Memory Lane: Reagents

Mists of Pandaria brought a lot of changes to the way our classes worked - the old talent trees were totally eliminated, divorcing your specialization from your talent choices, with the (fairly successful, I'd say) goal of truly making talents choices, and not simply having a "right way" and a "wrong way" to assign talent points. This change simplified things quite a bit, getting rid of any of the "10% more haste" and that sort of thing.

Another change was that it finally put the last nail in coffin for reagents. Today, the only things Reagent vendors sell are the Glyph/Talent reassignment items. So, in the interest of nostalgia, I figured I'd look at all the crap that we had to carry in our bags to function back in the day.

Priests: Honestly, here's where my memory's going to be murkiest, because my Priest only reached 85 when patch 5.0 was already out. He had been the only class I'd never gotten to the level cap (I plan to get at least one of each class to 90 this time around, and while it saddens me to have a level 90 Blood Elf but not an Orc or Goblin, so be it - then again, the Orc Warrior could very well be one of the first "class duplicates" to hit 90, though that will probably not happen for many months.) What I do remember is that they had to buy Holy Candles and Sacred Candles. As I recall, these were used to cast Prayer of Fortitude and Prayer of Spirit, and probably also Prayer of Shadow Protection. Something you'll notice a lot here is that most classes used to have a separate, individual-person buff that was reagent-free, and a raid-wide (or class-wide) buff that cost something other than mana. Today of course, these buffs are always raid-wide.

Warlocks: Warlocks had a ton of stuff. Primarily, they had to keep a whole separate bag for Soul Shards. Soul Shards used to be used for a lot of spells, including summoning your demons. They also did not stack, so you really did want a dedicated bag for them. Indeed, many of the old Warlock class quests, where you would learn to summon a new demon, would grant you a bigger soul bag. Additionally, Warlocks conjured Fire Stones and... there was another one, but I can't remember what it's called. Anyway, they were temporary weapon imbues that would give you a slight buff. Also, Warlocks had to carry around Infernal Stones and Demonic Runes in order to cast the spells that would call down Infernals and Doomguards. In the case of Inferno, to learn it, you had to do a somewhat out-of-the-way quest in Felwood that I had to look up at level 80. Soulstones were also a conjured item, and for a long time could only be cast preemptively.

Mages: Beyond Conjured Food and Conjured Water (and they used to be separate things,) Mages had to carry Arcane Powder in order to cast Arcane Brilliance (the single-person version was called Arcane Intellect) and to conjure Mage Tables. They also needed Runes of Teleportation and Runes of Portal to use their travel spells. This was all true fairly recently, so not much shock to be had, I'd guess.

Druids: Druids only had a couple reagents. In order to cast Gift of the Wild (the raid-wide version of Mark of the Wild) they would need to carry around some sort of store-bought herb (can't recall the name.) In order to use Rebirth, which was at one time the only Druid resurrection spell, you needed to buy various seeds - back when abilities had ranks, you'd need a new seed for each new rank.

Rogues: Oh boy. Not only did Rogues have to carry their poisons on them, they also had to make their own poisons! Rogues actually had two quasi-professions in addition to their other skills. Poisons was a bit like alchemy, requiring you to blend herbs in a vial. However, the herbs were all available from Poison vendors (you might still be able to hear them talking about those herbs in the poison store in Stormwind's Old Town.) These herbs could be found in pickpocketed junk boxes as well. Additionally, in order to pick locks, Rogues needed to have Thieves' Tools, which you'd get for doing one of the class quests or you could just buy them off poison vendors. Additionally, Rogues had to carry Blinding Powder to use Blind and Vanishing Powder to use Vanish. The former was made with the Poison skill while the latter was simply bought. Rogues were always dealing with Poison Vendors.

Shamans: The biggest burden on Shaman inventory space was, of course, their totems. Up to level 30, you'd get a quest at every tenth level to get another totem. This was an actual, physical thing to stick in your backpack that was required to cast totem spells. It was less of a reagent than a tool, as the totems would of course never be consumed, but it did mean that four inventory slots were locked down on Totem duty (though Ancestral Recall meant you could get rid of your Hearthstone if you so wished.) Reincarnation used to cost an Ankh, which was simply bought from Reagent vendors. Now, Water Walking and Water Breathing (the latter now dearly departed) took Fish Oil and Shiny Fish Scales. If you don't play a shaman, you might have wondered why the hell you kept finding those things at every damn level. These otherwise vendor trash-like items were actually used as reagents for these spells. If a shaman wanted to cast them, they had to farm them (or buy them from other players.) Good riddance, I say.

Hunters: Much as Warlocks had to dedicate a bag slot to Soul Shards, Hunters used to have to carry around quivers and ammo pouches for their ammunition. While a Warlock who was very good at keeping their pets alive could potentially get away with no soul bag, Hunters absolutely needed their ammo bags. The bags themselves actually provided a 15% haste buff, and provided a very generous amount of space for ammo, which we should remind you, was consumed by every single attack. It did stack to 100 (or maybe 200...) but you would definitely need to keep your arsenal full, especially before a big raid. Ammo would also vary in strength, so you'd want to upgrade it as you leveled up or went from tier to tier. Additionally, this made switching from Guns to Bows or Crossbows a bigger burden, because they used totally different ammo that required totally different bags. And that's before we even talk about the Pet leveling and ability-learning system. I won't go into that much, but one aspect was that you had to keep your pet happy in order for them to do their maximum damage. To do this, you had to carry around food that they would like. For example, Wolves only like meat and fish. Bears will eat nearly anything.

Warriors: Warriors didn't have to carry a god damned thing. Screw those guys.

Paladins: The Blessing System, as recently as Wrath of the Lich King (though far more so earlier) was batshit insane. Paladins used to have far more blessings that did much more specific things. Starting I believe in BC, they were given "Greater Blessings," which would affect the target and everyone of the same class that was in the Raid. Combining this with the fact that there were far more blessings to give out (four in Wrath of the Lich King, and many more earlier, though some of those were situational blessings that became Hands) meant that A: you had to coordinate big time between the Paladins in the raid, and B: You had to carry a whole lot of Symbols of Kings, which were required for each cast of a Greater Blessing. Additionally, Paladins had to carry around Symbols of Divinity. Paladins used to have an ability called Divine Intervention. What this did was the Paladin would sacrifice him or herself (though this did not incur durability damage, which was a big incentive to use it) to remove the targeted ally from combat, preventing them from moving or using any abilities for three minutes. This was a wipe-recovery move. If a fight was going south fast, you'd cast this on a healer and let everyone die. Because the target was forced out of combat, the boss would reset, and if the target was not too close, you could immediately begin resurrecting people. Obviously you never wanted to use this if there was a chance you could actually beat the boss, but it was a nice way to save two raid members their repair costs and get people off the ground quicker.

Death Knights: Yes, even Death Knights used to have reagents to carry around. They only had one, which was Corpse Dust. Corpse Dust was only situationally required, and if you did not use Raise Dead very often, you did not need it. Corpse Dust was only required if you wanted to raise a ghoul but had no humanoid corpses nearby to do so. Actually, Raise Dead used to be a weird and cool ability. If cast on a humanoid npc corpse, you'd simply get a normal ghoul. But if you cast it on a fellow player (there was not Raise Ally back then,) the player would actually become a ghoul, getting totally different abilities to use. There was even an Unholy talent back in Wrath that caused the Death Knight to come back as one of these ghouls for 30 seconds or so after they were killed.

So: Reagents. We used to carry a lot of crap around with us just in order to function. Inventory space has always been at a bit of a premium in WoW, but you can be very thankful that at least we don't have to lug all this stuff with us.