WoW Classic Season of Mastery Name Reservations Available Today

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Season of Mastery, their return to the nostalgia well.  This is another fresh start opportunity for those wanting the day one WoW Classic experience, and the whole thing kicks off for real today… or tonight… or possibly tomorrow depending on where you live… with a name reservation event.

When you can get logged in to reserve a character name

There was a similar event for WoW Classic more than two years back, which turned into a bit of a fiasco because they hadn’t put up enough servers.  Not enough servers became a bit of a theme for the launch, with long queues and more servers being added and layering tech, which allowed more players to be on a server than it would otherwise hold, having to run much longer into the life of the game than Blizzard expected.

So I am sure that this time around Blizzard will be prepared.  That have had the big WoW Classic launch, back in 2019, and the Burning Crusade Classic launch earlier this year, to help them size things.

And with all of that experience, they have 13 servers setup for name reservations today, eight in the US and Pacific and five in Europe.

• U.S. East Barman Shanker PvP
• U.S. East Jom Gabbar PvP
• U.S. East Shadowstrike Normal
• U.S. West Mutanus PvP
• U.S. West Nightfall PvP
• U.S. West Obsidian Edge Normal
• Australia Lionheart Normal
• Australia Swamp of Sorrows PvP
• EU Bonescythe PvP
• EU Dreadnaught PvP
• EU Ironfoe PvP
• EU Kingsfall Normal
• EU Quel’Serrar Normal

That doesn’t seem like a lot of servers.

But I cannot tell if the Blizzard team feels that WoW Classic has been done once, so it won’t ever be as popular again so there is no need to plan on anything like the 80+ servers WoW Classic eventually needed the first time around, or if they feel that Blizzard’s bad odor in the news cycle means nobody will show up for their grand re-opening (though that certainly didn’t seem to be a problem for Diablo II Resurrected).

Now, I suspect that this event is as much to let people reserve names… though this time around you will be limited to one character on one server… as it is a way to test the popularity of the idea.  After the 2019 name reservation event Blizzard started adding a lot more servers.

So we will have to wait and see if Blizzard piles on some more servers between today’s name reservation event and next Tuesday’s launch of the WoW Classic Season of Mastery.

WoW Classic Season of Mastery Goes Live on November 16th

Your chance to experience the rush and the crowds and queues, both in game and out, of a WoW Classic launch has returned

I bet they don’t line up this nicely in FFXIV

Blizzard has announced the launch date for their WoW Classic Season of Mastery servers.  Come November 16th 2021 in the US, or November 17th if you’re in Paris or beyond, you will be able to pile in to old Azeroth for another run through the game as it sorta was back in the day.  It will be a world-wide launch

The Season of Mastery Global Launch Times

If you’re jazzed to get back into semi-vanilla times again with your guild, you will probably want to get in there early and reserve a name for your main character.  You will be able to do so the evening of November 11th, at which time everybody with an active WoW subscription will be able to log in and reserve one name on one server.  Choose wisely and all of that.

There are some changes this time around when compared to the last run at a classic experience, which includes some pacing, difficulty, and quality of life changes I mentioned in a previous post.

While I am not exactly chomping at the bit for another run through a vanilla WoW experience… I think that might be more of a “once a decade” thing for me, I am sure there are plenty of people who missed it the first time around and raiding guilds who want to take another stab at the classic raids from the good old days.

Not mentioned so far that I have seen are the number of servers they plan to stand up.  We’ll probably get that soon as it will need to be decided on by the time they hit the name reservation day.  Of course, if things get swamped on the 11th then they might put more servers up before launch.

But if things are light… and given the mood about Blizzard right now that could be a possibility… well, I guess we’ll see.

But this completes the trifecta of nostalgia launches for 2021.  We got Burning Crusade Classic, Diablo II Resurrected, and now WoW Classic Season of Mastery.  I am happy with nostalgia trips, but it is tough to live on that alone.

Blizzard Goes Back to the Vanilla with the WoW Classic Season of Mastery

With the team spending their time scrubbing questionable content while Shadowlands founders and their legal problems continue, Blizzard has decided to play the nostalgia card again, returning to the WoW Classic well that got them out of the doldrums of Battle for Azeroth.

Classic is as classic does

Last week Blizzard announced WoW Classic Season of Mastery, which will be their second run at a vanilla experience.

That means some new fresh start WoW Classic servers will be coming our way at some as yet unspecified future date.

But wait, there is more.

Taking lessons from the original WoW Classic run Blizzard has decided to move the dials a bit when it comes to how the game plays.

To start with, players will level up faster.  Per the announcement:

We’re planning on increasing experience gains from what they were in the first iteration of WoW Classic. Our current plan is to set them close to what the 1-60 XP rates are in Burning Crusade Classic with a bigger focus on quest XP increases.

That should flatten out the slump from the late 30s to the late 40s when it comes to the leveling curve, or at least keep players from having to scrounge for every single quest in every zone before moving on.  I do like the pace of the Burning Crusade Classic 1-60 leveling, but I somehow managed it with three characters before that hit.

There are also a couple of “quality of life” changes mentioned in the announcement:

• Meeting Stones converted to Summoning Stones
• Increased Mining and Herbalism nodes

The former seems like a bit of a cheat, though I suppose I am biased having gone through WoW Classic without summoning, but mining and herbalism nodes did seem to be a bit of a choke point.  As Blizz points out, more players are on classic servers than were back with the original launch, so maybe that deserves a review.

Blizzard is also going to introduce honor system and battlegrounds right away rather than trying to simulate the progressions (and problems) that were seen both back in the day and with the WoW Classic phases.

But the big focus of this appears to be on raiders and raiding guilds.  Do I once again detect the hand of Holly Longdale guiding this?  Certainly raiders were a key demographic for the EverQuest retro servers.

While the new servers will go through the same six phase plan that WoW Classic did originally, the goal is to roll them all out at an every other month cadence, so the final phase will be available in less than a year.

Meanwhile, the team is concerned that the raid bosses seemed a little bit too easy in WoW Classic, so they are making some adjustments to increase the challenge in order to make groups wipe at something closed to the 2004 rate rather than the 2019 rate.  Those include:

• World buffs (like Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer and others) disabled in Raid instances
• Restoring mechanics that were removed early on to some Raid bosses
• No boss debuff limit (up from 16 debuffs in WoW Classic)
• Increased health on bosses, to offset player buffs and the removed debuff limit

So get set your raid calendar I guess and get ready for tougher fights.

Now I wonder how popular round two of WoW Classic will be.  There was at least a decade of pent up demand to see the content that had been missing since Cataclysm when it first launched in 2019.  Who will be queuing up this time around?

Somebody will, I am sure.  If the EverQuest progression server experience has taught us anything, is is that there is always SOME demand for a fresh start retro server experience.  Daybreak seemed to be able to swamp a server and have queues throwing a fresh one out there every other year.

But Blizzard and WoW… well, they have their own complications.  Leaving aside that the company is in bad odor due to its own bad behavior, they haven’t had Burning Crusade Classic running for all that long at this point, which has a lot of draw for raiders as well.  I am certainly not feeling any huge draw for the vanilla experience… or a slightly reformed version there of… right now.

As noted, the launch date for this new round of servers has yet to be mentioned, though beta testing for them started yesterday.  My invite must have gotten lost in the mail.  Blizz has tried to address some of the outstanding questions, but we’ll have to see how this rolls out going forward.