WoW Patch 1.2: The First EVER Patch, INTRO of LFG & MAJOR Change | Complete History of WoW

[Music] that's one point two named mysteries of Mora Don was World of Warcraft's first content patch releasing only six weeks after the base game on the 18th of December 2004 it introduced Mars on a large new dungeon that bulked out desolace focusing in on the origin lore of the center where's 8 our Sun of scenarios and Thera dices pairing resulted in the creation of the entire center race and now many years later Mara Dawn is the center of her grief this was a large three wing dungeon intended for players between levels 40 and 49 with the three wings being spread across that level bracket it on the quests that came along with it heavily bolstered the gameplay and the lure of desolace and Western calendar a place that without this patches contents was definitely a good bit closer to unfinished realistically it's quite easy to argue that mora Don was really intended for launch and missed the deadline but this was a wildly different era and world Warcraft shipped with more content than really anyone could have burned through that quickly even leveling to 60 at maximum speed with heavy optimizations which very few people did at this time took about six whole day slash played many players took months to get through the game rather than the days that were used to now while Blizzard was certainly cutting it close with content like with the raids of patch 1.1 thus was a substantial addition especially given how difficult and sprawling the higher level dungeons of World of Warcraft were as well later see with this series in the future patches dungeons in the game were truly designed to be adventures information on them was sparse and the game itself usually offered no more than a quest chain teasing the lore and setting up the enemy and given the freeform design and the varying utility of the classes in the game at this time it was a much less tailored experience one that varied wildly from Party to party you and your friends would have your own story to tell based on how your group faced the challenges within and that's part of what made the dungeon delving experience of early world Warcraft so darn memorable this was the first major addition to the game and was the first time that many new or younger players will have booted up a game and actually found it to be different in this case sure it was nothing extreme but this would have been a relatively new experience to a lot of players in the early 2000s while players open the launcher to have a sizable download and a list of things that were changed and new a free update to the game one that fixed loads of teething issues and added a whole new dungeon this came at a good time too as the subscription cost on top of the full price to release that was asking for quite a loss of course world Warcraft had so much content that that was entirely justified but this kind of patch really would have alleviated people's fears their subscription cost was clearly not going to waste and it does in fact give you this access to a changing and evolving world getting better only a few weeks after launch this was the major feature of patch 1.2 but there were two other headliners first off cloaks and helms could now be hidden from the interface menu now this was a feature that many made use of given how badly cloaks would clip and how Helms would hide most of the decisions major in character creation fundamentally though this was Blizzard reacting to player feedback and allowing them to further change their experience to make it their own and this is a trend that largely did define this era given how this was implemented in a rather inelegant way simply being a checkbox in the interface menu well I guess substance over style helped to find the game of this era - it really was Blizzard thinking of solution and quickly implementing it then the next major feature in 1.2 was an event the feast of great winter just in time for the real world Christmas I don't think I need to explain how magical Ironforge would have looked fully decked out with Holly in the decorative trace at this time a magnificent experience for those new to online games despite not being very serious you can imagine sitting down to a cup of hot chocolate logging in defeating the Grinch while taking in the atmosphere both in Azeroth and outside it all had a festive spark it's the touches like this that while not unique were delivered in such a light-hearted way for World of Warcraft that it never really broke the immersion of the world added a lot of character to the experience sure a lot of the blizzard events would feel a little bit silly but they always ended up feeling distinct and in universe immersion in Azeroth and it's familiar customs I think was only heightened by events like this and it served to foster a deep love that many people have with the world but of course vanilla was an interesting time and the minor system changes in this patch are fascinating to look back on a fundamental change was made where players would receive credit for killing a monster even if they died in battle and this was not a bug fix either this was a genuine design shift imagine dying in group content and not getting credit for the boss kill rating would be an entirely different landscape if not for this change in fact I can see it now as a level twenty-something hunter you'd have heard of an amazing quality blue bow found in the wailing cavern so you would have spent a while in the barren setting up a group you and your new friends would have went through all those confusing tunnels and after clearing a few bosses and beating the real challenge the infamous jump you'd end up fighting Lord Serpentis and right easy God is low health in your excitement you take one step too far back and Verdun the avert living would have killed you and you'd be dead you would not have got credit for the kill and when venom strike finally drops the warrior would have got it with their greed roll a pretty distressing way to ruin an evening for sure and there's no way you'd be playing with that warrior ever again out of the mixture of anger and shame thankfully though this is not something that remained an issue in the game for very long and really was not much of an issue once raiding actually kicked off but one point to also out of the ability to purchase other racial mounts at exalted reputation which offered players a chance to go a little bit off script and ride whatever they wanted provided of course they put the effort in gnomes could escape their dreaded Meccano Striders the noise of which drove many people to madness and tauren could hop on orcs wolves increasing their chances of actually making it through doors there were still some race restrictions though was blizzard did want to keep the game just not looking too silly Turin could not ride skeletal steeds or Raptors given their size and only gnomes could ride the Macau hiders the mysteries of Mara dawn also implemented the looking for group Channel so the players could quickly uncover those mysteries by finding a group in major cities without clogging up general or trade chat although being real it did little to stem that sight many players opted to use trade chat for absolutely everything anyway be that trading or spreading accusations of ninja looting before we get onto the more incremental change though there's a portent of the future here the patch notes say this additional improvements in looking for group functionality will be added in future patches Boulder Blizzard to call them improvements but that's not going to be covered till the next episode so hold tight for now though let's go through a ton of the smaller fixes and adjustments in patch 1.2 the game was just so different back then that examining these really just gives us a window into the design of the time some of them show off how supremely rough world Warcraft was at this time especially in the player experience site first off this patch made it so the player is afflicted by hibernate fear and SAP had an increasing chance to break free as the effect went on so it will last for about 15 seconds now the variance on the bad end was really rough prior to this resulting in a very frustrating experience when playing against a crowd control class although even with his change and hey sometimes today warlocks did remain to be a pretty frustrating and frightening opponent we then have some glaring balance issues being looked at here the most egregious of which being the druid bear form where the armor bonus needed to be almost tripled in order for them to be ineffective tanked and even out that they still did take more damage than warriors did in fact this is a fundamental difference that resulted in a lot of very interesting composition choices you see back in this iteration of world Warcraft class design hybrids could sometimes actually handle multiple roles albeit not as effectively as a pure class druids were especially good at this they had Bear tanking and cat DPS under the one feral combat tree and what this meant in practice was the Druids could be used as a flexible offtank when necessary and then otherwise performed cat DPS judy's this worked well for emergency situations and led to some interesting raid strategies and they also had a backup mana pool to throw around some heals too but of course the other side of that was that really they weren't going to be your main tank as much now as for some other interesting balance changes affecting warriors spell reflection was originally able to reflect abilities not just spells which I'm sure resulted in some very interesting PvP situations like rogues cheap shotting themselves keep in mind though at this point in the game you could not see buffs on enemies without a mage's detect magic so even if you were wary of spell reflects you still might be caught off guard if you miss the animation still the topic of warriors mortal strike was changed from dealing percentage damage to being weapon damage on a flat amount something that could have gone very wrong if it was not that way because if you had a whole bunch of warriors and mortal strike was just doing 4 to 5 percent HP is damage well let's just say bosses would not last very long Blizzard would not implement an uncapped flat percentage damage mechanic again now in return for these nerfs warriors were granted pummel a melee interrupt and this actually meant that warriors could double interrupt with shield bash and pummel if they have the macro setup to put on a shield bash and then go back to their usual weapon during combat then over on the economical side of things it's hard to find exact numbers but it seems that fishing was a little bit too lucrative in the early days Blizzard reduced the selling price of fished items and reduced the chance of getting greens while fishing it also initially did not require a minimum level to pick up and this meant that a low level character could max out fishing pretty quickly and earn a ton of money they would of course just have to progress while avoiding mobs in the higher level zones basically fishing was just a little bit overlooked and it needed to be reined in [Music] as for general player convenience there were some positive changes in one too but they weren't free druids on priests who were tired of buffing their group with mark of the wild or power at fortitude individually they were given a new option group wide buffs they didn't just login though to find these powerful lovely handy new spells no they had to find those spells through an item drop in this case it was a book that would teach you the spell for elite mobs and bosses above the mid 40 level range there was a tiny chance that the spell book would drop allowing a priest or a druid to use a reagent thankfully available through the reagent vendors to buff an entire party at once super handy but sadly for mages with their arcane intellect or worse still for the paladin's who granted blessings with only a 5-minute cooldown buffing players will still a decently laborious process of course not that every druid or priest had access to these tones as while they were sellable on the auction house given the nature of the game at this time I'd say a huge percentage of people playing those classes didn't even know what to look for while having to find ancient or secret knowledge to learn new techniques was great for the RPG feeling of the game the mysteries of Mara dawn also altered class fantasy for one particular class warlocks demons were now given random names from a huge selection based on type although in exchange they lost something that was extremely unintentional but ended up aiding the class fantasy of warlocks being pretty scary they lost the ability to kill players during duels the result of something between pet casts not being canceled and dart damage coming in at the same time that the jewels one HP protection limit ended so that's another thing that happened they were terrifying enough to jail thanks to their toolkit even without the looming fear of death and the subsequent corpse run beyond that though this patch ultimately did not change a lot it fixed a laundry list of issues with items and quests ranging from reducing the amount of kills needed for a quest or ensuring that some items had the correct stats there were little UI changes that made life a bit easier like arrows in the mini-map being easier to see plus they added an in-game toggle menu for add-ons but really it didn't change the landscape of Azeroth it iterated on it and improved it so all in all patch 1.2 was carried heavily by morons and many many fixes it was forever only six weeks after launch which is an update cadence that basically no developer could match today as for whether this trend would continue well the next patch would not be for almost three more months in terms of the subscription fee that would be like paying for well essentially an expansion pack would it be worth it well tune to the next episode to find out as we look at more design changes that would change the game greatly and traverse the ruins of dire mole so there you go about as episode two of our patch retrospective series if you'd like to help us out with this series the best way to do that is over on patreon and if you go for the $25 tier then that we will be sending physical things to you for the month of August that does and also involve two bonus items that I think you'll find to be pretty cool and that yeah just in general a massive thank you to everyone over on patreon they really do make these larger series a lot more possible to do and of course thank you very much for watching this video with all that says I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Bellular Warcraft

Views: 221,969

Keywords: Mysteries of maraudon, maraudon, Wow documentary, world of warcraft documentary, classic wow, wow classic, classic, vanilla wow, vanilla patch 1.2, vanilla patch 1.12, history of world of warcraft, history of wow, wow patch 1.2, wow patch 1.3, patch 8.2, world of warcraft, warcraft, wow, bellular, bellulargaming, bellular news, battle for azeroth, BFA

Id: 19phIGfFm0Y

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019