WoW Classic – Blizzard Announcing Major Wotlk Changes

Just when things were starting to play in Blizzard’s favor with everyone praising them for how they are listening to community feedback, they are once again “being Lizzard by taking a big L,” as Asmongold would say. This time, the topic is not focused on Dragonflight’s nerf to Soar and ruining another fun aspect, but instead, they are changing things for a re-release of a game that came in 2008, Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

Image Credits | Wowhead

Here we go again

We know that some of us are already experiencing PTSD considering what happened to Warcraft 3 Reforged, ironically covering the same main character that Wrath of the Lich King is about. Still, the changes are not as bad as that. Jokes aside, let us discuss the changes one of the best MMORPG games of its time will receive.

Raid Lockouts

The community hates the fact that the raid lockouts are being changed for Icecrown Citadel, Trial of the Crusader, and the one you probably forgot about, Ruby Sanctum. These raids used to have four different lockouts: 10-man normal, 10-man heroic, 25-man normal, and 25-man heroic. In WotLK Classic, there will only be two lockouts, which are 10-man and 25-man.

While this seems nice at first, as players will not be obligated to do four different runs in one week, there is a catch. The huge downside, at least at the moment, is the fact that players will be forced to either do normal or heroic without having the option to switch if they happen to get stuck on a boss.

Before, a guild could easily clear half of the raid on heroic and then clear the whole thing on normal (even if their normal run would mean that they have to start from the first boss). Today, this will not be possible because if players get stuck on a certain boss in their 10-man heroic run, that is it for the 10-man lockout in that week.

Blizzard’s idea is that people will do the 25-man difficulty with their guild while doing 10-man ones with PUGs (finding a random group in Trade Chat or the LFG channel), which is a good way of thinking, but the execution of removing lockouts that people are not forced to do is not the best.

Another thing related to the set of raids with normal and heroic difficulties is that players will not be able to equip trinkets that share a name if they are from different difficulties. While this only affects the Trial of the Crusader tier, it will be nice to see that there will be no human warriors with a double Death’s Verdict demolishing everyone in the arena and being on top of the ladder for all WoW Classic servers at the time.

2v2 Arena Achievements and Titles

Speaking of PvP, the 2v2 bracket will be eligible for rewards, just like it was in the Burning Crusade Classic. In the original WotLK, the 2v2 achievements were not there because it was quite difficult to balance. However, while there will be no balance changes for classes in WotLK Classic, Blizzard still decided to add the achievements and rewards for the best players (Shadowmourne users *cough*).

Image Credits | Warcraft Tavern

Character-based mounts, achievements and race & faction changes

It would not be Blizzard if they wouldn’t be implementing some feature that would make them money, and in this case, it is the race and faction change service. While it will not be coming on launch in September, it will be coming out later in an upcoming patch.

Because of this, people wondered how achievements would work, along with character-based mounts. While Blizzard probably has the technology to implement this feature that everyone is asking for, achievements and mounts will stick to the character as they did back in the original WotLK. Why, you ask? To “preserve the original Lich King behavior.”

LFG is still to be disabled

One feature that a lot of people seemed to hate in WotLK was the Looking For Group, which is the predecessor of the modern Dungeon Finder. Blizzard sticks to what they said a few months ago, which is that the LFG will not be enabled in WotLK Classic, and for players to find groups, they will have to use the traditional bulletin board (spamming Trade chat).

While this feature has some downsides, it also has a lot of upsides (unlike the Raid Finder that should have never been made), and many people seem to want it back. Why? Because finding a group for dungeons over the LFD is way more convenient, not only in terms of time but also in terms of not having to deal with people looking for unreasonable requirements to join their group.

Closing thoughts

We went on quite a rant, and we sincerely hope that Blizzard changes their mind about these changes before the WoW WotLK release date, September 26th. For those eager to play the most popular WoW expansion once again, the WotLK pre-patch has already been enabled on the PTR since August 4th, so we might see it going live as soon as August 16th.