🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 20:06:16 -0700, Tim Merrigan <tp...@ca.rr.com>
wrote:

>I've never played vanilla, having started with MoP, but I would like
>to explore pre cataclysm Azshara.  The Barrens, before the were split.
>Thousand Needles before it was flooded, etc.  (Or, for that mater, pre
>Sha Pandaria.  What's with destroying the world before we've barely
>started exploring it, anyway?)

You can see a bit of old Azshara when you do the Huln Highmountain
quests (and the Val'Sharah world quest that sends you there too) -
obviously it's missing the original mobs and quests (there were hardly
any quests there anyway) but the actual landscape is the pre-Cata one
:-) Also when the pvp brawl Southshore vs Tarren Mill is up, you get
original Hillsbrad Foothills with non-wrecked Southshore there (the
dungeon Old Hillsbrad is closer to the original than the present day,
too). There's not a lot else you can experience ingame though, other
than Theramore and Blasted Lands where you can talk to a nearby bronze
dragon to phase back to the old versions.

As to the rest, only answer is private servers at present, or various
old videos and photos, not the same as experiencing it yourself! And I
do wish they'd allowed a way to phase Vale of Eternal Blossoms rather
than just having it wrecked for everybody, the pre-Garrosh version was
much nicer, and if they'd thought to phase it, we could've had a
healing process in a patch to fill the gap after Siege of Orgrimmar.

Still, I guess the current way of totally removing old content is less
jarring than what Guild Wars 2 has, where the main city was destroyed
and rebuilt completely differently during a major storyline that's no
longer playable, so newer players like me have only ever known the new
version - BUT we get sent to an instance of the *old* version of the
city for various story quests, which is incredibly confusing when
suddenly everything looks completely different!