New Changes and New People Coming to Classic Era

The Classic anniversary servers are getting ready to leave Vanilla behind and progress into the Burning Crusade, with Blizzard announcing on Tuesday that the expansion pre-patch will arrive in January. Those who don't want to progress into BC will be given the option to freely transfer to Classic era, which I think everyone kind of expected and which should give the era servers a nice population boost again.

Some were surprised that there's no option to clone your character this time, but I wasn't. I've long been under the impression that the cloning service saw very limited use back in 2021, but what it did do for sure was lead to no end of complaints. I think I also saw a dev comment at some point that it required a surprising amount of work or something? Either way, I'm not at all surprised that Blizzard didn't consider it worth the effort a second time around.

What did make my eyebrows shoot up was this tidbit hidden away in the patch notes for the Burning Crusade Classic PTR:  

When making your decision to transfer, please consider that the Group Finder tool and the Dual Spec feature will soon be added to Classic Era realms. This means that new and existing characters on Classic Era realms will have the option to learn Dual Spec. At the same time, the rulesets between Anniversary Hardcore and the original Hardcore realms will be aligned. This means that the original Hardcore realms will receive Dual Spec, Instant Mail, and the Dungeon Finder tool. [...]

We recognize that to some players, any change being brought to the Classic Era or original Hardcore environments arrives with hesitation. We acknowledge this, and we want you to know that we consider any change we make to these realms extremely carefully. In the case of the Group Finder tool, we consider it to be a true quality-of-life update, bringing players an additional and intuitive way to connect with each other.

A similar quality-of-life update is Edit Mode, allowing players to edit their user interfaces, which we are adding as a new change to BCC Anniversary Edition. Quality-of-life user interface options like Edit Mode could eventually make their way to Classic Era as well, and we look forward to the community’s thoughts on optional user interface quality-of-life additions such as this.

The choice to bring Dual Spec to Classic Era similarly received a tremendous amount of consideration and listening to the community’s thoughts on this feature. Since its introduction to Vanilla WoW in Season of Discovery, and again from the very start of Classic Anniversary, the introduction of Dual Spec to Vanilla WoW has been arguably the single most popular new feature and one of the most well-received in the Classic space. Players have praised that it simply makes the game more fun to play, and our hope is that Classic Era players will enjoy it just as much.

I immediately got flashbacks to when they dropped a bunch of random changes on era last year and there was a proper uproar from the community. I guess at least they are telling us in advance this time... though hiding it in the patch notes for another mode's PTR is not good form in my opinion. It's a good thing that the era community is so tight-knit that it's extremely good at spreading gossip - I had a ping about the news literally minutes after it was posted, thanks to Ronkuby from the Classic era Discord.

I don't think there's going to be a huge uproar this time though. Streamer Xaryu did a community poll last month about what kind of features people would like to see in a hypothetical Classic+, and while I wouldn't claim that any streamer's community is necessarily representative of the player population as a whole, it was still interesting to see that dual spec was one of the most popular features with a 94% approval rating. (I originally saw this in a handy graphic that I unfortunately can't find anymore, so I can only link to this AI-powered summary of his poll and stream that I found instead; I'm sorry.)

I'll say that I'm personally not a fan of this move - I rated dual spec as one of Wrath of the Lich King's best features back in 2010 so I do get the appeal, but I do also think it changes things in a way that I'd personally have preferred to keep out of era. It greatly increases the pressure on hybrids to be competent and geared for multiple roles, and people who prefer to just play one spec are increasingly seen as "lesser" than those who are more flexible, in a way that isn't as pronounced when changing specs takes a lot more effort and there's no real expectation that most people would want to do it.

But it is what it is, and I haven't been spending a lot of time on era for a while anyway. Same thing with the group finder tool - that's the one for manual listings that was also on SoD I presume, not the fully automated retail variant. It's handy for sure, but it does change things a little yet again in a way that at least as far as I'm aware, nobody on era was asking for. How many more tweaks can we make to this museum piece before it becomes something very different?

Living in the Moment

One thing I personally find kind of off-putting about the wider retail WoW community is how a large chunk of it seems to spend more time looking forward to the next thing than actually engaging with the current content. Where the Classic community sometimes gets bogged down by nostalgia and wishing they could play the game again like it's 2006, retail content creators often strike me as the opposite, always laser-focused on what the next patch will bring, seemingly in a race to be the first to report on what's new, and by the time it actually goes live, they've already moved on again.

I've been finding it particularly noticeable recently because while we don't have a launch date for Midnight yet, I'd say the expansion is definitely still at least three months away (probably more) but I swear anything WoW-related in my feeds that's not about Classic has been about seemingly nothing else for months already. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not at all curious about what the expansion will bring, but I don't want to hear about every time an NPC passes wind in the Midnight beta either. I like having a vague idea of what's to come, plus maybe a couple of more specific things to look forward to, but primarily I want to see things for myself once the expansion launches! The other day a weird headline popped up in my reddit recommendations and all I could think was: "That sounds like it must be alluding to some major story spoiler or something; I think I'll just scroll past as fast as I can." At times, it can feel like navigating a minefield.

It doesn't help that a lot of the expansion discourse I have seen has been extremely tedious as well. To give an example, as a more casual player who uses minimal addons, I really don't think the removal of combat addons is that big a deal. There are millions of us already playing that way just fine! It's obviously going to lead to some changes, but if this game is good at anything it's constantly changing things around, so hey, it's another day ending in y. Another example would be people getting extremely up in arms about Blizzard being open about wanting to monetise housing the way pretty much every other MMO with housing monetises it. I can understand feeling a degree of disappointment if you were hoping for something better/more generous, but let's not pretend that anything they've announced is hugely surprising if you know anything at all about how housing works in other MMOs.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it weirdly challenging to find people talking about things going on in the game right now. I'd like to hear how other people are experiencing Legion Remix for example! Or if you're not playing Lemix, what are you doing? I've picked up running a few delves a week on alts again and it's wild how absurdly buggy they've been for many weeks now (in a way that actually benefits players too). Brann has become stupidly OP as one of his abilities can one-shot an entire group on tier 11, and several of the delve-specific abilities have become similarly overtuned to a ridiculous degree, such as the phase cutter ability in Archival Assault or the footbomb dispenser you can get from treasures.

At first I shrugged it off as "haha, patch day, right" but it's been literally weeks now and I'm finding it weird how nobody seems to be talking about it. Are we just keeping quiet in hopes that Blizzard doesn't notice? I would have expected their "fun detected" sensors to go off pretty much instantly, and I keep thinking that surely they must at least be aware of this bug and have it their backlog somewhere. Are they just too busy with Midnight and Legion Remix to care about things being wonky in the mainline game, where it's presumably a bit more quiet at the moment?

The funny thing is that it's only because of this bug that I've actually started doing delves on my healers again - I'd previously stopped because while they were doable, they were just too slow and tedious. With Brann one-shotting things occasionally (not all the time, but frequently enough), the pace actually feels much better and fun. I now kind of dread Blizzard actually fixing the bug and taking that away again. With how long they've left it in the game at this point, I honestly hope they just leave it in for what remains of the expansion as well. When Midnight arrives with its gear reset, it's going to be enough of a slog to get geared up and powerful again anyway.

Legion Remix: What Am I Even Doing?

Legion Remix continues to enthrall retail WoW players, and that includes me. The other week I went to K'aresh for a bit and it was like a ghost town. Rares I'd never seen before were up everywhere, only surrounded by tumbleweeds. Meanwhile in Lemix, seemingly every part of every zone is popping, as are all the activity queues.

Almost a month in, I'm working on levelling my third character, but I'm also feeling a bit lost. Looking back at how I wrote about MoP Remix last year, I actually had similar feelings back then, though I eventually found purpose in replaying all the Pandaria story quests, selective hunting of achievements, and grinding Bronze to be able to buy all the cosmetics.

I thought I'd just do the same thing again this time around, but the changes made to the system make everything hit differently. I feel like I'm getting showered in Bronze as a mere side effect of everything else I'm doing, and I've actually been holding off on buying too many things as I know that some rewards can be earned by simply playing too, and I want to avoid spending currency on an item that I would've gotten naturally a week later anyway. (I read several comments from people who fell into this trap.)

In terms of doing the story quests, the husband and I made our way through the original four zones as well as the entirety of the Suramar campaign, which meant we were "caught up" until today's patch release opened up the Broken Shore. I'm actually not sure how I feel about the more staggered content release cadence they are doing for Legion. I kind of liked how MoP Remix was just completely open from the beginning and everything felt like you'd simply get there when you got there, but I figured maybe slowing some of the rushers down a bit this time around wouldn't be so bad to maintain interest in Legion Remix for a little longer. Now that I'm seeing it in action though - I don't know, it feels like instead there is this unspoken pressure to always do the newest bit of content quickly while everyone else is there, because in two weeks everyone will have moved on again. It's probably only in my head, but either way I'm not sure this change actually feels like an improvement to me personally.

The fact that there's an achievement for levelling one of each class during Remix, combined with my interest in seeing the different class order halls, has made me consider making that a personal goal for myself, but I'm still not 100% sure I've truly got the motivation. Yeah, seeing different class order halls is cool, but the shtick of being made "leader of your order" or whatever less than an hour after creating your character just grates a bit, even with the humorous explanation given by the infinite dragons. My most recent alt is a monk and having famous NPCs like Chen Stormstout or Taran Zhu fawn over a derpy little level 30 vulpera as "Grandmaster" just feels wrong.

Everything's also flying by so fast it kind of makes my head spin. Does playing a few hours to make a number go from 10 to 80 at super speed even still count as "levelling"? Can I really think of these new alts as characters when they have so little history and have had no real adventures of their own? They feel like dress-up dolls for different transmog sets more than anything else.

It kind of highlights a problem I have with retail WoW in general: that it gives rewards too quickly and for too little, to the point where they start feeling a bit meaningless and I eventually get sick of them. I used to have a similar problem back when I played Neverwinter, whenever they'd have some sort of bonus event and I'd grind like crazy until I just felt burnt out. WoW does something similar to me nowadays, where they'll provide loads of activities that are quick and rewarding, and I keep thinking "wow, that was fun and took no time at all, I should also do that on my alt" or something along those lines, but even a quick task starts to take up significant amounts of time once you repeat it ten times, and eventually I hit the point where it just becomes too much and too repetitive, so that I end up needing a break. It's like when someone gives you a cookie and at first you just think that's nice but if they then expect you to eat twenty more you'll just want to get away from the craziness eventually.

Remix is like that too, only dialled up to eleven. I definitely enjoy it in small doses, but I'm honestly not sure I can deal with the way it attempts to inject dopamine straight into my veins seemingly every five minutes.