Hardcore Patchocalypse

It's a well-known truism that patch day in any MMO means chaos. New features are exciting of course, but something random is always bugged and becomes the worst problem ever for a few days, just to promptly be forgotten almost instantly the moment the issue is fixed.

Classic era should be devoid of such issues, seeing how it's a static game that doesn't receive content updates - however, as I mentioned previously, technical adjustments still need to happen sometimes and can introduce new bugs. Today's patch not only pushed the changes to the PvP ranking system live, it also laid the groundwork for tomorrow's launch of the official hardcore servers... and played havoc with era in general in the process.

Nothing was really completely broken, but there were a dozen different things going on that confused people, probably more than usual since everyone's used to things not changing on era. Chatting and grouping with people on the same cluster suddenly posed challenges, casters using wands would find their character starting to smack mobs with their useless melee weapon if the enemy got too close, and spell ranks had seemingly disappeared from the spell book (though they could be made to reappear via a Wrath-style tickbox). Talents were reset for no reason, and the talent window suddenly acquired a dungeon finder-style role icon. The general settings menu was updated to match that in Dragonflight, which looks bewilderingly different... though the thing that really bothers me personally is that the little check boxes are done in a different style than the Vanilla ones. Where's that striving for authenticity now...

Anyway, nothing's completely unplayable, and most problems seemed to be down to people's addons breaking, which is not unusual for major patches - but again, kind of unexpected for era players. Era also doesn't receive as much community support as other versions of the game, so some of those broken addons might stay outdated for a while. We shall soldier on.

As a somewhat tangential fun fact, the names of the hardcore servers going live tomorrow were revealed yesterday. There are going to be two per region, because apparently Blizzard hasn't learned anything from Wrath Classic's mono-faction servers, but oh well. Either way, what I really wanted to comment on were their names, which I thought were pretty brilliantly chosen to be honest: in North America, players will be playing on "Defias Pillager" and "Skull Rock", while Europeans will get to choose between "Nek'rosh" and "Stitches".

Defias Pillagers of course are notorious for being the most deadly low-level mob in Vanilla. Back in the day, the official Warcraft site had a "leaderboard" that showed how many people had died to different kinds of mobs, and the Defias Pillager, a low-level caster mob from Westfall that shoots disproportionally powerful fireballs for its level, was very high up on the list, right up there among raid bosses that were wiping raid groups forty people at a time. I expect the good old pillagers will claim the lives of many hardcore players as well, and that this will become the North-American Alliance server.

Skull Rock on the other hand is a cave in northern Durotar that is known to be a death trap for low-level Hordies, due to housing a mix of hard-hitting melee mobs and warlock-type enemies with pets, at a level when most classes don't really have the tools to deal with multi-mob pulls very well. I wrote about my own struggles with getting the Voidwalker quest for orc warlocks done in there in this post. I'm guessing many hardcore Hordies will meet their doom there as well, and that this server might end up being more favoured by the Horde.

Nek'rosh is an orc elite boss in the Wetlands and I guess has surprised many a unsuspecting Alliance player who found themselves sent on a mission to kill a level 32 elite when the previous quest in the chain had them kill regular orcs in the mid-twenties. But that's Vanilla for you! I'm not sure he'll get to kill that many people on hardcore since I don't think many who'll get that far will go into this chain unprepared, so I guess this name is a little less exciting than the others. I'd initially thought it was better than it was since I got my orc names mixed up and mistook him for one of the nasty named warlocks in Durotar.

Finally, Stitches is of course the high-level elite flesh golem that wanders the roads of Darkshire whenever someone completes the necromancer quest chain. While his body count probably isn't as high as that of other mobs, unexpectedly seeing this hideous giant lumber your way surely gave many an Alliance lowbie their first life-or-death scare after they innocently expected to be safe on the road. Another very worthy name for a server that's going to be all about dying at low levels.

We'll see what mayhem ensues tomorrow.