20 Things You Didn't Know About World of Warcraft

1.    During original WoW alpha, Scholomance was supposed to be an outdoor elite area (probably where Sorrow Hill is now), but the developers made it so big and good that they decided to make it an instance.
2.     At the beginning, there were shields and bucklers. Rogues and Hunters could use bucklers, but they later removed them, and Rogues/Hunters couldn't equip shields anymore. There are still bucklers in game, but they are labeled as "Shields".
3.     Survival talents for Hunters was the "melee" tree and had a Lacerate ability which dealt less than 100 damage at level 60.
4.     Discipline tree for Priests was supposed to be a "melee" tree (like Monks in some other games), which is why Inner Fire increased attack power.
5.     In Vanilla beta, Dwarves could be Mages.
6.     Hunters were using focus as their resource system, but it regenerated while standing still, and was very overpowered so they gave them mana instead.
7.     Several classes had talents which increased stats by a raw number (for example 20/40/60/80/100 Spell Damage (not percent but just 100 Spell Damage)), and they didn't scale at all with gear/level.
8.     There was almost no Spell Damage on gear during early Vanilla. It wasn't a strange thing to see a level 60 Mage with less than 30 Spell Damage.
9.     The reason why there are so many cloaks with exactly the same stats in the starting areas was because cloaks also had armor types (for example cloth/leather/mail/plate cloaks).
10.     There were two big islands off the western coast of Stranglethorn Vale, which were removed, but if you go far enough with mount and water walking, you can reach the area where they were. You will see that you are zoning in Isle of Doctor Lapidis or Gillijim's Isle.
11.     Elwynn Forest, Stormwind and Westfall were the first zones that Blizzard made back before 2001. That is why they are crappier than other starting zones.
12.     Azshara had very few quests because Blizzard had designed it with a terrible layout, and they realized that too late. They thought most people would hate it so much, so they just didn't bother and left it for future expansions (Cataclysm).
13.     Their original design (back before Alpha) was that Horde and Alliance each had only 100 quests in the game.
14.     At release, there were no quests at all in Silithus (or anything important), and it was added in a later patch.
15.     There were much less quests past level 50 at release, so players complained that they had to grind mobs in order to level, and Blizzard added more quests later.
16.     Blackrock Spire, Stratholme and Scholomance were all tuned for 15 people raids, and they were still way too hard even with 15 people, which they later toned down to 5 players (except Upper Blackrock Spire).
17.     Before TBC was released, you were able to blink through Deadmines portal and glitch it, cast slow fall off an unfinished tunnel, and reach a very early version of Hellfire Peninsula. Here is a video of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiL64...eature=related
18.     Emerald Dream was supposed to be released in Vanilla, as either zone/raid/continent. They scrapped it, but there are Emerald Dream zones in the game files, though not accessible in any way on official servers.
19.     T2 sets dropped in Molten Core, and had different graphics.
20.     Epic Mounts at release were just recolored normal mounts without armor. They removed them and replaced with armored mounts later (R.I.P Ivory Raptor). 

Via Palidan

None of the above information was gathered by myself. It's the work of the above named person, I'm merely redistributing it.