Vanilla WoW was unforgiving, maybe as bad as FFXI was.

1. You had to go down into scholomance when the cap was 60 to use the alchemy labs to create flasks, you couldn't go down there solo and that instance was rough.

2. You had to farm months to complete Molten Core, the rep require to get the item to "douse the flames" took forever to get.

3. You had to farm onixya for her scale in order to make the cape required not to instantly die from Nefarions shadowflame.

4. Stratholme was a 10man instance that was ridiculously hard, infact, you could still die there even when the cap was 70 if you weren't careful.

5. You had to do a huge annoying quest chain to gain entry to onixya, and Upper blackrock Spire.

6. To complete the spore boss in naxx you had to go get the shadow resist buff out of ZG.

7. World bosses dropped some of the best gear in the game, you could be pk'ed while fighting them.


People only seem to remember WoW when Blizzard started to streamline the game down.