In vanilla, certain classes are pigeonholed to a single spec. Druids, priests and palys had to be healers. You can even be rejected in the raid or guild just because you're not a healer spec. Druids served as priests' slaves solely for their Innervate ability which is at the highest tier of the Resto tree, and some butthole guilds even disallowed Druids with no Innervate to raid, not mine though. Hence, druids can't even use their own ability to regen their own mana.

Mages had it rough as well. If the 40 men raid had a shortage of wizards, the few mages had to conjure water like a million times and trade everyone individually for water and food.

Vaelastrasz, I'll never forget that name for as long as I live...

After clearing the Twin Emps, we never bothered with C'thun sadly. I wanted to fight him since he's an Old God and I've a deep interest in Old Gods. We went once, wiped in 30 seconds, then went off concentrate on Naxx.

Say what you will about anything else, but the community WAS better before automated LFD. Now you just get dropped in a dungeon with a bunch of people you probably will never see again, to run an instance that is ludicrously easy and get loot that's going to be obsolete in an hour. We used to actually talk to one another and coordinate and talk tactics and share food... there was definitely more player interaction and more of a sense of community. As much as I love the game, I definitely feel like Blizz are callously exploiting the tedium of levelling to sell their powerleveling service, at a very high price. Damn do you pay through the nose for someone to press a few keys. Not that I ever have, or will.

Some classes / specs were objectively bad for raiding. Others you couldn't raid on because they were not viable as you had nothing to help the raid with.

Gearing was a complete mess. You had INT stats on tanking gear, STR stats on healing gear. Those were completely useless.

Bosses were boring and not challenging at all. The challenge was in getting together a group that is not full of complete idiots.

There was only one difficulty, meaning those that were really good were not able to prove themselves.

And many other things.

Not challenging? The Red Dragon was called the Guild Breaker was he not?

WoW also has fun exploration.

I usually explore whole zones before questing.

There's a simple enjoyment to be had just by hanging around in remote areas killing things with no one around but you.

Like I said Vanilla WOW at times was like Morrowind.

Yes there were Kill and Collect quest but so far I see a good number of 1 goal quest.

One of the quests in duskwood required me to explore the entire nation of Stormwind (Elwynn, Westfall, Redridge, and Duskwood) to solve a mystery and kill a certain NPC.

Oh balls I forgot they have subscription fees. Nevermind.

You know what is guild breaker? Mythic difficulty is guild breaker because it actually requires SKILL. Not mechanics that kill you because you didn't farm shit quality gear for 3 months before seeing them.

Stupid and boring = boss with 3 abilities that require 30 people to have X gear in order to not take much damage, and 10 people to just tag along for the fun of dying and not doing anything because they didn't spend a lifetime farming crap.
Challenging = boss with 10+ abilities where 20 people need to work as a perfectly synchronised team and every single person's personal responsibility failure is guaranteed to wipe the raid.
Play Mythic or Challenge dungeons. ;)
Come back, come back!

FOR AZEROTH!

The only thing I really wish I had experienced of these times is the Alterac Valley of old. Must have been real awesome clashing for hours in the Field of Strife, doing miniquests and gathering resources.

Other than that, what Elenaire said. I'm glad I missed Vanilla.

Play the free demo version. Leveling is pretty fast now, but you could play an elf/dranei, a dwarf/gnome, and a human (ally side), and an orc/troll/goblin, undead, BE, tauren, and panda each 1-20 without too much overlap in content. Run all the 15-20 dungeons (quite a few).

Anyway, you could get 10-20 hours out of it easy without paying a dime.

Edit - and I would add several of the starter zones are still among my favorite areas.

I only got to experience it during the public test realms with the pre-made characters. It was lots of fun. There were many areas where you could assist and plenty of items to collect and hand in. It really felt like a shared effort. When one faction managed to summon the elemental, the whole stalemate would be broken instantly and it was utterly satisfying to see your enemies’ defence crushed and the players retreat frantically. I think Alterac Valley just suffered from a design flaw, it was clearly designed to be a more dynamic but finite battle, but it would always end in ‘zerging’ and a never-ending back and forth. Even when the main base was under attack, the attacked faction could almost always recover from it and drive the attackers back due to the distance between the battle and the graveyards (and rogues were good at recapturing graveyards). At some point Blizzard pretty much removed the NPCs from the equation and made it trivial to beat the captains and generals. Such a shame.

WOW got good by Wrath.