Happy Pre-Patch Day

Today marked the split of WoW Classic into the permanent "Classic era" and Burning Crusade Classic. I was rather bemused watching some of my guildies go nuts on Discord as Blizzard kept extending the maintenance window for the EU servers one hour at a time - personally I was busy with work anyway, so not too fussed about the exact go-live time.

Once I was done for the day however, I was excited to log in. I moved all my characters on to Burning Crusade Classic and then spent quite some time simply sorting out their inventories and re-assigning talent points. I'd actually forgotten that we got an additional row of bank slots in BC; that was very welcome! I also enjoyed vendoring some of my main's old gear with abandon to free up bag space... if I ever feel nostalgic about seeing her in tier two again, I can simply log into her clone after all. Before the Dark Portal opens, even more things will have to go though... need that bag space for all things Outland!

Comparatively, assigning talent points was a fairly quick affair. While I know that some people put a lot of thought into this, I've never been a fan of re-speccing so I just worked myself along the tree rather spontaneously, going "yeah, that looks good" or "eh, not so much" while plopping points into whatever seemed reasonable at the time. At level 70 I'll probably want to change things around again anyway. And it's not like I can't make adjustments even sooner if anything turns out to have been a really bad choice.

Once that was done I paid up to clone my hunter main to the Classic era. I almost cloned the wrong character by accident since for some reason, the order of my characters on the character selection screen was different on the Classic era server than it used to be. While I already have more MMOs on my plate than is reasonable, I do kind of like the idea of being able to go back and play a bit in OG Classic if the mood strikes me.

I will say though that seeing Ironforge - and the whole server - as empty as it was made me kind of sad. I knew it was going to be very quiet, with most of the population choosing to move on to BC for sure, but I didn't expect to find only 32 people online on the entire server when doing a /who. Blizzard already connected a lot of OG Classic servers in anticipation of this, but old Hydraxian Waterlords hasn't been connected to anything because it's the EU's only English-speaking RP-PvE server, so who do you connect it to? RP-PvP is an obvious no-go. Connecting to RP-PvE servers in other languages would also cause issues. And connecting to regular PvE is of course an option, but then what happens to the RP aspect... I wonder how that's going to pan out in the long run.

Finally, I went back to the Burning Crusade server and rolled up a draenei shaman - I almost said "because everybody's doing it" but the truth is I've always loved the draenei and their starting zone. I don't know how much I'll play this one, but I figured I might as well join in for the launch day fun. I expected Azuremyst Isle to be absolute crazy town, but it honestly wasn't too bad. I mean, yes, it was very busy, and there were some bottlenecks in terms of questing, but nothing that was a major roadblock if you were willing to wait a little bit and/or group up with people. I completed the basic starter zone and then moved on to the Exodar to learn jewelcrafting before logging out.

I'm actually not sure how I'm going to spend the next two weeks in Classic. The original plan from the guild's side was to still do some raiding to see how things work with the new talents, but there doesn't seem to be enough enthusiasm for that based on the sign-up sheets so far. At the same time I'm not too fussed about pushing more alts up in levels just now, when I already have three to four characters ready to go through the Dark Portal anyway. We shall see.