My first character was a Tauren Hunter. As I was leveling I kept seeing all of these high level characters going towards this huge city up on top of these bluffs. I decided to follow the road that everyone was taking, hoping it would take me there and I'd get to see what's so important.
As I was walking there I got attacked by a cougar that was a much higher level than me. I tried at least 5 times to walk around it but I'd either aggro another higher level mob or get the cougar on me again and die.
I decided I had to go back and continue gaining levels to beat this damn cougar. So that's what I did, I gained a few levels and walked right back to that cougar.
I died again.. a few more times actually..
But finally after what felt like forever, I was able to kill this freaking thing and continue the walk to this huge city. I had no idea how to get up for the first minute since there were no stairs and the lifts weren't visible yet. I had thought that I just wasn't a high enough level so I was kinda mad thinking I did all of that walking for nothing.
Once I waited on the lift and got to the top of the bluffs I fell in love. Thunder Bluff was amazing and so many people (maybe like 10) were in one place! It was a top memory for me in WoW, just realizing what I can do and how you can do it.
I have so many memories it's genuinely hard to choose, things like seeing capital cities for the first time, meeting a friend for the first time in-game, my first dungeon group and plenty of others.
If I had to choose a standout memory, it would be running through Uldaman for the first time with a decently geared 50(?) hunter. We still struggled from memory as it wasn't a properly put together group. But going as far as we did and seeing all the cool different things like Ironaya for the first time was incredible to me as a 12 year old kid. For such a long and often frustrating dungeon, Uldaman was still a very cool experience as someone new to MMO's.
oh, boy, i dunno. im bad at picking favorites. i guess i would have to say, once i started raiding in TBC. my guild wasnt very large, so we couldnt do any of the 25 man content without pugging a ton or collabing with another guild. so we mostly stuck to Kara. we werent the best players in the world, but we were dedicated and went at it every week. as a huge lore hound, i loved karazhan. i loved just looking around the environment. especially the library (i wonder how many people ever bothered to look up in that place?). i was also kinda peeved that they didnt bother to put Moroes' blinders on his model, or make any mention of them. instead, he was just a generic looking undead unit. i really loved doing that place every week and i remember how long it took us to FINALLY bring down malcazar. how good that felt. and then, when we were able to full clear the place every week. such a feeling of accomplishment.
honorable mention: tanking firelands in cata and doing better when i was drunk off my ass. my guildmates would call me Norm (after the Cheers character) and i could barely speak an intelligible sentence, but damned if we didn't ALWAYS do better when i was playing drunk. we first-try'ed several bosses that we had been wiping on for weeks when i played drunk. walking rhyolith in circles and picking up adds when it was my turn, required 10 billion percent concentration. it was like playing in a zen state.
I was level 59 with 3-4 bubs exp left before 60. Instead of finding one more quest, I just ran loops around the Burning Steppes killing everything in my path until I got that (at the time) final DING!
Getting the last piece of the Nightslayer set on that character was also way up there. Finally having a cohesive look was amazing.
The Warsong Gulch release. I think my druid was around level 20-30 at the time and it really blew me away. For days before I'd been happily questing through lazy zones like Mulgore and The Barrens but then I find that WSG entrance at the mouth of Ashenvale, queue one up and get greeted with these drums blasting in my headphones and everyone's stacking the gates getting ready to kill each other. It was a huge adrenaline spike.
I was addicted. As a resto druid I quickly found my place running flags and keeping people alive and with (good) PvP healers being in short supply I made a ton of friends. Someone would be on the verge of death and my spells would shock them back to life and once the dust settled I'd get all kinds of /emotes and pms like they'd never been healed before.
Some of them would follow me on world PvP excursions, counter-ganking in STV and Tanaris, eventually doing arena. I really miss it.
For me it was the day my in game buddy (who would later go on to become one of my best friends, he's even going to be in my wedding) got our mounts at 40 for the first time. We were excitedly running around Hillsbrad Foothills looking for something to fuck up, and decided to mount up and ride into Hillsbrad Fields. Just as we were coming over the last hill, the Legend of Zelda theme started playing. That was just so well timed and cool to me.
Not sure about fondest but a funny one that takes me back is when I was getting ran through RFC as a druid by a death knight.
I had met a lowbie leveling and he told me his friend would take us through RFC. I had no idea what that was at the time but I was down for the adventure. After seeing this DK tear his way through RFC I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
At the time I hadn't bought Wrath yet so when I created my character DK wasn't available. I asked the guy how to become a DK and he told me you needed a level 55 first. I thought he meant a character turned into a DK so I asked if Druids could become DKs...
...he said that Druids became professional waffle makers and only warriors could. I immediately logged off and created a warrior lol. That warrior was the character I took to 55 to become a Death Knight.
It wasn't until later I found out through a friend that my Druid was never destined to become a professional waffle maker.
This isn't one of my fondest memories but it was one of my favorites. Way back when I was an undead warlock in early vanilla I was busting my ass to get LBRS runs so I could get the libram drop required to summon an Infernal.
Infernals are why I made my warlock. At least it was what drew me to them initially. The cinematic with the infernal in the early WoW days still grabs me.
So I was super stoked to say the least. It was a grind. I ran it countless times before I finally got the drop but I was SO excited once I got it. I was so excited that I wanted to celebrate. So I took my guild out to Ashenvale and laid siege on Astranaar. We wiped out the town easy and I danced with my infernal in their moon well. It wasn't long before more and more Alliance kept coming to defend it but my favorite part was fighting off the Alliance from INSIDE their city. We eventually did get wiped out but it was great times when we held it :)
Me and my buddy on our level 19 hunter twinks (Horde) sitting at the grave yard in darkshire on lamp posts. Ganking every level 40 and under toon that walked by. And then the 60's starting showing up. Had a little fun but then died a lot. lol Good times..
I think I was around level 11. I had accidentally made my way to Barrens after my discovery of the zeppelin, and stumbled against this mysterious cave. After descending from the hill and dropping to its entrance, a raptor basically one shot my almost-full-white geared poor lock. You see, the mobs outside of the dungeon zone were also elites back then, and me, deciding that this must have been the end-game that everyone was talking about, I was determined to form a party to farm these insanely hard mobs for the ultimate riches.
After getting trolled hard in Barrens chat, a player had whispered to me. His name was Illidan.
Holy fucking shit! I thought, this guys name is FRIKKING ILLIDAN! He must be covered in Epics, heck even in GODDAMN LEGENDARIES
He was able to get the name of a motherfucking ENDBOSS OF THE EXPANSION! Oh man, I was so lucky.
So I start waiting.. I wait, and I wait.
He will be probably here on his EPIC mount, oneshot everything and let me have all the loot for myself!
I wait a little bit more. He says that he had to fight some enemies in between, but it should not take long and soon he can kill all the mobs for me.
Okay.
So after about 30 minutes, a lone orc hunter arrives, running on barefoot, with few mobs aggroing behind him. He seems to be wearing only a shirt and pants, running for dear life. It does not look good, and that one bite does it. He dies just before me, with that comical Orc death sound -Aauuugghh-, his corpse hits the ground. Thump. I do not think much of it, until the orc comes back to his corpse (which took a good 5 minutes).
"Hi gallow sorri im late.lets kill some dinos!"
You see, while I knew my WoW lore well, I didn't know the little function of shift clicking a players name. There he was, Illidan, the barefooted orc hunter, level 9. I had a pretty good laugh, and we got res-killed by the raptors until he decided "nah they too strong sori".
We went back to the Orc beginner zone afterwards, and I helped him tame some boars. I never saw him again though, and since Blizzard forced the name change of Lore characters, I would not recognize him anyway.
Thank you, barefoot Illidan.
I started WoW in BC.
I was really impressed after crossing the portal and panning my camera around to see what I came out of, then I looked up and I thought wow.
after playing around in hellfire for a bit I got one hit by the Fel Reaver who was walking around off-camera.
Barrens is probably my favourite questing zone.
The first character I ever created was a nelf druid. Upon completing character creation, I zone into the game for the first time. I find myself surrounded by probably 20+ other lvl 1 characters in various states of undress, dancing, dueling, licking, and mooing at each other. I was blown away by this strange new world.
One time I walked into org to discover a line of dancing (druid) bears stretching from the gate to the bank.
My first undead character I decided to be a traveling salesman and made my first gold by selling tailoring and enchanting products to other noobs.
For me entering Stormwind for the first time is one of my fondest memories. I was mostly playing alone, following the human quest chains, got the quest from Goldshire to deliver to stormwind. I legit had to ask someone in /s 'where is stormwind' and they pointed me down the road. It was night, I had the headset on with sound turned up. I approached the city, the music changed, I looked up and the music with the view matched together perfectly. The imersion was real, the wow was there. I spent an hour getting lost in the city and exploring.
When my friends and I made our twinks, we all decided to go as rogues, since we were teens at the time and I don't think I had even heard of other kinds of twinks. For level 19's, the BiS sword that didn't have an abysmal drop rate was Cruel Barb, a drop from VanCleef, in the Deadmines. I remember being a low level rogue and swimming down the coast to try to find the easiest way there without getting killed, my friends and I swimming together. We eventually made it, then had to stealth our way past alliance characters and mobs to the entrance where our friend's high level character finally met up with us.
We ran that dungeon 20 times and all of us had gotten our gear except one. Incredibly, run after run, that Cruelest of Barbs was just not going to drop for this guy.
Finally we actually put in a ticket with a GM and told him of our plight, and he said something like, "Let me talk to Mr. VanCleef and see what i can do."
Next run, we got it! I have no idea what or how that GM did what he did but man, we were all blown away. I'll never forget that.
Everything before expansions provides an abundance of great memories for me. It's why I'm elated we are getting Classic to experience it all again the way it used to be when it was really enjoyable to play and I couldn't pull myself away from it. 2 hours of retail and I'm calling it quits for the day. Classic was an all day affair with never enough time in the day to get things done.