Classic WoW Overhaul: Exciting Updates, PvP Shifts, and Community Reactions

What are the essential changes shaking up World of Warcraft's Classic realms, and why is the community in a frenzy over them? Get the lowdown on the latest updates that are sparking both excitement and controversy across Azeroth. In this episode of Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth, we take you on a journey through the most talked-about adjustments, like instant mail between characters, the long-awaited dual specializations, and the removal of buff and debuff limits—each stirring its own mix of praise and criticism. While these changes promise more player convenience and flexibility, the persistent issue of mage boosting remains a point of contention, reflecting the evolving dynamics since 2004.

Shifting our attention to PvP, we unpack the complexities surrounding faction imbalances and Blizzard's experimental tactics to restore harmony on the Anniversary Realms. The removal of faction escape via layering has intensified the stakes, urging players to commit to their chosen paths. We also spotlight the arrival of new realms named after world buffs and the introduction of a Looking for Group tool, promising a revitalized social experience reminiscent of retail WoW's dungeons and arenas. As we conclude, we emphasize the importance of preserving Classic WoW's nostalgic allure while encouraging our listeners to connect with us on social media for further discussions and insights. 

Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!

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Chapters

• 0:45 Changes and Controversies in Classic WoW
• 13:34 Classic WoW PvP Changes and Realms
• 24:20 Protecting the Integrity of Classic WoW

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:45

Thank you, hello and welcome to the Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth. As always here at the Pig and Whistle Inn in Stirling Wind, I go for a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft, so grab a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy this midweek episode. We'll be going over the classic fresh realms, kind of giving my thoughts on it. Um, if it's good, bad and different, the changes that they've made, you know all of that good stuff. So where we're going to start off is the few changes that we know that are going to be in the game. Okay, these changes are pretty much stapled that they are going to be on these fresh, classic servers.

Speaker 1: 1:30

I see a lot of people who are reacting to this and are like, yes, this is very good. Um, there are some people who probably don't like it. Um, but you know, it is what it is. Um, so the changes that we know are um, instant mail between characters at the same account. This is very, very good. This doesn't um change the mail from your character to someone else's character. This is primarily on your account. This means that you can essentially get your mail instantly. You don't have to send it, wait an hour, come back, do your alchemy, then stuff like that very good, very good change and, to be honest, should have been in classic in the very first place the removal of the buff and debuff limit.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Now this one is a bit more controversial, because what this means for raiding? Because they're not tuning the raids. So what this means for raiding is that it's possible that bosses just die faster and it's easier, um, which, let's, let's face it, every single raid in classic is easy. It is. Uh, nax is a little bit difficult because of 40 people being in there and having to manage 40 people is very tough, um, but let's face it, it's easy. Molten core was cleared within a week and took probably like an hour to clear, um, when it was first released. Same with blackwing lair took about an hour, uncourage about an hour, um, and then nax was about an hour as well. So, yeah, this is just going to reduce them times and raiding is going to be even more simplistic now Because of that non-debuff limit and buff limit. This means that people will come into the groups with more world buffs. This means that resto druids might actually be more useful and can hot stuff. You know stuff like that, but you know it's not going to make or break the game. In my opinion, it just makes it a little bit easier than what it already was, and this one, I think, is something that should have been in classic as well. I'm not going to lie, it was very annoying.

Speaker 1: 3:37

But dual specs, dual specializations, are going to be in the game. We don't know at what sort of iteration, we don't know how much the dual spec will cost, we don't know where you'll get it um, but you know it's going to be in the game. So they say instant mail and the debuff and buff limit will be implemented at launch and dual specs will be later down the line. Um, I'm guessing this might be blackwing Lair. That would be my guess for it. Now, the dual specs I really wish that they had this back in Classic, like actual Classic 2019 Classic, because when you're trying to raid Molten Core and Blackwing Lair as a mage, you can't really go fire, can you?

Speaker 1: 4:22

And the thing is, when I'm doing pvp, I get that frost is obviously the better choice for pvp, but I enjoyed fire a lot more. I was um half fire, half frost. I didn't have like combustion stuff, I just went full. Um, I just went down to blast wave and then got one ice block, um. You know, that's my sort of build that I had for pvp um, but this meant that I was re um respeccing every single week for raiding, for pvp. And then you have a spec for um, like gold farming potentially, but I just gold farmed with fire spec, I just gold farm with my pvP spec in Tear's Hand in the bottom right. That's where I just killed loads of mobs, where a couple of rich thorium veins spawn. You know that sort of stuff. But if you're looking to do Mara One Pool or Scarlet Monastery or anything like that, then you had to re-spec, you had to go full frost, load of people. That went. No, classic is classic. You know all that bullshit.

Speaker 1: 5:28

But what are they doing about the mage boosting? Because mage boosting in classic was very much a thing, it was very much a real thing, and they have put nothing on it yet. They put no sort of date on it, um or not date. They have put no limitations on it. So my theory is that they're just going to let it be because it is an in-game service. Technically you are boosting people in game for gold. You're not trading IRL money. Now this gold might be bought with IRL money. Some people do that, which is absolutely stupid, but what this basically means is that people will cry about the mage boosting and the thing is, you don't have to get boosted yourself, but people will cry about the mage boosting because, oh my god, that's not what Classic's all about.

Speaker 1: 6:30

No, classic is about breaking the game. Classic broke the game in so many different ways and because of its imbalance in multiple areas of the game and you know it is just what it is you have to do a mage boosting if you want classic. But people are like, no, this isn't my classic experience. No, you could do this back in 2004. You could. The thing is, players couldn't because they weren't good enough, and players couldn't because they had dial-up. Players couldn't because they had shit PCs. You know there's limitations to what people had back in 2004. And this was classic. That is what classic was Everything that they released it with back in 2019, and people cried about and they said, oh, but you couldn't do this in classic. No, you could. You could. The hardware was what limited you. All right that and the player's skill. You could technically do this in classic and there probably was one or two people that did it back in classic.

Speaker 1: 7:23

We don't know. There's no actual record to show that. There's no youtube, but there's probably an old website that has like super old videos on it that show warcraft like um, scarlet monastery pools and stuff like that. But yeah, there's nothing on it. Um, but yeah, I'm waffling on about that. So I think all of these are very good changes. I think a lot of people are agreeing. Um, there is this person though.

Speaker 1: 7:52

Dual spec is a bit much. Making players more versatile. Further, makes players less dependent on each other, slowly tearing apart rewarding collaboration. Super opium raids too. Making the respec free or less expensive would have been better, in my opinion.

Speaker 1: 8:10

No, firstly, I want two specs to pvp and pve fair enough. Secondly, they might implement it in season of discovery, where you have to be within a rested area to activate it. Therefore, it doesn't mean anything in raids. And thirdly, it means that you can switch up to make certain activities easier. If you're struggling in a dungeon as fire, you can go frost for the slows or something. You know that sort of deal. Um, it's just ridiculous. It's just ridiculous. And we've had classic. We really have. We had the full classic experience where there were barely any changes and it wasn't as enjoyable as you would think it's. It's very nice. The pace and the end game is very much dependent on who you play with, sadly enough. But I'll carry on with the next additions to it and we'll go from there, because I'll give my thoughts on it at the very end.

Speaker 1: 9:11

So this is a post that Blizzard made as an additional measure to improve the PvP realm experience. Senior game developer or game producer has announced a slightly experimental feature for Classic Fresh. This feature will attempt to maintain faction balance for individual zone layers. Ideally, it would lead to roughly a 50-50 balance of alliance and horde in any given contested zone, though time will tell. A second change is that layer hopping will be more heavily restricted on PvP realms. This is an intentional change to discourage players from purposefully flooding a zone. The post also reinforces that. This change comes with a lot of unknowns and is not finalised. This means there might not be a permanent change or the final version of this system, so it can be buggy. Deal with it, people. It's an experimental feature to try and keep the PvP what is it? The PvP flag? No, the PvP realm, that's the one 50-50. Very simple. So this is what the post was hey folks, I wanted to drop by to let you know of a slightly new experimental feature that is coming with patch 1.15 and the Anniversary Realms launching on Thursday.

Speaker 1: 10:27

As many of you know, with Season of Discovery we implemented a system for pvp rule set realms that restricted faction creation when one faction becomes dominant. This system worked fantastically for keeping one faction from snowballing and has maintained a healthy balance for our season of discovery. We've already announced that this feature will be enabled for the anniversary pvp realm. Very good, but one of the contested pieces of feedback was that the faction balanced realm team does not lead to a faction balanced world due to how layering systems handles players loads. Um, with 1.15, pvp realms will attempt to balance factions at both the layer and the specific zone level. What this means is that one faction exceeds our balance threshold. Any additional players attempting to enter the zone will be instead transferred to another layer. Very good, this is actually very, very good. The system will work much like War Mode system in the War Within, where we balance as many copies of the zone as possible and eventually any overflow of one dominant faction will end up on one-sided zone by themselves.

Speaker 1: 11:42

As part of this change, we are going to heavily restrict players ability to layer hop on a pvp realm. This is where you join someone else. Um, in classic they have things called layers. This is so that the game isn't slowed down. It isn't um, blowing up on launch, anything like that. So when you get invited, you might be on layer two, your party leader might be on layer three and you would switch layers to be on the same layer as the party Makes sense. Yeah, where we balance as many copies there, we go To layer hop on PvP realms. You will face a much longer cooldown before the system will allow you to change layer again and will also ramp up with each successive layer change.

Speaker 1: 12:26

The idea behind this is to try and maintain these layer faction balance and discourage a mass influx of multiple raids of one faction trying to flood a specific area. Now, this is good, although the problem that I will have with this is people during endgame content in WoW, if you go for your world buffs whether it be ZG or Stormwind, hero or or stormwind on e-buff, anything like that um, and you're not on the same realm as your guild and your guild are the ones popping the like, uh, world buff. It's gonna be a bit shit, but I would imagine they disable this in cities, I would imagine. So, um, that's the only problem I see with this so far. Um, whether we make a change here to these sort of systems, there are a ton of unknowns around quite how it will behave once real humans get involved. We will be closely monitoring how this all feels in game and will make changes or outright disable the feature if it ultimately leads to a negative player experience. We're excited to see how this plays out and carnage it may lead to.

Speaker 1: 13:34

One final warning, however please be very confident that you want to engage in player versus player combat in Classic Era, including the Anniversary Realms, as this time around, there will be no escaping the other faction by switching to a layer that was dominated by your faction. If you sign up for pvp this time, you're signing up for everything that entails, whether you roll alliance or horde. Good luck, see you on the battlefield. This is amazing because we were on a pvp server, our pvp, and there are people on pvP servers who, when fights break out, they are the ones to cry on the forums. Now, if fights are to break out and it's like you're getting ganked by level 60 horde and you're a level 37 in stranglethorn fair enough, I can. If it's a 1v1 level 30 versus 30 and then you're crying oh my god, this person beat me like it's a pvp realm, but I want to just level then you should have rolled pve. Okay, it's that simple. That's what you should have done. Don't be stupid, right, um? I think that this is good.

Speaker 1: 14:51

I'd like to see that they're trying experimental stuff within the classic fresh realms and I don't think people are having too many complaints about it. Let me quickly check this. Okay, stop the changes. We already got the most important qual Don't know what QOL is.

Speaker 1: 15:14

Firstly, this is a good change because if you look at the history of classic um, like servers, pvp servers, always and this is I, I cannot stress this enough always, about 90 of the time, fluctuate to either horde or Alliance. Okay, always, yeah, it's not even close, it's about 90% of the realms are either Horde or Alliance. Right now it's one of them. Okay, that's for the PvP realms. So this is a very good change, and the problem is that it doesn't work well. Even in war mode, on retail charts become really, become really unbalanced all the time, even with the 50-50 it's trying to do? Firstly, I'm pretty sure 50-50 is not implemented in the war within. I could be wrong in that, but I'm pretty sure the war mode in the war within does not try and implement a 50 50 split. Uh, to my knowledge anyway. Uh, there are always ways to mess up the war mode layering, for instance, multiple raid groups being invited into one layer. Also, issues like during city raids and raid groups being separated on a different layer wonder how well this will actually work. I'm'm going to say this right now.

Speaker 1: 16:30

The tour is opening more and more to classic classic being a bit changed. Lol, we'll see what's next. Well, yeah, obviously, because, let's face it, why do you want to play classic again? And if you say, oh, it's for the leveling experience. Literally, classic era is right there, you can make a character on classic era and you will have classic, okay. So don't give me that bollocks of oh, it's for the leveling experience, it isn't. It's to experience the nostalgia again of everyone logging in all at the same time in northshire abbey, in shadow gl Glen, in oh my God, I've forgotten the gnome and dwarf starting name. How have I done that? But yeah, like in the Valley of Trials, there's orcs and trolls. You know you got all of this that you want. You don't want to play classic, you want the nostalgic feeling, and that nostalgic feeling hits you the most when everyone logs in tomorrow, whenever it releases worldwide. And you've got, you know, a hundred people running around killing wolves. You know, it's that simple. Um, look, I think this is the words. I think this is a very good change. I think that it's what was needed in classic.

Speaker 1: 17:46

To be honest with you, um, my take on it is that it will have some workarounds. Let's just say, you invite an entire raid group. Will it phase them? Because the timer, when does the like internal timer for layering, like what is the clock on that? And does it tick down while you're logged off? If so, when does that reset? Because you're saying that it has an increased time every time you layer? So is it one hour and then two, four, eight, 16, 32 hours, and does it reset on every weekly reset? You know, we don't know, and that's the problem, and or that's not the problem. I think that's good that people don't know, um, because that way they can't manipulate it and say, yep, I've got a layer like swap. Uh, invite me and I'll come help kill the horde for you. You know that sort of deal. Um, yeah, we'll see. We'll see how this works and I think that it will be a very good change. I think that it's a change that was needed and I think that hopefully, in practice, it will work very well.

Speaker 1: 18:54

The last one I want to go through is just the realm names. Very simple. You have three new realms, one being normal, one being pvp and one being hardcore. These realms are named after the daimle world buffs. So Moldar's Moxie is the normal realm. You have Fengis' Ferocity, which is the PvP realm, and you have Slipkick's Savvy, which is the hardcore realm. All of these realms will be released on November 21st at 2pm PST I believe that is 11pm CET for Europeans. Molten Core and Oni will be open on December 12th. So you're going to have about three weeks just over three weeks, I would say to level and get ready for it.

Speaker 1: 19:44

But yeah, they also are introducing the Looking for Group tool, which allows players to create, join and browse parties manually. This isn't the World of Warcraft, wrath or cataclysm. Looking for group tool this is the one that you use for mythic dungeons in retail or arenas like looking for group arenas in retail. So you put up what you want. You put up oh, I want to go Scarlet Monastery and then you sign up, and then people can sign up for your dungeon. Very simple, it's very good and it's very effective. This is a very good change and one that should have been implemented in Classic again, but people hate that because they don't want Classic to change. So it is what it is, and you can also toggle between the old guild ui and the latest one, which is the cataclysm, to retail version. And don't get me wrong, the classic one is very simplistic, but the retail one, I think it's very good, I think it's a very clean design, I think it's good fun and I'm glad that you could switch between the interfaces. Okay, I think that's a very, very good choice to have, in my honest opinion.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Um, so what do you guys think? I think with classic it's it's tough, because there are obviously people who only want to play classic, and I get that. But the thing is you have multiple classic variations. You have classic cataclysm, which I do understand that people don't think that that's classic, so fair enough. But then you have season of discovery, which is classic with a few twists, but you have Classic Era. Classic Era is classic, full classic, okay, more classic than what these will be, these realms. So if you want classic, that's what you need to go for.

Speaker 1: 21:37

The whole I want fresh servers thing, I don't get it. I really don't. I understand that it's nice having everyone on the same page and the same sort of starting block, but in my honest, honest opinion, it's just going to dilute classic more. Because, yes, great, you've got your fresh servers. You're going to level 1 to 60 again. And then what you're going to do molten core again, you're going to do black wing layer, you're going to do whatever. Yeah, okay, you're going to do all of that. Fine, fair enough.

Speaker 1: 22:11

And then what happens when you're done? Okay, what happens when you're done after one year of playing classic? Then it's suddenly, oh, I don't want to go into burning crusade. Can we get classic fresh again? You know, because you'll go into burning crusade with these characters. And then it will be, oh, but I want classic again. And then it's like, ok, go and play classic era. No, I want fresh classic. And then it's like, why, I get it, might be fun, I do get it, but you're going to ruin the memory that was classic.

Speaker 1: 22:43

Ok, classic came out at such a good time 2019, I say good time. It was a bad time for the world, but it was a good time for classic. So classic came out 2019, late 2019. Covid hit early 2020. This meant everyone was in lockdown, everyone had time to play, everyone was on classic and it was great fun. It was absolutely amazing, the like feeling of wow, and you're going to dilute that so much. That's the problem with going oh, I want classic, I want fresh classic, I want classic again. The reason people like classic was because there was a 15 year gap between 2000, 2004 and 2019. A 15 year gap. There has been five years since classic was released. Five, take that into consideration. That is a long time. Actually, five years since classic was released. That's crazy already. Um, but yeah, nonetheless.

Speaker 1: 23:40

People wanting classic fresh oh my god, like classic fresh. They go into burning crusade. Can we get classic fresh servers? They go into Burning Crusade. Can we get Classic Fresh servers? They go into Wrath. Can we get Classic Fresh? Go into Kata Classic Fresh. There's a Classic Era and Season of Discovery servers. Yeah, but I wanted Fresh servers.

Speaker 1: 23:56

You know it's all bullshit. It's going to dilute the memory of what Classic is and it's going to make people not want to play it more. The more people that have experienced Classic, the less people that have experienced Classic, the less people that will come back for it. That's my honest opinion. That is my honest, honest opinion and it's sad, it really is, but that's my take on it. I still think that people will play and I think people should play.

Speaker 1: 24:20

I think Classic is a very good product by itself. When it was released, for what it gives, I think it's a very good product by itself, okay. Or when it was released, for what it gives, I think it's a very good product, which is its simplicity and its sort of fun factor okay. I think that it's very good. I just don't want to see it ruined because people constantly want classic, classic, classic and then classic, classic, classic, classic. You know that sort of bullshit, but anyhow, that's where it's heading, it looks like. But that is where I will end it for this episode. Thank you all very much for listening. Do check out all of the socials down below. Constant stuff happening over there. But thank you all very much once again and go, eval a friend, goodbye y'all. Thank you.