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Back in the Day: A week of EBay, Karazhan and class QQ

Dan O'Halloran
Contributor
Updated ·4 min read


What was going on in World of Warcraft this time last year? Back in the Day looks into the past of WoW Insider and brings back posts notable, controversial and sometimes humorous reflecting the state of the game one year ago this week.

For the week of January 27 - February 2, 2007:

The big news in the third week of TBC was E-bay's announcement: they de-listed all the gold sellers. Not that that stopped the black market for in-game gold sold for real life cash, but just today Blizzard struck another blow in the unending battle: they used the U.S. courts to shut out a major player in the gold selling industry from doing business on the Blizzard servers. The dance continues.

On the official forums, there was a mixture of apprehension about how classes were falling into their new roles and speculation about the nature of the post-60 raid game. One article addressed both these issues when it brought together the concerns of the community about Karazhan. Complaints included trash mobs in the zone being too difficult, bosses being too tough on melee classes, Nightbane's fear unfair to Horde and itemization out of line with the difficulty of the encounter.

Nowadays, the trash has been nerfed repeatedly, some bosses are still tough on melee classes, all Priests have Fear Ward, but a nerfed version making the Nightbane encounter difficult for both factions and the debate rages on whether itemization is good or not, but really, it depends on your class (hint: don't get a Priest started on the subject.)



Class complaints and tweaks were rampant during this time. Some Warriors complained they were gimped at PvP pre-70. Devs told them to level up already. Others worried how Horde Paladins aka Belfadins and Allaince Shaman aka Alliance Shaman were going to fit into each factions' tried and true raid line up. It didn't help that Draenei weren't flagged as Alliance for certain quests. Warlock Imps got the nerfbat upside their leathery heads when new abilities and gear overpowered the little buggers. Meanwhile, Hunter pets got blue promises of new skills in Patch 2.1. And Blizzard made the ill-advised prediction of no more class reviews. Apparently Patch 2.3 didn't count.

As players were chewing through Outland content, guides were starting to appear. Two of them we did ourselves:

  • How to beat the Ring of Blood: For all of you powerleveling to 70, don't miss this quest in Nagrand. Reward is a guaranteed upgrade.

  • Druid Flight Form FAQ: Information was just starting to come out about the Druid's unique new L68 ability. We collected it all in one spot.

And we also continued our coverage of helpful UI mods. AddOns that we covered that week were:

  • ItemRack: Allows you to create sets of gear and then change them out with a single click. Still usable, but soon to be replaced by in-game functionality in Patch 2.4.

  • MetaHud: Still a favorite by many players, it places all of your critical information around your character instead of up in the character box.

  • CyCircled: Another UI mod, this one changes your square hotkey buttons into circles. The link to the files in the article may be outdated, so if you are interested, try CyCircled WoW Interface page.

  • Totemus: A mod for Shamans that takes all their abilities, totem sets, weapon buffs, etc and puts them in one, configurable, circle based panel.

  • Ratings Buster: I can't even begin to tell you how much I love this AddOn. It converts equipment ratings into numbers that mean something. If those new shoulders add +9 to spell crit rating, RatingsBuster will translate it so you know that really means +0.45% to your chance to spell crit.

And finally we have a collection of posts that were just for fun:

That's it for this week, next week I'll cover Patch 2.07, the announcement of Nether Drake mounts and the infinite mana bug.