A new fork of World of Warcraft (often called WoW) is in beta currently and will go live on November 4. Its intent is something like the original WoW from 2004 for the feel, but with some class changes to make every specialization be viable. They say there’s four “pillars”:
Approachable and Familiar
The World as the Main Character
Journey Before Destination
Nurture and Protect Social Experiences
Worthy goals, but is it doable? I’m willing to give it a try. I’ve been playing the beta and it is comfortable to jump in and play.
One thing I do like is that there’s no realms (shards). For each character you choose a “ruleset”: PvE, PvP, RP, or eventually Hardcore. Every character in the same ruleset can potentially play with every other character. In support of this, every character will have a first name and a last name, whose combination must be unique in the U.S., Europe, or Asia.
I’m leaning toward maining Shaman this time around… In the TBC Anniversary server I am running bear druid (raid ranking)… In the Forever beta I have tanked as shaman with success so far, but I don’t think it will be viable long-term, but I am enjoying the class.
I’m undecided about what to main - I’ve played everything at different times and different expansions. Maybe Warlock? I haven’t done that in a long time, and it has a lot of utility…
One thing I’ll ask from the Beta participants to confirm: Instanced dungeons provide little-to-no EXP for kills, correct?
Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s FINE by me. I got sick of everyone sitting around doing nothing but dungeon grinding for levels, as opposed to grinding dungeons for gear.
But it means that depending on how well multi-spec works (something I’ve gotten conflicting answers on) doing a main healer class/build is going to be problematic if you don’t have a group to level with.
Specifically I’ve heard that the interplay between the specs for Paladin work well, the Shaman as “pretty good”, and that the Druid is kinda borked, or, at least it was last week. More suboptimal rather than borked perhaps.
Correct; at least, they aren’t any better than any other kills. The idea being to remove dungeon-grinding as the optimal method to level quickly from 10-60 (as you alluded to).
In the first week, the XP rewards for dungeon-related quests were really outsized, the incentivize players to run a dungeon once for leveling, then move on to follow the storyline elsewhere. My understanding is that has been corrected downward, but I haven’t really run any dungeons since, yet.
ETA: and by outsized, I mean just doing the three or four dungeon quests for Hall of Thanes was easily 1.5-2 levels just for quest XP.
I’d agree that was outsized, thanks for the confirmation.
If/when you have them, any good information on how multi-specs work would be good as well.
IIRC, when first introduced in BC(?) it was 1000 gold to buy a second spec, and switching back and forth could only be done in an area that provided rest - a capitol or an inn.
And again, only two specs. So especially if I want to play hybrid classes, that’s going to make a big difference. Fun times ahead.
I’m really excited about this, as someone who used to play EQ and vanilla WOW back in the day. I would love to get some friends to try it with me when it launches properly after beta, since they’ve never played WoW before and the “real” one (even on vanilla/retro servers) seem so overwhelming both in terms of gameplay systems and the narrative.
It’d be nice to be able to start them from “scratch” again, 2000s-style.
Hmmm, for classic anniversary, dual spec was only 40-50 gold. I assumed I had to go to a city to swap, but if memory serves I was informed I was making it too hard on myself.
If I had to guess, I would assume the same for Forever; 40-50 gold, available at level 40, probably freely swap as long as you are out of combat.
I can hope. Again, it was a MAJOR investment/effort when it first went live, and every retail update after made it easier/cheaper to the current free and easy model.
I asked because the info I follow had the level 40 option, and a cost of 100g, but they’ve also mentioned maybe dropping it to level 30. So figured I’d ask.
It also said that the respec would follow vanilla style - cheap, rapidly increasing if you did frequent respecs, then dropping slowly over time. But IIRC they said the increases would drop in a week (I don’t know if they mean drop to the original baseline or not though).
This is classic-ish. There are new quests, new zones, new dungeons… This is a divergence in the timeline, AKA “We realize our lore has completely fallen apart so let’s pretend none of that ever happened for this version of the game.”
Also some new mechanics, classes reworked, QoL improvements, etc… whereas classic is “This is how everything played before Burning Crusade was released.”
Exactly. WoW Classic was making the original WoW run on modern computers with modern networking improvements, with “no” gameplay changes. WoW Forever is taking the feel of the original WoW and iterating that to be a better game. It’s a wishy-washy sentiment, but what they’ve done so far is encouraging to me.
With the two-name system, I’m not sure it’s necessary. But I will be putting in my names early as well (one for each class).
The itemization is supposed to improve spell damage as well as healing. The idea being that healing specs should be able to do decent damage, even if they can’t compete with DPS specs.
I’m likely to go Enhancement Shaman as my main, at least at release. It’s fun. Still borderline between a proper Troll Shaman or a too-pretty Skyborne one.
My impression is the Retail WoW has long ago given up on being like the original WoW. It’s evolved into something different, with a different user base than those who play Classic WoW. WoW Forever may very well eat up the Classic user base.
But I think they’re doing Forever because Retail just isn’t pulling in new users any more. It’s too high a bar for a totally new player to jump into, but they can’t lower the bar without losing the players who want what Retail offers. (I’d characterize that as a raid-based treadmill that resets with every expansion.)
I think Blizzard wants to have a WoW that’s easy for new-to-MMO players to try and not be overwhelmed by decades of retail detritus. They want the leveling experience to be the point of the game, not the max-level raids. They’re implicitly admitting that Retail WoW is not where future growth will come from.
I’m skeptical they can ultimately pull it off, but if I can have fun for a couple years playing WoW Forever, then I will.
I loved playing a Disc Priest in the mainline WoW, but I got burned on the game itself and the crazy directions it was taking. I’m tempted to check it out in this iteration, as long as I can still do the “damage to heal” kind of build, and it looks like that’s exactly how it’s being done. The idea of being able to heal myself and others but also do enough DPS to solo fine made it one of the best classes of any MMORPG that I’ve ever played.
It seems like Forever is what Classic should’ve been, but the no changes folks ruled the day. Whereas Forever is trying to walk the line between the spirit of classic while also learning from two decades of improvements.
For example, a lot of the classes got reworked to have their fun spells from later expansions, like Penance for disc priest. Lava burst. Ice lance.
Oblivion portal opens, The Horde pours out, Doom Guy saves the day… I’d play that.