We hope you are not in a hurry? Classic WoW will feel like a lead shoe race to modern adventurers. We’ll tell you why that’s great!
You kick the goblin’s body off your sword with a strained grunt and look around, breathing heavily. The remains of your enemies are piled at your feet. The air in the old mine is still and heavy now, no trace of the frantic screaming and clattering that has accompanied you for the last hour. You sigh and pack a bunch of candles into your bag – which is way too small to hold more than a few puny scraps of cloth, a few chunks of copper ore, and the thick stubs of the candles. When you feel the warm light of the evening sun on your face again, you decide to make a quick stop at the Goldshire Tavern and treat yourself to a cold beer. You don’t have much money, but you damn well earned your after-work beer.
Classic-WoW is approaching with big strides and brings with it a few fundamental questions: How much comfort can it be? Would you like a bag of world portals to take home? A few yummy quests to show up on the map? A family pack of mounts available anytime, anywhere? If so, then we recommend putting a bite near the keyboard before visiting the Classic server, because the ride will be hard, slow, and frustrating. Or you can relax, take a deep breath and throw your modern WoW luggage overboard. We know exactly how frightening the idea of ”hardcore WoW” is, because of course we too have grown fond of modern Azeroth over time. However, embarking on an adventure by cutting all safety nets, letting go of the railing and launching yourself into the raging Classic sea is not only exciting – it brings with it a great deal of peace of mind. You have no idea how the individual game mechanics work, you hardly get any information from the game and on top of that you are all lost in the suddenly amazingly large world – and ninety percent of your fellow players feel the same way as you. Everything is slower and more relaxed, because Classic-WoW doesn’t even know what “World First” even means. And even if: First place was awarded fifteen years ago. you hardly get any information from the game and on top of that you are all lost in the suddenly amazingly large world – and ninety percent of your fellow players are exactly like you. Everything is slower and more relaxed, because Classic-WoW doesn’t even know what “World First” even means. And even if: First place was awarded fifteen years ago. you hardly get any information from the game and on top of that you are all lost in the suddenly amazingly large world – and ninety percent of your fellow players are exactly like you. Everything is slower and more relaxed, because Classic-WoW doesn’t even know what “World First” even means. And even if: First place was awarded fifteen years ago.
In the following we would like to take you on a little walk where we bring you a little closer to the sights of Classic-WoW. Of course, we are a little mean from time to time, because our old weathered WoW veteran souls only blossom when we are allowed to hand out a few well-intentioned tips. What we won’t bother about here, however, is nostalgia, because you probably can’t do anything with it. There’s no point trying to pitch someone’s favorite travel destination by digging out a faded vacation photo from the shelf and vociferously reminiscing about the good old days. Instead, we’re focusing on one particular aspect of Classic WoW: its extreme slowness. Because when everything happens in slow motion, the inner gaming workaholic automatically relaxes.
Big, wide world
One of the best features of Classic WoW is that the size of Azeroth has tripled in an instant. You ask how this is supposed to happen if all currently existing extensions are dropped? Quite simply: by walking. In Classic-WoW there are no flying mounts that you can use to take the direct route from A to B. If you’re looking to circumvent this by being clever and unlocking all flight masters, we’re sorry to disappoint you. On the one hand, the profession of riding master was obviously not as widespread before the cataclysm as it is today, because the air taxi stands are still extremely rare here. Second, the poor riding griffins weren’t trained nearly as well. Instead of fast and efficient flight routes, the flying cruise chickens like to stroll, fly a few loops, because the view is so beautiful and after half an eternity we drop you off in the middle of nowhere. And that, mind you, at an extremely steep price. Reasonable as you are, you save yourself the money for the taxi and prefer to work towards your own horse. At the latest, however, the bitter awakening comes at level twenty: you have another twenty levels ahead of you before you are allowed to appear at the riding school for the first time. On top of that, you are in an age before galloping inflation took hold in Azeroth – a single piece of gold suddenly represents a lot of money. Grumbling quietly, you decide to push a few quests in between and get money. But your card doesn’t want to work the way you’re used to. Where are the quest markers? In which area should you collect the bear butts requested by the quest giver? And this guy named Mankrik is looking for his wife but couldn’t give precise directions if his life depended on it. When you finally find the bears and impatiently hit two or three of them to make it go a little faster, you’re in the dirt after a few seconds.
Stop! What you just experienced was the WoW equivalent of a city dweller suddenly having to live on a farm.
Instead of approaching the situation the way you approach your big city life, it’s much more comfortable to sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy nature. In Classic-WoW you will not encounter any luminous bosses with planet-murdering swords in a duel – your position is that of a completely unknown adventurer who laces his satchel and sets off into the big wide world with a sinking feeling in his stomach. And ancient Azeroth offers you just that sense of small miracles, if you embrace them. Take your time and read the (often pages long) quest descriptions. If you are patient and keep your eyes peeled, you will automatically begin to ” A single quest can easily eat up forty minutes or more – and we’re not talking multi-step sequences that are fully voiced and involve vehicle sequences. We’re talking a forty-minute search for headscarves dropped by bandits loitering in a hidden corner of an insignificant cave. Instead of big, pre-packaged stories, you write your own story, which of course will at times end in you overdoing it and getting knocked out. Logically, because a single warrior gets into trouble when he is attacked by two bandits at once. Feel free to get angry about it, but avoid letting it frustrate you. Instead, you bandage your wounds, brush the dust out of your clothes, and plan your trip again. Heroes aren’t born by showing them how cool and invincible they are over and over again. They are born by testing their willpower and always bouncing back from failure. As the old saying goes, “A knight in shining armor is but a warrior whose steel has not yet been tried.” So don’t worry about the dents in your armor and the rising repair costs. They are part of your adventurous life.
No numbers, just dreams
Nowadays you join the group finder queue and start sprinting shortly after arriving in the dungeon. If you write a “Hi” or a “Moin” in the group chat, you only extend the time you spend in the stupid dungeon – after all, we all know the mechanics of the bosses and just want to see if the item falls that we want just need. Don’t know the mechanics? Then you represent an obstacle, after all the information can all be read with one click in the adventure guide. You need more than fifteen minutes for the dungeon? Uff, pretty slow. Be a little quicker next time, you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of your fellow players, do you?
Things are a bit different in Classic. Here dungeon visits are suddenly very relaxed, because you hardly have to bring anything with you – except time. You start your leisurely dungeon afternoon with a visit to one of the capital cities. In the corresponding chat channel, you can speak up and slowly but surely find your group together – there is no dungeon finder that catapults you into various dungeons across dimensions with a short drum roll. After saying hello to each other in the group chat, you start your journey towards the dungeon and in the meantime you can chat with your troops. You don’t have anything else to do anyway, so why not while away the time? As soon as you enter the dungeon of your choice, the first control abilities are unwrapped, which are part of the standard repertoire of all dungeon visitors in Classic-WoW. The fights are slow and very easy when no one is hitting the sheep wandering in the background or poking the stunned NPC in the second row. The reason for this is simple: Classic-WoW works without exception according to the “tank-and-spank principle”, i.e. there are no crazy opponent abilities. No super-duper ground effects, no morphs with their own skill bar, and no chase mechanics – just an enemy that gets tanked. Meanwhile, the damage dealers deal damage. And the healer heals. Finished. The absence of floating numbers is particularly nice – healers, for example, do not receive exact feedback. Instead, you look at your comrades’ life bars and roughly estimate how thick the magic band-aid must be that you send in his direction. overhealing? It doesn’t matter, nobody can keep up with that anyway. As long as everyone is still standing at the end, you are a good healer.
Compared to the fast-paced dungeons of the Battle for Azeroth era, riddled with special mechanics and short lifebars, Classic Dungeons feel like a leisurely trip to the city park. You have time to chat a little after the fights, because of course you sit down to eat and drink. Much like real adventurers would, you’ll slowly work your way through the dungeon with breaks for rest, only to share the hard-earned loot at the end. You may not get anything this time, but the experience points alone are valuable, because the path towards the maximum level is more of a marathon than a sprint.
city whispers
As soon as you enter one of the capitals, you will discover a country unknown to BfA players: players are hanging around everywhere! They jog and ride, jump and swim. Everything seems lively and sociable. If you need a new weapon, you will probably find a blacksmith (after a short request in the trade chat) in the dwarven district, because that’s where the blacksmith’s tools are. Looking for someone to sell you resources outside of the auction house? Look around near the market square, because that’s where the bank is. At that time there was no mobile bank access, nor was there a mobile anvil or a mobile postal service. And speaking of mailboxes: In Classic-WoW, these things represent the absolute social conurbations. Why only? Quite simply because there is only one mailbox per capital,
Speaking of banks. Remember all those level one characters running around Orgrimmar with their silly clothes and silly names? No? That’s because nowadays you have a resource compartment in your bank, change your clothes via transmog wardrobe and even guilds get their own storage. The strange figures are so-called “mules” or “bank characters”, which are becoming extremely important again with Classic-WoW. And yes, you read that right: Entire guilds also have to resort to the popular Lederhosen Trolls to store their reagents and quest items. Don’t worry about it and instead make a competition out of who dresses their bank character in the most absurd way. There will be no transmog in Classic, but your pack donkey doesn’t mind the stats on the items. See the shuffling of armor pieces, bolts of cloth, and ingots of metal as digital Zen gardening – today’s frenetic clicking and auto-arranging of compartments gives way to a glorious calm. In addition, a running bank compartment has significantly more character.
When it comes to emptying your bank character’s pockets, it gets especially nice, because the moment you enter the auction house, you’re given a lot of time to think about pricing, your inventory, and your life itself. Because of course there are no convenient search functions in the auction house. You’ll have to manually type in the item name each time to get the correct result, so just open a browser window with wowhead.com in the background. Back then, by the way, thottbot.com was our (now retired) data archive of choice. Stretch out, relax your mouse finger, and then get to work: Drag each stack of items to be sold individually into the sales window and note the estimated price, because you have to enter this again and again. If you want to have a full load of bookkeeping, it is best to work with pen and paper. Are you already annoyed? Just see the whole thing as a small Azeroth economic simulation and you’ll have a lot of fun spending a large part of your playing time with the slide rule. But seriously, it’s actually a cool feeling to make the long journey into the desert for the first time and visit the cross-faction auction house in Tanaris. Here you will find bargains from players who actually just wanted to quickly create their items on the Horde side, gems that are smuggled into the other faction, and completely overpriced everyday items. An everyday life as you imagine it in a goblin town! Also great is that in this way the neutral city becomes another metropolitan area – and in turn makes it attractive for the player to go on a short trip. All of this is, of course, absurdly complicated and slow by today’s standards. And one of the reasons why we can’t wait to finally set foot in bulky, ancient Azeroth again.
If you take your time and don’t approach Classic-WoW with the modern “efficiency” that has been trained by developers and the community for years, you are guaranteed to experience a completely new game: without cramped shoulders, headaches and the nagging feeling that your own playing time is not effective enough to use. No one is really fast here, so relax! The tasks distributed by NPCs take forever anyway and send you from one corner of the world to the other. The class quests alone give you an epic and lengthy journey, at the end of which you hold your water totem, a thick ax or a holy hammer in your hand. After that, you nibble on a copper vein and get the message “gathering failed” three times in a row. You don’t care about Classic-WoW. There are no shortcuts(buy now) . If none of us are heroes, then we’re all equal, so get out there in the world. stop Sniff the flowers. And for heaven’s sake stay away from Hogger.
What is WoW Classic?
World of Warcraft Classic is a true recreation of the original WoW as you know it from 2006. All parts of the game – from combat mechanics and talent trees to character models and zones – have been recreated, contributing to the authentic experience.
Getting Started
All players with an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time on their accounts have access toWoW Classic at no additional cost.
- Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
- Select World of Warcraft Classic from the Version menu. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second Account drop-down list. In this column, select the active account you want to play with.
- Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
- Click the Play button when the installation is complete.
You will need to select the realm you want to play on from several different realm types. Make sure you choose the same realm as your friends – in World of Warcraft Classic, you can only group with characters that are on the same realm as you!
Heroes&WIKI, WoW Classic, World of Warcraft Classic, WoW ClassicSpecial, WoW ClassicSpecials