What’s old, is new, is new again – with the World of Warcraft: Classic experience shifting into it’s new Season of Mastery.
The reinvigorated experience cribs some notes from RuneScape classic’s experiment to keep older content fresh, by way of changing up the formula and providing a familiar, but different experience.
In the nuttiest of nutshells, the Season of Mastery promises faster character progression, increased end-game difficulty, and ‘more refinements’.
In more granular detail however, basically the content rollout of the original classic has been amended to make progression feel different – including big ticket items like the game’s PvP system being available immediately, rather than a few months down the track. This is coupled with an accelerated rollout of content, meaning that there will be far less time waiting for the next phase of content while you raid Molten Core for the 18th time.
There is also a general improvement to the World of Warcraft character limit to accommodate this encouragement to make even more characters, with a limit of 50 player characters in each established platform of WoW:
You are now able to create additional characters up to a maximum of 50 characters in each of our three games:
- Up to 50 characters total in World of Warcraft Classic (includes Season of Mastery)
- Up to 50 characters in Burning Crusade Classic
- Up to 50 characters in World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
So if you even felt like you needed room for 150 characters across each unique era of World of Warcraft, now is your chance!
One particularly unique and truly new feature is the introduction of the Soul of Iron challenge.
Essentially this is a unique buff that people can now track to identify who within the game world have never perished – serving loosely as a ‘Hardcore’ mechanic for those that value the challenge:
Source: Wowhead
Purely cosmetic, the buff also grants access to a unique emote the makes you appear stone-like – so you can literally flex on people nearby that may have lost their buff.
The good news is that this particular hardcore mode doesn’t enforce the permanent loss of character on death, so it’s a ‘soft’ hardcore mode.
I am personally still deep in the thrall of the The Burning Crusade: Classic, but I have to say I was surprised to see the Season of Mastery servers fill up so fast:
Maybe it is enough to get people back on the vanilla Classic wagon, the real question is what staying power it might be packing.
What about you? Are you ready to level again, again? Let us know in the comments or on social media!
WoW Classic Season of Mastery is live NOW, available within the Battle Net launcher.
