After months of leaks and expectations, Holly Longdale, head producer of World of Warcraft Classic, officially announced Blizzard’s plans for Classic during the opening ceremony, and it confirmed most of our expectations. Yes, as you all already know, The Burning Crusade Classic will be released in 2021. 

However, there are a few things that remain unanswered:

– (Beta) Release Date
– Specific Changes
– Server Specifications (Fresh Start, Copy/Transfer, Faction Imbalance…)
– Quality of Life changes (Dual-Spec…)
– Fresh Start TBC Servers

Let’s dive into what we know so far and what it hypothetically means for us, rogue players.

Blizzconline 2021: The Burning Crusade Deep Dive – First Round Table

Right after the opening ceremony, three members of the World of Warcraft development team showcased what players can expect to see when they return to Outland in the upcoming Burning Crusade Classic.

What did we learn?

– All Classic servers will be upgraded to Classic TBC.
As a player, you can choose to transfer over your character to Classic Era or stay on TBC or pay to copy your character to keep them both alive in both expansions.
– Classic Era servers will never progress further than Vanilla, current Classic servers will forever progress throughout the expansion.
So far, we’re still waiting for information about the hypothetical creation of Fresh servers.
– During the pre-patch, players will be able to level up their new race. (Should you play blood elf rogue ?)
– Players will be able to buy a character boost to 58 in order to start their journey in Outland. (only once per account, only on Classic TBC accounts)
– No gold cap with the progression to TBC. 

– Paladins will get both seals, at 64 for original and at 70 for their counterpart.
Yes, Alliance finally gets to use the Seal of blood.
As Rogue versus Retri paladin, now you will have to deal with a stone form (assuming that most PvP paladins are dwarves) AND a Seal of blood. Not very good news, let’s be honest.

– 2.4.3 Team charter size, which means that each team can contain up to twice more the number of player required to play in arenas (4 members for 2v2 teams, 6 members for 3v3 teams, 10 members for 5v5 teams)

– Some bosses won’t be tuned to 2.4.3, rather pre-nerfed or different at all so it won’t get steamrolled.
– TBC phasing won’t be the same as retail TBC to keep a good progression pace through the expansion. (Back in 2007 with the release of TBC, most raids were opened from the start. On TBC Classic, basically, the season progress would be delayed from one tier through the whole expansion, meaning Tier 6 during Season 2.)

With such a progression, the PvP players would suffer a lot from the imbalance and be forced to practice raids to catch up with the gear difference. The community immediately reacted to that with multiple posts on the stream chat, and through Blizzard forums as well as Reddit, to explain how better this would be to follow the phasing that most private servers opted for during the past decade.

You can also find more information from Blizzard on this link : World of Warcraft TBC Deep dive.

Classic Burning Crusade, yes, but with a few changes – Second Round Table

In a decade, Blizzard has learned a lot of things, and one of the most important ones is to listen to their community, especially for Classic content which was played by hundreds of thousands of players during the past decade.

So after hearing about the community’s feedback regarding their schedule for Classic TBC, Blizzard revealed during the second round table (Q&A) that they would change the phasing that they initially planned, and start Season 1 at the same moment as the T4 content (Karazhan), and skipping the season change they had planned with Zul’aman release.

The phases are now looking like this:

– Phase 1: T4/S1
– Phase 2: T5/S2
– Phase 3: T6/S3
– Phase 4: Zul’Aman
– Phase 5:Sunwell/S4

This is very important information for us rogues, and especially the PVP players who were really scared to get to play with Season 1 weapons against a bunch of Rod of Sun King and some Warglaive rogues.
This phasing will prevent this from happening and that’s great news for the health of the PvP scene.

Raid, Drums, and Leatherworking

An important teasing was also made about the Drums which might not require Leatherworking to be used.

Such a nerf would mean that as a PvE rogue, you would not necessarily be forced to pick Leatherworking as a profession, and this would give you even more reasons to pick Engineering (for the goggles, and the battle chicken) and then Enchanting or Jewel Crafting. (could be enchanting until BiS rings, then Jewelcrafting).
Check our guide for more information to pick your professions.

PvP

PVP rewards and Battlegroups

According to Brian Birmingham’s explanation during the Q&A, PvP titles would be awarded by the top players of each region instead of battlegroups. That would allow keeping them very selective and rare. They’ll be given to the top percentage of those players region-wide.

Arena matchmaking system

Another great teasing was made during the BlizzConline. The hypothetical rework of the matchmaking system.

We’re also planning to use the modern matchmaking algorithms to more quickly match players with equally skilled opponents, while still keeping the rating requirements on purchased arena gear in later seasons.

Are we going to get MMR? (introduced with WotLK)
A lot of private server players have dreamt about this during the past decade.

Spell batching

Let’s make it simple: “For Burning Crusade Classic, spell batching is being removed to improve the overall experience.”

You can read an informative recap of this Q&A, here: World of Warcraft Q&A recap (wowhead)
Also, MrMG did a very interesting interview with John Hight and Brian Birmingham.

Silent Shadows Community Promotional Trailer!

On top of all these great announcements from Blizzard, we, at Silent Shadows, were definitely prepared for it and worked on a Promotional trailer to advertise our community. This is something we’re extremely proud of, and hopefully our members too.

We made small crowdfunding during December while the video was in the making, and with the generous help and support of our community, we are able now to fairly represent our community. Here it is.

Massive thanks to Vodko for doing his amazing job!

We’ll hopefully make more ?