Today’s WoW Classic US downtime sees the deployment of World of Warcraft Classic version 1.13.3. (EU realms won’t get this until 1am tomorrow if I read things right… but that will still be today here.)
Classic is as classic does
This update brings with it a few changes, the biggest being the introduction of battlegrounds to WoW Classic.
After the introduction of world PvP and the honor system with phase two of the WoW Classic plan caused… issues… like the expected non-stop gankfests made more sinister by increased populations relative to vanilla and the usual faction imbalances on servers (there might be an all Horde server now)… and also how honor is even calculated… led Blizzard to introduce battlegrounds early, before they got around to the full phase three release.
So, as of today we now have the Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley battlegrounds available, one of the first vanilla things you could queue up for… not counting the queue to get onto the server.
Warsong Gulch is the 10 vs 10 player capture the flag game that allow players level 10 and higher to join in. It is divided into level brackets (10 to 19, 20 to 29, etc) along with the level 60 bracket. Last week a level 19 hunter twink in planning paid me 5g to take him through the quest in Duskwood that has the special quiver as a reward, all while he was in ghost form because he was afraid the xp would level him up. So expect a lot of that.
Alterac Valley is the 40 vs 40 epic zone struggle that allows players level 51 and up vie for control of the zone. I’ve done Alterac dozens of times and I am still not sure how the whole thing even works. I just follow the mass and kill the things.
Whether or not these two will take any pressure off the gank fever on the PvP servers remains to be seen. I suspect life will remain miserable for many.
Also on the list of things WoW Classic is getting today is elemental invasions. In the zones Un’goro Crater, Azshara, Winterspring, and Silithus elemental invaders will be showing up. I am sure this is in furtherance of some event, but I honestly don’t recall what at the moment and the patch notes don’t say.
In addition we are also getting the key ring today. This is a special 12 slot inventory space that lets you store the keys to various things so that they don’t take up your otherwise limited and often critical inventory space. I have at least three characters that will get an extra inventory spot because the key to the side door of Gnomeregan will go there. Worth it to me.
Oddly I remember both the key ring being added and later being removed from the game. If you want to know more about it, WoW Head has a guide. Just remember it doesn’t show up in the UI until you actually have a key to store in it.
Finally, there appear to be a few changes to the LUA interface to keep addons from doing more than they should, a way to access paid character transfers has been added though such transfers are not yet available, the executable has been renamed, and some bug fixes have come along for the ride.
I have seen some people saying that with all of this we now have phase three in place, but that is not so. Phase three won’t be fully deployed until Blizzard opens up the Blackwing Lair raid and adds Darkmoon Faire to WoW Classic. We won’t see those until “early” 2020. That will bring us up to the July 2005 level of vanilla content.
Somebody did a nice post about the phases of WoW Classic if you are interested in what else is coming.
Now back to my nice comfortable PvE-RP server where open world PvP issues aren’t really a thing.
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