The curious case of Classic fresh

**Kenneth** · 10-04-2021

Classic has been over since early June with the natural continuation into TBC. Yet somehow someway the question always showed up at your doorstep. "When is Classic coming back?" You see if you're not familiar with private servers over the last 10 years a fun fact is that Wrath and Classic servers were always the biggest and had player bases stick around for most of the phases where as TBC was always popular but tended to fall off quicker. Depending who you ask there's dozens of reasons for this. To some TBC is the epitome of WoW. It's basically Classic with better class design, a few more things to do, and just overall a tad more fleshed out. Where as Wrath comes in and adds many things very old school players don't like and think was the beginning of the end such as the automated dungeon finder. No matter where you draw your line in the sand in this debate the point being is that Classic and Wrath just always did better than TBC as far as long term health on private servers. So it was no surprise that once TBC Phase 1 was on farm, people were beginning to gear alts, and the content started to dry out the question of "well when is Classic coming back?" arouse.

So I haven't been completely honest. Classic never technically left. If you remember correctly Blizzard did technically offer you a paid service to clone your character into a "forever Classic" version of the game while also allowing you to try TBC on the same toon. These servers never took off at the end of the day and only a handful of guilds still play on it to clear Naxx over and over. Too each their own. But now we don't need forever Classic servers because Blizzard dropped a bomb on us. "WoW Classic Season of Mastery". This is something we knew was coming but didn't know how soon. When TBC Phase 2 PTR came out there was ironically also a brand new Classic PTR which to many meant Classic Fresh was being worked on but a time frame was nowhere to be found. Now we have some real data from the men and women at Blizzard. In their most recent Classic WoW post they announced this Season of Mastery which includes a lot more changes and an interesting pace. Let's break it down. (Any Lucio Overwatch fans?)

Phases unlock faster

There is confirmed 6 phases similar to original Classic WoW but they are squished into a 12 month cadence rather than 18-20 months like original Classic. If you notice in the picture below the biggest change I can see is PvP honor system being in the game from launch. Meaning people can start ranking as their leveling. Technically you can level through the BG system with mark turn ins so I can totally see this being a style some people choose to rock.

Raids will be harder

- No more world buffs. At the end of Classic they let you store them in a Chronoboon Displacer allowing you to store them in a safe manor but it seems they are ridding of world buffs completely in raids as a whole. This change to some is great but to purists is awful. On one end it makes the accessibility of raiding a lot higher but it also kills a lot of the reason to leave the capital city and open world population suffers due to this. I can personally see both sides as I hated getting world buffs but I also liked killing people with world buffs. It did give me a reason to go back to Dire Maul, STV ZG Island, Felwood, etc and once the Chronoboon was added Felwood went from a populated PvP zone to completely dead.

- Restoring old mechanics. I'm not sure what specific mechanics were not in Classic WoW that will be in this but I am curious for sure. I know that many mechanics existed in Classic WoW but the bosses were killed so fast by world buffed warriors that you skipped them completely most of the time.

- No boss debuff limit. Boomkins, Shadow Priests, Hunters, and Warlocks are all rejoicing. In Classic only you had to have a dedicated Corruption Warlock because you couldn't fit everybody into the debuff limit. Some classes just couldn't use half their kits. To me this is a great change.

- Increased boss health to off set removed debuff limit. I don't know how I feel about this. Will classes be doing that much more damage that this won't feel like a burden? Increasing a mobs health doesn't make it feel more engaging like an added mechanic does. I'm skeptical.

Faster Leveling

- Xp rates will be the same as they are in TBC. This means 1-60 will be a tad quicker. Some people are cheesed about this saying leveling is half the battle but I don't think this makes the game any better or worse so I'll let everybody else debate it.

But what about mage boosting? Won't that just kill leveling anyway now that people can do some crazy things with mages? Blizzard has responded to this concern with this.

Hello. There are a couple of points we’d like to add to the discussion. We would like to make sure its still viable to level alts in this accelerated time frame.

With that in mind, we’re planning to take a look at mage boosting in the Beta for this release. We have some ideas for adjustments we can make to reduce its impact, especially in current hot-spots like Maraudon.

The proposed increased XP gains are focused entirely on quest XP. We don’t have any plans to increase other sources of XP at this time.

Quality of life

- Summoning Stones are now usable. This is a massive change as it kind of takes away from making a Warlock special in your group. Mages bring food, paladins bring buffs, and warlocks brought summons. On top of this it might hurt world PvP if a whole group doesn't need to venture out to get to a destination but rather only 2 people. Well see though.

- Increased Mining and Herbalism nodes. This is a great change. We saw how they already had to change Black Lotus back in Classic due to the demand of them from how many people participated in raiding compared to true vanilla.

All in all these changes should make for an interesting experience in a new Classic. If there was one change I would ask for it would be increased loot drops. If the game is going to go by quicker loot will be even more scarce then it was in a slowed down Classic WoW. 2 bosses per drop for 40 people is not enough and is the worst loot to player count ratio WoW ever had. They should double or triple it. What are your thoughts on all these changes?