasons? I've heard not so great things about it.
@@SOALgaming Reforged can be a bit buggy and IMO the art style isn't as good as the 2002 version. If you own Reforged, you can play the Classic version, but it makes you download the 20GB+ Reforged client. Can always sail the seas for older versions if you want the 1GB version that's bug free.
We jumped in at an odd time obviously. But Shadowlands introduced us to SO MANY characters, concepts, and story lines that we just had absolutely no idea about and it was all at once. That expansion touched on so much stuff that if you weren’t here for 20 years it was a lot. Hope your journey to the past has been awesome! One day we will be lore masters 😎
Wasn't looking for this but so glad to have found your playthrough. My daughters and I are getting back into WoW for The War Within and are planing to play the entire game as much in order as possible.
I'm doing the same exact thing! Don't really get why you don't read the quests though if you want to play the game for the story/lore... I definitely recommend playing Warcraft 3 first, as the bloodelves as a race was introduced there, the ghostlands was literally created and Illidan was introduced etc. Every player that played this TBC content in 2006 already knew about these stories and lore. Have fun with your journey!! it's really great :)
Oh yeah the “wondering if I should read every quest text” thing went out the window very quickly. I thought there was going to be a more manageable way to tell the difference between “more important/MSQ” quests and others. But, I’ve been reading every quest out loud basically regardless if I think it’s important or not. Definitely the way to go. I still have to give Warcraft 3 a go, and I might make a detour to do that before I begin Wrath. That’s really the expansion I’m super pumped for.
@@SOALgaming That's definitely a good idea! I'm currently in the middle of Wrath and it basically is a continuation of Warcraft 3's story. Very fun! I'm XP locking my character at level 57 to prevent me from getting kicked out of chromie. That happened to me the first time and once you are kicked out you can't go back.😁
I wish they would just fix Chromie time and allow us to just be in that timeline. Like…let me pick a timeline and just cap me at 60 anytime I want to be in that timeline. Whenever I decide to go back to the current timeline, put me back to max. I got big beef with the way Chromie time works LOL.
@@SOALgaming Exactly!! totally agree. they see Chromie as a way to get to max level as soon as possible, not necessarily as a way to experience all the story. They got the new 'remix' events for that now. But I also don't like that, because it's for a fixed period of time and I like to take my time to play through an expansion and take it slow...
I've been playing since vanilla so I did get to experience all of this stuff when it was the retail experience and I'm working on my own personal slow play through the expansions again in a similar way. I start up a character and play through the game just enjoying the stories and questlines and at lvl 59 I turned off xp gain so I wouldn't get kicked out of Chromie time. It's a great way to experience the various stories with all the quality of life benefits that retail WoW offers over Classic. As for the skipping over vanilla, there really is no Chromie time experience for vanilla wow since in Chromie time you can only get the post cataclysm world experience which has some differences. However, there's really nothing wrong with missing out on vanilla as there wasn't really a cohesive story that spanned all of vanilla. Each zone had its own storyline that culminated in a dungeon in that zone and at max level you'd follow a storyline that took you into a raid and that story ended at the end of that raid. None of the raids were really connected to each other story-wise aside from Onyxia was connected to Blackwing Lair and the 2 raids in Silithus were connected to each other. Beyond that everything was its own story. The expansions were the point where everything was connected to an overarching story going forward even though each story was contained within that single expansion. The story tying together across expansions really begins with Warlords of Draenor since the events of that expansion lead into Legion and that story carries through to the end of Shadowlands. Dragonflight is sort of a palate cleanser where the story we followed for the last several expansions is mostly irrelevant and we are going back to something that happened way back at the end of Cataclysm when the Aspects lost their power. So we are currently resuming that story with Dragonflight being a prelude and setting the scene for next multi-expansion story arc.
The dark portal is part of Warcraft 2 and it leads to Draenor the original home of the Orcs. The Orcs originally came to Azeroth as part of the Burning Legion's army to soften up Azeroth. A lot of the story in the Burning Crusade expansion begins with Warcraft 2 and continues in Warcraft 3.
It's so cool that you're doing this and its something I've been wanting to do myself! I'm a new WOW player and I started playing during the middle of BFA, so I never had that classic WOW experience. I feel left out when other players reference past events or scenes. Yeah I can watch lore vids or read about it on a wiki, but I wanna play through it!
Nah, I have classic characters, but in the interest of time I wasn't going to to play Vanilla because the lore to hours played ratio is not worth it. Chromie time just allows me to jump in the expansion I want immediately without putting in the 10,000 hours of ground work. If the Classic TBC Servers were still up I would have just done that instead, but even that has been made to be cataclysm. From what I can tell, true classic TBC isn't possible to play right now unless playing a private server.
Man. This is the coolest shit. I've been playing since right before BC dropped, and hard off and on since Warlords. That said, WoW has such a special place in my heart, especially those early years. It's just so great to see someone go through all the experiences from almost 2 decades in the past with a prospective like this. Please keep this up. I'll Patreon your stuff if I gotta.
I definitely fell in love with the game as well. It took a couple years to finally start the journey I wanted to take from the very beginning. But, In a way it’s almost better that I played through shadowlands and Dragonflight beforehand. Just getting the backstory on why the game is where it is. Glad you’re here for the adventure!
I started playing WoW during Burning Crusade in my mid teens and quit during Cataclysm, only coming back for a little bit each expansion; but before that I had acquired Loremaster (effectively twice from pre and post Cataclysm). I really like questing in WoW and I enjoy the slow roll through the world.
Not too long ago I actually tried to do something very similar to you, but with the goal of completing every quest I possibly could in order.
My personal plan was to, for the sake of maintaining a sense of progression, using the NPC to prevent experience gains in the major city to artificially cap myself every 5 levels until I clear an expansion/segment.
It was to be something like this:
Racial Starting Area and the Starting Area for Draenai/Blood Elves 1-20
Burning Crusade/Outland 20-25
WotLK/Northrend 25-30
Cataclysm/Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor 30-35
Mists of Pandaria 35-40
Warlords of Draenor 40-45
Legion 45-50
Battle for Azeroth 50-55
Shadowlands 55-60
Dragonflight 60-70
Unfortunately, I bounced off of this task when I got to Cataclysm due to some quests being impossible to complete in Uldum due to some bugs at the time, and it killed my motivation. Seeing this, however, might get me to try again.
@@TheJoukai I meaaannnnn you put in SO much work already!! If you can start again from that point that’s a giant jump forward! I’ve also theorized that Cataclysm is going to be my make or break point with this whole thing too (for different reasons obviously) I like your idea of using one character through everything, as that is what I ultimately wished I could do when I first started playing. But, I figured I would just take a character to max through each expansion. So my Mage through TBC and I already know what I’m going to roll for WotLK :)
16:55
You have to get 20 or 25 Heirlooms.
Heirlooms can be bought in undercity and ironforge - might have changed since i don‘t play it currently anymore but they should be there..
Heirlooms are expensive because;
First you buy them and you will be able to just create out of nothing this Heirloom for your Twink, cross-server and crossfaction -they‘ll grant you Xp boost‘s and the Gear is leveling with your Character so you barely ever need to change your equipment.
The effects last only like 20-30 levels under max lvl, you can Upgrade them too but each upgrade adds 5 or 10 levels and cost‘s a couple thousands of gold.
Those Vendors also sell you Maps for the fast travel routes. (And lots more stuff )
You gotta pack in surely atleast like 10’000 - 15‘000 Gold but if you want to max out the Heirlooms, basically you end up paying roughly 50‘000 Gold for 5 armor pieces and a weapon.
It‘s like a heirloom ~500g
First Upgrades ~1000g
Second ~2000g
Third ~5000g
Well that actually explains why I didn’t know how to get it. When I first started playing someone told me that heirlooms don’t really work the way they used to and I just NEVER learned how heirlooms work or even where to get them LOL. Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate it!!
Oh fuck this sounds fun as hell. Never played WoW growing up but interested lol
good luck on your journey!
Thank you!! :)
I am really happy to see you explore all the different mechanics, like blinking off a cliff - those are some very good game mechanics questions you are asking!
The Burning Scar and the wreckage of Silvermoon was the result of the Scourge's invasion led by then death knight Arthas Menethil. These events took place in Warcraft 3, so chronologically before the beginning of any WoW at all. But indeed, Blood Elves and the entire Eversong Woods were added in the Burning Crusade expansion, they were unavailable during the original Vanilla version of the game.
I must say, I disagree with the statement that there was little lore in the game before Legion! It's just that it was served to players differently. There are over a hundred of books all over the classic part of the world which you can literally open and read some part of the lore from - and that way learn a little more about the history or geography, usually somehow connected to the place you find the book at.
That was the way to communicate pre-game lore to the players, and well, the ongoing lore was in the quests and sometimes in off-game sources like IRL books. There wasn't so much delivered via video cutscenes as in some games, actually all the way up until BFA, not Legion. In BFA they started to lean much more heavily onto videos delivering the ongoing lore.
I have just discovered this, I subbed! I'll catch up to your current progress and accompany you on your journey!
Welcome to the journey!!! I DO get your disagreement. At the time of starting this, that’s just what I had heard. Basically the community saying Blizzard didn’t have the main story being told through cutscenes or being handed to you on a plate until Legion as you said. Everything that I’ve learned about TBC so far (at least the meaty good stuff) has been from different sources. Mostly looking up dungeon lore for a future video I plan on making. I’m sure that at some point I probably will hop into Classic/Vanilla to beat my head against the Vanilla 1-60 experience and learn all of that stuff too. It’s a right of passage and all 🤣
Play WarCraft III
I've heard this exact advice before. Loooooots of major lore leading into WoW I've heard. Is the reforged version worth getting purely for lore reasons? I've heard not so great things about it.
@@SOALgaming Reforged can be a bit buggy and IMO the art style isn't as good as the 2002 version. If you own Reforged, you can play the Classic version, but it makes you download the 20GB+ Reforged client. Can always sail the seas for older versions if you want the 1GB version that's bug free.
Oh that's kind of cool that you get the original version with reforged. Good timing too, it's half off on Battle net right now if I wanted to jump in.
@@SOALgaming You can play Reforged with original graphics but it's not exactly the older versions.
@Zhohan- AH! Okay I understand what you mean now.
HOLY S**! Me too bro, been playing since late Shadowlands and have been trying to do the same thing so I can understand the story lol
We jumped in at an odd time obviously. But Shadowlands introduced us to SO MANY characters, concepts, and story lines that we just had absolutely no idea about and it was all at once. That expansion touched on so much stuff that if you weren’t here for 20 years it was a lot. Hope your journey to the past has been awesome! One day we will be lore masters 😎
You just popped up on my recommendation and looking forward to seeing this whole series
@@taiun21 welcome to the adventure!!! Thanks for stopping in.
Talking over Illidan in the cutscene... you must be a streamer.
LOLLLLL guilty. HOWEVER, in my defense I had already recorded my reaction and my mic was muted so this was take 2. 🤣
Wasn't looking for this but so glad to have found your playthrough. My daughters and I are getting back into WoW for The War Within and are planing to play the entire game as much in order as possible.
@@mommabird9704 That’s amazing!!! What class are you all going to play? Also thanks for watching! :)
If you want to experience the Warcraft lore you should play Warcraft 2 and 3. These are RTS games but the lore is essential to understand WoW history.
Gotten lots of suggestions to play through these. I’m gonna have to get that done at some point!
I'm doing the same exact thing! Don't really get why you don't read the quests though if you want to play the game for the story/lore... I definitely recommend playing Warcraft 3 first, as the bloodelves as a race was introduced there, the ghostlands was literally created and Illidan was introduced etc. Every player that played this TBC content in 2006 already knew about these stories and lore. Have fun with your journey!! it's really great :)
Oh yeah the “wondering if I should read every quest text” thing went out the window very quickly. I thought there was going to be a more manageable way to tell the difference between “more important/MSQ” quests and others. But, I’ve been reading every quest out loud basically regardless if I think it’s important or not. Definitely the way to go. I still have to give Warcraft 3 a go, and I might make a detour to do that before I begin Wrath. That’s really the expansion I’m super pumped for.
@@SOALgaming That's definitely a good idea! I'm currently in the middle of Wrath and it basically is a continuation of Warcraft 3's story. Very fun! I'm XP locking my character at level 57 to prevent me from getting kicked out of chromie. That happened to me the first time and once you are kicked out you can't go back.😁
I wish they would just fix Chromie time and allow us to just be in that timeline. Like…let me pick a timeline and just cap me at 60 anytime I want to be in that timeline. Whenever I decide to go back to the current timeline, put me back to max. I got big beef with the way Chromie time works LOL.
@@SOALgaming Exactly!! totally agree. they see Chromie as a way to get to max level as soon as possible, not necessarily as a way to experience all the story. They got the new 'remix' events for that now. But I also don't like that, because it's for a fixed period of time and I like to take my time to play through an expansion and take it slow...
This video resonated deeply with me. Watching you live the WoW dream inspires me to pursue my own epic journey! 💖✨
@@palcsoke Yeeessss!!! Do it!! Let’s all become Loremasters!
I've been playing since vanilla so I did get to experience all of this stuff when it was the retail experience and I'm working on my own personal slow play through the expansions again in a similar way. I start up a character and play through the game just enjoying the stories and questlines and at lvl 59 I turned off xp gain so I wouldn't get kicked out of Chromie time. It's a great way to experience the various stories with all the quality of life benefits that retail WoW offers over Classic.
As for the skipping over vanilla, there really is no Chromie time experience for vanilla wow since in Chromie time you can only get the post cataclysm world experience which has some differences. However, there's really nothing wrong with missing out on vanilla as there wasn't really a cohesive story that spanned all of vanilla. Each zone had its own storyline that culminated in a dungeon in that zone and at max level you'd follow a storyline that took you into a raid and that story ended at the end of that raid. None of the raids were really connected to each other story-wise aside from Onyxia was connected to Blackwing Lair and the 2 raids in Silithus were connected to each other. Beyond that everything was its own story.
The expansions were the point where everything was connected to an overarching story going forward even though each story was contained within that single expansion. The story tying together across expansions really begins with Warlords of Draenor since the events of that expansion lead into Legion and that story carries through to the end of Shadowlands. Dragonflight is sort of a palate cleanser where the story we followed for the last several expansions is mostly irrelevant and we are going back to something that happened way back at the end of Cataclysm when the Aspects lost their power. So we are currently resuming that story with Dragonflight being a prelude and setting the scene for next multi-expansion story arc.
Glad UA-cam let me stumble across you lol this is awesome.
Glad to have you here, and thank you!😎
The dark portal is part of Warcraft 2 and it leads to Draenor the original home of the Orcs. The Orcs originally came to Azeroth as part of the Burning Legion's army to soften up Azeroth. A lot of the story in the Burning Crusade expansion begins with Warcraft 2 and continues in Warcraft 3.
It's so cool that you're doing this and its something I've been wanting to do myself! I'm a new WOW player and I started playing during the middle of BFA, so I never had that classic WOW experience. I feel left out when other players reference past events or scenes. Yeah I can watch lore vids or read about it on a wiki, but I wanna play through it!
EXACTLY! I know that it will never be or feel the same as back then but still worth a run through!.
Great idea
oh boy you have slow hands lmao
....HUH?! lol
You thought 3 days ago when this was posted that the most vanilla WoW experience you had available to you was Retail. 0.0
Nah, I have classic characters, but in the interest of time I wasn't going to to play Vanilla because the lore to hours played ratio is not worth it. Chromie time just allows me to jump in the expansion I want immediately without putting in the 10,000 hours of ground work. If the Classic TBC Servers were still up I would have just done that instead, but even that has been made to be cataclysm. From what I can tell, true classic TBC isn't possible to play right now unless playing a private server.