WoW Classic Glossary: Abbreviations & Acronyms

As someone who came back to private servers after a long stint on retail, I had difficulty understanding what people were actually talking about in player chat. I tried to find explanations (or even translations) online but didn’t have much luck. I asked on the forums here for some contributions and we ended up with a collection of explanations for common terms, acronyms and abbreviations expected to exist in Classic. We hope you find this useful 🙂

Instances acronyms and variations

RFC – Ragefire Chasm
WC – Wailing Caverns
DM (@lvl 20ish) – The Deadmines

• VC – also The Deadmines (Edwin VanCleef being the final boss)

SFK – Shadowfang Keep
BFD – Blackfathom Deeps
Stocks – The Stockade
RFK – Razorfen Kraul
SM – Scarlet Monastery

• :GY – Graveyard section only
• :L/Lib – Library section only
• :A/Arm – Armory section only
• :C/Cath – Cathedral section only

RFD – Razorfen Downs
ZF – Zul’Farrak
ST – Sunken Temple
Scholo – Scholomance
Strat – Stratholme

• :Orb Run – A common gold farming technique in which participants clear Strat Live for the righteous orbs and round robin the drops.
• :UD – Undead side
• :L/Live – Scarlet side (living side)

Mara – Maraudon

• :Blue/Purple – A variant of Maraudon where players enter through the blue/purple side.
• :Orange – A variant of Maraudon where players enter through the orange side.
• :Princess – A variant of Maraudon where players use the Scepter of Celebras in order to skip most of the bosses and only kill the final 1-3 bosses of the instance.

BRD – Blackrock Depths
LBRS – Lower Blackrock Spire
UBRS – Upper Blackrock Spire

• :Rend – A variant of UBRS where players stop after killing Warchief Rend Blackhand.
• :Jed/Rend – Jed Runewatcher is a rare spawn in UBRS that drops the healing pre-bis trinket Briarwood Reed. Explanation on process here.

DM – Dire Maul

• :N – North Wing only
  :E – East Wing only
  :W – West Wing only
• :Trib/Tribute/DMNT/DMT – A variant where players complete the North wing while avoiding to kill as many bosses as possible before killing the final one. If the other bosses are kept alive before killing King Gordok, each of them will award an item at the end of the dungeon, as well as a powerful buff which is often sought after by raiders. The loot awarded in a tribute run is often better than the one awarded by a regular kill, and it is also on a separate loot table.
• :Jump Runs/DME jumps/DMJR – A common gold farming technique usually employed by a fury warrior and restoration shaman. The duo will clear DM east and skip most trash by jumping. Explained here.

ZG – Zul’Gurub
MC – Molten Core, also referring to a priest’s Mind Control spell
BWL – Blackwing Lair
AQ20 – Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj
AQ40 – Ahn’Qiraj
Naxx – The Dread Necropolis Naxxramas
Ony – Onyxia’s Lair

Sellables reserved – A gold farming technique where a tank/heal combo (typically) will carry newer players through an end game dungeon in exchange for all drops except for bop items that the player can use.

Confusing ass Warlock specs

SM/Ruin – You take Shadow Mastery and spam Shadow Bolt.
DS/Ruin – You sacrifice the Succubus with Demonic Sacrifice to get 5% more extra Shadow damage and spam Shadow Bolt. Used primarily by raiders.
MD (improper DM)/Ruin – A spec used for tanking Twin Emperors in AQ40 because of extra Shadow resistance

NF/SL – A Warlock PvP spec which plays with Nightfall and Soul Link.
NF/Conflag – A Warlock PvP spec which plays with Nightfall and Conflagrate.
SL/SB – A Warlock PvP spec which plays with Soul Link and Shadowburn.

Raiding terminology

Hard Res – An item that has been reserved before a raid / dungeon that no other player is aloud to reserve or roll on. When putting together a dungeon or raid PuG, you should declare all hard reserved items in your LFG posts.
Soft Res – Any item that has not been hard reserved can be soft reserved by any amount of players. Players typically can only have 1 soft res per raid / dungeon and it must be declared before or at the start of the dungeon. If a soft reserved item drops, all players who reserved it will roll for it. If only 1 person soft reserved an item, they will automatically get it.
DKP – Dragon Kill Points. An alternative system for loot distribution that varies from guild to guild.
GDKP – Gold DKP; a loot system employed mostly in PUGS, but sometimes in guild groups, in which the item recipient is determined by gold bidding., explained here and from first-hand experience here.
+1 reset – In this loot distribution system the +1 refers to having received an item before. Once a member receives a +1 they are ineligible to roll. Explained here.

Table – a phrase often used to request water and food from a mage. Origin is in retail where mages gained the ability to prepare banquet tables.

Points of contention and discussion

a tourist (n) – A player who will only participate in Classic during the ‘initial hype’ and then leave shortly afterwards.
blizzlike (adj) – An unofficial emulation of the game in question that seeks to be as accurate to retail
as possible.
loot trading (v) – The ability to trade soulbound items with another player from your group after rolls have been conducted. Only in raids.
sharding (n) – System by which players are ‘instanced’ into smaller, separate virtual worlds to split large populations of similar level and thus reduce competition for resources. Regarded as a controversial change to the original game.
If you want to contribute to the glossary please leave a reply below. We have omitted obvious ones like ‘LFG’ etc. and want submissions that are specifically Classic or Vanilla related.