Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

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?

The State of My WoW-ing

I sometimes hear people say that WoW is in a better state than ever because of how many different ways to play it there are nowadays. Not enjoying retail? Well, Classic's right there and could still be earning your sub! Love the original world of Azeroth but Classic is just a bit too same-old, same-old for you at this point? Here's Season of Discovery! And so on and so forth.

I'm going to neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I'll say that the multiple versions of WoW thing has definitely worked out well for me in terms of getting value out of my subscription, as I've at least tried almost every mode that the dev team has come out with and I tend to enjoy playing more than one of them at a time. Sadly (to me), it often seems that I'm in a minority in that regard, with most players that I talk to just sticking to the one version they prefer and perhaps even actively disliking the other versions of the game.

I've been wondering what this means for this blog, because I imagine that if readers just want to read about their favourite version of WoW, me switching back and forth between talking about very different things seemingly at random might be perceived as annoying. I'll still write what I want to write, but I thought it might also be useful and interesting to give a general update on where I'm at with each version of WoW at the moment, so you know what to expect if there's one specific mode you're waiting to hear about.

Retail (The War Within)

I'm currently doing four delves a week with the husband but to be honest not much else. K'aresh has been entertaining enough - I rescued all the wee animals and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have the same staying power for me as the final zones of the last two expansions had. Patch 11.2 also killed my desire to play alts temporarily as it broke the Altoholic addon, and the bank restructuring made all my alts' banks a horrible mess. Altoholic works again now, but those banks are still in chaos and I just can't bear to look at them much, so my alts have mostly remained unplayed.

I'm generally feeling a degree of end-of-expansion ennui, which feels a bit weird to say when Midnight is still more than half a year away, but it is what it is. I don't feel like there's much to look forward to before then. I do have a few goals I want to achieve before the expansion ends, such as throwing myself against ?? difficulty Ky'veza and seeing all of Manaforge Omega on LFR, but none of these things feel particularly urgent at this point.

Admittedly Legion Remix is coming out in a few days, but I'm not actually sure how I invested I want to be in that either. I was quite looking forward to it initially (after how much fun I ended up having in MoP Remix), but from everything I've heard since then, the Legion version is actually going to be quite different and I'm not sure whether all those changes will be good or bad for me. I'll still check it out and will probably get a few posts out of it, but I'm currently not actively hyped for it.

Mists of Pandaria Classic

My "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms" has kind of stalled because I just couldn't bear levelling from 84 to 85. Fortunately this one isn't something that needs to be rushed, as I should still have several months to complete my goal (until Garrosh destroys the Vale in Classic too). I expect that I'll still get back to it in time before then, though I still have no plans to do anything else in MoP Classic.

Season of Discovery

SoD has sadly become another abandoned project. Remember, I wanted to level up so I could see the actual new dungeon Blizzard had added to it (Demon Fall Canyon). However, Incursions apparently managed to completely sap my will to play. It's kind of weird actually, but I really did not deal well with the way they required you to completely clear out your quest log. It made me realise that I really rely on those random breadcrumb quests to give me direction. Even if I technically know in my head which zones to go to for quests at level 45 for example, having to make a choice with no quest guidance whatsoever was weirdly deflating.

I do remember that I actually got to Searing Gorge and was kind of fascinated by the new Blackrock Eruption event there, but unfortunately this was also when my OP raid gear from BFD in phase one was starting to no longer be quite so good, and questing was starting to feel like a bit of a drag. At some point I just stopped logging in.

While I wasn't playing, the devs actually added a second new dungeon (Karazhan Crypts) and an actual new raid (Scarlet Enclave), followed by an announcement that they're stopping development on SoD but also not shutting it down. It's been sitting in this weird limbo state ever since where it's technically still there and has some people playing, but much of the community considers it dead because new content is no longer being added. (The server selection screen has the largest Europen PvE server listed as low pop at this point, and according to Ironforge.pro stats, the number of people still raiding there is about half of what it is on Classic era.)

Assuming SoD does continue to hang around, I expect I will get back to it eventually to check out more of the stuff I missed, but there's also a chance that I won't.

Classic era

I've mentioned before that while I love Classic era, I've seen so much of it as this point that the novelty has kind of worn off. I still log in almost every day to do things like create Mooncloth or put items on the auction house - to what purpose, I'm honestly not sure. I guess since the population on era is not that large (especially since the anniversary servers went live), I feel like I'm still making a small contribution to the server community by keeping the auction house stocked. I'm also still keeping an eye on my guild's Discord even if I don't have anything of my own to add.

I currently find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I'd go back to playing era as my primary mode of Classic, though I guess you should never say never. It seems more likely to me that one day I will finally tire of just logging in for cooldowns and auction house business and that will be it for me then. Though that day is not yet today.

Turtle WoW

I wasn't planning to get back into the private server scene, but I've got to admit my recent exploration of Turtle WoW has had me quite charmed. I'll probably keep at it until the server shuts down or I hit max level, whichever happens first. The dev team seems largely undeterred by the Blizzard lawsuit and even posted another update on their Unreal Engine project this week. While I have no doubt that they won't have a leg to stand on under the jurisdiction of a US court, I've got to admit I do wonder a little what will happen if the stubborn head of the turtle, who is supposedly located in Russia, manages to simply evade the long arm of the law due to geography. I'm sure the lawsuit has been great advertising for them over the past few weeks, bringing in a lot of new business for the time being.

Classic WoW & Me in 2024

It's once again time for my by now annual look back at my relationship with WoW (Classic, there will be a separate post about retail), through the lens of which characters I've made any progress with this year and how much.

The main thing that immediately became apparent when I started putting the numbers together for this is that I spent a lot less time in Classic in 2024 than I did in 2023. Based on my 2023 review, about 50% less in fact. That still left me with more than ten days /played, which is not nothing, but for comparison: in 2019, the year when Classic first came out, I spent more time than that on a single character over the course of only four months.

When I did play Classic, my focus this year has generally been on rolling up new characters for novelty, with the occasional check-in on old favourites for some routine gameplay or the odd adventure here or there.

Season of Discovery

I'm going to start with Season of Discovery, which got the largest chunk of my play time as far as I can tell, though the numbers might be a little skewed as I'm pretty sure I created most of these characters at the end of last year and they just hadn't reached a high enough level yet for me to want to include them in my end-of-year round-up. I then still played quite intensely for the first two months or so of 2024, before getting utterly disenchanted with the state of SoD and giving up on it. It wasn't until the other month that I felt inspired to dip back in, but it's actually been quite nice to get to the party late and not feel like I have to give a fig about whatever's going on at endgame.

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 37 Priest
• 2 days, 23 hours played (+1 day, 11 hours)
  
• 188 Alchemy (+48), 205 Herbalism (+55), 204 Cooking (+54), 201 First Aid (+72), 174 Fishing (+52)

Raiding in SoD phase one, even if only did BFD twice or something, turned out to be an unexpected boon as I reckon the gear my priest got from it might well last her until the level cap at this point. She's currently leading the charge of my alt brigade with the goal of seeing Demon Fall Canyon some time next year.

Shintroll - WG

• Level 35 Hunter
  
• 1 day, 21 hours played
• 154 Leatherworking, 225 Skinning, 205 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 153 Fishing 

My hunter is an interesting contrast to this because she hit level 25 only just before phase two came out and has been wearing mostly the same greens since then. Levels come fast with the XP boost, but gear not so much. It's starting to become somewhat noticeable at this point, but fortunately hunters are sufficiently OP that she's still managing to get by.

Shindig - WG

• Level 28 Mage
  
• 1 day played
• 98 Enchanting, 125 Tailoring, 103 Cooking, 75 First Aid, 75 Fishing

Mages have an interesting concept going on in SoD with all the books you can find and the scrolls you can decipher, but sadly most of them haven't seemed particularly useful to me so far. We'll see whether that changes at some point.

Shikana - WG

• Level 24 Shaman
  
• 18 hours played
  
• 129 Engineering, 111 Mining, 103 Cooking, 77 First Aid, 91 Fishing

I think I created this shaman with the goal of trying out shaman tanking, but with the changes to runes I'm now too worried about being considered "suboptimal" for group content without all my runes purchased from the vendor. This was very much driven home when I did a Ragefire Chasm on another character with a shaman healer who was only level 8 (TIL that you can enter RFC at level 8; I always thought the minimum was 10) and he basically did all his healing with spells from runes. Her gear is also starting to fall behind rapidly and I'm thinking I may have to take some time out just to hunt down both some gear and runes.

Shinlu - WG

• Level 21 Druid
  
• 1 day, 12 hours played
• 89 Herbalism, 90 Skinning, 71 Cooking, 52 First Aid, 34 Fishing

This druid hasn't had a chance to do much yet... I think I've only found something like four runes so far as well. Much work to do either way.

Tirr - Lava Lash 

• Level 32 Priest
• 1 day, 19 hours played
• 104 Enchanting, 140 Tailoring, 180 Cooking, 114 First Aid, 205 Fishing

This was the character I made on the RP server with the goal of "rerolling" there for phase two, just for the server to die the "free transfer death" shortly after. I was honestly surprised to see that it was still up when I logged back in last month. I did a bit of solo questing there, but a completely empty world doesn't hold that much appeal to me right now. That was a fun experiment last year, but for the time being I'm kinda over it. 

Hardcore

Shintar - Nek'Rosh

• Level 22 Priest
• 23 hours played
  
• 96 Alchemy, 140 Herbalism, 100 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 136 Fishing 

While hardcore isn't really my (primary) jam, I did decide to revisit it briefly in spring by creating a priest on Horde side this time around. That character is actually still alive, I just lost interest in the low 20s as I so often do because I felt I should run Wailing Caverns for the quests but also struggled to find a group until my interest just kind of fizzled out.

Classic era - Alliance

Tirr - Zandalar Tribe

• Level 20 Hunter
  
• 22 hours played
  
• 141 Herbalism, 101 Skinning, 136 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 140 Fishing 

The most invested I got into Classic era this year was probably when I checked out the "community fresh" project on Zandalar Tribe in summer. Even so, that still resulted in less than a day of play time from me, so that should give you an idea of how inactive I've been on era in general this year. Also, when I logged in to check this character's /played, there were only two other people online on the entire server. No need for "community fresh" when there are actual Blizzard-run fresh anniversary servers.

My existing Alliance characters saw a little bit of... not really play, but active time as I started making money over on Alliance side at one point. Earlier in the year, a guildie needed help transferring an expensive recipe from Alliance side to Horde via the neutral AH and I was happy to help him out. He reimbursed me of course, but the whole thing did make me realise how poor my Alliance characters were in comparison to my Hordies, so I decided to try and make some easy money by actually regularly using my cooldowns to refine Deeprock Salt and create Mooncloth. Nothing to write home about, but I'm just going to list the overall stats in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 9 hours played (+3 hours)
  
• Sarelle - NK: 20 days, 14 hours played (+1 hour)
• Faly - NK: 8 days, 22 hours played (+1 hour), 292 Cooking, 225 Fishing
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 16 hours played (+3 hours), 300 Tailoring (+5, from making Mooncloth), 252 Enchanting (+2), 281 Cooking, 122 Fishing
• Razorr - Pyrewood Village: 2 days, 8 hours played (+4 hours... I have no idea what I did in that time as she gained no levels or skill-ups - it's possible I just made a mistake in my calculations last time), 160 Mining, 235 Skinning, 162 Cooking, 196 First Aid, 65 Fishing
• Shintar - PV: 2 days played (+0), 125 Mining, 172 Engineering, 181 Cooking, 145 First Aid, 126 Fishing

Classic era - Horde

Shintau - PV

• Level 56 Shaman (+3)
• 8 days, 18 hours played (+19 hours)
  
• 268 (Tribal) Leatherworking (+3)

My only Horde character to achieve anything noteworthy this year was my shaman, who gained three levels. Still not 60 after more than five years though, hah! I just did a bit of questing and ran both Sunken Temple and Maraudon. The Mara run didn't give me much XP, but it allowed me to play with a friend from OG Classic that had finally decided to start playing on era and we had a good time.

The rest of my stable didn't do much either, so again I'll just list them in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Shika - PV: 33 days, 16 hours played (+1 day, 5 hours) - I think I may have attended one or two raids at some point in the year, I got to be part of Bracken's Atiesh adventure, and I did spend some time farming ore on occasion. Mostly I just logged in to put stuff on the AH though.
  
• Shilu - PV: 16 days, 7 hours played (+3 hours) - I don't even remember what I did on this one
  
• Shinny - PV: 4 days, 14 hours played (+10 hours) - my mage appears to have lost two levels since I wrote down that she was level 44 last year, and she's only 42 now; as this isn't Everquest it seems safe to say that was just me getting it wrong. She maxed out her tailoring due to me deciding to regularly craft and sell Mooncloth on Horde side as well: 300 Tailoring (+12), 143 Enchanting, 272 Cooking, 263 First Aid (+7), 178 Fishing (+1)
  
• Fooba - Mirage Raceway: 1 day, 12 hours played (+1 hour), 133 Mining, 97 Blacksmithing (-27? clearly another mistake in my notes last year), 76 Cooking (+56), 110 First Aid (+17), 77 Fishing (+70)
  
• Gemba - MR: 1 day, 4 hours played (+0), 97 Herbalism, 150 Skinning, 2 Cooking, 113 First Aid, 80 Fishing 

Once again I'm ending the year with no real idea of what next year will bring for me in Classic. Season of Discovery has given me some goals for the time being but that mode has a very uncertain future. I might revisit Hardcore again at some point, but beyond that I have no real plans, so my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me.

More Levelling in SoD

I mentioned last month that I was getting back into Season of Discovery with the goal of eventually seeing the Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. Over the past couple of weeks, I got a bit distracted by some things in SWTOR, but I haven't forgotten about this project, so I wanted to jot down some notes about my most recent adventures.

In general, I've continued to be surprised by how not dead the SoD servers have remained after the launch of "Classic Classic". According to my census addon, there are pretty consistently about 1000 players online on Wild Growth Horde side, which is actually pretty close to my personal sweet spot in terms of server size: enough people to keep the auction house replenished, make it easy to get into a group for most dungeons and see plenty of activity out in the world, but not so many that you can no longer gather or quest without perceiving other players as a constant competitive nuisance.

The economy is a bit less good and feels quite inflated to me. People trying to charge one gold for a single Green Hills of Stranglethorn page feels quite ridiculous to me for example. I sometimes see complaints that prices on the era servers are inflated due to the servers' age, but at least on the PvE cluster, most things are pretty fairly priced even after more than five years. Occasionally someone will try to drive the price of certain goods up, but the thing with era players is: they've got time. If you charge too much, they can always wait and/or go farm for themselves. On seasonal servers there's more urgency to get stuff now and it's noticeable.

I also remember hearing that certain activities in earlier SoD phases really cranked up inflation (incursions awarding lots of gold or something?) and that's probably part of it as well. Either way the end result is that as someone returning after several months of absence, I find a lot of things on the AH quite unaffordable. If I find one of those lost supplies boxes, if I can't fill them with my own gathering and crafting skills, it's basically a no-go. I have managed to make a bit of gold by occasionally flogging some goods for (to me) rather silly prices as well, but opportunities for that are somewhat limited and partially luck-dependent so not really a reliable solution.

I think there's also bots? It's probably not as bad as on the anniversary servers, and I've stated in the past that people are way too quick to cry wolf about people supposedly botting, but sometimes you can definitely tell. (I remember one time in Elwynn when I saw a whole stream of low-level humans leave the village zig-zagging along the exact same path; that was eerie.) I haven't come across a lot of such cases on SoD myself, but definitely at least a suspicious number of hunters with unnamed or scrambled pet names.

As for myself, I continue to rotate through all my alts to use up some restedness and try to have them quest in different places for variety. My priest also healed a Razorfen Kraul and my mage did a Wailing Caverns and a Shadowfang Keep. The latter was a bit funny to me because I actually used the group finder tool for the first time and saw a group that was just missing a tank - with the three dps being a warrior, a shaman and a warlock, all three of which can tank in SoD. I sighed and just listed my mage by her lonesome... but within less than five minutes the other group had invited me anyway and we were off to the races.

It's also been fun to do more "discovering" of content and mechanics that are unique to SoD. The other day, I was in Stranglethorn Vale during the Blood Moon for the first time, and while I had the immunity buff on me, it was still a slightly odd experience. I didn't actually see any fighting for example, but lots of max-level allies running around killing my quest mobs. Does that give them rewards? I couldn't be bothered to do any deeper research on it. I did also run into this boss-type mob that was yelling and taking a swim in Lake Nazferiti for some reason.

In terms of questing, my hunter has offered the most interesting experience. I only noticed the other day that it's possible to place traps in combat now for example, something I'm pretty sure wasn't possible in the earlier phases. She also kind of struggles with the massive XP bonus, since it doesn't apply to pets, meaning her little tiger is currently three levels below her. I've tried to get him caught up by focusing a bit on mob grinding while unrested, but then I hand in one quest and bam, suddenly I'm another level ahead again. It's a bit annoying to be honest.

Another questionable adventure she had occurred around the AQ gate opening event. I mentioned previously that it worked a bit differently in SoD compared to normal, with the war effort completing automatically on a timer, but apparently the ten hour war - or at least the events tied to it - were extended significantly as well. I kept running into giant floating Qiraj crystals in levelling zones for days, which I think made farming Brood of Nozdormu rep a lot easier for people, but I'm not sure Blizzard fully took into consideration what this would mean for levellers. For example one of these crystals spawns right in the middle of Camp Mojache, so when I tried to pick up the flight path there, I swiftly got stomped into the ground. I couldn't even res and quickly click on the flight master, as I would instantly get put into combat and killed again. I think in the end I had to accept a spirit rez and use my hearthstone.

The other day I saw a video by WillE about what's new in SoD, and he mentioned that there are now vendors that sell all the runes for one copper each. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I was a bit concerned about how much of a grind it would be to find all the runes at this point, and this is definitely a nice solution for people who want to level more alts to raid. But I'm not looking to raid, and finding more runes was kind of part of the journey I was looking forward to? I mean, I can still gather them myself over time, that hasn't been disabled as far as I'm aware, but it does make me a bit worried whether people will be shirty in dungeons if you haven't just bought all your runes. Then again, so far everyone I've grouped with since my return has been very chill, so one can hope.

Why I'm Not Playing as Much Classic Anymore

The launch of WoW Classic five years ago rekindled my interest in WoW in a way I didn't think was possible, and was also the event that truly revived this blog after it had more or less lain fallow for several years. That's why I added (Classic) to the blog title at the time, and updated the header to feature images of what I loved most about Vanilla... the beautiful world (and specifically parts of it that the Cataclysm had destroyed).

I had no interest in retail at the time and didn't think I was ever going to play it again, and I did stick strictly to Classic for about a year. Then I decided to at least dip my toes into BfA (when that expansion became part of the standard subscription with the Shadowlands pre-patch) and found that it was alright as something to play with the husband on a very casual level (since Classic sadly hadn't appealed to him at all).

I continued dabbling in retail throughout Shadowlands while at the same time ignoring huge swathes of the game, which is why many of the complaints people had about that expansion largely passed me by. However, then Dragonflight came out and... it was really fun! So my retail play time went up, and at some point last year the scales tipped to the point that I ended up actually spending more time in retail than in Classic.

While some of that has been due to retail improving, part of it has also been my interest in Classic decreasing a lot, and I wanted to talk a bit about why that is, and where I see my relationship with Classic going in the future.

Since there are several different versions of Classic, let's split things up by "mode":

Vanilla / Classic era

I'm inluding hardcore in this, because while permadeath changes the feel of the game considerably, it's still the same world with the same quests and the same gameplay. Either way, I think this version of the game is great and I do still love it. This is honestly what I wanted out of Classic when it was first announced: a place I can go back to whenever I feel nostalgic for the original World of Warcraft.

However, a side effect of this version's unchanging nature is that... at some point you're just kind of done. I've seen this a lot in my Classic era guild, where even the most devoted players (she had a freaking real-life tattoo of Atiesh!) eventually reach a point where they've achieved everything they wanted to achieve and want to move on to other things. And I think that's fine.

The few that stick around for years regardless usually seem to do so because of strong social ties and/or a deeper involvement with guild business, which again, makes complete sense to me. However, I'm just not in that place myself anymore. I actually do still log into Classic era almost daily, but I don't really play much and I just generally feel like I've kind of seen it all. Not literally of course, but... I was really deep into Classic for two years on Alliance side, and then again on Horde side when I moved to the era servers, so it feels like everything about the zones and dungeons is honestly still quite fresh on my mind and I'll need some time away before I'll get the itch again.

Progressive Classic

Progressive Classic ceased to be of interest to me when it was first announced that all BC Classic characters would have to transition into Wrath of the Lich King, since that was the expansion where I personally felt that things started to go downhill, and while I did have some good times in original Wrath, I tend to think of those days as the kind of experience that was good once but that I'd rather not go through again.

Cata Classic was similarly uninteresting to me, even if I feel that people tend to be a bit too harsh on that expansion. (For me it was quite similar to Wrath in that it had both good and bad aspects.) Personally I don't think that Blizzard will actually continue to ride the expansion train until Classic catches up with retail, but until they tell as otherwise it's fair to assume that they will, and when I look at the line-up of what's to come next, I don't really see much reason to get re-invested into progressive Classic either.

Mists of Pandaria: If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state. I was intrigued by seeing both in-game NPCs and actual players talk about its beauty back when the expansion was current, but by the time I went to check out Mists in late 2013, the zone had already been changed to its permanently destroyed state to accommodate the entrance to the Siege of Orgrimmar raid.

That is literally all a Mists Classic could offer me though. I just spent several months levelling characters through MoP Remix earlier this year, so in terms of Pandaria quests, dungeons and raids, I've had my fill of that content recently.

Warlords of Draenor: I'm actually kind of curious what garrisons were like when they were the focus of the game, but from my understanding a lot of their appeal came from the fact that they were competely broken in terms of how much gold and resources they generated, which is something that Blizzard later nerfed, and somehow I can't see them putting them into Classic in their broken state again, so yeah... I just don't see much of interest here.

Legion: I didn't play during Legion but people mostly seemed to love that expansion, and even while playing through the content years later I could kind of see why. Still, all that content is still in the game, with the only things missing being the temporary systems like the artifact weapon grind and the randomly dropping legendaries. I wouldn't see the point in reliving a classic version just for those.

BfA: This one doesn't actually seem that long ago and I did play through that content in retail... plus again, it's still there for you to play through right now, just minus the systems that everyone hated, like Azerite power. I just don't see the point of a Classic version.

Seasonal servers / Classic+

I'm lumping these two together even though they're not exactly the same, but they are the same for my purposes.

If Blizzard were to actually release a Classic+, I would check it out for sure, but I'm not hopeful that it would appeal to me in the long term. Back in 2016 (during my private server days) I wrote a post called "Nostalgia and Other Reasons to Play Vanilla" in which I noted that people loved some very different if not outright contradictory things about original World of Warcraft. In a similar vein, after Classic was first announced, I wrote a post called "Flaw or Feature?" in which I also noted that taking away an aspect of the game that one group of players dislikes to make things smoother for them is just as likely to break the game for somebody else.

In a nutshell, I feel that this is exactly what Blizzard has done with some of their "twists" on Classic, and I don't think it's something on which they will change direction either as it seems to appeal to the people who keep the lights on on the current Classic servers. To be more specific, I cannot get over how they've merged everything into big megaservers (because players demanded it!) because those are absolutely antithetical to the Classic experience for me and playing on one just tends to sap all my enjoyment out of the game after a few weeks/months.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority on this as well, so again, I don't expect things to change, but the point remains that both the Classic dev team and the current community seem to want the game to go in a direction that ultimately doesn't appeal to me, so I'm not hopeful that anything that comes out of these efforts will have lasting appeal to me personally.

I will of course continue to keep an eye out for new developments and I suppose one should never say never, but as it stands, I simply need a break from Classic era and don't see the other modes of Classic producing anything that will manage to enthrall me anywhere close to the way the vanilla game did and still does.

That Classic Plus Survey

Ever since Blizzard first decided to commit to Classic, they've been surveying the community about its opinions on the matter. We first found out that Classic Burning Crusade was going to be a thing through one of these surveys, and when we were wondering what was going to come after Classic Wrath of the Lich King, once again the fact that Blizzard sent out a survey about Classic Cataclysm turned out to be a pretty big hint.

With that in mind, I've been finding it very interesting that a new Classic survey has been making the rounds, and it's not about Classic Mists of Pandaria, but rather (quoth the survey) "a new version of World of Warcraft Classic". People have been calling it the "Classic Plus Survey", which is why I chose that as my post title too, but I actually think that this is largely projection on the community's part and this "new version of WoW Classic" is just as likely to be the next seasonal server after Season of Discovery. Either way, it shows us the general direction of Blizzard's current line of thinking.

Most mentions of the survey that I've seen have been relatively vague, so thanks to Dwarflord for going through screenshots of all the questions in detail, which allowed me to transcribe most of it into this blog post. It starts by asking the player to familiarise themselves with "a mix of features that could be included in a new version of World of Warcraft Classic", consisting of:

• New or unexplored storylines and lore
• New reputations and rewards
• New/reimagined raids
• New/reimagined dungeons
• New/future races pulled back
• New/future classes pulled back
• Minor class changes
• Returning player re-entry feature
• New player experience
• New group events and rewards
• Ongoing class tuning/polish
• Guild bank
• Collections UI
• Dual talent specialisation
• New/future class & race combinations
• Improved social features
• PvP honour system improvements

Most of these are not surprising on a conceptual level, as they are things that players have been talking about for a long time. New or retrofitted classes/races surprised me a little, because even though that's something that private servers have done sometimes, I haven't really seen a lot of community demand for it in the context of Classic. The only things I hadn't thought about at all before were "new player experience" and "returning player re-entry feature", because I'm not sure how either of these would even work in Classic. In retail, the former is a tutorial island, which I guess would technically be possible in Classic but would still feel a little odd to me at least, and the latter is a button that clears your bags and gives you a free set of gear, something that definitely wouldn't work for Classic.

Later on, there are a few questions that pit four of these features at a time against each other, asking the player to rate which one would be most likely to make them want to play and which one least likely.

Another question that I thought was very interesting was the one that basically asked people to declare allegiance to what I would call several opposing attitudes towards Classic WoW. Below I've bolded the ones I personally agree with.

• "A new version of Classic should stick to the original level 60 cap and fit any new content within that cap" vs. "A new version of Classic should expand to higher level caps beyond 60"
• "A new version of Classic should find ways to incorporate entirely new continents or continents from WoW expansions (e.g. Outland)" vs. "A new version of Classic should focus primarily on the existing Classic continents of Azeroth (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms)"
• "I prefer shorter content phases for a new version of Classic to keep things fresh and keep players interested" vs. "I prefer longer content phases for a new version of Classic so I have time to fully explore the content or level up alts"
• "A new version of Classic should focus more on the levelling journey" vs. "A new version of Classic should focus more on the end-game experience"
• "A new version of Classic should focus on raid content for smaller groups (10-20 players)" vs. "A new version of Classic should focus on raid content for larger groups (25-40 players)"

The main bulk of the survey after that are several detailed lists of new features that could be added, with the question always being whether this particular feature would make you more or less likely to want to play this hypothetical new version of Classic WoW. Several of these make reference to "Classic era", which I'm hoping is just sloppiness in terms of wording, as I don't want them to change the existing Classic era servers and I also think it's probably not what they mean either... in the context of the rest of the survey, I just interpreted "Classic era" to mean something like "the vanilla game as it currently exists in Classic era".

Anyway, first we start with some proposed quality of life changes. I'll add my own opinion after each one:

• Revamping or adding flight paths, boats or zeppelins to Azeroth to make travel around the world more efficient - I'm mostly neutral about this one. I wouldn't mind them making some of the flight paths a little quicker and less scenic, but at the same time I'm not sure I'd really want a lot of additional ones added... having to leg it through the scenery is part of Classic's appeal for me.
  
• Adjusting the way items stack in bags to make inventory management easier - Sure, why not?
  
• Introducing in-game resources to help players find the right guild for them - I never really got much use out of the guild finder in retail, but I struggle to see how this could cause any harm either.
  
• Adding guild banks to Classic era - I guess that's okay? Though there's a certain charm to always having to pester the dedicated guild bank officer for stuff.
  
• Reducing the mana cost / increasing duration of group buff spells (e.g. Prayer of Fortitude) - Sure, why not?
  
• Adding flying mounts to Classic era - Er... no, and as many others have said, how would this even work, considering they had to do Cataclysm to enable flying on these continents in the first place? Maybe they put this question in as a relative measuring stick, knowing that most people will say no to it.
  
• Adding summoning stones to dungeon/raid entrances - I guess I wouldn't mind that one.
  
• Adding chronoboons to safely store world buff effects - Well, the chronoboon already exists and I'm happy that it's there.
  
• Increasing the size of the quest log - I guess this is okay as well? Having to pick and choose your quests/having to abandon some to make room sometimes does influence your gameplay in a way, but not to a degree that I personally care about.
  
• Adding the customisable HUD from later expansions so players can customise their HUD without requiring addons - To this one I would say no, as I use the default UI and the new and customisable UI in retail looks very different.
  
• Introducing a way to help players find groups for group/elite quests - Maybe? I liked the group finder we had back in original Burning Crusade for that kind of thing. But nothing too dungeon-finder-like please.
  
• Making mail delivery between players instant - Not gonna lie, I like how the fact that there's a delay when mailing things does encourage interactions between guildies when you want something to be traded immediately, but I wouldn't mind this too much either.
  

Next we have a list of "general features":

• Introducing more seasonal servers with experimental changes that run for a limited time - After how burnt I felt by Season of Discovery, I think it's unlikely they'll come up with another temporary server project that'll interest me.
  
• Creating new servers that are fixed on certain expansions like Classic era is fixed on original Classic - This one made me raise my eyebrows: so they have heard the cries for BC and Wrath era servers! This would still be a loud YES from me, even if it would be kind of late for my OG Classic characters.
  
• Adding more crafting specialisations (e.g. Weaponsmith vs. Armorsmith) - Don't really care about that one. I think there'd be a risk of any new one instantly being much better than all the old ones.
  
• Adding more legendary weapons that can be crafted in raids - Don't really care about this one either.
  
• Introducing avenues to acquiring "BiS" loot from sources other than raids - I guess I wouldn't mind this one? Though again, there'd be a risk in terms of balancing for sure.
  
• Ongoing balancing and tuning of gear/items over time - I'd be okay with this occasionally, but not like they've been balancing things in SoD.
  
• Adding pet battles to Classic - No, that would be a bit too much whimsy for Classic in my eyes.
  
• Making more content account-wide - As much as I've been welcoming the focus on more things being account-wide in retail, I feel things being per character is part of Classic's charm.
  
• Starting new progression servers that start with Classic era and continue through the expansions sequentially - This is another one that I've seen pop up in community conversations quite often. I don't think I'd personally want to go on that whole ride again, but I think it's something enough people would like that it'd be sensible to do at least for Vanilla to Wrath.
  
• Adding the ability to craft gear that is purely cosmetic - I don't really see what the point of that would be in Classic.
  
• Adding an in-game store that allows players to purchase cosmetic items with real money - NO!
  
• Adding achievements to Classic - Please no. Achievements can be fun but are very distracting and change the focus of the game a lot.
  
• New group events or scenarios with unique rewards - Sure, though it would depend on what they are. From what I heard about incursions in SoD they weren't exactly the greatest success in terms of fun gameplay.
  
• An in-game economy for player-driven boosting/farming services - I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I'm not a fan of paid boosting (even if it's done with in-game gold) so I'll say no to this one.
  
• The ability to purchase boosts to instantly level new alts - NO!
  
• Adding expanded profession/crafting options from Season of Discovery to Classic - I never really got to see that part of SoD so I have no opinion on it.
  
• New factions to build reputation with and unlock new rewards - I guess why not? Though the details of the implementation would matter.
  
• Adding customisable instanced player housing - That this is on the list when even retail doesn't have housing yet is just wild to me. I have no real opinion on it though.
  
• Adding the WoW token so players can pay their subscription with in-game gold - NO!
  
• Adding transmogrification to let players change the appearance of their gear - No, thanks. I do like transmog in retail, but it does change the general vibes of the game a lot to have people prancing around in nothing but bikinis and silly costumes all over.
  
• Adding the Crafting Orders system from Dragonflight to Classic - Now this one is interesting to me, because even though Dragonflight's crafting changes didn't fully work for me, I did think that something like the crafting order system might actually work better in Classic than in retail, so I would be up for giving it a go.
  
• Adding the guild levelling and reputation system from Cataclysm to Classic era - No, thanks.
  
• Adding more class-specific quests/quest lines - Yes, please!
  
• Increasing enemy toughness in the open world to increase the sense of danger when exploring - I think enemies in the open world are plenty tough in Classic already? There's a reason hardcore is so deadly. Assuming you're not a warrior running around in Naxx gear.
  
• Adding new zones to Azeroth in Classic era - I'll tentatively say yes, though I'm not sure what exactly they mean by new zones. I'd like to stay in the general area of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom, but if we're talking something like a Classic Mount Hyjal or a new island off the coast somewhere, I'd be game for that.
  
• Introducing levelling heirlooms to Classic era - Please no.
  
• Adding more group/elite quests that require multiple players to complete - I actually don't really feel that this is particularly needed... but I guess I wouldn't mind it either.
  
• The ability to toggle on "hardcore/perma-death" mode where character death is permanent - I think having the existing hardcore servers where everyone is on even footing is better. An optional toggle where some characters only have one life while others can just respawn feels like an invitation to grief.
  
• Tiered levelling phases with level caps below max level - I thought this sounded really cool in SoD, but seeing how dejected I felt at the start of phase two, I'll say no to doing this again.
  
• Completely revamping quests and quest lines in existing zones - Wouldn't that just be Cataclysm all over again? Please no.
  
• Completely revamping the layouts / geographies of existing Classic zones - Same as above?
  
• The ability to play "solo self-found" (no trading, grouping, or auction house) - Don't care, but if people like it, I don't think this would be harmful. It's already an option on the hardcore servers.
  
• Adding more race-specific quests/quest lines - Yes, please!
  
• Increased XP gain for previous tiers/expansions - No, thanks.
  
• Adding new quests and quest lines to existing zones - Yes, please!
  

Next we have a list of PvP features... I don't need to add my opinion on any of these because I don't like PvP in Classic so I really don't care either way.

• Re-balancing PvP to make it more fast-paced and tactical
• A bigger focus on open world PvP
• Adding rated battlegrounds to Classic
• Adding arenas (2v2/3v3/5v5 deathmatch) to Classic
• Re-balancing PvP to make it more slower-paced and strategic
• Revamping/re-imagining the honour system to make honour a currency like it is in later expansions
• Adding more quests focused on PvP
• Adding battlegrounds from WoW expansions to Classic era
• Revamping/re-imagining existing Classic battlegrounds (e.g. Warsong Gulch, Alterac Valley)
• Adding open world PvP events to Classic (e.g. Blood Moon, Battle for Ashenvale)
• Making it easier to track your honour/rank within the existing Classic honour system

Then we have features related to classes, races and skills:

• Giving Horde the ability to play paladins and the Alliance the ability to play shamans - I don't feel strongly about this one, but having that separation is a pretty iconic part of Classic...
  
• Adding races from newer expansions to Classic (e.g. worgen, pandaren etc.) - I think most of them wouldn't fit. I think Turtle WoW has high elves and goblins, and those would probably just about work, but I think most others would feel out of place in the Classic world.
  
• Ongoing balancing and tuning of talents and class abilities over time - I think some occasional balancing might be good, but not like the crazy roller-coaster that has been going on in SoD.
  
• Adding the ability to swap seamlessly between multiple sets of talents - Please no! This was a huge game-changer in Wrath and I was not a fan.
  
• Adding new specs to existing classes - Not really sure how that would work... maybe?
  
• Adding the rune system from Season of Discovery that allows players to gain new abilities or modify existing abilities - I think no. Runes were fun at first but got tedious quickly, and classes seemed to be more defined by their runes than anything else.
  
• Giving classes the ability to play new roles (e.g. mage healer, rogue tank etc.) - I think I'd be up for that one. Shaman tanks in SoD seemed pretty cool.
  
• Adding classes from newer expansions to Classic (e.g. death knight, evoker etc.) - Like the newer races, I think they just wouldn't fit.
  
• Adding new abilities/skills to Classic that aren't from modern WoW - I don't hate this but I think I'd rather not. Classes in Classic already have a lot of abilities as it is...
  
• Re-balancing talent trees to make weaker specs more viable - Maybe a little? But as SoD has shown, this kind of balancing is hard.
  
• Adding select abilities/skills from modern WoW to Classic - I think this is another nah. Many of the runes in SoD were like that, and it just made those new abilities way too OP.
  

Finally, a list of dungeon and raid features:

• Random raid finder that automatically finds you a group for raid content - NO! Though picturing a randomly thrown together LFR group trying to take on Vanilla Naxx is so horrifying it's almost funny again.
  
• Levelling raids designed for groups below max level - I thought this was neat in SoD, but again, ultimately ended up being a bit disappointing, so I'll vote no.
  
• Adding heroic versions of dungeons to Classic - Probably no? I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of something like a heroic Stratholme for example, but... just not convinced it would ultimately be a good thing.
  
• Updated or modified raid loot - Maybe? I mean, this could mean anything.
  
• Introducing a Mythic+ style system for dungeon content in Classic era - No, thanks.
  
• Updated or modified dungeon loot - Same comment as on the raid loot.
  
• Creating new raid content within the original Classic era - I think this is something a lot of people have been asking for, but I don't know how it would fit into the existing framework of the Vanilla raids. Suddenly having a new raid that gives better loot than Naxx would feel... odd.
  
• Adding world buffs from Season of Discovery into Classic (e.g. Blackfathom's Boon) - Neutral on this one. I thought the idea of world buffs that only work for lower levels and do things like increase your run speed was neat, but I can also do without them.
  
• Random modifiers for dungeons that change every time you enter a dungeon - That sounds like the M+ thing, so again, no thanks.
  
• Adding modified versions of raids from expansions to Classic era (e.g. Karazhan, Black Temple etc.) - Not gonna lie, a Classic Karazhan would be intriguing. Though it would also have a lot of potential to be disappointing.
  
• Creating new dungeon content within the Classic era - I think this would actually be nice. I heard the other day that there's actually a new dungeon in SoD phase four, and that alone made me consider trying to level up a character after all, just to see that.
  
• Adding more attunement quest lines that require you to finish them before you can enter a dungeon/raid - I don't mind attunements, but I don't think we need more of them for existing content.
  
• Adding heroic versions of raid encounters to Classic - Please no.
  
• Introducing the Alpha/Beta/Gamma rune dungeon system from Wrath of the Lich King Classic to Classic era - I have no first-hand experience with that, but from what I read about it, it didn't sound that great to me.
  
• Ongoing balancing and tuning of dungeon and raid encounters over time - Same response as to the other balancing questions: a little bit can be good, but the example of SoD has not been promising.
  
• Random dungeon finder that automatically finds you a dungeon group and teleports you to the dungeon - NO!
  
• Re-balancing raids to make more varied group compositions viable - Not sure what that would look like...
  
• Revamping/re-imagining existing dungeons in Classic - I think I'd rather keep the existing ones.
  
• Adding support for GDKPs (raid format where players buy gear with gold) - NO!
  
• Increasing the overall difficulty of Classic era raids - Also no! Classic raiding is meant to be easy; it's why we like it.
  

After that there are only a few more generic questions, such as about your general attitude towards changes in a new run of Classic (would you like to see none, some, a lot, or don't care), and what you look for in your entertainment in general (competitive environment, low price etc.). There were also a few more opposing opinions about WoW in general, where it wasn't clear to me whether this was still meant to be about Classic in specific or retail as well, and as such I wasn't sure how I would answer:

• "The community is friendly and welcoming" vs. "There is a lot of toxicity within the player community"
• "Provides a hub for social interactions among players" vs. "Is not a great game for social interactions with other players"
• "Does not provide an immersive story" vs. "Provides an immersive story"
• "Is for younger gamers" vs. "Is for older gamers"

All in all, I've got to say I think this is a very good survey, even if there are a lot of suggestions in it that I personally wouldn't want to see implemented. It basically feels a bit like Blizzard just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks... but words are cheap so I see no harm in it. Season of Discovery seems to have had a similar approach but with actual patches, which resulted in lots of hype at launch and then a massive drop-off in interest, with people citing sometimes outright contradictory reasons for their disappointment. As such, it strikes me as sensible to directly ask "What is it you people actually want?" instead of just continuing to implement more changes and then seeing how people react.

I'm also very curious what will come of the answers. I know what I would like and what kinds of opinions I've seen a lot on reddit, but the silent majority that doesn't post in places like that may well have very different ideas.

Hanging With the Freshers on Zandalar Tribe

There is an actual guild called "Freshers" on Zandalar Tribe, so just to be clear on that right away, this post isn't about them. I merely use the term in a general way to refer to players looking for a fresh server experience.

I wrote about the community-driven "fresh Vanilla server" initiative about a month ago, and I noted at the time that this project wasn't really for me, for a number of reasons. Those reasons still apply, however... I'm also a very curious person, and I kind of wanted to know more about how things were going over there, especially after I saw lots of people talking about the US version of the project on the Deviate Delight server, both positively (it's oh so busy, there are so many players here) and negatively (it's all streamers and their fan clubs and there's drama everywhere), yet at the same time heard nary a peep about the goings-on on the European equivalent Zandalar Tribe. Are there no European content creators supporting the project? I mean, WillE gave it a shout-out in one of his video only the other week! What was going on there?

Plus, taking a new alt through the first twenty levels of the Vanilla world is always good fun, even if I'm somewhat creatively bankrupt at this point and keep recreating my night elf hunter from 2019 Classic everywhere.

Anyway, I kept levelling my way through Teldrassil in very short play sessions initially, and it was pretty quiet there. I did all the quests, even the ones that require a lot of running back and forth, and moved on to Darkshore by level 12 or 13, by which point I'd run into what must've been less than a dozen other characters. However, things started to pick up a bit once I made it to Auberdine, and I figured human lands were going to be even busier.

I had my first grouping experience while doing the mushroom quest in Cliffspring Hallow. I spotted a human warrior the moment I entered and worried whether we were going to compete for spawns, so I immediately turned into a direction away from him. Soon afterwards I saw him trying to take a shortcut by jumping down a ledge instead of clearing a proper path, at which point he quickly got swarmed by naga and died (there were some mobs and distance between us, so it's not like I could've come to his assistance). After he revived we found ourselves fighting next to each other for a bit, and eventually grouped up to kill the rare naga as well as to maybe get the quest starter that can drop from the Twilight guys, though we had no luck with that. At least the rare dropped a mail chest for him. We parted ways again after exiting the cave and it felt very friendly.

I continued questing in Darkshore until level 16 or so, at which point I thought it might be a good time to move to Westfall to get ready for the Deadmines. I had another nice grouping experience when I teamed up with a gnome mage to do the Defias traitor escort. After I had gathered up all the dungeon quests, I continued questing, picking flowers and fishing in the zone while keeping an eye out for potential groups. Once someone whispered me to ask whether I'd like to join their DM group, but at the time I was only logged on briefly and didn't have enough time for a dungeon run. Overall it took several days and me being level 19 to actually find a party, which kind of surprised me. I think I'm relatively patient when it comes to manual group finding so I didn't mind too much, but for what's supposed to be a "fresh" server where the low levels are popping, LFG seemed really quiet and like people were mostly looking for mid to high level dungeon groups already.

The DM run itself was fine - people weren't super chatty, but everyone was nice enough and we had no issues. I whispered the priest to thank them for also healing my pet and they replied that they'd just finished levelling a hunter to 60 so they understood what it was like.

Ultimately I came away from the whole experience kind of wondering what the point was. I had a nice enough time, but in terms of population levels, I think I could've had pretty much the exact same experience on the main era PvE cluster or on hardcore. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if those were actually a bit busier than this was.

I guess Zandalar Tribe could aim to fill the niche of "PvP server that isn't as busy as Firemaw", which is something I thought could be viable ever since Classic era blew up at the start of last year and I spent some time puttering around on the empty second PvP cluster. However, as a "fresh" experience, catering to the kinds of players who want to see everyone starting together and huge crowds in the levelling zones, it doesn't really seem to be fitting the bill right now. I guess things could always change if a large content creator ends up giving it additional publicity, but right now - as much as I'm all in favour of more era servers getting love in some form or another - it doesn't strike me as a huge success for its intended purpose.

Honey, Your Changes Are Showing

I've mentioned before that Classic era is in a somewhat unusual situation, being an MMO that isn't supposed to receive updates and changes, yet that due to the fact that it shares a client and code base with other versions of WoW sometimes experiences a degree of "feature bleedthrough" as bugs. It's not ideal, but bugs happen in any game, and I guess when you're playing what's probably the least popular of all the current versions of WoW, you're not in a position to complain too much about stuff like that.

When last week's patch for phase four of Season of Discovery landed and brought some strangeness to era once again, I think most of us figured initially that it was just going to be one of those days, however a post on the official forums by community manager Kaivax quickly raised both eyebrows and hackles, as it highlighted several changes to era as intentional:

• The Guilds user interface has been updated to provide more ease of Guild management.
• Alliance players now have access to the Might of Stormwind, to a version of the Warchief’s Blessing world buff effect. This new buff is gained for turning in a new quest “End of the Dark Horde” in Stormwind and is mutually exclusive with Warchief’s Blessing.
• The Songflower Serenade and Dire Maul Tribute buffs can no longer be dispelled by enemy players.
• Druids can now train and use polearms.

The new guild UI was the most glaring and obvious change, and I've got to admit my own reaction was very much "thanks, I hate it". There's already an addon to at least partially revert to the old one, but I haven't seen an option to banish the new one from the quick bar entirely.

You see, the Vanilla user interface was very basic, but it understood what's important to people. If I'm in a guild and actually looking to interact with other players, the first thing I'll want to know after coming online is who else is online, what classes they play, what level they are and what they are up to right now (as in, whether they are already busy with something else or whether we might be able to do something together).

At the bottom you also had the box for the guild message of the day, in case there was something the guild wanted to immediately communicate to you.

In comparison, the new UI that's supposed to "provide more ease of Guild management" is dominated by guild chat, which you can already read in the chat window anyway, with the list of people who are online being relegated to a narrow column on the side that doesn't show you what level the characters are or what content they are doing. For that information, you have to go to a second tab, and the guild info hides behind yet another tab. It's cluttered and ugly and I hate it.

In retail, I've at least got some use for the fact that the guild chat in the guild window contains historical information showing chats from before you came online, as I'm in a small guild with friends there and it can be interesting to see who's been about when you haven't logged in for a couple of days. But in a large guild like I'm in on Classic era, I really don't need a backlog of people saying hi and bye, discussing trades and announcing world buffs.

Last year during the patch before the launch of hardcore, Blizzard also updated the settings UI to retail's new look and I grumbled about that, but ultimately I've got to admit I didn't mind that one too much. There were some new accessibility features in there which are obviously not a bad thing, and ultimately the game settings are not something I look at very often. The guild window is a very different matter however, as that's something I and I'm sure many other Classic era players interact with every day, if not multiple times a day, and having to deal with this new abomination is... off-putting.

I feel like user interface changes are one of those ways in which you can boil a frog, because one small change is just so easy to justify. It doesn't change the game! You can always get an addon to modify it! I didn't see anyone shed any tears over the fact that Classic launched with WoW's modern raid frame UI for example, instead of the horrible old one from original Vanilla. But this? This just hurts, man.

What about the other changes?

Adding a new quest and a new world buff for Alliance is easily the biggest change of the lot, but ironically I think that both of the world buff related changes might not have been too badly received if they had been communicated properly. Blizzard also revamped the way the PvP system works on era last year, and from what I've seen, those changes were overall pretty well received. Yes, we want era to be the museum piece, but people are not entirely blind to the fact that things are not the same now as they were in Vanilla, and that there are times when it might be a good idea to tweak something. Just not like this.

To add some more context for the world buff changes for those not in the know: people care a lot about world buffs for raiding, and Horde actually had one more world buff than Alliance. Some Alliance players would go out of their way to get it by getting themselves mind-controlled at the Crossroads via a friend or second account whenever the Horde dropped the buff, but my impression has been that this was both very niche and not all that popular. So I don't think many Alliance players are actually going to be upset about getting easier access to the buff themselves... plus from my understanding they'll still have to do UBRS for it, just like the Horde does now.

And as for the dispelling issue, apparently this has been a form of "PvP" on the PvP servers since the launch of Classic, though I've never heard of it happening on PvE. I think the problem was that people were doing it basically just to grief. If you're a shaman hanging out in Stormwind as a ghost, just to revive and spam purge on someone after world buffs drop, before you get killed again by the guards, you're not really PvPing in the classic sense - you're not winning a fight in any meaningful way; you're just eating a repair bill to make someone feel bad. So again, I can't see most people making a big deal about this. Just some context from Blizzard's end and a heads-up would've been nice.

Now, the druid change is simultaneously the least meaningful and the most worrying part of those patch notes. It's the least meaningful because I've been told by druid mains that it has zero effect on their meta. Personally I vaguely recall an occasion while levelling early in Classic, where either I or someone else was on a druid in Razorfen Kraul, and when Armor Piercer dropped, I was a little disappointed when I realised that it couldn't be used by druids in Classic. So yay for a couple more weapon options for feral druids while levelling?

The problem is that this is a class change, something that's completely unheard of on era, and one that nobody asked for. Up until now, the Classic devs have been pretty good about taking care of era even though it wasn't the most popular mode, and being respectful of the community that plays there wanting to enjoy the game in its original state. I can't blame people for being worried about the team suddenly setting a precedent for implementing random changes in era that nobody asked for, presumably just because it was more convenient to copy and paste the same settings from SoD. I hope they'll hear the loud and clear feedback that this is not something players want or take lightly.

EDIT: OMG, it's like someone is reading my blog! They actually reverted the druid change and the Alliance Rend buff, as well as apologising for the way the whole thing was handled. You can read the blue post here.