Numbers do not lie…lately Classic Era servers for World of Warcraft have been surging in popularity. Even Vanilla private servers like Turtle WoW have exploded in player base. Season of Mastery came and went. Some lost interest pretty quickly, while others used it as an opportunity to explore Hardcore leveling. But if Blizzard were to release a SOM 2, what would it have?
Many Classic Plus+ seekers have ideas in their own minds. Here is my own list:
Heroic and/or Mythic+ dungeon system: more challenges, nicer rewards
Flex raiding: 10, 25, 40 man options, additional loot
TBC talent trees: fix (mostly) undesired classes like Ret Paladins, Enhance/Ele Shaman, Boomkins, Shadow Priests, etc.
Reworked PvP system: the Vanilla ranking is…toxic
Hardcore mode: dedicated HC servers
That’s not asking a lot, right? In an ideal world, I would love to see the development of zones that were left unfinished or incomplete such as: Hyjal, Karazhan Crypts, Ironforge Airfield… there are too many to name.
And with the popularity of Hardcore, they have to create dedicated HC servers, right? The people love Classic. Give the people what they want!
My fear is over the past few years, many of the OG Vanilla devs have parted ways with Blizzard, and thus, it’s hard to gauge how fleshed out their Classic team really is. Do they have the bandwidth to develop new Classic content? They tested out Heroic+ in Wrath Classic, which gives me hope. Seems like they wanted to test the waters a bit… could it be a precursor to a Classic Plus?
Only time will tell…
In the meantime, I love hearing other players’ thoughts and ideas on what they could do for a SOM2/Classic Plus. A Classic buddy of mine, Josh Corbett always has great ideas and dialogue on the topic. In a recent tweet, he included his predictions:
Safe to say I’m very much on the same page as him. I could live without the 2x EXP Rate. A big attractor of Classic is leveling out in the open world. I think a failure of SOM was that they sped up the leveling process. People actually enjoy leveling and questing in the open world…did I mention how popular Hardcore is?
Either way, I’m keeping my ears and eyes peeled for any news on Season of Mastery 2 / Classic Plus.
The dual spec is a nice quality-of-life thing, too. Be interesting to see how that would play out in Classic.
It really would be a game changer for Classic raiding! I’m really itching to see what they decide to do!