I got access to a wow beta account and for some reason picked Warlock to play. However I was a little early as their talents were still in progress. Yes I leveled a Warlock to 60 in beta with no talents..
It wasn't all bad. Voidwalkers had a "sacrifice and make your master immune for 5 seconds" skill which worked well with hellfire as you might guess.. this was patched in a couple days.
You could also do some fun with fear + dots to kill some very difficult elites.. if you took the time.
Release day
On release I decided to start a rogue, and joined a guild with some of my old MUD friends. Here's me being the first to chat in the area.
End of release day
Pretty much says it all here.
Shortly after reaching 60 on my rogue, I decided to roll a warrior right away. Warrior's received a pretty big nerf right before release and were very, very few in count, making tanking anything challenging very difficult. As you can see leveling was not exactly smooth going.
Release - molten core
We started making our way through molten core like many other guilds. Here's T1 armor on a night elf prior to being redone. The shoulders are T2 wrath - yes they dropped in MC for a little while.
Release
Here's my character in DPS gear. Pink boots! I was lucky enough to get a hand of rag before blackwing lair was released. This lead to new opportunities...
Early release
Not everything was quite done despite "release" status...
Early release
Not everything was all that thought out either...
$$!
Release
Different kind of release?
Release
Here's damage meters after a full ZG run. Yes that's right, with sweeping strikes and whirlwind and a hand of rag warriors could kick out ~25% more DPS than anyone.
Release
Guild eventually procured one of the first Thunderfury's.
Release - BWL
We were on the bleeding edge during BWL and was one of the first guilds to reach the Nefarian fight. No one really knew what to do until we hit on the what should be obvious strategy of "split up and kill all the adds pouring in until Nef comes flying in". As you can see we had a slight balance problem.
Release - BWL
We got the first world wide Nef kill. We announced it to the forums, and that he dropped a head quest with a turn in at Stormwind similar to Onyxia. That caused..
head quest with a turn in at Stormwind similar to Onyxia. That caused..
Release - BWL
Thousands of people made level 1 humans and ran to stormwind - it was total chaos. We turned in the head and... the server crashed.
The lord of blackrock spire. Me in redone T2.