There
are many World of Warcraft (WoW)
players out there who lamented about the good old times before Blizzard decided
to dumb down the gameplay with the release of the very first expansion, The
Burning Crusade. Mmogah believes that if you happen to be one of them, you’ll
definitely want to check out Nostalrius, one of the best private servers for
Vanilla WoW (patch 1.12.1).
Nostalrius
is identical to retail WoW to some extent. It offers 2 types of servers – a PvE
and a PvP server that run on a 1x rate. Unlike other private servers,
Nostalrius does not provide bonus benefits or rewards to their donors so it’s
not at all pay to win, has a very strict policy regarding multi-boxing cheating
and botting, and even often bans the gamers’ accounts. The best part though is that this private server is
perhaps one of the most highly populated private WoW servers out there that is
running Vanilla WoW. With a player base
of between 4000 to 6000 at almost all hours of the day, you’ll definitely
be able to find a group for whichever stuff you want to do – be it running a
dungeon or a raid, sacking an opposing faction’s city, or questing.
Sounds
like fun? Well, I’m sure you’re eager to get started. The gameplay in
Nostalrius is pretty much similar to the
retail version of Vanilla WoW since they are running the same patch. This
means that all those new classes that had come with the subsequent expansions
won’t be available. The Horde is left with their core races, namely Orc, Forsaken, Tauren and Troll; while
the Alliance has the Humans, Dwarves,
Night Elves and Gnomes. In terms of classes, the Paladin class is
restricted to only the Dwarves and Humans. The Shaman class, on the other hand,
is limited to all races of the Horde, with the sole exception of the Forsaken.
Similar
to retail WoW, questing makes up the “bread” of WoW while the “butter” mainly
consists of occasional trips to the dungeons and to battlegrounds or arenas.
Questing in Nostalrius might be a bit troublesome than in retail as some quests
are broken, especially those quests in Desolace.
Thus, it might be wise to browse through the list of broken quests at the forums
prior to heading into a zone to level. After all, it can be very frustrating to
have wasted hours trying to figure out what you did wrongly when all these
while it is the quest that is the core of the problem.
For PvE, Nostalrius currently has several
end-game raids available, including Molten
Core, Blackwing Lair and Onyxia, and it is going to release the 20-man Ahn’Qiraj raid soon. Once Ahn’Qiraj is
completely released, the developers will continue on by testing and releasing Scourge Invasion and Naxrammas. All of
these are in addition to the world bosses that the game provides. However,
since the game is running on the pre-expansion patch, the number of raids and
dungeons can be less than what most experienced WoW retail players would be
used to.
Due
to Nostalrius’ high player population, the queue times for PvP are respectably fast. The game currently offers 3
battlegrounds, Warsong Gulch, Arathi
Basin and Alterac Valley, and if you happen to be playing on the PvP
server, you’ll definitely be engaged in open world ganking… ahem, PvP, I mean. Well,
it does bring back all the good old times, doesn’t it?
Of
course, there are also professions that you can pick up and level, a range of
trading options, mounts to collect, achievements to attain, guilds to sign up
for, and many more. It’s also good that Nostalrius provides rapid Game Masters’
responses, which is in fact, much faster than what current retail WoW could
offer.
Being
a private WoW server, Nostalrius does have its fair share of downsides as well.
Besides the aforementioned broken quest lines, the game will occasionally feel
laggy despite having good latency. Some players reckoned that it may be caused
by a sudden spike in people logging in.
The
high population in the game also brings some disadvantages, which include very
high competition for special mobs or nodes. In fact, if you happen to pick up Alchemy and Herbalism, you might have
quite a bit of trouble in finding Black
Lotuses. Players also like to group up for quests due to the lower mob
count available, but this also means that the drop rate will be drastically
lowered and your group might need to grind more to collect all the quest items
you all need.
Although
Nostalrius has its problems, it is still one of the fastest growing and perhaps
best private WoW server on the internet that doesn’t have any pay to win
element. If you’re feeling nostalgic for Vanilla WoW, or even if you’ve never
played WoW before but are looking for a challenge, Nostalrius is definitely the
best choice out there. So, don’t miss out on all the fun – play Nostalrius
today.