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 to 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?
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